JohnFest: A celebration of John Anderson

John FEST 2018

The Department of Earth, Environmental & Planetary Sciences Presents:

A CELEBRATION OF JOHN ANDERSON John Anderson in 2010.

Photo: Alex Witus

DR. JOHN B. ANDERSON : D

THE HEART AND

r. John B. Anderson, Maurice Ewing Professor of Oceanography at Rice University, is the intellectual leader in

applying marine geology to solve glaciological and sedimentological problems of societal relevance. By using the history of ice sheets to learn how they behave, he provides essential knowledge for projecting changes in sea level. And, by studying the past and ongoing response of the Texas shelf to the rising sea level, he informs decision-makers tasked with adapting to the changes. With 44 years as a dedicated teacher with a strong, diverse service portfolio, John has made his discoveries widely useful to government, academia and society, all while empowering the next generation of researchers and educators to carry on this important work.

Listing many of John’s numerous accomplishments is straightforward, although a real effort because he has so many of them. A few highlights include: • • • •

More than 250 research papers, 9 books, 13,000 citations, and h-I of 63 62 graduate students Department Chair, Director of the Rice Shell Center for sustainability Testimony to Congress, service on key national committees

Such a list misses John’s most important contributions. He identified leading problems of societal relevance and set out to solve them within the framework of teaching and service that define a true professor. This required improved Antarctic support, ships, corers, and more, so he served on the committees to make these happen. It also required community commitment, so he set the right example through service on the necessary steering committees. It required a cadre of new researchers with a broad range of skills, so he advised students who went on to succeed in many directions. John did all of this with integrity and good humor. And, when political interference threatened science, he stood firm and communicated reality.

John’s greatest scientific result, with his students, is the “death mask” of the Antarctic ice sheet. Sea-level rise is one of the most pressing issues in a warming world, with huge uncertainties and potentially very expensive outcomes that greatly complicate efficient response. Reliable models projecting the future must be informed by knowledge of the past. John tirelessly led the effort to map the sea floor around Antarctica, including 24 research voyages, and to read the history revealed there. The ice sheet exhibited long-term stability and short-term rapid retreats, confirming physical understanding that humans could trigger changes that would be dangerous for coastal communities. Confident scientific advice to policymakers thus rests in important ways on the scientific discoveries of John Anderson and his students.

John successfully supervised 62 students and research for their masters’ degree, Ph.D., or both. Many of those students, along with scores of undergraduates and guests from various universities, were able to participate in cruises to the Antarctic, where they were witness to how much John enjoyed being at sea. Many students were equally inspired by the experience of being in Antarctica and found it launched their careers, although there were certainly a few that discovered they were not suited to being at sea and decided to pursue future land-based studies.

Image: Davin Wallace JohnFest 2

SOUL OF EARTH SCIENCE AT RICE UNIVERSITY Like John, many students had projects in both Antarctica and in the Gulf of Mexico as part of their research, allowing each student to see the impact and interconnectedness of the two programs.

Ten of John’s graduate students went on to hold faculty positions and have supervised dozens of additional students studying glacial history, sea-level change, coastal geology, sediment transport, and sequence stratigraphy, among other topics. A few dozen of John’s former students have gone to work in the oil industry, in Houston and around the world; these students are equally successful in their careers and are influencing the petroleum industry, in part by recruiting the next generation of students to internships and jobs. Other past students have gone on to work in science education and outreach, Antarctic logistics management, and the environmental industry.

] Anderson Achievements: GCAGS Outstanding Educator Award 1992 Elected to Fellowship, The Geological Society of America May 1995 Rice GSA Faculty Teaching & Mentoring Award May 1996 AAPG Haas-Pratt Distinguished Lecturer President-Society of Sedimentary Geology (SEPM) 2003-2004 Rice University Presidential Mentoring Award 2004 SEPM Shepard Medal 2007 Distinguished Lecturer-University of Durham, England Spring 2008

Image: Stephanie Shipp

Many of the 62 former students are gathering together to mark John’s retirement. Some of them graduated over 40 years ago and there is one who has yet to defend. Not all have met each other, especially if their time at Rice was separated by a couple of decades.

However, most of us know each other by name as part of the same community, a long chain of overlapping students that have heard the stories about each of those that preceded, and sometimes heard them often enough to retell those stories on our own. John’s insight and guidance has helped make all of these careers possible; the community of alumni that have come together around John will continue to value the rich experience of our connections to him and to each other.

Richard Alley Julia Wellner André Droxler

CONTENTS: 6 ANDERSON FELLOWSHIP 8 10 14 42 46

S ong of John

A nderson Academic progeny R ecollection & Appreciation Portrait of John Anderson

S ymposium schedule and speaker abstracts

John has been a great mentor supporting my academic career for more than 15 years. Starting in my first year of graduate school, he has never treated me less than a valued colleague. He has always been there to bear me up. Not only is he a great academic mentor but also an excellent role model for how to treat other people.

Alex Simms, Ph.D., 2006 Image: Alex Sims

JohnFest 4

Early in my graduate career at Rice, as the day of my comprehensive exams approached, I found myself wondering how much of an impact my research would have and if there was a way to deepen that impact. Somewhat stressed by the impending exams, I made my way to John’s office and proclaimed I worried that only my mother would read my thesis (note, she never did) and that I wished to do something more with my work. John leaned away from his computer, put down his cigar, quickly assessed the need to pull me away from the cliff edge, and assured me that he would support any effort I wanted to undertake. Thus, I began my three decades of collaboration with Earth Science teachers, launched through educational grants with John from NSF’s Directorate for Education and Human Resources and Office of Polar Programs. John always supported his students in reaching their potential no matter the pathway they chose, and he did so with a unique blend of gentle guidance, kindness, humor, strong coffee, and cigar smoke.

Stephanie Shipp, Ph.D., 1999 Image: Stephanie Shipp

The Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences is pleased to announce a new fellowship opportunity:

THE JOHN B. ANDERSON FELLOWSHIP FOR A SUSTAINABLE EARTH Made possible in part through the Human Impacts on the Earth Endowment, a generous gift challenge supported by Mary Anne and William Dingus (BA ‘81).

The Human Impacts on the Earth Endowment supports research and education in Earth systems science, through the building of a world class center in Earth, Environment and Energy.

JohnFest 6

The Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences is pioneering a new frontier of systems thinking called Whole Earth Systems Science. We are studying how the ocean, atmosphere, biosphere, and deep Earth interact to give us a habitable planet. Students are working with complex datasets that span a vast array of processes, length scales and time scales, to make predictions about the future of our planet.

The John B. Anderson Fellowship for a Sustainable Earth will help support the next generation of students to develop science-based solutions for the world’s most pressing problems, through collaborative research with Houston’s unique combination of energy, medical, chemical and space sectors.

For additional information please visit: https://earthscience.rice.edu/sustainearth/

Chile, Falkland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula December 2012- Jan 013 Image courtesy of Robert Milam

Portrait painted by Becky Totten Minzoni 2018 Photo: Jeff Fitlow

JohnFest 8

BIGJOHN

Every morning at Rice you can see him arrive, Head over the crowd, as he walks up the drive, Kinda broad in the shoulder, narrow in the hip, All the students know you don’t give no lip to Big John.

Somebody said he studied at South Alabam’, Where they say “Please” and “Thank you, Ma’am”, Then New Mexico, his Master’s great, And a PhD from Florida State, Big John.

by Richard Alley Led 24 voyages to complete the task, And make a map of the whole death mask Of Antarctic ice, where it lived and died And the sediments it left beside, Big John…

Found the ice just sits for thousands of years, Then all of a sudden, disappears, It jumps the bump, then in a race Retreats so fast that it leaves no trace, For Big John.

Three years up north, Michigan’s Hope College,

Unzip one fjord and the sea will rise

Where he taught, and gained the useful knowledge

A millimeter or two, they’re just that size,

That it’s a long, long way from there to the coast,

But a whole lot bigger one awaits,

Which is where we needed John the most, Big John.

Hanging on by its fingernails, it’s Thwaites, By its fingernails.

So he headed back south to Houston’s Rice, In seventy-five, and the fit was nice, As he climbed the ranks to the Ewing chair, Forty-three years he’s been happy there, Big John.

Big John, Big John, He’s Big John 13,000 citations, h of 62, More than two fifty papers and 9 books too, 62 grad students through the door, And undergrads helped out by the score, That’s John.

Served as President of S S G, And lectured for A A P G, S E P M’s Shepherd Medal they say, And a Fellow of the G S A, Big John.

If Thwaites jumps the bump and falls into the pit, Then coastal people will say “Oh ---- (that’s it)” They may plan for one meter, get four or five, And a lot of drivers better learn to dive, In a hurry.

So it’s back on the ship and down to the ice, A better picture would be nice, To learn how close the dangers lie, If we spit in Mother Nature’s eye, Again.

His students know just how to read What happened there, as they follow his lead, With side-scan sonar and a deeper core, And better ways to find out more, for Big John.

John learns the truth and he tells it clear, And he won’t let anyone interfere,

Was Department Chair, now directs the Center

Science makes us better, so

For Sustainability, then enter

He stands tall when people need to know,

Teaching and mentoring awards; on the go

Big John.

Told the Congress what they need to know, Big John.

Big John, Big John, He’s Big John John mapped the shelf off the Texas beach, Sea level’s past and future reach, That’s where more water soon may be If Antarctic ice falls into the sea. So Big John…

Thanks, John, for all the great things you do, For your leadership, and good humor too, And now as your retirement nears, We send our best for a lot more years, Big John.

Big John, Big John, He’s Big John

ANDERSON ACADEMIC PROGENY JOHN’S CONTINUING INFLUENCE - IN THE WORDS OF HIS STUDENTS….

I

t can be difficult to precisely gauge a person’s influence on the broader society. There are brief, dramatic events that historians identify as turning points in the trajectory of world affairs. But what about the less obvious changes that individuals go through in the process of higher education? These are more difficult to measure, yet for the students concerned, passage through graduate school often profoundly alters their future. We recall Manik Talwani, during the seminar class in which incoming graduate students learn about each faculty’s current research, emphasizing the importance of carefully selecting your research topic. Reason being, your thesis is likely to be the foundation for, and therefore shape, your entire career. Looking back over the years, these words certainly have been true. Studying under John Anderson’s direction has not only shaped our own careers but those of over 60 graduate students. We have been influenced by his infectious curiosity, passion, and high-energy drive in addressing critical questions regarding ice-sheet behavior and climate and sea-level change, through the study of the stratigraphic and sedimentologic record. As graduate research students, we benefited from John’s crucial guidance within a creative, supportive, and inclusive environment. Neither of us can think of a time when John was inaccessible to his students, even while running dual research programs in Antarctica and the Gulf of Mexico, and handling the demands of Department Chair … and …. editing theses, writing articles, publishing books, teaching classes, running field trips, leading committees, all the while maintaining that tremendous sense of humor and joy of life that is one of his many hallmarks. A champion for openness, respect, inclusivity, and diversity, John’s impact has not necessarily been the result of a single dramatic event, but rather a series of life-changing events that have impacted not only his students but many others within – and beyond - the department. These events have generated ripple effects that will continue to reverberate and positively influence the broader society as his students strive to replicate the values John instilled and create a similar environment for their own students, colleagues, friends, and families. The comments from his students that follow, and those shared at the JohnFest Celebration, touch on these values again and again, and illuminate our shared experiences and our deep appreciation for all that John has done for us. Thank you John!

Ken Abdulah, Ph.D. ‘95 Stephanie Staples Shipp, Ph.D. ‘99

DENNIS

KURTZ

M.A.

1978

Ph.D.

1980

MARY LOU COLE

HOERSTER

M.A.

1979

Ph.D.

1982

RICHARD

WHEELER

M.A.

1979

ROY

ADAMS

M.A.

EUGENE

DOMACK

M.A.

ROBYN WRIGHT

DUNBAR

KATHY BALSHAW

Image: Stephanie Shipp

1980 New Zealand

Image: Scott MacDonald

1980

Ph.D.

1982

M.A.

1980

Ph.D.

1984

BIDDLE

Ph.D.

1981

TOM

GRIFFITH

B.A.

1981

M.A.

1988

ROBERT

MILAM

M.A.

1981

FISCO

M.A.

1982

MEYERS

M.A.

1982

BARBARA ANDREWS

SHEEDLO

B.A.

1982

M.A.

1984

CARL

WOLFTEICH

M.A.

1982

CHRISTOPHER

BRAKE

M.A.

1983

PAMELA POLITE NM or TX 1982 NATHAN Image: Elizabeth Watkins JohnFest 10

Lou Bartek

DENNIS

KURTZ

M.A.

1978

Ph.D.

1980

MARY LOU COLE

HOERSTER ROY

M.A. ADAMS

1979

Ph.D. M.A.

1982 1980

RICHARD

WHEELER EUGENE

M.A. DOMACK

1979

M.A.

1980

Ph.D.

1982

ROBYN WRIGHT

DUNBAR

M.A.

1980

Ph.D.

1984

ROY

ADAMS KATHY BALSHAW

M.A. BIDDLE

1980

Ph.D.

1981

EUGENE

DOMACK TOM

M.A. GRIFFITH

1980

Ph.D. B.A.

1982 1981

M.A.

1988

ROBYN WRIGHT

DUNBAR ROBERT

M.A. MILAM

1980

Ph.D. M.A.

1984 1981

KATHY BALSHAW

BIDDLEPOLITE PAMELA

Ph.D. FISCO

1981

M.A.

1982

TOM

GRIFFITH NATHAN

B.A. MEYERS

1981

M.A. M.A.

1988 1982

ROBERT

MILAM ANDREWS BARBARA

M.A. SHEEDLO

1981

B.A.

1982

M.A.

1984

PAMELA POLITE

FISCO CARL

M.A. 1982 WOLFTEICH

M.A.

1982

NATHAN DENNIS

MEYERS KURTZ CHRISTOPHER

M.A. BRAKE

1982 1978

Ph.D. M.A.

1980 1983

BARBARA SHEEDLO MARY LOUANDREWS COLE HOERSTER SCOTT

B.A. 1982 M.A. 1979 MacDONALD

M.A. Ph.D. M.A.

1984 1982 1984

CARL RICHARD

WOLFTEICH WHEELER JANE

M.A. MATTY

1982 1979

M.A.

1984

CHRISTOPHER

BRAKE JILL

M.A. SINGER

1983

M.A.

1984

SCOTT ROY

MacDONALD ADAMS MOHAMED

M.A. BAEGI

1984 1980

M.A.

1985

JANE EUGENE

MATTY JOHN DOMACK MICHAEL

M.A. SMITH

1984 1980

Ph.D. M.A.

1982 1985

JILL WRIGHT ROBYN

SINGER DUNBAR ELIZABETH

M.A. WATKINS

1984 1980

Ph.D. M.A.

1984 1987

MOHAMED KATHY BALSHAW

BAEGI BIDDLE MARGARET

M.A. Ph.D. HERRON

1985 1981

M.A.

1988

MICHAEL JOHN TOM

SMITH GRIFFITH JOHN

M.A. B.A. JEFFERS

1985 1981

M.A. M.A.

1988 1988

ELIZABETH ROBERT

WATKINS MILAM DOUGLAS

M.A. KENNEDY

1987 1981

M.A.

1988

MARGARET PAMELA POLITE

HERRON FISCO LOUIS

M.A. BARTEK

1988 1982

Ph.D.

1989

JOHN NATHAN

JEFFERS MEYERS DAVID

M.A. REID

1988 1982

M.A.

1989

M.A. B.A.

1988 1982

DOUGLAS ANDREWS BARBARA

KENNEDY SHEEDLO

M.A.

BARTEK WOLFTEICH WENDY

Ph.D. M.A. SMYTH

1989 1982

M.A.

1991

DAVID CHRISTOPHER

REID BRAKE MARK

M.A. THOMAS

1989 1983

Ph.D.

1991

M.A.

1984

WENDYStephanie Shipp MATTY SMYTH JANE

M.A.

1991 1984

MARK Image: `Tony Rodriquez THOMAS JILL SINGER

Ph.D. M.A.

1991 1984

MOHAMED

BAEGI

M.A.

1985

MICHAEL JOHN

SMITH

M.A.

1985

ELIZABETH

WATKINS

M.A.

1987

MARGARET

HERRON

M.A.

1988

JOHN

JEFFERS

M.A.

1988

DOUGLAS

KENNEDY

M.A.

1988

LOUIS

BARTEK

Ph.D.

1989

DAVID

REID

M.A.

1989

WENDY

SMYTH

M.A.

1991

MacDONALD

John Anderson

Image: Richard Wheeler

1984

LOUIS CARL

SCOTT

John Anderson, Crabbing on the Gulf Coast

Image: Davin Wallace

JohnFest 12

LOUIS

BARTEK

Ph.D.

1989

DAVID

REID

M.A.

1989

WENDY

SMYTH

M.A.

1991

MARK

THOMAS

Ph.D.

1991

PETER PETER

POPE POPE

M.A. M.A.

1992

FERNANDO FERNANDO

SIRINGAN SIRINGAN

Ph.D. Ph.D.

1993

LAURA LAURA

BANFIELD BANFIELD

M.A. M.A.

