Uppercrust 2016

www.uc.edu/geology

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Letter from the Department Head....................................................................................................... Pages 1 - 2 Faculty & Students News.................................................................................................................. Pages 3 - 27 Consortium Leadership Interview: Arnie Miller................................................................................ Pages 14-15 Geology Donor List................................................................................................................................. Page 18 Remembering Sopth America: Kenneth E. Caster.............................................................................. Pages 20-21 Colloquium & Visiting Speakers 2015-2016.. ........................................................................................... Page 22 Geology Student Spotlight................................................................................................................. Pages 23-24 Graduate Degrees 2015-2016.................................................................................................................. Page 26 UC Carrer Days. . .................................................................................................................................... Page 26 Alumni News.................................................................................................................................... Pages 28-55 Dating Clams to Study pollution History on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands: Kelsey Feser...................... Pages 54-55 A Call to Action.. .................................................................................................................................... Page 56

L e t t e r

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D e pa rt m e n t

H e a d

Dear Alumni,

W

e have had another very exciting and productive year. I hope your year was as good as ours, and that you and your families are all in good health. I hope you enjoy reading the Upper Crust to give you a flavor of the many activities we have been doing and to catch up on departmental news.

Our academic year began with a grand celebration of Professor Paul Potter’s ninetieth birthday at the Montgomery Inn by the Ohio River.

The attendance was impressive, including the state geologists from the Tristate area. We are all very proud of Professor Potter’s contributions to our department and our discipline as a whole, and his continued active participation in our activities.

We are especially

proud that Professor Potter will be receiving the prestigious Sidney Powers Memorial Award this coming summer at the AAPG meeting in Alberta. This award is given in recognition of distinguished and outstanding contributions to, or achievements in, petroleum geology. It is AAPG’s most distinguished award, and is made at such times as the Executive Committee may designate.

In January, we had a retirement event for Professor David Nash at Teak Thai Restaurant on Mt. Adams.

Fortunately, Professor Nash will still be teaching this coming year, and he will be with us as an Emeritus Professor for many years to come as he helps establish the Great Miami Ground-Water Observatory. We also had the opportunity to celebrate Professor Attila Kilinc’s 80th birthday back in February.

Like previous years, our undergraduate students have been particularly busy taking a broad range of geologic and associated courses. Our students have also done a lot of outreach this past year, including running booths at the Cincinnati GeoFair and the SW Ohio Science Fair, visits to local schools, participating in science fairs, and arranging picnics and holiday parties. Our undergraduate student numbers remain high. They are all highly motivated and very enthusiastic about their major. In particular, our undergraduate geology club has been flourishing and they have organized some exciting fieldwork, including two weeklong fieldtrips, one to Death Valley and the other to the Appalachians. In addition, many of our undergraduates are working with our faculty on research projects and some have presented their

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work at GSA meetings. We hope to be able to enhance research opportunities for our students with our endowments in the coming years to help train our students in geologic skills and critical thinking.

will join our department in January 2017. Dr. Sturmer will bring with him a whole range of new skills to help train our students in both pure and applied aspects of geology. We are very excited to have him join our department.

Our very talented and dedicated graduate students are continuing to do a wonderful job as teaching and research assistants while undertaking world class research on a range of diverse topics. Again this year our graduate students have been very successful in obtaining numerous grants to support their research, including grants from the Geological Society of America, National Geographic Society, Sigma Xi, the Paleontological Society and hydrocarbon companies. They have also presented their research at numerous national and international meetings and have published a large number of papers in international journals. This past year we graduated eight master and four doctoral students, and we will be bringing in eleven new graduate students from distant parts of the US this coming fall.

Again this past year we have submitted an impressive number of research grant proposals, many of which were funded. These include grants from the National Science Foundation, USGS, National Geographic Society and industry. This is helping to boost our reputation and is providing invaluable resources for us to help train students for the future workforce. An easy measure of our research productivity is the extremely impressive number of papers we have published in the past year, with most appearing in very highly ranked journals such as PNAS, Paleogeography, Paleoecology and Paleoclimatology, Geomorphology, Quaternary Science Reviews, Journal of Geophysical Research, Lithosphere, American Mineralogist, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, and Paleobiology.

We are continuing to provide exciting fieldwork opportunities for our students.

This past year we ran our Himalaya and Bahamas fieldtrips, and this coming summer we have a fieldtrip going to Iceland for a couple of weeks. Our fall fieldtrip was a great success again this past year.

We spent several days in Bigfoot country, Salt Fork State Park, in eastern Ohio. We continue to provide modest subsidies for student fieldwork thanks to your contributions to our endowments. We are very much appreciative of your support. Thank you.

Our colloquium series was very successful again this year. Dr. Andrew Czaja did a superb job in arranging the program, which included a mixture of students and faculty, and external speakers. External speakers included: Tom Serenko (Ohio Geological Survey), Brigit Hagedorn (University of Alaska), Scott McCoy (University of Nevada, Reno), Nora Noffke (Old Dominion University) and Briony Horgan (Purdue University).

Last September, we ran Career Days for our students.

We are very grateful to John Thaeler who organized this event and arranged for an impressive and extremely interesting group of professional geologists to talk about geologic careers. We would like to thank all who attended and gave talks. We will continue to run this event every year to help our students with career planning.

Our new faculty members are continuing to excel and are providing many novel opportunities for our students. We are very fortunate this spring to have been able to recruit Dr. Daniel Sturmer as the Professor Paul Potter Assistant Professorship in Basin Dynamics. This was possible due to your very generous contributions to the Basin Dynamics fund; thank you so much. Dr. Sturmer has had six years of research experience with Shell Oil Company, first as a geochemistry intern to work with their research geochemistry modelers in the summers of 2010 and 2011, and then, from 2012-2016 as a full time research and exploration geologist. Currently, Dr. Sturmer is undertaking postdoctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin and

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Many thanks to all of you who have kept in touch with us and have generously supported our program throughout this and/or previous years. Your continued support is extremely appreciated especially during these hard economic times as it helps us to continue to do many exciting educational and life transforming things for our students.

Please do not hesitate to contact me to find out more about what we have been doing with our students and how you might help us continue to provide our students with a stimulating learning environment and preparing them for the work force. You might also like to check out our very informal weekly newsletter, Rolling Rocks (at http://www.artsci.uc.edu/departments/geology/news-andevents.html).

I should like to sincerely thank Warren Huff and Tim Phillips for their dedication and hard work in compiling and producing this newsletter.

Please drop by the department if you are in town.

Best wishes,

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A aron D iefendorf This was a great year for my students. Julia Wise is finishing up her dissertation and will defend her Ph.D. later this month. Julia has been spending much of her time out in New Mexico where she has been studying how humans modify carbon in the Rio Grande. In July, she will begin a new job working for Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Yeon Jee Suh and I were awarded a research grant from the Korean Institute of Ocean Science and Technology last fall to study Midwestern US hydrology and vegetation response to warming during the last interglacial. This will serve as an analog for today and the future. Yeon Jee took time out from processing marine core samples to successfully defend her Ph.D. qualifying exam in October.

Erika Freimuth also passed her Ph.D. candidacy exam this past year! Erika is focused on advancing

how we reconstruct paleohydrology using leaf wax hydrogen isotopes. When Erika’s not in the isotope lab running samples, she’s hiding away writing manuscripts.

Earlier this semester, Tom Lowell and I took a group of students up to Brown’s Lake in northeastern Ohio as part of a new Geology Workshop course. Students learned how to core lake sediments, measure water quality, and even fly a drone! q

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W arren H uff I am continuing to collaborate with colleagues in Anthropology and Physical Geography along with Lewis Owen on a study of Quaternary volcanism in the southwest and its probable effects on some of the early pueblo Indian cultures in that area.

Some of this work involves the study of volcanogenic components in soil profiles from the pueblo site at Chaco Canyon, NM and the extent to which they coincide with the timing of major eruptions from Sunset Crater volcano north of Flagstaff, AZ. This project represents the increasingly collaborative interactions that our department is developing with other STEM disciplines in A&S. In May, Liz Haussner successfully defended her MS thesis entitled, A revised mid-late Holocene alluvial chronology of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. She is currently serving an internship with the USGS. In addition, I have ongoing projects with German and Swedish colleagues looking at Ordovician and Silurian K-bentonites exposed in the Devonian-age Siljan impact structure in south-central Sweden, and with Russian colleague Andrei Dronov on Ordovician K-bentonites from Siberia that appear to indicate a modified orientation of the collision arc between Baltica, Siberia and Laurentia at that time. I continue to collaborate with several Chinese colleagues on studies of Cambrian and Neoproterozoic Kbentonites from both the North China craton and South China.

This has led to a number of jointly authored papers recently, but I am particularly pleased to point out that Brian Nicklen published two papers in the journal Stratigraphy last year from his doctoral dissertation on the Guadalupian K-bentonites found in west Texas.

In addition, at the invitation of the edi-

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tor of the American Mineralogist I was pleased to publish a review paper on K-bentonites in the January 2016 issue.

I am working with some French colleagues on a study of volcanogenic slope failure potential on Piton de la Fournaise volcano on La Réunion Island, France. The basic concern is that a major destabilization of the Piton de la Fournaise flank occurring today would trigger a tsunami with catastrophic impacts on the coastline population of the island and around the Indian Ocean. 80% of the 840,000 inhabitants of La Réunion and most of the economic activities are located on the coastal fringe.

I continue as secretary of The Clay Minerals Society, which takes me to annual meetings as well as to executive committee meetings at the society office in Chantilly, VA each year. This summer the annual meeting will be in Atlanta, home to a number of commercial clay producers (I am currently working on how best to say “y’all”).

Beyond that, I continue to teach introductory level physical and historical geology along with graduate-level courses in clay mineralogy. The fall and spring semester intro courses are offered in both face-to-face and online format. As those of you currently working in academia are well aware, technology is dramatically changing the nature of higher education. My face-to-face class enrollment has been dwindling in recent years while the number of full-time UC students choosing to take the online class has dramatically increased. My lectures are captured by audio/video software called Echo360 and posted on our course management tool, Blackboard, for the online class. All weekly quizzes, exams and homework assignments are posted on Blackboard, as well, so most of these students never attend an in-class presentation or discussion. I am also currently serving on a couple of campus-wide committees charged with increasing the University’s focus on eLearning.

I am particularly pleased to welcome Jeff Hannon (BA ’10, MS ’12) who will return this fall to begin his doctoral research, and perhaps share a bit of fiddle playing. q

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E va E nkelmann Over the past year I continued research on understanding the interaction between tectonics and climate driven surface processes in southern Alaska. During the past year my research project on studying the erosion and rock exhumation in the St. Elias Mountains (southeastern Alaska and western Yukon) came to an end with the graduation of Adam Piestrzeniewicz (M.S.) and Sarah Falkowski (Ph.D) and the publication of four more research papers. In my current research I shift from the source of sediments to the sink; focusing now on reconstructing spatial and temporal patterns of exhumation through examining sedimentary deposits in the Gulf of Alaska. My current graduate students Catherine Dunn and Nathaniel Bootes investigate offshore sediments from boreholes drilled on the shelf adjacent to the St. Elias Mountains as well as from distal deep-sea fan deposits. These two projects are funded through the NSF–Ocean Science Program and the American Chemical Society – Petroleum Research Fund. We are using a double-dating approach using fissiontrack and U-Pb dating on individual zircon grains that allows quantifying the cooling and exhumation of rocks in the source region and identifying sediment provenance, respectively. I have two undergraduate students, Victoria Thomas and Shannon Neale, who help in the thermochronology lab with sample preparation and conducting individual experiments.

graduate student Sonia Sanchez-Lohff is using zircon fission-track analysis combined with U-Pb dating on Jurassic through recent sediments deposited in the Cook Inlet Basin to reconstruct the upper plate response to the various subduction phases that are stored in the forearc sediments. In the past summer (2015) we collected samples in the Matanuska Valley and the Talkeetna Mountains (southern Alaska) as well as core samples in the Alaska Center of Geological Material in Anchorage.

The results from the St. Elias Mountain project and preliminary offshore data were presented by my graduate students Catherine Dunn and Adam Piestrzeniewicz, and myself at the GSA Cordilleran Section Meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, and at the AGU Fall meeting in San Francisco.

I continued developing my classes I teach at UC. Last fall I taught the upper level class on “Thermochronometric Methods” and we conducted a 3-day field trip to Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina where we collected various lithologies and perusing different sampling strategies for thermochronology. In the spring semester I taught again “Structural Geology” for our undergraduate students where we also went on a 3-day field trip measuring various structures in Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky. q

Together with my collaborator Dr. Emily Finzel (University of Iowa) I started a new research project funded through the NSF–Tectonics Program located in southern Alaska. We are investigating the sedimentary record in the Cook Inlet forearc basin that was formed in the Jurassic and underwent since then various phases of flat-slab and normal subduction. My

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C arl B rett During the past year I continued to work on several projects related to Ordovician to Devonian stratigraphy and paleoecology with present and former students. Because of my involvement in the International Subcommission on Stratigraphy dedicated to the global stratigraphy of three different geologic periods: the Ordovician (SOS), the Silurian (SSS) and Devonian (SDS) subcommissions (I am presently Vice Chair for the latter), I have an ever-increasing number of meetings to attend and present talks) and I got to see parts of the world again in 2015 (five countries: Belgium, Germany, England, as well as Canada, and seven US states (Oklahoma, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, as well as Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. A highlight of the year was the joint Devonian Subcommission meeting and final meeting of IGCP 596 in Brussels and the associated pre- and post-meeting field trips. Both the premeeting trip in the classic Devonian sections of Belgium and the post-meeting expedition in the Middle and upper Devonian in the Rhennisch area of Germany were hugely successful and informative. I was most intrigued by aspects of cyclic sedimentation in the Givetian and hope to link these with the well-studied successions of the Appalachian Basin.

It was also a good year for student advisees: PhD, James Thomka, and Masters student TJ Malgieri completed their degrees, as did four outside PhD advisees: Jesse Carluci (University of Oklahoma), Tom Schramm (LSU), Ryan Wilson (Indiana University), and Trisha Smrecak (Michigan State).

I attended two of these and did the other two by Skype.

I also continued to work on high-resolution stratigraphy, depositional cycles and paleoenvironments of the Upper Ordovician, Silurian, and Devonian in the Cincin-

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nati region and elsewhere. Several projects are currently in progress.

1) Graduate student Allison Young is continuing to work in collaboration with Tom Algeo, Pete Holterhoff (UC alumnus and researcher at Hess Oil Corp.), and Pat McLaughlin (UC alumnus, now with the Indiana Geological Survey) and myself, on correlation of the upper Ordovician Lexington Limestone and Kope Formation of the shallow water Lexington Platform and its transition into dark, shale-rich facies of the “Point Pleasant” and “Utica” formations in the deeper water Sebree Trough on the basis of carbon isotope stratigraphy, biostratigraphy, and sequence stratigraphy. These are the most important source rocks for petroleum and natural gas in Ohio. The overall objective of this research is to develop better models of sequence stratigraphy for mixed siliciclastic-carbonate systems in epicratonic platforms and basins.

2) During summer 2015 I also extended research on sequence and event stratigraphy and carbon isotope profiles in the Late Ordovician Katian Stage stratotype and auxiliary sections in central Oklahoma. This work, in conjunction with Steve Westrop (University of Oklahoma), Dan Goldman (University of Dayton), and Jesse Carlucci (Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, Texas) will require substantial revisions to international stratotype sections.

3) A new initiative, with UC Masters student Tim Paton, involves documentation of hardgrounds (cemented sea floors) spectacularly encrusted by intact fossil communities from the Ordovician of southern Ontario. These extraordinary buried communities were discovered in a quarry near Lake Simcoe by a Canadian researcher, George Kampouris who invited us to work cooperatively on documenting the hardgrounds. They are divided into local hummocky mounds up to 2 m across that underwent multiple episodes of obrution (sediment smothering) that preserved intact and in situ remains of bryozoans and delicate echinoderms.

The mounds also provide a unique opportunity to test ideas on community patchiness and the relationship of per-mound biodiversity to mound size and topographic heterogeneity.

4) In 2015, Christopher Aucoin (PhD pre-candidate) and Masters student Cameron Schwalbach,

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C arl B rett (Continued) as well as Pat McLaughlin, continued study of the sequence stratigraphy and bioevents of the upper Katian (upper Cincinnatian) Richmond Group and the so-called Richmondian invasion. As a part of a Fulbright Fellowship with André Desrochers at University of Ottawa, Christopher is now extending this research into southern Ontario. He has been examining outcrop sections and drill cores in the Ottawa basin. This work includes analysis of carbon isotopes in drill cores through the Upper Ordovician. The results of these major studies are being synthesized in a completely revised Upper Ordovician Cincinnatian sequence stratigraphy, which builds on the seminal work of Holland and Patzkowsky, but subdivides the Cincinnatian into a number of new high- resolution sequences.

5) Former UC student, James Thomka (now at University of Akron, OH) and I have continued working on the detailed sequence and cycle stratigraphy, taphonomy, paleoecology (especially of echinoderms) and paleoenvironments of the early Silurian interval in Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Thomka completed his PhD dissertation and several papers were published (Thomka and Brett, 2015a, b) or are in press.

6) Patrick McLaughlin (Indiana Geological Survey) and I attended the Mid Paleozoic meeting of IGCP 591, on the Ordovician and Silurian, in Quebec City. The post-meeting field conference in Anticosti Island led by Andre Desrochers and Jin Jisuo was inspiring and provided a very intriguing look at the upper Katian-Telychian succession. I hope to continue research on extending correlations and evidence of bioevents from the Appalachian Basin and Cincinnati Arch into the Anticosti region.

To that end, I am working with Pat and others on correlation and isotope stratigraphy of a long core section of the Katian-Llandovery interval drilled on Anticosti.

we intend to produce a synthesis on sequence and chemostratigraphy of these highest Silurian beds and to tie sequences into those in the classic Salina Group of New York State.

8) I also worked on new Devonian projects in eastern North America. A series of freshly blasted roadcuts in central Kentucky provided important new sections of the Middle Devonian (Givetian) Boyle and Portwood formations. Jay Zambito (Wisconsin Geological Survey) and I measured these and other significant exposures of Middle Devonian in the vicinity of Irvine, KY, and sampled them for C isotopic and other geochemical analysis.

We are attempting to better synthesize bioevents and sequence stratigraphy of the mid-continent with those of the classic Appalachian Basin area.

