Grant Award

Welcome to this new Mineral Sorting blog, a blog designed to document a faculty-student research project based at Saint Joseph's College!

Recently, I received word that my two-year $50,000 grant proposal to the American Chemical Society was accepted. This funding will allow me, and student researchers from the Department of Natural Sciences at Saint Joseph's College, to examine geologic processes affecting the mineral composition of early post-Ice Age sediments in Maine.

The research has implications for interpretation of long-term climate changes and their effects on the landscape. This is basic research on how the rock record preserves a history of events on the Earth’s surface.

The grant supports three weeks of field work during two summers to collect sediments, which will be brought back to the campus lab for mineral identification. Our research team also will figure out the size distribution of the collected sediments in order to shed light on how natural geological sorting processes affect the distribution of minerals in the rock.

I hope that you will consider following our progress.