Upper Crust 2021

“Our three sleeping tents were protected by an electrified bear fence. This is about as dark as it would get at night” - Abby Kelly University of Cincinnati | 3

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04........................Letter from the Department Head 08............................................Dr. Paul Edwin Potter 20............................................ Faculty & Staff News 29.......................................................Save The Date!

36.........................................................Alumni News 37........................................Department of Geology Graduates 2020-2021 41....................................LYRICS TO “SGT. CASTER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND” 49...........................Department of Geology Donors 2020-2021

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[after Chancellorsville, on the march to Gettysburg] “…the solider who would finally get the army through its trials was a profane, weary one with no stars on their shoulders and scant hope of any in their crown, the everlasting high private who was being challenged now, once and for all, to show what kind of person they really were.” – Bruce Catton, The Army of the Potomac: Glory Road Greetings all from what might, just might be our turn away from a year of isolation and anxiety towards one where we live and work with new and better practices, and a renewed sense of collegiality and partnership. I have re-read many of the Friday Field Notes sent out over the past year that document the difficulties and dislocations everyone faced as the pandemic took over. Many of us, truth be told, had aspects of our lives that involved unexpected turns for the worst. We experienced plenty of sadness, worry, frustration, and fury during the past year of turmoil. Family life faced inwards, oftentimes for the better, but not always. Our villages shrunk down to moms and dads. But by now, time and space and the wonder of modern vaccines has put much of this trouble in our rear-view mirrors. I choose to be very cautiously optimistic that the virus will be contained, that our return to campus will be lasting, and that better times lie ahead.

Despite everything, the Department had a very good year. The faculty were tremen-

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dously productive in research, teaching, and service. Along with our graduate students -- typically as first authors -- we published 70 peer-reviewed papers; adding the astonishing 47 papers authored by Tom Algeo and his research team, the total hits 117. Thirteen externally-funded grant proposals were active, and another 22 proposals were submitted to external agencies, including the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Energy, and the ACS’ Petroleum Research Fund. New external funding this past year totaled nearly $1.6M, a record. We taught 35 courses, nearly all of them 100% online, and nearly all of them online for the first time.

The faculty adapted gamely to this mode of teaching as the curtain fell – boom!

--on in-person classes, a tribute to their commitment to the next generation of geoscientists. Our courses were just about as sophisticated as the new technology allowed; zooming in colleagues from across the country to participate regularly in seminars was a notable silver lining. And other activities kept on: advising graduate students, reviewing papers and proposals, serving as editors-in-chief and assistant editors (for Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology, Geology, Quaternary Research, and PALAIOS, for example), and doing the selfless work of doing service for a diverse host of committees, boards, and committees. Graduate students submitted 32 grant proposals last year; 12 of them were funded. I’m fortunate to be serving as chair

for such a creative and hard-working group.

The Department’s staff did their part to keep the gears turning. I don’t say this lightly: they will all tell you that the current Department Chair is not shy about texting and phoning.

Pandemic or no, budgets need constant attention and updating, instruments need repair and modification, safety inspections and inventories don’t stop, students need advising and degree audits, stipends need to be administered, samples processed, equipment and supplies ordered…All the vital things that keep our house in order were done thanks to dedication of Sarah, Mike, Kate, and Krista who all worked under unusual and sometimes difficult conditions. Thank you.

Our students, both undergraduate and graduate, labored under unusual circumstanc-

ment. The faculty focused on how the Department can remain relevant as our planet and society change rapidly. We need to be nimble as climate disruption becomes the norm, the distribution of water around the globe changes (already resulting in significant human migration), the demand for energy continues unabated, and the transition to green technologies leads to tremendous demand for elements across the Periodic Table. Relevant?

Our livable future needs geoscience!

The Department is full of ideas to make our teaching and research more impactful. We plan to teach more quantitatively and more explicitly about climate, water, and all of Earth’s resources. Plans are afoot to build a new analytical geochemistry lab for hands-on teaching, for both undergrads and grads. As part of our effort to attract more undergradu-

Letter from the Department Head es, too. Life wasn’t fair in many respects. The comradery that makes the student life special went missing. Our floors in Geology/Physics were largely empty (it felt strange) and we were all reminded that science is, in part, a social undertaking. DL learning has some advantages (and for some, is quite a hospitable and productive environment) but it cannot replace the collaborative learning that spontaneously takes place, for example, during a lab or in the field. I salute our students who found a way to take a full schedule of courses, get all their work done, kept their cameras on, and made the best of it. Twelve students graduated with Geology BS degrees, four with MS degrees, and three with their PhD. Well done!

The past year was also one for reflection and conversation about the future of the Depart-

ates to our major and to better prepare them for their careers, integrating quantitative, field, and laboratory geosciences will be our new mantra (look for Dylan Ward’s conceptual venn diagram in these pages). We are also taking steps to broaden our community. The Department’s first DE&I Committee met this spring and their recommendations will be considered in the fall. And, we are on the cusp of changing the Department’s name! After much discussion and several ballots, we have three finalists: the Department of Geosciences, the Department of Earth Sciences, and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Please let me know what you think.

This past year was actually a great one for me in one important respect: reconnecting with many of our alumni and meeting and

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getting to know many alums for the first time.

I sincerely appreciate and admire your support of the Department and have so enjoyed the laughs we’ve had and the stories we’ve shared. It has been gratifying to learn what a positive impact your experience in the Department had on you. Thank you for your genuine interest in helping the current crop of students succeed. As always, thank you for all your financial support which allows us to do so many things that overwise simply would not be possible.

I hope we can connect in person during the coming months at the AAPG-SEG meeting this coming September in Denver, at GSA’s Annual meeting in Portland, OR in early October, or in Cincinnati next April for the joint meeting of

the North-Central and Southeastern Sections of GSA (guess who’s the meeting Co-Chair?).

And, with any luck there will be fieldtrips sometime during the next year. Let’s plan on meeting on an outcrop.

Best regards, stay well,

Craig dietscc@ucmail.uc.edu

The Department is reimagining its undergraduate program.

Dylan Ward came up with this Venn diagram to illustrate how field work, quantitative approaches (including modeling), and laboratory analysis -- what the faculty do -- intersect in various ways creating an array of entry points for students and paths for them to follow as majors.

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joint North -Central –

Southeastern Section Meeting 7-8 April 2022 Cincinnati, OH

Our livable future needs geoscience Let’s Celebrate Together!

CONTACT THE MEETING CO - CHAIRS Deadline for submitting proposals for sessions, field trips, and short courses: 1 July 2021

Craig Dietsch, dietscc@ucmail.uc.edu Rebecca Freeman, rebecca.freeman@uky.edu

HOW TO GIVE If giving by check, donors should make their check payable to The University of Cincinnati Foundation and in the memo portion of the check, write-in “Research Fund in Geology” or “Geology Alumni Graduate Fund”. Please send your donation to The University of Cincinnati Foundation PO Box 19970 Cincinnati, OH 45219-0970 If online, donors should go to https://foundation.uc.edu/give Once on the website, under the “Select Area to Support”, click on the “UC Colleges/Units” button. There will be two drop downs. On the left drop down, they will select “College of Arts & Sciences”. On the right drop down, they will scroll down and select “Research Fund in Geology” or “Geology Alumni Graduate Fund”.

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Paul Edwin Potter, age 94, died July 4, 2020.

He was the second son of Edwin F. and Mabel Y. Potter, was born August 30, 1925 in Springfield, Ohio. All but his very earliest years were spent in southwestern Ohio-first in Cincinnati and later in Clermont County-where he went to a two-room school from grades 5 through eight. Paul served in the U.S. Army in World War II, finished as a Private First Class in the Philippines in May 1946. After World War II he studied geology at the University of Chicago, spent nine years with the Illinois Geological Survey in Urbana, Illinois, where he also obtained a second MS degree in statistics. Subsequently, he spent a year at Johns Hopkins University, seven at Indiana University followed by 19 at the University of Cincinnati.

In 1992 Paul retired from the University as Professor Emeritus and moved to Brazil to

teach for seven years but returned in 2001.

Throughout his career Paul has done both research and teaching and in the process has studied geology mostly in the Eastern United States, Mexico, and across South America, especially in Brazil. Over his lifetime he has helped coauthor several books and many research papers, so he was well known not only in North America but widely abroad. The service will be held in the gazebo at Mt. Moriah Cemetery, 686 Mt. Moriah Dr., Withamsville, Ohio on Thursday, July 9th at 10 am with full military honors. Memorials may be directed to the Dr. Paul Edwin Potter Geology Fund at www.gcfdn.org/Giving/Donate/Online.

Obituary published in the Cincinnati Enquirer July 6, 2020

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Stories of Remembrance

University of Cincinnati, Geology Department: The Department and the global geological community lost one of its giants when Dr. Potter died on July 4th. Paul was a celebrated, much honored, and much respected man of our profession: a teacher of the old school, a researcher who admittedly paid more attention to data and facts than to the fads of current thinking, a colleague and friend to dozens and dozens of survey geologists, an author, a WWII veteran, and a man of wit, insight, and graciousness. A complete biography of Professor Potter is in the works and will be published in these pages and announced (with some pride) throughout the College.

The Department will honor Professor Potter and pay tribute to him and his accomplishments during the coming year. When the pandemic ends and field work and field trips begin anew, the Department will host a grand field trip dedicated to Paul. Everyone in our Department community, his friends, and his colleagues at the Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois surveys will be kept abreast of these events.

There is so much so say about the life and career of Dr. Paul Edwin Potter. For now, let me just say that upon the news of his death, I received emails from across the US, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, and Mexico full of genuine words befitting the loss of Paul and proclaiming a sincere fondness and admiration of the life he led.

RIP, P.E.P. Almerio Franca: Prof. Maynard forwarded me the message about Prof. Potter passing. Myself and my family are very sorry. We last met him about four years ago when I drove his car with him to some old towns in Kentucky, places he used to love so much. After that, we kept talking on the telephone. Last time was about a month ago. His voice was weak but the brain was the same, lucid and talking about geology - his passion.

I had the honor and privilege to be his student in the good old times of early 1980’s when our classes were at the Old Tech Building. During this time I learned a lot with him, not only geology, but also about American culture, a point he always talked to me, whenever we travelled to-

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gether.

He was particularly loved here in Brazil, mostly at Petrobras where he used to be one of the first American consultant. He also spent some time at two Brazilian Universities, as Visitor Professor – at UNESP in Rio Claro, and the Federal University in Porto Alegre. His Brazilian students admire him a lot.

I and Prof. Maynard had planned a trip to Cincinnati for June. However the virus came and we could not go. A great pity.

A great loss for all who had the pleasure to know him, chiefly for the Geology Department who had him for such a long time.

We are all missing him. May God have him.

Almério and Family.

Ryan Wilson: Another legend has passed. Dr. Paul Potter of the University of Cincinnati was an inspiration to so many in the field of Geology, publishing numerous papers and books on Basin Analysis, Sedimentary Petrography and the power of Q-FL ternary plots for sand and sandstones, to the first comprehensive textbook on the Sedimentology of Shales. The legacy he leaves behind is untouched with countless awards and some of the most successful students in the exploration and technology sectors in energy and academia. Dr. Potter motivated me in many ways throughout my career, and never missed an opportunity to send me a hand-written letter to congratulate me on a recent publication, or to send a draft of a manuscript for me to review. He lived his life to the fullest and always reinforced the importance of observation-based interpretations, especially from upscaling petrographic analysis to regional stratigraphic architecture. You will be dearly missed, but through your impact on the science, as well as your teachings in life you certainly won’t be forgotten.

Goodbye to a mentor who has passed along so much knowledge, wisdom, and fortitude to always dig deeper and pay attention to the details, not only in science but also in life. The Godfather of shale sedimentology has passed away, the sector of petroleum geology has forever been changed not only by his teaching but the works

Dr. Paul Edwin Potter of his students. Dr. Potter lived life to the fullest, often joining field trips and core workshops while I was at Indiana University in his late 80’s he was never one that could stay off the rocks. Thank you for all you have inspired for your students and geology as a whole, you have left a legacy that will never be forgotten.

Roy Kepferle: Tribute to PEP by RCK Professor Potter came into my life in the field in the mid-sixties while I was working as a geologist with the KGS-USGS Kentucky Mapping Project, following a four-year stint in Tokyo, Japan with the Military Geology Branch of the USGS. I was one of five geologists assigned to the USGS office in Elizabethtown (E-town), Kentucky. My wife and I had bought a house and were fairly well settled down to raising our growing family. He was unmarried, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

Paul had brought a few graduate students from Bloomington to look at some of the exposures that were particularly puzzling to some of us of the E-town office. We who had mapped in The West were accustomed to great exposures over wide areas; my thought when first arriving in Kentucky was “where are the rocks? I see only green!” Roadcuts and stream beds exposed strata open to consideration. Those basal Mississippian-aged 300-500 feet of strata that make up the escarpment at the outer edge of the Bluegrass-Muldraugh Hill on the west flank of the Lexington Dome--were and are particularly puzzling.

They defy “layer-cake” interpretation and correlation to which we westerners had been exposed.

Completion of the Geologic Map of Kentucky has allowed a best interpretation is that they are part of a westward prograding delta into an inland sea.

During that and on later and shared trips I found that Paul had a familiarity with the rocks that I lacked. There was much to be learned from him, often with his way of teaching by asking others their opinions and reasons. I gained a deeper appreciation for our work due to his relentless curiosity which stimulated my own. Although we were nearly the same age, we had different life experiences. He was interested in hearing about my journey--growing up in Colorado, being re-

cruited by the military at age 17 to learn Japanese at Yale and Minnesota, serving in Japan during the Occupation, studying Geology on the GI Bill at Colorado and South Dakota School of Mines, and at this point in time, learning what the rocks in verdant Kentucky had to tell us. When Paul suggested that I pursue a higher degree, I presumed he was inferring that I apply at Indiana. To my surprise, he said he thought conditions might be more favorable in Cincinnati under Professor Wayne Pryor.

