Rafael S. Orozco - Geologist

I'm a senior undergraduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. My major is Geology with a concentration in Petroleum Engineering. My interests lie in the subsurface, specifically basins as they are repositories for the history of our planet. My current focus is using seismic and geophysical logging data for interpreting the subsurface.

I never considered Geology as a career before arriving to university, due to a lack of exposure to the field growing up. After watching a documentary about Snowball Earth, I became fascinated at the concept of the Earth as a system, and promptly switched my major to Geology. The congenial atmosphere of the Geology department combined with a deep appreciation for field work, has made me feel like I've found a second home.

I was fortunate to be born and raised in one of the most beautiful areas of the country, Santa Barbara, California. The juxtaposition of the mountains and the ocean allows you to go hiking in the mountains to snorkeling in the channel within the same day. The history and culture of the area has instilled in me a strong sense of environmental stewardship and responsiblity for building sustainable communities, which has been a great motivating factor in my life.

I recently completed Geology Field Camp in the Black Hills of South Dakota with the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology which was a blast! I made a lot of new friends from across the country while learning about the unique geology of the Black Hills region.

Read More

This is a cross section from my sophomore Field Methods course. Our Field Methods starts in January when it is often -40 degrees outside, therefore we often work inside at the start of the semester by setting up different rocks around the lab with varying dips and elevations to produce a geologic map, history and final cross section of the area.

This was the final mapping project for my sophomore Field Methods course. We mapped for 8 hours along a road on Fort Wainwright, AK. This was done during one of the coldest Spring seasons in recent memory in Alaska. We had to wait until the week before finals for it to warm up to just above freezing.

This is from my Paleontological Methods course. This course is taught by Pat Druckenmiller (Earth Sciences Curator, University of Alaska Museum & UAF Dept. of Geology). The course is designed to provide students with the necessary skills to conduct research at the Museum of the North. The microphotography done on this specimen involved using a stack of photographs with varying depths of field and then processing the images using Photoshop. I created the scale shown in the diagram to aid in future work.

This was a project for my Paleontogical Methods course. The purpose was to produce a 3d model of a Pterosaur skull using photographs. This is a technique called Structure from Motion. The process involved taking 45 photographs from varying angles and uploading them to free software such as Autodesk 123d or Meshlab. The software is able to pull information such as camera location and orientation for each photo, which is then used to create a point cloud with the use of a sophisticated algorithm. The software interprets this point cloud to create a 3d model. The model can be viewed in 360 degrees. A 3d printer will hopefully be incorporated by next year to take this process one step further.

Read More

I have worked as a mine geologist at the Fort Knox Gold Mine located outside of Fairbanks for the past two summers, mostly logging core along with other associated duties.