Having earned his Pitt Bachelor of Science degree last August, KEVIN ROBINSON was eligible to participate in today’s Commencement ceremony. But Robinson, now a graduate student here, had a scheduling conflict: He’s in Mongolia this year on a Fulbright Research Fellowship,Trying to Get to The Bottom of Climate Change

Kevin Robinson wielding one of the devices he used to collect sediment cores from lakes in northern Mongolia. Robinson is the only Pitt student ever to receive a U.S. Fulbright Research Fellowship as an undergraduate.

His heart pounding and his nerves on edge, Pitt undergraduate Kevin Daniel Robinson braced himself as he entered Buyant Ukhaa airport in Mongolia’s capital city of Ulaanbaatar early one Saturday morning in June 2003. The confrontation Robinson had been dreading seemed imminent. As he prepared to check in for his flight back to Pittsburgh, Robinson faced the sickening possibility that he had just wasted the last two months of his life.

Among the things Robinson hoped to bring home with him were seven plastic tubes, each of them six feet long and three inches thick, weighing a total of about 100 pounds. Highly conspicuous. And highly valuable. Priceless, arguably, because of the treasure inside them, treasure that Robinson had traveled halfway around the world—literally—to obtain. (“If ‘Outer Mongolia’ sounds like some place that’s on the far side of the planet, that’s because it is,” notes G. Alec Stewart, dean of the University Honors College and one of Robinson’s Pitt mentors. “Mongolia is on exactly the other side of the Earth from Pittsburgh.”)

Robinson knew that Mongolian customs inspectors were likely to hassle him about the tubes and might well confiscate them because of what they contained. If Robinson were forced to leave the tubes behind at the Ulaanbaatar airport, he might never see his treasure again, and his Mongolian expedition—involving two months of punishing travel and work in one of the world’s most remote and climatically unforgiving regions—would have been for nothing.

The University Honors College has been sending Pitt undergraduates to Mongolia on summer internships and research projects since the late 1990s, but the college sponsored no such trips in 2003 because of the SARS outbreak in Asia.

Luckily, Robinson, an Honors College student enrolled in the Department of Geology and Planetary Sciences, made contact in early 2003 with a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who gave Robinson and a friend, Pitt biological sciences major Scott Stark, permission to accompany a group of Smithsonian archeologists on a summer 2003 dig in Mongolia.

While not underestimating the SARS threat, Honors College Dean Stewart didn’t worry about Robinson’s safety.

“Here was a student who, as a Brackenridge Undergraduate Research Fellow at Pitt, had bicycled solo from Reading, Pa. [Robinson’s hometown], to Vancouver, B.C., studying North American glacial features along the way,” Stewart said recently. “Then Kevin took the spring 2002 term off to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, by himself, from Georgia to Maine.” (During his hike, Robinson raised more than $1,500 for Project Linus, a charity that distributes blankets and quilts to needy children.) The summer before his Mongolian expedition, Robinson spent two months living along the shores of Lake Tanganyika in one of the poorest areas of Tanzania, working with a National Science Foundation-funded research group; Robinson investigated how climate changes affected distribution of diatom algae in the lake.

“Obviously, this kid could take care of himself under pretty rough conditions,” Stewart concluded.

To finance his largely self-conceived research trip to Mongolia, Robinson cobbled together travel/research grants from the Honors College, Pitt’s University Center for International Studies, the geology and planetary science department, and miscellaneous other sources. Then he packed up 300 pounds of outdoor gear and scientific equipment—including an inflatable raft and Soviet topological maps of Mongolia dating back to the 1920s—and left for Ulaanbaatar on May 20, 2003.

“I’m pretty sure that there are only two boats in Mongolia. One is my rubber raft. The other belongs to the Mongolian Navy,” Robinson joked. “They’re not a very seafaring people.”

Robinson and his friend Stark flew from Pittsburgh to Chicago to Japan to Korea, where they met up with the Smithsonian archeologists. “We were able to book seats on the same flight from Korea to Ulaanbaatar as the Smithsonian people, which was great,” Robinson later recalled, “because I had no idea how to get around in Mongolia. Once we latched on to the Smithsonian group, Scott and I had rides from the airport in Ulaanbaatar to our hotel and, from there, out into the field.”

