Faculty & Staff News

Aaron Diefendorf

I hope everyone out there is doing well. It’s been a quasi-productive year, although challenges of COVID still remain. As I write this, my wife and kids have COVID! And, supply chain issues are wreaking havoc on keeping instruments fixed and presents many challenges for keeping research moving forward. Tom Lowell and I received a grant from NSF to study diatom biomarkers. Meg Corcoran (who co-wrote the proposal) is finishing up her PhD and will defend this coming spring. Watts Dietrich joined our group this past fall and is focused on the diagenesis of these diatom biomarkers for his MS. A new cadre of undergrads have joined the lab including Megan Hamilton and Michael Schenk. We also received NSF funding to expand the analytical capabilities of the Stable Isotope Laboratory. We managed to get a bit of field work in last fall with lots more planned for this coming summer. It was great to see many of you at the recent GSA meeting here in Cincinnati.

Andy Czaja

Hello friends! Despite the continued disruptions from the pandemic this year, my lab was able to get some work done studying the early evolution of life on Earth, the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere, and the search for ancient life on Mars. planning for the sample return missions are targeting 2033, only eleven years from now! MARS REPORT: The first year of the mission has been a rousing success! In addition to successfully piloting the first aircraft on another planet, and taking breathtak-

Once again, this year I have focused on my Mars work as a science team member of the NASA Mars 2020 mission (Perseverance rover). As I noted in Upper Crust last year, one of the main objectives of the mission is to search for evidence of ancient (fossil) life and collect samples for return to Earth on a future mission. If Mars ever hosted life, it’s most likely to have been microbial. And my role, as a microbial paleontologist is to advise on what samples to collect that might hold evidence of ancient life. If it’s there, we should be able to find some evidence, but we will almost certainly need higher magnification and more sensitive instruments to really be sure, so that’s why we want to bring the samples back. Recent

ing images of an ancient crater lake (check out https:// mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/), we studied the crater floor units and collected eight samples, all of which represent igneously emplaced rocks. These will be a major boon for understanding the geologic history of the area and also should allow us to calibrate Mars’ crater chronology by determining the exact ages of these rocks. As of the middle of April 2022, we have arrived at the delta in the crater to learn about its sedimentology/stratigraphy and to also search for organic biosignatures. I anticipate a lot more exciting news to report next year! My current students have all had successful years too, despite the pandemic restrictions. Andrea Corpolongo (Ph.D. candidate) continued work on her NSF-funded project studying the paleontology and paleoecology of 2.5-billion-year-old fossil microbes from the Kaapvaal Craton of South Africa. Andrea also continued to be a strong advocate for our department’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as well as an outreach program to promote our science to the general public. Camden Goland (M.S. student) is continuing work on a project to study thermal alteration of fossil organic matter from some of the same geologic units that Andrea is studying, despite not being able to be in the lab this year. Desirée Baker, who started in Fall 2021, began work on a NASA Exobiology-funded project looking for evidence of oxygen production by microorganisms in 3.2-billionyear-old deltaic sediments from the Moodies Group of South Africa. This project has major implications for how we might search for similar evidence in the deltaic sediments in Jezero crater on Mars! In the last year, both Andrea and Desirée joined the Mars 2020 science team as well, as student collaborators and Andrea is currently leading the production of a manuscript about the minerals detected by the SHERLOC Raman spectrometer on Perseverance.

My former students have been busy and successful as well. Andrew Gangidine (Ph.D. 2020), finished his postdoctoral fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC and took a permanent position as the Curator of Earth and Space Sciences at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Brookfield, MI. Finally, Jeff Osterhout (M.S. 2016), after earning a Ph.D. at the UCLA in 2021, began a postdoctoral fellowship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA working on aspects of Mars Sample Return. Finally, I am looking forward to welcoming a new student in the Fall. Brianna Orrill received her B.S from Arizona State University in 2021 and will likely work on a project relating Mars and the Early Earth. For more goings-on in my lab, please check out my website at http://andyczaja.com.

