Brendan Moehringer '23

Brendan Moehringer '23: Research with Jeff Rahl, Summer 2021

This summer I did research with the Washington and Lee Geology department as a Summer Research Scholar. I spent a majority of my summer working in Lexington in the tectonics lab in the science center, but also was extremely lucky to be given the opportunity to get some pretty incredible traveling experience for my work. During July I was able to fly to Texas to work at Baylor University for 2 weeks, and then in August I traveled to Crestone Colorado to do some field work in the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

A majority of my summer was spent working on a project that focused on how the water content present in quartz grains effects the crystallographic preferred orientation (CPO) of the quartz crystals. While in Lexington we made electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) maps of 3 different sections of our thin section using the scanning electron microscope (SEM) in the IQ center. This was done to get the crystallographic orientations of a large quantity of grains within our sample. Then I made a map of the actual thin section using photoshop so that we could match up the EBSD grains to the location of the grains within the thin section. This all had to be done prior to me going to Baylor to make sure the work I did while there was as efficient and streamlined as possible.

The reason I needed to go to Baylor was to work with their fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) machine to get the water content measurements we needed for the project. I got to meet and work with Dr. Kenny Befus and also some PHD students from Baylor. This was a very useful experience for me because I got to see what a geology department looks like and operates at a larger school with graduate students which is very different from what we have here at Washington and Lee. I was able to collect FTIR data points for 1000 different grains in our sample. When I first began my work at Baylor, I thought this number was a stretch goal that I would not be able to achieve, so I was very happy that I was able to reach it before I left Texas.
Since this time in Texas, we have been working on analyzing the data that I did collect and have been making good progress towards finishing the project. We are hopeful that we can finish writing the paper by late September so that we can submit it to begin the peer review process. I am very thankful that I have been given the opportunity to get a published paper during my time as an undergraduate student.

Separately in August I flew out to Colorado to begin working on a project in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. I spent 2 days doing field work and sample collection in the mountains with Dr John Singleton and one of his masters students. This project is in its very early stages, and I hope to continue working on it in the future, and may use it for my senior thesis next year. This summer has been a new type of experience for me that was very different from any type of work I've ever done before. This work has been very helpful for me towards figuring out what I want to do with my career going forwards in the geology field.

Supported by a NSF grant, SRS, and the R. Preston Hawkins IV Award