Faculty & Staff News

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 Madagascar, 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.

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

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 paleontologist is to advise on what samples to collect that might hold evidence of ancient life. If it’s there, we should be able to find some evidence, but we 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.

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 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

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 interruption- and, 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 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

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 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 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)

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, InternaDan Sturmer tional 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), characWell…what a year again! I didn’t expect to be terization of a debris flow in Mammoth Caves working from home a year after the last update, but here (Bosch et al., in press, Journal of Cave and Karst studies), we are. I have been back to campus a few times, but I carbon dioxide sequestration in heterogeneous aquifers am looking forward to being back on campus full time (Ershadnia et al., in press, Advances in Water Resources), in the fall. Our daughters Ivy (4) and Eliana (2) are back carbon isotope stratigraphy of the Ely-Bird Spring bain pre-school and they are having a blast. Sarah contin- sin (Sturmer et al., in press, SEPM special volume), and ues to teach online courses in the Environmental Studies structural geology of the Buck Mountain area in central program UC and she will be starting in the Computer Nevada (Whitmore et al., in press, SEPM special volume.

Science M.Eng. program at UC in the fall. I also published a data layer documenting nearly 700

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 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. complete a PhD working with Mike Blum on the source- In addition to the student projects mentioned to-sink sedimentary system related to the Triassic Chinle above, I have several projects that I will be working on in

Formation. Additionally, we are planning to lead a field the coming year. I have several projects related to landtrip to the Blue Diamond landslide as part of the nation- slide analysis, including DEM analysis of several landal AEG meeting in Las Vegas in 2022. slide deposits in Nevada (with new UC PhD Chris Shee-

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 han 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 28 | The Upper Crust