Beck Publishes Paper on Drilling Sediment Cores, Co-Leads Workshop

Associate Professor of Geosciences Catherine Beck co-authored a paper published recently in the journal Trends and Ecology and Evolution. “Advancing ecology and evolution through continental scientific drilling” highlights how drilling sediment cores can inform our understanding of how ecosystems evolved through time.

Beck said one of her main contributions to the paper was the case study about how continental scientific drilling has provided important data for interpreting the context in which our earliest hominin ancestors evolved in eastern Africa.

The paper is related to her work as a principal investigator for the Turkana Basin Drilling project (TARGET) in which she and fellow researchers are seeking to core the sedimentary record from 4 million years ago to the present – a depth of nearly two miles. She and other members of the research group are preparing an updated drilling proposal for the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) seeking approximately $2 million to go toward the more than $6-million cost of drilling.

Beck has a grant through the Turkana Basin Institute to support pre-drilling activities related to outreach and community engagement, connecting the drill core to modern water quality, and building a network in Kenya to support TARGET.

Earlier this fall, she co-led a workshop on planning and implementing continental scientific drilling projects at the 30^th Colloquium of African Geology in Nairobi, where she and her colleagues met “an energetic and enthusiastic group of primarily graduate students” from Kenya, Tanzania, and Cameroon. Beck said she hopes activities like this will help increase the participation of African geoscientists in large-scale continental scientific drilling projects such as TARGET.

Beck also collected water samples from rivers and springs around the Turkana Basin that were then analyzed in her Hamilton isotope lab, as well as in Assistant Professor of Geosciences Emily Baker’s lab. She said the data from the samples will be used to inform future sampling activities.