Amphibious achiever
Early one morning last January, MIT undergraduate Theresa Oehmke was eating breakfast at the Kilauea Military Camp on Hawaii’s Big Island when a colleague burst into the room, yelling, “Oh my god, the plume, it’s moving! We have to go chase it now!” Without asking questions, Oehmke threw together a few belongings, grabbed a few slices of cheese for sustenance, and hopped into a van. She and her peers were in hot pursuit of a column of volcanic smog that was quickly rising out of reach. The experience was part of course 1.092 (Traveling Research Environmental Experiences, or TREX), offered by MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) during each January’s Independent Activities Period. Through the course, Oehmke, a CEE major, embarked on a two-week journey to Hawaii, collecting air samples from this volcanic plume to measure sulfur dioxide emissions — a somewhat precarious process that relies largely on calm winds...