A meeting with Professors Pryor and Richard Durrell went well. The offer of an assistantship plus the opportunity to maintain tenure with the USGS made becoming a student again a financial possibility. Wayne went on sabbatical in Germany.

We were fortunate in finding an affordable house on the corner of Clifton and Glenmary. I was struggling through basic requirements of Calculus and German, and the mandatory Historical Geology course under Professor Ken Caster.

(Ken never missed an opportunity to show that this representative of the U.S. Geological Survey did not know everything.) My wife took on the entire task of raising our family, while I sheltered in my study. Here I was, no advisor, slowly developing friends among my classmates and the faculty.

It seemed that times when I was feeling overwhelmed, Paul would arrive from Bloomington unannounced with a box of Sap’s Donuts that he had picked up from a bakery in Columbus, Indiana. They were a hit with the whole family! https://columbusin.proboards.com/thread/55/ saps-worlds-best-selling-donuts.

On these visits Paul would be on his way to Clermont County to be with his parents on their farm.

Paul would often accept an invitation to share a meal with my family, to our mutual enjoyment.

The years of ‘69 and ‘70 were seminal for me.

Prof. Pryor had returned from sabbatical and my basic concepts of sediments and stratigraphy were given a retread in class and in the field.

His trips down the Mississippi from Illinois to Dauphin Island, the Florida coast, and the Keys were especially constructive in interpreting depositional environments in ancient strata. I was hooked! Paul was still in Bloomington.

A topic for my dissertation was approved. My coursework allowed me to return to mapping. In

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Stories of Remembrance

the meantime, the Elizabethtown office of the USGS was closed and I was assigned full time to a new office set up in Erlanger, KY. (Both offices happened to be over a pharmacy.) With this, we decided to sell the house in E’town, and Rhua found one we could afford in Paddock Hills, a neighborhood that would allow our high-schoolready children to attend the schools of their choice. Paul continued our connection, always bringing those Sap’s Donuts.

My dissertation concerned a sequence of interbedded siltstones and shale that I had interpreted as having been deposited as a subsea fan. Sole marks and interior sedimentary structures led me to believe that the siltstone beds were deposited as turbidites. Paul was interested in showing them to the coauthor of their book “Sands and Sandstone”, Dr. Francis J. Pettijohn. The field visit finally came about but no definitive proclamations were forthcoming until this instructive interchange between the two. Paul asked something like, “Well, Francis, do you believe these are turbidites?” To which Francis replied, “Before I answer that, I would need to know what sediments were below, above, and the lateral extent of these deposits.” My approach to answering these questions was vindicated.

My assignment with the KY-USGS Mapping project ended and I was given one with a new program concerning the black shales of the Appalachian Basin (EGSP). The overall support was from the US Department of Energy administered by the Morgantown (WV) Center for Energy Research. Grants were allotted through contracts with state geological surveys and universities, including those of Kentucky and Ohio. My immediate supervisor in Washington, DC was Wallace DeWitt, Jr., “Wally” for short. I was given the position of Technical Project Officer (TPO) for the projects won by Potter, Maynard and Pryor and one by Prof. Frank Ettensohn of the University of Kentucky.

With Wally’s blessing, I accepted an invitation from the UC Geology Department to move into space down the hall from Paul’s office in the Old Chemistry Building. From this vantage point, I was able to grow professionally by joining in some of these studies while working on the USGS project under Wally. Along the way, shared studies with Paul and other faculty and students in the geology departments of both Cincinnati and Kentucky have fostered lifelong friendships and

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prepared me for my retirement from the USGS. With the end of the Eastern Black Shales Project, my office in the Department was cleared. I transferred everything to a new office in the Geology Department at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) in Richmond, KY. Even though my family remained in Cincinnati, our contacts with Paul became more occasional. One of the rare trips we made together was when we drove toward Louisville. Paul had one of the GIS instruments and was photographing significant outcrops and recording the exact position from his hand-held GIS. He never retired. Attached is a photo of Paul and my daughter as we were preparing to leave.

My present apartment is in a retirement community recommended by a fellow resident who took a room in our apartment on Clifton. She is also the godmother to our youngest daughter born in Cincinnati. Professor Paul Potter deeply influenced my career and my life.

RIP Paul.

Alex Bartholomew: Very sad to hear about the passing of Dr. Paul Potter. He was 94. I was exceedingly lucky in graduate school to have my office next to his for 5 years. He was always happy to chat about any and all kinds of things, and was of course a massive resource of sedimentary geology knowledge. He was a life-long learner. He was in his 70s-80s when I knew him and he’d just gotten his first computer. He would come over to my office next door at least once a week and say “Young man, could you help me for a moment?” He wouldn’t want me to fix the problem for him, but to tell him how to fix it himself so he could do it right next time. I wore a tie when I taught my labs and he liked that, but I wore sneakers, which he called me out on. One day he slipped a fancy shoe catalogue open to a middle page under my office door with a post-it note on it that said “you should get this pair”. One time my buddy Brian (Dr. Potter referred to him as my “young friend from Nebraska”) and I asked Dr. Potter to give us a tutorial on sedimentary petrology. We got out the microscopes and Potter met us in a lab room. He started to talk to us and after a few minutes said “ok boys, get out your slides and let’s take a look.” We said we didn’t have any slides. He said “Well this would work a lot better if you had something you actually look at.” Then

Dr. Paul Edwin Potter he went to his office and got some for us to use.

He was very generous with his time with us. Once he even took me to see the remake of War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise. He didn’t really like the movie, but he was really impressed I got so much Cajun/Asian food for like $7 (he was extremely frugal) at the mall food court. When I very badly cut my hand one day in the hallway by accidentally smashing a fire hose housing window, he walked me to the hospital across the street and sat in the waiting room for several hours while I was stitched up. He did, however, make me put my coat on first and I got blood everywhere because I had to let go of my hand. I have lots more memories but these few stand out. He was great and I’ll miss him a lot.

Archives & Rare Books Library, University of Cincinnati: The Archives & Rare Books Library and the GMP Library lost a great friend last weekend. Paul Potter, professor emeritus of Geology, died on July 4th at the age of 94. Professor Potter was a wonderful man, kind in all respects, and a lover of books and libraries. In his retirement years, he would stop by ARB to talk about Cincinnati’s geological history, especially around the campus and University Heights. And on one memorable morning as he walked to campus in front of Deaconess Hospital as it stood then, Dr. Potter explained how the construction of the building led to the wind tunnel beside it that could actually knock a person down during a particularly windy day - as he spoke, a pedestrian was blown over!

Rest in peace, Professor Potter.

Brandon Nuttall: Paul E. Potter, Ph.D., passed away on 4 July 2020. Dr. Potter had a distinguished industry and academic career during which he wrote and co-authored the books on sedimentology: Paleocurrents and Basin Analysis (1963), Sand and Sandstone (1972, 1987), and Mud and Mudstones (2005). As a member of AAPG, his contributions have been recognized with the Jules Braunstein Memorial Award (1990), Grover E. Murray Memorial Distinguished Educator Award (2002), and Sidney Powers Memorial Award. The Eastern Section of the AAPG recognized him with the Outstand-

ing Educator (2000) and John T. Galey Memorial (2007) awards. He was the author or co-author of at least 16 papers and notes in the AAPG Bulletin. His publishing career wasn’t limited to AAPG; he has more than 200 citations in the GeoRef database. Additionally, Dr. Potter cooperated with many state geological surveys and other organizations to produce reports, maps, charts, and field trip guidebooks.

I met Dr. Potter when I attended the University of Cincinnati in the 1970s when the Department of Geology was in the oldest building on the main campus, the “Old Tech” building. I remember that in addition to his office, Dr. Potter had a separate room for his reprint library. If you were looking for him or a particular paper, he was most likely in that library with the paper. In his statistics class, I learned the importance of knowing what your data looked like and understanding the limitations of making inferences, was I justified using that F-test? Many were the times Dr. Potter would stop me in the halls, “Mr. Nuttall, I have this data set…” and I’d be off working on finding the mineralogical differences between fluvial sands on leading and trailing continental margins. He emphasized looking the part of a gentleman. Always a gentleman himself, he was rarely without a necktie.

Southern Illinois was often the destination for departmental field trips. Dr. Potter had a whistle and would enforce time on an outcrop; when that whistle blew, it was time to re-board our vehicles.

Later, we would find that he had arranged with local church groups to prepare and serve homecooked meals (usually in the church’s all-purpose room). On one occasion, while working on an outcrop of Ordovician carbonates, he enthusiastically exclaimed he had found two “fossil cow horns.”

After my time at Cincinnati, Dr. Potter worked on many projects with surrounding state surveys. At the Kentucky Geological Survey, his visits always included a basket of apples. He was very good at arranging interesting transportation. We had a barge to ferry field trip participants around the Mississippian Fort Payne exposures on Lake Cumberland during a period of unusually low water.

When a drought drastically lowered water levels along the Mississippi River, he arranged for a private plane flight to view the exposed point bars.

I didn’t expect to be discussing investing when I visited his newly acquired condominium. And, I never did figure out when he discovered the

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Stories of Remembrance

best soda fountain in Bedford, Kentucky. He was both a mentor and a friend. I’m sure his many colleagues and students have fond memories. Paul will be missed.

Published in the AAPG Search & Discovery Digest Cameron Schwalbach: Dr. Paul Potter was a lot of things. To geologists, he was the father of shale sedimentology and basin analysis, and left a legacy that will never be matched or forgotten. He was a gentleman that lived with zeal, not only in science, but also in life.

I took classes and went into the field with him on many occasions, long after he stopped officially teaching at the University of Cincinnati, and he had more enthusiasm for being on the outcrop at 90 years old than most of my students and colleagues have in their 20s and 30s. His constant drive to know more and dig deeper was admirable and contagious, and I feel extremely lucky to have learned from him.

To me, he was a teacher and a mentor, but he was also a friend – my eldest. He was never afraid to speak his mind, and was always sure to remark on my unruly hair and dirty field clothes, recommending that I wear a nice tie and dress-the-part (which I was sure to do). We had more in common than I ever would have thought – he had the same grade school teacher as my grandmother and the house he grew up in still stands not two miles from my own. Every interaction saw him genuinely interested in my studies, my career path, and my family, who had grown to love him as one of their own. Befriending him (or him me) benefited me in ways that I cannot fully express, and I am eternally grateful for the time we spent together. I love and miss him dearly.

David Lienhart: I first met Paul Potter in the late summer of 1965. He came to the laboratory where I was working as a petrographer / forensic engineering geologist. He came to see my supervisor, Bob Barnett, an old friend and to talk to me regarding data plots I had been making from petrographic analyses of Ohio River sands dredged from various river-mile locations from Pittsburgh to Cairo, IL. I plotted this data by river-mile so I could see

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how the local geology altered the composition of sands along the entire stretch of the Ohio River.

Bob “Barney” Barnett introduced me to Paul, and we instantly became good friends. He asked to look at my plots and asked for copies and we talked for quite a while. For the rest of my career he would come by for visits every few months.

He was working at Indiana University at that time but by 1970 he came to work at the Geology Department of the University of Cincinnati. We kept in constant contact and when I won a Fellowship in 1986 I returned to the University of Cincinnati and took one of his courses that he chose to teach at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio from 6pm to 9pm every Thursday evening. That was about a 1 1/2 - hour drive from my home so my wife, Donna always came along, and Paul instantly became friends with Donna. From that time on, the three of us would often get together for dinner and often drove up-river to Augusta, KY for dinner at one of Paul’s favorite eating places. We did this for many years, but the last time we got together was the Sky Galley at Lunken Airport in Cincinnati. His osteoporosis problem was getting worse and then I had a seizure a month later and was also diagnosed with osteoporosis when both shoulders broke during the seizure. We did not see each other again until the Geological Society of America meeting in Indianapolis in 2018 and Paul was wheelchair bound by that time, but we talked for a while. We did not meet again after that, but we remained life-long friends until his death on 7/4/2020. He would have turned 95 on August 30th, 2020. Paul was the most honorable and decent gentleman I have ever met in my life and that is how I will always remember him in the time I have left on this earth. https://earthsciencesociety.com/2013/11/26/ the-king-of-sand-paul-edwin-potter/?fbclid=Iw AR3uEYjIUUMCZlg7OIzAUS1dXNOmf15aH3Jw_ nV79GPP12hRUcW82K7zCLw Gregory Wahlman: I first got to know Dr. Potter as an undergraduate and masters student at Indiana University (196874). In 1971-72 I was a “gopher” lab assistant in the Stratigraphy Lab across from Don Hattin’s and Paul Potter’s offices, and so I saw him just about every day. After my master’s degree, I worked for Texaco in New Orleans for a year, and then I returned to the University of Cincinnati in 1975 for

Dr. Paul Edwin Potter a PhD, and Paul had also moved there from IU. His office was in the hallway leading to the Old Tech museum, and his workroom was in the museum next to the paleo grad student offices, and so I again saw daily. I remember many times being back in the museum offices late at night, and you would hear Paul’s heavy leather shoes clomping across the concrete museum floor. He would enter his workroom and then from the other side of the open-ceiling wall would say in his distinctive voice - “Is that you over there Mr. Wahlman?” And then he would hold a conversation over the wall for a while as he did his work, saying things like “Well, Mr. Wahlman, that’s a very slick idea!” On the rare occasion that my wife would come to Old Tech, if Paul was in his hallway office, he would see her passing by and jump up, run out into the hallway, and wagging his finger at her, exclaim loudly - “Welllllll, Mrs. Wahlman - it’s so nice to see you again!” - It kind of freaked Joani out! I think that I took every class Paul offered, except for the shale seminar (I always regretted that, especially considering what has happened in the shale world since). In his graduate classes, Dr. Potter usually let the students select their theme paper topics from a list, but he always assigned me a stratigraphy topic that had some paleontological component that he needed researched for one of his projects -- and he always gave me an A+ on those papers. Paul was “different”, but he was a great geologist and teacher, a very nice gentleman, and “He did it his way”! The UC Geology Department was lucky to have him for so many years. Through those many years, I have always enjoyed talking with Paul at annual AAPGSEPM meetings. I last saw him at the 2018 AAPG meeting, where he was in the hotel bar engaged in conversation with a group of people at around midnight. Impressive for a man in his 90’s! I’ll miss visiting with him at those annual meetings.

