BUILDING A TIME-DISTRIBUTED GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH COMPONENT INTO THE HYDROGEOLOGY PROJECT AT JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY'S SUMMER FIELD COURSE IN IRELAND

The Kinvarra drainage basin in the Burren region in County Clare, Ireland, provides a spectacular setting within which to study the hydrogeology of a classic karst system. The rain that falls in the higher elevations moves in sheets over the landscape, collecting eventually in streams and rivers that conduct the water into the limestones that make up most of the region. Downstream, the water encounters more soluble limestones and makes its way underground, traveling through channels and diffusely, occasionally re-emerging in streams and turloughs, and eventually discharging (as groundwater) into the Kinvarra Bay. For the past 18 years the students attending the James Madison University summer field camp have studied this system and attempted to quantify the water moving through the system in its various stages.

In 2017, a geophysical component was added to this project, collecting resistivity data across the main body and discharge of Black Rock Turlough. The students processed the data, and interpreted the resulting images to get a sense for how the water moves through the underground portion of the system. The intention is to develop this project in future years as a time-distributed real research project; time-distributed in the sense that the data collected in subsequent years will be at different locations so that a more complete picture will be developed over time, and real in the sense that the answers aren’t known by either the students or the faculty ahead of time.

The goal of this project is not to turn the students into geophysicists, but rather to help them understand how geophysics can be used to help answer geological questions. Some of the questions we as faculty will be addressing along the way include how to introduce previous results to the students each year in order to maximize the pedagogical benefit, and how to best assess the students’ learning outcomes.