Photo Captions: Group photo at Donner Summit: 1. Perseverance’s first sample seen in the drill bit, 9/1/2021 2. The front edge of the delta in Jezero crater. It is here we hope to find evidence of ancient life that might have existed in this paleolake. (Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)

Brooke Crowley

It’s hard to believe that it’s already time to write another newsletter update. The past 12 months have gone quickly. Looking back, it’s overall been a positive and productive year. We have an excellent new cohort of graduate students, including two students who are working directly with me: Clark Ward and Jonas Zajonz. Clark is pursuing a master’s and comes to us from Nebraska. Jonas is from Germany and is pursuing a PhD. He’s also working with Josh Miller. Emily Simpson has been working hard on her PhD research and passed her qualifying exams this Spring. Way to go Emily! We will have a new MS student joining our lab next Fall, Andrew Hensley. He will be working on a funded collaborative project on Haiti’s recently extinct rodents. I’m thrilled to be working with such a great group of engaged and enthusiastic young scientists.

My own research continues to move along nicely. I am wrapping up several very diverse projects, several of which have involved isotope values in feces… I hadn’t anticipated that this would be a research direction I would pursue, but feces can be collected without ever handling or disturbing wild animals, and it turns out fecal isotopes are very wellsuited for assessing diet and tracking foraging areas for individual animals. A special issue in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution called “A Golden Age for Strontium Isotope Research? Current Advances in Paleoecological and Archaeological Research”, which I helped organize, is also finally complete. It was a pleasure working with my fellow co-editors and I am proud of our final product.

Travel-wise, I haven’t been up to much (thanks to COVID), and mostly, I have been focused on lab-based work. However, I have been able to visit family (in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Michigan). My husband and I have also been enjoying regional State Parks, and we continue to thoroughly explore Cincinnati on foot. If you haven’t tried this, I highly recommend it. Let me know if you’d like some ideas or route suggestions.

On a more personal note, I was diagnosed with breast cancer in early March. I did not share this with many people at the time, but now feel comfortable letting others know. I had surgery at the end of March, with about a month and a half of followup radiation therapy. To my knowledge, the cancer is now gone and I can move on with my life. This was a personal challenge, but also a learning and growing experience. Among the things that I learned is that I am part of a very loving and caring community here in Cincinnati (both at work and at

Lastly, we are trying to gather contact details for alumni who would be interested in being part of an alumni mentor network. The primary goal of this network is to help current students connect with alumni who have had various experiences following graduation, but I am also hopeful that it could be useful for keeping alumni connected as well. We have a Google Survey that asks for details regarding when you graduated, your preferred contact details, and the types of networking activities you might be interested in participating in in the future: https://forms.gle/o9p6wWrykYuC2reUA. Everyone is invited to be part of this network, and the more people that participate, the stronger the network will be. If you haven’t previously completed the survey (or even if you think you might have but can’t remember), please consider doing so.

Photo Captions:

1. Embracing an early January snow storm at Cumberland Falls State Park, Kentucky

Strontium analysis allows researchers to peer back in time to see how animals lived August 13, 2021 The New York Times turned to a University of Cincinnati expert in strontium analysis to explain how studying this element can help researchers better understand how extinct animals like woolly mammoths lived. Brooke Crowley, an associate professor of geology and anthropology in UC’s College of Arts and Sciences, has analyzed strontium, hydrogen and other elements to track the movements of hawks, jaguars and even extinct horses based on what they were eating — or more precisely, where they were eating. Strontium is absorbed in the food chain and becomes a telltale marker for researchers to learn about the habitats important to animals, including long-dead woolly mammoths that roamed Alaska. A study in the journal Science by the University of Alaska pieced together the 28-year life of a woolly mammoth they named Kik that roamed what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge more than 17,000 years ago. The researchers were able to use strontium analysis of Kik’s surviving tusks found in the permafrost to track his yearly movements. The unique strontium signature from the food he ate each year was embedded in layers of the growing tusks that researchers examined. Another elemental signature in the tusks — nitrogen — suggested Kik died from starvation. “It’s rather amazing how much one can learn from little tiny bits of material from a now-extinct animal,” Crowley told the New York Times. “I’m particularly impressed that the authors were able to track this individual mammoth’s movements for his entire life.”

Crowley, who was not involved in the University of Alaska study, has examined strontium in other collected Ice Age mammal specimens to understand their migrations and use of the landscape in North America.

