Sage Ridge Visits the Desert Research Institute

On Friday, January 20, Sage Ridge staff and faculty members Dr. Carol Smith-Nichols, Elizabeth Kenney, and Paul Dolan joined current parent Ryan Krebbs for a tour of the facilities at the Desert Research Institute. Hosted by the STEM Education Program Manager at DRI, the visit included tours of the Environmental Analysis Lab, the Trace Chemistry/Ice Core Laboratory, the Organic Analytical Lab, and the Green Box Lab and discussions with the scientists who run those labs. The group met Sage Ridge alum Dr. Nathan Chellman ('08) who did his senior internship at Desert Research Institute and studied at Brown University after graduating from SRS. Currently a postdoctoral fellow, Chellman and a team of scientists have been processing a section of an ice core extracted during 2013 fieldwork in Greenland that exhibited chemical evidence from the Thera eruption on the island of Sardinia in 1600 BCE. Chellman was a part of the team that visited Greenland and extracted the 212-meter ice core from an ice sheet that the team was analyzing last Friday. He shared that "the plane landed out in the middle of the ice sheet, hundreds of miles from any other camps or bases. The pilot dropped us and our gear out in the snow, and then took off and left. Help was a few days away at best, so we had to just get working and get camp set up before everything blew away, because it’s always windy there. There were no buildings, no infrastructure, just us and our camping gear." Elements of Chellman's Sage Ridge experience like Outdoor Education, Senior Internship, and lab science are very much integral to his postdoctoral endeavors.