As much as Robinson appreciated the archeologists’ help, their fieldwork left him cold. “Digging up ruins, studying rocks, that really doesn’t interest me very much,” said Robinson, who was aware of the incongruity: Geology majors like him were supposed to bore rocks, not vice versa.

Early in his undergraduate career here, Robinson actually had considered switching his major to emergency medicine (he’s a Pennsylvania-certified emergency medical technician) because while he understood the economic value of geologists’ work—locating oil deposits, for example—he didn’t see how geologists could improve people’s lives.

But then Robinson’s department recruited two young assistant professors of geology, Mark Abbott and Michael Rosenmeier, whose research fascinated Robinson. Both professors study the social impacts of environmental change. Among other things, they examine lake sediment cores in order to track climatic changes.

Top: Robinson (at water’s edge) prepares to paddle out onto a lake to collect a sediment core. Bottom: While doing research in a glacial mountain valley in northern Mongolia’s Hovsgol Aimag region, Robinson lived and worked with the Tuva, a Mongolian people native to Siberia.

A parfait-like core of sediment from an undisturbed lakebed can provide a layer-by-layer picture of climate changes over thousands, even tens of thousands of years. That’s in contrast to tree rings, which likewise record climate changes but for only as many years as that particular tree was alive.

Robinson saw how evidence gathered from research like Abbott’s and Rosenmeier’s could influence public policy on environmental issues. Intrigued, he began working in Abbott’s lab. With guidance from Abbott and Honors College Dean Stewart, Robinson came up with an unusually ambitious proposal for his senior honors thesis: traveling to Mongolia and retrieving sediment cores from lakes there. Subsequent analyses of these samples, Robinson argued, might help scientists better understand Mongolia’s climate and lead to better management of the Alaska-size country’s natural resources.

In recent years, Mongolia has suffered from unusually dry-summer and cold-winter cycles known locally as dzuds. Between 1999 and 2001, harsh weather killed more than 2.4 million livestock in Mongolia, directly or indirectly affecting an estimated 400,000 people and costing the country an estimated $78.3 million. Nearly one-third of Mongolia’s 2.5 million people depend on livestock for food, transport, and heating materials.

Before Robinson could do any lake sediment sampling in Mongolia, he needed to find lakes.

“At first, as we were traveling with the Smithsonian group, my friend Scott and I would go off on our own with my inflatable raft, looking for lakes and gathering whatever sediment cores we could,” Robinson remembered. But the lakes they were finding in this manner tended to be too shallow for effective sediment coring, so the Pitt undergrads split off from the Smithsonian archeologists.

For about $200 U.S.—a windfall in that part of the world—Robinson rented nine small-but-tough Mongolian packhorses and hired three guides, including a 26-year-old interpreter named Sanjim. Together they rode up into the mountains of northern Mongolia, looking for deep, old glacial lakes.

“I’m pretty sure that there are only two boats in Mongolia. One is my rubber raft. The other belongs to the Mongolian Navy,” Robinson joked. “They’re not a very seafaring people.”

They lodged in gers (circular, domed portable tents used by nomadic Mongols) with the Tuva, a Mongol people native to Siberia who have inhabited the mountains for centuries and know the land intimately. Sanjim himself was Tuvan, and he immediately recognized lakes that Robinson pointed out on his 1920s Soviet maps. “The maps were incredibly accurate,” Robinson said later. “I would show Sanjim a map, point to a lake, and say, ‘Can you get me there?’ Sanjim would say, ‘No problem.’”

But even in midsummer, it was a challenge finding lakes that weren’t frozen over, Robinson discovered. “We would ride to people’s tents, describe a certain lake, and ask, ‘Can you ride a horse over this lake?’ If so, we wouldn’t go near it. If not, then we’d paddle out and measure its depth.”

Living with the Tuva, whose livelihoods depend on reindeer, Robinson witnessed how climatic warming can devastate fragile, indigenous cultures.

“Reindeer are cold-weather animals, obviously, that feed on lichens, which are cold-weather plants,” Robinson later explained. “As the climate has warmed in recent years, the lichens have moved higher and higher up the mountains to where the temperature is cold enough for them to grow. They’re basically at the mountaintops now, and it’s getting harder and harder for the reindeer to reach them.

