This NSF grant to the University of Minnesota provided partial funding for a large project to collect drill core samples from the Mexico City basin. This basin, with a population of 21 million people, has held a lake for hundreds of thousands of years. Over time, sediment layers are deposited in lakes, and each of the sediment layers contains information about the conditions around the lake at the time it was deposited. By collecting core samples, the layers can be analyzed to understand how climate, hydrology, ecosystems, volcanoes, and earthquakes in the region have changed throughout the lifespan of the lake. These analyses provide important evidence to understand these natural processes. The information collected also allows us to better predict and prepare for changes in these processes, and the chance of destructive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, and other hazards in the future, all of which are known to be important problems in this region. 

The specific activities this NSF grant supported include:

• Shipping materials, tools, and supplies to the site for drilling.
• Travel and other costs for supervisory staff from the drilling facility at the University of Minnesota to be on-site during drilling, to manage the drilling operation, drill core sample handling, logging, and documentation, and other on-site activities.
• Travel and other costs for drilling facility outreach staff to work with University of Mexico researchers on public outreach campaigns, to communicate information about the project to local communities and schools. Two of the posters created for this purpose are included with this report.
• Shipping materials, tools, and core samples (more than 3,500 feet / 1,068 meters) from the drill site to the University of Minnesota drilling facility’s specialized lab for core scanning, logging, and analysis.
• Lab activities at the University of Minnesota drilling facility lab.

 Project scientists visited the unique facility at the University of Minnesota as a team twice, each for 10 days at a time. Working 12 hours each day, they analyzed the core samples on specialized lab instruments, and split the core samples open to look at the layers of sediment. They described, interpreted, and photographed the core samples, extracted nearly 5,000 small pieces of sediment out of the layers, and shipped those pieces to their own labs for slower, detailed analyses on other types of instruments to generate additional data. This work on their own lab instruments is still underway at the time of this writing, and will require years of work.

During drilling, the outreach team created two educational posters explaining the goals of the project, the scale of time that scientists hope to be able to gain insight on with the cores, and the methods used to extract cores. These posters were displayed at the drill site for interested passersby and used at several outreach events.

The outreach team ran two major events at local schools. The first, at Escuela Secundaria Técnica no. 43 in Mixquic, 4 km from the drilling site, a GLOBE school, included a presentation and hands-on activity involving core samples taken from Lake Chalco. Myrbo introduced the activity with a presentation about how and why scientists take core samples. The cores were examined by the students with guidance from local teachers, Sandy García León, and Myrbo/Loeffler. Students analyzed the samples and made observations using hand lenses provided by the team.

The second outreach event held with local schoolchildren was located at the historic Estación Sismológica Central, now a UNAM outreach facility, where Myrbo, Loeffler, and UNAM faculty led a mock coring activity, where students constructed their own coring devices and extracted core samples from fake (gelatin) lake sediments, and then analyzed these cores. Instructions for setting up and running this coring activity, along with basic supplies needed for it, were provided to local educators, who report that they have continued to use the activity successfully and frequently since the project first introduced them to it.

A custom digital field trip guide was created and is available in the Flyover Country mobile app as well as via an open application programming interface (api.flyover.umn.edu/guide). This guide not only provides information about the scientific goals and motivations of the project, it also acts as a geologic guide to the Mexico City region by exposing interactive geologic maps, locations of archeological sites, highlighting human/environment impacts like subsidence due to groundwater pumping, and providing information about the many volcanoes that surround the city. This guide can be saved for the user’s devices for offline use in the Flyover Country app. Users are notified that the field guide is available whenever they use the app in the Mexico City area, or by looking at the list of field guides available in the application.

Last Modified: 03/31/2017
Modified by: Anders J Noren