跨越断层线

While Paleena 艾米 ‘23 may not be making waves in the literal sense, she is busy tracking 他们. More 具体地说, she’s busy tracking seismic waves in the lower mantle as part of a summer 研究 internship at Yale University.

 

When Paleena first heard about the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), she began applying to partner 学校s such as Stanford, Brown, and Yale – eventually landing a much coveted spot at the latter. Faced with a tough choice between the SURF program and an internship at NASA, Paleena took a leap in a new direction and was placed in the Earth and Planetary Science department at Yale, participating in seismology 研究. 

A competitive, eight week program, SURF partners with 学校s across the nation, to bring the experience and insights of graduate-level 研究 to undergraduate students, with the goal of increasing their academic confidence and educating participants on potential careers following the completion of a PhD program. 

Under the guidance of a PhD candidate, Paleena is testing a new method created to analyze the different alignments and polarizations, otherwise known as anisotropy, 下地幔内.

“The waves of an earthquake will go all over the earth and will bounce off different boundaries of the earth, like the lower mantle and the inner core. 然后我们可以选择 the earthquake waves up…and can tell through how the wave changes what’s in the mantle 具体地说. The lower mantle is an area that hasn’t really been explored much. 他们 know that the anisotropy is happening in the upper mantle, but not a lot is known 关于下游地区.”

Focusing her 研究 on stations across Alaska, Paleena’s applying skills and topics she’s learned in her physics classes at WC to her current project. 

“Every physics class I take now has a coding component,  and I’ve learned how to use 稍微多一点. It’s becoming a really big part of physics. 有一种特殊的地震学 [coding] package that has been created for analyzing data and seismic waves – I can use this program to analyze the parameters of the waves and if they’re good, bad, 或平均.”

While her time at Yale may be winding down, Paleena’s work is far from done. 随着 interns work through their data, they’re also working out interesting, complex issues 这些都是使用新方法带来的. 

“We’ve kind of been in a pickle, [we] need better data, and the data I currently have has been measured from the wrong distance.”

Though the work can be challenging, Paleena is optimistic, and grateful for the experience 她从实习中获益良多. Her time spent working on graduate-level 研究 has reaffirmed her choice to attend graduate 学校, where she hopes to study Climate 工程. For now though, Paleena has plans to 研究 the viability of Enhanced Silicate Weathering as a 碳封存策略 for her senior capstone experience.