1994

De BAUDUHIN BAUDUHIN De

SARZALEJO SARZALEJO

M.A. M.A.

1994 1994

KENNETH KENNETH

ABDULAH ABDULAH

Ph.D. Ph.D.

1995 1995

MICHAEL MICHAEL

HAMILTON HAMILTON

M.A. M.A.

1995 1995

JANA DaSILVA DaSILVA JANA

LAGE LAGE

M.A. M.A.

1995 1995

PHILIP PHILIP

BART BART

M.A. M.A.

1996 1996

BRENDA BRENDA JENNIFER JENNIFER

ECKLES ECKLES SNOW SNOW

M.A. M.A. M.A. M.A.

1997 1997 1998 1998

MICHELLE COOK COOK MICHELLE ANTONIO ANTONIO

FASSELL FASSELL RODRIGUEZ RODRIGUEZ

M.A. M.A. Ph.D. Ph.D.

1999 1999 1999 1999

STEPHANIE STAPLES STAPLES STEPHANIE

SHIPP SHIPP

Ph.D. Ph.D.

1999 1999

ASHLEY LOWE LOWE ASHLEY JULIA SMITH SMITH JULIA

AGER AGER WELLNER WELLNER

M.A. M.A. Ph.D. Ph.D.

2001 2001 2001 2001

CARMEN CARMEN AMANDA AMANDA LISA MARIE LISA MARIE DAVID DAVID JESSICA JESSICA ALEXANDER ALEXANDER BRANDI BRANDI ZAID PATRICK ZAID PATRICK KRISTY TRAMP KRISTY TRAMP BRADLEY BRADLEY RUSSELL TYLER RUSSELL TYLER DAVIN DAVIN ROBERT ROBERT RODRIGO RODRIGO TRAVIS TRAVIS

FRATICELLI Ph.D. 2004 FRATICELLI Ph.D. 2004 MOSOLA Ph.D. 2004 MOSOLA Ph.D. 2004 FRETWELL Ph.D. 2006 FRETWELL Ph.D. 2006 HEROY Ph.D. 2006 New Zealand HEROY Ph.D. 2006 Image: Stephanie Shipp MADDOX M.S. 2006 MADDOX M.S. 2006 SIMMS Ph.D. 2006 SIMMS Ph.D. 2006 BOYD M.S. 2007 BOYD M.S. 2007 TAHA Ph.D. 2007 TAHA Ph.D. 2007 MILLIKEN Ph.D. 2008 MILLIKEN Ph.D. 2008 MICHALCHUK M.S. 2009 MICHALCHUK M.S. 2009 SMITH Ph.D. 2009 SMITH Ph.D. 2009 WALLACE Ph.D. 2010 WALLACE Ph.D. 2010 WEIGHT M.S. 2010 WEIGHT M.S. 2010 FERNANDEZ Ph.D. 2011 FERNANDEZ Ph.D. 2011 *STOLLDORF M.S. 2012 *STOLLDORF M.S. 2012

Ph.D.

1998

Ph.D. Ph.D.

1998 1998

Jana DaSilva Lage Image: Stephanie Shipp

JULIA SMITH

WELLNER

Ph.D.

2001

CARMEN

FRATICELLI

Ph.D.

2004

AMANDA

MOSOLA

Ph.D.

2004

LISA MARIE

FRETWELL

Ph.D.

2006

DAVID

HEROY

Ph.D.

2006

JESSICA

MADDOX

M.S.

2006

ALEXANDER

SIMMS

Ph.D.

2006

BRANDI

BOYD

M.S.

2007

ZAID PATRICK

TAHA

Ph.D.

2007

KRISTY TRAMP

MILLIKEN

Ph.D.

2008

BRADLEY

MICHALCHUK

M.S.

2009

RUSSELL TYLER

SMITH

Ph.D.

2009

DAVIN DAVIN ROBERT ROBERT ROBERT ROBERT ROBERT RODRIGO RODRIGO RODRIGO RODRIGO RODRIGO

WALLACE Ph.D. WALLACE WALLACE WALLACE Ph.D. Ph.D. WALLACE Ph.D.

TRAVIS TRAVIS TRAVIS TRAVIS ANNA RUTH ANNA RUTH ANNA RUTHANNA RUTH

DAVIN DAVIN DAVIN

The Oden, 2010 Image: Alex Witus

Image: Pam Polite Fisco

2010 2010 Ph.D. 2010 2010 2010 2010 M.S. 2010 2010

2010 2011

*STOLLDORF *STOLLDORF M.S. *STOLLDORF *STOLLDORF M.S. *STOLLDORF M.S.

2011 Ph.D. 2011 2011 2012 M.S. 2012 2012

2012

HALBERSTADT B.A. HALBERSTADT B.A. HALBERSTADT HALBERSTADT HALBERSTADT B.A.

2013 2013 B.A. 2013

M.S. M.S. 2013 M.S.

Ph.D. Ph.D. Ph.D.

2013 2013 Ph.D. 2013

2013

MINZONI Ph.D. MINZONI MINZONI Ph.D. Ph.D. MINZONI MINZONI Ph.D.

2016 Ph.D. 2016 2016

2016

WEIGHT M.S. WEIGHT WEIGHT WEIGHT M.S. M.S. WEIGHT M.S. FERNANDEZ Ph.D. FERNANDEZ Ph.D. FERNANDEZ FERNANDEZ Ph.D. FERNANDEZ Ph.D.

ALEXANDRA KIRSHNER WITUS ALEXANDRA KIRSHNER WITUS ALEXANDRA ALEXANDRA KIRSHNERKICHNER KIRSHNER WITUS ALEXANDRA WITUS REBECCA TOTTEN REBECCA TOTTEN REBECCA TOTTEN REBECCA TOTTEN REBECCA TOTTEN

John Anderson, USCG Glacier, 1981

WITUS

BRIAN

DEMET

M.A.

2017

BRAD

BROEKSTRA

HOPE

COLLEGE

CHARLES

DUNNING

HOPE

COLLEGE

2010

2016 2016 M.S. 2016

Whidby Isand

Image: Lindsay Prothro

2016

RECOLLECTION & APPRECIATION John’s impact on his students and colleagues are reflected in the many following recollections and letters of appreciation.

I

arrived in Houston from New Hampshire in August of 1985, with all of my worldly possessions in the trunk and back seat of my 1973 Oldsmobile. Sight unseen. I had never been to Houston, never even been to Texas. One of my undergraduate professors back East suggested I should apply to Rice, so I did. I was accepted, and offered a tuition waiver and a decent fellowship, so I headed south.

On the day I arrived, John Anderson and several of his grad students, I think it was Margaret Herron, Jill Singer and Doug Kennedy, were eating lunch at the picnic table on the balcony of the 2nd floor of the geology building. I was immediately welcomed into that group, and although I had come to Rice “undecided” about whom I would work with, from that point forward I think it was just assumed I was part of that team – by me and by them.

John’s students at that time were Jill Singer, Liz Watkins, Margaret Herron, Doug Kennedy, Tom Griffith, and Lou Bartek. I was assigned an office with Lou, across the hall from Doug and Tom. We quickly came to learn that we were about as opposite as two people could be, in every sense – not just the obvious ones (he was Big Lou, I was Little John), but also in our approach to just about everything. I learned a lot from being around all of those folks.

Mark Thomas, Dave Reid, Peter Pope and Wendy Smyth arrived a year or two later, and Ken Abdullah and Phil Bart shortly after.

It was a tight group, particularly among those of us who were working on Antarctic projects (which was really everyone except Liz). Not only was there a lot of interrelationship between our projects and the data and techniques we were using, but also the need to serve together and support each other as science staff on the cruises where the data was collected. So although we each had individual thesis projects, we, along with John, were really a team in every sense of the word.

I learned a few things very quickly about John. First, we were all treated like family, by John and Doris. Chip and Heather were very much in the picture too. In fact, Chip was there at that very first lunch, he must have been 13 or 14 at the time. I hear so many stories from friends and colleagues about the horrors of their graduate school experiences, and the torment their advisors inflicted on them. My experience at Rice was completely the opposite, and I attribute this to John and Doris, their warmth and support, and can’t thank them enough for making me feel like family.

Second, John treated us as peers -- meaning our independent work and ideas were valuable to him, and although a big part of his mission was to mold us into practicing earth scientists, he generally treated us as colleagues rather than minions carrying out research on his behalf. And he trusted us. On one trip to Antarctica, John was able to snag a vacant seat on an earlier C130 flight from Christchurch to McMurdo. The rest of us - Mark Thomas, Lou Bartek, Dave Reid and I – had to stay behind and wait for the next

JohnFest 14

flight down. John trustingly left us with his Amex card to handle our expenses until we rejoined him the next day. Due to some mechanical problems, the next day turned into the next week ....

T

he Antarctic cruises on Polar Duke and Glacier were probably the most memorable part of my experience at Rice – three cruises to the Peninsula and one to the Ross Sea. I think I set a record for a Masters student. John’s rapport with the ships’ crews was fantastic. He treated them with respect, and endeavored to make the cruises both meaningful from the scientific perspective, and fun for those on board. In return, they went above and beyond to ensure that his cruises were successful. He was truly in his element out on the fantail, pulling core on deck in foul weather, ice in his beard and a cigar hanging from his mouth. Or standing on the bridge, urging the captain to pick his way between icebergs to get into an elusive bay to collect an important core, and also to take advantage of the calm water to have a barbeque on the deck. And who can forget that bootleg David Allen Coe tape that played over and over and over again until it mysteriously disappeared. Rumor has it that Larry Lawver tossed it overboard in the Drake Passage, and that it now rests on the seafloor of the Southern Ocean, somewhere near the wreckage of MH 370 ....On the Peninsula, I particularly remember the courtesy visits to the various international bases – dropping in on the British at Faraday Base and John somehow arranging to trade two cases of Budweiser for an equal amount of Guinness; and resupplying the Russians at Bellingshausen and being treated to a glass of vodka and a slice of the single, three-inch long cucumber that they had proudly grown in their greenhouse, while they waited with hope for a re-supply from the crumbling Soviet Union. On one trip, we encountered a luxury cruise ship; when they heard that we had the distinguished Dr. Anderson with us, they invited him to board and offer a brief lecture on the glacial geology of the Peninsula. Of course, he required an escort of three or four graduate students. We waited patiently at the bar while he entertained the passengers.

We didn’t just do science, we were really explorers at heart, particularly in the Antarctic, collecting data where none had been collected before, and seeing things no one had ever seen before. Of particular note was the seismic data we collected in the bays and fjords of the Antarctic Peninsula, and on the foredeepened continental shelf, which set the framework for coring and shallow drilling of a series of glacial and interglacial sequences where they outcropped on the scoured shelf.

The international Antarctic geology community was a fairly small, tight one, and I had the privilege of meeting many of them at various meetings and conferences. One I remember particularly was the 1987 SCAR Conference in Cambridge, UK, hosted by the British Antarctic Survey. The first night there, after we arrived and dropped

We didn’t just do science, we were really explorers at heart, particularly in the Antarctic, collecting data where none had been collected before, and seeing things no one had ever seen before. our bags in the dorm rooms where we were staying, John suggested we should head out to the pub to meet some of the FAGS. This being my first trip to England, I wasn’t sure what to make of this suggestion, but I quickly discovered that the FAGS were the Friends of Antarctic Geology, and many of them had actual girlfriends and wives.

Of course, preparing for the Antarctic cruises was a logistical challenge, so each of us received a deep indoctrination into the months long process of planning and preparing for a cruise, packing and shipping equipment and planning out the details of the scientific program. Usually half of it was thrown out the window when weather and ice conditions didn’t cooperate, so we also got first-hand experience in changing plans on the fly and adapting to what was possible, to ensure we accomplished something of value. When equipment broke at sea, we figured out how to fix it, and John’s diverse talents in all things mechanical and electrical (and his absolute lack of fear in taking a stab at something he’d never tried before) rubbed off on all of us. The science team on these cruises truly worked as a team, putting full effort into the work at sea even if the data was for someone else’s research project. And John set a clear expectation – no matter how late the hour, no matter how miserable the conditions on deck, if the ship’s crew was out there doing work for our program, we were out there with them, until the work was done.

John was famous for designing, and sometimes home-building the equipment we needed, from the settling tube connected to the Apple II computer in his lab, to a lot of the coring and high resolution seismic acquisition systems on the Polar Duke and Glacier. I remember a few trips with him to a government surplus yard along the Ship Channel to “see what we could find”. The place was filled with cold-war era control panels, steel office furniture, and all kinds of salvaged motors and pumps. I think we came away with a few high-pressure hoses, an aluminum storage locker, and I seem to remember a 12-foot john boat that we strongly considered taking “because we might need it someday.”

Maybe the biggest coup in the used equipment procurement arena was in 1987 when John somehow convinced the Dean that Rice really needed to acquire a 38-foot Chris Craft motor yacht to use as a research vessel in the shallow waters of the Gulf. We spent weekends outfitting it with a generator, hydraulic winch, and a high resolution seismic acquisition system, christened it the R/V Matagorda, and commenced to perform research along the Texas gulf coast. I became intimately familiar with that vessel, as I was apparently the only person in the program who was capable of snaking between the engines and the pumps to run hoses and cables through the bilge in order to complete the conversion. The Matagorda served the department for a few years until the larger and more capable R/V Lone Star was acquired and outfitted.

smoked mullet in St. Marks, and fine dining with Dennis Cassidy at the Brown Derby in Tallahassee. I saw clear blue ocean water and snow white sand for the first time in my life. There were really only three famous people who grew up in the sixties around Mobile Bay – Ken Stabler, Jimmy Buffett, and John Anderson.

J

ohn is a great story teller, and I think he married one of the best in Doris, who provides additional prompts and fills in overlooked details, and I suspect occasional embellishment of her own. Most of the stories I remember involve the people who meant the most to him – his students and colleagues, and their adventures at Rice, on field trips, on research cruises and the like. Certain people were absolutely legendary in these stories -- Dennis Kurtz, Scott MacDonald, Ken McMillen, HC Clark, and of course Martha Lou, and these stories helped connect us to those who came before us and those who have come since. I’m sure Big Lou and Doug Kennedy, from my era at Rice, are recurring characters in stories told even today.

John certainly wasn’t above poking fun at himself either, and this characteristic made him much more human and approachable to his students. Of course, John comes from the school of story telling that firmly believes that the point of the story and keeping the audience engaged takes precedence over the actual facts. Fortunately, that is different from his approach to science, where data and analysis provide the foundation, but where there is still room for creative thought where data is incomplete.

I didn’t continue with glacial marine geology after receiving my Masters degree from Rice. I, like many of his students, entered the petroleum industry where I have spent the last thirty years. But what I learned here at Rice, from John, has served me very well over those years. How to frame and solve problems, how to plan logistically complex projects and programs. How to build a team and work together with them until the job is done. How to look around and get to know the places where I am working and the people who are there. How to tell stories and inspire people to tell their own. How to treat my employees as colleagues, and my colleagues as family.

I’ll never be John, but I hope to be like him in many ways. Not Big John, but Little John.

John Jeffers M.A. 1988 April 3, 2018

J

ohn is an authentic son of the Alabama Gulf Coast, and a 40+ year academic career in Michigan and Texas, fortunately, did little to change that. Many of us got to experience the annual roadtrip to Tallahassee to deliver and pick up samples from the repository at Florida State. This journey required a stopover at John’s family home in Saraland, just north of Mobile, with a homecooked meal prepared by his mom, a drop-in visit from his sister and brother, and an evening of storytelling with John and his Dad. You just can’t beat a house built of cypress wood. Along the way, I was introduced to the beauty of the coastline from Gulf Shores to Pensacola, eating

John Jeffers

Cin-Ty Lee, EEPS Chair

Phil Bart

I came to Rice as an assistant professor in 2002. I consider myself so fortunate to have overlapped with John. He was always a source of wisdom and stability in the department, and I always saw John as the model for how to be a good faculty member. I learned, albeit slowly, that it’s not just about doing the best one can at research, but it was even more important to just be a good person and help others. I believe that John instilled these views in all of our faculty.

I haven’t done a tally but I’m guessing that John has advised maybe a hundred students. But whatever the actual number, he has truly impacted many lives in a positive way. Over the years, John has always been a great mentor. John likes to say “there’s a way that you could test that” in group discussions we’d have about this or that idea from a recent paper. It was a very stimulating environment and if you liked to collect data in the field, this was a great place to be.

Shortly after I got tenure, I had the opportunity to go on a sabbatical. Instead of going elsewhere as one typically does, I decided to stay at Rice and take John’s siliciclastics course. I had never been properly trained in sedimentology and always felt this gaping hole in my understanding. John was gracious enough to let another faculty member take his course. The first thing about John is that he is the quintessential geologist. He has the eye for making keen field observations and the incredibly rare talent of being able to synthesize all these observations into understanding how systems work. He taught the students how to think and to develop intuition. He had a way of connecting to the audience. John’s class opened up a new world for me and even changed the course of my research. The other thing I remember from this class is that it was hard to compete with all these young Rice students!

