![\"Group](\"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/218\/2023\/11\/group-photo.jpg\")
The Summer 2023 field team (back, left to right) Gregory, Kerry Black \u201924, Ethan Watson \u201923; (front, left to right) P\u00e9ter Horv\u00e1th, adjunct professor of earth sciences, and Emma Hunt, assistant professor of earth sciences.<\/p><\/div>\n
He met Hunt his junior year when he took a required minerology and petrology class. Through the class he discovered his interest in rocks and minerals, which hold secrets about the earth\u2019s history and the formation and movement of its tectonic plates.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s this really big picture understanding of how the earth has changed over time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
This past summer, Gregory spent 10 weeks on the kyanite research. Much of it was spent reading scholarly articles on the geology of the Appalachians. It wasn\u2019t the lightest reading he\u2019s ever done.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more syllables you have, the better, I guess,\u201d he said, laughing. But he learned to digest dozens of pages and summarize key findings.<\/p>\n
Hunt said that\u2019s a key element of the senior thesis process. Students working through significant amounts of research have to learn where to skim and where to slow down, \u201chow to distinguish what\u2019s really useful for their aims,\u201d she said. Research is one way students can gain high-impact engaged learning experiences, a central element of Furman’s educational framework, The Furman Advantage<\/a>, which also includes mentoring, reflection, career preparation, and the Pathways Program<\/a> advising curriculum.<\/p>\n For three days, though, Gregory got to be on site at Willis Mountain, near the center of Virginia.<\/p>\n \u201cI liked actually seeing these rocks that I had been reading about,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Hunt said that\u2019s the best part of geology \u2013 she\u2019s done field work in North America, Europe, South Africa, Greenland, Iceland and Asia.<\/p>\n Gregory uses a rock saw to prepare samples for the creation of thin sections, while Horv\u00e1th supervises.<\/p><\/div>\n Furman\u2019s connection with the Kyanite Mining Corporation began in summer 2022 when Ethan Watson \u201923 conducted research there. Watson collected samples and began a broad investigation of the temperatures and pressures at which kyanite would have formed in the metamorphic rocks that make up the Appalachians.<\/p>\n Gregory is continuing that work \u2013 called geothermobarometry \u2013 with Watson\u2019s samples and more of his own. In the lab at Furman, he cleaned, photographed and cut the samples for microscope slides. (Those slides will be the foundation for another student\u2019s summer research in 2024.)<\/p>\n Kyanite is not especially rare, but it is rare for it to be found in such a high concentration as it is in Willis Mountain. Its presence tells stories about \u201cthe metamorphic processes through the formation of the Appalachians,\u201d Gregory said.<\/p>\n His summer also included a trip to Rice University in Houston to use its Electron Probe Microanalysis Lab to analyze the chemical compositions of his samples. By understanding the unique elements in a deposit and the concentrations of those minerals, researchers can model the temperatures at which those rocks were altered.<\/p>\n Next spring, Gregory will present the results of his work in Asheville at the Southeast Sectional Meeting of the Geological Society of America. He also is applying for graduate programs in geology. He\u2019ll be ready for both.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve seen Connor develop his confidence in his abilities as a researcher, as an independent scientist,\u201d Hunt said.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Connor Gregory \u201924 got a close look at kyanite last summer at a Virginia mountain where the mineral is mined. He got an even closer look in a Furman lab as he prepared samples for microscopic and chemical analysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":272,"featured_media":29056,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,39],"tags":[208],"class_list":["post-29055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earth-environmental-and-sustainability-sciences","category-music","tag-undergraduate-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Man](\"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/218\/2023\/11\/Horvath_Gregory.jpg\")