22 JANUARY 2025 WorldWide Drilling Resource® Students Collecting Cores for an NSF Project Adapted from Information by NSF University students play an important role in advancing science supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Last year, Ryan Thigpen, Mike McGlue, their students, and a team of coring experts anchored a platform in the middle of Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, and extracted a 100-foot-long tube of sediment from water depths greater than 400 feet. The core could reveal evidence for more recent earthquakes along the Teton fault, which the team has suggested may extend across the Yellowstone caldera. This giant crater first formed following a huge eruption 2.1 million years ago and the last known significant quake recognized along the fault occurred approximately 5000 years ago. Thigpen and McGlue, along with coinvestigators Ed Woolery, Summer Brown, and Kevin Yeager, are professors at the University of Kentucky. They are collaborating with experts from the NSF-supported Continental Scientific Drilling Facility at the University of Minnesota to study the region’s seismic and climate history. “The coolest thing about this project is that it not only involves so many fellow faculty members but also brings in students from undergraduates to Ph.D. students,” Thigpen said. “I love working with students and taking them to cool places.” When this project concludes, it will live on in an NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Track 1 project to combat climate change in Kentucky. “Our Teton project helped provide students with skills and training that they can continue to refine and apply in the EPSCoR project,” Thigpen said. From collecting cores, measuring microbes, to collecting water samples, NSF has many options for students to support principal investigator-led projects. In addition to supporting these NSF projects, high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, can also directly seek these options with NSF 101 on funding opportunities. Photo courtesy of Summer Brown, University of Kentucky. The expedition scientists along with the entire ANSEP middle school academy, including students and staff. Photo courtesy of ANSEP. ENV
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