With support from the Curson Travel Award, fourth-year graduate student Indujaa Ganesh will spend two weeks in the Nine Hill paleovalley region in Western Nevada to research and understand the emplacement of the Nine Hill Tuff (NHT) there. The Nine Hill paleovalley hosts six different units of the NHT, one of the many extensive and long runout pyroclastic density current (PDC) deposits in the Great Basin. Indujaa's work will involve using anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility to estimate flow directions and also measuring outcrop thicknesses, grain size distributions, and lithofacies to understand the flow properties.

This research is relevant to Indujaa's current research on the mechanics of long runout PDC deposits on Venus. Indujaa adds, "This is also an opportunity to gain field experience in volcanic landscapes and build valuable geophysical skill sets, both of which will open up potential planetary analog research avenues in the future."

The Curson Education Plus Fund in Planetary Sciences and LPL was established by Shirley Curson, a generous donor and friend of LPL, for the purpose of supporting travel expenses outside the state of Arizona during summer break. The award is open to students in the Department of Planetary Sciences and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who propose to fund study, museum visits, special exhibits, seminars, instruction, competitions, research and other endeavors that are beyond those provided by the normal campus environment and are not part of the student’s regular curriculum during the recipient’s school year.