Dan Sturmer

It has been an incredibly busy year. I finally returned to teaching on campus this spring. It has been nice to get back to a more normal schedule. Our older daughter Ivy is finishing up Kindergarten and Eliana (3) is enjoying pre-school. Sarah continues to teach online courses in the Environmental Studies program UC and she is finishing up a M.Eng. in Computer Science here at UC. Vince Nowaczewski successfully completed his Ph.D. qualifying exam in March. This summer he will be in northeastern Nevada where he will be mapping the Spruce Mountain Quadrangle south of Wells. The goal of the mapping will be to better understand formation of the Middle Pennsylvanian Hogan Basin, strata of which is exposed in several mountain ranges in east-central Nevada. He also continues to work on geomechanical modeling to explain the distribution of structures within the Ancestral Rocky Mountains orogen. I am sure that you have heard about our GSA joint NorthCentral/Southeastern section meeting that we hosted in April here in Cincinnati. I served as the technical program co-chair with Alan Fryar from the University of Kentucky. I think the meeting went very well and it was really interesting being involved in the full planning and watching the meeting come to fruition. This summer is already filling up. The weekend after finals I will head to Reno where I am presenting a talk and a poster at the Geological Society of Nevada symposium (postponed from 2020). A few days later I will lead a 5-day field trip for the department around central and northern Nevada. I will likely do some more field work, including mapping with Vince at Spruce Mountain and leading several undergrads to do field work on the Spruce Mountain landslide in Nevada. Several undergraduate students will be working with me this summer on DEM landslide analysis, shear-wave velocity analysis, and landslide statistical analysis projects…more about this next year. Additionally several of the students will assist with GRP and refraction seismic analysis of areas along Cooper Creek and at the TEMMS along the Great Miami River. Those projects are spearheaded by Reza Soltanian and Dylan Ward. Additionally, I will be working on several grant proposals and will be working on manuscripts throughout the summer and fall. We are going to Maui for a week in July which will be a really nice break. It was a busy publication year with 8 papers released in the last year. One of them involved building a set of paleogeographic maps to document changes in late Paleozoic sedimentation and tectonism in eastern Nevada (Cashman and Sturmer, 2021, P-cubed). During the making of this paper my co-author and I realized that the traditional Antler Orogeny story doesn’t really match the

data we collected (more on this in next year’s edition). A set of papers focused on late Paleozoic sedimentation in western North America, including a summary of the late Paleozoic in North America (Sturmer et al., 2022, P-cubed), Adam Jones’ MS thesis work in the Oquirrh Basin (Jones et al., 2021, P-cubed), and the influence of the Ancestral Rocky Mountains on sedimentation in the mid-continent (Wang et al., 2022, P-cubed). My former M.S. student Nick Ferry and I ran a field trip to several landslides in the Las Vegas area as part of the 2022 GSA joint Cordilleran/Rocky Mountain section meeting (Ferry and Sturmer, 2022, GSA). I also co-authored papers with several graduate students in our department, including papers focused on a debris flow in Mammoth Caves (Bosch et al., 2021, Journal of Cave and Karst Studies), geophysical analysis of compound bar deposits (McGarr et al., 2021, Hydrological Processes), and modeling carbon dioxide injection in fluvial deposits (Ershadnia et al., 2022, Chemical Engineering Journal). Finally, I was the lead author on 3 meeting abstracts and co-author of 9 other abstracts.

This has been a busy teaching year as well. Last fall I two versions of our Careers in the Geosciences class, one at the 2000-level and one at the graduate level. This is the first time that the class has been taught at multiple levels, and it was a great success. This spring has been very busy for teaching. I taught three courses, including structural geology, Earth surface processes, and a newly-developed 7-week natural hazards course for UC Online. Next fall will also be busy, with Careers in the Geosciences (undergrad and grad), Applied Geophysics, and co-teaching regional tectonics seminar with Craig. We are also planning to have the Career Days event in fall 2022, probably in September. If you are interested in participating, please let me know!

Photo Captions:

1. Washoe Valley seismic survey deployment crew including students and faculty from UC and University of Nevada, Reno. 2. Burros joining our Blue Diamond landslide field trip 3. La Madre landslide deposit (gray) atop Jurassic Aztec Sandstone (tan and red) 4. XRF analysis of paintings in the UC art collection. 5. Presented a poster with Stefan Fiol (left) from CCM looking at the how landscape geomorphology influences the evolution of drumming patterns in a valley in the Himalaya of India.