I am continuing to collaborate with Charles Ver Straeten, New York State Museum, Gordon Baird (SUNY College Fredonia), Alex Bartholomew (UC alumnus, SUNY New Paltz), and several other New York stratigraphers on the revision of the New York State Devonian Stratigraphic Correlation Chart, which is intended to comprise a series digital charts and a book discussing the details of Devonian stratigraphy. One important spinoff of this project was the realization that the frequency and intensity of physical and biotic fluctuations varies substantially from one stage to another, a phenomenon that I term “volatility”, something I intend to work on more thoroughly in the next few years. q (Editor’s note: Carl’s publications over the past year are listed at bit.ly/1No71GV)

7) Together with PhD student Matthew Vrazo, I have expanded field study of the sequence stratigraphy of Upper Silurian Wills Creek and Tonoloway formations in Maryland. Working with Brad Cramer (University of Iowa), in the next couple of years,

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B rooke C rowley The 2015-2016 academic year went quickly for me. I enjoyed teaching a diversity of courses, including tutorial-based Zooarchaeology in the fall and two large introductor y elective courses in the spring. I think I have inspired at least a couple of students to consider majoring in Geology. I want to acknowledge my teaching assistants, both graduate and undergraduate, whose support, insight, and camaraderie were critical. As summer approaches, I am now gearing up to finish a number of research projects, several of which are collaborations with my students. I look for ward to wrapping these existing projects up so I can start some new ones. Ian Castro, who graduated with his BS this spring, completed a senior thesis on the degree to which habitat disturbance, forest clearance, and potential ecological differences influence

the Sr isotope ratios of small-bodied rodents from north-central Madagascar. Ian presented his results at the North-Central GSA meeting in April and we will write up the project for publication this summer. I am also both happy and sad that my PhD student, Jani Sparks, will be finishing this summer. Jani has been part of my lab for four years and she will be missed. 20162017 promises to be an exciting year as well.

I plan to co-teach two new upper level courses, Teaching Geoscience and Vertebrate Paleontology.

I will also welcome a new masters student, Jenelle Wallace, who will be joining the department in the fall. q

L ewis O wen During the past year, I have continued my research and teaching that focuses on the Quaternary geology and geomorphology of tectonically active mountain belts and their forelands.

This has involved fieldwork with students and colleagues in the Himalaya of India and Nepal, Nevada and Southern California, and Thailand, and laboratory work in our geochronology laboratories. During this period, I continued to work on my NSF and National Academies research grants on active tectonics in SW USA, Alaska and Pakistan. Last September, I was appointed as one of the three Editors for Quaternary Research and in February as an Associate Editor for the journal Geomorphology.

This past year, I continued to work with my graduates Kate Hedrick, Sourav Saha, Liz Orr and Jenny Arkle. I am hoping Kate and Jenny will have completed their doctorates by the time you read this newsletter! I took on a new postdoctoral researcher, Paula Marques Figueiredo, at the beginning of March who will be working on tectonics geomorphology. q

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J. B arry M aynard Retirement means you teach a bit less and don’t go to meetings. Everything else is about the same. Big projects are a total geochemical profile of a major manganese deposit, Obrochishte in Bulgaria; an “atlas” of Kope structure and stratigraphy aimed at civil engineers; editing a translation from Russian of a book on isotope geochemistry

of manganese deposits; and finally developing a comprehensive kinetic model for brass corrosion in drinking water distribution systems, the last with UC alum and current MS student Mike Lees. q

Ed i to r ’s n o te : O n M a y 1 3 , 2 0 1 6 Ba r r y wa s not i f ie d th a t h e h a d b e e n e le c te d a s a G SA Fe llow f o r 2 0 1 6 . This is terrific news, Barry, and we all congratulate you!)

Dear Barr y, Congratulations! You deserve it fully and the referees we asked to support the nomination were all surprised that you were not already a fellow.

Regards Prof Nicolas J Beukes Director CIMERA Department of Geology University of Johannesburg

K rista S milek During May of last year, I had the pleasure of running the Ocean Margins field trip to San Salvador Island, Bahamas for the third time around.

Joining me on the trip was my co-leader, Kelsey Feser (PhD, 2015) and 16 students, including Geology majors, minors, and a graduate student. We spent the majority of the two-week trip out in the field with Gerace Research Centre serving as our home base.

During the day we went snorkeling and diving, visited outcrops and fossil reefs to interpret the depositional history of the island, explored caves and blue holes, con-

ducted transects and collected mollusks to investigate benthic community structures, and much more. The evenings were spent back at the field station discussing the day ’s events and working on projects. The trip was a great experience for students and leaders alike and I look for ward to the next trip in May 2017. q

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P aul E. P otter The school year 2015-2016 proved most eventful for me.

Much to my surprise I was awarded the AAPG Sydney Powers Award for Scientific Accomplishment in Petroleum Science, my Brazilian friend Peter Szatmari of PETROBRAS and I published the last of our trilogy of papers on the middle and upper global Miocene tectonic event in “Marine and Petroleum Geology�, helped two colleagues with the Kope Formation, and on a much lesser note, invited colleagues, graduate students and friends to a Sunday evening, day-before-classes-start 90th birthday party at the Montgomery Inn Boathouse with about 80 attending.

Receiving the AAPG Sydney Powers Award for Achievements in Petroleum Science was a total surprise. This resulted from the persistent and systematic efforts of AAPG member Jim McDonald of the Ohio Division of Natural Resources, who started in 2014 collecting letters predominantly from the Eastern Section, but with two important ones from PETROBRAS and one from Brasilia, all from Brazil, where I taught back in the 70s, 80s and 90s. These came from independent petroleum geologists, state geologists, professors, and even the manager of geology of a large integrated oil company. So Jim is the one who deserves the credit for this: in reality, I am only the messenger. I am not sure about this, but this may be the first time anyone in the Eastern Section has received this award. THANK YOU ALL! Many of you may wonder how a Midwesterner like myself ever came to publish any papers on the middle and global Miocene, when I had never done anything remotely like this before.

Since the mid-1970s I have been interested in big river systems and in the early 2000s began to systematically collect data on them. I found that many of these rivers had middle and late Miocene inceptions. A second and much greater surprise for me was the enormous number of interconnections-teleconnections that are generated by a global orogeny. While I felt comfortable about shifting through literature, marshalling the data set and providing a geological interpretation, my insights into deep earth processes are nonexistent. So I asked Peter, the tectonics and deep earth specialist of PETROBRAS, to join me. The last of the three Miocene papers outlines in a plausible way how heat from the core is transmitted upward through the mantle, largely as mantle plumes, and offers a tentative explanation of why its inception was so abrupt.

What is astounding to me is that both the award and the publication of the last trilogy paper occurred in the same school year, most unlikely it seems to me.

Of far less importance, but a first of its kind for me, was my late August birthday of 90. I had a party for about 80 at the Montgomery Inn Boathouse along the Ohio River on Sunday evening before classes started last August. I had never done this before. The setting was beautiful: a large red tent with an unobstructed view of the late summer-blue Ohio River to the Kentucky shore, a beautiful evening and a fun crowd. I believe all the guests enjoyed the party, and best of all, I enjoyed it enormously. For me it was one of the best times of my life. So maybe we will consider it again for Fall 2016?

A minor activity is helping Barry Maynard, Mark Bowers of Civil Engineering and Jerry Weisenfluh, assistant director of the Kentucky Geological Sur-

Continues

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D aniel S turmer As Lewis highlights in his Head’s letter, we are delighted to welcome Dr. Daniel M. Sturmer as the Paul E. Potter Assistant Professor of Basin Dynamics beginning in the upcoming academic year. Daniel received his Ph.D. in geology in 2012 from the University of Nevada, Reno and has subsequently worked for Shell Exploration & Production in Houston, TX. His responsibilities at Shell included prospect identification, risk and volumetric analysis; regional subsalt seismic interpretation; lease sale coordination; well log analysis; source rock and fluid evaluation; and data evaluation and integration. His primary accomplishments at Shell include: 1. Evaluation, re-mapping, and completion of new risk and volumetric analyses for Shell’s Miocene play prospect portfolio in deepwater Gulf of Mexico.

2. Creation, organization, and oversight of a successful play-based exploration field course in Nevada in 2014. This resulted in a request to re-run the course again in 2015.

3. Coordination of all Shell lease sale activity for the western Gulf of Mexico lease sale 238, which led to winning 1 block.

the turtle prospect portfolio; this tool was used to rank the Shell portfolio in the Gulf of Mexico & offshore Canada, which was recently released worldwide.

5. Completion of a study of the source rock families in the Gulf of Mexico, the results of which were integrated into a re-evaluation of the deepwater Miocene play.

Miocene leads.

6. Mapping portions of six contiguous deepwater lease blocks in the Atwater Valley area of the Gulf of Mexico and identification of ten

Currently, Daniel is undertaking post-doctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin. Among the courses Daniel hopes to offer graduate and undergraduate instruction in Petroleum Geology and Economics, Applied Geophysics, and Cordilleran Tectonic Evolution. Daniel’s appointment fills an existing gap in expertise in this department and the prospect of his arrival has generated considerable excitement and enthusiasm among students, staff and faculty. q

4. Completion of a study on turtle structures in the Gulf of Mexico and development of a tool to rank

P aul E. P otter (Continued) vey, marshal what is known about selected engineering properties of the Kope Formation in Greater Cincinnati.

This formation consists of interbedded shale and thin limestone beds and is prone to slaking and land sliding when wet. Consequently, it has great social significance for the Greater Cincinnati area. So far we have completed the first region-wide map of the Kope outcrop, a structure map of part of it, and have a section with numbered beds to facilitate finding where you are in the section.

In short, we are providing the engineering community with a readily available introduction to the “geoengineering stratigraphy” of the Kope.

I went to the Indiana Section of the AAPG in Indianapolis and gave a paper, and to the national meeting of the AAPG in Denver, where I took a two-day class in seismic stratigraphy taught by Professor Octavian Catuneanu of Alberta, based on his book.

Still keeping busy, but at a lower level each year. q

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AAPG E xplorer , December 2015

By VERN STEFANIC, Managing Editor Paul E. Potter, an award-winning geology professor, researcher and best-selling author with more than 60 years of experience and distinguished accomplishments, has been named the recipient of the AAPG Sidney Powers Memorial Award - the Association’s highest honor. Potter, professor emeritus at theUniversity of Cincinnati, is widely celebrated as an expert on th.e Midwestern U.S. Paleozoic - he performed groundbreaking research on paleocurrent analysis and basin analysis - and is the author of “Sedimentology of Shale ( 1980),” one of the first textbooks on the subject When celebrated educator and researcher Paul E. Potter receives his award in Calgary in June he will become the 69th winner of the M PG Sidney Powers Memorial Award.

The Powers Award is given annually in recognition of distinguished and outstanding contributions to, or achievements in, petroleum geology.

Sidney Powers himself was a founding member and 14th president of the Association. He died in 1932 at the age of 42.

Frank R. Clark, in his memorial to Powers, said. “Sidney Powers will be known by future generations for his able contributions to pure and applied geology, but, important as are his scientific achievements, his character was greater, because it typified service to others.”

In Potter’s 60-plus-year career, he has had a significant influence on geologists in their formative years, which is a big reason why his peers saw him as an ideal recipient for the honor.

It’s not the first time Potter has had the spotlight on him and his work. He also has won:

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1. AAPGs Jules Braunstein Award for presenting the best poster at the 1990 annual meeting in San Francisco.

2. SEPM’s Francis J. Pettijohn Award for Excellence in Sedimentology (1992).

3. The Eastern Section’s Outstanding Educator Award (2000} and John T. Galey Memorial Award (2007).

4. AAPG’s Grover E. Murray Distinguished Educator Award (2002).

He received his undergraduate, master’s and doctor’s degrees from the University of Chicago - plus a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Illinois in 1959and started his career in 1952 as a geologist with the Illinois Geological Survey.

He was named an associate professor of geology at Indiana University in 1963, and from 1966-71 was a full professor.

He began his long career as a professor at the University of Cincinnati in 1971, also during that time serving five stints as a visiting professor at universities in Brazil.

In addition, he has authored or coauthored more than 130 articles and maps, and seven books - including the seminal “Exploring the Geology of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Region.”

In addition, Michael D. Lewan (PhD, ’80), U.S. Geological Survey, Golden, Colo., will receive the Robert R. Berg Outstanding Research Award in recognition of his pioneering role and expertise in petroleum geochemistry. q

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A tique A hmed B aig

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(Editor’s note: Prof. Baig was a Fulbright Post-doctoral Research Fellow here during 1987-88 from the University of Sind Jamshoro, Pakistan) Dear Prof. Huff Thank you for your reply of April 21, 2016. It is nice of you that you want to include some of my research activities during the last years in the alumni newsletter. My research activities during the last years are as under.

1-Supervised a PhD thesis on “Geochemistry,Mineralogy and Sedimentological investigations of BARA FORMATION SEDIMENTS FROM LOWER INDUS BASIN SOUTHERN SINDH PAKISTAN 2010-2013 2-;RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS Hakro, A,A.D,Baig,M.A.A,: Baqri,S.R.H. and Khokhar,Q.D (2014).Clay Mineralogy of the Bara Formation exposed at Ranikot,Lakhra and the sub-surface of the Thar Coal Field,Sindh,Pakistan.International Journal of

K enneth T ankersley During the 2015-2016 academic year, I continued my field and laboratory research on how humans adapt to periods of catastrophic, climatic, and environmental change.

Lewis Owen and I returned to the high dry lands of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico to examine geological evidence of the Anthropocene and to evaluate soil salinity and Ancestral Puebloan water management systems. This research included Warren Huff and an interdepartmental team of UC faculty and graduate students as well as archaeologists from the American Museum of Natural History, Penn State University, University of Arizona, University of CaliforniaBerkeley, and the University of Virginia.

I concluded my fieldwork at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, which resulted in an article in Quaternary Research, which was co-authored with Lewis Owen, Madhav Krishna Murari, Brooke Crowley, and Glenn Storrs.

I also concluded my research on catastrophic volcanism and its implication for agriculture in the Maya Lowlands. This research was published in the Journal of Archaeological Research Reports, an article co-authored with Warren Huff and Nicholas Dunning and Christopher Carr (Department of Geography), David Lentz (Department of Biology), and Vernon Scarborough (Department of Anthropology).

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economic and Environmental Geology,Vol.5(1)32-38 Hakro A.A.D. and Baig (2014).Depositional environments of the Bara Formation Sandstones from Lakhra Areas,Sindh,Pakistan.Pakistan Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research (Physical Sciences),Vol.57,No.1 Jan-Feb 20-31 Hakro A.A.D.and Baig,M.A.A.(2013) Depositional Environments of Bara Formation,Fort Ranikot Area,Sindh University Research journal (Science series),Vol 45,(1),83-94 I am pleased to inform you that my children are the permanent citizens of USA. They have pressed me

and my wife also to take the Green Card of USA. We are on Green Card

At preset I am in Toronto Canada with my son and his family as visitors.

With kind regards, Dr. M. Atique Ahmed Baig q

archaeological significance. This research was also published in the Journal of Archaeological Research Reports, an article co-authored with Denis Conover and David Lentz (Department of Biology).

I have been very fortunate to be a member of an international team of 25 Quaternary scientists examining evidence for a cosmic airburst at the onset of the Younger Dryas. This work has resulted in a suite of publications in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

For the reading public, I published a new book on Dr. Charles Louis Metz and the American Indian Archaeology of the Little Miami River Valley.

Finally, I was truly humbled and honored this year to have been elected to the Fellows of the Graduate School. q

In the laboratory, I examined the stable carbon isotope values of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) and their

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Consortium Leadership Interview: Paleontological Society’s Arnie Miller

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By Zoe Gentes,

Paleontology,

eet Dr. Arnie Miller, president-elect of the Paleontological Society. He was elected to the position in 2014, which involves serving two years on the council as presidentelect, two as president, and two as past-president. Miller has a diverse academic background in geology and related fields. He is an evolutionary paleobiologist and paleoecologist, with research and teaching interests in biodiversity throughout geological time and in the present day. His work led him to achieve the Journal of Sedimentary Petrology Best Paper Award from the in 1990. in 1978, Miller received his B.S. in biology and geology from University of Rochester. He earned his M.S. in geology from Virginia Tech in 1981, and his Ph.D. in geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago in 1986. After his Ph.D., he went on to the University of Cincinnati to become a tenured geology professor, and eventually became head of the department from 2003– 2008. He also became an adjunct curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, and served as director for the University of Cincinnati Environmental Studies Program from 2010-2011. He is now the senior associate dean in the university ’s McMicken College of Arts & Sciences.

Miller was named a fellow at the University of Cincinnati Graduate School in 2004 (as well as the chair of graduate fellows from 2010 to 2012), a Centennial Fellow of The Paleontological Society in 2007, and an AAAS Fellow in 2013.

Q&A Q: What made you passionate about geosciences early in life?

A: When I was in the sixth grade at a public school in the New York City area, I was lucky to have a teacher who was nuts about geology. He took us on geology field trips to collect rocks

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and minerals, and to look at glacial features pre served in the region. When I took introductory geology in college, I was amazed to see how much I already knew because of my sixthgrade experience! That, and numerous school field trips over the years to the American Museum of Natural History, really got me interested in geology. That said, I wasn’t really exposed to paleontology as a science until college, when I was fortunate to take courses from Dave Raup, Jack Sepkoski, and Dan Fisher. Dave wrote the textbook that we used in his paleontology course, and the data-driven brand of paleontology taught and advocated by my professors at Rochester really turned me on. Of course, it was great that Jack and Dave later moved to the University of Chicago, in time for me to complete my Ph.D. there under their tutelage.

Q: How did your time spent with various departments and programs at the University of Cincinnati help you become a more broad-minded geologist? Do you appreciate multidisciplinary sciences more because of your background?

A: I did a stint as director of the environmental studies program at the university, and have also been collaborating with university colleagues in biological sciences on an investigation of changes in plant composition along an urban-to-wildland gradient. This project emerged naturally for me from my longstanding interests in marine ecological gradients preserved in the fossil record and on tropical sea floors in the present day. Through these experiences, as well as my time spent in modern settings in the Bahamas and, especially, the Caribbean, I have come to understand the transcendence of major themes in biodiversity across different spatiotemporal scales, and that solutions to major societal problems that dovetail on geological themes

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necessarily require contributions from multiple disciplines in, and beyond, the sciences.

