On Monday, September 27^th, Wooster’s Climate Change class hit the road for Kidron, Ohio’s Sonnenberg Village.

The settlement is a rejuvenation project aimed to relocate and reconstruct over a dozen 19^th century buildings on this five-acre sight.  In addition to preserving these historical structures, the project incorporates environmental responsibility into its model by including sustainable living elements in its long-term plans.

Already, a garden is growing and three buildings have been successfully transferred to the sight.  But a fundamental piece of their heritage remains unknown—when exactly were they built?

This is where the climate experts come in.  Teaming up with College of Wooster faculty and students, representatives from Sonnenberg Village have invited Greg Wiles and his Climate Change students on site to discover the origins of these precious pieces of Ohio’s history.

When the team arrived they got right to work extracting samples.  Using the method of Dendrochronology, otherwise known as Tree-Ring Dating, the team used their expertise and precision to muscle their way into the history of mid-western American architecture.

Without damaging the integrity of these structures, the geo-team successfully extracted samples from a reconstruction in-progress, the Lehman Spring House, and the larger Lehman House.  Now, let the investigation begin!

After carefully prepping the core samples, dendrochronolgical evaluation began today.  The team is diligently counting and measuring tree growth rings, determined to discover the date early Ohioans constructed these historical shelters.  Lab work will continue until the Geo-team reports back on the solved mystery of Sonnenberg Village.

Odell Lake, located in Holmes County, Ohio, was cored this summer by The College of Wooster and the University of Cincinnati geology departments.

Geophysical techniques were used to map the depth and stratigraphy of the lake.

Odell Lake is a kettle lake, composed of three basins that were formed by ice breaking off of a retreating glacier.

Climate Change: Core Sample Lab, 9-12-10

Core samples and mud everywhere! At first glance, looking at feet and feet of mud samples from Odell Lake didn’t seem like the most fun activity. Little did we know we could truly act like real geologists, taking magnetic readings, putting together professional-looking photos and looking for organic life in the middle of these long, muddy samples. We each had different tasks that, together, would form a well-established report of the cores. My task was photographer. This put my years of photography training and photography schooling to work, just kidding. The task was a bit tedious but relatively straight forward. Taking detailed pictures of each core in stages to make sure no part was missed. Making sure everything was labeled correctly so there would be no confusion.  The next step was taking the separate pictures of the samples, three to a core, and splicing them together to make a visual of the core sample in its entirety. Having never used photo shop before, the TA, Stephanie Jarvis, and I worked through the confusion of technology and eventually got everything working.

Everyone continued to work examining and putting together the samples.

Other groups had the task of taking magnetic readings of the samples. The process looked confusing, but with the data collected, much could be told of the magnetic susceptibility of each sample.

https://climatechange.voices.wooster.edu/2010/09/20/165/

Last week Derek and I lined up all of the sections of lake core “E” in order to identify any transitions that we wanted to investigate.  After opening up each of the 5 thrusts and laying them end-to-end, we decided to look at a transition in E4 (the fourth thrust down from the sediment-water interface).

We chose this section because lots of the core was a reddish-brown color, but then all of a sudden it changed to a dark black color, indicating that there were many organic materials present at this time.  This is especially interesting because usually the organic materials are near the top of the core, but in core “E” we found the most organic-rich materials to be at the very bottom.

Derek and I cut out some pieces of sediment out from the transition and began picking organics out of these pieces under a microscope.  We will send these to Beta Analytic (a radiocarbon dating facility) to determine approximately when this transition took place, and our class will do some investigating into any possible climate events that occurred at this time.

For the past two lab periods, Eliza and I have been working on gathering magnetic susceptibility readings from the Odell cores.  Magnetic susceptibility is a measure of the concentration of iron oxides in the sediment.  To do this, we used a magnetic susceptibility (MS) meter.  This meter is connected to a computer that is used to record the readings.  To take these readings, one member of our team would place the sensor region of the MS meter to the core, while the other member would press the “record data” button on the computer.  This process was repeated every two centimeters along the length of the core.  Once the readings were finished, the data set was calibrated, and a graph was made of the readings.  This graph represented the magnetic susceptibility, or presence of iron oxides, along the length of the core.  Magnetic susceptibility is used as a proxy record for a few different factors.  The most important of these is grain size.  By looking at the magnetic susceptibility records, we can see the difference between the grain sizes of sediment, which may indicate a transition between sediment types within the core.  This transition can be due to a number of factors, including climate change, change in precipitation, or a change in the vegetation of the region.