In just two short weeks, the students have learned more about the geology of the Turkana Basin than any of them may have expected. Little did they know that it would prepare them for their future modules, teaching them to be more aware of their surroundings and exactly what type of environment to look for [...]
Map of the Koobi Fora Region As an educational and celebratory culmination to the geology module, we went on a geology-based camping trip to the Koobi Fora region, particularly close to where Richard Leakey established the Koobi Fora Base Camp in 1968. In the early 1970s Richard and Meave Leakey led a crew [...]
Throughout the history of the Turkana Basin, the dominant hydrographic systems that have fluctuated throughout the basin have been fluvial and lacustrine systems. While this fluctuating environment has been a main theme throughout most of the Geology module, students are now turning to studying current day environments to better understand sediment accumulation in past environments. While [...]
Lake Turkana (Present); Lokochot Lake (3.5 Ma); Lonyumun Lake (4.1-3.95 Ma) The idea that the same natural laws and processes that operate on Earth today have operated in the past is an assumption many geologists use in order to better understand the geologic past. This idea is known as uniformitarianism, also defined as “the [...]
Understanding the basin's fluctuating history provides a more complete picture of what factors may have affected early life in this region. Vital to this research is mapping, the ability to show features on the landscape and to mark areas of interest that can be relocated. Back in the 1970s when some of the first paleoanthropological expeditions began, navigating in the field [...]
For this module, titled Sedimentary Geology and Geochronology of the Turkana Basin, Professor R. Linda Martin will be leading the students back in time as we reconstruct the past landscapes of the Turkana Basin. Professor Martin is currently the Academic Director for the Origins Field School and has been conducting research in the Turkana Basin since 2011. [...]
One of the final concepts we learned about in ecology was the relationships between organisms. Specifically, the relationship between intimacy (a measurement of the proximity in which these animals interact) and lethality (how harmful the relationship is). For example, a lion and a zebra would have low intimacy and high lethality, because they spend very [...]
On Tuesday, the field school explored near the edge of Sibiloi National Park to learn more about adaptive strategies of vegetation in such an arid environment. In particular, we focused on the desert rose, Adenium obesum, a rather amazing tree. The desert rose is an incredibly slow growing tree, growing an average of 1 millimeter [...]