Friends of Orton Hall Fund continues to provide strong support for SES students

The Friends of Orton Hall Fund has been providing invaluable support for our students to conduct fieldwork, present at conferences, and achieve research milestones. We extend our heartfelt thanks to all who have generously contributed to FOH—your support continues to make a meaningful difference. Below are reflections and stories shared by students themselves.
Rene Castillo

I recently attended JpGU 2025, where I had the opportunity to present a poster in the IODP Expedition 405 session, sharing preliminary results from my machine learning project focused on mass transport deposits (MTDs). It was a rewarding experience to engage with the international scientific community and receive valuable feedback, especially from my Japanese collaborators, whom I was excited to present alongside. As part of the conference, I was also invited to join a short field trip to the Boso Peninsula, where we explored exposures of the accretionary prism and MTDs in outcrop. The trip was led by one of the scientists from Expedition 405, providing an incredible chance to connect our core data with analog features in the field. I was fully funded to attend JpGU 2025 by the Friends of IODP (FOH), whose support made this experience possible. This funding covered travel, lodging, and conference expenses, allowing me to present my preliminary machine learning results on mass transport deposits (MTDs) from IODP Expedition 405 without financial burden. By enabling my participation, FOH directly supported the dissemination and development of this research, fostering collaboration with Japanese scientists involved in the expedition and helping integrate insights from core data, machine learning, and field observations. Their support was critical in advancing both my project, PhD publications, and broader international collaboration within the IODP community, setting me up for a future as an international scientist with IODP.
Austin Weber

With my FOH award I was able to finish collecting data for my dissertation research. I used my award to analyze nearly 4000 mineral particles (extracted from ice cores) at the Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis. The data from this research will be used to reconstruct a history of tropical dust transport, with implications spanning the Andes, the Amazon basin, and (potentially) the Sahara desert. This includes a search for evidence of a megadrought 4200 years ago that may have led to the collapse of many ancient civilizations.
Simone Reed

Climate change has led to the exposure of new, uncharacterized dust sources such as dry lakebeds and land exposed by glacial retreat. These new dust sources contribute to regional and global dust emissions, increasing the uncertainty of climate models as the radiative and cloud-forming effects of aeolian dust depend on its geochemical and mineralogical composition. Thus, the characterization of Potential Dust Sources (PSAs) is paramount. Tropical glaciers in the Andes Mountain range have undergone rapid retreat in the modern era, losing around 30-60% of their total area. The Quelccaya Ice Cap (QIC) in particular has experienced a retreat of 37% of its total area in the last 40 years, exposing ~22km2 of land. This land may act as a new dust source, supplying the QIC with local dust, lowering its albedo, and enhancing melting. This potential periglacial dust source is uncharacterized, however. My project seeks to characterize the geochemical (trace and rare earth elements), mineralogical, morphological, and radiogenic (Sr87/Sr86 and Nd143/Nd144 isotope ratios) compositions of both near-glacier PSAs and dust from the surface of the QIC and determine the provenance of dust deposited onto the QIC. I have selected nine PSA samples consisting of seven periglacial soil samples (representing the local source) and two from the Lake Titicaca paleo-shoreline (representing a regional source). I have also selected three dust samples collected from the snow of the QIC during the 2023 dry season. Friends of Orton Hall funding has allowed me to perform ICP-MS and SEM-EDS measurements on PSA samples and SEM-EDS on dust samples. ICP-MS data shows a difference in trace element and rare earth element composition between regional and local samples and SEM-EDS measurements have shown a difference in mineralogical composition and the morphology of grains between local and regional sources. This demonstrates that distinguishing local from regional sources is possible. SEM-EDS analysis has shown a similarity between the mineralogical composition and morphology of grains between the local PSAs and dust in the QIC, reinforcing the hypothesis that this newly exposed land is contributing to dust in the QIC. My next steps are to perform x-ray diffraction measurements on all samples to get a clear bulk mineralogical composition and to perform geochemical analysis on dust samples to compare to PSAs. This project opens the door to future work of determining the provenance of dust throughout a core of the QIC, providing a crucial dataset used to constrain dust models in the southern hemisphere.
Connor Hopps

Through the help of FOH, I was able to buy the necessary materials, chemicals, and equipment to construct a pollen-processing lab at OSU Newark Campus. Among these purchases was an Eppendorf 5804 centrifuge. Without this lab, I would be required to travel to the University of Minnesota to process my core samples for my thesis. This would not only take much more funding, but also slow my work considerably. This new lab also allows the opportunity for any future students to pursue pollen work with easy accessibility through OSU facilities.