Riding on camels and living in yurts were just part of the summer for Maddie Mette ’10, who spent late July and early August in Mongolia taking part in a geology research trip.

Mette (Burnsville, Minn.) was a member of a Keck Geology Consortium field excursion that took several professors and a dozen students to a remote section of southwestern Mongolia to study fossils and rocks in the Gobi-Altai area.

Although that region occupies a key position for unraveling the complex geologic history of central Asia, it is by no means easy to reach. Mette had to first fly to Beijing, then to Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaanbataar. From there it was a three and a half day jeep trip to the field site, says Mette, over roads that were rarely paved. “And sometimes we were just driving down riverbeds.”

Much of the fieldwork involved “knocking out chunks of rock” that were then shipped back to the United States for analysis. “We found some pretty cool stuff like ancient reefs and fossils of early marine animals such as gastropods, brachiopods, and trilobites,” says Mette. She will spend time this year studying stable carbon isotopes in a large section of marine carbonates, and will present her findings at a Keck Symposium this spring.

Although she isn’t likely to specialize in marine carbonates in geology graduate school—which she hopes to enter next fall—Mette says that the summer’s work really “improved my research skills and ability to take good field notes.”

Her biggest Mongolian surprises? That the famed Gobi desert is made up of rocks, not sand, it isn’t terribly hot most days, and that “it rained like crazy and even hailed once.”

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