Q: In what direction do you hope to see The Paleontological Society go during your term as president?

A: It’s still a little early in the game for me to know for sure, but there are two things I’m already confident I’ll focus on. First, given the challenges facing our graduate -student members in moving into productive, postgraduate careers, I’d like the society to explore and report on the career paths taken by former student members over the past decade, and to investigate the current breadth of career opportunities available for students who will complete their degrees in the next several years. We need to begin embracing and encouraging potential career opportunities that lie beyond our traditional boundaries. Second, recognizing that professional paleontologists benefit immensely from the research and outreach activities of avocational/amateur pale ontologists, I would like the society to undertake a robust initiative to recruit avocational/amateur paleontologists as members and, in the process, provide opportunities and resources not currently available to this group.

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Because of the growing value of syntheses that meld paleobiological data with geochemical and other data, I would like to learn more about EarthChem and related databases, and how to most effectively link these to paleontological data in synthetic analyses.

Q: What do you think are the biggest challenges for collaboration between different geoscience fields?

A: We all have our day jobs, and, even though we some times acknowledge areas of overlapping interest among different fields, especially when we attend special inte grative workshops and symposia, the long-term payoff is still sometimes limited. We need to more strongly incentivize and encourage efforts to collaborate across disciplines, and encourage a general willingness to step out of our comfort zones and spend the time needed to get truly integrative efforts off the ground.

Q: What area of the STEPPE disciplines are you best acquainted with? Which are you most interested to learn more about?

Q: If you could travel anywhere on Earth to conduct geoscience research, what would it be and why?

A: Given my background, it comes as no surprise that I am best acquainted with paleontology and related disciplines, and STEPPE consortium members and partners (in addition The Paleontological Society!) that focus on largescale assembly of paleobiological and biological data, such as The Paleobiology Database (which I was founding member of ) and iDigBio.

A: Well … given my interest in the Ordovician, I would LOVE to get a close look at the Ordovician limestone and fossils at the summit of Mt. Everest. But I have no intention of climbing Everest anytime soon, so I guess I’ll have to wait until it is possible to be beamed up and down, a la Star Trek! q

S arah Hamme r ’s Ne w S on , Ad am Hamme r.

Aug u st 18, 2015

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Craig Dietsch Greetings All. Time flies. This past year was marked for me by a series of interesting, fun, and rewarding field trips. Last summer, Richard Beck (who knew the Department of Geography had a structural geologist?), Brian Davis (who knew DAAP had a bona fide mountain man amongst the ranks?), Lewis Owen, Dylan Ward, and I led another field trip to the Himalaya of northern India with 17 undergraduates — including students from Biology and the Environmental Studies program — and graduate students Lizzie Orr, Sourav Saha, and Chris Sheehan. (Chris Screen, if you are reading this, CAVS are champs!) After our semester-long course and preparation (quick: what is the difference between a brochure and a flyer?), another delay in Newark and a night in New Jersey, an unusual flight to Delhi all in daylight (with the chance to see central Asia), we arrived in Manali on June 4th. At Jispa, we learned that the Baralacha La was closed due to snow! Contrary to rumors, it didn’t open two days later, nor two days after that, nor...in the end we spent 4 nights at Patseo (giving Zach Altman time to go running...dude, at altitude!) before heading back south, and another 4 nights along the Chandra River near Sissu. Thanks to everyone for understanding that the mountains always win. The impassable snow — we drove up towards the pass and met it at 4500 m asl — made this a different trip but as always, we learned more about these incredible mountains and their landscapes. The students got to have two full days of geomorphic mapping (great, right?) My own highlights included learning and doing structure-for-motion with Dylan, walking up the Sheti Valley off of the Chandra and finding the nose of the Tandi synform, the garnet-stuffed Beck Pegmatite (smashed up on our last night so everyone could get a piece), working with Richard using multispectra satellite data to ground-truth bedrock geology, and more gompas.

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I also led an 8-day petrology fieldtrip to New England in early May, including new major Ben Kehres, Ian, Jason, Ken, Sourav, and new graduate student Josh Bergbower. This trip was simply incredibly fun, interesting, productive, and wet.

Special thanks are due to our friends and colleagues who made time for us. Jon Kim of the Vermont Geological Survey led us on a transect across northern Vermont, arranged a special tour of the Rock of Ages granite quarry in Barre (we saw xenoliths bigger than a school bus and lamprophyre dikes), and hosted us for dinner (thanks also to Teresa!). Mike Jercinovic of UMass Geosciences gave us a tour of the microprobe labs there, including the unique UltraChron probe used for monazite geochronology. Jared Singer of Earth & Envi Sciences at Rensselaer met us at an outcrop in the eastern Adirondacks and gave us a tour of his LA-ICP-MS lab. Mineralogy and petrology trips will be run again this coming year — please join us! q

Join Us!

oming this fall: The 4-Day Field Trip

When: Thursday, October 13th through Sunday, October 16th.

Where: Southern Illinois, including the fluorspar district of Harden County.

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Late last fall, I led a small group from mineralogy (including Ian Macadam, Ken Peterson, Jason Cesta, and Ivan Carajabal (who knows about emergency bacon) to the fluorspar district of Harden County, southern Illinois for a couple of days of mineral collecting. We collected barite along a fault zone, supergene iron oxides, and of course, fluorite related to MVT mineralization. Very special thanks are due to Paul Potter for coming along on the pre-run, introducing me to Brett Denny and Joe Devera of the Illinois State Geological Survey (and a new fluorite geochemistry project), and sharing with me some of the places from his early work in Illinois. Joe and Paul were central in negotiations with Don Hastie who owns the quarry where we did our fluorite collecting.

How: Camping at Giant City State Park (where there is a lodge).

What: Upper Paleozoic sed/strat/paleo, Hick’s Dome, geomorphic riddles, fluorite and fluorite collecting, intrusive breccias, New Harmony geohistory.

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Chris Atchison The past year has gone by exceptionally fast. I added two new federally-funded projects to an existing one that are all focused on broadening participation and providing support and opportunities for students with disabilities interested in, or currently pursuing degrees or certificates in the Geosciences. I am also working with Craig Dietsch on another proposal that will focus on tapping into the scientific abilities of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This project will focus on a series of field courses, both national and international, that will pair traditional Geoscience majors with students with ASD in field-based settings.

This year I was excited to welcome Ivan Carabajal to UC as a graduate research assistant. Ivan is perhaps one of the first graduate students to focus entirely on Inclusive Geoscience Education research. Since there is no Geoscience Education program in the department, this is a new collaborative between Geology and the School of Education, with the hopes of a new program development in the future. Ivan is off to a great start, and has received research funding from both UC and the Geological Society of America. I was also asked to serve on the doctoral committee for Anita Marshall, at the University of South Florida. Anita’s research interest is very similar to my own, and will also be working with Ivan on one of my funded projects.

I’ve always been told that obtaining research funding is only a small part of the game. It is the dissemination of your findings that drives scientific innovation. Along with producing four publications this year, and several others in review, I co-authored the American Geosciences Institute (AGI) Consensus Statement on Access and Inclusion [www.americangeosciences.org/community/disability-consensus-statement], and a revision of the Position Statement on Equity and Inclusion in Science Education for the Association for Science Teacher Education (ASTE), currently being ratified by the ASTE Board.

Inclusive Geoscience Education is beginning to build an audience in both the Science and Education communities. I was invited to give Keynote addresses at the Confronting Barriers to Inclusion: Opening the Gate to Accessible Fieldwork conference for the Higher Education Network of the Geological Society of London, England, and the Advancing Individual Differences Research on STEM Learning Opportunities conference

for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Santa Barbara, CA. I also gave international research talks at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, another for the British Ecological Society, in London, and one at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

On top of the research, I am currently completing my year as the Chair of the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. The Division activity at the annual meetings over the past few years has been impressive, managing over 400 technical and poster presentations, along with various short courses and field trips. At the 2016 GSA Annual Meeting, a few colleagues and I will be leading two accessible field trips around the Denver area, both entitled: An Accessible Journey through Geologic Time in Central Colorado. One trip will focus on higher education students with disabilities and the other on middle and high school students with disabilities. Both trips will pair students up with geoscience faculty and Earth Science teachers working to create inclusive instructional environments to accommodate the diverse needs of every student.

Finally, I am completing my eighth year as the Executive Director of the International Association for Geoscience Diversity [www.TheIAGD.org]. The IAGD is an organization charged with identifying current research opportunities and instructional best practices for underrepresented students with disabilities, while seeking to raise awareness of improving access and exposure to the geoscience disciplines for students and geoscience practitioners with disabilities. The IAGD, which is an Associated Society of the Geological Society of America, has a broad membership in nearly all 50 states and around 25 different countries. In 2015, the IAGD officially became an non-profit organization and established the IAGD Foundation, with efforts to provide opportunities for students to engage in research and travel to present their findings; develop workshops and field courses on inclusive instructional strategies that provide professional development for Geoscience instructors and faculty; and to create after school programs that will foster the interest in students who would otherwise decide that a career in the Geosciences is not the right fit for their diverse physical or sensory abilities. For more information about the IAGD Foundation, or to partner with us, please visit: www.TheIAGD.org/Foundation, or stop by and visit us at Booth 466, in the 2016 GSA Annual Meeting Exhibition Hall. q

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Department of Geology Donors 2015 -2016 Eugene J. Amaral Beckman Communications Bruce Braswell Katherine V. Bulinski Leland W. Burton John L. Carter Annette M. Crompton Andrew D. Czaja David & Sara Weston Fund Devon Energy Corporation Craig Dietsch Dry Dredgers, Inc. Susan M. Dunlap Michael E. Effler Robert J. Elias Janet M. Elliott Frank R. Ettensohn ExxonMobil Education Foundation Michael N. Fein Robert Ferree Vernetta Fluegeman Richard H. Fluegeman Stephen J. Folzenlogen Janet G. Gasper Theresa D. Gerrard Wayne R. Goodman Dominique Haneberg-Diggs Edward F. Hawkinson Katherine M. Hertlein F. D. Holland Warren D. Huff Raymond P. Karpovich Roy C. Kepferle John C. Kern S. Duff Kerr

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Arthur L. Kimmel Nicole Kirchner Laurence H. Lattman Michael G. Loudin Lucile and Richard Durrell Special Fund Jack E. Mase Joshua H. Miller Arnold I. Miller Kirk M. Nixon Lewis A. Owen Mary L. Pojeta Paul E. Potter The Procter & Gamble Fund Stephen P. Reidel Cornelia K. Riley Edgar Roeser Maria H. Rufe Gerald G. Schaber Richard B. Schultz Yeong Seong Lisa Sharp Shell Companies Foundation, Inc. Frederick E. Simms James T. Teller William A. Van Wie Roy B. VanArsdale Ronald A. Ward Raelyn E. Welch William L. Wilsey Jenea L. Woods Maureen M. Wu

Thank You All for Your for Contributions to the UC Geology Department’s Continued Excellence!

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A ndy C zaja This past year has been exciting for the UC PAstBio Lab (Paleobiology and AstroBiology Laboratory).

I recently finished a manuscript on some exceptionally large 2.5-billion-year-old fossil bacteria from South Africa. They are likely the remains of sulfur oxidizing bacteria, a type of organism not found that far back in the fossil record before now. In May of 2015, my students Kira Lorber and Jeff Osterhout and I traveled to Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada to do fieldwork as part of Jeff ’s masters work. We studied and sampled stromatolites from the 1.4-billion-year-old Sibley Group and from the world-famous 1.9-billionyear-old Gunflint Iron Formation. The latter is where the first real fossil evidence of life in the Precambrian was discovered. Kira continued her work on another set of 2.5-billion-yearold fossil microbes from South Africa. We presented the results of our work at a number of conferences this past year including the NASA Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago, the GSA conference in Baltimore, and the Midwest Geobiology Symposium in Bloomington, IN. Jeff and Kira will also present the results of their work this summer during their masters theses defenses. In the fall, Jeff departs for UCLA where he will pursue a Ph.D. Craig Dietsch and I began a collaboration earlier this year to study garnet inclusions in high pressure metamorphic rocks using Raman spectroscopy, an emerging technique.

More on that as details unfold. I have also begun a number of collaborations over the past year to study fossils with colleagues from four countries spanning four continents: two from the USA and one each from Australia, China, and Brazil. One of my US colleagues and the

Australian colleague each visited for a week to learn and use my laboratory instruments (Raman spectrometer, confocal laser scanning microscope, and optical microscopes).

A new student, Andrew Gangidine, will join my lab this fall. Andrew received his B.S. in Biology from UC in 2015 and worked in my lab last summer learning to make thin sections and identify Precambrian microfossils in them. We will travel to Yellowstone this summer with Jeff Havig (UC Geology) and Trinity Hamilton (UC Biology) to collect samples as part of Andrew’s project on microbial biosignatures.

Another exciting bit of news is that I was selected as a member of NASA’s Mars2020 mission Return Sample Science Board (RSSB).

NASA is planning another rover mission to Mars in 2020 that will include the ability to collect and cache rock and regolith samples that will be returned to Earth on a later mission. The RSSB is tasked with advising NASA on what types of samples to collect and how to handle them to avoid contamination. I am also one of the representatives of the RSSB on the Landing Site Working Group, which will advise on the best place to land the mission.

One final plug: Aaron Diefendorf, Jeff Havig, Trinity Hamilton, and I, along with our students will host the 5th annual Midwest Geobiology Symposium here at UC on October 15, 2016. This is an event that brings in geobiologists and affiliated scientists from all over the Midwest for a one day, student-centered symposium. Please contact one of us if you would like more information. q

Dr. Attila Kilinc Celebrates his 80th Birthday!

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Remembering South America K enneth E. C aster

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t the risk of being redundant and boresome, I have recently indulged in the non-uncommon senile pursuit of organizing memories; in this instance those of my several years spent in South America in geological pursuits just at the close of the Second World War and following. This is not a scientific report, but one of human experience.

During the years 1944-1947 I had the rare experience of serving as the Head of the Department of Geology and Paleontology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. In connection with this assignment I had many opportunities to travel, mostly with a geological mission, into the hinterlands, as well as to most of the leading cities. Following my Brazilian years I also visited Uruguay and Argentina and the western Andean countries; I also lived for an academic year in Columbia, while serving as a Visiting Professor at the Escuela Nacional de Minas in Medellín.

The opportunity to visit Brazil came as the culminating dream, which I had lived with since my graduate school days at Cornell University. As you all know, I am an invertebrate paleontologist, interested in a diversity of organisms, mainly from the Paleozoic era. This came as a result of my undergraduate major activity in biology and especially invertebrate zoology. In my graduate years the general invertebrate faunas of the Devonian system (some 400 million years ago) were my consuming interest. The rocks in the hills around Ithaca are of Devonian age and replete with fossils – fully as much so as the older, Ordovician rocks of the Cincinnati region. In the Nineteenth Century most of the basic paleontol-

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ogy of New York’s rich fossil trove had been described by James Hall of Albany in the great Paleontology of New York, and by his successors John M. Clarke, Rudolf Ruedemann and by Winifred Goldring in my generation.

Because of the regional structure and the ancient sedimentary history of the New York area, the Lower, Middle and Lower Upper Devonian rocks outcrop widely there and the faunas had been exhaustively covered by these earlier investigations. But the latest Devonian, and overlying Mississippian strata (the latter being the first unit of the Carboniferous) do not occur in a fossiliferous condition in Central New York State where previous efforts had been in the main concentrated.

It so-happened that Professor G.D. Harris, Professor of Paleontology in Cornell’s Geology Department, came from Jamestown in southwestern New York, and had become interested in his youth in this terrane and its fossils, although his career had taken him into the latest division of Geologic time, the Cenozoic (Tertiary), where he had become a world famous student of Tertiary Mollusca. In the spring of 1928, after completing his historical work, he took me to his family farm, west of Jamestown, on a survey of the Late Devonian and Mississippian, including the strata outcropping in the Oil Region of Pennsylvania and along the Allegheny River. It proved to be a “fatal” adventure and set me on my main course of a lifetime of paleontology. Up to that time, I had been studying fossils for the evolutionary perspective they gave to my main interest in Recent invertebrates, and at the insistence of my Undergraduate advisor, J. Chester Bradley, Professor of Entomology, and also of A.H. Wright, Professor of Vertebrate Zoology, with whom I had studied several courses.

My Botany Professor, likewise, Loren C. Petry, who was a paleobotanist, interested in Late Devonian floras, suggested that I ought to have a course, at least, in Historical Geology and Paleontology.

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Incidentally, and aside, all this concentration on biologic pursuits was essentially avocational, for while a student in the Liberal Arts College at Cornell, my official major was Pre-Law, and for which I fulfilled essentially all of the prerequisites. But I was a Schmetterling, and was always petitioning for extra subjects, such as Ancient Greek, both German and French courses, and a course in Russian, etc. Most of the Biology work was given in the Agricultural College, and the transfer of credits across the administrative lines slow, and as a consequence not easily caught up with in the Registrar’s office.

While still under the head of “prolegomena,” I should also note the Professor Harris was highly idiosyncratic; not only was he a teacher, largely by precept: any promising student became a zealous companion in research, but also a participant in the publishing of two paleontological journals, the Bulletins of American Paleontology and Palaeontographica Americana, which were projects of his home basement and a tower room the geology building, McGraw Hall, in both of which he had presses, and practically until my generation, even the type-setting was done there as well. Both journals were largely devoted to Tertiary paleontology, and in the main to the Mollusca. They were in the main written by Harris’s students, as well as by Harris himself. In retrospect, I deduce that Harris felt a bit remorseful that over all the years at Cornell he had given so little attention to the local strata and their fossils, and saw in my growing interest and enthusiasm a possibility for making amends.

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Harris’s) farm near Jamestown and in camping out while I explored the area we had seen in reconnaissance during my first trip to the area. A very large collection of fossils accumulated.

Needless to say, I had entered graduate school with the objective of becoming a paleontologist, and set about preparing my large collection which comprised mostly brachiopods and pelecypod molluscs. A great many of the forms which I had collected were undescribed, and never had the faunas of that area of geologic time been brought together into a comprehensive work. Thus I started to prepare a handbook for my use. This was during the school year 1929-30.

