Ianthe Nelson demonstrates ground-penetrating radar for a geology class on the Arts Quad recently. Robert Barker/University Photography
Ianthe Nelson has become pretty good at peering below the surface. Cornell seemed a cold, inhospitable place when she arrived four years ago. And the earth's crust was an impenetrable mystery -- until the geology major developed skills for imaging underground structures, skills that landed the graduating senior a job in the petroleum exploration business.
Nelson's specialty uses a machine called ground-penetrating radar, or GPR. A much more powerful and sensitive version of the radar guns used to catch speeders, GPR sends energy beams deep into the earth's surface, then reads the reflected energy as it bounces off materials of different consistencies to make computer-processed images of geologic formations.
Until Nelson took Cornell's machine to Orange County, Fla., to look for sinkholes, GPR was mostly used for environmental and geotechnical applications. But her experiments with GPR, part of her senior honors thesis, greatly refined the technology as she produced exquisitely detailed, three-dimensional images of potentially dangerous sinkholes.
"Her work as an undergraduate has been clearly on par with some of the best graduate student research we have," said an enthusiastic Larry D. Brown, professor of geological sciences. "She has been our cutting edge into a powerful new technology for subsurface studies."
Academic research aside, Nelson also found a major sinkhole under a road north of Orlando that should have public-works officials very interested.
A 10-year resident of Austin, Texas, and balmy California before that, Nelson was dismayed by Ithaca's chilly weather. And the typically large, freshman-year classes weren't much more appealing -- until she found a home in the geology department.
"Geology at Cornell is like a family. Everyone watches out for you, and you get to know everyone, including the professors," she says, fondly remembering picnics and dinner parties at faculty homes.
Although she didn't care for winter weather here, Nelson at first didn't give Ithaca summers a chance. Instead she headed south -- way south -- between her sophomore-junior years where winter comes in July and winds blow cold off the Andes Mountains of Argentina.
The first winter-in-summer let her complete the geology fieldwork requirement. The second, when she was actually paid to freeze, Nelson was hired to try GPR in stratigraphy studies in the Andean foothills -- without much success.
"I spent the whole summer trying to get results, and believe me, we tried everything," Nelson says. "But that's how science works. I guess that's how you learn."
Her special touch with a difficult technique so impressed Phillips Petroleum Co. that they offered Nelson an internship with the firm's Americas Division. Fortunately, she has been studying Spanish and Portuguese, with the goal of living and working in South America. She hopes the oil company likes her well enough to offer a permanent job, but if not, she says, "Graduate school in the spring is still an option."
Grad school, if it comes to that, will be in some area of geology, probably in geophysics. The life of a geologist is not so bad, she says.
"It's the one field where, when you come back from a trip with a heavy bag and somebody says, 'Whadaya got in there, rocks?' you can answer, 'Yes.'"
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