The Long Valley Caldera. The White Mountains. Lone Pine.
Thanks to a $198,248 National Science Foundation EMpowering BRoader Academic Capacity and Education (EMBRACE) grant, Visiting Assistant Professor of Geology Nikki Moore traveled to east-central California locales this summer to explore dike swarms—the plumbing of magmatic systems found on earth and other planetary bodies.
Moore’s field, geochemical and geochronological work on the dikes contains equal parts teaching and research, making it a perfect fit for a grant program intended to give undergraduate faculty the time and means to step away from or reduce their teaching load to develop a robust research program.
Dike swarms “are the feeders for volcanic eruptions in a range of geologic settings,” Moore says, “and thus are the connection between magmas that are generated deep in earth’s mantle and those that travel through the crust to be erupted at the surface.”
Because swarms exist from the deep geologic past, Moore says, they “can provide important evidence to help reconstruct the magmatic history of these regions.”
Understanding how magmas form in the mantle—a place no one can go—then change as they run the gauntlet through the crust before erupting at the surface is imperative to learning more about how and why volcanic eruptions happen in different parts of the world, Moore says.
This summer, Moore planned three trips to the Sierra Nevada, each accompanied by different Claremont Colleges students. Together, the two hiked to dikes Moore targeted and mapped, collecting a compositional range of dike rock samples for lab analysis.
Studying the chemical composition of these samples will help Moore confirm whether the Independence Dike Swarm (IDS) is 148 million years old, as experts believe, or if the dikes started to be emplaced even earlier, as preliminary data suggests.
Beyond covering her summer trips to east-central California, the NSF grant will fund student research assistants and expand the analytical capabilities of the College’s Oxtoby Lab. Moore will develop a new method for determining ages on the Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer (LA-ICP-MS) using fused rock powders rather than whole mineral grains.
This new cost-effective and efficient dating procedure, Moore says, “will benefit our faculty in their research and broaden the range of analytical experiences our students can obtain.”
Khadi Diallo ’25 joined Moore for a July trek to Onion Valley. Their days typically began at 8 a.m. and ended by 3 p.m. due to the extreme heat occurring in the lower elevations of the Owens Valley region. In those seven hours, the two navigated as much of the mountain area as they could in search of rock samples.
For Diallo, a geology major and California native, the six-day experience was as fulfilling as she expected. The rising senior says joining Moore in the field helped her connect the idea of geology mapping with how it’s used in the real world.
“I was in constant awe of the mountains,” Diallo says. “There’s something particular about mountains, too, where you’re looking at them from a distance and feel both very big and very small. You come up to the mountains and realize the sheer magnitude of geology there.”
After relaxing and volunteering for much of the summer, Diallo says her field research with Moore “got my mind churning back to geology” as the new school year approaches.
Diallo even plans to incorporate her summer research into her senior thesis.
“As a geology student,” she says, “it’s good to get fieldwork into your repertoire. A big part of geology is choosing whether to go into fieldwork, and it’s important to get a taste of it to see if it’s something you like, and I do like it.”