Bill Haneberg: Many of us in the geosciences have had the great fortune to interact with the late Paul Potter, who died in July, at one time or another during his prodigious 70-year career. Craig Dietsch and Dan Sturmer, two of Paul’s former faculty colleagues at the University of Cincinnati Geology Department, are organizing a 2021 GSA South-Central and North-Central Joint Section Meeting session to honor Paul’s contributions to the geosciences.

The session is titled “Unravelling Sedimentary Ba-

sins: A Session in Memory of Paul E. Potter.”

A great deal of the work that led to Paul’s international reputation was grounded in the American Mid-continent and he was a friend of the state geological surveys in the region, including the Kentucky Geological Survey. Paul was an author or co-author of 24 KGS publications and was once named the survey’s most valuable unpaid employee in reflection of his contributions to the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Bill Haneberg 1st State Geologist and Director, Kentucky Geological Survey For more information or to submit an abstract, please visit: 2021 Joint Section Meeting geosociety.org • 1 min read Technical Sessions list and details for the 2021 GSA Joint North-Central & South-Central Section Meeting, 18-20 April.

Mark Fisher: I have a memory to share from a graduate level geology course that Dr. Potter taught in 1978 or 1979. It was a basin analysis class with perhaps 10 soft rock (sedimentology and stratigraphy) students. It was an early morning class that almost always involved the entire class reading a recent technical paper. Dr. Potter would ask each individual in the class a question. You could never hide the fact that you had not read the paper.

Just skimming the paper would show up in your answers. It was best to immediately come clean and admit that you had not read the paper. Maybe better to skip class that day. Dr. Potter would start the class with something like this ..... “Mr. Fisher, what are the two key conclusions of this paper.” ....”Not so sure about your second point.

How about you Mr. Jordan, what do you think?“ ...... that is correct Mr. Jordan, a gold star for the day. Mr. Hoholick, what are the key summary words of the paper......His voice had a distinctive inflection that we could easily mimic after class to great amusement.

By the end of the discussion, we thoroughly understood the paper. By the end of the quarter, you also knew which classmates studied the hardest and had the sharpest minds. It was a very good and challenging class.

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16 | The Upper Crust

Stories of Remembrance

Neil D. Samuels: I would not now call Wayne Pryor and Paul Potter good cop/bad cop, but when I first met them upon starting my MS in 1979, that was my first impression. It did not take long for that to change to “great professor/great professor.” Although very different in so many ways, both were instrumental in my education (geologic and otherwise).

Though Wayne served as my advisor, I spent a good deal of time with Paul in class and visiting outcrops. My strongest memories of him are from stopping to eat while on the road. I can still hear his voice asking the waitperson; “are your tomatoes ripe,” and if not, he would forego the salad.

Paul knew what he wanted and expected and would not settle for less, in every aspect of his life including his teaching. He set high standards and was willing to make sure we all met them.

And let’s not forget his passion for sand. Even many years after leaving UC, I made sure to send him samples-- river sand from the Congo near Brazzaville, the beaches of Gabon, the desert of Algeria. I looked forward to the lovely thank-you notes, as Paul was nothing if not well-mannered.

An outstanding geologist, dedicated teacher, and gentle soul, Paul will be missed by many.

dare ask: why did his hair never seem to get longer? As we were driving through a small town quite a distance from Cincinnati, Dr. Potter pointed to a barber shop and remarked that his hair had once been cut there. He went on to say that during the process of writing papers and books, he’d go for a drive until he came across a barber shop he hadn’t visited before. Upon entering the shop, he’d request a slight trim. When seated in the barber chair, Dr. Potter would proceed to explain the research problem he was working on.

If the barber was able to follow what was being said, Dr. Potter was satisfied it could be written in a way that readers would understand. If not, the presentation would be revised and tried out on other barbers until there was clarity.

Sean Cornell: Wow... that news stings! I’m so sad. “Well you know young man...” is a phrase I’ll never ever be able to say without saying it in his voice. He paid me to write the glossary of two of his publications and to type some manuscripts as a grad student. So many discussions... so many opportunities to interact with him. Makes me very sad... but I’ll always carry a piece of him with me.

Rajarshi Dasgupta: It is with sadness that I learned today about the passing of Emeritus Professor Paul Potter (Dr. Potter, as we all called him) of the University of Cincinnati. When I joined UC, he was well into his retirement and yet, he was in his office at Braunstein Hall regularly. My personal interactions with him were limited, but his passion for geology was remarkable. RIP Dr. Potter. The Geology department, all its students and the UC community will miss you.

Robert Elias: I heard from Danita Brandt that you’re collecting remembrances about Dr. Potter. Here’s a story with a lesson I think is worth passing on to future generations: As a graduate student in the 1970s, I came to realize that Dr. Potter usually provided revelations about science and life during field trips. On one such occasion, he disclosed the answer to something I’d wondered about, but of course didn’t

18 | The Upper Crust

Stephen O. Moshier: This photo was taken in about 1989 in south central Kentucky (the quarry name must be in my field notes). When I was on the faculty at UK, I got to know Dr. Paul Potter through our involvement in the GSK. Paul would stop by my office when he was in the building (often using the library).

He invited my graduate carbonate class to join his class on a field trip to south central Kentucky.

My wife learned of a sudden schedule change on her floor at Central Baptist Hospital the weekend of the field trip. I timidly called Dr. Potter to ask him if I could bring my three-year-old son along!

He said that would be great and ended up taking quite a liking to the little rock picker.

Rachel Bosch: I have fond memories of helping Dr. Potter organize samples in the storage room in Braunstein.

Here is a link to his colloquium talk of 9 March 2018: https://bit.ly/34bl2Dv

Dr. Paul Edwin Potter THE PUBLIC LIBRARY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY VETERANS HISTORY PROJECT Veteran’s Name:

Paul Edwin Potter

Collection Name:

Paul Potter Collection

Branch of Service:

United States. Army

Dates of Service:

1944-1946

Highest Rank:

Private First Class

Date of Birth:

1925-08-30

Place of Birth:

Springfield (Ohio)

Conflict: World War II Awards:

Battle Stars (2)

Location of Service:

Oklahoma; Philippines; Fort Bliss (Tex.); Texas

Gender: Male Ethnicity: Caucasian Parents:

Edwin F Potter; Mabel Youger

Schools:

Anderson High School; University of Chicago, Chicago IL;

University of Illinois, Champaign IL

Neighborhoods:

Clifton (Cincinnati, Ohio); North College Hill (Ohio); Norwood (Ohio);

Pleasant Ridge (Cincinnati, Ohio)

Prisoner of War:

No

Injured in Service:

No

Collection ID:

VHP/2017/516

Subjects: Potter, Paul; World War, 1939-1945

University of Cincinnati | 19

20 | The Upper Crust

University of Cincinnati | 21

Faculty & Staff News 22 | The Upper Crust

Photo Credit: Aaron Betts

Brooke Crowley

Happy Spring from Cincinnati!

Despite the fact that I have not been able to travel, and have been primarily working from my home, it has not been a dull year. Instead, this past year has been one of growth and reflection for me. The COVID 19 epidemic has given me the opportunity to reflect on what is truly important to me, re-evaluate how and where I work, and also revisit my teaching, including redesigning and running multiple courses online.

I have previously shunned the idea of teaching in an online format, but when given no other option, I fully embraced it, and I feel that I was still able to connect with my students and provide them with an authentic and genuine learning experience. In some ways, I think that the online platform actually improved student participation. The chat function gives students who might hesitate to speak in class a space to share their opinions and ask questions, students can annotate images and figures on a shared screen, and breakout rooms allow students to work together without being surrounded by the cacophony of other groups in the same physical space. I do look forward to returning to the physical classroom, but I now am much better equipped to teach online, or perhaps run hybrid courses in the future.

Research-wise, the past year has not been as productive as some, but I have still been able to move forward with several projects, including work in Mada-

gascar, Haiti, and more locally in North America. I’m very happy to report that my recent graduate Stella Mosher published her Masters research last summer in Acta Oecologica (well done Stella!), and my current PhD student, Emily Simpson, is making good progress with her own research.

Our grad students have also been adapting to a highly restricted physical world. Thank you everyone for maintaining a positive attitude through all of this. Four PhD students successfully held and passed their qualifying exams last Summer and Fall, and six students gave final thesis or dissertation presentations virtually in the past year. I would like to commend these students for their flexibility and willingness to try this different format. We had just two new students join us in Fall 2020 but will have a larger cohort of five students starting in Fall 2021. We are planning to hold a virtual alumni networking event on August 27th (more details later; please save the date!) but I am very hopeful that we will also be able to do more in person.

Remember that if you aren’t already connected, please consider joining the departmental alumni network on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/ groups/6807518/). You can ask to join directly through LinkedIn or by writing to Dan Sturmer, who is the account administrator. Hopefully this will help alums stay connected with each other as well as faculty and current students.

University of Cincinnati | 21

Despite

C y d n

a j a z

Hello friends! the massive disruptions this year, my lab was able to get some work done studying the early evolution of life on Earth, the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere, and the search for ancient life on Mars.

A

Once again, this year I have focused on my Mars work. As a science team member of the NASA Mars 2020 mission, I was excited to watch Perseverance launch last July from Cape Canaveral, FL and successfully land on Mars in February 2021 (both while nervously pacing and holding my breath!). As I noted in Upper Crust last year, one of the main objectives of the mission is to search for evidence of ancient (fossil) life and collect samples for return to Earth on a future mission. If Mars ever hosted life, it’s most likely to have been microbial. And my role, as a microbial paleontolo-

gist is to advise on what samples to collect that might hold evidence of ancient life. If it’s there, we should be able to find some evidence, but we might need higher magnification and more sensitive instruments to really be sure, so that’s why we want to bring the samples back. Those samples might return as early as 2031, only ten years from now!

So far, the mission has been commissioning and calibrating all of the instruments by analyzing the bedrock and regolith (martian soil) near the landing sight, taking breathtaking images (check out https://mars. nasa.gov/mars2020/), and piloting the first aircraft on another planet, all with great success. In the coming months and years, we will range further afield to study the crater floor to collect samples for geochronology, the delta to learn about its sed/strat and also look for organic biosignatures, a marginal carbonate deposit that might have been chemically precipitated (stromatolites?), the crater rim, and hopefully beyond to the ancient rocks beyond the crater.

My current and former students have all had successful years as well, despite the pandemic restrictions. Andrea Corpolongo (Ph.D. candidate) continued work on her exciting project studying the paleontology and paleoecology of 2.5 billion-year-old fossil microbes from the Kaapvaal Craton of South Africa. Andrea and I received a three-year NSF grant in 2020 to do this work.

Andrea also was instrumental this year in advocating for and helping lead our department’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as well as an outreach program to promote our science to the general public. We all owe her many thanks for her efforts. Camden Goland (M.S. student) who started in our program in Fall 2020 has made progress on a project to study thermal alteration of fossil organic matter in a variety of rock types, despite not being able to be in the lab this year. Andrew Gangidine (Ph.D. 2020), who is a postdoctoral fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, was recently offered a permanent position as a research scientist there. Finally, Jeff Osterhout (M.S. 2016) successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles this spring and is now Dr. Osterhout! I could not be prouder of all of them.

Finally, I am looking forward to welcoming a new student in the Fall. Desirée Baker received her M.S. from Southern Illinois University this year and will join my lab to work on my NASA Exobiology project that was funded in 2020. We will work with several other people from around the US and Europe to look for evidence of oxygen production by microorganisms in 3.2 billion-yearold deltaic sediments from the Moodies Group of South Africa. For more goings-on in my lab, please check out my website at http://andyczaja.com.

24 | The Upper Crust

Check out his link!

UC astrobiologist helps NASA look for life on Mars Andy Czaja is on the science team that will explore Mars with advanced rover https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2020/07/ n20933036.html#print

Photo Captions: •

Me and my kids watching the landing of Perseverance in February 2021.

• Image of the Jezero Crater floor (near field), delta (flat top feature with resistant layers in the mid field), and crater rim (mountain in the far field). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech • An erosional remnant of the main delta in Jezero crater on Mars named Kodiak. Look at that stratigraphy!