Carl Brett

The past year was a bit rough from end to end. My old Silver Toyota Sienna (2004) finally gave up the ghost, without much fanfare. That vehicle had carried so many loads of rocks and fossils, kids and students; in 2020, its transmission nearly gave out and for a while, I thought it was over. But with a change of trans fluid the old car began shifting more and more easily and the minivan and had a remission for nearly another year. I had hoped to get it over 300,000 miles and almost but not quite made it. In February, our entire family got Covid for a second time, despite having shots and booster, both times it was not much worse than a cold, but the after effects may have contributed a bit of fatigue and malaise that have plagued me for the past months. On the other hand, the year had its highpoints. In June, 2021, former PhD student Christopher Aucoin completed and defended a dissertation detailing the onset of the Richmondian invasion, a coordinated immigration of over 50 species, mainly from warm water tropical areas, into the Cincinnati region, that took place in a couple of phases ~446 MA, each one occurring abruptly in just a single small scale cycle. Chris also documented the relationship of early phases of this bioevent to a detailed sea level history and disturbances of the global carbon cycle. My current students, colleagues and I resumed more active field work in several areas. PhD student, Cole Farnam has established the presence of the latest Ordovician (Hirnantian) strata in Ohio, which, though perhaps less than 100 Kyr after the great Hirnantian extinctions, show an already well established Silurian fauna, indicating a remarkably rapid recovery to a new relatively stable fauna that then largely persisted for millions of years into the Silurian. We continued sampling of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana and spent time working with colleagues at the Ohio Geological Survey core facility at Delaware, Ohio analyzing drill cores from central Ohio and integrating with outcrop studies in the Upper Ordovician and Silurian. Masters student Josie Chiarello made good headway in sampling and assembling data pertaining to two newly proposed Late Ordovician faunal invasions of corals, stromatoporoid sponges and varied brachiopods. We measured and sampled several newly blasted roadcut sections and made extensive faunal counts. She will finish her thesis this summer.

Allison Young worked toward completion of her dissertation on sub-surface-outcrop stratigraphy of the Lexington-Point Pleasant formations and also moved up to an important position as geologic project manager for Tetra Tech, an environmentalengineering firm; she will be working with our department to develop student internships with this company. During the pandemic, I worked with undergraduate student Sam Little on the extensive collections of the famed Dry Dredger, Steve Felton, who passed away in 2019. Sam worked diligently on the project and subsequently has become an active Masters student. He is making further important discoveries on the patterns of the famed Richmondian Invasion. His project also illustrates the very productive relationship we have with the Cincinnati Dry Dredgers, America’s oldest and one of the largest and most active amateur paleontological groups. Sam is fully documenting strata in a “research trench”, which has been excavated on private land by Dry Dredgers Dan Cooper and Matt Phillips; Sam’s work is also partly supported by the Dry Dredgers funds. In turn, I am working with these individuals and others to help document and publish on their many excavation sites around the world.

In May 2021, I spent a week with family near Nashville, Tennessee and I combined this trip with field work with colleagues and former PhD students Pat McLaughlin (PhD, 2006; now at the Illinois Geological Survey after several years at the Indiana Survey) and Jay Zambito (PhD 2011; professor at Beloit College). Pat and Jay were sampling Devonian and Mississippian rocks in the nearby region for phosphatic sediments at very interesting new sections near Gallatin and Westmoreland, TN. There is currently an effort to sample and studying the geochemistry of nodules of calcium phosphate minerals: not just because our country’s phosphate supplies are dwindling, but because some of these nodules also contain concentrations of rare earth elements used in multifarious high tech applications including the manufacture of cell phones, digital cameras, and LED lights. Our former student, Tim Paton (MS 2017) and I spent a couple of excellent days studying new Ordovician sections south and east of Nashville. A very exciting discovery was a new roadcut with the famous Millbrig bentonite, in a ditch, which was resting on a remarkable bed of phosphate pebbles with even a few whole trilobites, apparently buried alive by the ash. During a very productive week in central New York State, I worked with several colleagues and students, including Pat McLaughlin (more phosphate prospecting) and ran a special multi-day field trip course for my students, and visited localities where I am doing research in conjunction with some very dedicated amateur paleontologists. I also spent time at the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) near Ithaca, NY. Together with PRI director Warren Allmon and Greg Dietl, Director of Collections, my long-term collaborator, Gordon Baird (Emeritus, SUNY Fredonia) and I received funding from the National Science Foundation to curate, database, and fully document our Devonian research collections amassed during four decades of field study in New York. PRI will dedicate an entire floor of a newly renovated building to housing these collections. We are working with PRI to make certain that this archive is fully documented. We will also produce a digital atlas of Devonian fossils for the general public. This process has also included writing monographic chapters on Middle and Upper Devonian strata in New York to be published as a major book through PRI this year. During the summer of 2021 there was a great deal of activity literally right outside the door of the Geology-Physics Building. Excavations for the new Clifton Court Hall, in the space be-