“At the present rate of warming, the lichens will die out, the reindeer will run out of food, and the Tuva will have to abandon their traditional way of life, which they’ve been living for thousands of years. Already, their population is dwindling, because it’s hard for them to raise enough reindeer to survive off them entirely anymore.”

Robinson eventually gathered seven sediment cores from three lakes in a glacial mountain valley in northern Mongolia’s Hovsgol Aimag region. (Robinson would name one of these previously unnamed lakes after Sanjim; it is now known officially to geologists as Sanjim Nuur, or Lake Sanjim.)

To gather lake sediment cores, Robinson used the “hammer coring” method. First, he would lower by rope a long plastic tube, equipped with a one-way valve, until it touched the lake bottom. He then would lower a second rope attached to a weight, which would drop onto the tube and hammer it deep into the sediment. Because the tube’s one-way valve let sediment in but not back out, Robinson could yank the tube back up by rope without spilling or even disturbing the sediment inside.

The next challenge would be getting his sediment cores home.

Professional geologists know that customs officials do not view rocks, sand, mud, and dirt as merely…rocks, sand, mud, and dirt. For example, if Greek customs officers encounter someone attempting to exit their country carrying bags of rubble, they see a probable smuggler of precious antiquities. In a mineral-rich but still largely unexploited country such as Mongolia, customs officials are likely to suspect that a 22-year-old American seeking to leave their country carrying tubes full of lake sediment—tubes which must remain sealed—is smuggling out samples for analysis by foreign mining companies looking to cheat Mongolians out of their country’s natural resources.

When Robinson arrived in Mongolia, he hadn’t been aware of the suspicion he might later arouse trying to leave the country with his sediment tubes. He had brought from Pitt a permit authorizing him to carry organic materials across national borders, but no one had told him he would also need special permits from the Mongolian government to get his sediment cores out of the country.

“I spent a day in Ulaanbaatar,” Robinson later remembered, “frantically running around to the Mongolian Ministry of Natural Sciences and Ministry of Agriculture for the proper permits, but they wouldn’t give them to me because I wasn’t working under contract with a Mongolian university. I pretty much resigned myself to leaving my stuff with Mongolian customs, hoping it would be stored at the National University [of Mongolia] in Ulaanbaatar and I might later be able to get the right permits to get it out of there.”

Those and other, less hopeful possibilities raced through Robinson’s mind as he checked in at Buyant Ukhaa airport and proceeded toward customs.

“That’s when I looked around and realized, ‘Hey, there’s no one here,’” Robinson later recalled, with a laugh. “I thought, ‘Where is everybody?’”

At home in bed, maybe. In any case, it was early on a Saturday morning, and customs officials simply hadn’t shown up for work yet. Relieved and grateful, Robinson saw that his sediment cores were safely loaded, boarded the plane himself, and settled in for the long journey back to Pittsburgh.

Robinson returned to Mongolia late last December. While other Pitt students were snug at home with their families, Robinson spent the latter part of his holiday break aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, among strangers, hurtling across Russia toward the land where his promising research career had begun in earnest.

Now a graduate student pursuing an M.S. degree in Pitt’s geology and planetary sciences department, Robinson is conducting a 10-month project aimed at reconstructing the environmental history of northern Mongolia from lake sediment cores. His research is being funded by a U.S. Fulbright Research Fellowship, awarded to Robinson as a senior. He is the only Pitt student ever to receive a Fulbright Research Fellowship as an undergraduate.

In preparation for his return research trip, and consistent with Fulbright requirements, Robinson studied the Mongolian language intensely last year, through Pitt’s Less-Commonly-Taught Languages Center.

“Kevin is just one of those absolutely brilliant, outgoing, highly motivated students you sometimes get the privilege to work with,” Robinson’s graduate adviser, Rosenmeier, said last week. “He’s also a very charming guy, which works well for him in terms of establishing contacts abroad and getting a research project off the ground.”

“I’ve got to say, we have some exceptional undergraduates in our department,” said professor and geology and planetary sciences chair William Harbert, grinning proudly. “It’s just incredible, their dedication, their drive and ambition, and it’s a pleasure to have the opportunity to interact with young people like that. Our students have included Brackenridge Fellows, a Truman Scholar, and a Udall Scholar.

“But even in that group, Kevin stands out. He really does. He’s a superstar.”