John’s Gulf of Mexico and Antarctic research programs always had many students. I first arrived at Rice, which like most other graduate programs, had a high number of students seeking temporary refuge from the bad job market - when the economy was still recovering from the collapse of oil prices. Many of us came in for a M.S. degree but we enjoyed the experience so much that we stuck around for a Ph.D. One of the exciting things about working with John was the ample opportunity to present your results. He encouraged us to present posters and talks at conferences on the data we collected. For a number of years, John ran a research program funded by exploration companies. That included an annual conference held at Rice. And we traveled to many other locations to present results as well. Wow, what an experience. “What? You get to collect this data and then travel to all these great cities to present it at a conference while you’re in graduate school?” Not a bad gig.

Cin-Ty Lee

Professor and Dept Chair

“He was always a source of wisdom and stability in the department, and I always saw John as the model for how to be a good faculty member. I learned, albeit slowly, that it’s not just about doing the best one can at research, but it was even more important to just be a good person and help others.”

At the conferences, we would be part of the entourage. John is very social person and he was great at introducing us to folk. John knows everybody and everybody loves John so it was always exciting to finally be able to match faces with authors whose paper you had just finished reading the previous week.

My first conference was in Santa Barbara where John introduced me to the famous Dr. Jim Kennett whose 1977 paper is an all time favorite of mine. One of the many things I love and appreciate about John to this day is that he is the number one supporter of the science that his students complete in both the formal and informal conference settings.

As scientist in training, that gave us all a lot of confidence that we were doing solid, high quality research on important question if John thought well enough of it to promote our results in public.

When I first arrived to Rice in 1989, I took John’s GEOL504 class. I was impressed that he always included a lot of active research and various explanations to classroom discussions.

John being a super curious guy with a good balance of skepticism for this or that hypothesis would often say “There’s a way that you could test that.” (yes, worth mentioning again) For John, testing this or that hypothesis invariably involved a heavy reliance on “ground-truth” data. On a personal

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level, I’ve been super fortunate to have a great friend in a fellow southerner after whom I could model my professional and personal life. You know what you’ve done for me John!

Unusual taxi driver at the 2003 ISAES meeting in Potsdam Germany Since graduating in 1998, I’ve stayed in pretty regular contact with John both socially and professionally. Our families are close and we like hanging out together. He’s a hoot to be around and always has the best stories to tell. He remembers more than I’ve forgotten. There are stories he’s told me where half way through I’ll say, “hey wait a minute, I was there for that one!”

A few months back, I’m not sure why, John told Sophie (my wife) about the time he and I meet at the 2003 ISAES meeting in Potsdam Germany. I should have known from the minute I landed that this trip was going to be unusual. As is my habit, I brought my journal and pen with me to get in a little writing on the long plane ride from Baton Rouge. As is also my habit, I got pretty tired of writing on one of the long legs of the trip that I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. So I put my pen in my pocket, and my journal in seat-back jacket. I woke up in time to see everyone departing the plane. I met John in the airport as his plane arrived an hour before mine. John got a kick out of the HUGE ink stain on the pocket of my favorite shirt because before I fell asleep, I forgot to retract the stylus on the pen!. Well, anyway, I was able to change into a nice shirt a few days later, when the airline delivered my bag that was lost in Atlanta.

On day five of the conference, some time was dedicated to exploring the surrounding area. We went into Berlin for the day and after awhile, it was getting late. We decided it was time to get on the tram to make it back Potsdam and meet the conference group for a pre-paid dinner cruise on the Havel. Finding a tram station took awhile and as we were finally on our way, we began to wonder if we were going to arrive on time. John and I are known never to be late for anything, especially me!

The conference organizers were very explicit that everyone should be aboard before 6 pm. Finally, we arrived at our tram stop. John said “Let’s go Phil, this is our stop.” We got off, the tram doors close and the tram whirls down the track just as we realized this was not our tram stop. “Oh no, we’re not going to make. WAIT, there’s a taxi!” We run in front of the moving taxi as it approaches because we can’t afford to lose another minute. We circle around the taxi and get into the back seat. We were a little proud, navigating through Germany not speaking a single word in German. “Ha, we’re going to the dock after all.” That’s when we notice an older gentleman sitting in the passenger side of the front seat. He turns around

towards John and I. We’re thinking, this guy already has this taxi locked up! He says something in German that we didn’t understand. When he realizes that we’re American, he says in a heavy accent, “driving school”. We look at the driver. It’s a teen-age student learning to drive with his instructor. It hit us all at once. Yikes, this was no taxi! After we explain our situation, they took pity on us and the teenage driver brought us to dock in time for our dinner-cruise on the Havel.

Now, if you already heard this story from John, he may have told it a little differently than I’ve recounted. And if you’ve heard John tell this story more than once, you’ve definitely gotten two different versions of the story with a fact or two changed around. One time, John retold the story with us at the 2001 IGS meeting in Austria! But that’s a minor detail.

As is John’s way of telling a story, you get to share a laugh with a world-class story teller!

Cheers, Phil Bart M.A. 1996 Ph.D. 1998

Lou Bartek Alpo Chili on Field Trip!

While shopping for dinner during an undergraduate, east Texas Field trip, on which I was the TA, John was inspired to purchase a few cans of Alpo dog food, as we cruised down the aisles, purchasing ingredients to make John’s famous chili, for a group dinner at the campground. We had the chili for dinner that night and after everybody had consumed a few beer (some quite a few more than others!) and was relaxed, John asked me to get the Alpo cans. He told me that he would keep folks occupied with stories and cigars, as I opened and emptied the Alpo cans in a remote trash can and then took the empty Alpo cans and placed them on top of the trash in the trash can at our camping site.

The next morning he asked one of the more gullible young ladies on the trip to take our remaining trash to the trash can before we departed the campground. She of course discovered the Alpo cans and came back to the van with a complexion that was white as a sheet. John asked her if she was alright. She stammered that she had seen empty cans of Alpo mixed among the empty cans of chili beans and tomatoes. She asked why the dog food cans were with the chili ingredients. John told her that he did not have a chance to hit the ATM before we left (in those days ATM’s were not everywhere) Houston. Consequently when we were shopping the previous evening we came up a little short when it came time to pay for groceries. So he told her that he had me go back and return some of the ground beef that we had picked up for the chili and then go and pick up a few cans of Alpo dog food, that we could mix in with the remaining ground beef so that we would have the amount of “ground beef ” that was needed for a group as large as ours. John enhanced the story by explaining how important it was that we used Alpo as the ‘beef ’ substitute because when fried, it developed a texture that was just like fried ground beef and unlike most other brands of dog food, frying Alpo drove-off the distinctive “aroma” of stewed horse meat, so Alpo was the only dog food that he found to be a good substitute for ground beef that he liked to use when he found himself in a pinch. He went on to explain that he had found that because Alpo had very little water in it, it’s volume did not change much when cooked so he could easily expand the volume of ground beef to the amount needed in the chili to feed a large group by mixing in little Alpo. He followed up by stating that he did because he did not think that there would be any problems with using the Alpo because there had never been complaints after the couple of other times that he had needed to do this to make ends meet.

As you can imagine, the young lady’s eyes opened even wider and her chin nearly hit her chest, as her mouth gaped open, as she listened to John’s explanation. However, her complexion did get any more pale. Had that occurred, I think that she would have passed out, due to a lack of blood flow to her brain! The extreme nature of girl’s reaction was contagious and triggered similar responses from many of the other students in the van. As John surveyed their faces, he could not hold back any longer and a smile slowly spread across his face, just before he burst out laughing. He was a little disappointed in himself, because he really had hoped to milk JohnFest 18

this joke throughout the rest of the day. However, he had not anticipated that it would go over as extremely as it did with this group and he did not have the heart to “torture” them with the uncertainty of their concern about whether they had all consumed “gourmet” dog food the previous evening.

I was never able to try this joke during one of my field trips, during my 25 years of teaching because I never developed John’s reputation as a culinary wizard. You have to have that reputation in order to generate the dramatic shock effect that occurs as students make the transition from the eager anticipation that they experienced before they eat dinner, to the “horror” they experience once they think that they just gorged on and enjoyed a feast of dog food!

“Asleep” on Beach in Jamaica, surrounded with empty bottles of Red Stripe Beer!

At the end of a field trip, I took a picture of John, asleep on the beach in Jamaica. John really was just taking a nap, honestly! I took the picture right after we surrounded him with almost all of the empty bottles of Red Strip beer that the group had consumed that afternoon. I later used this image as the last slide at the end of my Ph.D. Proposal Defense.

After completing the technical portion of my presentation and was making the transition to taking questions from the committee, I clicked forward to the image of: John, dressed in a “ ratty” old T-shirt, swimming trunks and sandals, laying on his back in the shade of a mangrove tree, on a white sandy beach, with his arms by his sides, his head slightly tilted toward the side with his eyes closed and completely surrounded by empty bottles of “Jamaica’s Finest!!”

- Red Stripe Beer. The volume of sound in the room immediately elevated as people in the audience chuckled and whispered to one another. After the room grew quiet again, I finished my Ph.D. proposal Defense by stating that, “I believed that with John’s able leadership, as illustrated in the image on the screen, I feel certain that I will be able to successfully complete my project.”

In the photo, it appeared as though John was passed-out on a tropical beach, after enjoying many local “beverages”. Of course I felt like I was taking a bit of a chance by presenting this image and I was a little worried when the image was displayed on the screen because it was being shown in front of John’s peers. However, I had been at Rice long enough to know that John had earned the respect of everybody at Rice for his: (1) Great Work Ethic; (2) Creativity while Addressing Problems; (3) Easy-Going Nature and associated Ability to Get Along with just about Anybody; (4) Wonderful Sense of Humor (including his ABILTY to LAUGH at HIMSELF - Which was VERY IMPORTANT to ME at that VERY MOMENT !!); (5) Ability to INSPIRE the Best Efforts from people with whom he worked; (6) PATIENCE !! (he needed a lot of that during his work with me!)

These are just a Few of JOHN’s MANY VIRTUES! So I hoped that no offense would be taken and that presentation of the image would be received as it was intended, which was as a momentary pause, to relieve some of the tension that one experiences during these types of events. There was a very brief, but tense (at least for me!) moment between when the audience quieted down, and the moment that followed when John, true to form- let out a great, big, belly laugh as he bellowed, “God Damn Lou!” You can imagine that as I saw him starting to smile, as he released that laugh, that I felt a great sense of happiness and relief.

John offshore Jamaica, Swimming through “CLOUDY WATER” During a field trip to Jamaica, during very windy morning, we took a small boat, across the choppy waters of the lagoon and reef that is adjacent to the Discovery Bay Marine Lab. We were dropped off in an area just seaward of the reef and the plan was to slowly swim back toward the land, across the reef and lagoon, examining the different sub environments as we went. Before departing that morning we consumed the traditional Jamaican breakfast of Açaí and Saltfish. Açaí is a yellow colored plant that looks and tastes a lot like like scrambled eggs when it is cooked. I thought it was tasty, but I only consumed a moderate amount of it because I had seen that the water was choppy and knew of my great propensity for getting sea sick. I also knew that not eating anything was not a good move either.

About the time that we entered the rough water, a Russian Bauxite freighter had exited the port near Discovery Bay and was just moving beyond the reef, up-current from us. As luck would have it, the freighter pumped it bilges right after it got beyond the reef and that NASTY fuel and sewage laden water drifted right down into the area where we were swimming. The rough ride in the boat already had me feeling queasy and becoming immersed in this soup of filth pushed my stomach over the edge.

At that moment I was truly terrified because when I get sick, it is a violent event, during which I lose control of my body. At that moment I was treading water in a location where the sea floor was about 50 to 75 feet below me. So there was no place where I could put my feet down to try to brace myself and keep my head above water. I really feared that if I got sick, then I would drown.

Before we got into the water, we were each assigned a “buddy”, whom we were supposed to stay near and each “buddy” was responsible for keeping track of and helping the other stay safe. My buddy was Dr. Robert Dunbar and I swam over toward him and expressed my concerns as I began feeling worse. Since he was a professor I felt like I had a good buddy and would get some good advice about how to handle the problem. WRONG!!! Rob was very interested in exploring the reef and not happy to hear that my circumstances might interfere with this. His advice to me was that I should swim over to the reef, were the water was more shallow and get sick there. I looked over at the reef and saw that the combination of the shallow water and increased toughness of the sea was causing waves (BIG WAVES) to break over the reef. I quickly

realized that if I took that advice, I would have been cut to ribbons by the jagged coral as large waves impaled me on the reef. I turned to express concern about this to Rob, but he was gone when I turned around.

I then realized that I was on my own and decided that the best thing that I could do was to tread water as hard as possible, right before I thought that I was going to get sick, in an effort to get as much of my upper body out of the water, as possible, as I got sick. So I swam a little distance from the group, so that they would not get exposed to my breakfast in the water. I continued to feel worse and I eventually had to employ my plan. Thankfully, I began to feel much better almost immediately after I purged my system of the delightful mixture of a traditional Jamaican breakfast and the bilge water that I had accidentally swallowed.

I swam toward an area where I could see a bunch of people from our group and on my way there I came across John. He was really excited and very animated as he started talking to me about this exciting natural phenomenon that he had just experienced in the water. He expressed wonder about this location where he encountered large volume of beautiful fish that were feeding. He told me that he saw this group of fish, high in the water column. He said that it was really odd because they were not near any type of structure, the type of thing that usually attracts fish. However, he pointed out that in the area where the fish were, the water was a little “cloudy”. He said that it was exciting to watch the fish as they gobbled down “chunks” that were suspended in the “cloud”. When he mentioned the “chunks” I began to think that maybe he had encountered the “cloud” in the water that was the by-product of not so natural phenomenon of me getting sick. So I asked John to tell me exactly where he had encountered the fish. He pointed the area out and sure enough, it was the site where I had rung the dinner bell for the local fish. I then explained to John that the site of his fish rapture was where I had gotten sea sick a few minutes before. As you would expect, John was a good sport about it. However, he then spent much of the rest of the trip trying to jokingly inject water down my snorkel as I swam.

We had a big laugh!

Matagorda Bay, 1987 Lou Bartek Capt. Ken John Anderson Mark Thomas

With my kindest regards,

Lou Bartek

Ph.D. 1989

Bradley Broekstra

Brian Demet

I can honestly say that I would not be where I am today professionally if it were not for Dr. John Anderson. I think my mother actually wrote him a Thank You note when I graduated from college, and went to Graduate School. I was one of Doc. Andersons first students at Hope College in Holland Michigan, where he started teaching after getting his Doctorate Degree from Florida State.

By the time I worked with John, he was basically a walking geologic encyclopedia. I’m guessing he was born this way, since the scope of his knowledge is otherworldly. John was a great mentor for me as a scientist and human being. Deciding to go to Rice and work with John was a decision with which I have no regrets and one that has blossomed a satisfying career in the geosciences.

Not that I was a wayward student (wink wink), but as a second semester sophomore, I had yet to choose a major.

Then as fate would have it, there was a May Term course offered that was going to be Physical Geology 101 ( Rocks for Jocks) taught in the field. Doc Anderson was one of the three Geology Professors at Hope, and all three went on the trip which was held in Salida Colorado. We lived in tents in a camp ground adjacent to the Arkansas River. We collected and identified our own minerals and rock types. Went on long hikes to see different Geologic formations. It was just a great time. I said “this is what I want to do with my life”. Little did I know I would wind up sitting at a drafting table and behind a computer for 40 years as a Petroleum Geologist.

Brian Demet Ph.D. 2017

Beer drinking was prohibited in camp, but there were ways around that. This was 1973 and Coors beer was only sold west of the Mississippi River, so of course it was our beer of choice. I had two fraternity brothers who also went on the trip. There was a convenience store just down the highway so occasionally after class was over for the day and before dinner, the three of us would saunter down to the store, buy us some beer and go up in the hills across the road from the camp ground. We were into second beer, and I heard Doc Anderson calling my name, Broekstra-Broekstra. I thought oh sh.. we’re busted. There was Doc Anderson scrambling up the hill with a parched look on his face. I said Doc, how did you find us. He gave us that patented crooked smile, and said “ I heard you popping the tops “. We handed him a cold one, and have been friends ever since.

Bradley R. Broekstra Hope College

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1988 Alabama Tertiary sequence stratigraphy field trip

Defining a sequence boundary, 1988 Alabama Tertiary sequence stratigraphy; John Anderson, Pete Vail, Lou Bartek

Eugene Domack Eugene Domack

(M.A. 1979; Ph.D. 1982) passed away from complications from pneumonia on November 20, 2017. Gene spent most of his career at Hamilton College in New York. He had recently moved from Hamilton College to the University of South Florida.

During his career, Gene established himself as one of the foremost authorities on Antarctica, focusing on glacial response to climate change. Indeed, it is fair to say that Gene was well ahead of his time, being one of the first scientist to utilize the sedimentary record to examine climate and glacial changes in Antarctica during the Holocene. He collaborated with some of the world’s best polar scientists and led multiple Antarctic expeditions, including his role as director of the LARISSA (LARsen Ice Shelf System, Antarctica) project, and international program focused on the rapid changes that are occurring in the Larsen Ice Shelf region. His work provides a valuable framework for assessing current rates of change and he was one of the first scientists to argue that current rates of change are largely unprecedented. His research gained him recognition as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, both awarded in 2012.

Gene was also known as a great teacher and mentor; three of his former students moved on to Rice to conduct their graduate work.

