There are many types of photography, but all of them aim to achieve the same basic principle: to stop time. The role of the photographer is to choose what portion of space is to be frozen in time, for what length of time, and what is the focus of the image. I have personally become quite accustomed to journalistic photography, which focuses primarily on capturing people and places in action. Most of my blog so far has displayed this form of photography, capturing BotS in many of the unique locations we visit, usually pointing at, picking up, or sampling some […]

Once again based on campus, the BotS crew continues to examine the many different aspects of the Susquehanna River watershed. Starting at the headwaters of Buffalo Creek, we had the opportunity on Monday to take a variety of water quality samples as the creek progresses toward the Susquehanna River. In the mountains, with water flowing through inert bedrock, the stream is highly responsive to changes in acidity. Due to concerns of acid rain affecting the ecology of this portion of Buffalo Creek, the local watershed alliance has constructed a set of artificial wetlands that filter the water through limestone and […]

It’s amazing how things move in cycles. Coal, lumber, oil and now natural gas have created many boom and bust cycles for Pennsylvania. Marcellus Shale, the next boom and bust cycle, is a very controversial topic in Pennsylvania and New York because of the negative impacts it has on the land and those who live on the land. Thursday we went to Dimock, Pa., a town that has been severely impacted by the drilling of natural gas wells. The process of hydrofracking the shale bedrock to release the natural gas involves sending hundreds of gallons of water under high pressure […]

Even as Pennsylvania recovers from the after-effects of the coal and logging booms, another natural resource has been discovered within the borders of the Commonwealth, the Marcellus Shale. Over the millennia, the 300 million-year-old shale has been compressed and cooked by the heat of the earth’s  core, producing natural gas trapped in the tight layers of the rock. To extract the methane from the rock, the gas industry has pioneered the use of two specific methods to extract the valuable resource from its present location approximately a mile beneath the surface of the Appalachian Plateau: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. […]

Week Two of Bucknell on the Susquehanna has been largely focused on two elements: Rocks and humans. While we are no longer a Stone Age society, dependent on stone to make our tools, we are still tremendously influenced by the rocks that make up the world we live in. From quarries to sacred Native American grounds, and from outcrops of the now famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) Marcellus Shale to obscure piles of dirt that turn out to be 800,000 years old glacial deposits, we have been all over the history of the Susquehanna River Valley. Rocks are […]

Intermittently since the summer of 2008, my home has been in the Susquehanna River Valley and so has my classroom. Come the end of this month, the river will BE my classroom for the duration of the fall 2010 semester. I cannot put into words how excited I am for this experience, especially as one of the culminating academic opportunities of my undergraduate experience. My first experience in a kayak was near my home in McHenry, Md., on the Youghiogheny River (and you thought Susquehanna was hard to spell) at the age of seven or eight; and I promptly tipped the […]