We're in Grayson County in southwest
Virginia
close to Mount Rogers, which is the
highest point in Virginia
and our research is looking at ancient volcanic rocks
that formed about 750 million years ago.
Today we're looking at
rocks called conglomerates, which are
sedimentary rocks that have clasts
of older rocks in them,
and we are collecting
clasts of the volcanic 
rhyolite that are in the conglomerate
in order to analyze them through geochemistry
and to determine the age of the clasts.
Around 760 million years ago there was
an attempted rift.
There was a supercontinent kind of like
Pangaea but the one before that was
called Rodinia and that started to split off,
but it didn't
continue splitting,
so 250 million years later it split off.
It's important because we're trying to
figure out in that gap of time
what sort of events were happening on
the Earth.
It's a cool experience because
a lot of people might not think that
oh they're just rocks, but to us
it's more just like a sample
that can tell us the history of what's happening here.
We just take these little pieces of rocks
and we get so much information out of them
that to us they are really important.
There are a
great deal of benefits of having
just two of us with one professor in the field.
It's exciting because she has tons of
information and tons of knowledge and
she can do one-on-one teaching us.
What has brought us out here and enabled us
to do this work is a grant
called an EDMAP grant,
which is administered through the
U.S. Geological Survey.
That program is specifically for
training students to do field mapping
because it's how important
field mapping is to the science of geology.
The heart of geology is
being out in the field
where the rocks are because it's one
thing to be excited about something you
read in a textbook or that was in the news,
but it's another thing to say, look here's
this rock and we collected and it tells us
this much about geology.
