Owasso students are rocking geology
By Dominic Leading Fox
Ms. Chatwin’s force of AP Environmental students is making a name for themselves in the field of hydrogeology as the only high school group presenting at a large Geological Society of America meeting.
Pictured from left to right: Shannon Chatwin, Ariel Salinas, Sophia Hunt, Nosrat Montaha, Michelle Currie, Jim Puckette, Landon Mortimer. Photo courtesy of Sophia Hunt.
From March 13-15, Ms. Chatwin and some of her students attended a large meeting with the Geological Society of America, where they gave a presentation based on the work they had been doing around the Northeastern Oklahoma region for the last couple of months, sharing both scientific sentiments and scientific sediments.
“We went around to the Verdigris river, Tar Creek, the Arkansas river and a couple of their tributaries. We studied what the water quality was like, and we went into what could've caused those problems based on the natural geology of the area, but also anthropogenic sources such as mines and factories and general runoff,” student Sophia Hunt recalled.
Hunt and her fellow students put in an unbelievable amount of work to prepare for their presentation at the GSA event.
“Out of all the projects that I've done with the kiddos, this one’s probably the most labor-intensive on my side because these guys were here every day after school till about four or later for the last month and a half,” Chatwin said.
Of course, the team had some help along the way. These studies were all done in partnership with OSU, who supplied a lot of the equipment and funding.
“OSU has a program where they try to teach high schoolers more about hydrogeology, and so they give resources and grants to teachers [so they can] teach kids about it. They saw what we were doing in AP Environmental and were like, “Hey! We have this thing; you should come!” Hunt explained.
That thing was the Geological Society of America’s South-Central Section Meeting, a convention made up of workshops, presentations and field trips. With their partnership with OSU, they managed to secure an invite and present their findings from their studies.
“Basically the GSA gets people and businesses all in a room so they can swap ideas [and] network,” explained Hunt.
Getting there, however, wasn’t easy. In a somewhat dramatic fashion, the team found themselves with a few roadblocks.
“All of a sudden, we didn’t have any funding to go to the National Geological Society of America’s meeting, so I made contacts with our local geological societies…each of them donated quite a bit of money to cover food and housing and field trips,” Chatwin recalled. “It allowed us to get more equipment and do more things than we would have. We wouldn’t have been able to do what we did without the local people and geologists helping us.”
When they were finally able to go, the group had a lot to take in. They learned various skills that would help them in their futures within the field of geology and met many professionals in the field.
“It was an amazing learning process! We learned how to use google sheets, how to access scientific records, how to talk to people and how to write up our own grants,” said Hunt. “We got invited to go on a trip to the Bahamas with them, we’ve gotten offers to tour labs, and people have mentioned really big scholarship opportunities as well.”
Chatwin and Hunt both hope that high school students will take more interest in fields that aren’t as talked about within their school spheres.
“It made some students get really excited about geology when they thought it was boring. Talk to Sophia! The only way to get kids excited about different things they can do in college is to actually get their feet wet,” Chatwin expressed.
This is not the last venture these students will take in the scientific field. As they do more and more work to monitor conditions around Oklahoma, they will gather experience that will bolster greatness in their futures within environmental science. Science “rocks”!