At Harris’s suggestion, I learned photography and the special process in which he specialized of coating the fossils with a film of ammonium chloride to conceal color differences wrought by weathering. The result was close to sixty plates of fossil pictures. Harris was pleased by the result and said that he thought the project was worthy of publishing in his Bulletins, for he thought it would be useful. However, if that were to be done I must needs learn how to make collotype plates, the process he was then employing for his illustrations. q

At Harris’s suggestion I enrolled in a night-school class in typesetting in the local high school. This was at that stage wholly a hand-process. I also helped him make correction in type for manuscripts in process of printing and helped in running the large press in his basement.

In the realm of science, I spent the summer following my graduation at the Harris (actually Stoneman: Mrs.

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D i st in g u ish e d C oll o qu ium & Vi si t i n g Spe ak e r s 2015 -2016 D r . D evon A nne O rme

D r . M atthew P asek

Stanford University

University of South Florida

“Forearc Basin Record of Continental Collision in Southern Tibet”

“Methane Emissions from the Natural Gas Supply Chain”

“Phosphorus and the Origin of Life”

D r . A aron P utnam

D r . D avid B. N ash

School of Earth Sciences and Climate Sciences, University of Maine “A Bi-hemispheric Perspective on the Last Glacial Termination: Insights from the Iceage Footprints of Mountain Glaciers”

University of Cincinnati “Great Miami Ground-Water Observatory: An Opportunity Too Good to Miss”

D r . D aniel S turmer

D r . B riony H organ

Shell Oil Exploration & Production, Houston, Texas

“Mineral Records of Ancient Climates and Habitable Environments on Mars”

“Evolution of the Pennsylvanian Ely-Bird Spring Basin, Nevada and Utah: Deciphering Basin Dynamics Using Multiple Techniques”

Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Purdue University

D r . B irgit H agedorn

University of Alaska, Anchorage “Biogeochemical Cycles and Associated Metal Fluxes from the Greenland Ice Sheet”

D r . C hris R einhard Georgia Tech

“The Evolution of Earth’s Oxygen Cycle: Cause and Effect”

D r . C olin R obins

Claremont McKenna College “A Partial Environmental Record from the Micromorphology and Mineralogy of Ancient (1–4 Myr old) Calcic Soils in the Desert Southwest”

D r . J ack C onrad

NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine “Whale-sized Lizards, Thread-sized Snakes, and a Brief History of Squamata: Join us for a Look at the Quarter-billion-year History of Snakes, ‘Lizards’, and their Kin”

D r . J ames T homka University of Akron

“Dynamic Linkages between Stratigraphy, Climate, Oceanography, and Biotic Events in the Middle Silurian of Eastern Laurentia”

D r . L ixin W ang

D r . J avier S anchez

Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis

“Late Cretaceous-Cenozoic Deformation History of Northwestern South America: Studies in Intermontane Basins, Colombia”

“Ecohydrology in Water-Stressed Environments”

University of Houston, Texas

D r . C layton S. P ainter

C onocoPhillips Co., Houston, Texas “A Multi-discipline Approach to Understanding Controls on Basin Filling and Stratigraphic Architecture in the North American Cordilleran Foreland Basin”

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D r . D avid L yon

Environmental Defense Fund

L arry W ickstrom

AAPG Visting Geoscientist “Historical Development of Oil and Gas In Ohio”

D r . M atthew F. K irk

Kansas State University “Geochemical Controls on Microbial Methanogenesis in Cherokee Basin Coalbeds”

D r . N adine M c Q uarrie University of Pittsburgh

“Can Thermochronometers Be Utilized to Constrain Timing, Tempo and Geometry of Fault Motion?”

D r . N ora N offke

Department of Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia “Microbially Induced Sedimentary Structures Recording an Ancient Ecosystem in the 3.48 Billion-year-old Dresser Formation, Pilbara, Western Australia”

D r . S cott M c C oy

University of Nevada, Reno “Shifting Rivers and Moving Divides: A Dynamic View of Landscape Evolution”

D r . T homas K. R ockwell San Diego State University

“Is the Southern San Andreas Fault Really Overdue For a Large Earthquake or Just Late in the Cycle?”

Thank You All! Special thanks to our own Dr. Andrew Czaja and Kate Cosgrove for planning and coordinating their visits here!

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Geology Student Spotlight:

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Ivan Carabajal

he traditional Geology curriculum has always presented severe problems of access to students with various disabilities. Physical impairment limits access to field outcrops, and visual impairment limits the use of the optical microscope for observing rocks in thin section. Ivan Carabajal, the first ever Master’s student in geoscience education at the University of Cincinnati, is trying to change that. Specifically, Ivan is working to ensure that people with mobile and sensory disabilities are not excluded from geological instruction.

The Los Angeles native landed at UC’s graduate program last summer, after earning his bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of California, Davis in 2013. Joining UC was an easy decision to make, he said, considering the strong sense of community and renowned faculty that define UC’s nationallyranked geology program.

The recipient of a graduate research assistantship and the UC Graduate Student Governance Association Diversity Research Fellowship, Ivan has made a strong positive impression on campus as someone who plans to help shape the future of how geology can be studied. This year, he was recognized with an outstanding mention by the Geological Society of America for a graduate student research grant.

cal methods and fieldwork curricula across the country can become more accessible to students who identify as having a disability. As a highly physical area of study, students with physical or sensory disabilities can be dissuaded from pursuing an education in geology. But as Ivan’s research and his own experiences make clear, playing on the strengths of aspiring or professional geologists with disabilities is a way to reveal aspects of the science in a new light.

One of Ivan’s influences as an undergraduate was a blind paleontologist who was able to interpret the intricate features of invertebrate marine fossils much like his sighted peers despite his disability. Ivan was also inspired by an innovative geologic map created by Julie Hendricks, a recent UC graduate in Special Education, to use textured patterns as a way for students with visual disabilities to visualize the geologic makeup of the Vancouver, BC, region during a recent accessible field trip. He believes that learning works best when students are seen for what they can do—not for what they cannot.

Although the idea of a geologist with a pith helmet working alone to unearth the secrets of the world is fun to entertain, Ivan said he finds solace in science’s social aspects. Whether it’s camping underneath an open sky in the desert with fellow geologists or exploring new caves, Ivan thinks geology works better when more people are included.

Ivan’s geological interests intersect at the old and the new. While concentrating on the study of the old—namely the timeworn and changing elements of the earth—his studies are driven by a need for the new, in this case a redeveloped geological praxis that encourages those with disabilities to practice geology.

As a research assistant under the direction of Dr. Chris Atchison, Ivan examines how pedagogi-

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F a c u l t y

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S t u d e n t S

One

memorable experience he’s had at UC was participating in a course designed by his graduate advisor [http://cech.uc.edu/headlines/2016/TAP_Class.html] that integrated students with cognitive disabilities into an inclusive science methods course for pre-service teachers. The course featured a weekend trip to Mammoth Cave National Park where many students had their first geological field experience. The class opened his eyes to the wonder of inclusive science and learning from the perspectives of others. Watching other students witness Mammoth Cave for the first time reaffirmed his passion for making geology approachable for everyone.

Because his research focuses mainly on unprecedented areas of geology, Ivan is grateful the faculty have supported him throughout both his academic and topographical journeys. His advisor Dr. Chris Atchison, as well as Dr. Warren Huff, are both mentors he said have been “incredibly helpful” in his research path. Ivan also credits Dr. Craig Dietsch, an associate professor and dedicated chess opponent, for being “an amazing faculty member.”

ena. Having a home base here at UC with so many helpful people is really important.”

Ivan’s studies will lead him to both Arizona this May and to western Ireland in May 2017 to participate in a current NSF-funded project led by Dr. Atchison and Dr. Steve Whitmeyer at James Madison University, where work on creating access to inaccessible field sites through audio-visual communication technologies for students with mobile disabilities. This summer, Ivan will also be teaming up with researchers at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities to assess the accessibility of their Hydrocamp program in an effort to create a hydrogeology field course that is inclusive of all learners’ physical and sensory abilities.

Keeping an eye on the future, Ivan plans to apply to the University of Cincinnati’s PhD program in education after getting his master’s degree next spring. It’s here at UC that he wants to continue pioneering geoscience education through new models of inclusive learning in field-based environments. q

“The geology department is incredibly welcoming, even though my research is unlike anyone else’s on the faculty,” Ivan said. “At first, I was intimidated by this new method of conducting research that focuses a lot more on words and meaning than it does on numbers on an Excel spreadsheet, but I have learned to embrace it and appreciate how it can be used to understand difficult and complex phenom-

In Rememberance K e n n e t h B e e m (PhD ‘73) Th e B a l ti m ore S un, June 9 , 2 0 1 5 Kenneth Alan Beem, a retired Montgomery College geology professor who was a specialist on Baltimoremade pottery, including the McCormick teapot, died of cardiac arrest June 3 at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He was 72 and lived in Catonsville.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Richard and Jean Beem, he was a 1960 graduate of Mifflin High School. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at

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Tulane University. He received a doctorate in geology at the University of Cincinnati. He was a specialist in micropaleontology and had worked at the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1971, Dr. Beem joined the faculty of Montgomery College in Rockville. He taught geology and biology for more than 36 years before he retired.

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E a r ly S p r i n g F i e l d T r i p Anonymous

I.

III.

There comes a point when even without a cover you go to the outcrop in the heavy rain.

Your brothers go because you ask them to, because they want to, because you are going, and are going to get wet, too because what the hell we are here and it’s been a long way, and not only that, a new, local guy is there who is so happy to meet you and share the stories, and learn and try out some new stories.

Soaked to the bone but never alone, Head high, arms raised where most sink like stones.

We started in a light drizzle, the group a bit apart, quiet, not quite awake But inside our worn strong metal there was some expectation, optimism perhaps, perhaps even some excitement that wasn’t yet ground down by hours and hours on the big flat, rolling roads.

Dresden Station was wet but had purple garnet — the best rock — and the fine-grained black rock was simple and maybe the only clear message to understand there.

IV.

At our second camp (without water) we were ready to really get started.

The late, late western sky clears up and the overviews go by fast but they resonate so pleasantly.

A little melancholy seeps in since the deep folds, crinkles, flames, and breaks, and the big slabs slamming down on the soft black rocks get farther and farther away.

Blue sky and big white clouds across the big long ridges are laughing and we still are, too.

By the time the road is straight and flat, the strata become plain the grey has returned, the chill, the rain.

Paves way for hammer falls that grade the day away.

Darkened skies that blanket the terrain.

We had easily adjusted to the rain and chill, could feel our own chemistry, and had made it this far, far offshore to us.

II. It’s a bit foreboding this old landscape.

There is a bluish hue peering beneath The gray veneer Through hordes of grey we braved but shedding skies reveal a golden face to which we are beholden, it soles our weary pace a clarion we hearken without staring, it elates paves way for hammer falls that grade the day away.

Pierces darkened skies that blanket the terrain.

Endless jest and mockery distracts from rain torrential Fades to solemn silence when events explained sequential twist the mind like folds and faults, focus is essential.

In Rememberance Harold Bohmer Jr. Harold “Hal” Bohmer died Monday, December 29, 2014, at home in Tucson, Arizona surrounded by his loving family after a short illness. His profession as a geologist brought him to Tucson for work during graduate school in the fifties and he later returned with his wife Cynthia to retire and bask in the beauty of the mountains.

Hal was born in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1930 and attended Williston Academy, now known as the Williston-Northampton School. He graduated from Amherst

(MS, PhD ‘64)

College following four years of service in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. Hal went on to complete both an M.S. Degree and a Ph.D. in geology at the University of Cincinnati where he was awarded two National Science Foundation Fellowships. Later Hal was honored with membership in the scientific research society Sigma Xi. He then worked as Senior Research Scientist for P.P.G. Industries for 34 years. He worked in the research facility in Barbarton, Ohio, and then for the last six years of his career in Monroeville, PA. Research expeditions in Sierra Leon and Greenland were highlights of his career.

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F a c u l t y

Graduate

&

S t u d e n t S

2015-2016

TJ Malgieri, M.S. Ibrahim Ugurlu, M.S. Jim Thomka, Ph.D. Frieda Akerstrom, M.S. Julia Wise, Ph.D. Alex Wall, M.S. Elizabeth Bullard, M.S.

Degrees

Jani Sparks, Ph.D. Matt Vrazo, Ph.D. Katie Dunn, M.S. Kate Hedrick, Ph.D. Chris Sheehan, M.S. Liz Haussner, M.S.

Congratulations!

UC Geology Career Seminar G e t t i n g R e a dy

for the

Workforce

Rich Pohana

Distinguished Alumnus

John Thaeler

Geotechnical Engineering City of Cincinnati

Chief Operating Officer Vitruvian Exploration II, LLC

Ron Counts

Presenters

Governmental United States Geological Survey

Patrick McLaughlin

Brenda Hunda

State Surveys Indiana Geological Survey

Katherine Bulinski Academia Bellarmine University

Cincinnati Museum Center

S ept . 17-18 th , 2015

Chad Ferguson

Oil & Gas Industry BHP Billiton Petroleum

Sp e c i al T hanks to All of the P re s e nte r s!

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e are extremely grateful to the members of the Alumni Advisory Committee for their continued support and recommendations concerning departmental long-range plans. As both the academic and industrial worlds of geoscience continue to undergo change it is extremely helpful to have the insight of these individuals to help balance our our decision-making activities.

W ayne G oodman (MS ’76)

T homas K lek amp (MS ’71)

Consulting Geologist/Board Member/Owner Associate at Core Energy LLC. Owner at Northern Lights Energy, Saginaw, MI. wrgnle@alphacomm.net

Past-President of the New Orleans Geological Society.Senior geologist with Amber Resources LLC. klekamp@bellsouth.net

E dward O’D onnell (MS ’63)

J. T odd S tephenson (MS ’79)

Edward.ODonnell@nrc.gov Senior Geologist in the Regulatory Guide Development Branch in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Office of Research

Vice President Geosciences Northern Division at Chesapeake Energy. todd.stephenson@chk.com, jtoddstephenson@ gmail.com

Can you identify the people in this photo?

See the answers on page 36.

1971: Knifey Sandstone and Cane Valley Limestone Field Conference Location: Overlooking the Green River Reservoir near Campbellsville, KY

Photo from Tom Klekamp

Josh Miller’s new daughter.

Orion Lawson Miller May 12, 2016 27

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‘Be Gentle’ To Old Tech – 1888 Building

2016

by Judy Piket News Record Staff Reporter November 2,1971

“Please Be Gentle, this is the Oldest Building on Campus,” reads the sign above the lecture hall entrance of the Technical Building, commonly known as Old Tech.

Anything on campus older than Old Tech is probably on display in the ivy-covered building, which houses classrooms and library space.

Built in 1888, the three-story structure is located opposite the main entrance of TUC. The building received its nickname in 1901 when the Technical School of Cincinnati, affiliated with the University, took up residence in the building.

With the discontinuation of the school in 1907, the building and equipment were turned over to the College of Engineering. The college remained there until 1912 when it moved into the newly built Baldwin Hall. From this time on, Old Tech was the home of the geology department and until last year, the geography department.

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Old Tech’s upper floor contains classroom and office space while the basement, once occupied

by ROTC facilities, is now a geology laboratory.

The geology research library, containing over 15,000 volumes, is located on the main floor.

According to Dr. R.A. Davis, assistant professor and curator of geology, the function of the museum is three-fold: research, display and lending. The main attractions of the museum, continued Dr. Davis, include the skeleton of Old Chief, a former circus elephant, as well as the exhibit of a Eurypterid, a marine animal, which existed in this area 450 million years ago.

The museum also contains numerous mineral and zoological exhibits as well as one of the most complete collections of fossils in the Cincinnati area. q

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Bob French (BS ’59, MS ’61) I must admit that life tends to be a little quieter in retirement but after a wonderful career spanning more than 55 years I won’t complain.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a Northern Colorado Geologists luncheon in Fort Collins. Peter Price (Univ. Kentucky, ex-Marathon Oil) presented a very good paper on ‘Base Metal Deposits in Gulf Coast Sedimentary Environments’. Having worked on some related projects I found his interpretations most interesting. During a private conversation with Peter he asked if I knew Dr. George Barbour, needless to say the conversation lasted quite some time. Peter said that when he was a student studying chemistry he had the pleasure of meeting George and immediately changed his major to geology. I wonder how many other lives and professional careers were influenced by George during his own career. I guess the terms of his grant to UC is proof enough.

In the business world we found that the turmoil in the USA coal and gas industries created some issues and some opportunities for GTLE Energy Ltd. The Company continues its biomass/coal research programs and has registered all its patents in countries of interest. However, the coal beneficiation plant we built in North Dakota was purchased by an Indian company and is now being installed in Indonesia where it will process low-grade coal for export. This action has already attracted the attention of other foreign companies that may be interested in the technology after the plant is fully operating in about six -twelve months time.

Meantime I am amazed that our children are now openly discussing their plans for retirement....Are they too early or did I leave it too late? q

Ed O’Donnell (MS ’63, PhD ’67)

Elizabeth C. Craig (BA ‘63)

Editor’s note: The following article appeared in the August 5, 2015 issue of the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) Reporter.

Hi Beth,

Ed O’Donnell (RES) was recognized as a 50-year member of the Geological Society of America, in the July 2015 issue of their magazine GSA Today, v. 25, no. 7 on page 20. According to Ed, “It’s a shock to hear it was 50 years. All I can say is the time passed too quickly.” Ed is also an active member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Prior to his extensive NRC career, he was an exploration geologist for Amoco. q

My colleague Ken Tankersley tells me he happened to chat with you after his presentation in Mariemont last week. If I have managed to locate the correct address for you then I am delighted to re-establish contact after all these years. And I would very much like to add you to the mailing list for our annual newsletter so you can get some idea of what has been going on here in the department over the past decades. I hope all is well and I would be pleased to know how things have been going for you. q Warren

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Henry (Hank) Schoch (BS ’66) Warren: I hope this finds you and yours in good health. All is well out here western Colorado. Judy and I celebrated our fiftieth anniversary last July, and we look forward to fifty more, if that’s the way things shake out (of course, I always look over my shoulder when I express thoughts like that, because, as Satchel Paige once observed, you never know what might be gaining on you from behind).

Travels have been modest: a trip to Crater Lake and up the Oregon coast last September to visit an old park service friend and to do some sightseeing, and various jaunts over the mountains to Denver and Albuquerque to visit kids and grandkids and to attend recitals, little-league games, and figure-skating extravaganzas in which the youngsters are involved.

