Trip Description
The Critical Zone spans from the top of trees to the bottom of groundwater, where rock meets life. Ten Critical Zone Observatories (CZOs) now exist in U.S. The Susquehanna-Shale Hills CZO involves an interdisciplinary team working to (1) advance methods for characterizing regolith, (2) provide a theoretical basis for predicting the distribution, properties and evolution of regolith, and (3) study the impacts of regolith on fluid pathways, flow rates, solute residence times, and response to climate change. The field trip will explore the site and suite of tools used at the CZO. The trip will pay special attention to the use of CZOs for K–16 educators in the environmental and Earth sciences, by sharing and contributing to a Virtual Fieldwork Experience (VFE). VFEs are multimedia representations of actual field sites that can serve as proxies and catalysts for fieldwork. The program will include overviews of CZ Science, and VFEs, using Shale Hills as a case study for the science and pedagogical approach. Participants will contribute to the site’s VFE and be able to use it in their teaching. The VFE is intended to serve as a model for VFEs that participants create, ideally with substantial student participation. A key component in the CZO approach is to train a new cadre of CZ scientists who have been exposed to interdisciplinary collaboration, research and thought–a goal that is being achieved in part through a collaborative three-year REU/RET program between Shale Hills and Christina River Basin CZOs through summer 2016.

Primary leader: Don Duggan-Haas
Trip co-leader Tim White is a Senior Research Scientist in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute and member of the graduate faculty in Geosciences at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). He is a classically trained field sedimentary geologist with expertise in stratigraphy, paleopedology, paleoclimatology, paleoceanography, and more recently, modern soils and landscape evolution. Much of his research has focused on reconstructions of past episodes of global warmth as analogs for Earth’s near term future. Tim earned a B.A. in Geology from Washington and Lee University, and the M.S. in Geology and Ph.D. in Geosciences from The Pennsylvania State University. He spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher in Geoscience at the University of Iowa, before receiving a USGS Mendenhall post-doctoral position in Anchorage. Tim returned to Penn State in 2004. He is the Coordinator of the Critical Zone Observatories National Office.