View final reports
Field research background
For about a week in July, 2014, students on Lewis & Clark College’s Mt. Fuji Summer Overseas Program studied three lava flows on the north side of Mt. Fuji through a combination of field reconnaissance and systematic data collection. All three lava flows – called Kenmarubi, Takamarubi, and Aokigahara — are relatively young, effusive basaltic flows. The best-dated and most voluminous is the Aokigahara flow, which erupted in 864-866 AD from a parasitic cone on the northwest flank of Mt. Fuji.
Ecologist Watanabe Michihito of the Mount Fuji Nature Conservation Center served as our regional guide and also spearheaded one of three field investigation groups. Each group contained 4-5 students and focused on one particular topic at all sites visited: local land use history, botany, or geology. Watanabe headed the botany group, trip co-leader Andrew Bernstein led the history group, and the other trip leader, Liz Safran, led the geology group. Students in each group worked together to formulate their own research questions, hypotheses, and data collection plans, which were then modified to accommodate the needs and questions of the other groups. Field data were collected with the Fulcrum survey application on iPad minis. At night, the mobile devices were synchronized, and any necessary changes to the surveys were made. Students kept data diaries, reflecting on the day’s field work, and cleaned up data from their field surveys nightly. Ultimately, data were exported from Fulcrum into a variety of formats, including text files or .kml files, for manipulation or display in other programs, such as Excel, Google Earth, or QGIS. We invite you to view the reports stemming from these field investigations at the top of this page.