Earlier in the year, I was invited to do on-camera interviews for a CSpan feature relating to the history of Grand Junction, Colorado, and for a three-part, three-hour Rocky Mountain PBS series entitled Heart of the World, Colorado’s National Parks. Another fifteen minutes of fame, I guess.

The view from our living room reveals an abrupt escarpment, less than a mile distant, which marks the near boundary of Colorado National Monument. The monument’s 20,450 acres are situated on the northern flanks of the Uncompahgre uplift and offer dramatic vistas of red-rock canyons, towering sandstone monoliths, and forested mesas. Exposed are ancient meta-sediments and meta-igneous basement rocks, and above them, a discontinuous sequence of Mesozoic terrestrial sediments. Absent from the monument are any units above the basement and below the overlying sediments which once may have been present but later removed by erosion. They represent a hiatus of about 1.17 billion years -- the Great Unconformity. Also missing is an immense thickness of Cretaceous and perhaps younger rocks whose erosion was prompted by the latest uplift. Some of those units, however, like the Mancos shale and Mesa Verde

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formation, are still exposed in the adjacent Grand Valley and beyond the Colorado River in the Book Cliffs. The edge of the uplift, nearly conterminous with the monument’s northeastern boundary, is defined by a high-angle reverse fault with thousands of feet of vertical displacement. A prominent monocline in the more plastic sediments above the fault plunges from the uplands into the valley below.

The monument is a land of desert bighorn sheep, eagles and peregrine falcons, deer and elk, coyotes and mountain lions, an occasional bear, and a host of lesser creatures. Evidence of past life includes some fossil dinosaur bones and tracks scattered throughout each of the various sedimentary formations, and a variety of features which attest to 13,000 years of human use and occupancy -- everything from Paleo-Indian times during the twilight of the last glacial, to the Archaic Period, to the Fremont and Ute occupancies, and finally to the eras of European exploration, 19th century settlement, and into the 20th century.

A rather superficial survey of the monument in 1963 identified only 76 cultural sites, but years of hiking in the area have revealed many more, even to my untutored eye.

Following my retirement, I resolved to add to the list.

I have only a little formal training in archaeology, and my approach to the task is neither structured nor comprehensive. I simply wander around in the backcountry with a handheld GPS receiver and a camera, and when I stumble across something cultural, I record the UTMs, snap a few photos, and scribble some notes. I maintain three databases of my findings (Works, Excel, and Access), and I share them regularly with the National Park Service.

Thus far, I’ve identified 430 sites, and I suspect there are hundreds, if not thousands, more. Aboriginal finds include lithic quarries (a local orthoquartzite was a favored material), stone projectile points and tools, open camps and rock shelter habitations, refuse middens, storage cists, potsherds, trade items, and ground-stone objects like manos and metates. Historic features include brush and wire fences, abandoned corrals, roads, and trails, wells and cisterns, homestead structures, “cowboy” camps, storage caches, mines, prospect pits, and claim markers, Moqui steps and pipe ladders, lime kilns, and trash dumps. Here and there

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Schoch (Continued) are tools and implements dating back to CCC and WPA construction projects during the 1930s -- things like broken tools, wheelbarrows, ore carts and odd lengths of mine-rail, junked vehicle parts, and the like.

I’m not academically qualified to judge the significance of my finds, but I have some favorites. Among them, a cluster of four Ute tree platforms (all have fallen over and are in various stages of decay), a nearby wickiup, and a pristine panel of rock art dating back to Archaic times, 2000 to 8000 years ago.

The tree platforms, according to Ute elders who’ve visited the site, served a pre-burial function. The body of a decedent was placed on the elevated scaffolding for exposure to the elements.

After a year or so, the skeletal remains would be collected, bundled in juniper bark, and given a traditional crevice burial. The wickiup accommodated the shaman who presided over the funeral rites.

The Utes were expelled from western Colorado in 1881 following the Meeker Massacre, but likely slipped in and out of the area well into the 20th century, so the tree platforms are at least one hundred years old, and probably much older. There are only thirteen such sites known to exist in all of Colorado and Utah.

The rock art panel features likenesses of a centipede and turkey tracks and some other jottings on stone, but their meanings are lost to the ages. Interpretation of these things is more art than science, and like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. For example, there’s a Ute rock art panel in the monument with recognizable

In Rememberance

images of bighorn sheep and a bear paw pecked into the sandstone, but also the likeness of a person riding what appears to be a bloated critter of some kind -- at first glance a horned beast shaped rather like a hippo and therefore bearing no resemblance to any local wildlife (I’ve attached a photo). I’ve showed it to a couple of Ute elders. One of them, Clifford Duncan (now deceased), was a shaman and medicine man, and his interpretation of its significance was somewhat vague and leaned toward the spiritual. In other words, he didn’t know. The other elder, Roland McCook, is a registered civil engineer in his early 70s, and his interpretations tend to be more prosaic. After studying the figure for a while, McCook said, “You know, at roundup time on the reservation, the men would take all the horses, and we kids were obliged to ride cows.” Bingo!

In my wanderings, of course, I keep an eye out for geological curiosities, too. Of late, my interest has been piqued by a large number of cannonball concretions I’ve found in the Burro Canyon formation (lower Cretaceous), and by evidence of Liesegang banding and derivative weathering patterns in various sandstones throughout the monument.

I hope you find this response to your query satisfactory. If it’s too long, please feel free to edit it as you see fit. We plan to get back to Cincy this fall, and I hope to visit the campus and department. If our paths cross, maybe we can get together for lunch. q

Gene C. Ulmer ( BS ‘54)

Thomas Farmer (PhD ’68)

Dr. Gene C. Ulmer, a resident of Warrington for the past 45 years, passed away Friday, Sept. 18, 2015 at his residence. He was 78.

Gene was the loving husband of Dagmar Ulmer.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Gene was a son of the late Howard and Mildred Ulmer. He recieved his BS in Chemistry at UC in 1954, then spent a year in Geology before going off to Penn State. He received a Ph.D. in Geochemistry and Geophysics from Penn State University in 1964.

He was a Professor of Geology at Temple University for 39 years, several of which he served as chairman of the department, and he retired as Professor Emeritus of Geology at Temple. Gene was a member of the Franklin Institute’s Medal of Science Award committee. He was a recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Program and received the Humboldt Research Award, an award given to internationally renowned scientists and scholars. q

I’ve been busy trying to finish the manuscript of “Volume 2, Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis, Earth’s Climate History.” The deadline is January 31, 2017 and hopefully I can meet it. I had a small ‘bridge’ document published last year (2015) by Springer entitled “Modern Climate Change Science: An Overview of Today’s Climate Change Science,” 106 pages with some outstanding color illustrations.

The broken ankle is finally healed and I can put full weight on it now. It’s awkward trying to walk somewhat normally after 2.5 years in a wheelchair but I’m managing with a walker.

My field days are over but windshield geology is still exciting. I’m looking forward to this year’s ‘Upper Crust’ as always. I hope this finds you well and thriving as I hope the department is also. q

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Stephen Meyers (MS ‘77) I had to laugh at the photo of me on page 35 of the 2015 spring issue of the Upper Crust. The caption was reminiscent of a Big Foot sighting where he was rumored to have been spotted near a Mason high school. Big Foot I’m not. So to dispel any such rumors and to negate any reports of my demise, I thought an update was needed.

Helen, Stephanie and I returned to the Cincinnati area in 1985 after almost a decade in the oil industry. I left Texas Oil & Gas where I was exploration manager for South Louisiana for two reasons; too many transfers (by the time Stephanie was 14 months old she was on her third town) and career burnout.

After a short stint in the PhD program, I ventured into the environmental industry due to the need to support my family.

During this time Helen and I bought a worn out, blown out soybean farm in northern Clermont County. We have spent 26 years, with Stephanie’s help, rehabilitating it into what might now be confused with an arboretum. Let me dispel any false impressions one may have as to gentleman farming. There is nothing gentlemanly about it. 124 acres of fields and woods is a lifetime of hard labor while requiring one to become a passable tractor mechanic.

I operated a successful environmental consulting company from 1987 to 1999. Towards the end I was getting bored writing the same reports as well as becoming concerned about the constant exposure to toxic wastes. (Keep in mind that when in the environmental industry you seldom work in five star locations. You commonly wind up in some contaminated pit in a facility that belongs, or should belong, in the Superfund program.) While playing environmentalist, Helen and I became organizational advisors to a 4H club in Clermont County. One evening when I was noting my boredom of things environmental, I started casting about for a new career. (Ok, I’ll admit it, I have career ADD.) Helen in her infinite wisdom stated that I should get into teaching because I loved torment-

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ing the teenagers in our 4H club. She was right. After taking evening education classes at Xavier I became a newly minted high school science teacher with a comprehensive science license.

(That bachelor’s degree in Biology and Chemistry came in handy even though I thought as a geologist I would never use it again.)

I started my teaching career at Indian Hill High School and have been there for the last 16+ years. One of my goals was to teach every science and I have accomplished it. I have taught Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Environmental Science, AP Environmental Science and have started an upper level Geology course. The school has been very generous with their financial support and I have equipment most high schools would envy including such things as a quality seismograph and petrographic microscopes. Helen as usual was right. I love teaching at the high school level, particularly the juniors and seniors. (Freshmen are another matter.) I get the opportunity to stimulate their interest in science (any science) and am rewarded when the graduates return to visit exhibiting so much excitement for their chosen field of study.

While many of my contemporaries are retired or considering retirement, I can’t think of doing the same.

There is nothing like being constantly surrounded by 16, 17 and 18 year olds to keep one thinking and not acting one’s age. Besides, I don’t play golf. q

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Stephen Meyers (continued) Hi Dr. Huff, During an earlier e-mail I mentioned that I could put together an account of my experiences as a BP field geologist during the summer of 1974.

Somehow, Dr. Pryor talked BP into hiring Jim Rennison, Bill Harmon and me for their summer field program in Alaska. The three of us traveled to Anchorage and met the BP geologists that would lead the field work. Each of us colonials was paired up with one of the BP geologists. I was to work with Pat Monteleone, an American expat living in Jolly Old. Firearms training was included in outfitting the party. Because few English have had exposure to firearms, these became Jim, Bill and my responsibility; hence we were to be geologists, pack mules and protectors of the endeavor. (Bill, note that I did not include comments as to the unfortunate misuse of your comb at the Kit Cat Club.)

Bear Lake Region Our first assignment was on the Alaskan Peninsula not far from the start of the Aleutian Islands. (See map.)

The goal of this field work was to establish a stratigraphic framework for the rocks plunging beneath the Bering Sea. (BP was interested in an upcoming lease sale.) The three field teams worked in widely separated areas. I believe that Bill and Jim’s teams worked beach sections while Pat and I described and sampled the mountainous interior. (See photo 1.) Because we had the farthest to go each day, the helicopter would take us out first and we would be the last to be retrieved. Fog that rolled off the Bering Sea was pretty common in the mountains and there were some thrilling days when I wondered if we would be picked up. (During one desperate occurrence I almost hit the helicopter with a flare in fear not being located.) I wasn’t too keen on staying out all night because of the cold temperatures (sleet was

common) and the abundant Alaskan brown bears. One eventful day, after being dropped off, Pat and I were intent on picking up the strat interval we left the day before. I put my pack and rifle down and we split up, Pat going around one side of the mountain and I the other. It was sleeting at the time and I was focused on the ground. After traveling some distance, I started to recognize the lithology and promptly turned around.

As I walked, concentrating on what was beneath my feet, I got about 60’ from my pack and rifle when I looked up. An 8’ brown bear was sitting, teddy bearlike next to my pack. (I’m glad bears don’t have opposable thumbs because if he had he could have shot me.) There were no rocks or trees to climb and Pat had not returned. So as the bear and I stared at each other, I remembered that BP gave us a referee whistle to toot because the rumor was that bears don’t like the noise. In my enthusiasm to reach the whistle I ripped the zipper out of my raincoat. I can testify that this particular bear didn’t like the noise because he got up and started to weave his way toward me. I abruptly stopped tooting. We had chased bears in the helicopter before and they could really run. I therefore thought it a mistake to try to sprint off. I started backing up as the bear slowly closed the distance. I backed over a small hump in the ground and ducked

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Stephen Meyers (continued) marmot chuckling at his accuracy. Keep in mind that by this time we had been out close to two months with no radio, phone, music, bright lights or outside contact while working 7 days a week. With the wind constantly blowing in your ears, a person tends to get a little goofy. After repeated beanings, I started to take it personal and would shout expletives and shake my fist at that devil in fur. I almost had the ultimate revenge when we were out on a reconnance and landed on top of a cliff section. Looking down, I spied a marmot on a lower bench. I found a handy mark VI boulder and gave that marmot a fright.

behind it hoping that the bear would lose interest if I was out of sight. Well, I guess my disappearance along with the wind and sleet lessened the bear’s interest because he never did come over the top of that hump. (There for a while, I didn’t think I would see Cincinnati again.) After this episode, the rifle was my constant companion.

Our living quarters were a cluster of shacks adjacent to the Bear Lake outlet.

Great fishing, as Bill’s photo can attest.

We dined on moose, caribou and the abundant trout and salmon. The hunting guide who owned the camp was a true entrepreneur. Because the area was tundra, he reasoned it would be a great idea to stock the area with rabbits so that he could charge his clients an additional fee. Sometimes great ideas don’t work out; bald eagles picked off every rabbit that ventured out onto the tundra. The rabbits wised up and stayed in camp, tunneling under the shacks and hiding behind drums and clutter. One could literally scoop up handfuls of rabbits. Either Jim or Bill’s party brought back a seal pup whose mother was found dead on the beach.

(See photo 4.) The cook tried unsuccessfully to keep the pup alive.

Lake Illimani Region After several weeks in the Bear Lake area, we packed up and headed north to Lake Illimani with the purpose of describing and sampling the sea cliff sections on Lower Cook Inlet. Each day we would commute via helicopter from our camp on Lake Illimani to the beach sections. It was at these cliff sections that I met the archenemy of field geologists; the wooly marmot. While minding my own business and sampling and describing a beach cliff, I would be hit on the head by a pebble. Looking up high on the cliff top I would see the fuzzy face of a

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It was during our stay at Lake Illimani that I failed a significant intelligence test.

While returning to camp we located an old mine. The entrance was dynamited in but we decided to land and inspect the site. There were old anvils, mule shoes and dog sled components lying about and a nearly collapsed shack. I entered the shack and saw old burlap bags of samples. Moving aside a sack or two, I saw an old crate. The crate was partially filled with sticks of dynamite. The top sticks would crumble at the touch, but I quarried my way down, and eventually found a firm stick. It was dated 1918. I brought my treasure to the helicopter and found a handy storage area inside of a roll of paper towels. Returning to camp and overwhelmed by hunger, I bolted for the cook shack. The helicopter mechanic had the stick land between his feet when he retrieved the paper towels. It didn’t go off, but he never forgave me.

I would like to give field party leaders a little advise.

Don’t go back into town and tell those remaining to conduct reconninance with the helicopter. Our leader made this mistake. In our joyriding we just happened to land near the summit of Mt. Illimani, at an elevation of +/- 9000 feet. (See photo 5.)

Icy Bay Approximately two months into the program and we returned to Anchorage to re-equip. (My field boots disintegrated after being constantly wet for 2 months.)

It was at this point that Jim Rennison returned to Cin-

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Stephen Meyers (continued) cinnati with Bill and I soldiering on. We traveled to Icy Bay in the Gulf of Alaska. (See Photo 6.) Our purpose was not conventional work as before, but to take oriented cores in the tillite and have the interval dated by magnetic reversals. The samples were shipped to a lab at the University of Rhode Island. The work was less strenuous with little mountain climbing and no marmots. We had a drill powered by a chain saw motor and a pump up sprayer for lubricating the bit. No eventful injuries occurred unless you count being stung repeatedly on the face by hornets or some other related, irate insect type. The base camp was run by an older couple that supplemented their gold panning income with customers like us. Their cabins were located in the middle of a Sitka spruce forest. Bears of both the brown and black varieties would pass through camp on a regular basis. The owners had a couple of large dogs that would clear the camp of the intruding bears. If the bear was of the brown variety, the bear would try to kill the dogs but they worked as a team slowly moving the bear along. If a black bear entered camp, the dogs would tree the bear and create a major racket. We had been so accustomed to the much larger brown bears; the black ones didn’t generate the same fear. One time the dogs had treed a black bear and I went outside to take in the show. The bear was about 10 feet up the tree and in an irritated state; snapping his jaws, etc.

While standing under the tree with the dogs, the bear finally got so mad that he decided he was going to come down and whip all three of us.

Unfortunately, the bear had a tactical problem; he had to back down the tree. When his posterior was within range, the dogs would bite him and up the tree he would go. I finally had to grab the dogs by the collar and drag them away so the bear could escape.

After several weeks (it seemed like months) we were informed that the field party was coming to an end. With that information, Bill and I went down to the beach and burned our field clothes. Our return luggage was unique; wooden boxes of samples, Bill’s hatchet, and a gray whale vertebrate wrapped in bubble plastic. Upon arrival at the Greater Cincinnati airport, my future wife did not recognize me because I had lost 30 pounds, hadn’t had a haircut in 3 months and was sporting a moustache.

When I graduated and was hired by Atlantic Richfield in 1977, I was temporarily assigned to their research lab in Dallas. One day my supervisor approached me and asked if I had field experience in Alaska. I replied to the affirmative and was promptly shipped off to the Gulf of Alaska for field work. But that is another story. q

D e a r U C G e o l o g y A l um n i The Geological Society of America 2016 Annual Meeting will be held September 25-28, 2016 in Denver, CO. (http://community.geosociety.org/gsa2016/home/). I would like to invite you to attend and to join us for an alumni get-together on Monday, 26 September 2016

and

Friends,

from 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM at the Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center, Capitol Ballroom 7.

Hope to see you in Denver, Warren D. Huff warren.huff@uc.edu

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John Beyer (BS ’70) Editor’s note: As reported in the July 2016 issue of the AAPG Explorer (bit. ly/294Rrik), John is the editor of the recently published AAPG Memoir 110, The Eagle Ford Shale: A Renaissance in U.S. Oil Production. Known as a world-class source rock for years, the Eagle Ford Shale became a worldclass oil reservoir early in the second decade of the 21st century. Oil production from the Eagle Ford grew from 352 barrels of oil per day (BOPD) in 2008 to over 1.7 million BOPD in March 2015.

