Selamat Datang semua!
My name is Asmara, and for the last few weeks, I have been helping Jade with her fieldwork at Sinabung!
A little bit about me: I was raised in Oshkosh, Wisconsin by adventurous parents. My mother is from Indonesia and came to the United States by herself in pursuit of college education. My father is also native to Wisconsin and is a geology professor. The spirit of exploration and love for our earth was ingrained in me from a young age.
Now, I am a geoscience student at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. To explore the geosciences, I took advantage of every opportunity that Trinity threw at me. My first research project was on salt tectonics in the Flinders Ranges of Southern Australia during the summer of 2016. While at the Flinders Ranges, I encountered an outcrop of the Ediacaran Fauna and fell in love with fossils. With that in mind, my second project had to be paleontology related. I
investigated the paleoenvironments of dinosaur footprints in the Texas Hill Country during the summer of 2017. This project revealed my excitement and interest in paleoenvironments. For my senior thesis, I am investigating paleo-flood events from a Piston core in Mobile Bay, Alabama. We aim to develop multi-proxy paleo-flood assessment tools for coastal bays and evaluate the frequency of riverine floods in Mobile Bay through laser particle size distributions and elemental composition. Then, I will look at foraminiferal assemblages to see the relationships of flood events with eutrophication and hypoxia. I could talk about my senior thesis forever, but I will spare you for now!
I also take advantage of all of the lecture series that come through Trinity. When I met Dr. Shan de Silva at Trinity during his guest lecture, I was really excited to learn about geology from my mother’s homeland. I was beyond excited when I received an email from him later that week inviting me to assist Jade in her fieldwork in Indonesia!
Here I am now- living the dream. I get to learn about volcanoes, get more rocks for my collection, practice my Bahasa Indonesia, and take many many photographs of the land I love.
Udah dulu ya!
-Asmara Lehrmann