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS • Selfie of Perseverance rover and Ingenuity the first aircraft ever flown on another planet! Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

University of Cincinnati | 25

Carl Brett

On January 1, 2020, I wrote the following words in a letter to my extended family: “New Year’s Day dawned cool and sunny in New Tazewell, Tennessee, where we were once again back at [my daughter] Leanne’s house for that holiday and I took the dogs out for an early walk. With 2019 hindsight, but lacking 2020 foresight, I couldn’t help but breathe deeply the brisk morning air and ponder: what lies ahead for our family and the World in the new year, the new decade?” I faced the new year hopefully, though with a bit of anxiety-as I had to complete a major monograph before summer and prepare for an international meeting on the Devonian in New York in July and help run two major symposia at Geological Society of America (GSA) and a field trip for Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in the fall. None of that happened!! (the Devonian meeting was postponed to 2023-which allowed a much more even paced preparation of the Devonian monograph; positive spinoffs of Covid-19). One key principle of Earth history, of all history, featured by the late Stephen Jay Gould in his classic book “Wonderful Life”, is contingency. I often emphasize to my students the notion that quirky unpredictable events-sometimes very small and localized- can have a profound impact on the outcomes of Earth and life history; life can change on a dime (as on the last day of the Cretaceous)! And, there was never a better time to make that point than 2020. Something that apparently happened in a Wuhan wet-market would have an impact on the lives of most everyone on the planet.

For all of us, 2020 was a pause- an interruptionand, for some at least, a boring, anxious, or awful time.

To be sure, there were times that I felt like we were living in Bill Murray’s “Groundhog Day”; in summer, it did become difficult at times to remember which day of the week it was; some things seemed endless. And yet, for our extended family, this year featured a good many important and positive and minor negative, but life-changing experiences: the ‘yin and yang’ of a pandemic year.

Just before UC’s spring break in March, 2020, there came startling pronouncements from the University. Finish up your classes/labs get your things together and prepare to work from home for the rest of the semester and maybe the rest of the year. The buildings were being locked down and students would not return after spring break: we would instead have an extra few days to prepare to take courses on-line.

During the 2020 spring break, as I tried to learn about Kaltura recordings, virtual classes on Webex, and Canvas (the University’s new learning platform), we also managed to move our two grandkids, Eugene (then 7) and Aurora Hess (then 4) from back to Cincinnati. Their

24 | The Upper Crust

mother, Leanne, stayed behind in Tennessee to finish her work and seek a new job and home near Cincinnati. At that point, we took on a new, jointly shared, full-time job: care and feeding of two little, highly energetic kids.

My remarkable partner of 46 years, Dr. Betty-Lou Brett, who had taken early retirement from Cincinnati State College, in 2018 “to spend more time with the grandchildren” (‘be careful what you wish for’), became director of the “Brett-Hess Grandma school” (or school of Grandma).

A week after the kids moved in, on April 7-8, we also had a small tornado rip down our street. We heard the warnings on TV, then the sirens, and then as we huddled with the two grandchildren in the basement, we heard the crashes. The whirlwind raced up our street-fortunately sparing houses on either side (though our neighbors had a shed knocked off its foundation), but uprooting trees, snapping power poles, and stripping limbs of ours and some shingles off the roof. Over and above the pandemic, we were trapped at home, literally, because of trees and powerlines were across the road. There was no power or internet for a week, but we were able to charge the cell phones with Betty Lou’s solar panel charger, set up a hotspot, and keep the virtual classes going. Ultimately, we got a new roof out of the deal.

I managed to record lectures for my two courses

and used a mix of asynchronous and Webex classes. With expert help from my TA and PhD student, Cole Farnam, we even managed to do a virtual field trip and run a couple of projects with Stratigraphy class using photographic images of drill cores and gamma ray logs generously provided by the Ohio Geological Survey. And, in the midst of this, Cole successfully completed his preliminary exams!

Eventually, our daughter, Leanne, was able to join us in Cincinnati and got a new home and a new job working at a nursing home in Hamilton, OH. I was in the midst of helping Leanne move from the Tennessee home, on the 5th of July when I received the very sad news that our revered colleague Paul Edwin Potter had passed away on Independence Day. Paul was a legend and his books and my many discussions with Paul further inspired my own interests in basin analysis, shales and geologic history, in general. He even bought me dinner when I first met him, as a graduate student visiting the UC’s museum then in Old Tech building in 1975; such a grand and wise gentleman, and so memorable. This sad time was brightened, for me, by the birth of a new (adopted) grandson. Quincy Devon BrettWeise (nice middle name, for a Devonophile like me!), born August 1, adopted by our son Kenton and daughter-in-law Amanda. Though born prematurely, little Quincy is thriving and his family is delighted.

During the summer of 2020 I worked with graduate students, Cole Farnam and Josie Chiarello on nearby field sites. We could not travel widely and plans for fieldwork in Missouri and Ontario, Canada had to be scrapped owing to lockdowns. But work could continue cautiously in the great Commonwealth of Kentucky, where some spectacular new road cuts were opened up in 2020.

I also kept busy and sane, working through batches of fossil specimens that I gathered in boxes and brought in carloads to my garage from the home of Steve Felton, a celebrated member of the Dry Dredgersour local amateur group, who, sadly, passed in 2019. My grandchildren even helped me wash and re-box batches of fossils. No one was staying at the old Felton place, so it was a quiet and safe-if somewhat spooky- place to work, with plenty of rock material remaining in the basement and garage- and organizing information on the stratigraphic collections from the scraps of often water

damaged labels. Through the fall, I worked with an outstanding undergraduate, Sam Little, who will become a Masters student in our program this fall. Sam helped a great deal in curating and labeling material. We made very good headway and managed to curate and database hundreds of drawers of material. In this way, we salvaged a great deal of data and an archival collection of fossils from several hundred localities in the Cincinnati area. Sam even established a small research project on encrusting organisms and predatory boreholes brachiopods, based on the collections.

In 2020, my students and I published about a dozen papers, including one introducing the possibly useful concept of volatility in environmental change/ evolution (Brett et al., 2020a, Palaeo-3) and a major summary paper that documents a decade of study on the sequence stratigraphy, correlation and paleoecology of the classic Ordovician Cincinnatian of the Cincinnati Arch (Brett et al., 2020b, Palaeo-3). This article, builds upon and extends the seminal framework on sequence stratigraphy of UC alumnus Stephen Holland (University of Georgia) and combines efforts of PhD student Chris Aucoin, as well as UC alumni Dr. Ben Dattilo (Purdue University, Fort Wayne), Dr. Pat McLaughlin (Indiana Geological Survey), and Cameron Schwalbach (Cincinnati Museum). I also continue to work with alumnus Dr. Nathan Marshall and Emeritus Professor Barry Maynard on geochemistry of Ordovician shales. As ever, I am delighted to continue research with such an excellent network of collaborators.

The fall 2020-spring 2021 academic year, was both a great time and a difficult one. I used a hybrid format: broadcast live from my classroom using Webex and, at the same time, allowed students who wished to come in with masks on for classes. I also ran labs that permitted students to come in on their own in very small groups. We even managed to run a few real field trips for three courses, in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. We rented large vans and/or let students drive their cars, so that they could be spaced pretty far apart, and always with masks. Students, including my freshmen class, were surprisingly cooperative and appreciative, as well. I am greatly indebted to excellent teaching assistants Josie Chiarello and Tyler McGarr and undergraduate helpers, Will Wright, Kenzie King, Patrick Boylson, and Sam

University of Cincinnati | 25

Little (they take Supervised Undergraduate Teaching for credit) who expertly helped guide us through the quirks of virtual/hybrid meetings, as well as real labs and field trips.

I am pleased to report, as of today (April 2021), that I managed to complete five different and rather completely modified courses with a hybrid approach, mostly remote, but including labs and even field trips, and never had to miss a single (virtual) class, even during my time with Covid. A lot of extra work we all have done. Though their plans were drastically changed, my current graduate students Josie and Cole, made steady progress in their research and two longer term PhD students, Allison Young and Christopher Aucoin, both working full time jobs and laboring with restrictions of the pandemic- moved ever closer to completing dissertations; both hope to finalize their degrees in 2021.

In October, at the (virtual) annual meeting of GSA, headquartered in Montreal, I was honored to receive the Laurence Sloss medal for excellence in sedimentary geology from GSA’s Sedimentary Geology section. My response was the first on-line GSA talk I had given (no doubt much longer than anticipated but it worked!) and it was gratifying that many former students and colleagues were able to attend virtually. It was one highpoint of the odd fall.

But not all positive news is good news!! Our whole family contracted Covid-19 about November 11-Veterans Day, also Aurora’s 5 birthday.

We knew it could be coming once there was an outbreak in the nursing home where Leanne works. It had been one of the only facilities in the area which was Covidfree but that all changed when a worker came in without a mask and later proved to have Covid. A few days later (after Aurora’s birthday party) Leanne tested positive.

Betty-Lou and I and the grandkids were not with her at that time and she quarantined in her apartment. However, the virus was already spread. As a precaution, I took a Covid test, though with little or no symptoms, while staying away from students. By the time positive test results came in I had already had the virus for a week, but would scarcely have guessed that. None of us had much in the way of symptoms, other than the peculiar loss of taste/smell and a general slight fatigue; no coughing, pains, or much fever. Leanne rapidly recovered from her symptoms and got her taste back; in a couple of

26 | The Upper Crust

weeks she was able to go back to work-where she was much needed. The kids had low fevers and Aurora, now 5, complained that her “nose was broken” (meaning she could not smell!). By Thanksgiving, we shared a wonderful meal at our house-since we had all been positive for Covid-19. We had a great deal to be thankful for. Not a perfectly easy time- a bit scary, for sure-but interesting, and, for us, not much worse than mild colds. I do not mean to make light of this: we were very lucky and the same disease brought tremendous suffering to many, often needlessly.

To sum up, despite being a stressful and hectic year, in most respects 2020 was actually a grand one for us: we managed to move our grandchildren from Tennessee, in March, and their mother, in June, to Cincinnati and get them a home here; we became full-time “parents” again! We weathered an April tornado, but got a new roof put on our house.

Research and teaching went on-though not as usual. I got a medal, and on top of all that, we also got a new grandson. Our family did get the corona virus, but barely noticed it, and now that we have also had our vaccinations, hopefully, we can start to put this behind us. What a remarkable and interesting year!

Life, like Earth’s history is contingent and full of yin and yang.

Photo Captions: • Former Student: 50 years ago.

CB on an outcropS of Buffalo, NY ca.

1971 • Eugene (7), Aurora (4) Pongo and Rollo (12) heading to a creek in Finneytown •

Aurora Hess with fossil on an outcrop AND FUTURE STUDENTS! Published:

Brett, C.E., Aucoin, C.D., Dattilo, B.F, Freeman, R.L, Hartshorn, K.R., McLaughlin, P.I., Schwalbach, C.E., 2020a. Revised sequence stratigraphy of the upper Katian Stage (Cincinnatian) strata in the Cincinnati Arch reference area: Geological and paleontological implications. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 540: 33

Brett, C.E., Zambito, J.J., McLaughlin, P.I. and Emsbo, P. 2020b. Revised perspectives on Devonian biozonation and environmental volatility in the wake of recent time-scale revisions, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 549: 10 p.

In this chaotic year of pandemic I discovered that one of the advantages of retirement is that I didn’t need to deal with virtual class and lab activities for grads and undergrads that way my colleagues have. My primary activities are basically able to be accomplished at home. I continue as an associate editor for the journals Clays and Clay Minerals and the American Mineralogist.

This work requires finding reviewers for submitted manuscripts, summarizing their reviews and making a final recommendation regarding publication. Quite often this requires minor revision by the authors before a final copy can be submitted. One of the primary reasons for revisions often has to do with the fact that the authors are from non-English speaking countries, so their grammar and syntax needs some clarification. I am also in my final year as the secretary of the Clay Minerals Society.

This requires me to summarize Executive Committee, Council and business meetings, typically held online.

But one, very delightful experience for this year has been the discovery that I am the 2021 recipient of the Collins Medal, awarded by the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

At its meeting in March 2008, the Mineralogical Society’s Council finalized an agreement, initiated in 2007, to establish a new medal, named after Joseph Henry Collins (1841–1916), mining engineer, mineralogist and geologist, and one of the founding members of the Society. The first award was made by the Society in 2010. The official definition is: The Collins Medal will be awarded annually to a scientist who, during a long and active career, has made an outstanding contribution to pure or applied aspects of Mineral Sciences and associated studies. Publications, teaching, outreach and other activities leading to the promotion of mineral sciences, in the broadest sense, will be taken into account in making the award. Nominees do not have to be Members of the Mineralogical Society or nationals of Great Britain and Ireland.

Beyond this, it’s been a particular pleasure to wrap up working with Jeff Hannon, who finished his doctoral dissertation and is now doing post-doc research with John Valley at the University of WisconsinMadison. Jeff ’s research at UC involved in the study of altered volcanic ash beds that occur in the Cretaceous Cenomanian-Turonian boundary interval through the US Western

Warren Huff

Interior Basin over tens of thousands of square kilometers. He used strontium, oxygen, and hydrogen isotopic ratios determined by mass spectrometry, as well as trace elemental analysis from X-ray fluorescence, zircon dating and mineralogical characterization utilizing X-ray diffraction in order to properly characterize the volcanic sources. Most of his work involved samples from 30 unique ash beds collected throughout the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming and Montana. These beds represent 30 individual ash fall events that occurred during the Cretaceous from 105 – 70 Ma, spanning the Mid-Cretaceous magmatic culmination and the transition into shallow-subduction Laramide tectonics. He has published several papers from his research. His most recent paper is:

Paper:

Hannon, J.S., Dietsch, C. and Huff, W.D., 2020, Trace-element and Sr and Nd isotopic geochemistry of Cretaceous bentonites in Wyoming and South Dakota tracks magmatic processes during eastward migration of Farallon arc plutons: GSA Bulletin, Dec. 8, (https://doi.org/10.1130/ B35796.1)

University of Cincinnati | 29

systems that developed in Mississippian time. We will continue collaborating with Tandis Bidgoli at the University of Missouri.

Adam is taking a break from his program, but we hope to see him back soon.