Steve Wells (PhD ’76) New Mexico Tech Hires Stephen Wells as President The head of a Nevada-based research institute has been named the new president of New Mexico Tech.

The school’s Board of Regents announced Thursday that Dr. Stephen Wells has been chosen to lead the Socorro-based university that has about 2,200 students and is getting a five-year contract.

New Mexico Tech was founded in 1889 as the New Mexico School of

Since then, the play has been a victim of its own success. Production from shale oil in the United States has helped contribute to a glut in world oil supply that led to a precipitous drop in oil prices beginning in the summer of 2014.

As prices fell from over $100 per barrel in July 2014, to less than $30 per barrel in January 2016, production from the Eagle Ford declined over 500,000 BOPD. q

Mines. It is the state’s smallest research institution.

Wells will succeed Dr. Daniel Lopez, who is retiring June 30 after 23 years as New Mexico Tech’s president.

Wells has been president of the Desert Research Institute, a research institution with 560 employees in the Nevada System of Higher Education.

He was a professor with the University of New Mexico’s geology department from 1976-91 and also headed the department from 1989-91 q .

1. Tom Klecamp, University of Cincinnati 2. Al Taylor, USGS 3. Alan Horowitz, Indiana University 4. Martin NogerKentucy GS 5. Paul E. Potter Indiana University 6. Stephanie Hrabar, University of Cincinnati 7. Jim Baxter, Illinonis GS 8. Alan Thomso, Shell Development Co. 9. Don Carr, Indiana GS 10. Wayne Pryor, University of Cincinnati 11. Richard Lewis, USGS

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Tom Klekamp (MS ’71) Warren, Mike Fein (BS ’73) has received the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies (GCAGS) Outstanding Membership Award, and, more recently of Jeff Spencer (BS ’80), Mike Fein and me at the New Orleans Geological Society (NOGS) luncheon meeting in which Jeff was our featured speaker. And here is the award citation: Michael Fein 2015 Distinguished Service Award Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies 2015 Distinguished Service Award Presented Sunday August 20, 2015 at the 65th Annual GCAGS Opening Session and Awards Ceremony: Dedicated servant to the geological community and the local and regional geological societies over the last three decades, Mike Fein has served as a dynamic and impactful member to the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies and the GCAGS affiliate, the New Orleans Geological Society, in his numerous and various roles where his aspiration to advance the knowledge of geoscience into our communities remains unchanged.

Mike served as the Treasurer for the 2013 GCAGS convention, and has served different offices and chairs and received numerous honors in the GCAGS affiliated society of NOGS: Secretary, President-elect, President, Memorial Foundation (Secretary, Chairman, and Trustee), Honorary Life Member, Outstanding

fairs. For years, Mike has been integrally involved in the Greater New Orleans Science and Engineering Fair and maintains a close relationship with the GNOSEF coordinators and each spring imparts his enthusiasm on NOGS members for judging volunteers. Mike is a regular at “Super Science Saturday” held each year at the Louisiana Children’s Museum and which NOGS is a major participant. This event brings younger school-aged children from all over New Orleans to have a hands-on experience with fossils, geology and petroleum exploration and production. Mike also involves himself with the Deep Water Symposium, which is a major event for engineers and geoscientists. In 2014, he was instrumental in adding a geoscience education day to the Deep Water Symposium, which proved so successful that attendees requested another geoscience education day for 2015.

It is evident that with each position that Mike Fein has undertaken, he serves with unrelenting zeal and passion and he inspires all with whom he works. Mike Fein is the epitome of commitment, dedication and service, and our geological societies are forevermore changed by his humble contributions. q

Service Award, Awards Committee Chairman, and Nominating Committee Chairman. In addition, Mike Fein was a co-editor to the 1987 publication of Oil and Gas Fields of Southeast Louisiana, Vol. 3 Supplement.

Mike Fein has a record of long-term service to the NOGS, especially in the area of promoting science education and NOGS involvement in science

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James Teller (BS ’62, PhD ’70) Editor’s note: Jim has kindly shared a copy of his remarks at the retirement dinner for Richard Durrell, 7 June 1985 at Queen City Club As I look around this room I see many who helped guide me through my early years in geology.

Ken Caster - who taught historical geology “upside down”, beginning with the Pleistocene, and whose stories of the history of geology fascinated me, whose parade of classic stratigraphic sections overwhelmed me, and whose artistry dazzled me.

Harvey Sunderman - whose course in Common Rocks seemed anything but common to me, with dandies like limburgite and porphyritic mylonite, plus an assortment of brick fragments, irrigation tiling, and clinkers (I don’t mean your jokes, Harvey). The stories that first spring to mind about Harvey are not suitable for this mixed and esteemed audience.

And certainly there were others, such as Bill Jenks, Ron Schmidt, Len Larsen, and, during my grad studies, Wayne Pryor, who helped in many ways to guide me toward being a professional.

No one, however, exercised more influence over me in my student days than Richard Durrell.

Initially, of course, it was he who introduced me to geology. With that, my long-standing loveaffair with nature had a new dimension - one where all the mysteries and beauties of the earth had an explanation.

Professor Durrell presented this new and fascinating world in the clearest of words, and with an abundance

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of slides. Oh, the slides. Marvelous glimpses at mountains and valleys, into cracks and crevices, both in our own backyard and in far-flung corners of the world. With, of course, Lucille for scale. But more than the visual aids and enthusiasm he brought to the classroom was his ability to explain everything in lucid, straightforward terms. It was clear that he loved the subject he was teaching and the teaching itself.

Certainly this ability to communicate what are often difficult concepts about the earth has been put to good use in his nature conservancy efforts, where he has been responsible for advising and persuading non-scientists of the value of preserving our natural heritage. I’ll have to admit, however, that there were a few occasions during my first year in geology when I had doubts about geology as a profession. I remember being one in a long line of students in the Intro Geology mineral quizzes, where dozens before me had given every specimen that vaguely looked like halite, 15 the “taste test”.

Overall, however, the Intro labs, especially the “study hour” with RHD, was spellbinding. How could anyone deduce so much about an area by just looking at a geological or topographic map? Likewise, in the field, gravel pits became laboratories filled with a myriad of stories: - there were the economics of the pit and the pre -excavation human history of the area. - the soils and vegetation at the top of the cut - the new inwash of sediment that built alluvial fans and formed mud puddles on the floor of the pit. - the history of the sand and gravel itself, with sed. structures and buried organics that told a complex story. 3. and, a whole petrology course assembled together in the grains and pebbles of the gravel, not to mention the fossils in these pebbles. Similarly, Prof. Durrell’s courses in glacial geology, geomorphology, and physiography opened new worlds to me. In fact, my own teaching today is modelled after Prof. Durrell ‘s courses.

Of course it was his explanation of the thick, moving masses of ice that ground their way across N. America to Cincinnati and beyond that interested me most.

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James Teller (continued) The crystalization of a magma seemed pretty straightforward to me at that time (little did I know), and the bending of strata, marine sedimentation and even continental drift, while fascinating, were pretty slow processes. But the complete re-sculpturing of millions of square miles of North America, and Europe, and Asia, and Antarctica - in “only” a few hundred thousand years - was pretty heady stuff.

And, I could see the effects of all this in my own backyard. I think it was slides of Alpine glaciers, and those in Iceland and elsewhere, combined with Prof. Durrell ‘s first-hand experience in these icy locales, that excited me most. It was almost as if he was an on-the-scene reporter, telling us about the glacial event - about the process of reshaping the continent, as it happened. His enthusiasm for geology and for nature went beyond the classroom. He felt that every moment could be used to learn about the world around us. He taught me that understanding was a new key to enjoyment.

And yes, even though I first thought it was impossible, I learned how to identify rocks in roadcuts “while driving by at 50 mph”. 4. Nothing goes unnoticed by Richard. I remember going into the field with him as an undergraduate. My head was constantly twisting and turning as rocks and sediments and landforms were described and interpreted, while simultaneously he made observations about clouds, and soils, birds and flowers, and farmhouse designs. It soon became apparent to me that there was a lot going on around me that had been missing.

Richard Durrell has been more than an outstanding teacher - for which he deservedly won the Neil Miner Award for excellence in teaching given by the National Assoc. of Geology Teachers - more than a conservationist - for which he has been honored on many occasions.

Yes, Richard Durrell ‘s influence went much further. His passion for living life to the fullest probably has had as much influence on me as anything else. In this regard he has been a friend and a counselor.

I remember as an undergraduate being in a quandary about whether I should run for President of the Campus YMCA, about adding another responsibility to what I then felt was an already busy schedule. “Do you want to do it?” he asked. “If so, then you can. Get up a little earlier, don’t take so long at lunch. Live life to the fullest; be confident and accomplish everything

you can.” Well, I took his advice. And, because I became president of the Y, was in charge of many of the activities at the 1961 Y Freshman Camp, where I first met the girl I married. It 5. Had it not been for holding this “prominent” position, so my wife Kathy tells me, she probably wouldn’t have looked twice at me.

And, if this contribution to my domestic life wasn’t enough, a few years later Richard and Lucille, who had been off on one of their many trips, brought back a Pipestone “fertility turtle” from a trip to Minnesota and gave it to Kathy and me. Stephen was born about a year later, Melissa a couple of years after that, and since then we’ve hidden it in our basement. was Professor Durrell that kept in touch with me while I was in the oil industry, and who persuaded me to leave that comfortable 1ife to return to U.C. for my Ph.D. so I could go into teaching - which he knew had always talked of doing.

And, although I don’t know for certain, I suspect it was his behind-the-scenes work that helped in acquiring funding for research, both during my student years and after. Through his devotion to teaching he persuaded many others to take up geology as a profession, and the long list of successful graduates from the Department during Prof. Durrell’s years of teaching Intro Geology attest to this. It is one thing to teach, it is another to make it come alive to young people enough to make them choose a career in an area that is usually unfamiliar to them when they enter college.

Perhaps because he saw in the study of geology more than the traditional components outlined in the textbooks - the subtleties, the interrelationships with other parts of science and nature, as well as with people - his kaleidoscope of words and pictures made the world a new and fascinating place. 6. He opened doors for all who sat in his courses. He led us along the path of discovery, pointing to the beauties and the mysteries of the earth. He asked us to look, to see, to understand, and to question.

To Professor Richard Durrell - my guide on this journey - geologist, naturalist, and teacher extraordinaire, my friend and mentor, I say thanks for showing me the world and how to enjoy it to the fullest. q

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Jack Wunder (BA ‘70, MS ’79)

Susan Eriksson (ATT ’75)

Hi Warren,

Dear Warren,

I hope all is well with you. I am still working as a geologist for the U.S. Department of the Interior on oil and gas projects in Montana and the Dakotas after retiring from Phillips Petroleum Co. many years ago when it merged with Conoco. My wife, who I met when I lived in Norway during the 1980’s, and I enjoy an active outdoor lifestyle in Montana, where we wake up every morning to a view of the snowcapped Beartooth Mountains. Last summer we spent some time hiking in Alaska and in the Yukon, Canada. We had so much fun in the far north last year that we are again going back to Alaska on vacation this coming summer.

I am with Chris Atchison and Ivan Carabajal on a field trip in Arizona. We visited meteor crater, which I last visited on the field trip led by Dr. Larsen in 1974!

Funny, eh? q

Best wishes to you, and to the former and current members of the Geology Department. q

Philip Clymer (BS ’75) Warren I kind of slid into retirement three years ago. The East Texas oil industry had taken a strong nosedive some time before that. My last two years of working was on West Texas projects for Tyler-based companies. After a dry period in 2013 I discovered that I was eligible for Social Security so I signed up thinking I could always un-retire if the work situation improved. I gradually accepted the job title “retired”, and the recent downturn in oil prices makes me very glad I’m no longer part of it.

I made a couple of ill-timed career moves over the years. I did computer consulting for a while, doing data base management, computer mapping, etc. but hit the high-tech bust and the IT managers who were giving me work gave it instead to their IT buds that got cut from other jobs. Also I tried environmental for a short time, but the lesson I learned there was don’t ever go to work for anyone whose nickname is Psycho Bob. I spend my time now playing guitar, building wooden things out of the scrap wood accumulation in my garage, and reading all the classic books I never got around to previously. Along this path I have discovered many gems by authors such as G.K. Chesterton, Anna Green, Mary Rinehart, and a host of others. I wore out my first Kindle and recently bought a new one that has a camera function on it. Thus I enter the 21st century... q

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Raman Singh (MS ’66, PhD ’71) (Editor’s note: The following article appeared in the May 2016 issue of AGI’s Quarterly Donor Newsletter AGImpact)

Dr. Raman Singh: “Make Earth Science Week A Household Name” I have been very happy for many, many years to have supported Earth Science Week. Now retired, but having taught geology for 26+ years (mostly at Northern Kentucky University) I felt that Earth sciences education should start long before most of our students start taking geology courses at colleges/ universities. AGl’s foresight in initiating the annual Earth Science Week on a national scale was a good invitation for my support. Active participation by geology/Earth sciences departments at colleges, universities, and museums will encourage even more participation by local schools. The path of discovery using school class-room activities rather than only information transfer is what I like in the design of Earth Science Week. This is well suited for these students to start comprehending the importance of geologic time, breaks in the rocks record and that fossils were ancient organisms, and even more importantly, how these ideas slowly developed over long periods. A recent poster on Earth’s Connected Systems is definitely addressing this methodology.

With the discovery of the sea floor spreading and reevaluations in evolutionary tempos in the early 1960s to the continuing developments in planetary geology, it would be hard to find more appropriate ‘gifts’ to a scientific discipline. With these vehicles we wish you continuing success in making the Earth Science Week a household name! q

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Tim Carter (BS ‘74) It’s hard to believe it’s been forty-two years since I walked out of Old Tech for the last time, but it’s true.

I have many fond memories of my time at UC and I’ve recently begun to curate them using electrons. My first passage was about the legendary Dr. Ken Caster. You can read about it here: http://go.timcarter.com/kencaster You may find this hard to believe, but I was given an assistantship back in 1974 to get a Master’s degree in Engineering Geology, but I gave it back to Dr. Fleming. I told him I was starting my own residential construction business.

True to my word, I started to flip houses three months after graduation and before long I was building custom homes in Cincinnati, OH. My geology degree came in very handy. I was the only builder using soil maps to make sure I knew what I was building on and the basements I built were bone-dry because of my fortuitous education in hydrogeology! It helps to pay attention in class.

Fast forward twenty years from graduation day and I was selected as one of the top 50 remodeling contractors in the USA. A few years prior to this I realized if I continued to wear a tool belt and carry around heavy pieces of lumber, etc. each day I’d be crippled by the time I was 60.

I had always wanted to write a book about how homeowners like you are often taken to the cleaners by dishonest or poorly trained builders. Two months after receiving the award, my wife suggested I take the book idea and turn it into a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Ask the Builder appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer for the first time in October, 1993.

Soon after starting it I realized most writers make little money. The publishers are the ones raking in the sweet moola. I saw the Internet for the first time in September of 1995, and instantly saw I could be a publisher for $1 a day, the cost of hosting a website at that time. I launched AsktheBuilder. com six weeks later and it’s my flagship occupation as I still add content each week as well as how-to videos.

wonders of oxygen bleach. Over twenty years ago while writing a column about cleaning wood decks I became aware of this miracle product. Within six months, Kathy and I had started a small cottage business called www.StainSolver.com. We still sell lots of it each week.

Geology is alive and well in New Hampshire. My house rests on the Meredith Porphyritic Granite often referred to as the Kinsman Granite. It’s considered one of the most beautiful rocks in all of New England with it’s massive feldspar phenocrysts and frequent inclusions of gorgeous mica.

The last period of Continental glaciation left it’s telltale evidence all around me as well. When I go hiking while doing outdoor ham radio I often see bedrock with glacial striations.

Look at a terrain map of central New Hampshire on Google Maps and you can clearly see how the grinding glacier plucked off rocks from the southeast-facing mountain faces after gliding up the lower-slope northwest-facing mountain sides. Each day when I drive back from downtown Meredith, NH, I get to see this classic striking profile when I look at the northeast face of Mt. Ladd.

My latest project is an expose’ book where I reveal why your asphalt shingle roof is failing long before it should. While writing the book I was the first person in the world to discover how to use a very common material to prevent asphalt shingle deterioration. Who would think at age 63 I’d finally own a patent, but it’s true!

I’m hoping to retire next year. My goal is to do more amateur outdoor radio, travel to see my kids and help Kathy with anything she wants me to do.

I want to take this rare opportunity to thank Dr. Huff for allowing me to share this story with you and I wish to thank all current and past faculty for their vocation. Your work has allowed me to help grow my businesses and enjoy much of what I see on a daily basis here in NH with so much bedrock exposed above the ground. Please come up and visit. q

I’m still married to my high school sweetheart Kathy. We have three grown children and we live in central New Hampshire on the shore of Lake Winnisquam. I often marvel at the gorgeous sunrises I’m blessed to see and have included one of the more spectacular ones.

My research while writing the many home improvement columns allowed me to discover the

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Michael Lewan (PhD ’80) The December 2015 edition of the AAPG Explorer announced that the 2016 Robert R. Berg Outstanding Research Award would be presented to Michael D. Lewan, U.S. Geological Survey, Golden,

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Colo., in honor of his singular achievement in petroleum geoscience research and for his pioneering role and expertise in petroleum geochemistry. Congratulations Mike!! q

Jim Harrell (PhD ‘83) I am now in my seventh year of semi-retirement. Although I no longer teach at the University of Toledo, I continue to work there almost daily on my archaeological geology research. In the past couple of years I have made four research trips to Egypt for fieldwork on several projects: the ancient gold mines and associated forts in the Nubian Desert, the ancient Gebel el-Silsila sandstone quarry in Upper Egypt, the Middle Kingdom Recent Publications Harrell, J. A. and P. Storemyr. 2013 (published in 2015). Limestone and sandstone quarrying in ancient Egypt: tools, methods, and analogues. Marmora – An International Journal for Archaeology, History and Archaeometry of Marbles and Stones, v. 9, p.

19-43.

Harrell, J. A. 2014. Discovery of the Red Sea source of Topazos (ancient gem peridot) on Zabargad Island, Egypt. In L. Thoresen (ed.), Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Sinkankas Symposium – Peridot and Uncommon Green Gem Minerals (April 5, 2014), p. 16-30. Fallbrook: Pala International.

