Contact: Kay Fike Jones
A senior Mississippi State geosciences major travels to Washington state next month to discuss research she conducted last summer at a 35 million-year-old volcanic crater.
Beth Fratesi of Starkville was among nine university students selected for the 1999 Keck Geology Consortium Junior Research Project. The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Charlie E. Fratesi, she is a 1995 graduate of the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus.
Supported by the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles, the consortium was created in 1987 to improve the quality of geology education. It operates a field program designed to study the petrologic and structural evolution of the Northern Rio Grande Rift (or fault) in Central Colorado.
Fratesi's study of the Bonanza Caldera near Moffat, Colo., helped authenticate data on the process that brought about the crater's collapse. Her work culminates in mid-April when she and MSU geology professor Bruce Panuska, her research supervisor, take part in a national symposium at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash.
The symposium at Whitman College also is sponsored by the Keck Foundation.