First post!

Greetings everyone! I'm writing you all this evening from the far away land of... Providence, Rhode Island? Okay, so while I may not be down in Antarctica yet, I figured I would introduce myself, our plans for Antarctica, and some background about how I've been blessed with multiple opportunities to live and work in one of the world's most remote locations.

I thought I would start off by first introducing myself and a little about how I got here. I grew up in Cresskill, New Jersey, just a few miles outside of New York City. After graduating from Cresskill High School in 2004, I attended Penn State University (For the Glory of Old State!) where I studied Physical Geography and minored in Climatology. While at Penn State, I also had some great internship opportunities. In 2006, I was an intern at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and in 2007, I interned at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Both of these internships were focused on studying Mars using satellites that take pictures of the planet's surface. It was these internships that led me to work at Johnson Space Center during the summer of 2008 and to then start graduate school studying Planetary Geology at Brown University here in Rhode Island. I'm currently in my third year of graduate school, and my work has focused primarily on studying what we can learn about Mars by looking at different features and processes that are found here on Earth - a topic called "comparative planetology".

So before arriving at Brown, my research advisor received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the ice-free regions of Antarctica to look at how the surface changes over time. Just like how a bicycle will rust if it is left outside in the rain for too long, rocks and soils all over the world will change depending on where they are and how long they've been there. The rocks that we are looking at in Antarctica have been sitting outside for MILLIONS of years, and so the goal of this grant is to look at what happens when you take a clean, fresh rock and leave it outside for a few million years. The major factors that must be considered are what the rock was originally made of, how long it has been sitting outside for, and what has the weather and climate been like? If you leave a bicycle outside in a rain forest, it will probably rust much quicker than if you leave the bike in the Sahara Desert. So, the point of this grant is to not only understand what the rocks in Antarctica are made of, but also to study what we can learn about the climate of Antarctica by simply looking at how the rocks have changed!

Similarly, the rocks on Mars have been changing as well, except many parts of the martian surface are thought to be BILLIONS of years old! My personal project will be determining if the surface of Mars behaves in a similar way to the surface of Antarctica and, if it does, what can we learn about the martian rocks and martian climate? This work is just getting started, and we hope that this coming field season in Antarctica will help to collect all of the samples we could ever need to finish both of these major projects!

So anyway, that's a little background to catch you up on the background of this project. I will update again in a day or so, and then we are off to New Zealand in less than two weeks!


Mark