(1975-1750 BC) sandstone temples in the Nile Valley, the ancient limestone and gypsum quarries at Tell elAmarna in Middle Egypt, and the chalcedony-bearing Nile River gravels near Cairo. When not in Toledo or Egypt doing research, I spend time on the family farm near Brownsville, TN. q

Thoresen, L. and J. A. Harrell. 2014. Archaeogemology of peridot. In L. Thoresen (ed.), Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Sinkankas Symposium – Peridot and Uncommon Green Gem Minerals (April 5, 2014), p. 31-51.

Fallbrook: Pala International.

Bloxam, E., J. Harrell, A. Kelany, N. Moloney, A. el-Senussi and A. Tohamey. 2014. Investigating the Predynastic origins of greywacke working in the Wadi Hammamat. Archéo-Nil – Revue de la Société pour l’Étude des Cultures Prépharaoniques de la Vallée du Nil, n. 24, p.

11-30.

Harrell, J. A. 2014. Report on geological prospection in the vicinity of Amarna. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, v. 100, p. 25-33.

Harrell, J. A. and R. E. Mittelstaedt. 2015. New-s ly discovered Middle Kingdom forts in Lower Nubia. Sudan & Nubia, n. 19, p. 30-39.

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Michael Trippi (MS ’86)

Dana Ulmer-Scholle (BS ’81)

Editor’s note: Mike has been with the USGS for a number of years and he and his colleagues Robert Ryder and Christopher Swezey have just published USGS Scientific Investigations Map 3343, Geologic Cross Section I-I’ Through the Appalachian Basin From the Eastern Margin of the Illinois Basin, Jefferson County, Kentucky, to the Valley and Ridge Province, Scott County, Virginia. q

AAPG Award for ScholleBook

Dale Kramer (BS ’85) Greetings Professor Huff and All: I am retired due to disability since year 2003. I fish and travel. I have travelled the last three years in Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu and Samoa. I am hopelessly addicted to South Pacific culture and geology.

Last year, whilst travelling Tonga; shear geo-coincidence collided with me. I geo-bumped into Professor William Dickinson (Bill).

Bill was assisting with lapita petrography research on Nukualofa Island.

We visited for two nights with wonderful geo-musings over the evolution of Plate Tectonics from theory to paradigm.

We discussed: 1. Bills’ development of QRfF etc. Petrographic tectonic regime ternary plots.

2. Professor Paul Edwin Potters’ Sand Studies circumventing South America viz. South America and a Few Grains of Sand.

3. The book, “The New View of The Earth” (Seiya Uyeda,1972).

4. And more.

The early morning of the third day we discovered Bill deceased. He had departed Earth in his sleep.

Bill was laid to rest in the Tongan Village Nukuleka, Nukualofa. His was a traditional Tongan Burial. Most relevant is the fact that Bill conducted his Petrography on Provenance of Lapita at Nukuleka in 1970. Bill determined then that Nukuleka was the first landing of Tongans to Tonga (2000 BC) . All I can think to say is, “Full Circle.” q

Drs. Dana Ulmer-Scholle (Research Professor at NM Tech) and Peter Scholle (Emeritus Director of the Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources) were the lead authors on a recently completed book—A Color Guide to the Petrography of Sandstones, Siltstones, Shales, andAssociated Rocks. Published by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) as Memoir 109, the 540-page, full-color, hardbound book is designed to help students, instructors and industry professionals with the microscopicstudy of siliciclastic rocks and associated deposits (cherts, evaporites, and others). It contains over 1,100 light microscope andscanning electron microscope images ofgrains, textures, and structures of clastic terrigenous rocks as well as their diagenetic alteration (compaction, cementation, dissolution, and replacement) and porosity reduction or enhancement. In addition, full-color diagrams, an extensive glossary, index, foldout birefringence chart, and an included DVD with Powerpoint files of all of the petrographic images provide additional information for both novices and experienced practitioners.

The volume also provides classification diagrams for accurate description of sedimentary rocks and their porosities. Perhaps most importantly, the book, through its extensive picture captions, emphasizes paragenesis, the sequencing of events in the post-deposition history of sedimentaryrocks. The ability to distinguish the relative timing of compaction, dissolution, cementation, and deformation events is critically important in petroleum and mineralsexploration (and in general geologic investigationsas well), and petrography is arguablythe most important tool to accomplishsuch studies, especially when used inconjunction with a variety of radiometricdating and thermal history analysis tools.

Although most of the examples within the book are from the United States and Puerto Rico (New Mexico samples, like the cover art, are common throughout the book), there are also photographs of samples from 32 other countries. q

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Margaret Zeigler (MS ’92) Editor’s note: Margaret is currently the Executive Director of Global Harvest Initiative (http://www.globalharvestinitiative. org). The following comes from their 2015 Annual Report:

BUILDING SUSTAINABLE BREADBASKETS Declaring that eradicating poverty and hunger is both the “greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development,” United Nations member states in September 2015 adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), an ambitious agenda to end hunger and poverty once and for all by 2030. The SDGs are designed to protect the planet, to preserve natural resources and to create the conditions necessary for sustainable and inclusive economic growth and prosperity. The Global Harvest Initiative (GHI) applauds and supports this cooperative effort of governments, multilateral institutions and civil society. In the spirit of the SDGs, the Global Harvest Initiative is delighted to present our 2015 Global Agricultural Productivity Report (GAP Report): Building Sustainable Breadbaskets. A vibrant agriculture and food sector is a powerful foundation for broad-based, inclusive economic growth and development, creating multiplier effects throughout the entire economy. In addition to those employed directly in agriculture and food production, manufacturing, marketing and sales, there are many others who provide training, financial services, energy, technology, equipment and transportation, adding value to and creating jobs in all economic sectors. With the right policies, innovations and knowledge-based practices, agriculture systems provide sufficient, nutritious and affordable food, conserve natural resources, raise people out of poverty, empower women and

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girls and generate sustainable economic growth across a variety of industries. Scientific and technological advancements improve productivity, reduce the environmental footprint of food production and help mitigate its contribution to climate change. Our 2015 GAP Report highlights the impressive legacy of the United States’ conservation agriculture system, which was built in the wake of the 1930s Dust Bowl crisis and created a vibrant agricultural economy and abundant food supply. It demonstrates that threats can be overcome, but continued commitment and investment are necessary to generate new innovations to conserve soil, water and other precious natural resources, assuring that we are maintaining a sustainable breadbasket for tomorrow’s challenges.

The report also shines a spotlight on Zambia, a country that is diversifying its agricultural production systems and building its capacity to become a regional breadbasket in southern Africa. Tackling global hunger and ensuring future generations have access to sufficient affordable and nutritious food in the face of population growth and climate change requires immediate attention from public and private sectors alike. Together we must create food and agriculture systems that incorporate transparency, best practices of productivity, conservation, animal well-being and responsible stewardship, from farmer to consumer, building resilience at every step of the value chain. This should be our shared vision of agriculture; we should settle for nothing less. q Dr. Margaret M. Zeigler Executive Director Global Harvest Initiative

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Terry Acomb (BS ’93, MS ’97)

Richard (Rich) Schultz (PhD ’91)

Hi Warren,

Hi Warren,

Things are great here in Fruita (CO). I had a vertebrae decompression fusion surgery (fused C6 and C7 like Peyton Manning) at Vail last summer due to a painful pinched nerve in my neck. It has worked out more than great I was rock climbing again by October. Thank goodness for modern orthopedic surgery I feel quite fortunate. Incidentally, Fruita has just been named one of America’s “coolest” towns http://matadornetwork.com/trips/americas20-coolest-towns-outdoor-adventure/. q

I’ve accepted a position as Associated Dean of Distributed Learning at North Park University in the northern portion of Chicago. I’m in charge of online and hybrid courses at the university as well as faculty development ventures and professional development for technology training of faculty. I hope to be able to make a vast improvement in the way alternative courses are delivered from North Park in the future.

Shaun Becker (BS ’08)

John Alten (BS ’02)

Warren, I’m now a project manager at AECOM (URS was bought

by AECOM) and am pretty busy here. I’ve also acquired the position of quality manager for the Cincinnati office.

Major projects include CCR unit hydrogeological characterization and monitoring well network design for a major utility company. Past experience includes extensive geotechnical field investigations for CCR landfill development and stability analysis investigation at hydroelectric dams in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Kentucky. The dams projects were an extremely interesting 6 months of field work (at three dams).

Other projects include post closure monitoring of hydrogeologic conditions for landfills and solid waste management units for RCRA compliance.

Otherwise, I’m just busy being a dad to three daughters (two step-daughters ages 15 and 10, one 18 month old) and trying to play guitar in two new bands. q

I trust all is well with the Geology Department at UC and fondly remember my time there back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Please give everyone my warmest regards. q

I am one of several UC geology department alumni working for a large consulting and engineering firm’s Cincinnati office. Among our many routine environmental due diligence and compliance tasks, we have been busily engaged helping our clients comply with new federal mandates pertaining to environmental conditions at power plants, specifically coal plants. See EPA CCR (coal combustion residuals) link: https://www.epa.gov/ coalash/coal-ash-rule. EPA finalized national regulations to provide a comprehensive set of requirements for the safe disposal of coal combustion residuals (CCRs).

Other mandates include enhancements in groundwater monitoring systems near CCR impoundments. Lots of drilling, hydro-testing and groundwater sampling - so we are busy. Through these processes, all of us, new folks and seasoned veterans alike, are continuously learning more about pertinent environmental issues. Learning new things is always a plus (sure you agree) and it makes our jobs satisfying and interesting.

I send greetings to all my classmates and wish you good luck in all your endeavors. q

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Joanne Ballard (MS ’09)

Katie Glover (MS ’04)

Hi Warren,

Thanks, Warren. As for an update, I’m in the last year of my PhD in Geography at UCLA. I have used lake cores from the San Bernardino Mountains to reconstruct a 100,000-year paleoclimatic history for the mountains around L.A. Results show that southern California has been subject to dramatic precipitation changes in the past, with some droughts lasting thousands of years, and very sudden, episodic influxes of precipitation.

Here is an update on what I am doing: I graduated from the University of Tennessee in August 2015 with a PhD in Geography. I was advised

by Sally P. Horn and my specializations are Quaternary environments and Biogeography. One paper from my dissertation has been accepted for publication in the journal Palynology. It is entitled, A 23,000-year microscopic charcoal record from Anderson Pond, Tennessee, USA. Fire history was reconstructed from the original Hazel Delcourt pollen slides. Sally Horn and Zheng-Hua Li are co-authors.

Here is a picture from fieldwork a few years ago, on Sugarloaf Mountain (in the San Bernardino Mountains). We were looking for evidence of glaciation, and believe this part of the range could have supported small rock glaciers. q

Two upcoming papers will deal with past fire histories of 3 other southeastern sites (Jackson Pond, KY; Cahaba Pond, AL; and Pigeon Marsh, GA), and a new proxy for fire found in late glacial lake sediments.

I attended the inaugural Drilling and Coring Summer Institute in August 2015, led by Amy Myrbo at the Limnological Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Twelve participants from around the world had a great time gaining hands-on experience with multiple types of lake coring devices, including freeze-coring. Lab work included interpreting smear slides and learning to use Bacon software. Participants toured the chain of lakes by bicycle.

Since January, I have been teaching geology classes at Pellissippi State Technical Community College, Knoxville with Kathleen Affholter, and working on a database and mapping project for a group of archaeologists at TVA, led by Edward Wells III. q Thanks! Joanne

D

o you have any recollections of field trips, social events, classroom experiences or other experiences during your UC days that you would like to share with your alumni colleagues?

Send them to Warren Huff, email: WARREN.HUFF@UC.EDU or Dept. of Geology, UC, Cincinnati, OH 45221 and we’ll include them in next years’ issue.

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Katherine (Kate) Bulinski (PhD ’08)

Sarah Derouin (PhD ’08)

Hi Warren,

Hi Warren,

Hope all is well! Everything is moving along here at Bellarmine University. We have more environmental science majors than ever and have plans for a new lab facility that is scheduled to be finished in time for the fall semester. Life has been very hectic and fun lately as I’ve had the opportunity to travel a lot in the last few years, taking students to India, Guatemala and Peru. I also went on a vacation to Thailand with my husband (...where I was attacked by monkeys while checking out the local geology! Rabies vaccinations are expensive…). Across the river from Louisville, the Falls of the Ohio State Park opened its newly renovated interpretive center this January and it is a great improvement over the original exhibits. I was asked to be featured in the “What does a Paleontologist Do” part of the exhibit, so now there is a life-sized picture of me on display, and it is a source of endless amusement for my students. I also was asked to be a part of the Bearded Lady Project http:// thebeardedladyproject.com/keeping-it-local-with-apaleontologist-in-louisville/, which features women in paleontology, and my portrait is scheduled to be unveiled at GSA this fall. Last year I was elected to serve as a Councilor for the Paleontological Society.

My term happens to coincide with Arnie Miller’s tenure as President of the society, and Brenda Hunda is also serving as co-editor of the Journal of Paleontology, so Cincinnati paleontology currently has a healthy presence within the society. q Cheers, Kate

Always so lovely to hear from you. I hope you are doing well and things in Cincinnati are great!

The last year has been exciting for us-- I quit my job with the Bureau of Reclamation and my husband Matt and I moved to California for his new job at Netflix. He’s loving his work and I have enjoyed taking a few months off and getting to know California.

I’ve been writing a fair bit and have discovered my love for science communication. I applied to the Science Communication program at UC Santa Cruz and was accepted to the fall 2016-17 cohort. I am thrilled to start this new adventure and be a part of such an amazing group of communicators. If you’re at AGU this fall, please let me know-- I’ll be there reporting!

Again, wonderful to hear from you. Take good care and hope to see you this fall! q Best, Sarah

Bradley Deline (MS ’06, PhD ’09) I am currently living in Carrollton, Georgia working at the University of West Georgia. Last year, I received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor. I am teaching classes in Dinosaurs and Paleontology. I take my paleontology students on yearly field trips to Lake Cumberland visiting many of the localities that I originally visited with Dave Meyer. I am still working on Paleozoic Crinoids including exploring how taphonomy alters the characterization of morphology along with fellow UC alum James Thomka and describing a new crinoid fauna from the Ordovician of Sardinia. My wife Stacy has been focusing on her artwork and we have been happy and active in our small local community. q

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Justin Stroup (MS ’09) Hello Warren, This year has been jam-packed and full of surprises. I completed my PhD at Dartmouth College this fall having studied the Holocene fluctuations of Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru. I wish I had a good story about fieldwork this year but the truth is I have spent most of my time in front of the computer trying to finish my dissertation. I’m sure many people can identify with that eventuality. Tom Lowell has been instrumental in my dissertation work and we recently published a paper together in the Journal of Quaternary Science entitled “Late Holocene fluctuations of Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru, registered by nearby lake sediments”. Tom and I continue to work together and we plan to publish some more papers in the future.

Since finishing up at Dartmouth, I moved to Boston with my wife Caroline. She is in her second year of residency as

Alex Reis (BS ’15) Hello Dr. Huff, I have been working as a staff geologist with AECOM since the end of September working on environmental cleanup sites. I have been a part of work on 2 superfund sites, I took part in oversight of the cleanup at the Peter’s Cartridge site in Kings Mills and I am part of a team working on a remediation project the Conrail Superfund Site in Elkhart, Indiana. I have been involved in a few other sites as well, with groundwater sampling, but those two sites are the most notable.

All is well with me, I hope all is well with you. q Thanks, Alex

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an OB/GYN at Tufts medical center in downtown Boston. I have been lucky to find a job as an assistant instructor at Tufts University nearby. I am really enjoying the opportunity to teach and also the chance to learn some Boston area geology, especially the glacial history. While the geology is different from Cincinnati one of the similarities is the excitement of learning about a new area.

This reminds me of some of the first trips I took when I moved to Cincinnati to start my masters with Tom about 8 years ago. The truth is so many of the skills I learned during my masters continue to benefit me today and I am so grateful to be part of the UC family. q Best, Justin

Rajarshi Dasgupta (MS ’14) Hello Dr. Huff, How are you? Over the past year, I have been continuing to work as a content writer, a job that is not at all related to the earth sciences, but allows me to brush up my creative writing skills. While I enjoy the financial freedom, I miss the challenges of academia and especially the rigour of grad school in the US. So I am looking forward to returning to academia as soon as I can.

Hope all is well at UC Geology. q Sincerely, Rajarshi Dasgupta

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Michael Oestreich (BA ’11) M i k e ’ s M e a n d e r s : K e n i lw o r t h , U ta h Nestled on the rim of a bowlshaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s famous Book Cliffs lies the quiet old town of Kenilworth. Five miles up the canyon from Helper, a winding two-lane road passes a cluster of houses and ends in a dusty overgrown baseball field. An idle walking beam oil pump stands at its center.

This is the heart of Castle Country, so named for the towering spires and rampart-like mesas that protrude skyward out of the San Rafael Swell forming the nearly sheer southern face of the Wasatch Range. A low, rolling desert stretches to the south, hosting the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry and a simulated Mars research station. To the north, a traveler driving through the narrow slot in the cliffs known as Castle Gate can continue up to 7,440ft Soldier Summit before winding slowly back down to the Great Salt Lake Valley.

It is when passing through the massive cliffs of the Cretaceous Price River Formation at Castle Gate that one realizes something else besides the spectacular vistas brought others long before to the region: bands of black gold lie in between the thick cyclical sandstone and shale deposits of the cliff face. Coal was first mined commercially in eastern Utah in 1875 near the present-day site of Scofield Reservoir.

When the Denver and Rio Grade Western Railroad decided to change its course of construction to access the isolated coalfields in 1883, the area boomed. As was typical of burgeoning late 19th-Century United States, immigrants of many nationalities arrived on the railroad and settled in the boomtowns alongside native-born American fortune-seekers. Helper, UT, named for the extra “helper” locomotives needed to get trains over steep Soldier Summit, quickly became a hub of the mining region with so many different languages spoken there it earned the ketchup-derived nickname “Town of 57 Varieties” (although records indicate only 27 languages were spoken).

and wandered into the steep ravines east of Helper, pursued by their owner Heber Stowell. As lucrative as the coal business was at the time, within two years the Independent Coal and Coke Co. was formed to work Stowell’s original claims.