Vince Nowaczewski joined my group as a PhD student in the fall. He completed a M.S. in Geology at the University of Kansas followed by nearly a decade working for Chesapeake Energy in Oklahoma. He is interested in geomechanical and geodynamic modeling, and he has been working on models to explain the distribution of structures within the Ancestral Rocky Mountains orogen. This summer he will also start working on a project to evaluate the sedimentology and stratigraphy of the middle Pennsylvanian Hogan formation in eastern Nevada.

I had four publications that were released in the last year and four that are in press (though two are still in press from last year), including studies on the Late Paleozoic rocks in Nevada (Sturmer and Cashman, 2020, Geological Society of Nevada 2020 symposium volume), modeling of interactions between flue gases and mafic rocks (Sturmer et al., 2020, International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control), analysis of aeolian sand dunes near Tonopah, Nevada (Oglesbee et al., 2020, Catena), trace element concentrations in mid-Paleozoic mircofossils (Gangidine et al., 2021, Life), characterization of a debris flow in Mammoth Caves (Bosch et al., in press, Journal of Cave and Karst studies), carbon dioxide sequestration in heterogeneous aquifers (Ershadnia et al., in press, Advances in Water Resources), carbon isotope stratigraphy of the Ely-Bird Spring basin (Sturmer et al., in press, SEPM special volume), and structural geology of the Buck Mountain area in central Nevada (Whitmore et al., in press, SEPM special volume.

I also published a data layer documenting nearly 700 large-scale landslides in Nevada (you can check it out at https://gisweb.unr.edu/MyHAZARDS/). Several other manuscripts are in revision, review, or preparation.

Dan Sturmer

Well…what a year again! I didn’t expect to be working from home a year after the last update, but here we are. I have been back to campus a few times, but I am looking forward to being back on campus full time in the fall. Our daughters Ivy (4) and Eliana (2) are back in pre-school and they are having a blast. Sarah continues to teach online courses in the Environmental Studies program UC and she will be starting in the Computer Science M.Eng. program at UC in the fall.

Nick Ferry successfully defended his M.S. project looking at the Blue Diamond mega-landslide last summer. Nick has moved on the University of Kansas to complete a PhD working with Mike Blum on the sourceto-sink sedimentary system related to the Triassic Chinle Formation. Additionally, we are planning to lead a field trip to the Blue Diamond landslide as part of the national AEG meeting in Las Vegas in 2022.

Adam Jones continued to define his project assessing sedimentology and U-Pb detrital zircon geochronology of the Scotty Wash quartzite in Nevada as a potential termination for the continent-wide drainage

28 | The Upper Crust

In addition to the student projects mentioned above, I have several projects that I will be working on in the coming year. I have several projects related to landslide analysis, including DEM analysis of several landslide deposits in Nevada (with new UC PhD Chris Sheehan and UC undergrad Jake Parsons), deep ReMi analysis of landslide deposits in Washoe Valley, NV (with John Louie from UNR), and further documentation of large landslide deposits in Nevada. I am also working on a set of Late Paleozoic paleogeographic reconstructions in

Nevada with Pat Cashman. Another potential upcoming project is with Wanda Taylor (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) and Tandis Bidgoli (University of Missouri) to use multiple techniques to evaluate the processes that led to the demise of the Sevier hinterland plateau in southeastern Nevada and southwestern Utah (still waiting to see if we get funding, fingers are crossed!).

The XRF lab has been pretty slow this year since access to campus has been so limited. I am continuing to work with Mark Krekeler and Claire McLeod at Miami University. At UC, I am working faculty and graduate students, including Carl Brett, Craig Dietsch, Emily Simpson, Josie Chiarello, and Tyler McGarr. There are some bigger projects coming down the pipeline, so I expect the XRF lab to really pick later this year.

This has really been the year of teaching for me. Last fall I taught our first Applied Geophysics course, Careers in the Geosciences, and I co-taught Regional Tectonics. In applied geophysics the class analyzed CHIRP (high-frequency acoustic data) data collected by Tom Lowell from 6 lakes in Maine. These projects were condensed into 3 poster abstracts that were presented at the GSA Northeastern section meeting a few weeks ago. This semester I am teaching Structural Geology and Surface Processes/Freshman seminar. I am also helping facilitate a beta-test of a virtual field camp option for our students. It looks like most of our students will be able to return to in-person field camps this summer, but it is a nice option to have available. All of this teaching has been fully online. It has been really interesting to see what works (and what doesn’t) with online teaching. Next fall I am only scheduled to teach Careers in the Geosciences as Applied Geophysics will be taught every other year. We are tentatively planning to have the Career Days event in spring 2022, once we can have everyone meet in person again. If you are interested in participating, please let me know!

Events for this summer are taking shape. I will be writing several manuscripts and grant proposals. I have virtual talks and/or poster presentations at the AAPG ACE, GSA north-central/south-central, and GSA cordilleran section meetings. In May I will be re-collecting two deep ReMi lines in Washoe Valley, Nevada. We had originally tried to collect the data in March 2020 but were shut down by the pandemic. Later in the summer Vince and I will head out to eastern Nevada to scout out exposures of the Hogan formation for detailed analysis. I am looking forward to returning to a more normal year (even if we don’t get quite all the way back to normal). I hope all of you are well and please feel free to reach out!

Photo Captions: •

Sara made me a cake for my 40th birthday!

SAVE THE DATE! We will be hosting a virtual gathering of alumni and current students on Friday August 27th from 4-6 pm. Additional details will be shared via Friday Field Notes later this summer. Our platform is TBD but will be similar to Wonder.me, which allows participants to move freely around a virtual space (rather than being stuck in a pre-described space like a breakout room). This event is part of our efforts to build a more active alumni network. For anyone who is interested in being part of this effort, can you please complete this short survey? https://forms.office.com/r/nU0eZyd0LD.

University of Cincinnati | 29

During a year like no other, I could not be more pleased and prouder of with members of my Bone Ecology Lab. Moving to a virtual lab was interesting, but everyone stepped-up to the challenge.

Abby Kelly (PhD, exp. 2022), published the first chapter of her dissertation, which was highlighted by the UC press office (https://bit.ly/3vO4rBP) Describing her work, Abby reports, “During the last Ice Age, large mammal diversity in northern Alaska included bison, horses, mammoths, short faced bears, lions, and more: far more species than are found today. In this paper, I focused on bison

and horses, the two most common large mammals, and tested whether differences in their diets (evaluated using toothwear) could help explain the high species diversity. I found that both bison and horses had diets that likely incorporated a wide range of vegetation types, instead of being limited to grass-dominated diets like most modern bison and horses. Further, their diets were highly overlapping, suggesting that competition for dietary resources may not have been strong among these ancient arctic herbivores.” This year, Abby received one of the Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship (UC Graduate School), which provides her a fifth year of funding.

Maddie Gaetano (PhD, exp. 2023) is currently preparing to take her qualifying examination for PhD candidacy. Maddie’s research focuses on the ecological and environmental drivers that supported the evolution of antlers in female caribou. As part of her dissertation, she is testing the novel hypothesis that female antlers, which are shed within a few days of giving birth, provide a key nutritional resource during peak lactation. Maddie has been making exciting discoveries concerning the ubiquity with which antlers are gnawed on caribou calving grounds and the specificity with which caribou target antlers over other available bones. Maddie is particularly excited to evaluate how resource availability and nutrient stresses (including changes in caribou population densities and climate) influence the reliance by caribou on antlers as dietary supplements. Among Maddie’s accomplishments this year, she received an honorable mention for her NSF Graduate Research Fellowship proposal and received a coveted Lewis and Clark research award.

30 | The Upper Crust

Josh Miller

Bianca Neale (B.S., exp. 2023) has been working in my lab for nearly two years, pushing us forward on a variety of projects. Last summer, Bianca received a Women in Science and Engineering Fellowship to support her work. While fully virtual, Bianca was able to complete her analysis of small mammal remains coming from the pellets (regurgitated packets of fur and bones) of predatory birds that I collected previously from the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska. By taking advantage of the randomness with which raptors sample (eat…) available small mammals, Bianca was able to reconstruct the relative abundances of small mammals across the landscape. This work represents the first evaluation of how rodent communities change across the Arctic Refuge’s Coastal Plain. Contrary to some expectations that rodent communities should be fairly static, Bianca found that lemmings are the dominant rodents in the west, while voles dominate rodent communities in the east. Presented at the 2020 virtual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP), Bianca’s work highlights the complexities of studying and managing biodiversity in one of the most remote settings in North America. During her WISE Fellowship, Bianca also worked with vertebrate anatomists and an established paleo artist to design the logo for the 2020 SVP meeting.

Also focusing on Coastal Plain pellets, Madison Wells (B.S., 2021) evaluated the diversity of pellet producers during her capstone project. Using pellet dimensions (length, width), Madison compared Coastal Plain pellets to the known dimensions of pellets from diurnal (hawks, eagles) and nocturnal raptors (owls) that live or breed on the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain. Madison’s work indicates that pellet producers may include multiple nocturnal and diurnal raptors. While the presence of multiple predators does not drive the change in small mammals across space, evaluating pellet producers provides additional ways of evaluating raptor presence, avian diversity, and species interactions across the Coastal Plain.

University of Cincinnati | 31

Turning back to larger mammals, William Wright (B.S., exp. 2021) has been working on a comparative taphonomic analysis of bison and horse bones from Late Pleistocene permafrost deposits of Yukon, Canada. These include some of the same specimens (all radiocarbon dated lower jaws) that Abby is studying as part of her dissertation research. Will has been focusing on bone completeness, weathering, and traces of bone modification (gnawing) left by carnivores. Will’s work is still in progress, but while many taphonomic characteristics of bison and horse fossils are similar, there are dramatic differences in the likelihood that bones of the two species show signs of carnivore modification. Overall, horses are more likely to be gnawed. Further, when evaluating the probability of gnawing in the context of the two species’ relative abundances (thanks to the two timeseries of radiocarbon dates!), bison were only targeted by carnivores when horse abundances were very low. According to these findings, horses in Late Pleistocene Yukon were preferred by large predators over bison.

This finding aligns with previous work on Yukon paleoecology and is the first time that millennial-scale prey switching in mammals has been evaluated using a taphonomic analysis.

Much of my own research this year focused on using accumulations of shed female caribou antlers to study aspects of historical caribou migration. After female caribou shed their antlers (marking calving grounds) they can persist on tundra surfaces for centuries or longer. Using this historical resource, I am evaluating changes in calving ground geographies through time. I have also become interested in what antlers can tell us about where they were grown. Because females grow their antlers during the late-spring and summer, antler geochemistry has the potential to record this aspect of seasonal landscape use. A particularly useful geochemical tool for evaluating specimen provenance is strontium isotope ratios (87Sr/86Sr), which vary across space largely in response to changes in surface geology. Plants and animals incorporate bioavailable 87Sr/86Sr without meaningful bias, meaning the spatial signature is recorded by developing biological tissues, including antlers.

Using these principals, I put together a team (including Brooke Crowley, Abby, Maddie, and other colleagues) to test whether current patterns of summer landscape use of the Porcupine Caribou and the Central Arctic herds (both of which calve in the Arctic Refuge) correspond to patterns of landscape use that predate the initiation of biomonitoring programs by state and federal wildlife agencies in the 1980s. Using shed antlers collected from calving grounds of both herds, we found that summer landscape use for the Porcupine Caribou Herd has been largely stable across the antler record (reaching back 700 years), but there was a significant shift in summer landscape use for the Central Arctic Herd after the late 1970s. This timing is coincident with a number of ecological stressors, including increased anthropogenic activity and development in the Central Arctic Herd’s winter, summer, and calving ranges (i.e., roads, pipelines and other infrastructure supporting petroleum extraction). You can learn more by reading UC’s press release or reach out if you would like a copy of the publication.

It has been a joy to work in the Arctic Refuge for nearly a decade, but a large portion of the calving grounds for the Porcupine Caribou Herd are to the east in Yukon, Canada. I have been eyeballing the Canadian calving grounds (Ivvavik National Park) for years and I am excited to report that the first rounds of fieldwork, supported by the Yukon Government, are about to begin! While COVID-related challenges prevent me from taking part in this summer’s adventures, multiple Canadian crews are heading out by helicopter and inflatable raft to start surveying for antlers across Ivvavik. I can’t wait to join the fun next summer!

Photo Captions: • “Kelly horse mandible photo credit Andrew Higley/UC Creative.jpg” Caption: Abby Kelly with horse mandible (Late Pleistocene, Yukon, Canada). Blue mold identified tooth evaluated for dental microwear.

•

Caption: Official logo for the 2020 virtual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Designed by Bianca Neale

32 | The Upper Crust

Yurena Yanes

The past academic year my students and myself have been successful and productive even under current difficult times and several personal challenges for everyone. I feel fortunate to work with strong and resilient students who are capable of adjust and navigate sudden struggles and still find a way to thrive and stay motivated academically.

I have taught several classes using online format on the topics of Historical Geology and Tropical Islands. Teaching these courses helped me to improve my online teaching skills and I was able to interact with many undergraduate students from different backgrounds and interests. In addition, I have continued organizing the virtual Geology Colloquium. I had the chance to invite many terrific scientists that gave very interesting scientific talks on a variety of topics for our Geology students and faculty.

I have continued working on several funded research projects on Quaternary mollusks from various geographical regions and age intervals. I am also excited to consolidate three new collaborations with outstanding scientists from other schools and plan to spend the summer writing new collaborative grants to seek external funding and recruit new students in the coming years.