He was one of our department’s most prestigious alums and he will be missed by all of us who knew him. - John Anderson

A Tribute to Gene Domack Words and Images by Amy Leventer

Lessons learned from John and Gene I’m here today to say a few words about Gene Domack, one of John’s earliest students; Gene died this past November, after a brief illness, leaving behind a legacy that includes many of us here today who worked with him, hundreds of undergraduates who he introduced to Antarctica, and his family - his wife Judi, daughter Maddie, and mother, Vivian.

For those of you who don’t know me – I am one of Gene’s oldest friends, and we shared countless adventures, large and small, from our many Antarctic field seasons to our weekly ritual of Sunday morning coffee – it has been hard to say goodbye to a friend and colleague of 35 years.

Gene and I first met in graduate school in the early 1980s and over the years, along with miles of sediment core, we collected a lifetime of memories. I’d like to share a few of these with you today – little pieces of Gene’s life that I hope will help us all remember the best parts of him.

John was perhaps the most influential person in Gene’s life, working with Gene at the very beginning of his academic career – and providing a lifelong model for pursuing excellence in science within a framework of large scale synthetic thinking. Gene earned his Master’s degree with John way back in 1980, and only two years later, his PhD. Gene and John’s first paper together was published in the journal Nature in 1980 – Lower Cretaceous sediment from the East Antarctic continental shelf.

After that, Gene never looked back, pursuing questions regarding the evolution of the cryosphere for the rest of his career. He was one of the most perceptive scientists I’ve known, keenly observant and intelligent, with a remarkable ability to make connections among a wide range of seemingly unrelated projects – ranging from the exotic, like Antarctica, Africa and Greenland, to our own backyard in upstate NY. Throughout Gene’s career, John remained a friend, providing a helping hand, encouragement, and kindness at times when Gene needed it most. For that, I will always be grateful. For it’s in the hard times, that we truly understand the value of our friends.

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I want John to know that the lessons that he taught, mostly by example, were an integral part of Gene’s life.

“Like John, Gene had a deep appreciation for the beauty of the landscape. All of nature was a wonder to him – he was the first one out on deck to watch a majestic Antarctic sunrise, or up on the bridge when we were lucky enough to catch the southern lights.”

So, with that, I want John to know that the lessons that he taught, mostly by example, were an integral part of Gene’s life.

Like John, Gene loved being in the field – he was single-minded and totally dedicated to the task at hand. Many of us were witness, for example, to Gene’s ability to watch, seemingly endlessly, the printout from the sub-bottom profiler.

And he truly loved describing freshly opened sediment cores – really, just look at his smile.

Like John, Gene had a deep appreciation for the beauty of the landscape. All of nature was a wonder to him – he was the first one out on deck to watch a majestic Antarctic sunrise, or up on the bridge when we were lucky enough to catch the southern lights.

And finally, like John, Gene recognized that within the pursuit of science – with its long days and nights, and countless deadlines – it’s important to take a step back and remember that what truly matters most are the people who stand beside you – your shipmates, yes, that’s Gene in the lower right, with his Packers jacket, those who support your work, like Lorenzo, with his 4 AM pastry delivery to the Palmer night shift, your friends, and most of all, your family.

I can tell you, that beyond the honors, the accolades, the grants, the papers, and the adventures, what mattered most to Gene were friends and family. I don’t think many of you know that Gene took a year-long sabbatical the year Maddie was born, he was a stay at home dad. I’d come over to work on papers with Gene and while he rocked Maddie to sleep, I’d type away.

John, you have so much to be proud of, but perhaps most of all, I hope you understand how much we all learned from you – yes, the science – but so much more. I thank you most for the lesson, the reminder, that we are all human, but all seeking the same things – acceptance, a helping hand, and friendship. Your graciousness meant the world to Gene, and so it means the world to me.

-April 21, 2018

Robin Wright Dunbar

Ruthie Halberstadt

For all of us who were there when John got tenure… do you remember the night we celebrated him???

John inspires me through his creativity (who else would think ofvkelp-rafted debris?!), his collaboration (countless international colleagues), his approachability (I feel incredibly lucky to still get to ask John science questions!), and dedication to beer (once at a WAIS meeting, we visited three separate breweries the day before actually setting foot in the conference venue). I am also eternally grateful to John for the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream to hike the Appalachian Trail, and for continuing to support me in everyday ways. Most of all, I am grateful to John for introducing me to Antarctica – through classes as an undergrad, and in person as a M.S. student. I am where I am because of John Anderson!

We took him out to dinner. What was the name of that Greek place at the ship channel?? Anyway, we took him there. Must have been at least 15 of us. Many hours later, he had to help us out with the bill. I think to the tune of $250 more than we could all pull together. We all got home late, safe (another story), and happy. Way to go, John!!! I will never forget what he said when he next saw us all back at the department the next day. This is close to a quote: “You know you are in trouble when you get home aTer 1:00am and your wife is up ironing.” As I recall, it was also Halloween and Doris had full kid duty that night, too.Thanks, John, for the extra $250 and for the life lesson! Thanks, Doris, for sharing him with us that night!

Love you, Robyn, and all the rest of us there that night.

Robyn Wright Dunbar M.A. 1980 Ph.D. 1984

John Anderson, Oden, 2010 Image: Alex Witus

John Jeffers and Margaret Herron as John Anderson and Martha Lou Broussard, Halloween 1987 JohnFest 24

Ruthie Halberstadt B.A. 2013 M.S. 2016

Mary Lou Cole Hoerster I have WAY too many wonderful memories of my time with you at Rice to mention here. Some of my favorites certainly involve the six weeks or so during the summer of 1977 when you, Dennis Kurtz, and I lived out of your “customized” white van while doing first Dennis’ field work in the Medicine Bow Mountains and then my field work in the Puget Lowlands.

I remember being very cold and wet in Wyoming, where it rained every day, the van leaked, and absolutely everything got wet, and then going up to Puget Sound, where a rare temperature inversion made hanging off the sea cliffs almost unbearably hot and where some jerk tried to steal your lawn chair.

Of course I’ll never forget the surprise of the nude beach below the university in Vancouver... I was traumatized for life by the border crossing into Canada, where you told the guard we had no tobacco products, with your pack of Swisher Sweets clearly visible on the dashboard, after which the guard pulled his hand out of the map pocket and asked what the brown sticky stuff was, only to be told by Dennis that it was Coke (spilled in there about a week before). You warned the guard to be careful of the bottle of acid in the glove compartment, at which point he made us all get out of the van and had the whole thing gone overwith a drug dog. When they opened the bench/bed in the back and found all the sample bags, my entire life flashed before my eyes, and I was sure we’d be held in the detention area forever!! That said, just thinking about that trip today brings on serious feelings of nostalgia for eight-track tapes of “Waylon and Willie and the Boys”.

I also have fond memories of the research cruises we took on the Gus out in the “Guff of Mexico”. I particularly remember Captain Mark making repeated dives under the boat with a knife in his teeth to cut our water sampling hose off the propellers after we accidentally backed over it and spending the rest of that cruise fishing for snapper with Claudia, since we weren’t allowed on the coring deck. I also remember Carey, the enormous Cajun cook Captain Mark hired at the last minute, who infuriated you by eating all the cream pies

you’d brought—and then throwing them up over the side.

(He also chickenfried everything.)

Then there were the river sampling trips in an old leaky boat with a motor that often decided to quit, the many fun beach sand sampling trips where many a crab was caught on the side, coring on Galveston Island, and of course the long hours in the lab with the settling tube and optical microscope.

I wish I could be there to celebrate with you and Doris, but I currently work for what is probably the most award-winning winery in Texas, Grape Creek Vineyards in Fredericksburg, and weekends in April are our busiest time of the entire year.

(If you ever plan to visit, be sure to let me know!) I am a true survivor, from as yet undiagnosed celiac disease, and then nearly dying after falling down a mine shaft at Marascal in Big Bend, and H.C. Clark’s and your “Mother Liquor” (the same pot of water used to boil five or more pots of spaghetti noodles when the water supply got low, also at Big Bend), and more recently, from my ex-husband and a bout last summer with a rare and aggressive form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma (the latter two of which being situations that can change at any time). I am blessed with three wonderful children, all grown: a redhaired artist/illustrator daughter who lives in Fredericksburg with me, a blonde pharmacist/model daughter who lives in Denver, and a brunette mechanical engineer son who lives in Chicago. My undergrad degree having been in music, I still play the piano as often as possible.

I’m very grateful for everything you did for me, and I wish you and Doris all the best!!!

Love, Mary Lou Cole Hoerster (aka “Ol’ Mara-lu”) M.A. 1979 Ph.D 1982

The Ross sea, Nathanial B. Palmer 2015 Image: Lauren Simkins

Dennis Kurtz Reflections on Leadership One bright Houston day in spring of 1976, John Anderson called me down to his office. I was a new graduate student, having recently begun working with him to investigate Triassic strata in New Mexico. He told me the National Science Foundation had awarded him a spot on the A.R.A. Islas Orcadas, an Argentine research vessel going to Antarctica that winter (summer in Antarctica), and wanted to know if I was interested in filling it. With no hesitation, I said, “Yes,” and that began (for me) four years of research into glacial marine sediments both modern and ancient. And, I guess, that was the start of the Rice University Antarctic research program. In that first, year I represented Rice alone; other times we went south together; other times I led crews, ultimately becoming Chief Scientist during Deep Freeze 80.

Along the way, we expanded our thinking in space and time to study glacial marine sediments and sedimentary rocks throughout North America and in units over 2 billion years old. Throughout all of this, JBA mentored me, encouraged me, taught me, trusted me, worked with me, and laughed beside me. We wrote grant proposals in a hotel room in Buenos Aires; camped out on the South Island of New Zealand; took road trips to Tallahassee to study sediment deep sea core samples, and had more discussions – scientific and philosophical – than I can remember. John Anderson was the consummate teacher. I probably did not realize it that spring day, but he saw things in me that I might never have seen in myself - the potential to do and to imagine endeavors other-

wise unrealized. And, more importantly, he taught me how to see those things in others.

Years later, after I had left Rice, and was considering a career change to public education, we had another conversation. I asked him if being a high school science teacher would be a “waste” of everything I (and by extension, we, for all we had worked on) had done. Without hesitation, John said, “No.” Teaching for him was, and is, a calling and he assured me I would be a memorable teacher. He encouraged me, speaking of the experiences I could share, the inspiration I could give to future scientists, and that I could one day help develop improved science curricula. That telephone conversation ended with me feeling proud and confident for my future.

I spent over 30 years in public education – as a teacher and as an administrator. In the classroom and from my office, I affected the lives of tens of thousands of student and thousands of professional educators. Not a month went by when I did not think of some lesson John had taught me. I truly believe that the best of him on many occasions funneled through me to them, and that a real part of me that he had nurtured was passed forward.

I thank John B. Anderson, my mentor, my friend, for all of the lessons he taught me; and I thank him on behalf of all those others, who he indirectly influenced, and whose lives, like mine, are richer because of him.

Students rarely return to thank their teachers.

That’s just the way it goes.

This time, though, is different.

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Dennis D. Kurtz M.A. (1978) Ph.D. (1980)

Nathan Myers

Image: Nathan Meyers

John was my Masters adviser during 1980-82. I participated in the Deep Freeze 81 Antarctic expedition aboard the USCGC Glacier. After graduating and working for AMACO for 4 years, I participated in two expeditions as a contract computer programmer for NSF aboard the Polar Duke during the 1986-87 season. I believe John dubbed these latter two cruises RUBS86 (Rice University Bransfield Strait geophysics [the geophysics part was somehow implied...]).

Going to Antarctica was pretty awesome, in the true sense of the word; I had never been out of the USA (except Canada, but back then that didn’t really count), had never been exposed much to other cultures, and of course, never been to the Deep Freeze.

Moving to Houston from Missouri in January 1980 was in and of itself a culture shock almost as severe as going to a foreign country. The southern accent (not the Texas accent -- John mostly spoke “Alabaman”) was sometimes hard to penetrate. One day I came to school and saw John in the sediment lab and he turns to me and says, “Hey, I got a great big pill from on the beach the other day.” “Pill?”, I said. “What kind of pill?” He looked at me with that whats-a-matterwith-you-ain’t-never-heard-of-a-pill-look and I said, “You mean like a great big pill for a horse or a cow or something?”

He says, “Huh?, no! Like you know when you pour epoxy on the sand at the beach and when the epoxy sets up you pill it up.” “OHHHH” says I, “You mean a peel!” “Yah -- thats what I said”, said John, “a pill”!

Here is a true story from the last Polar Duke cruise I was on: We had finished work in Bransfield Strait near Palmer Station and were making for port at a town in southern Argentina. I don’t remember the name of the town, but we had on board a National Science Foundation (NSF) official who

needed to be at a international meeting in this town by 8:00 AM of a certain day. The seas between the Antarctic Peninsula and southern South America can be rough at times and this time the waves were running around 20-30 feet in height. The NSF official asked the Captain to make good time so the Captain obligingly pushed our speed up to 14 or 15 knots. At this speed the waves would occasionally break over the bow of the ship or the ship would bury its bow in the oncoming wave. The ship rolled and groaned and shuddered from stem to stern with each wave. Most people were hanging out in their cabins as there was not a lot to do with the ship rolling and pitching so much. The cook... man you gotta love that cook... made chicken and dumplings for dinner the evening before our Argentina arrival. I went up for supper and had a decent helping of chicken and dumplings but didn’t want to push it because of the rough seas.

The NSF official had one decent helping, and then another, and then complimented the cook on the wonderful meal and then had some desert. After dinner I went up to the bridge to hang out (literally) for a while. There were wooden hand rails on the ceiling that ran from port to starboard and I occasionally would go hang on a rail and let me feet swing.

So, I was hanging out and the NSF official comes up to the bridge to check on our progress and the ETA for Argentina. So, he is chatting with the Captain and First Mate, but maybe starting to look a little pale and a maybe a little green and then... up comes the chicken and dumplings all over the deck. The Captain was able to keep a straight face and look concerned until the First Mate pulled a fork out of his shirt pocket, turned to the Captain and asked, “You want the light meat or the dark”?

Nathan Myers M.A. 1982

FSU Core Repository 2007

McMurdo Station

Image:Yusuke Yokoyama

Image: Scott McDonald

Image: Kathy Balshaw Biddle

John Anderson, Oden, 2010 Image: Alex Witus

JohnFest 28

USCG Glacier, 1987 Mark Thomas John Anderson

Pamela Polite Fisco USCG Glacier, 1981

GOOD OLD BOY VISITS THE BIG CITY I didn’t get to see John often after moving to San Francisco in 1985, so I looked forward to the annual AGU meetings in the City when I could catch up with him at one of the sessions, over a beer or occasionally for dinner. I recall one evening when my husband, Dennis, and I had arranged to meet John for dinner on the last night of the conference.

John arrived at the restaurant a little late but with a good excuse and a classic John story. I may be off on a few details, but here is the gist of John’s story: John’s flight departed early the following morning so he requested an early checkout from the hotel. The bill was slipped under his door that afternoon and he planned on settling up at the front desk on his way to meet us for dinner.

When he looked at the bill panic set in as the “additional

charges” line read $157.00! John knew that the mini-bar was expensive but he remembered having only some nuts and a beer on the first night he arrived while he watched a little TV and settled in. Apparently, John had been channel surfing through the “Pay Per View” shows and each time he clicked back and forth between the movies it registered as an additional charge on his bill! With his hat in his hand, he hustled down to the front desk to beg forgiveness as he knew that his Rice University credit card was not going to pay for that bill. John explained that he had no idea there was something called “Pay Per View” on his TV, had not read the fine print and that he hadn’t even watched a whole movie! The manager took pity on him and credited back all the movie charges. John was very happy to pay for the beer and nuts from the mini-bar because at that point, they seamed down right cheap to him!

Happy Trails, Pam Polite Fisco M.A. 1982

The Group USCG Glacier, 1981

Lindsay Prothro I first met John during my senior year at LSU when I visited Rice over winter break to discuss the possibility of conducting Antarctic graduate research. I hadn’t submitted my application yet because I didn’t know if I should apply for a MS or PhD, so I’d hoped to get John’s opinion. Because the visit was part of a family trip to Houston, my mom drove me to Rice and stayed with me in the parking lot as I waited for John to call and say he’d arrived.

Finally, he called. We spoke briefly, then with a big grin on my face, I hung up the phone, turned to my mom, and said, “He sounds exactly how I thought he would!” As anyone who has ever met John can attest, that Alabama accent is an endless source of entertainment—it makes every story 10 times better and is often imitated in (affectionate) jest by his friends and colleagues.

After our initial meeting, Rice was definitely my top choice for graduate school. My mom later told me how she knew Rice was where I would decide to spend the next five years.

It wasn’t me walking out of John’s office with a brand new copy of Antarctic Marine Geology under my arm and the intention to apply for the PhD. It was my face after I hung up that phone.

