News Source: UConn Today
Author: Sarah Al-Arshani
This winter, 10 UConn students traveled to Taiwan for a three-week Earth science field course, learning alongside local students and experiencing the country’s unique geology, geography and culture firsthand.
The course Winter Geoscience and Geohazards in Taiwan, led by Tim Byrne, professor of Earth sciences, gives students across multiple disciplines the chance to conduct fieldwork—learning everything from field mapping to data collection and synthesis—while gaining a new cultural perspective.
Byrne, who has led the course every other year for the past decade, says Taiwan’s unique geological features, including its tectonic activity and susceptibility to geohazards, make it an ideal destination to explore the course’s concepts
“It’s incredibly active with erosion and climate,” Byrne says. “The Taiwanese people are all sensitive to this. It’s great to have students go from Connecticut, where there is very little risk of natural disasters, to a country that lives with them every day.”
Byrne describes the trip as an immersive learning experience, mixing informal lectures, field trips to active volcanos and recent earthquake sites, museum tours, conversations with experts, and visits to picturesque beaches surrounded by palm trees and uplifted coral reefs. In one activity, students measured structural and stratigraphic sections of varying types of sedimentary rocks to better understand the natural setting of oil and gas production.