As a young girl growing up in Louisiana, Candace Gossen loved to dig in the dirt.

Now grown up, the part-time PSU environmental sustainability instructor is still digging through the dirt--this time as a scientist.

Gossen recently returned from her latest research trip to Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, where she studied lake deposits for deforestation research.

A large web of thickly grown vegetation grows over the surface of the lake she studied, which made it easy for her to walk on it to gather deposits. While searching through the murky water of the lake, she found something special--carbon deposits--probably from a human hundreds of years ago.

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By: Matt Alpert
Daily Vangard