John’s personality is as great a legacy as his work. Between his stories and all their myriad endings, his shirts, and his legendary field trip cooking, he has left an impression on us all. Each of his students leave Rice with their own entertaining John stories, but most importantly, they all possess John’s agreeable, collaborative disposition. I recently began a list of qualities to remember and attempt to exemplify throughout my career. Most are inspired by John’s example, including:

John Anderson

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John Anderson LIndsay Prothro

1. Work efficiently to maintain a healthy work-life balance; 2. Start projects and proposals early to remain stress-free; 3. Allow time for others in your day; 4. Always get enough sleep (see pic) I still have a long way to go, but I have never grown so much as a person and scientist as I have during my time here. I’m grateful to John for his commitment to excellence in both science and character, and I’ll always remember the lessons and the laughs.

Lindsay Prothro Rice University Ph.D. Candidate

Tony Rodriguez John is the best story teller I have ever known, which makes writing a story about John difficult for me. The best stories I have of John fall into two categories. The first are of funny situations that occurred during field excursions and have little to do with science. During my first trip on the R/V Lone Star I was terribly sea sick, the boat broke, and we were stranded for a week in Key West. During that week we had to deal with a crew member who went on a bender and another crew member who was Captain Mark Herring’s girlfriend, until he decided to visit another woman on the island.

and I didn’t bring any screwdrivers or many hand tools with us. When the vibracorer broke, John took it apart and fixed it with a penny and pliers. I felt comfortable fixing small engines after that day and have never forgotten tools since.

When I was collecting seismic data with John in Anguilla, he purchased 12 live rock lobsters from a local fisherman and we kept them alive in the shower (for a while) and ate fresh lobster every night for a week. At a Chapman Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico John, Marco Taviani, and I ate out at a local restaurant where we all ordered something different and rotated plates to the right periodically throughout the meal.

Tony Rodriquez Ph.D. 1999

John taught me how to launch a boat and back up a trailer on a Saturday afternoon at his house in Galveston while his brother in law was in the back seat drinking beer and heckling me. Working in Anahuac we would stay in a “motel” across the road from a bar which doubled as the motel lobby.

The motel was really a trailer with holes in the floor and our room would periodically fill up with mosquitoes during the night. The next morning there were blood stains all over the walls and ceiling because we killed the engorged bugs with bath towels in the middle of the night in an attempt for relief.

The second category of stories are about data collection. We collected a transect of vibracores across Galveston Island together. Vibracoring works best in saturated sand, so we took advantage of a small embayment, like Sweetwater Lake, and flooded areas, like a flooded field behind the gas station that was filled with extremely warm water. These places had the most disgusting water I have ever swam in. We always collected data during the hottest days of the summer, worked until exhaustion, and aimed at getting 80% of the grime off in the shower at night before we went out to eat; a high percentage considering how filthy we were.

At the end of one tiring day collecting drill core, Julia and I accidentally unhooked the guyline that was holding up the drill tower. The 15-foot tower crashed down on John’s back and knocked him in the water. I thought that was the end of John, but he was fine and jumped back on the boat unharmed. We spent the rest of the day recovering the drill rig from the bay. Once we were vibracoring the Trinity Delta

These are just a few stories I have from working with John.

Every field trip was full of learning, debate, adventure and fun. I loved those five years I spent as a graduate student at Rice and the next five years I spent working with John on research projects. I use lessons learned from John every day in my personal life and career. Thanks for everything, John.

“When the vibracorer broke, John took it apart and fixed it with a penny and pliers.”

John, Marco, Tony

Sabrina Sarzalejo Saludos What to say about John Anderson, well I can say so much!

He is a wonderful human being that wins the appreciation and respect of everybody that gets to know him. He was a fantastic advisor and I was so fortunate to be able to work with him and his group of students. He has all the characteristics that make a professor great, he is very knowledgeable, an excellent teacher, a team leader and a lot a fun to be around. Definitively to work with him on the field was an adventure both on the boat and on land. The boat experience with him was so interesting, it is so when your professor would at that time teach you stratigraphy, sedimentology, how to acquire seismic data and also be the boat’s captain as well as the chef. Field trips with him, did not matter if they were to the Four Corners area, Galveston or any other location always had a lot of good science, a lot of fun and a lot of what I will call “interesting tasty food”. Yes, as Venezuelan I was not exposed at home to the spicy chili beans, spicy gumbo, spicy creole crawfish and other spicy food that he would love to prepare for us. I have this funny memory of him pulling apart my portion prior to flavouring it with spices and saying “here´s the baby food for Sabrina, ja ja”. I have to say that after a while I did developed a taste for that “interesting tasty food” of his. I have so many great memories of my time at Rice as his student. I remember that we, his students, once filmed a video for his birthday where we highlighted his special characteristics as a person. That video was so funny that it made him and us laughed until we all cried. Back home when I told stories about my time as a student at Rice I was always the envy of my coworkes that were not as fortunate as I to have such a fantastic advisor.

I hope that you all greatly celebrate his life at the Johnfest and that he in this new phase of his life will achieve as much and have as much fun in doing it as he did as a professor at Rice.

Sabrina Sarzalejo M.A. 1994 John Anderson Sabrina Srzalejo Ken Abdulah

JohnFest 32

Baffin Bay Beach Ridge Image: Alex Simms

New Mexico, 2009 Image: Alex Witus

Oden, 2010 Davin Wallace John Anderson Image: Alex Witus

Alex Simms I.

III.

I think some of my most memorable experiences with John revolved around the R/V Trinity (a.k.a. “The Barge”). A couple of my favorites include changing an axel to the trailer in a farmer’s field near Palacios, Texas; running from lightning storms in Mobile, Alabama; and learning how to back a trailer in Corpus Christi, Texas. The first memory started when I was driving down the two-lane highway with John and Patrick Taha between Palacios and Port O’Connor, Texas. Suddenly a car frantically passed us emphatically pointing to our trailer. We pulled the truck over and inspected the trailer only to find it was missing a whole wheel, not just a tire, but the whole wheel - only the axel was showing.

Luckily it was a tandem trailer but we hardly trusted that trailer with both sets of wheels. We unhooked the trailer and searched the surrounding communities for the required hardware. After about 6 hours we finally found an axel and wheel set in Bay City, Texas. After replacing the axel in the farmer’s field we slowly towed the Barge to Palacios and parked it for the weekend (not trusting the mismatched sized wheels). We later returned with a new trailer to Palacios where we had stored the boat to take the Barge back to Rice. I will never forget changing the hardware on the trailers as the Fire department was evacuating the town due to an incoming hurricane. Fortunately, we finished in time.

We returned to Palacios the next week hoping that the storm took out the old trailer (so we would finally be rid of it) only to find it was the only trailer in town to have survived the hurricane. I think the trailer was reborn as a Mardi Gras float in Galveston…

The last story is more of a tribute. I remember a rainy day in Corpus Christi, Texas when again the weather was bad – lots of lightning due to thunderstorms. It was too much to go out onto the bay and so we had nothing to do. John decided that the day might be well spent teaching me how to back a trailer. So there I was underneath the causeway out to Padre Island trying to learn how to back a trailer. I’m sure John was frustrated with my lack of skill and almost hitting the bridge pylons several times but he was extremely patient and teaching me an important life skill – how to back a trailer. I think about all the wonderful things John taught us, not just with science but life. He was never judgmental, always supportive, and treated us as colleagues. I think one of the most enduring things he gave us was confidence in ourselves. He always supported us and believed in us. It has helped me not only in my career but in all other aspects of my life too – Thank you John…

II. My second set of stories revolves around something I came to dread while working on the Barge – lightning. I think every afternoon while working in Mobile, Alabama with Tony Rodriguez a lightning storm would pop up. At the time the barge didn’t exactly have the fastest engine – I think we could make 8-9 knots on a good day with me sitting on the bow trying to get it to plane out. One storm in particular is grained into my mind. Usually when a storm would pop up, we would of course have about 60 feet of cast-iron pipe in the hole and would just wait out the lightning storm praying we wouldn’t get struck. But one time it was bad enough that even John wanted to get back. The image engrained in my head is me sitting with my back to the wind on the bow of the Barge hanging on for dear life as we bounced over waves.

I could barely see John back at the helm through the heavy rain, with lightning striking all around us. I think I have never been so relieved to be back ashore when we finally pulled into the dock near Hope, Alabama (properly named I might add).

Jill Singer My contribution to the “JohnFest” collection of stories is about how I joined John’s Antarctic research group and learned to love country western music.

I started at Rice with an adviser whom I took an instant dislike to. Not knowing exactly what to do, I started hanging out with the “cool kids,” the Antarctic group led by John. John invited me to attend their weekly meetings even though I was not doing Antarctic research.

As the semester continued, I grew more and more certain that I would need to make a change. Between my interactions with my adviser and the fact that my desire to do anything related to geochemistry had disappeared, I was feeling a bit lost and very much uncertain about continuing at Rice. The bright spots in this period were the conversations John and I had about using a recirculating flume to conduct a series of experiments looking at the erosion of unsorted sediment. I figured I could stick it out in geochemistry and pursue the flume experiments for my Ph.D. research topic.

This is how things stood back in late spring 1980, when John flew off to New Mexico to teach his portion of the geology field camp. While he was away, I conceded once and for all that I could not do my master’s research in geochemistry, and I decided to level with John upon his return. I was very nervous, totally unsure what his reaction would be.

Soon after John returned, I entered his office, took a seat, and said something along the lines of, “You know what we’ve been considering for a Ph.D. project? How would you feel about that becoming my master’s thesis?”

John was quiet for a minute, then he stood up and said, “Let’s go get some coffee.”

Walking to the Student Center, I thought, Oookay...he wants to break the news to me in a public place. He’s going to tell me that he can’t take on another student. I guess I was a bit numb by this point, but I knew that anything was better than my current situation.

So we sit down with our coffee, John looks at me, and I’m thinking, Here it comes. Without missing a beat, he says, “I think the flume would need some upgrades to achieve higher velocities. We’ll need to talk to Dieter Heymann [at that time, chair of the department] about identifying funding for you, because you’ll lose the geochemistry fellowship you have now, and I’ve committed all the NSF money for current and incoming graduate students.”

I’m not sure John even remembers that conversation in the Student Center. How afterward, he took me directly to the JohnFest 34

department office and updated Dr. Heymann. How by the end of the day a source of funding had been identified for me. But I sure do. That day was a turning point in my academic life, setting the course for my professional career.

Of course, once I was part of John’s “Antarctic research group,” I took my share of teasing. I was too short to reach the top of the settling tube, where samples were introduced.

John added the “Singer stool,” which he loved to show any and all visitors to the Sedimentology Lab. And along with the others in the lab, I had to endure country western music day in and day out. I think John had the radio dial permanently set to his favorite station. I also remember the year he piped country music into the USCGC Glacier and subjected the entire crew to Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Willie Nelson.

But for all the teasing and crazy music, these were some of the best times of my life. Within a year or two of joining the Antarctic research group, John entrusted me to coordinate ordering supplies for the Sedimentology Lab (all those little yellow envelopes and vials). He also had Robyn Wright teach me to take over the job of maintaining the Antarctic inventory and ensuring that everything was ready for the next cruise. And on three of my four trips to the Antarctic, John assigned me to “run the night piston coring crew.” While I was at Rice, I didn’t appreciate the value and significance of being entrusted with these assignments. But after starting my own academic career at Buffalo State, I realized that my confidence in organizing my lab and conducting fieldwork on the Buffalo River had its origins in John’s mentoring.

I spent about seven years at Rice, and there are too many memories to recount. I had a wonderful experience there and learned so much. Thank you, John, for your generous spirit, your careful mentoring, your passion for discovery, your high standards, and your respectful treatment of people. Your influence on my career is not something I can easily quantify; my indebtedness to you is immeasurable.

Enjoy your well-earned retirement, although I know you will still pursue research because that is what defines you.

And if you have any more trips to Antarctica planned... please take me along!

With the very best wishes on your retirement, Jill Singer M.A. 1983 Ph.D. 1987

A CELEBRATION....

Special thanks go to Dorothy Ballentine and John Sneider for hosting the icebreaker event.

April 21, 2018

More than 100 former students, colleagues and friends gathered at Rice University’s Cohen House to celebrate the retirement of John Anderson.

Thanks go to Laurence Yeung for providing the guitar used in Richard Alley’s performance of Big John!

Stephanie Shipp and Ken Abdulah arranged a wonderful dinner program, roast and gift presenation.

Organizing Committee: Jerry Dickens Jeff Nittrouer Martha Lou Broussard Sandra Flechsig Susi Haveman Linda Welzenbach Stephanie Shipp Ken Abdulah

Patrick Taha In my time at Rice University pursing a Ph.D., I spent several years attending lectures, symposiums, conferences, and Oil Industry consortium events with John Anderson and fellow students. I could tell you which years I attended, but it wouldn’t make a difference to this story because any of John’s former students will connect with what I’m going to say next. John enjoyed talking/presenting/discussing geology (heck, John just enjoyed talking in general), but John was never more alive than when conducting field work. He made a career of it. In addition, his mechanical aptitude when equipment snags arose often saved a field day that would otherwise have been lost. That said, there were times when even John’s skills weren’t enough to solve a problem, which often led to an interesting cast of characters getting involved and a good story. The picture below captures one such incident.

To set the scene, we had been out all day in West Bay, behind Galveston Island, either collecting cores or seismic data with the research pontoon. In the cool breeze of a late November day we were looking forward to getting back to John’s weekend home on Galveston Island for a warm meal.

We pulled up to the boat ramp and someone in the party jumped ashore, started the truck, and backed the boat trailer down the boat ramp into the murky water of West Bay. When the boat was winched in and attached, multiple attempts was made to haul the trailer out of the murky water, but it wouldn’t budge. Murky being the key word, it was difficult to tell what was catching the trailer. That didn’t prevent one of the students stripping down and reaching as far under water as possible, keeping his head up, to try and figure out the cause of our dilemma.

The water in November is unforgiving and the student came out shivering with nothing else to show for it. Other attempts to help dislodge the boat trailer included chucking the anchor overboard to reduce ballast and then realizing it wasn’t attached to the side of the vessel. That’s the last we saw of that anchor. Eventually, as evening set in, it was decided to tie the boat up somewhere close, disconnect the trailer and leave it in place, move the truck, and make a fresh attempt the following morning.

The picture above is from the following morning. We continued to trouble shoot the cause and concluded the concrete boat ramp had a lip or drop off where the axel or some other portion of the underside of the trailer was catching.

Around this time a man walked past and announced he had had the same issue yesterday with his trailer. His solution to the challenge was the solution of many a man in life when faced with physical adversity: use more power! He broke the back axel of his truck trying to ram his trailer out of the water and was awaiting a tow truck. That was good informaJohnFest 36

tion to have. And around this time another man who lived in the neighborhood came by, couldn’t help wanting to take up the challenge, and announced with bravado that he had a big truck that could easily pull our trailer out, not bothering to assess that our own dually truck was an equal to his vehicle. Against our better judgment we let him have at it, to no avail. We all felt embarrassed for him and looked the other way as he tried repeatedly and eventually announced he had to give up. He then grabbed a beer and hung around watching the next step of the saga, because hey drinking a beer before noon is always healthy.

John announced that it was time to call a tow truck. Half an hour later the tow truck arrived with a small man who swaggered up full of bombast about how he’d get the trailer out in a hitch. After several attempts he had to give up too. The problem we were all having is the issue anyone has when applying a horizontal force against a vertical barrier. Somehow or other we needed to give the trailer movement in a positive Y-axis direction before moving it in a positive X-axis direction out of the water. The tow truck driver announced he had a solution. His boss had an even bigger tow truck with a winch/crane that could provide an upward force. So, we waited around for another 30 mins for his boss to arrive.

The saddest part of this whole story occurred next. The tow truck driver spent the next 30 mins bragging about both his boss and his bigger truck. When the boss finally did arrive, he was in a particularly surly mood for reasons no one could understand. The boss whipped his truck into alignment, backed up, and then laid into his employee, constantly yelling at him and disparaging him as the employee worked diligently to connect the winch to the trailer. This left all of us looking off again in opposite directions to try and save this poor employee some face. On a positive note, the boss’s winch/crane was just the solution to our problem.

The trailer was raised to a 45-degree angle, which allowed x-axis forces to finally prevail and pull our trailer out of the water. To this day though, I can’t get the image out of my mind of this tow truck boss yelling merciless as his poor employee, who had done nothing wrong, and then speeding off from the scene without ever so much as having spoken to us, the customer. We then paid the employee and he left too.In the end we rode the boat around to another boat ramp and exited the water without further delay. This was only one of the many stories I could tell about time spent in the field with John.

In conclusion, I thank John for the many positive and the many colorful experiences I had while pursuing my Ph.D. Moments like these will not be forgotten.

Patrick Taha Ph.D. 2007

Galveston Bay field trip, 1982 Image: Elizabeth Watkins

Oden, 2010 Image: Bjorn Eriksson

John Anderson and Chris Odezulu, Matagorda 2016 Image: Travis Swanson

West Bay, Galveston Island Image: Patrick Taha

First Core from SHALDRIL Image: Julia Wellner

Davin Wallace Antarctic lemonade In 2007, as a first-year graduate student, I was fortunate enough to participate in an Antarctic Peninsula cruise as a field assistant. On one of the first days of sailing across the Drake Passage, which was a story in of itself, we gathered in the mess hall for our first group dinner. John, intending for everyone to hear him, walked up to a vat of pink lemonade. He exclaimed, “Alright! The pink lemonade is back this year!” He poured himself a glass, took a sip followed by an “Ahhh”, and walked away to get his dinner. Assuming we were in for a treat, about 15 people filled glasses with the pink concoction. We sat down and drank this substance, which tasted something like a mix of antacids and vinegar.

