UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State graduate student Erik Schoonover, a doctoral candidate in geosciences in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, was recently awarded the Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Fellowship Award.
The six-month fellowship began in early June and is a partnership between the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., giving Schoonover the opportunity to research the collections at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
“The museum has one of the world’s largest collection of rocks and mineral samples from all over the globe, all different kinds of settings, collected back from the late 1800s to modern samples that are collected today,” Schoonover said. “I’m trying to create a new classification scheme measuring minerals that will allow us to understand how granites form.”
That new classification scheme is based around his work with zircons, a common accessory used to trace mineral constituent of all kinds of igneous rocks.
“Zircon-based classifications are great because zircon survives long after the rocks are eroded away,” he said. “If we can compare those zircons that lack any evidence of the original rock to a classification scheme, we can determine how those zircons originally formed, telling us about past environments.”
Schoonover’s new method is looking to push current methods forward around zircons using examples from the Smithsonian that he would not have access to study in his work at Penn State.
“Zircon fingerprints environments and geochemistry has been used in the past to distinguish general rock classifications from each other,” he said. “Typically, zircon studies use single analyses of each grain. A new method was developed to measure a profile of the grain — using a laser to measure chemistry from the outside to interior. Our routine builds on this method to measure trace elements to determine the temperature and processes from rim to core. This expands the dataset from a single analysis per grain to geochemical time series for each grain. We use this to tell the crystallization history of each grain where a single analysis could not.”
Schoonover said he is hoping to come away from his time in D.C. with an understanding going far back in time.
“Zircon is one of the few materials that still exists from the early Earth,” he said. “If we use this new method that tells us about the growth history of individual zircons, we can make new interpretations about the other minerals present, temperature evolution, and more details about how magmas evolved on the early Earth. Potentially telling us how continental crust formed in deep time. ... With the classification scheme we can apply it to early Earth zircon analyses and determine if there are any modern analogous samples. Those samples can then be used to better understand zircon formation, and consequently, continental crust evolution, on the early Earth.”
Schoonover, who began his time in D.C. on June 1, said he is excited to know that he is continuing his work in that environment.
“I’m super excited. It’s super cool that people also think that what I did creating a new method is interesting and could be useful for the samples that they have,” he said. “I’m hoping to develop a tool that the community can then apply to their samples.”
During his time in D.C., Schoonover has the chance to work with a curator at the Smithsonian that does similar experimental and field work, and the experience is one he said he knows is a rare opportunity.
“This fellowship gives me access to a wide variety of samples that would be near impossible to go and get outside of this opportunity,” he said. “A lot of them have research already done on them, so I can take my new method and compare them to work that’s already been done. The Smithsonian has advanced instrumentation that we don’t have at Penn State that I can use, so that will help make my method more robust.”
Though Schoonover still has time left as a Penn State student following this experience, he said is hoping that it is one that he can use to grow professionally, potentially as a museum curator himself.
“Professionally, the museum curatorial jobs highly impactful. You do research on a wide array of samples and communicate with the community and a wide variety of age ranges of people from all over the globe. Being able to communicate science like that is very fun,” Schoonover said. “There’s a large contingency of people doing science in general in D.C., so there are a lot of different research institutions, people working in science policy, and the community at the Smithsonian. I’m really excited to get plugged into that professional science community that’s all around."
Reflecting on the recognition, Schoonover was honored and knows it was a lot of work to get to this point. Throughout his work at Penn State, he mentioned his advisor, Jesse Reimink, has been a huge help in taking the data and pushing it forward, while the LionChron lab manager that works with Schoonover, Joshua Garber, has also been instrumental in helping him design the method, run the tests, and figure out what the data means.
“It’s a huge honor to be able to go,” Schoonover said. “My lab at Penn State allowed me to do this work, and my adviser and I were able to work together on this project. Now we're able to apply the methods we created to the national collections.”