My master student William (Reed) Sanchez has successfully completed his research project on Holocene archeological marine mollusk assemblages from Morocco and will be defending and graduating in the summer

2021. My PhD student Catherine Nield has worked hard to complete one of her dissertation projects on isotope systematics of land snails from polar regions and is designing another two projects on last glacial snails and paleoclimate inferences. My PhD student Ezekiel (Zeke) King Phillips has completed his first research project on stable isotope ecology of land snails from temperate woodland environments and is developing two other chapters on laboratory feeding experiments of land snails. I truly feel proud of working with students that are so motivated and enthusiastic.

I am excited to work this summer with a new undergraduate student Kaaviya Muruganantham. She was awarded a 2021 WISE fellowship to work on land snail foraging ecology with PhD student Ezekiel King Phillips and myself. We plan to combine field, laboratory, and intellectual work, and enjoy the learning journey all together.

Apart from working with my students, I have been very engaged with Diversity Equity and Inclusion activities to further create a more inclusive and welcoming environment in The Geosciences. I am looking forward to continuing this service for the UC Geology Department and the Geoscience Community as a whole.

Photo Captions: • Malacology lab group. From left to right: Yurena Yanes, Tim Pearce, Reed Sanchez, Zeke King Phillips, Wesley Parker and Catherine Nield.

University of Cincinnati | 33

three wells. The groundwater observatory is located a stone’s throw from the Great Miami River, and in systems like this there are strong interactions between river water and groundwater, as well as with other parts of the ecosystem such as plants, microbes, etc.

That’s why our new sensors and system are designed to target a wide range of environmental parameters in the river, above the ground (e.g., vegetation, humidity, etc.), and, of course, in the groundwater. The new name reflects the nature of Charles Vernon Theis’s research as one of the few groundwater scientists of his time that transcended the constraints of disciplinary boundaries. Thus, naming an environmental monitoring and modeling site after him reflects his enthusi-

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, last year was a great year for me and my group here at UC. I received research funding, published peer-reviewed papers, and organized online conference sessions. Here I would like to briefly write about C.V. Theis Groundwater Observa-

Reza Soltanian tory (CVTGO). We changed the name of the observatory to the Theis Environmental Monitoring and Modeling Site (TEMMS). Originally, the observatory was designed to look solely at the groundwater system using pairs of

asm and attitude toward multidisciplinary research.

Photos below show some of our work at the TEMMS in 2020. Corey Wallace (NSF postdoc fellow), Tyler McGarr (Geology Master student) and I have maintained and enhanced the TEMMS in 2020. Please see our recent interview with Cincinnati Public Radio and University of Cincinnati News in links below. https://www.wvxu. org/post/crosby-township-water-sensors-could-becopied-nationwide#stream/0 https://www.uc.edu/ news/articles/2020/11/uc-unleashes-new-tools-totrack-water-pollution-at-groundwater-observatory. html

36 | The Upper Crust

I should also thank Craig Dietsch and David Nash for their continued support of our efforts at TEMMS.

My PhD student Reza Ershadnia is working on his dissertation focusing on multiphase and multicomponent flow and transport of methane in shallow aquifer systems. He published 2 peer-reviewed manuscripts in 2020 and is working on the third one. He did not give up working with our Linux cluster during the pandemic! See Reza’s photo!

I almost forgot to write that my first student defended his thesis! Tyler McGarr successfully defended his thesis and extracted a manuscript that is currently in review. In his thesis Tyler coupled geophysical techniques with physical and chemical sediment analyses to quantify exchange dynamics between groundwater and river water in a compound bar deposit at TEMMS.

Modeling Site •

NSF postdoctoral fellow Corey Wallace collecting groundwater samples at the Theis Environmental Monitoring and Modeling Site.

•

NSF postdoctoral fellow Corey Wallace collecting soil gas samples at the Theis Environmental Monitoring and Modeling Site.

• Geology Master’s student Tyler McGarr collecting electromagnetic induction data at the Theis Environmental Monitoring and Modeling Site.

• Geology PhD student Reza Ershadnia working hard during the pandemic on developing his models of methane fate and transport in groundwater systems through parallel computing using our Linux cluster.

Articles:

My visiting student Wanli Ren from Jilin University completed her work and returned to China. She will be missed.

Photo Captions: • Installing new solar panels and automated pumping systems in summer 2020 at Theis Environmental Monitoring and Modeling Site.

• Installing groundwater sampling ports using a Geoprobe in summer 2020 at Theis Environmental Monitoring and Modeling Site.

• Reza Soltanian monitors the aquifer hydrologic response during a pumping test at the Theis Environmental Monitoring and

University of Cincinnati | 37

Alumni News 38 | The Upper Crust

Department of Geology Graduates 2020 -2021 Congratulations to all the Graduates of the UC Geology Department!

Nick Carns

Ed Powell

Ryan Cook

Amy Ritter

(Geol-BS)

(Geol-BA, EVST-BS)

Aaron Fletcher

(Geol-BS)

(Geol-BS)

Jake Round

(Geol-BA, EVST-BS)

(Geol Minor, Biol-BS)

Jacob Frederick

Madison Wells

Maddie Horton

Jacob Miller

MacKenzie King

Jacob Round

Sam Little

Chris Sheehan

Jake Parsons

Tyler McGarr

(Geol-BS)

(Geol-BS)

(Geol-BS)

(Geol-BS, Phi Beta Kappa)

(Geol-BS)

(Geol-BS)

(Env-Geo Minor)

(Geol Minor)

(PhD)

(MS)

University of Cincinnati | 37

Gerald Schaber (MS ’62, PhD ’65) (Photo sent to Ed O’Donnell)

Thanks much for the links to the really incredible, high-resolution, panoramas from the new Mars rover. They are truly mind-boggling.

Technology has come a long way. We thought the rather poor quality images showing the surface of Mars adjacent to the stationary Viking Mars landers back in summer of1976 were great!

I guess--given the technology of that time--they were. I remember being in the Viking area at JPL standing next to Carl Sagn and others trying to find a good landing site for Viking 1 and 2 (see attached photo). .Carl would freak out if he could see the news Mars rover imagesright?

Neil D. Samuels (MS ’79) (https://profoundconversations.com) neil@profoundconversations.com A respected coach, mentor, and innovative thinker, Neil Samuels has successfully worked with leaders at all levels for nearly 30 years. He has demonstrated value in helping senior leaders develop themselves, their teams, and their organizations as they navigate through complex, large-scale change.

Phil Clymer The attachment is my latest work. Something new for me, a collaboration. Short version of long story, we inherited a house in Trinity Texas, but not wishing to be an absentee landlord we put it on market. In the nine months it took to sell we became close friends with our realtor Carolyn. She learned of my glass work, she does it too. I had a window cut out but lacked time to finish. So she selected the pattern, the glass, and cut the glass, I applied the copper foil, soldered, and framed it. She did amazing job on color selection, I learned she has been a water colorist since college (she is slightly older than I) so is well versed in coloring.

But the really amazing thing is this 310 piece puzzle was her first glass project. She was not intimidated in the least. She admitted she took a break in the middle to do a few sun catcher things when she realized she was in over her head. I didn’t do anything this complex until I had two years’ experience.

Merrill Essex (B.S. ’74) Merrill (www.EssexEstateServices.com) recently passed her Certified Master Appraiser exam, governed by the National Association of Jewelry Appraisers of which Merrill is a Certified Senior Member. She also is a Graduate Gemologist of the Gemological Institute of America...so that makes her GIA GG & CMA NAJA. Lest you think gemologists are only about bright shiny objects, Merrill described to me a part of how she qualified as CMA this way: “In order to qualify I have to set up a gem lab with all sorts of cool equipment. The relatively new issue is to be able to detect the difference between natural mined and lab grown diamonds because LGD’s are being used in jewelry everywhere now. LGD’s are type 2a and they don’t fluoresce like typical natural Type 1a diamonds with N3 centers. That’s one way to tell them apart. HPHT diamonds phosphoresce after short wave UV, but the CVD variety don’t. That’s the clincher...I have to use a combination of devices to measure transparency, fluorescence and phosphorescence to make the call.

40 | The Upper Crust

Bill Haneberg (MS ’85, PhD ’89) & Jason Dortch (MS ’07, PhD ’10) The Kentucky Geological Survey recently published the following report:

U.S. Geological Survey funds project to use a mathematical registration approach to address differences of geologic maps and digital elevation models:

Kentucky Geological Survey Director and State Geologist William Haneberg received funding from the U.S. Geological Survey for a new project, “Transforming Past into Present: A Registration Approach to Using Old and New Topographic Information to Improve the Fidelity and Value of Legacy Geologic Maps.” In addition to Haneberg, KGS researchers Jason Dortch and Yichuan Zhu are part of the research team.

A mathematical registration approach will address differences between rock formation contacts on geologic maps made decades ago and geologic contacts from modern digital elevation models, or DEMS, made using methods such as airborne Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, surveys. Topographic variation can also occur between more recent photogrammetrically derived DEMs and LiDAR DEMs. Remapping of large areas would be inefficient but other methods can be developed to compare topographic base maps and modern high-resolution DEMs.

For this project, a pilot program will evaluate three quadrangles. Alternative approaches for registration will be evaluated through the pilot program. A small number of points will be manually identified for transformation in standard GIS software, and Matlab and Mathematica will be used to correlate images, along with fully developed specialty software. These tasks will determine whether differences are related to the map data or are the result of real topographic change caused by human activities. Targeted field checking, documentation of transformed geologic polygon accuracy, and changes in methods, if needed, will also be part of the pilot program.

Jeff Spencer (BS 80’) Our partnership/company is involved in workovers & recompletions in the western Anadarko Basin. Retirement was a little too slow so I got together with some friends and we put this together. Not a full-time gig and, with or without COVID precautions/ restrictions, we have been able to do much from our homes. Easy to remote login and work on my Geographix project. I also do a little expert witness work, not as a geologist, but as an oil field historian. I was involved in 3 cases last year. I’m VP for the Petroleum History Institute and the Historian for the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies. Our oldest daughter lives and works in Raleigh, NC and our youngest is about to leave Houston to work in the DC area. Looking forward to traveling again.

Mark Mersmann (BS ‘79, MS ‘91) Jeff Spencer sent me his Old Tech Gangue T-Shirt and I had a local T Shirt Co. reproduce the design on a new T Shirt. So you might mention in the newsletter if you want, that if anyone wants a trip down memory lane Old Tech Gangue T Shirt they can contact Big Frog Custom T-Shirts at 7426 Beechmont Ave. in Cincinnati and ask for the Old Tech Gangue design on shirt that is in Mark Mersmann customer file.

Here is the new shirt Dr. Huff. They used a photo of the old shirt so it’s exactly the same. Of course they can print and cotton blend and any color on any color... I got gray because I will wear it when I run (post COVID) and it will show my sweat and make me feel like I can still run fast like at when at Old Tech and am young again... :). Maybe in the next newsletter you could request readers send in vintage photos from old tech and the Fenneman room especially if anyone has some. Good times!

But I knew that even then!

University of Cincinnati | 41

THE STORY BEHIND “SGT. CASTER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND”

nut. A part of that hour’s discussion commonly included playing a game or two of the card game “Hearts.”

PALEONTOLOGY SEMINAR (K.E. CASTER), C. 1974

For those that don’t know the game, and it’s been decades since I last played it, the game is one where the objective is NOT to take tricks including any and all hearts, which create bad points for the holder, and the queen of spades, which is the card that causes more “bad points” damage than all the other heart cards combined. With the queen being a 13-point card and all hearts one each, the game ends when the unfortunate losing player reaches 100 points, with the winner being the player with lowest points at game’s end.

During the legendary Professor Kenneth E. Caster’s distinguished career as a world-renowned Paleozoic invertebrate paleontologist and mentor of many paleontology students (and others) at U.C. Geology, one of the staples of life as a paleo student in the Department was mandatory attendance at Ken’s Paleontology Seminar, which was held from 8-9 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. No sleep-in’s for only later classes for paleontology grad students…and, occasionally, guest students studying under Wayne A. Pryor or Paul Edwin Potter. In what seems so counterpoint to today’s Covidrelated issues, there was NO/ZERO valid excuse for missing Seminar, except for a VERY SEVERE illness (maybe if KEC was having a clement moment). As has been discussed in other accounts of Paleo Seminar, this hour was Ken’s pride and joy and center stage, a chance to mentor his students in the value of being thorough in their research on a topic, concise and accurate in its presentation, and able in defending any challenges to one’s interpretations. All those attributes have served us all in later life, whether as professional paleontologists, academes, workers/researchers in other geological fields, or merely able workers at any craft. Most Paleo Seminar topics in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s were sequential systematic treatments of groups of fossil animals following the format of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology, with each student being assigned a tranche of species to be reviewed over a presentation typically lasting 3-4 days.

(Longer if Ken didn’t like the quality of the presentation and went off on long tangents, right Bill Harmon?)

On occasion, other paleontological topics would be examined, typically various topics in paleoecology. Ken’s “footnotes” and challenges to a presenter, often aided and abetted by the at-times devilish and always precise (and delightfully humorous!) Professor Richard A. Davis, and regular guest participant, the legendary Sedimentology Professor Wayne A. Pryor. Those of us who participated (as if there were a choice!) got an occasional good grilling and a focused teaching of professional “life lessons” from the best!

Particularly when Paleo Seminar had been a grueling hour for the presenter of the day and his grad student audience, in other words, when Ken had been particularly demonstrative in delivering his famous “long footnotes” to a piece of a presentation, or when he went into one of his notable “NO-NO-NO-NO-NO-NO” lines with a follow-up when he didn’t agree with a key point presented by the “victim of the day,” there was a need for some decompression after the Seminar Hour. Routinely back in the time our group was on campus in the mid1970’s, that meant a “cooling off hour” from 9-10 a.m. or so at the Tangeman Union Center over a coffee and do-

40 | The Upper Crust

Our hearts games sometimes got to be very aggressive ways to vent off steam after a rough seminar, and we had some very savvy card players in our group.