We looked around in disbelief at each, and assumed it was some kind of Antarctic delicacy that required an acquired taste.

After dinner, John walked over to us, shaking an empty glass, and asked us all, “How was that lemonade? Pretty amazing right?” Dumfounded,everyone just nodded in agreement.

John dumped his tray, walked back over to where he was sitting, where he subsequently retrieved his actual glass of a completely full pink lemonade, which he dumped down the sink!

The only problem was that the cooks thought everyone loved it so much because the vat was empty, that they filled another one. We ended up having to drink it for three days.

Thanks John for teaching us about Antarctic drink delicacies!

Matagorda jelly fish identification One Summer, John, Brad Michalchuk (former student), and I were coring washover fans on Matagorda Peninsula.

Our first day was beautiful weather, so we headed out to the barrier. As we approached, we noticed there were jellyfish approximately every square meter in our coring sites. John said, “I am not sure if those are the stinging kind, so let’s just take some cores.” Up until this point, our pattern was I took the first core, Brad the second, and John the third. I jumped in the water, and it became clear quickly that they were in fact the stinging kind. Brad and I struggled with the first and second cores, getting stung frequently, but recovering what we needed. John’s role was taking a paddle and flinging the jellies out of the water away from us. When it was John’s turn to core, he said, “Well, I think two cores are plenty from here. Let’s ride out of here like a bat out of hell!

Thanks John for teaching us how to identify stinging jellies!

JohnFest 38

On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans. As a Tulane undergraduate at the time, we were sent to “sister schools” where we had housing. Since I was from Katy, the Earth Science Department opened its arms to me and other refugees (which is a whole other thank you letter!). John sought me out, and given my research interests aligned, took me under his wing. Katrina profoundly shaped my young scientific mind, as well as my life, and John naturally guided me through this tough time.

He mentored me during that semester just like one of his own students, and suggested I apply to Rice for graduate school after I graduated from Tulane. I was fortunately accepted, and began my studies with John. It was during this time that we formulated the idea to study past hurricanes, in particular developing methodologies to reconstruct the frequency and magnitude of intense events to understand both paleoclimate and risk. This work formed the basis of my Ph.D., and it was only with John’s ideas, mentoring, and encouragement that the projects were successful. Fast-forward nearly a decade, and reconstructing storms is something I focus much of my research effort currently pursuing. I have been lucky enough to teach the next generation of students what I learned from John. If I can be even 10% of the advisor John was to me for my own students, I would be content.

Thanks John for giving me a chance, while also mentoring, advising, and shaping me as a scientist! You and Doris both have been a constant positive force in my career and life!

Davin Wallace Ph.D. 2010

Sophie Warny John has been an inspiration since I met him when I was a doctoral student in Belgium. When I was hired on tenure-track at LSU, he was my key role model because what always impressed me is the way he is able to have such a high profile scientific career while still having a wonderful family life. That balance is not easy to achieve, but John and Doris are the best proof that this can be done. I will never be able to thank John enough for allowing me to do the palynology on their inspiring projects, giving me the opportunity to reconstruct Antarctic’s vegetation. I should also credit John for giving me the chance to meet my husband, Phil Bart.

If John had not sent Phil to work in Belgium 25 years ago, I would have never met him! I will always be grateful for having both John and Doris in my life.

Sohie Warny

Chile, Falkland Isles, South Georgia adn the Antarctic Peninsula trip, December 2012 Image courtesy of Robert Milam

Richard Wheeler Greetings and Congratulations John and Doris!

I’m not saying we’re old, but we do have a lot of history together, so bear with me as I recall a few highlights.

We first met at Hope College in the fall of 1973. I was a lowly, demoralized and dejected sophomore Chemistry major who was finding no joy and seeing little future in pursuing the discipline that brought me to Hope. You were the youngest member of Hope’s Geology Dept faculty and getting top reviews (verbal . . . not RateMyProf) from my fellow students. Bob Wood encouraged me to sign up for your Oceanography & Limnology course, which turned out to be a hugely refreshing alternative to Organic Chem II! Through courses, labs and, of course, field trips (!) I learned that my innate childhood interest in the earth could be actually be pursued as an academic discipline, even a career path.

But it wasn’t just the academic exposure that made the big difference. Your personal enthusiasm and playful, even irreverent spirit at this staid private Christian institution were magnetic.

And then there was the cultural dimension: Who knew (certainly not this Midwestern boy) that raw Mobile Bay oysters out of a can could taste so good with beer, or that frying catfish in the rain was not a winning proposition? I was hooked, other students were flocking into the department and together we were breathing new life into the program.

Oceanography, or marine geology, became a theme for the duration of our years together. The NSF grant to study Lake Mac and other western Michigan coastal inland lakes was a great opportunity for me and my cohorts to get involved in handson research, and we all got our first pub’s at the GSA sectional meeting the following year.

(from The Wild One), riding your motorcycle with Doris on the back through the front door of HC’s house, was a testament to the advice you gave me when I arrived at Rice: “Work hard, play hard, in that order.”

You and Doris played key roles for both Janet and me in our personal and professional lives. Your friendship and hospitality were only eclipsed by your commitment to supporting us in pursuit of our careers. Your whole person approach to our relationships was truly unique and a great blessing to both of us. I can hardly imagine the sum total of all the lives that have benefited similarly.

We wish you both a long, healthy and energetic retirement filled with countless more opportunities to enjoy life and the relationships that enrich it! Thank you!

All the Best, Rich Wheeler

John Anderson, Hope College

R/V Hope I on Lake Macatawa, Michigan The summer of ’75 brought new opportunities. You were moving to Rice but making a stop at FSU Antarctic Core Facility for the summer to collaborate. Sue Shepley and I were invited to join you, Doris and the kids in the migration, U-Haul and all, and to spend the summer in Talahassee analyzing core samples and picking diatoms. Sue and I spent a lot of time analyzing and interpreting samples, but also enjoyed being in community there with you, Fred & Marianne, Andy and others. And naturally there was always time for other priorities!

As I followed you to Rice in May of ’76 to start graduate work and join the Buccaneer study with you and Rudy the intensity stepped up. The studies and the work were more demanding, and the play was more intentional and creative than ever. Your appearance at the departmental Halloween party as Brando’s Johnny

JohnFest 40

R/V Hope I Lake Macatawa, Michigan

A FEW MORE WORDS...

•

About a man who loves liver but hates raisins?

•

About a man who can’t pronounce the name of his favorite wine (MD 20/20) or his favorite cigar (Swisher Sweets)?

•

About a man who loves classical music, especially Hank Junior and David Allen Coe?

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About a man who is frequently misidentified as Kenny Stabler by older, inebriated women?

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About a man who has worn out several icebreakers, and at least a dozen smaller boats?

•

About a man who taught me as an undergraduate to “Get out of the van and look at the goddamn rocks!”?

career. Though I don’t use my geoscience technical skills every day, the experiences of collaborative and supportive teamwork, passion and excellence in what you do, and having fun at the same time are things that I have carried with me for the past 22 years and will continue to do so. Some of my longest lasting friendships were formed in your lab – the culture that you created was a big piece of this! Lastly, a few memories from my Rice days that always bring a smile … great food and team events, Laura and I on the boat in the GoM collecting seismic with the occasional swim, field trip to the coast ‘dating’ the rubbish from hurricane events (I try to teach this to my family!) … You truly have made a difference for so many of us – thank you!!! Best wishes and congrats!

•

About a man who accepted a very immature and mediocre undergraduate student into his program, and turned him into an Antarctic Marine Geologist?

Brenda (Eckles) Head M.A. 1997

•

A man who always put his students first, who inspired in each of us a sense of ownership in our field areas, who encouraged us to realize that we weren’t just scientists, but rather explorers?

What Can I Say?

•

A man who taught me how to write a thesis (although if anyone has slogged through the thing you might know that he didn’t teach me how to stop writing!)?

•

A man who taught me not just to learn, but to understand?

•

A man who is largely responsible for all the successes I had in my career?

What can I say? Only one thing. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Tom Griffith B.A. 1981 M.A. 1988

Happy to see that John’s work and influence on so much and so very many is being recognized and celebrated. John’s picture on JohnFest was the first time that I have ever seen him without a beard. John is a prolific scientist, but he is fist and foremost a great person and leader. He never overworked his “guys,” he just made an environment that made everyone work extra hard to maximize their contributions.

David Reid M.A. 1989 Hi John – sorry that I couldn’t make it down to Houston for the big event! However, I still wanted to send my best wishes and congratulations on your retirement and legendary career. Also a big THANK YOU for a great couple of years of graduate school that were a great foundation to my

Listening during the Johnfest tributes and roasts, I heard a lot of commonality with my experience and your other students. Amazing opportunities offered, quick acceptance as part of the Anderson family, an expectation that I’d pull my own weight matched with an offer of support and guidance, and a role model for how to be a good scientist and work/ life balance. The gift of believing in me - that I’d be able to figure it out when Brenda and I headed down to South Texas in the big department truck with the long trailer loaded down with the huge generator or being able to keep the Elics system (with its instruction manual in French) collecting digital seismic data during my summer cruises. Once I’d accomplished those things, my confidence soared.

I think of the people that I’ve had the opportunity to coach and mentor and see many lessons that I learned from you and the Anderson group. I hear myself telling funny stories to try and help people see different perspectives or avoid pitfalls. A favorite that I’ve told many times over the years is the one that you shared before I presented at my first AAPG. I was presenting in one of the huge rooms and was pretty nervous. Your shared how one of your earlier students had been so nervous that he kept edging further and further from the microphone...until he fell off the back of the stage! After I stopped smiling, I focused on calming myself down with my new definition of success - just don’t fall off the stage.

Thank you so much for all your support and guidance John.

My experiences in your group opened my eyes to so many more possibilities that I could achieve and provided a stable platform from which I could explore.

Laura Banfield M.A. 1994 Ph.D. 1998

PORTRAIT-

Antarctic Ice Shelves Exposed:

“If you went to McMurdo in the 1980s, you were called ‘a red coat’ …”

quipped John Anderson, Maurice Ewing Professor of Oceanography in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, in reference to the bright red parka that everyone wore, and still do wear when they go to Antarctica. A veteran of 24 Antarctic cruises since 1970, Anderson has donned the red coat to help understand the past behavior of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) and its contributions to sea-level rise (SLR). He retires from academia this spring of 2018, but he has no plans to end his Antarctic adventures. “We are in exciting times. We are finally getting to the point where we are making exponential increases in our learning curve.”

That learning curve is about deciphering the past behavior of ice sheet areas that are resting on substrates below sea level, particularly at a location called “the grounding zone,” where ice transitions from being coupled to the sea-floor to floating ice shelf. The grounding zone is a dynamic setting now acknowledged by glaciologists as a significant control on ice sheet behavior. Ancient clues recently revealed from high-resolution multibeam bathymetry data have enabled Anderson and his academic progeny Dr. Lauren Simkins, to connect the grounding zone with 47 years of research on the marine geology of the Antarctic continental shelf with the role AIS contribution may have to global SLR. From 1978-1987, Anderson’s research was limited to a set of opportunistic piggy-back rides with military ice-breaking missions aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Glacier. Anderson and his students were forced to focus much of those early cruises learning about ice sheets underlying submarine geology from hit-or-miss traverses using acoustic subsurface data along with the contextual collection of sedimentary drill cores. In spite of the limitations, they collected more than a thousand cores, sampling a diversity of ancient glacial deposits. In 1987, the military was decoupled from science operations. Anderson now had the freedom to choose traverses from a dedicated science vessel Polar Duke, which was equipped with more sophisticated subsurface capabilities, allowing better data acquisition from a variety of depth profiles and resolutions. At the same time, a new theory was published by University of Wisconsin scientists suggesting that the behavior of the AIS was regulated by both the ice and the bed on which it rested. “Clearly the ice is sliding on its bed, but how it was sliding on its bed, and what controlled that behavior was unknown,” recalls Anderson. It turns out that the ice at the base, where it is “grounded” to the continental shelf, was producing pressure melt water that was being incorporated in subglacial sediments to produce a mobile, deforming substrate, which acted as the lubricant that allowed ice streams to flow at high velocities. These deforming sediments feed sediment accumulations at the grounding zone producing landforms known as grounding zone wedges. This led Anderson and his team to take advantage of a new type of sea-floor interrogation technique to look for additional features specific to those formed at past grounding zone locations.

It was 1995 when Anderson first acquired multibeam bathymetry data, but it wasn’t until 1998 that he was confident he was seeing large scale subglacial lineations and grooves that would convince the community that ice had been further out on the continental shelf and therefore representative of past grounded ice streams. The critical leap came in 2015 with the use of an improved multibeam bathymetry system, which revealed sub-meter scale glacial landforms on the sea-floor. Most of these landforms represent features that can’t be seen beneath the modern AIS. “This is beyond anything we can do through the ice for decades to come,” Anderson asserts.

“So now all of the data we collected over the last 20 years comes in handy.” The multibeam and subsurface datasets combined with the physical evidence provided by thousands of sedimentary cores allowed Anderson to characterize grounding zone landforms and processes relevant to the modern ice sheet. That data ultimately confirmed a catastrophic collapse of the Ross Ice Shelf that began 5000 years ago, resulting in the current configuration about 1500 years ago.

JohnFest 42

Decoding Advance and Retreat from 48 Years of Seafloor Exploration

By Linda Welzenbach

Anderson believes the most compelling

John Anderson 2010 Photo: Alex Witus

evidence for global climate change is sea-level rise. As the current global rate nears three millimeters per year, as compared to the half millimeter per year that was the average over the last 4,000 years, Anderson believes potential AIS contributions should be taken more seriously than it has been in the past. Assessments by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) focus on projected contributions of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets to SLR. Since his first trip to Antarctica in 1970 as a graduate student, Anderson has been trying to convince the glaciological community that the AIS may have been as dynamic as those in the glaciated Northern Hemisphere. “We know it’s the biggest volume of ice, so that if you changed the volume of the AIS just 1 percent, the rate of sea level rise would be greater than all the combined ice sheet and glacier contributions elsewhere,” says Anderson. Most of those volume contributions could come over the next decades to centuries, and they would have to involve the fast-flowing ice streams that are capable of transporting continental ice to the ocean over those time scales. The 2002 breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf along the Antarctic peninsula supported Anderson’s point, suggesting that additional focus on the role of ice shelves was needed to determine their function in advancing the AIS to the ocean. While ice shelves themselves don’t contribute to SLR, glaciers and ice streams that feed into these ice shelves accelerate when the ice shelves are diminished. “So, this small-scale breakup has provided the proof in the pudding, that yeah, you get rid of an ice shelf, then discharge from the continent increases dramatically” added Anderson. To help address the question of how important this effect is to SLR, Anderson has been working with glaciologists and modelers to provide a geologic context for past ice shelf behavior. In 2015, almost 50 years since his first trip to Antarctica, he finally saw evidence for past ice shelf collapse, and it came from the home of the largest ice shelf on earth in the Ross Sea.

Anderson and international colleagues had been working on deciphering information from subsurface sediments that suggested a catastrophic event occurred, even before acquisition of the multibeam data. “We were already hot on the trail! We saw these rapid changes in sedimentary cores and were just starting to do work on 10Be[beryllium]” said Anderson. Initial hints of the breakup came from a shift of sediment types that reflected a transition from sub-ice sheet to open marine conditions.

This was corroborated by an increase in radiogenic beryllium (a cosmogenic radionuclide whose presence or absence from sediments is an indicator of expanse of ice coverage over the sediments where it is found), combined with the first systematic application of compound-specific radiocarbon (an isotope of carbon-14C that is useful as a clock for determining the age of materials on Earth) ages from the marine sediments, to constrain the timing of ice shelf breakup. Additional evidence from specific fossil foraminifera assemblages (opportunistic planktonic species that take advantage of the warm deep water incursions) indicated that warmer water was present at the grounding zone, and may have played a role in the breakup. There is also evidence of past subglacial lakes and channels that supplied freshwater to the grounding zone and into the ocean, but very little is known about the impact of these water sources on the stability of grounded ice. Recently, Anderson and postdoc-

Bathymetry of the seafloor at Pine Island Bay, West Antarctica, in 2010 showing distinct iceberg plow marks formed by an ancient collapse of the ice shelf. Small corrugation ridges (transverse to the long lineations) within the individual plow marks were formed by tides moving the iceberg up and own, bouncing off the sea floor. (Image: John Anderson)

toral fellow Dr. Lauren Simkins employed the expertise of fellow faculty member and volcanologist Professor Helge Gonnermann, who provided geothermal modelling based on the discovery of volcanic seamounts that may have been associated with the ancient channels, since heat flow can produce warm water which could also contribute to instability of the grounding line.

“There are [still] a lot of dead end roads…and we don’t like to talk about those, but what the research will do is encourage the glaciological modeling community to recognize the diversity of factors, and [the] complexity of their interactions. I won’t quit research because we’ve come too far. We are making discoveries that are very informative to the ice sheet community, and so we really feel like we are playing an important role.”

