The graduate experience: conferences, collaboration and scaling the Andes

View larger image — Heather Guy ’18, an international student who completed Appalachian’s Master of Arts in geography program in 2018. Photo by Marie Freeman

“At Appalachian, you get a very personal experience, and you can form relationships with the faculty, which … can open doors to new opportunities and allow you to personalize your degree.”

Heather Guy ’18, who came to Appalachian from the United Kingdom

Posted Aug. 16, 2018 at 4:49 p.m.

Prior to enrolling in Appalachian’s geography graduate program, Heather Guy’s work experience involved computer modelling — an activity that kept her in front of a computer screen all day.

Guy ’18, of the United Kingdom, who graduated from Appalachian in 2018 with a Master of Arts in geography, wanted to stay in research but longed to be doing fieldwork in remote locations. Appalachian provided that opportunity.

As a graduate research assistant with Appalachian’s Department of Geography and Planning, Guy served as a team member on multiple fieldwork campaigns to the remote high Andes in Peru and Bolivia, which she said improved her fieldwork skills and “gave me the experience that I needed to apply for similar jobs in the future.”

She was also able to attend and present at international conferences, visit and work with collaborating institutions, and write her own paper for submission to an academic journal.

“At Appalachian, you get a very personal experience, and you can form relationships with the faculty, which, in addition to making your time here enjoyable, can open doors to new opportunities and allow you to personalize your degree,” Guy said.

Guy’s research at Appalachian involved precipitation patterns in the high tropical Andes — examining precipitation measurements and samples collected by a network of citizen scientists living at elevations above 13,000 feet.

Her hope, she said, is that her research may inform others’ understanding of precipitation processes in the high Andes — how they have changed in the past and how they might change in the future — so that people there, many of whom rely heavily on precipitation and glacial meltwater for farming, tourism and hydroelectric power, can prepare and adapt.

Heather Guy – The Science of Abroad

Heather Guy ’18, an alumna of Appalachian’s geography master's program, explains how studying ice core samples can help reconstruct past weather patterns, informing both researchers and citizens of changes in store.

Transcript

Heather Guy: So, we work with observers like Philippe all over this region — the Cordillera Vilcanota in Peru. We also work with observers in the Cordillera Real in Bolivia. We have about 13 observers right now, and about three of the observers have been taking observations for four years and the rest of them just this most recent year.

So, they’re each collecting simultaneous samples of precipitation every day, every day there is precipitation. So, this gives us a really good record, spatially and temporally, of what the precipitation is doing in this region.

As well as that, we collect these samples every year we come down here, and we analyze them for their isotopic content. And what we’re looking at when we’re analyzing them for different isotopes is the different flavors of oxygen atoms and hydrogen atoms that have very slightly different weights. This is an atomic scale. And that can tell us some more about where the precipitation has come from, what type of precipitation it is and the kind of weather systems that are producing this precipitation.

And the reason that we’re trying to do that, is that these glaciers on some of these mountains over here, they’re recording, every year, the precipitation. And that isotopic content of each of those precipitation events is preserved in the ice. So, what we can do is drill down into the ice and extract an ice core, and then we can use the isotopic content in those ice cores to reconstruct the weather in the past, and some of these ice cores are thousands of years old.

And so, if we can understand at such a small daily resolution today what weather systems are corresponding to which isotopes, and where the moisture is coming from, then we can reconstruct what happened in the past, how it’s changed and that knowledge is really useful for us trying to understand how it might change in the future, and therefore, how these people need to prepare and adapt in order to make sure they maintain their water supplies.

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Geography: Master of Arts (MA)

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