A company town sprang up in the forbidding high valley (6,800ft elevation), built by the IC&C, and soon two separate railroads were laid up the canyon to serve the three loading tipples operating at the cliff bases. English immigrants working under the towering cliffs were reminded of Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, England, and so named the company town which celebrates its 110th birthday in 2016. Though less than 200 people live there now, Kenilworth once boasted 1,050 inhabitants at its peak in 1947, many of whom were of Greek or Italian descent.

Mining primarily in the bituminous Castle Gate D coal seam, IC&C was faced with a significant engineering problem of bringing cut coal from the mine at close to 7,500ft elevation down some 700 vertical feet to the tipple where the product was sorted by size and loaded into railroad cars. In addition to the elevation difference, the upper mine portal was located on a small bench on top of a sheer cliff hundreds of feet high, and it was not directly above Kenilworth; rather, it was in a side canyon almost a mile distant. Nonetheless, the 22ft-thick Castle Gate D seam was the most profitable coal to mine in the district so the company endeavored to build a very unusual inclined plane tramway to move coal, supplies, and workers.

Coal in nearby Kenilworth was discovered in 1904 in the storytale fashion of the Old West: by men in search of wayward pack animals. Horses, in this case, had escaped

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Michael Oestreich Continued In a map view, the mine tramway resembled a lazy “S” shape nearly a mile long. It snaked right across the cliff face along a very narrow bench that had just enough room for mine cars with a 300ft drop on one side and an unstable vertical sandstonecapped shale face on the other rising at least another 100ft above the track. In some cases a rock retaining wall was built on a bouldery sandstone outcrop to support the track above when there was no bench.

If this wasn’t enough, the last part of the tramway was a 1200ft long straight incline that dropped almost 700ft on a 60% ruling grade. A single steel cable that ran the entire length of the track from the mine, around the long S-curve, and to the tipple, lowered multiple-car trains of coal down the mountain and pulled workers and supplies back up. The cable was kept from stringlining at the curves by horizontal sheave wheels arranged in an arc next to the tracks, all placed at just the right angles so the cable would settle into them after the train passed.

Without the sheave wheels, a stringlined cable would pull the mine cars off the track and send them down the ravine the hard way. One wonders what kind of communication was available between the hoist operator and the workers riding the tramway when there was no direct line of sight from the hoistman to his charge.

I hiked up from Kenilworth to the mine portal in September, 2014, intrigued by what might have been left behind after the mine closed in 1970, and by a distant connection to my hometown. Towards the end of the mine’s life, coal from its seam was used by the Indiana & Michigan Power Co. which operated the Tanner’s Creek generating station near Cincinnati. Once I arrived at the top of the 30-degree incline--quite out of breath--I found that the traverse across the cliff face to the second bend of the “S” was impassable without mountaineering gear.

The retaining walls had washed out, leaving rails hanging in mid-air, and what was left of the roadbed was buried under soft, wet shale talus cones. Ever in pursuit of efficiency, the mining company dug a mile-long tunnel in 1959 to connect the Kenilworth mine underground to the north side of the mountain where another loadout existed.

The new haulage tunnel rendered the tramway obsolete, so the latter likely fell out of use around 1960 and began to decay.

My only recourse to continue the adventure was to climb up and over the washedout tramway sections via more stable ground. Upon reaching the mine I found it to be well sealed with a concrete wall across the wide portal though the coal seam was easily 7ft thick in outcrop. Two giant ventilation fans rest next to the portal along with the ruins of several small buildings. The majority of the metal had been scrapped, though a lot of torch-cut pieces were left behind indicating a sudden interruption of the work. Perhaps the tramway was put out of commission by a fallen boulder during the scrapping process, leaving no means to access the site. Whatever the reason, the fans and a pile of scrap metal are all that remain of a unique engineering feat of American coal mining.

Kenilworth as a mining town passed into history in the 1970’s when reclamation workers removed the great tipple and all other mining company buildings. The plot of land where the tipple once stood became a baseball field, though as the town’s population dwindled the ballpark also succumbed. An oil company had purchased most of the coal lands around Kenilworth and set up pumpjacks on many of the former mining properties, including in the center of the old ball field. Today, the early 20th-Century boomtown is beginning a revival as new residents seek to enjoy the breathtaking desert scenery that opens away to the south. Kenilworth’s cliff top mine certainly has one of the best views I have ever seen from a coalmine portal. q Editor’s Note: Mike has also been featured in a TV program about this historic Golden Spike locality at Promontory Point, Utah. You can see it at: http://video.kued.org/video/2365729668/

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Daniel List (BS ’13) Hi Dr. Huff!

I’ve had a fantastic year full of new experiences and opportunities. I was able to land a job working offshore as a mud logger with the oil field services company Schlumberger. While placed in the center of the drilling action in the gulf I served as a first line of safety to the rig by monitoring well conditions and identifying hazardous situations. I was also responsible for examining and describing rock samples used in determining the operation’s position in the strata and distance from the pay zone. Working offshore provides a great combination of time off and money, perfect for anyone who loves to travel. I was able to fly myself to London for two weeks in December to experience the Christmas festivities being held. Not long into the new year I found myself among the many oil field workers to be laid off when the price of oil dipped under $30 a barrel. Since then I’ve joined a programming boot camp where I will try my hand at web development! q

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Molly Southwood (BS ’13) (Editor’s note: Molly works as a jeweler at Signet)

Thanks, Dr. Huff. So far it has proved to be an interesting career path. Signet’s acquisition of Zales meant that the company needed more jewelers. I was lucky enough to get accelerated training to advance to C level in such a short time. My background in mineralogy has been helpful, especially when gemstones for custom work come into the shop. I enjoy refurbishing jewelry, I see it as a good blend of art and geology. q

Adam Leu (BS ’11) Hello Warren, It’s good to hear from you.

After graduating from UC in 2011 I attended the Precambrian Research Center (PRC) Field camp in northeastern Minnesota. We focused our studies on the North Shore Volcanic Group (NSVG), the Duluth Complex, and Biwabik Iron Formation. Two weeks after my return from field camp, the main professor, Jim Miller called me up and asked if I would be his graduate student in the upcoming year, 2013, at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). I happily accepted! I moved up to Duluth, MN and underwent a mapping project in the Layered Series of the Duluth Complex mapping and studying a discrete, unique, and only partially mapped layered mafic intrusion; the Wilder Lake Intrusion.

Unique attributes of this intrusion include, but are not limited to a reversed cryptic variation up section (Mg# in Ol and Cpx), the arrival of Fe-Ti oxides prior to clinopyroxene, and an upper cumulate reversal where a 4-phased cumulate gabbro sits below a 2-phase cumulate troctolite. My thesis defense is set for May 26th of 2016. There were a few delays involved, but I am glad to finally be finishing it up. While I was waiting for edits to come through, in 2014 I worked in Northern Saskatchewan as a contract geologist for Rio Tinto working on their Rough Rider Uranium Project. These sites are located in the eastern portion of the Athabasca Basin

where several hundred meters of sandstone sit atop Pelitic rocks, granitic gneiss and garnetite bedrock. The Uranium typically is found in discrete pods along structural boundaries at the contact between the sandstone and bedrock, and is typically found as Pitchblende. After the summer season I worked for a small exploration company based out of the twin cities on a frack sand/sandstone mapping project in WI, MN, and Northern Iowa. The following summer I got married to my beautiful wife Karen, and started a temporary position with the Natural Resources Research Institute - the applied research group for UMD. I was contracted to be the on-site geologist for a MN-DOT project that required a small geotechnical investigation (166 short drill holes ranging from 9 - 86 ft) to make sure the sulfides in the rock would be properly accounted for when the new roadcuts were cut, exposing the sulfides to the atmosphere. This project ran through December of 2015 and I spent a lot of time looking at the iron formation and Archean chlorite schists. I worked directly with the drilling team, Idea Drilling. In January 2016 I went back to Northern Saskatchewan to work with Rio Tinto again. Working on the Henday Uranium prospect, I logged core through March. I am currently looking for summer work and finalizing my thesis and Master’s degree plans. q Kindest Regards, Adam Leu

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Emily Wendler (BS ’10) (Editor’s note: Emily lives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and is a full-time reporter at KOSU Radio. On June 28 she produced the following report on NPR’s All Things Considered.) http://bit.ly/291C20d

Ibrahim Olgun Ugurlu (MS ’15) Since graduation, life has been a lot different. Gone are the graduate school days of freedom.

Now I work set hours, 9-6, Monday through Friday. No longer am I up at 3 am reading papers on porosity between Fifa games on my PS4. Now, the only time I’m awake at 3 in the morning is if nature calls!

I have been working now for about 5 months, which has included many training courses and certifications,

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Ibrahim Olgun Ugurlu (continued) such as the Well Log Interpretation Training Course and IWCF (International Well Control Forum), respectively. I received my first assignment about 2 months into my new position, which was petrographic work for acidization of a well. After successfully completion of the assignment came more training.

Between training sessions, I took 10 days off to introduce Turkey to my American girlfriend. The vacation was amazing; I took her paragliding over the Blue Lagoon, we stayed at a resort in Cyprus, and toured Anitkabir, which is Mustafa Kemel Ataturk’s Mausoleum (it would be like visiting the National Mall in Washington DC). She will be leaving Cincinnati to join me in here Ankara this June.

Other future plans include a trip to Las Vegas in October to attend the AAPG meeting in order to accept an award that I received during my graduate years. Overall, I have been keeping busy and have adjusted to life as a professional. q

Tanya del Valle Wadia (BA ’09, MS ’12) (Editor’s note: Tanya has shared some photos of her recent trip to India) 1st photo- Christmas decorations at a Christian church in old Mumbai. Christmas decorations were quite rare. It is mostly a commercial holiday in Mumbai, but where there were decorations the large star is used frequently instead of Christmas trees. I was in Mumbai for three weeks visiting my husband’s family for the first time. He grew up in Mumbai.

2nd photo- The Gateway of India in Mumbai shot from Sea Deck high tea at the Taj

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Mahal hotel. The Gateway of India is a well-loved monument built by the British to commemorate the landing of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911. It is also the place where the last British soldiers left. The 1903 Taj Mahal hotel is the first hotel built to provide luxury accommodations to Indians after a wealthy Indian J.N Tata was denied entry to a British hotel.

3rd photo- Sunset at Calangute beach. After three weeks in Mumbai, I spent a week at the beach in Goa. It was an interesting beach filled with Russian tourists, swim burqas, and holy Hindu cows. q

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Patrick Cullen (BS ’13)

Michael Perkins (BS ‘15)

This past year has been an interesting one from my point of view in the oil and gas industry. Due to it being in a drastic decline, a lot of fellow geologist in the industry have been laid off and jobs are becoming more and more scarce. This decline has however given me opportunities I would have never had, such as prospecting outside of the Appalachian Basin and being more involved on the business side of things.

I have also accepted admission to graduate school this coming fall along with an assistantship at Miami University, and I am looking forward to pursuing my master’s degree. On a more personal note I am getting married on June 18th this year to the love of my life.

Even with the decline in industry there are plenty of exciting things going on. q

I’m currently working at an outdoor education institute in southern California and am excited for the possibility to work as an interpreter/ park guide this summer for a number of different state/ national parks. I’m also traveling/ backpacking a lot and enjoying the beautiful localities that the west has to offer. q

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Join Us!

oming this fall: The 4-Day Field Trip

When: Thursday, October 13th through Sunday, October 16th.

Where: Southern Illinois, including the fluorspar district of Harden County.

Natashia (Pierce) Metz (MS ’13) I will be celebrating 3 years at CB&I Environmental & Infrastructure, Inc. in September.

I switched over to the Commercial Division this past November and have been taking on more work on commercial projects as well as the federal projects I have been working on. Bryan and I went to Colorado for our honeymoon and had a great time hiking around and staying in mountain cabins the whole time. We stayed in the Estes Park area for half the week and in Colorado Springs area the second half of the week. q

How: Camping at Giant City State Park (where there is a lodge.

What: Upper Paleozoic sed/strat/paleo, Hick’s Dome, geomorphic riddles, fluorite and fluorite collecting, intrusive breccias, New Harmony geohistory.

D o you have any recollections of field trips, social

events, classroom experiences or other experiences during your UC days that you would like to share with your alumni colleagues?

Send them to Warren Huff, email: WARREN.HUFF@ UC.EDU or Dept. of Geology, UC, Cincinnati, OH 45221 and we’ll include them in next years’ issue.

D ear UC G eology A lumni and F riends , The Geological Society of America 2016 Annual Meeting will be held September 25-28, 2016 in Denver, CO. (http://community.geosociety.org/gsa2016/home/). I would like to invite you to attend and to join us for an alumni get-together on Monday, 26 September 2016 from 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM at the Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center, Capitol Ballroom 7.

Hope to see you in Denver, Warren D. Huff warren.huff@uc.edu

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Kelsey Feser ( PhD ‘ 15)

Dating clams to study pollution history on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands

By Stephen Durham The Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) in Ithaca, New York, USA is currently running a campaign to support its new dating laboratory. Before you jump to conclusions, this is not a lab taking the likes of tinder to a new scientific level, it is a lab for gauging the ages of biominerals such as seashells and bones using a technique known as amino acid racemization (AAR) geochronology (for info on how this works see PRI’s project page).

The dating of biominerals and seashells has many applications in research. Fields such as paleontology, tectonics and marine conservation all benefit from accurate dating methods that can help scientists put their samples in temporal context and form a clearer understanding of what has been going on over a period of time.

We spoke with Dr. Kelsey Feser, a paleontologist from Cornell College in Iowa, USA, who is visiting PRI’s AAR lab to date seashells from St Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.

Dr. Feser collected the shells from sediment cores and is using them to investigate the history of seagrass meadows that are threatened by pollution. During her visit to Ithaca, we took the opportunity to ask her a few questions about her research and why AAR dating is an important tool for her project…

How did you collect the seashell samples and what can they tell us about human impacts on the spectacular marine environments of St. Croix?

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I collected the seashells by digging sediment cores while SCUBA diving in shallow seagrass meadows just off the coast. The cores were 40cm deep, and contained all of the sand and seashells that have accumulated on the seafloor for hundreds, or even thousands of years. By picking out the shells of thousands of clams and snails from several depths in the cores we were able to construct a record of how the abundances of these animals have changed over time.

Clams and snails are very sensitive to environmental changes, particularly those imparted by human activity, so through this research we hope to determine whether the population changes we found were caused by nearby sources of pollution.

Human impacts on the coast of St. Croix are not hard to find— Dr. Feser photographed this decaying barge not far from the island’s main power plant.

The sorts of pollution sources that we think could be impacting marine clams and snails in St. Croix include runoff during heavy rains and contamination from a power plant and a large, unregulated dump.

Why is AAR dating important for your research on St. Croix? What do you hope to learn from the data you are collecting at PRI? I’ve been working in St. Croix for six years, and the question that keeps popping up is “how old are these shells?” And it’s not a trivial question. I am interested in the effects of human impacts on populations of ma-

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The clam shells being dated are tiny—smaller than a fingernail!

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rine clams and snails through time, so it is incredibly important to know how recently these population changes took place. If they happened 5,000 years ago, humans were likely not the cause! By sampling in seagrass beds, where a thick root mat anchors the sand and prevents it from getting mixed up by waves, we are hoping to find that the deeper the shells are buried, the older they are.

This would help us better interpret the changes we see in clam and snail populations through our cores. By collecting lots of shell ages throughout a given core, we can answer this question.

Finally, we want to know how long-lived seagrass beds are through time; this is especially pressing given the alarming declines in seagrass meadows around the world.

By combining our knowledge of change in seagrass-indicating mollusks, and the ages represented through the core, we can determine over what timescales seagrass beds have remained stable around St. Croix and hopefully improve our understanding of what the human impacts on these ecosystems have been over time. The results of this research could have important implications for the conservation of other types of marine life that rely on seagrass, such

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as sea turtles.

AAR is the best option for me because I can date far more shells than I could using a more expensive technique like raA sea turtle foraging in seagrass, a habi- diocarbon dattat which, sadly, is in decline worldwide ing, and quantity is crucial for answering these questions What have been the benefits of running your samples at PRI? I was thrilled when I found out PRI was getting an AAR lab! By visiting the PRI lab, I have learned the AAR process first-hand and am processing my own samples. This has provided me with invaluable insight into the steps required to date a shell and has also brought down the cost of sample processing considerably. I also was able to bring along one of my undergraduate students, John Lewis, who is participating in a faculty-student summer research program with me. Neither of us could have gained this “insider’s insight” had we elected to mail our samples to a lab to have them run for us. Additionally, working with PRI researchers like Greg Dietl and Steve Durham has been valuable and hopefully will lead to new collaborations beyond my short stay. q

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A CALL TO ACTION! Your contribution to some or any of the following endowments is greatly appreciated and strengthens the Department of Geology. Gifts enable us to better serve our students, staff and faculty. They help support a wide array of programs and services, including undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships.

E

ndowment

Bucher Walter Fund: All-purpose fund for research and teaching.

$

.00

Fenneman Nevin H. Fund: Supports research and travel.

$

.00

$

.00

$

.00

Support for graduate students in paleontology, including a summer $ fellowship.

.00

Student Sedimentology Research Fund: Support for graduate students in stratigraphy and

Rawlinson George and Frances Fund:

sedimentology.

Graduate fellowships.

Caster Kenneth E. Fund:

Cook Walter and Kathryn H. Scholarship Fund: Used for scholarship awards to under-

graduates, and for field-camp scholarships. $

.00

$

.00

$

.00

Hoholick-Potter International Fieldwork Travel Fund: to be used for international fieldwork. $

.00

Durrell Richard H. and Lucile Fund:

Public education, including outside speakers.

Geology Alumni Graduate Fellowship Fund: To support graduate fellowships.

Klekamp Thomas C. Student Travel Fund: A relatively new fund, to be used for undergraduate $

.00

Larsen Leonard Fund: Instructional field trips.

$

.00

Student Field Experience Fund: Used for field camp, as well as other field experiences of students.

$

.00

$

.00

student travel for research.

Research in Geology Fund: A primary repository for annual gifts. Open for investments of

any sort in research.

For additional assistance making your gift, or for more information, please contact: Shelly Deavy, Associate Director of Development, Kathleen Collins McMicken College of Arts and Sciences 513.556-6435 DEAVYRE@ucmail.uc.edu, COLLINKN@ucmail.uc.edu

Mail checks to: The Department of Geology University f Cincinnati PO Box 210013 Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0013 Geology Office: 513.556.3722

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http://foundation.uc.edu