(An expanded version of this article will appear in Outcroppings magazine late summer 2018.)

JohnFest 44

“The Antarctic Research Facility is a national repository for geological materials collected in polar regions, which houses over 20,000 meters of deep-sea core sediment as well as other geologic samples.

The vast holdings of the AMGRF, which includes the entire decades-old Eltanin and Islas Orcadas piston-core collections, have provided critical data that inspired many follow-up or expanded investigations.

Notable are the “groundtruth” data that led to major initiatives by the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), its successor, the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP), and other national and international groups.”

Excerpts from 2004 AMGRF proceedings and NSF //www. research.gov/

Images courtesy of Alex Witus

EVENT AND PROGRAM SCHEDULE Friday, April 20 RECEPTION AND GREETINGS (The residence of Dorothy Ballentine & John Sneider)

USCG Glacier, 1987 John Anderson talking science with helo pilots

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Saturday, April 21 INTRODUCTION

(100 Keck Hall)

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ANTARCTIC SCIENCE

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SPEAKER ABSTRACTS

John Fest

SPEAKERS & ABSTRACTS Introducing our speakers, including abstracts, a brief biography and snapshots“then”Speaker and “now” Abstracts:

An Arctic Ocean marine ice sheet during the penultimate glaciation: An analogy to WAIS? Martin Jakobsson (Stockholm University) Ice conditions in the Arctic Ocean during glacial periods have been much debated, with hypotheses formulated long before direct observational data existed. In 1888, Sir William Thomson, aka Lord Kelvin, speculated about extensive and thick floating ice in the Arctic Ocean when elaborating on possible effects of isolating its water masses from the rest of the World Ocean. Nearly a century later, glaciologist John H. Mercer brought up the subject and postulated a grounded marine-based ice sheet over the Barents Sea and an associated complex of thick floating ice shelves in the Arctic Ocean during the last glaciation. He further proposed from field observations that during an earlier glaciation, an Arctic Ocean marine-based ice sheet over the American sector was large enough to extend far above the marine limit of the Canadian Arctic islands and land areas of northwest Alaska. Mercer based his logical reasoning for the marine-based ice sheet, including a thick ice shelf in the central Arctic Ocean, on analogies with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). If WAIS is removed, a landlocked region remains with some islands close to the South Pole with strong physiographic similarities to the present Arctic Ocean surrounding the North Pole. During this presentation, I will begin by briefly presenting Mercer’s hypothesis and follow-up key studies, for example by glaciologist Terry Hughes. The hypothesis of an Arctic Ocean wide thick ice shelf has been difficult to evaluate because floating ice shelves leave few direct traces behind after their disappearance. However, the hypothesized Arctic Ocean ice shelf has been proposed to reach a thickness of about 1 km, implying that it would ground on bathymetric highs along its flow path to form ice rises or ice rumples. In this presentation I will present our work over the last 20 years aimed to address the existence of an Arctic Ocean wide ice shelf, involving geophysical mapping and geological coring during icebreaker expeditions as well as formulations of conceptual numerical models. In two recent papers (Jakobsson et al. 2016; Nilsson et al, 2017) we presented new evidence of ice-shelf groundings on bathymetric highs in the central Arctic Ocean, resurrecting the concept of an ice shelf extending over the entire central Arctic Ocean during at least one previous glaciation. Dating of sediment cores point to that the occasion for and Arctic Ocean wide thick ice shelf was approximately 140 000 year ago, i.e., the penultimate glaciation.

Martin Jakobbson in Longyearbyen Svalbard. April 10, 2018.

After completing a Ph.D. in 2000 at the department of geological sciences, Stockholm University, Martin Jakobsson joined the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, USA, for a research scientist position. The Ph.D. thesis was titled "Mapping the Arctic Ocean: Bathymetry and Pleistocene Paleoceanography."

Martin returned to Stockholm University from USA in April 2004 for an associate professor position at the department of geological sciences.

From November 2004, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him five years to devote full time for research as an Academy Fellow through support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. He was promoted to full professor of Marine Geology and Geophysics at Stockholm University in September 2009 and has served as Head of the department of geological sciences since 2012. His current research interests include the Arctic Ocean glacial history, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, submarine glacial landforms and geophysical seafloor mapping using acoustic methods. Martin has spent more than one year of ship time onboard open ocean research vessels and he has been Co-Chief Scientist on eight international ocean expeditions. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Class V for Geoscience elected Martin as a member in 2012, and he is acting as the 1:st vice president of the Academy since 2016.

Anatomy of a meltwater drainage system beneath the ancestral East Antarctic ice sheet Lauren Simkins (Rice University)

John Anderson and Martin Jakobsson aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden in 2010. Photo taken by Björn Eriksson.

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Subglacial hydrology is critical to understand the behaviour of ice sheets, yet active meltwater drainage beneath contemporary ice sheets is rarely accessible to direct observation. Using geophysical and sedimentological data from the deglaciated western Ross Sea, we identify a palaeosubglacial hydrological system active beneath an area formerly covered by the East Antarctic ice sheet. A long channel network repeatedly delivered meltwater to an ice stream grounding line and was a persistent pathway for episodic meltwater drainage events. The channel network was connected to upstream subglacial lakes in an area of geologically recent rifting and volcanism, where elevated heat flux would have produced sufficient basal melting to fill the lakes over decades to several centuries; this timescale is consistent with our estimates of the frequency of drainage events at the retreating grounding line. Based on these data, we hypothesize that ice stream dynamics in this region were sensitive to the underlying hydrological system.

SPEAKERS & ABSTRACTS improving, the long-term history of these processes and their relationship to climate and ocean forcings are lacking.

Rice University crew at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Brian Demet, Lindsay Prothro, Lauren Simkins, Anna Ruth Halberstadt. January 2015.

Marine sediment archives along the coast of Antarctica serve as important records of Holocene ice shelf history. Multiproxy analyses of sediment cores from targeted basins are used to reconstruct glacial changes, namely ice shelf extent from lithofacies and diatom phytoplankton abundance, as well as water mass identification from foraminiferal assemblages. Cores collected during the IB Oden 20092010 cruise to the eastern Amundsen Sea show strong evidence for advection of Circumpolar Deepwater beneath the Cosgrove Ice Shelf during the Holocene. The Cosgrove Ice Shelf retreated to its modern-day position during the Late Holocene, at a time when other ice shelves in Antarctica were stable or advancing under cooling climate conditions.

Thus, oceanography, rather than regional climate, was the major control on ice shelf stability in the eastern Amundsen Sea during the Holocene.

This contrasts with Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves, where recent collapses are thought to be driven by increase in atmospheric temperature. Sediment records of pre-instrumental ice shelf history in the Northern Antarctic Peninsula further indicate that atmospheric temperature was the primary control on ice shelf stability during the Holocene. Future aims are to investigate past oceanography and ice shelf history of the southern Amundsen Sea, where Thwaites Glacier drains today.

Lauren Simkins, 2017.

Lauren Simkins graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Barbara with Alex Simms, a former John graduate student. She started a postdoctoral position in 2014 with John working on the paleorecord of Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat. During her time a Rice, she has participated on a cruise to the Antarctic and taught a undergraduate and graduate course called 'The Cryosphere.' Lauren and John just received funding from NSF to work as part of an international team to understand changes in Thwaites Glacier, which is currently one of the Antarctic glaciers contributing most to global sea-level rise today. She will be starting as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia in the fall.

Becky Minzoni, Amundsen Sea, Antarctica 2010.

A Tale of Two Ice Shelves: Using Fossil Plankton and Sediments to Understand Antarctic Ice Stability Becky Minzoni â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;16 (University of Alabama) Ice shelves serve as important barriers to continental ice that flows to the sea and contributes to sea level. Recent thinning, fracturing, and collapse of Antarctic ice shelves have raised alarm for the stability of the marinebased West Antarctic Ice Sheet. As such, we need to better understand controls on ice shelf stability through time, including climate, oceanography, bathymetry and internal glacial dynamics, in order to more accurately predict future ice sheet behavior and sea level contributions. An area of heightened concern is the Amundsen Sea, where two major ice streams, Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, drain a large sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Relatively warm Circumpolar Deepwater breaches the continental shelf edge and flows landward along the fore-deepened continental shelf of the Amundsen Sea, where it has been shown to melt the underside of modern ice shelves.

While understanding of these present day ocean-ice interactions is

Becky Minzoni, Mobile Bay, AL 2017.

Dr. Rebecca (Becky) Totten Minzoni is an assistant professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama, specializing in sedimentology, stratigraphy, micropaleontology, and geochemistry in Antarctica and the Gulf of Mexico. A New Orleans native, Dr. Minzoni is driven by the impacts of historic climate change and strives to better understand recent observations within a geologic context.

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Before joining UA in 2016, Dr. Minzoni worked at Shell Exploration and Production as a stratigrapher in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. Dr. Minzoni received her B.S. in Geology and Geophysics from the University of Kansas in 2009, with a Goldwater Award for her senior thesis work on the geochemistry of giant swimming lizards of the Cretaceous seas. Eager to explore icehouse climates, Becky then met â&#x20AC;&#x153;Dr. Antarctica,â&#x20AC;? (also known as John Anderson), caught the marine geology bug, and has never looked back. Becky earned her Ph.D. from Rice University in 2015 on glacial response to the last 14,000 years of climate change in the Antarctica Peninsula. Key to understanding and predicting ongoing changes in the glacial landscape is evaluation of controls on glacial behavior. Dr. Minzoni tackles this problem by interrogating marine seismic, sediment cores, and diatom microfossil assemblages to reconstruct glacier and ocean changes at the decadal to centennial scale.

In Anderson student fashion, Becky is now embarking on field studies in coastal environments closer to home-- in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas-- to reconstruct flooding history and ecological response with sediment and diatom microfossil records. She is motivated by the need to better understand post-settlement environmental changes in the context of natural Holocene variability.

The Signature of Ice Flow Across the continental shelf, Antarctic Peninsula Julia Wellner â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;01 (University of Houston) During the last glacial maximum, grounded ice from the expanded Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet extended across the continental shelf on either side of the peninsula. Grounded and flowing ice carved a distinctive array of glacial geomorphic features on the seafloor, which were then exposed as the ice sheet retreated. Interrogation of seafloor records allows reconstruction of the evolving ice sheet geometry and interpretation of flow characteristics. Shifting flow directions in several areas, including across the Seal Nunataks, which divide Larsen A and B, and offshore of Larsen C, indicate flow reorientation that reflects the changing ice sheet geometry as the ice retreated across the continental shelf. Evidence of possible previous ice-shelf collapses are noted near the shelf break, further illustrating the critical, protective effect that ice shelves impart to marine terminating glacial environments. The seafloor geomorphic record in the Weddell Sea contrasts with the western side of the peninsula, where ice flow paths are more structurally controlled and thus do not change significantly during retreat.

Julia Wellner, Weddell Sea, Antarctica. Photo by Kathleen Gavahan After completing both AB and MS theses in structural geology, Julia had an epiphany that she actually wanted to be a stratigrapher and marine geologist. She came to Rice in 1996 to start a Ph.D. working with John and started making up for lost time working in both the Gulf of Mexico and the Ross Sea. She stayed at Rice for a post-doc and has been at University of Houston since 2006.

The influence of sediments on the extent of glaciers reaching the ocean Bernard Hallet (University of Washington) It has long been known that glaciers reaching marine waters can produce vast amounts of meltwater and sediments through glacial erosion, which can impact fjord geochemistry and marine ecosystems, as well as form thick sediments near the glacier margin. In this lecture, I will focus on relatively recent research by several groups on the influence of these marginal sediments on the extent, and advance/retreat of these glaciers.

This influence, which arises largely because marginal sediments tend to slow submarine melting, is of special interest because it likely modulates the complex and only partly understood behavior of glaciers reaching marine waters in general. Importantly, these glaciers include those draining from the Greenland and Antarctica that are major contributors to sea level rise. Hence, additional research on the influence of sediments on glacial extent may well significantly contribute to current efforts to reduce major uncertainties in predictions of sea level rise.

Alex Sims, John Anderson and Julia Wellner, Antarctica, 2007.

Bernard Hallet and John Anderson, 2007.

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Delayed grounding-line retreat following ice-shelf collapse in eastern Ross Sea Phil Bart â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;96 (Louisiana State University) With M. DeCesare, W. Majewski, A. McGlannan, B.E. Rosenheim The geology of the Whales Deep Basin (WDB) in eastern Ross Sea is a key recorder of West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) dynamics. Recentlyacquired data provides unequivocal evidence that the WAIS paused several times within 75 km of the WDB continental shelf edge before contracting an additional 200 km toward Roosevelt Island. Here we present a retreat chronology derived from abundant in situ foraminifera that were isolated from grounding-line proximal sediments. The new ages indicate that abrupt grounding-line shifts from the continental shelf edge and establishment of sub-ice-shelf conditions prior to 14.7 cal kyr BP. Despite a subsequent ice shelf collapse at 12.3 kyr BP, an outercontinental-shelf grounding position was maintained for several millennia by rapid deposition as ice stream discharge accelerated.

Aggradational stacking of grounding-zone wedges (GZWs) created a foredeepened subglacial topography, which predisposed the deflated ice stream to its subsequent 200-km grounding-line shift at 11.5 kyr BP. The new detailed reconstructions are extremely important because models that seek to predict WAIS responses to change must first be able to reproduce the preceding pattern and timing of post-LGM retreat.

sedimentologists, glaciologists and climate modelers to reconstruct icesheet changes. Phil received a NSF CAREER and presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He served as a US Geoscience representative to the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). He has published more than 40 peer review articles on Antarctic marine geology and last glacial cycle stratigraphy. Phil teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses and advised more than 30 graduate student research projects. Phil is married to Sophie Warny, who is also a LSU associate professor/CENEX Chair in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. They have two daughters, Manon (20) and Zoe (18) and two cats (Lilly and Midnight). Manon is a Physics and Chemical Engineering major at LSU and Zoe is currently finishing her senior year of highschool. Lilly and Midnight are underemployed at present. In his free time, Phil enjoys singing (badly), cooking (well-ish), eating (a lot) and drinking icy cold beer.

Antarctic Ice Sheet sensitivity to sub-ice-shelf bathymetry: model-data convergence in the Ross Sea Anna Ruth Halberstadt â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;13 (U. Massachusetts) Sub-ice bathymetry has been shown to influence ice-sheet stability at a continental scale, down to the scale of an individual ice stream. Here, numerical ice-sheet modelig is used ot investigate ice-sheet sensitivity to bed elevation underneath the modern Ross Ice Shelf. Bed elevation has significant uncertainty in this region, despite playing an important role in Last Glacial Maximum ice retreat. Model simulations were run over alterated bed configurations to assess ice-sheet response to bed uncertainty. This sensitivity analysis brackets the possible range of dynamic ice-sheet behavior and ice volume changes throughout the last glacial cycle.

Sub-ice-shelf bathymetry can influence the behavior of individual ice streams and even the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).

When bed elevations are high, Ice Stream D (Bindschadler Ice Stream, feeding Whales Deep trough) does not fully develop, and the resultant large groundling-line embayment facilitates Ross Sea deglaciation. This feature is independently inferred from mapping and analysis of seafloor geomorphic landforms! Modeled ice-sheet behavior suggests that this embayment is related to increased activity of Siple Coast ice streams, leading to thinning in the interior WAIS with greater pos-LGM ice volume loss.

John and Doris Anderson with Phil Bart in Gent Belgium for a conference during his gap year between his M.S. and Ph.D. working at the RCMG. Eating famous Moules-frites (mussels and fries). Photo by Sophie Warny, a Ph.D. student at UCL in Louvain-la-Neuve at the time, who showed us around Belgium.

Phil Bart is an associate professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

He has been a faculty member since 1998. Phil completed his M.S. and Ph.D. at Rice University (with John Anderson as his major adviser) and his undergraduate studies at the University of New Orleans. His research interests lie in the general area of Antarctic marine geology and geophysics.

He collaborates with biostratigraphers,

Ruthie Halberstadt on the Jan - Mar 2015 cruise aboard the N.B. Palmer (NBP1502A) to the Ross Sea (with other Anderson affiliates: Lindsay Prothro, Lauren Simkins, Brian Demet and Phil Bart). We collected sedimentary and geophysical data to reconstruct Ross Sea deglaciation history and ice-sheet dynamics.

SPEAKERS & ABSTRACTS expeditions led by J. Anderson have revealed important evidence that at the LGM the Ross Ice Shelf was ice covered (Bart et al., 2017) and complex large scale advances and retreats have been recorded on the seafloor (Halberstadt et al., 2016) that suggest revision of general understanding of Antarctic marine based ice sheet behavior including the ice sheets of the LGM. New geomorphic and geochemical data indicate ice shelf fluctuations (Simkins et al., 2017; Yokoyama et al., 2016) that are an important dataset for improving glaciological models to understand future ice sheet changes.

Yusuke Yokoyama, at Rice 2014.

Ruthie Halberstadt in the Friis Hills, (Dry Valleys) Antarctica, assisting New Zealand collaborators recover a permafrost drill core spanning the early-to-Mid Miocene, January 2017.

