Gustavus Geology-Why Geology Rocks!
Why Major In Geology?
Geology is the ultimate interdisciplinary science. Geologists think about how the Earth system works over long and short time scales, and in particular how scientists can learn about the Earth by studying rocks, sediments, geologic structures and landforms. This requires a fundamental understanding of other sciences, namely physics and chemistry, in addition to knowledge of the Earth-sytem components.
Why Students like Geology 
- Camping trips for classes
- Great professors
- You get to go out and actually see what you are learning about
- Road trips
- We have the best office on campus
- Geology parties
Learning about geology has allowed me look at landscapes differently.Now as I see them, I not only take in their beauty, but also thinkabout how they were formed and the geological history behind them.The Gustavus geology courses I have taken have broadened my interestin natural landscapes and helped me develope an appreciation for thehistory of earth's physical geography.
—Jackie Brost
This summer I went out to the Uinta Mountains with Ben Laabs and Jeff Munroe and Lee Corbett (Middlebury College). For the first week we went on a backcountry lake sediment coring trip. What this meant is that we had to hike in (I think it was like 5 miles) all of our gear and gear to build a raft for lake sediment coring. Luckily we had a team of horses and mules to do most of the grunt work. It was really cool to get a 14 foot pvc pipe full of mud from the bottom of a lake,using only what we could carry in on foot and with mules. For the second week I did a little more lake coring with Jeff, and then I did the research for my senior thesis. My thesis is going to be on glacial recontruction using pebble fabrics, grain size analysis, and outcrop descriptions. To get pebble fabrics we went to four different glacial moraines with good outcrops and found the trend and plunge of pebble elongation on 280 different pebbles. I am going to plot this data on a rose diagram to find the direction of flow. At the outcrops I also did a detailed outcrop description, measuring the thickness of different layers and describing what each layer looked like. I then collected samples from many of the layers and brought them back with me. I am going to sieve these samples and do a grainsize analysis to see if all the grains are roughly the same size or if there is a great difference in grain size. All of this information should ultimately tell me the "behavior" of the glacier, or how it deposited it's moraines.
—Todd Kohorst
