Zach Perrine | Student

Environmental Geosciences Exploration

When Zach Perrine stepped foot on the DePauw University campus, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. “I took everything. I took arts and humanities, physics, history…I declared as environmental geoscience late,” he says. “My sophomore year, I took Weather and Climate, and that’s when it hit me…I could see myself doing this.” Once declared, he dove in. 

Perrine took advantage of every opportunity he could. He went to New Zealand over the 2025 winter term. During his senior year, he took a winter term course on nuclear power, taught by a ’72 alum who is an expert in the field. Just a few weeks later, he piled into a van for spring break with a group of geoscience students and a professor to see the Guadalupe Mountains of west Texas and New Mexico. The impact of these individual experiences has a unique power when Perrine considers them together.

New Zealand’s unique tectonic geography makes it a virtual hothouse of hands-on education on volcanoes, earthquakes, mountain building, glacial movement and more. “All the geosciences majors went. I learned so much and had a great time,” he says. The nuclear power winter term yielded similar observations. “I learned a lot. I knew nothing about nuclear power going into that class.” And in the Guadalupe Mountains, the spring break trip included an up-close look at the wonder of a 260 million year-old oceanic reef. 

Community

So much of Perrine’s exploration has been done in the close community of professors, his peers and even alumni. Perrine and his adviser, geology professor Tim Cope, both describe the geosciences students as a tight knit group. Not only do they share majors and career goals, they also share experiences like trips to New Zealand and the mountains of west Texas. “There’s nothing like driving cross country with a group of students in one van. We get to know each other extremely well,” says Cope. 

The community doesn’t happen by accident. The geosciences department maintains a fund that makes off-campus study like the one to Guadalupe free for students and winter term courses like the one in New Zealand affordable. “After declaring and taking these trips, I got to meet people who were like me. Intellectually, we had similar interests,” Perrine says. “And the professors, while they may not be our age, I feel like they understand us and speak our language.”  

Bringing the Pieces Together 

Cope notes that scientific subject matter can appear to be an abstraction for a lot of students. That’s where Perrine jumps in on the conversation, “You can be told a lot of things in class — how everything forms, what it looks like — but you don’t really recognize how it all works together until you’re actually out in the field. Being able to go to these places and see these rocks and structures helped me put it all together.”  

Perrine’s capstone project is the perfect example of this concept. Cope had a collection of 235 black and white aerial photos of Putnam County from 1946 that someone in the department had acquired at an estate sale. He challenged Perrine to digitally stitch the photos together and build a three-dimensional layer on top of that to compare and contrast with current topographical representations of the same area. 

Perrine had done some GIS work with professor Beth Wilkerson, but in many ways this was new territory. Perrine used a software called Metashape to import, align and build a map that could then accept a 3-D mesh overlay to create a realistic color topographic map of the entire county from those 80-year-old prints. 

“I had to learn an entire new software program, work through the roadblocks and produce something original. I had a lot of fun learning and it feels like a great skill to take with me,” he says. Off to the next mountain!