Anna Ruth Halberstadt (Ruthie) came to Rice in 2009 as an undergrad in Civil & Environmental Engineering. She was eventually converted to the Earth Sciences by John Anderson and the wonderful ESCI department, graduating in 2013 with a double major. Ruthie stayed at Rice for her M.S. with John in glacial geomorphology, which entailed Antarctic field work aboard the N.B. Palmer in 2015. She is now at UMass-Amherst learning ice-sheet modeling from Rob DeConto, and gaining a new appreciation for Antarctica through intimate personal experience of snow and ice in Massachusetts!

Rapid changes of Antarctic ice sheets during the last 30,000 years Yusuke Yokoyama (University of Tokyo) Global climate and mean sea level (GMSL) during the last 30,000 years have experienced large changes. GMSL was lower more than 100m during the last glacial maximum (LGM), which is centered at around 21,000 years ago. Glaciological and geological evidence suggest that the Northern Hemisphere ice sheet could hold only ca. 100m or less GMSL equivalent ice during the LGM, thus the residual ice must be located in the other hemisphere, likely in Antarctica. Since the total GMSL during the LGM was 120m or more below the present day level (eg., Lambeck et al., 2014), 20-30m GMSL equivalent ice must be placed in Antarctica.

However land based evidence using cosmogenic radio nuclides (CRN; eg., 10Be), exposure dating suggests that LGM Antarctic ice volume was less than 10m GMSL equivalent ice or less (eg., Bentley et al., 2014).

These contradictory pictures have remained unsolved for more than 20 years. Recent studies have confirmed that GMSL was indeed 120m below present (Yokoyama et al., 2018) and the maximum possible in Northern Hemisphere ice volume is below 100m of GMSL equivalent ice (Lambeck et al., 2017). Thus Antarctica, in particular, the Ross and Weddell Sea regions are important areas to study and the U.S.

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Yusuke Yokoyama, Ph.D. is professor at the Analytical Center for Environmental Study, Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, and professor at the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Graduate School of Science. He earned his Ph.D. in Earth Sciences in 2000, from the Australian National University. He was a postdoctoral chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2000 to 2002, and research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA) from April to September 2002. He was appointed lecturer at the Department of Earth and Planetary Science in 2002, and associate professor at the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute in 2008, becoming professor in 2014. Professor Yokoyama’s research primarily focuses on quantitative studies of past environmental changes using geochemical and geophysical measures to better understand the physics and interactions of Earth’s various components. He has collaborated on various international studies, including research on the Great Barrier Reef on Australia’s coast. He is the recipient of the Wiess Visiting Professorship (2014-2015) from Rice University, USA in 2014 hosted by Prof John Anderson, and is a member of many professional academic organizations, such as the American Geophysical Union, Geochemical Society, and International Union for Quaternary Science. He also serves on various boards and committees, including contributing author of IPCC assessment reports, and is a member of publication committee of American Geophysical Union.

Exploring the morphodynamic response of coastal barriers to sea-level rise along the Texas Gulf Coast.

Travis Swanson (Rice University) The Texas portion of the Gulf Coast spans nearly 600 kilometers and is chiefly composed of barrier islands and peninsulas that shelter numerous landward communities from damaging storm surge and waves. Presently, this coastal barrier system is evolving at an unprecedented rate, as sediment that comprises these protective barriers is being depleted while sea-level rise is accelerating, reducing the resilience of coastal communities. To help explain the morphodynamic response of Texas’ coastal barrier system to anticipated accelerated sea-level rise, a reduced complexity coastal barrier model is constructed from a combination of extant models of cross-shore barrier morphodynamics, alongshore sediment transport and time-variable ravinement depth. Simulation timesteps capture the geomorphic response of Texas’ coastal barriers to sea-level rise by tracking the motion of key geomorphic boundaries within the barrier system: ravinement depth, shoreline and bay line. The motion of these boundaries is calculated via parameterized expressions

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of alongshore, cross-shore and barrier overwash sediment transport that represent the time-integrated effect of short-term coastal processes, such as fair-weather waves and storms, and longer-term processes such as sealevel rise, dynamic barrier morphology and barrier sediment composition.

Model results suggest that the fate of Texas’ coastal barriers is strongly influenced by the modern subaerial barrier sand volume and barrier location within the large-scale longshore sediment transport network.

substrate) and a fishery. We collected rugosity measurements and submersible-camera data across intertidal patch and fringing oyster reefs in Back Sound, North Carolina. These data show that variations in structural complexity at the decimeter-decameter scale, control fish abundance, with the highest abundance generally occurring in areas of intermediate structural complexity. These areas correspond to the maximum growth zone or areas that are exposed about 40 percent of the time. Despite the importance of oyster reefs to John-the-fisherman, the quantity of oysters and fish habitat oyster reefs provide today is only a fraction of what it was prior to the significant decrease in global reef abundance that began ~150-300 years ago, estimated at 85 percent loss.

State and local organizations have made significant investments to improve the management of oyster reefs and results presented here will ensure that future investments in restoration will pay the highest dividends in terms of oysters and high-quality fish habitat. In short, John should fish along the sides of oyster reefs to maximize his catch rate.

Travis Swanson, Big Bend, TX, winter 2014.

Tony Rodriguez in New Zealand, 1996.

Travis Swanson demonstrates the impact of sea level rise on a barrier island wave tank model, Oceans Day at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, June 2017.

Travis was born in San Antonio and studied geology at UT Austin. After 12 years, and a few graduations at UT Austin, Travis thought it was time to diversify his career, and joined the clastics research group at Shell in Houston. Shortly afterward, driven by a desire to return to an academic path, Travis applied for a postdoc with John’s group at Rice University.

Over the past year and a half, Travis has applied state of the art coastal barrier models to make long-term forecasts of Texas coastal barrier island and peninsula response to sea-level rise.

Stability of linked coastal barrier and estuarine systems under accelerated sea-level rise Antonio Rodriguez ‘99 (U. North Carolina) When I think of John Anderson retired, I imagine a note on his office door that reads “Gone fishing - JBA” and somewhere in West Bay he will be with his line in the water. Increasing our understanding of fish habitats will maximize John’s productivity during retirement and is the focus of this study. It is well-known that structurally-complex environments, like seagrass, saltmarsh and oyster reefs augment fish abundances by providing refuge from predation and serving as important foraging grounds, but how does fish abundance vary within these environments? Here, I focus on oyster reefs that function as both estuarine fish habitat (in a landscape that lacks any alternative hard

Tony and Patricia Rodriguez, 2017.

Tony graduated from Hamilton College (Clinton, NY) in 1994 with a BA in Geology and Rice University in May 1999 with a Ph.D. in Geology and Geophysics. He stayed at Rice for the next year as a Postdoctoral research associate (from May 1999 to January 2000) and as a Lecturer (from January to July 2000). In August 2000, he accepted a job at the University of Alabama, department of geological sciences as an assistant professor. He left the University of Alabama in August 2005 as a College of Arts and Sciences Leadership Board Faculty Fellow, and the George Lindahl Fellow, and is currently a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Institute of Marine Sciences and Department of Marine Sciences. Tony’s research emphasis is on estuarine evolution and most of his work takes place along the middle Atlantic coast. He

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collaborates with many of his colleagues at UNC examining anthropogenic and climate impacts on marsh, oyster-reef and beach environments. Tony lives in Morehead City, NC. with his wife, two sons and two dogs.

Prograding coastlines in times of drought? The curious case of Baffin Bay, Texas Alex Simms’06 (UC Santa Barbara) For nearly 40 years, professor John Anderson has used the northern Gulf of Mexico as a natural laboratory for studying the processes controlling coastal stratigraphy. One important theme of this research has been how climate modulates sediment supply and the manner in which this is recorded in coastal stratigraphy. This work has largely confirmed conceptual models suggesting coastlines retreat during periods of drier climates as a result of diminished fluvial input and prograde during wetter periods as a result of increased fluvial input. This behavior holds true for every Central and East Texas coast estuary examined; however, this commonly observed behavior appears to break down along the South Texas coast. Along the semi-arid Baffin Bay coastline of South Texas, optically stimulated luminescence ages from beach ridges suggest the shoreline prograded forming well-developed beach ridges during periods of drier climate and underwent retreat and/or no progradation during periods of wetter climate. The difference in responses is attributed to the nature of the systems supplying sediment to the coast. The Baffin Bay coast experienced enhanced sediment delivery due to dune reactivation along its southern margins during drier periods. Our results suggest that although sedimentary systems do record environmental signals, the nature of how that signal is propagated varies depending on the climatic and physiographic setting of the system.

John Anderson and Alex Simms enjoying the views within the Lemaire Channel, Antarctica in March 2007.

After receiving his B.S. from Oklahoma State University, Alex came to work with John in 2001. Upon completing his Ph.D. in 2005, Alex returned to OSU as an assistant professor. He taught there until moving to the University of California Santa Barbara in 2010. Following John’s example Alex conducts fieldwork in both Texas and Antarctica, although he now focuses most of his time on the California coast. Alex and his family, including five children, currently live in Durham, England, where Alex is a Fulbright Scholar on sabbatical leave from UCSB

Impact to the 8.2 ka punctuated sea level even on the Mustang Island Corpus - Christi Bay Bay complex Sophie Warny (LSU) with S. Ferguson, J.B. Anderson, A.R. Simms, and C. White The results from an investigation of the coupled Mustang Island–Corpus Christi Bay complex, Gulf of Mexico, shows that the island was eliminated as an effective salinity barrier between 8.86 and 8.17 ka. This event is recorded by a fivefold increase in dinoflagellate cysts within Corpus Christi Bay. During this time, the bay-head delta shifted 15 km landward and oyster reefs within the bay died off. Our age model indicates that this event most likely resulted from the most rapid period of eustatic rise of the Holocene, which peaked at 8.18–8.31 ka. This

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event is attributed to late-stage ice sheet disintegration, particularly in North America, by the rapid draining of Lake Agassiz–Ojibway. Local glacial-isostatic factors resulted in a sea-level rise of only 0.2–0.56 m in the western Gulf of Mexico, which was less than needed to submerge the barrier. Rather, it was the marked nature of this sea-level rise that led to the virtual destruction of Mustang Island as an effective salinity barrier.

These results provide an analog for predicting coastal morphodynamic response to accelerated sea-level rise and emphasize the need for better understanding of barrier response to sea-level rise and developing improved numerical models for predicting future changes to coastal barrier shorelines.

Sophie Warney is an associate professor of Palynology in the department of Geology and Geophysics & a curator at the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She received her Ph.D. from the Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium working with Dr. Jean-Pierre Suc on the Messinian Salinity Crisis. In 2011, she received a NSF CAREER award to conduct palynological research in Antarctica. Since being hired at LSU in 2008, she directed 18 graduate student’s dissertations or theses on various Cretaceous to Cenozoic palynological projects. Her students are now employed with the oil and gas industry (HESS, BP, DEVON, CHEVRON, BHP Billiton Petroleum and EOG), with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, with environmental companies, with IODP or as instructor. Sophie first met John and Doris at a geological meeting in her home country (Belgium) in 1994. Her first postdoctoral research contract was with John’s group at Rice, they have since collaborated on SHALDRIL and on Gulf of Mexico projects.

A Holocene record of flux of alluvial sediment related to climate: case studies from the northern gulf of Mexico Kristy Milliken ’08 (University of Kansas) with J.B. Anderson, A.R. Simms, and M.D. Blum Sedimentary deposits contain a record of long-term sediment flux and sediment yield rates for geological systems. Furthermore, studies that quantify detailed analysis of closed systems are particularly useful for validating the efficacy of other tools to derive sediment discharge, sediment flux, and sediment yield for use in forward stratigraphic modeling. We test the reliability of the BQART equation using millennia-scale sediment-flux estimates derived from five fluvial–bay systems of western Louisiana and Texas. The BQART equation (derived from measurements of modern fluvial load) provides a relatively robust tool to derive sediment yield or sediment flux for small, low-relief coastal-plain fluvial systems. The fluvial–bay systems studied span humid (Calcasieu, Louisiana) to semiarid (Nueces, Texas) climate zones, and provide a natural laboratory to study effects of Holocene climate

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change on sediment flux. These systems preserve a Holocene record of variable sediment yield that can be linked to climate-induced vegetation effects. High sediment yield of the Calcasieu fluvial system during the mid-Holocene is attributed to climatic, vegetation-cover shift to semiarid grassland, respectively. Low sediment yield of the Nueces fluvial system during the mid-Holocene is attributed to a climatic, vegetation-cover shift to arid desert, respectively. This study supports theoretical arguments that sediment yield is greatest in semiarid to subhumid fluvial systems with diminishing sediment yield in arid or humid climatic regimes.

time-averaged annual landfall probability of 0.46 percent. This is similar to previously published sites from across the Gulf of Mexico. These data are especially useful for interpreting long-term coastal system response to storm impacts. Along the upper Texas coast, we determine the average storm-related offshore sand flux for the middle part of the Holocene to be ~4200–4400 ± 670 m3/yr, with a decrease in the offshore sand flux to ~920–970 ± 270 m3/yr during the latter part of the Holocene.

Kristy Milliken in Maxwell Bay, Antarctica in 2005.

John Anderson and Davin Wallace reconstructing hurricane impacts from sedimentary cores extracted from Laguna Madre, TX, for Davin’s dissertation.

Kristy Milliken, 2015.

Kristy worked with John on the Gulf Coast (Calcasieu and Sabine lakes) and in the Maxwell Bay in Antarctica. Kristy is currently teaching at Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs, CO. Previously she worked at Exxon Exploration and Chevron Research.

Reconstructing hurricane impacts from western Atlantic margins Davin Wallace ’10 (Univ. of Southern Mississippi) Hurricanes annually threaten the Western Atlantic margins. Due to a relatively short instrumental record, paleohurricane archives can shed light on current and future hurricane impacts by providing a geologic and climatic context. I will introduce existing archives and discuss dating methods, site selection criteria and statistical applications. Across the Atlantic Basin, regional shifts in hurricane overwash on centennial to millennial timescales have been linked to various climatic modes of variability, including El Niño/Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation, but could also reflect regional-scale controls on hurricane activity. Over multi-millennial periods in the Gulf of Mexico, different spatial locations in Laguna Madre, TX, record intense hurricane event deposits from ~5300 to 900 years B.P. and provide a long-term,

Davin Wallace is currently an assistant professor in the Division of Marine Science at the University of Southern Mississippi located at Stennis Space Center. Davin earned a B.S. degree cum laude in 2006 from Tulane University, with a double major in Geology and German.

He earned a Ph.D. degree in 2010 in Earth Science from Rice University under the advisement of Dr. John B. Anderson. In 2012, he was a National Science Foundation EAR Postdoctoral Fellow jointly at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2015, he was selected as a National Academy of Sciences Gulf Research Program Early-Career Fellow. Dr. Wallace’s

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SPEAKER ABSTRACTS

research interests include coastal geology, sedimentology, paleotempestology, and response of environments to global change. He has worked in such areas as the Gulf of Mexico, Japan, Bermuda and the Philippines.

Till deltas and grounding zone wedges, evolution of a concept and its bearing on ice sheet stability Richard Alley (Penn State) We are able to decipher the tectonic evolution of the Bay of Bengal by examining a variety of geophysical and geological data, both on land and at sea and across international boundaries. Thus we examined seismic reflection as well as gravity data in the Bay of Bengal, seismic seaward dipping reflectors and magnetic data in Bangladesh, land gravity and Deep Seismic Sounding data in Bengal, India, as well as petrological inferences regarding the Rajmahal traps in Bengal, India, and the Sylhet traps in Assam, India. This exercise in forensic geology also shed light on three geologically perverse entities:

Operators’ Manual, and author of the book. His popular account of climate change and ice cores, The Two-Mile Time Machine, was Phi Beta Kappa’s science book of the year. Dr. Alley is happily married with two grown daughters, two stay-at-home cats, a bicycle, and a pair of soccer cleats.

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The old Antarctic explorers (from right to left) Richard Alley, Doyle Watts, David Elliot and Tom Gracanin, on a momentary break from an expedition doing geology in the Antarctic Peninsula, in 1978.

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Richard Alley, 2013.

Dr. Richard Alley (Ph.D. 1987, Geology, Wisconsin) is Evan Pugh University professor of Geosciences at Penn State. He studies the great ice sheets to help predict future changes in climate and sea level, and has conducted three field seasons in Antarctica, eight in Greenland and three in Alaska. He has been honored for research (including election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Foreign Membership in the Royal Society), teaching and service. Dr. Alley participated in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on climate change (co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize), and has provided requested advice to numerous government officials in multiple administrations including a U.S. vice president, Presidents’ Science Advisors, and committees and individual members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. He has authored or coauthored over 290 refereed scientific papers. He was presenter for the PBS TV miniseries on climate and energy Earth: The

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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Bernard Hallet

Julia Wellner

Yusuke Yokoyama

Travis Swanson

Tony Rodriguez

Martin Jakobsson

COASTAL SCIENCE Davin Wallace

Kristy Milliken

ANTARCTIC SCIENCE Ruthie Halberstadt

Lauren Simkins

Becky Minzoni

Phil Bart

Sophie Warny

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