tween our building and Clifton Avenue, began to take shape in July and by August there was a major exposed pit section ~5 m deep for the basement section and an additional 6 m side-hill excavation for the wall of the building. Together, these cuts provided an excellent, though completely ephemeral, exposure of the middle Cincinnatian (Late Ordovician ~447 Ma) Miamitown, Bellevue, and Corryville members. These units were named in the early 1900s, for exposures near the University, but in the present day, most all of the old type exposures are under concrete in this very urbanized area. Fortunately, I was able to document these beds in some detail in photos and measured sections before they were covered. Although they accidentally destroyed our extensive “rock piles”, which I have used in teaching for years, the folks from Messer Construction kindly brought up several large blocks from the basement excavation and made them available for our study. Thus, we were able to learn new things from strata literally right under our feet at UC.

Two new undergraduate students Nathan McCarthy and Bianca Neale, inspired me with their skills and motivation. They were so excited and focused that they began going out to fossil localities on their own almost every weekend. The had wanted to find a rare and beautiful type of fossil echinoderm, an edrioasteroid or seated star, a dime- or quarter-sized disk with a five-rayed “starfish” webbed together with scale-like plates. I had told them of a locality where a specimen of this rare fossil had been found on an earlier field trip. During a warm day in February, they sent me a cell phone photo of a slabs covered with the rare fossil Isorophus cincinnatiensis-the official fossil of our fair city (really; Google it!). I challenged them to find the layer in place and sure enough they found it 4 meters up on both sides of the roadcut. They brought back many dozens of specimens, including a slab with more than 130 specimens, one of the densest occurrences ever found. Nathan studied the size distribution and interactions among these tightly packed encrusting animals. This past April he presented their findings at the North Central Section of Geological Society of America here in Cincinnati.

The latter GSA meeting occupied a good deal of time in the winter of 2022. Professors Craig Dietsch and Rebecca Freeman (University of Kentucky) as well as our Dan Sturmer, coconvened a very successful meeting where our colleagues and students made nearly 50 presentations. I plugged away during the winter and early spring of 2022 and produced two new articles/guidebooks on the Ordovician and Silurian sequences, chemostratigraphy, cycles, and depositional environments in the Tristate Area.This was done in collaboration with colleagues Ben Dattilo (UC PhD, 1994; now at Purdue university, Fort Wayne) and Chris Waid of Ohio Geological Survey, PhD student, Cole Farnam, and Kyle Hartshorn (Dry Dredgers), a remarkably skilled avocational stratigrapher. In the end, we ran two full-day field trips that were well attended and seemingly very well received. In turn, we made some important new connections. The two guidebooks, each with a major stratigraphic synthesis, will be published, one each, through the Ohio and Kentucky Geological surveys. We had hoped to get back fully to face-to-face teaching in 2021, after the difficult and often isolating 2020, but that was not to be. It was a bit of a juggling act trying to come up with virtual classes and still cater to the students who came in to school. I broadcast and recorded most of my classes from the University. I still ran some single day field trips by spacing students out in large vans and having them wear masks except on outcrops. Yet, I found these students to be genuinely plugged in and quite appreciative to be getting back out on real rocks again. The up and coming freshmen and sophomore cohorts were among the best I have taught in 45 years. In fact, they were an inspiration to me and reminded me why I do not want to retire any time soon.

Field Trip Groups

Field trip group at Trammel Fossil Park, Sharonville, Saturday April 9, 2022. Note Professor Dave Meyer (far left), Ben Dattilo (center), new UC graduate student Ian Forsythe, next to Ben on right and immediately behind undergraduate Nathan McCarthy (seated), and Cole Farnam (second from right). Photos by Stephen Pekar (Queens College), next to Nathan. Nathan McCarthy (green coat) makes and interesting discovery at Lawrenceburg, IN, examined by Carl and others.