When this little tradition first began, regular players and decompressors included: Bill Harrison, now Professor Emeritus Dr. William B. Harrison of Western Michigan University; John Warn, another Ph.D. student with Ken who had a long career in the energy industry after building an expertise in crinoids; Steve Aronoff, a Caster paleo grad student; Gary Taylor, a Caster student who had a distinguished career at Amoco and British Petroleum after finishing his Master’s; Steve Meyers, a Caster student who studied Ken’s favorite fossils, problematic echinoderms, and became a noted secondary teacher of the sciences in Greater Cincinnati after a brief career in the energy industry; Helen Young Meyers, a charming undergrad Geology major whom Steve smartly picked out to court and eventually marry; Bill “Strata” Harmon, a Caster Master’s student working with Ordovician brachiopods; LeRon Bielak, a micropaleontologist grad student who worked with both Dr. Caster and Prof. Briskin (the only Briskin mentoree who ever became a regular, Madeline gave most of her students a free pass to avoid Seminar); and yours truly, Wayne Goodman, a micropaleontology/sedimentology grad student working with Richard Davis as primary advisor with Ken Caster and Wayne A. Pryor as additional mentors. Later arrivers to the paleo group who may have been a part of this tradition would include noted KEC mentoree, Paleozoic coral expert, and Winnipeg, Manitoba Professor Bob Elias; and Caster Master’s student and successful energy company manager Bob Garrison (one of Bill Harrison’s first students at Western Michigan). Professor Dave Meyer joined the Paleo Seminar “interrogation party” after his arrival in the Autumn of 1975.

My recollection is that the savviest player of all was Helen Young Meyers, a petite and charming coed with a high pitched voice whose alter ego as an aggressive and at times vindictive player would come out of all that charm and sweetness during a Hearts game. Dropping the queen of spades on an unsuspecting victim and then delivering that sweet and telling little giggle is an ongoing recollection. Steve, My Friend, you did so well

LYRICS TO “SGT. CASTER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND” PALEONTOLOGY SEMINAR, C. 1974 It was ‘bout a year ago today Billy Baxter taught the folks to play.

The Queen and nasties are now in style And they’re guaranteed your day to rile So, may I introduce to you The game that seems to last for years, Sgt. Caster’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

We’re Sgt. Caster’s Lonely Hearts Club Band We hope that you enjoy the show.

We’re Sgt. Caster’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Sit back and watch the morning go.

Sgt. Caster’s Lonely, Sgt. Caster’s Lonely, Sgt. Caster’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It’s nerve-wracking to play here, It’s certainly a thrill, We’ll let you munch on Queens with us, We’ll let you munch on Queens, I don’t really want to start the show, But it’s time to pass 3-left, you know, Strath will start it by dealing wrong, And he wants you all to play along, So let me introduce to you…

The one and only Queen of Spades, And Sgt. Caster’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

(WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS) What would you do if I played out of turn, Would you get mad and dump hearts on me?

Pass me high spades and I’ll show you a run,

And I’ll give you 26 with glee.

I get by with a little help from my friends.

My score gets high with a little help from my friends, Gonna die with a little help from my friends.

What do I do when the Queen is in hand?

And the other spades have left her alone?

How do I feel at the end of the round?

When I’ve munched again and start to moan?

Well, I score high with a little help from my friends.

Do I want it to happen…?

I need somebody to munch, It could be anybody I want somebody to munch.

Would you believe in a void the first round?

Yes, we’ve noted it happens all the time.

What do I see when you lead out with spades?

I can tell you, it means “Mama’s” mine.

Oh, I score high with a little help from my friends.

Do I want it to happen, I need someone else to munch.

It could be anybody, I just need someone to munch.

I score high with a little help from my friends.

Yes, I soon die with a little help from my friends, With a little help from my friends, a little help from my friends…

in partnering with that sharp little package of charm for all these years! Hearts games became a regular enough part of our thrice-weekly post-seminar life that, like a lot of things we paleo grad students did, there eventually evolved an ongoing scoring system and standings to identify the best player(s). (in an earlier missive, I have described how a scoring system evolved in Paleo Seminar itself to score the event as a “Caster versus opponent” football game.) An “efficiency rating” formula was

calculated and was regularly updated on the old blackboard in the “bullpen office” at the back of the Old Tech Museum on the ground floor, where 3-5 grad students typically officed, shared “war stories,” and bolstered their friendships with one another.

With it being the 1970’s, after all, we were all Boomers, some of us were borderline hippies with a big geology passion, and all enjoyed the early years of hard

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rock music. We were among the early benefactors of AOR (Album Oriented Rock), which became a popular radio genre in the early 1970’s, when FM radio had its first big explosion after prior generations had grown up on tinny AM radio, Pop-40 formats, and formulaic 3-minute hit single records. Early AOR Cincinnati powerhouse WEBNFM radio, which still exists 50+ years later, was the major delivering entity in the Cincinnati area market. (Complete with its irreverent and clever fake commercials for Tree Frog Beer, Brute Force Cybernetics products, etc.) A handful of our entourage back then, including Gary Taylor and John Warn most notably, were and are capable musicians. Gary has made a nice second career of his prowess. So, yes, we were all rock-and-roll/album rock afficionados at some level, and that played into Paleo Seminar in a unique way.

Sometime in 1974, when the Beatles were still near the top of the food chain even though the band had dissolved into solo acts after 1970’s Let It Be album, there evolved a song that was Beatles-themed to commemorate Paleo Seminar and the Hearts tournament, Sgt. Caster’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was probably a group effort at some level, but I suspect that I was the primary collaborator on this little project. I recently found the lyrics to this knockoff song on a piece of ledger paper while doing some “Covid cleaning” of old archives. It is separately attached to this recollective narrative.

Most of the lyrics are self-explanatory once one knows the basic rules of the game…and the vindictiveness with which its savviest players played. (Are you listening, Helen?) In the first couplet, “Billy Baxter” was and is Dr. William Baxter Harrison, whom John Warn affectionately dubbed “Billy Baxter” way back when. Bill was the guy who got the Caster Hearts Club rolling. Part of the game, after the hand is dealt, is passing three cards to your opponent to the immediate left to make one’s hand less vulnerable, and that is captured in part of the lyrics. “Strath” is Bill “Strata” Harmon. He picked up that moniker when we pranksters put him on the Dry Dredgers’ mailing list as “Strata” and their representative

permanently etched a new nickname into Bill’s legacy with a typo on their mailing list. “Scoring 26 points” happens if a player has a hand that can take every trick, thus capturing all hearts and the queen. That player can either deduct 26 from his/her score or add 26 to everyone else’s. Many lyrics refer to the undesirable results of “eating the queen” or “eating hearts.”

So, Friends, that’s how another iconic part of Caster Seminar history and its sidebar stories came into being. It’s not that being grad students in our Department in the mid-1970’s didn’t give us more than enough to do without getting impish. But, rather, since we regularly spent 16-18 hour days on campus and in Old Tech (and/or Basic Sciences for those who officed over there), we developed a very tightly knit fraternity that in many ways created its own culture. And, accordingly, made some incredibly special lifelong friendships, a continuing gift from KEC and our other Geology Department mentors.

P.S. I’d promised in a sneak preview a few days ago that I had a li;le fun something comingyour way. And, with Dave and Carl copied, here it is. In my ongoing “archives cleanup” that hasbecome a semi-occasional part of Covid life while in semi-isolaFon, I found in a file folder thelyrics to “Sgt. Caster’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Dave, I don’t know if this tradiFon of a post-Seminar “decompression hour” was sFll going on aLer your arrival, but it was a regular part of lifethrice a week during my days there. Carl, I know that you have revived a version of Seminar, Ithink in aLernoons these days and perhaps sFll going on virtually unFl we can reconvene inperson.

But Ken’s version was not just a scholarly endeavor, it was...well, A SHOW. As the old linegoes, you had to be there.So, that all said, the lyrics are a;ached along with a li;le explanatory prose that will give you all alook into the past at life among we paleo grad students some 45+ years ago. Priceless. So glad Ifound this li;le Fdbit among reams of stuff that mostly comprised old xeroxed reprints that havebeen donated to the local recycling center.Enjoy!Cheers to All, have safe and happy holidays should we not connect again before...Wayne

Anastasia Fries (MS ’17) I work for the Environmental Compliance Program at the Ohio Department of Health and conduct inspections of active lead abatement projects to ensure that contractors are completing the work in compliance to the Ohio Administrative Code. I work throughout the entire state of Ohio, so I get to travel a lot for work. My promotion just adds the responsibility of administering the Lead Abatement Tax Credit program which provides applicable homeowners of pre1978 homes a tax credit for getting lead abatement work done at their owned properties. I, unfortunately, don’t get to do much with geology (which I miss), but I make up for it whenever I can with hiking and exploring.

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Stephanie Kidwell (MS ’03) While I will always love geology I realized my heart wasn’t in it. After I left UC in 2003 with my MS I taught high school science while I completed my MS Ed. It was a lot of fun, but when I volunteered in the hospital one summer I fell in love with nursing. There’s nothing like the feeling of giving something of your soul towards the healing of another person. Sometimes my patients were the tiniest preterm neonates (that was HARD), sometimes they were school age kids, sometimes they were adults.

Usually they were moms and babies, but holistic nurses care for the whole family, not just the patient.

I’ve worked in the hospital, telehealth, home care, and in the community. I always knew that I wanted to go into nursing education but I delayed that transition because I loved clinical care. I miss those babies and I miss my kids, but after COVID I finally made the transition. I won’t tell you about my emergency COVID assignment, but it was horrendous.

I am half way through my MS in Nursing Education. I love my school, Chamberlain University, so much that I am now a nurse educator there (started in August). The education model is fantastic. The level of care for students, colleagues, and patients is incredible.

I am having a wonderful experience in the BSN program. I spend a lot of time in the lab and simulation center trying to get students practice ready (in other words, I get to play with the high tech toys). I teach moderate size groups, but my favorite role is one on one with the high risk students. Sometimes students need extra help because they haven’t had the advantage of learning to study or think technically or juggle full time work + full time study + full time parenthood. These students just need encouragement and support to thrive.

Doing just that has earned me quite a bit of attention up the chain of command. I was recently awarded a small token of appreciation. I was nominated by the Dean of Academic Affairs and others, and then won the Academic Colleague of the Session. The campus awards this title 6 times per year, so it is certainly not a rare event, but I appreciate the recognition.

The plan is to finish up this degree and immediately start my doctorate in nursing education. I will certainly engage in nursing education research, but my focus will always be on teaching. I intend to stay with my university too - it is so special.

I am still living in NYC with my husband of 14 years, Nate, and our two children, Ben (9), and Lana (5). Life is busy, but that’s a good problem to have. I think we’ll head to CT soon to slow down a bit, but I’ll always be a NYC girl.

I hope you and yours are well. Have a happy and safe 2021!!

Editor’s note: Stephanie has been awarded the Daisy Foundation Award, which honors the super-human work nurses do for patients and families every day wherever they practice, in whatever role they serve, and throughout their careers – from Nursing Student through Lifetime Achievement in Nursing. As Stephanie reports, “The DAISY Award began after a very sad story of a young father, Patrick Barnes, who was diagnosed with a terminal illness in 1999, 6 weeks after the birth of his first baby. His family honors his memory by giving thanks and recognition to nurses who provide extraordinary care and faculty who provide extraordinary education to these nurses. I received the award from Patrick’s parents, who described how nursing care made a tremendous impact on their son’s last months of life and on the family’s coping and feelings of support. I am so honored to receive this award in my first year in academia. If I am a recipient of this prestigious award it is because I work and learn from an incredible team, if I am being honest. The DAISY is a reminder of why I entered this amazing field, the good that we can do with direct clinical care, and the good that we can accomplish by fostering the development of caring nurse graduates.”

Kent Walters (MS ‘13) Kent works for the Michigan Department of Environment Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) in the Materials Management Division (MMD). Specifically Kent works with open and closed landfills in Western Lower Peninsula of Michigan reviewing geological and hydrogeological investigations and overseeing groundwater contamination cleanups. Kent is also a part of the Michigan PFAS Action Response Team (MPART ) working on several sites with Per-and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances contamination. Kent sits in on the MPART groundwater technical advisory team reviewing and discussing challenges with PFAS contamination and groundwater.

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Robert R. Gaines (MS ’98) Bob Gaines is presently serving a 3-year term as dean at Pomona College in Claremont, California, but, particularly in COVID times, he feels fortunate to find some time for geology. Even his 2019 convocation address to the entering class of 2023 featured trilobites (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHA8DgFfItg) as a lens on a liberal education. Bob continues his work on the Burgess Shale and other deposits like it found around the world, and is inspired by many other mysteries brought to his door by Pomona students. He anticipates a return to the faculty in 2022-23.

Michael O’Connell (BS ’96) We traveled as a family out to the NW last summer, and my boys got to see some Cascade volcanoes for the first time. We steered clear of the cities of course, and car-camped around in a rental van. We went to Mt. Rainier, St. Helens, Canon Beach, Olympic peninsula and North Cascades park. It was a great trip!

As of this year, there is a new Bearcat in my family as my oldest started at UC in Chemical Engineering. I’ve got one younger that I’m working on for geology, but we’ll see. They both love science and the outdoors, so I can’t complain too much.

We also just got back from Florida and visited one night with geology alum, Brian Burke, who has lived in the Tampa area for a while now working for Arcadis. It was great catching up over a few beers.

It’s hard to believe, but I have now been back in Cincy for 10 years and lead the Environmental Assessment group at PSARA Technologies.

