By Rachel Hergett, MSU News Service
BOZEMAN — When Devon Orme looks at a mountain range, she sees more than its towering beauty. She thinks about how it formed, the unseen forces that built it and the rocks making up its slopes. She sees a slow series of processes occurring over millions of years, what she calls “deep time.”
“Geology is very much a way to look at the landscape and also understand it in the aspect of time,” said Orme, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth Sciences in the College of Letters and Science at MSU.Orme is seeking greater understanding on how time and tectonics act on the world around us as a recipient of a 2020 National Science Foundation CAREER award, one of the most prestigious grants for researchers early in their careers.
“Devon exemplifies the values of MSU’s land-grant mission,” said Michael Babcock, head of the MSU Department of Earth Sciences. “This prestigious award is a testament to her internationally recognized scholarship that brings tremendous opportunities for our students.
”Orme’s specialty is tectonic sedimentology, using the sedimentary record to look at how the plates of the Earth’s crust move and collide to create mountain ranges and other formations.
291,481.19“Rocks actually record the history of Earth,” Orme said. “They tell us when life came about with the fossil record and when mountains were being built versus when they were being eroded.
”As a field-based geologist, Orme maps landscapes, including observations about where certain types of rocks are found. She focuses on convergent margins, areas usually at the edge of continents where plates in Earth’s crust are being forced under other plates. Back in the lab, she will run tests to determine each rock’s age, chemistry and thermal history. Current projects look at formations in Montana, California, Tibet and the Bengal Fan, the latter of which required drilling into the floor of the Indian Ocean to collect sediment cores.
The CAREER award includes $652,000 over five years to look at the formation of forearc basins in California and Tibet. These are the valleys between the oceanic trench where one plate goes under another and a volcanic arc that forms as the lower plate descends into the Earth, generating the magma that is eventually erupted. As these mountains grow, their sediment is trapped in the forearc basin. Forearc basins are information-rich, with the sediment providing a record of the movement of the tectonic plates. They also tend to be resource-rich, holding oil and gas deposits and arable land.
Orme’s research looks at the formation of these basins, and how they contrast with other types, such as rift basins. With a rift basin, a valley is created where two plates are moving apart. Why then, Orme asks, does a valley also form when two plates move together?The CAREER-funded project will compare and contrast two ancient forearc basin systems. Orme explained that forearcs are easily destroyed in the geologic record through the erosion of material at the contact between two tectonic plates, but can be preserved by tectonic shifts. California’s Central Valley is a hub of agriculture, producing more than half of the country’s fruits and vegetables. It is also a preserved forearc basin, protected as the tectonic plates that formed it slide past each other along the San Andreas Fault. The second basin in her project is located in southern Tibet and is of particular importance to Orme, whose doctoral research involved dating the Indo-Asian plate collision that created the Himalaya Mountains and preserved the basin.
Orme’s award proposal grew out of a research project in the Bridger Range in MSU’s backyard, where four undergraduate students created a map of the area, interpreting the sediment distribution around Bozeman to reconstruct what the area would have looked like throughout 1.3 billion years of geologic time. Each undergraduate was responsible for two or three rock samples, from collection to mineral extraction and dating using radioactive decay.
“The Bridger Range project showed me that I can do this with undergraduate students,” Orme said, describing how she saw the CAREER award as a prospect that could help fund the students’ growing desire for hands-on learning experiences. “The CAREER award would be the best way to pursue my research while also supporting student opportunities.
”Without actively participating in undergraduate research, Orme said her career would probably have taken a different trajectory. Understanding the processes that created the mountains of Big Sur near the University of California-Santa Cruz appealed to her tendency to see the big picture.“That research experience not only helped me find my passion for what I wanted to study but also set me up for success for graduate school,” Orme said. “The science, in order to progress, needs a team. Why can’t that team be students?
”The new MSU Sedimentary Undergraduate Research program will provide opportunities for a dozen undergraduate students to travel to either Tibet or California. Samples they collect will then be tested in a thermochronology lab Orme set up at MSU as well as other labs at the University of Arizona and the University of Utah to look at the history of each in terms of age as well as temperature and magnetic shifts. The program also aims to increase diversity in the geosciences and will actively recruit Native American and first-generation college students and engage with middle school girls interested in STEM fields.
“The project will promote gender, racial and ethnic diversity in the geosciences, which is critical to the future of all STEM fields,” Babcock said. “Our department is extremely proud of Devon. She is an amazing scientist and assiduous in her support of students.
”For Orme, the CAREER award represents a culmination of the last 10 years of her life, building a reputation as an active member of the geosciences community while passing on some of the opportunities she was afforded in undergraduate research to her students.
“I was very emotional when I got it,” Orme said. “I can actually study regions of the world I want to study, but also be able to mentor students and have them actively contribute to research that’s eminently publishable.”
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