A workshop report from a 2022 meeting held by Associate Professor of Geosciences Catherine “Cat” Beck in Nairobi was published in the June issue of Scientific Drilling. Beck said the report, “ICDP workshop on the Deep Drilling in the Turkana Basin project: exploring the link between environmental factors and hominin evolution over the past 4 Myr” is one step in gaining approval for a two-phase project that would “explore the impact of several types of evolution (tectonic, climatic, biological) on ecosystems and environments.”
She is working with a team of researchers from around the globe on a project that uses scientific drill cores to “look into the processes of the past and present.” The researchers say that samples recovered from eastern Africa’s dynamic tectonic, environmental, climatic, and ecological setting “give them a way to look at change through time in unprecedented ways.”
Beck noted that in addition to the workshop report, a related drilling proposal was submitted in January and is still under review.
“These are just the first steps of what will be a multi-year push towards realizing this project but the science we would produce will be game changing so definitely worth the long spin up,” she said.
Hamilton students Sara Shedroff ’23 and Marcella Winget ’24 traveled to Kenya with Beck during the summer of 2022 to participate in the research, which received funding from the National Science Foundation. Adeera Batlay ’25 did summer research fieldwork in Kenya in 2023. This summer, Andrew Fredericks ’25 and Batlay are helping with the project in Beck’s lab on campus.
