FARMINGTON – Tramping uphill along a muddy path, rain pouring down, Jason Choquette suddenly stops and stoops over a slab of multi-hued stone, slick with water.

“It’s good it’s raining,” he says. “You can see it so much better.”

Choquette, a University of Maine at Farmington senior geology major, explains what he now knows about the hill he’s standing on, simply from reading the stone under his feet.

He speaks of how 400 million years ago, this rocky outcrop in New Vineyard was fathoms under a prehistoric ocean. Of how the mud at the bottom was so deep not even worms could survive. Of how, over time, the mud, moved to and fro by tidal currents, turned to stone, and of how the stone became the only map we have now of our ancient past.

It’s heady stuff, and Choquette of Farmington, his four classmates, and his professor, Doug Reusch, get excited enough to interrupt each other now and then, debating the merits of various theories.

For their yearlong senior project, each major chose an area near Farmington to map, Reusch says, although “mapping” is an understatement. Really, what the students are doing is researching the geological history of their chosen area, trying to find the answer to a specific problem.

For Choquette, it’s what caused the peculiar rock formations and when and how they were created.

The mountains around Farmington have been relatively little studied, Reusch says, which is both a blessing and curse for his students. It’s understandably harder for undergrads to do research in an area even geologists with 30-plus years of experience don’t understand, he says. “But there are also plenty of problems left to figure out,” he says.

Plenty of problems, and plenty of glory, it seems.

In his research, Choquette stumbled upon some evidence that seems to explain a geological-history question local scientists have wondered about for years.

For the UMF geology majors, though, the senior field-research program is far more than just the chance to work in the field.

Being thrown out into the fray, studying and having to draw on what he’s learned – all by himself – and having to come to his own conclusions about what he sees in front of him have taught Choquette more than his three previous years in school, combined, he says.

The program is relatively new, Reusch says. He and professors Tom Eastler, David Gibson, and Julia Daly have been working to expand it, as a way to solidify what their students have learned during the past three years. Whoever said learning has to take place inside was missing something big, Reusch says.

Choquette is not the only one who agrees with him. Michael Bodkin, studying a time period much closer to the present, becomes animated when explaining how 12,000 years ago, parts of Farmington were either at the bottom of an oceanfront lake, or under the sea in an estuary.

Bryan Way of Nashua, N.H., points out different minerals on the ground and explains how geology is really the confluence of all the sciences – chemistry, biology, and physics. Desmond “Tex” O’Brien of Nobleboro and Thomas Gregg of Mapleton, squint down at squiggly lines in the dark stone under their feet, debating with Choquette over which way water must have been traveling to create the pattern.

And this is only fieldwork – just one component of the project they labor to finish for untold hours, every week.

With a passion some seem to reserve primarily for expensive tools, Reusch and the five students explain that lab work – cutting stone with diamond-studded blades, melting rock and testing its chemical components in space-age machines, studying paper-width slices of stone under powerful microscopes – helps them pick out what rocks were once animals and plants and which were sand and mud.

It’s a study that’s only just beginning at UMF, Reusch says. There are still lifetimes of problems to sort out in this small corner of the Appalachians, and eons of change left to uncover.