Rachel So

I had a lot of fun hanging out with all the organic geochem folks at #OrganicGeochemistryGRC this past week! And of course it was great being able to present my cool research and taking in everyone else’s cool research 😎.

Very excited that I got to share my work through USC’s Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability!

I'm very honored and excited that I got to give a talk at the 2nd International GDGT Workshop in Zurich this past week. I had a wonderful time chatting with old and new colleagues alike. Already can't wait to see what the next GDGT Workshop will bring us!!

Also, the view at Bear Lake is simply breath-taking.

Grabbed some mud in the nearby creeks/rivers, too.

Spent the last couple days sampling sediment and plants in the Bear Lake region. Thank you to @Dan_E_Ibarra for inviting me to join him and his students on their sampling trip. It was a wonderful opportunity to see this lake site with my own eyes.

And some amazing new friends to share this memory with

Trekking through the rainforest

Cleaning the science tent at the drill site and organizing cores in the warehouse

Had a nice adventure in Brazil this past month helping with the Trans-Amazon Drilling Project. Despite technical difficulties pausing drilling, I still got to see the drill site and cores, as well as meet some wonderful Brazilian colleagues.

I'm so grateful to everyone who made this fantastic experience possible. Thanks again and hope to see some of y'all at AGU later this year!!!

And enjoy some very beautiful scenery!

Got some field work action (which I don't get a lot of) measuring ash beds at the Wilson Creek Formation and got to explore Obsidian Dome.

Finally got to see in person the Mono Lake I've read in papers so many times and the oldest trees in the world (4,000+ yr bristlecones!)!!!

It's been an amazing 2 weeks of #PaleoCamp!! I met so many wonderful people. We learned a lot, hiked a lot, and got attacked by bugs a lot😆 Thank you so much to the instructors for their hard work organizing this and to all my PaleoCAMP homies for making this experience awesome!

Seeing how Great Salt Lake changed 5.5 ky ago is interesting in light of today's historic low lake levels which are increasingly being featured in the news. Below you see the exposed ooid-covered lakebed during extreme low lake levels back in May 2022.

High salinities and different lake conditions prior to the step shift compromised temperature interpretations for the mid-Holocene.

We see a 5.5 ka step shift in several other GDGT indices, interpreted as a switch in lake conditions from the warm, dry mid-Holocene to the wet late Holocene.

We reach the upper limit of the ACE salinity proxy (blue) for the whole record, but extended archaeol (black cross) shows the highest salinities occurred pre-5.5 ka, consistent with regional evidence for a dry mid-Holocene.

Over the last 7.2 ky, isoGDGTs were dominated almost entirely by GDGT-0 with a change in distributions for the remaining isoGDGTs at 5.5 ka.