We occasionally need some geologists, so feel free to share my contact info. If nothing else, I might know someone else that’s looking for people.

I hope all is well with you, and at the department.

Megan Moore (BS ’09) I’m in the Abandoned Mine Land unit in the Missouri Land Reclamation Program. Long story trying to be short--we focus on reclamation of coal mined lands that were abandoned prior to 1977 SMCRA. The goal is to abate hazards to human health, safety, and property--as well as try to fix up the environmental degradation left behind by these old mines. We also will work on emergency Pb/Zn mine situation (like a shaft that had been closed suddenly opening up on someone’s property), and close these hazards as quickly as possible when they come about. The details are coordinating with different agencies (USFWS, Army Corps of Engineers, Dept of Conservation, State Historic Preservation Office...... etc.) to ensure we won’t be impacting threatened or endangered species, historically significant areas, floodplain, etc., then working with our engineer on what we want to do to a particular site, writing up the project specifications, getting the project off to bid, then working with and monitoring the contractors as they build what’s been designed. I worked odd jobs in Colorado while going through school, spent a lot of time at a whole effluent toxicity testing lab, then left there after a long time to a job that paid much better---roadway construction. I served as a quality control inspector for the contractor’s side of a big highway project in Colorado and tested concrete. Having done the roadway construction job and learned the ropes of construction oversight, on top of my education background turned out to be two winning tickets...so now I live in Missouri doing work that’s in line with what I’d hoped to one day find work doing!

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Kenan Cetin (PhD ‘92) These days I know more about what’s going on in UC Geology than any other time in the last 20 years or so, thanks to Craig’s regular Friday Field Notes. Speaking of Craig, it was very good to see him and Scott (Ritger), albeit only on an iPad screen, during a zoom meet for alumni that Craig initiated some months ago. On the home front, things are moving along well. My daughter Kezban turned 16 early this year and very excited about driving practice in a few weeks! Pelin continues to work for U. of Pittsburgh. Her getting used to work from home was probably the easiest among her student health center colleagues since tele-psychiatry has been a well-established mode of work for psychiatrists, at least for a few decades now. She will have a tough time to go back to work from her office after the pandemic is over; she now loves her set up which is so convenient for her. On my end, I continue to work for the WV Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP), managing the RCRA Corrective Action (CA) program/ projects. I am in my 7th year with WVDEP, and I have to say this year will be the most satisfying because several of the cleanup projects I have been involved with since their investigation and remedy decision phases are now in the remedy implementation phase, with a couple of them coming to fruition when they are completed this summer.

These are multi-million-dollar cleanup/remedial action projects which had to be postponed for a full year because of the pandemic. It will mean a bunch of days of travel to job sites and being out for field oversight on these work sites. After a really static year of working from home with occasional field work, I will enjoy the change of pace and being outdoors on job sites. Beyond project and program management, I am looking into ways to update a few agency guidance documents relating to erosion and sediment control as well as stormwater management and design by incorporating climate change related recommendations. With several extreme precipitation and flooding events recorded in WV’s recent history (i.e., a 500-year even in 80s and a 1000-year flood event in 2016), making appropriate updates to such guidance documents will be timely. I have also been a part of a group in the agency discussing matters regarding development of a state standard for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in groundwater and soils. As many of you will know, the PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals” because of their potential for causing various health ailments in the groundwater throughout the country is the hottest subject of anxiety and discussion in the environmental remediation world. Here is a link to a decent interactive map displaying the seriousness of the areal distribution of PFAS: https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/ map/. In the absence of a national standard at the moment, many states, including WV, have recently started looking into the feasibility of developing their own state standards. However, with a new administration in place, USEPA might now be encouraged to speed up the process of developing a national standard very soon.

Cheers and wishing all the colleagues a safe and a happy ending of the pandemic!

Jacek Jaminski (PhD ‘97) Marzena (PhD ‘98) and I are doing well slowly adjusting to working full time from home. She brought her microscope from work (Shell) and we have FedEx delivering thin section to our house every couple of days. Really cool! We are still with oil and gas industry, but how long this is going to last considering the downturn and the strategic changes companies are undertaking. BP has announced this morning a move from being an Integrated Oil Company to an Integrated Energy Company with phasing out oil and gas fairly soon. Very exciting move that brings a lot of change to geoscientists in the company.

I have chatted recently with Andrew Polter from UC McMicken development team. He told me about recent sad news about Dr. Potter before official obituaries came out. We have also talked about Dr. Dietsch assuming a role of the Head of Department. A lot of changes. Marzena and I are looking forward to receiving the newsletter. It is really true pleasure to see the work faculty and students are doing. Very exciting.

Jacek and Marzena

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Alec MacDonell (BS ’19) I graduated in May 2019 with a Bachelor’s of Science in Environmental Studies, a Minor in Geology, and a GIS Certificate. One of my favorite classes while at UC was the Bahamas course taught by Krista Smilek. It was such a great experience. I couldn’t have had a better way to end my collegiate career.

In the summer of 2019, I was a Course Assistant for the field course Ecosystem Field Studies near Jamestown, Colorado. After returning to Cincinnati, I continued working my valet job at the Renaissance Downtown Hotel while actively applying for jobs. In the summer of 2020, I was able to land a Crew Member position with American Conservation Experience’s (ACE) Southeast Region. For three months, I performed invasive species removal and trail maintenance in Myrtle Beach State Park, Mammoth Cave National Park, and Cherokee National Forest. After vigorously applying for internships and jobs for the past few months, I just accepted an offer with the Larimer County Conservation Corps to return to Colorado. I will be installing energy efficient items in homes and educating the residents of Fort Collins about how to reduce their impact and save some money along the way. From the first time I set foot in Colorado, I knew I was going to work and live there one day. My UC Environmental Studies and Geology experiences made all of this possible.

This past summer, I worked for American Conservation Experience in Asheville, NC performing trail maintenance and invasive species removal. With my background in customer service, water conservation and conservation corps, I was able to land a position with Larimer County Conservation Corps in Fort Collins, CO. I am currently educating residents in Fort Collins and Loveland about water & energy conservation and installing energy efficient products in their homes to help them be more efficient and save some money along the way. I am looking for future employment as this is another term based job.

Andrew Gangidine (Ph.D. 2020) and Annie Gangidine welcomed their first child, Evelyn Aila, in January 2021. As is traditional, the proud parents are exhausted, but happy.

Ms. Claire J. Taghiof (BA ’19) Moving to Los Angeles, CA where I’ll be joining rag and bone (https://www.rag-bone.com) to work with the company in sales management and work with the textiles sustainability team.

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Thomas Malgieri (MS ’16) I was working offshore for a small ocean survey company out of New Jersey starting in late 2017. Primarily we did geophysical and geotechnical surveying for the installation of renewable energy such as windfarms. I lead the geotechnical effort for the windfarm that is slated to be installed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard (it was recently approved). We did 30-foot sediment cores and offshore CPT work (which was rather interesting). In the summer of 2019 I decided that I was done with the offshore life and came on board with an Environmental, Geotechnical and Civil Engineering Company closer to home in New York City named Langan Eng & Env Svcs., Inc. We are one of the largest and well-established firms in NYC and continuously rated amongst the top engineering firms in the country.

Currently I am a Staff Geologist who specializes in Phase I and Phase II investigations, Site Conceptual Modeling, Drilling, Coring, Sediment Analysis, Soil Vapor intrusion, Groundwater monitoring, and various other things. I am one of the few TRUE geologists in the NYC office and am frequently consulted to advise our staff and clients on site conceptual models, geology, and sedimentology pertaining to construction of various building types. One of our largest projects I have contributed heavily to is that of development of Hudson Yards (https://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com/). It has been a really great decision and wonderful career move.

Personally I met a wonderful woman named Vanessa and we recently got married in January and purchased a house in Park Ridge, New Jersey. We got a goldendoodle puppy named Luna in February and she is beyond the love of my wife’s life. My parents are doing well and still living in my childhood house and boating to their hearts content.

Rachel Bosch Science Around Cincy: Rachel Bosch Cave erosion measurement video by Science Around Cincy https://buff.ly/30pQv3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR_ZeHj0VKU&pp=QAFIAQ%3D%3D

One of Josh Miller’s graduate students (Abby Kelly) is giving a virtual presentation on some of her doctoral research on Ice Age paleoecology. Check it out today at 2 pm Eastern Time!

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Steve J Schoch (BS ’15) Hey all! After graduating I started down the management path in wine and hospitality, spending several years running wine bars, event centers, and restaurants in the Greater Cincinnati area. Having the geological background provided valuable insights into the world of terroir and viticulture. However, glass ceilings are very real in hospitality management and I reached a point where the fork led to business ownership or career change.

I went with the latter and transitioned into financial services, which up to that point had been simply a pursuit of passion rather than profession. Today, I spend my time building relationships with people across the country and helping them identify their goals and efficient ways to achieve them. Located in Cincinnati, I am based at the Northwestern Mutual firm in Rookwood Commons and am working towards CFP® and ChFC® designations while building my practice. I work primarily with young families, (pre)retirees, and income-driven professionals that have company benefits who are seeking ways to enhance their strategies to becoming wealth dependent. Our firm specializes in tax-efficient savings philosophies and helping people maximize their income-earning years while preparing for financial independence.

I currently reside in East Walnut Hills with my S.O., our two dogs – Millie & Maya, and our many plants. We spend our free time hiking, travelling, and finding estate sales to explore. Since 2020 shut down so many of our favorite cocktail bars, we’ve started getting really into rum collecting and are always in search of single origin bottles (especially from Peru or Haiti!).

If anyone has questions about how their benefits work, funding a tax-free retirement, financial strategies that corporations and banks utilize, or simply want some advice on budgeting and saving principles I can be reached at steve.schoch@nm.com or via phone at 513-256-7712. Consultations are free and I’m always happy to chat for a bit to see if it’s worth diving deeper. Wishing everyone the best in this next year and beyond.

Neil Samuels (MS ’79) I’ve had quite the journey since leaving Cincinnati in 1979 -- from exploration geologist to non-profit co-founder!

At Amoco, after spending 10 years looking for oil and gas in the US, the Middle East, and West Africa, I had the opportunity to move into an internal change management consulting role and jumped at it. As my wife would say, I became a different person after finding my passion.

After BP bought Amoco, I moved to London for 4 years as the head of Organization Development for Europe where I managed a team of ten consultants supporting 35,000 employees in 15 countries. It was the most meaningful, supportive, and creative role of my career. After returning to the States in 2005, I left BP and started my own consulting practice called Profound Conversations.

Then last July, a colleague and I founded the People Powered Innovation Collaborative (PPIC) a not-for-profit whose purpose is to elevate the ability of organizations to help create a “world that works for all!” which we define as one in which economies, businesses, and all people thrive, and nature flourishes now and across the generations.

Based on our combined 70+ years of consulting, we believe any corporation can contribute to creating a world that works for all by co-creating more of what really matters with its stakeholders, if it reimagines its business model and operating model in support of a purpose that goes beyond profit only. We help them do so with confidence and courage through: Research and Development: As a social science-based action research organization, we create evidence-based, inclusive practices (toolsets, skillsets, mindsets) for reinvention.

Applying & Learning: To gauge the efficacy and improve what was created in the R&D workstream, we move into the “field”, where we work with client partners from start to finish, while also building capacity and jointly reflecting on our progress.

Sharing: We freely share our research findings and all our constantly evolving toolsets, skillsets, and mindsets – through print and online publications, workshops, webinars, and an active practitioner/leader network.

Still in start-up mode, we have a core team of six and a fully functioning Board of Directors. Though we may be small in size, we are high in aspirations. Feel free to reach out to me for more information. neil@ppicollaborative.org https://ppicollaborative.org

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Department of Geology Donors 2020 -2021 Thank You All for Your for Contributions to the UC Geology Department’s Continued Excellence!

Vanguard Charitable Dr. and Mrs. Lewis A. Owen Mr. Ronald F. Broadhead Dr. and Mrs. John K. Pope Mr. and Mrs. Leland W. Burton Ms. Maureen M. Wu Greater Cincinnati Foundation Mr. and Mrs. S Duff Kerr, Jr. Mrs. Cornelia K. Riley Mr. and Mrs. Joseph W. Breuer Dr. and Mrs. Warren D. Huff Dr. and Mrs. Frank R. Ettensohn Ms. Jenea L. Woods Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Kuntz Aethon Energy America’s Charities Anonymous ExxonMobil Education Foundation Dr. Richard B. Schultz Ms. Janet G. Gasper Dr. and Mrs. Frederick E. Simms Dr. Frederick C. Shaw Mr. Jack E. Mase Drs. Jacek and Marzena Jaminski Dr. and Mrs. Roy B. Van Arsdale Shell Companies Foundation, Inc.

Dry Dredgers, Inc. Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Ferree Ms. Abigail E. Padgett Mr. and Mrs. John R. Ford Mr. Matt Phillips Dr. Robert J. Elias Dr. and Mrs. Brian L. Nicklen Mr. and Mrs. Wayne R. Goodman Dr. and Mrs. Gregory P. Wahlman Mr. and Mrs. Annette M. Lipsky Ms. Elizabeth A. Krebes Dr. and Mrs. James T. Teller Dr. Kenan Cetin Dr. Linda P. Fulton Dr. Stephen P. Reidel and Ms. Mary R. Knight Applied Science & Engineering LLC Mr. Eugene J. Amaral Mr. and Mrs. Robert P. Elliott, Jr. Dr. and Mrs. Steven M. Warshauer Mr. and Mrs. Steven Reisbord Mr. and Mrs. Victor V. Van Beuren Ms. Mary L. Pojeta Mr. and Mrs. John M. Wunder Mr. Tod W. Roush

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Notes

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Notes

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