CLASSROOM EARTH
Coping with COVID: Lessons from My
Undergraduate Fieldwork during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Isaac Pope, SA-9950 - Centralia College
assimilated to the new environment, others struggled–– regional and global geoscience projects were cancelled or postponed until travel restrictions were lifted, funding was cut, or researchers simply lost the time. In the midst of the chaos, I was slotted to begin an undergraduate research course where I would soon find many unexpected lessons awaiting me.
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Closure Chaos: The Challenge Begins
While colleges prepared to close their campuses in March, I was register- ing for my Spring quarter research course. Under the guidance of professors Patrick Pringle and Michelle Harris of Centralia College, I was set to investi- gate the Puget Lowland Mima Mounds. Composed of a sandy loam contain- ing sparse pebbles, the Mima Mounds are dome-like ellipsoids whose long axes parallel the downslope gradient of the host terraces (Tabbutt, 2016). They occur on terraces that consist of coarse-bedded gravels long interpreted as Vashon Outwash (Walsh and Logan, 2005). The mounds are a local lenticular thickening up to two meters of a continu- ous diamicton that forms a veneer along a single level of Pleistocene terraces (Figure 1).
ithin weeks of the new year, the world ground to a halt as COVID-19 and ensuing closures swept the globe. The resulting reorganization of the social fabric precipitated a radical change in the lives of many as work and study were transferred to homes. While some disciplines readily
Despite the attention of brilliant geologists for over a cen- tury, the Mima Mounds and their origin remain enigmatic, inciting a variety of genetic models ranging from earthquakes, vegetation, and even burrowing rodents (see Washburn, 1988, for a review). Though most authors hypothesize on the origin of the topographic mounds themselves, the mode of deposi- tion producing the diamicton composing the mounds remains a subject of contention. In the midst of this debate, research over the past two decades by geologists Patrick Pringle, Barry Goldstein, and others revealed that a late-glacial meltwater
Figure 1. Numbering in the thousands along several prairies in the Puget Lowland, the Mima Mounds are composed of a sandy loam diamicton overlying coarse-bedded gravels of second- stage recessional terraces commonly believed to have resulted from Vashon outwash (Walsh and Logan, 2005). In the midst of a century-long debate on the mounds’ origin, my research investigated the mound diamicton and underlying gravels to ascertain if a debris flow associ- ated with the Tanwax flood may have been involved in this intricate story. Photograph from Logan and Walsh (2009).
Jan.Feb.Mar 2021 • TPG 15
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