GEOSCIENCES DEPARTMENT

Assistant Professor Mea Cook, a paleo-oceanographer, joined the Geosciences Department in a tenure-track position in the fall of 2009, after spending a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor during the 2008-2009 academic year. During the summer of 2009 she was a research scientist during a two-month cruise in the Bering Sea. Back at Williams, she designed and oversaw the renovation of a new laboratory where she and her research students reconstruct ancient climate based on recovered sediment cores.

Peter Tierney ’10 and Nari Miller ’12 making reef sediment measurements
at Mary Creek, U.S.Virgin Is. as part of Winter Study course.

Professor Rónadh Cox continued her research on steep gullies (lavakas) in Madagascar and impacts on Jupiter’s moon, Europa. She is also pursuing her investigations into the origin of enigmatic boulder ridges on shore-hugging cliffs in the Aran Islands.

Professor David Dethier’s NSF-funded investigation of weathering and erosion rates in the Colorado Front Range was advanced with help from James Trotta ’10 and Rebecca Gilbert ’10. Dethier collaborates with University of Vermont Professor Paul Bierman ’85. Dethier is also the coordinator of data collection for weather, stream flow, and precipitation chemistry in Hopkins Memorial Forest.

Assistant Professor Lisa Gilbert, at Williams-Mystic, was on leave during the 2009-2010 academic year. She was a visiting faculty member at both the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory of San Jose State University.

Professor Markes Johnson was on leave during the 2009-2010 academic year and traveled extensively in Asia and Europe pursuing new research initiatives. He also made it to South America for a conference. We suspect he set a Geosciences Department record for the most miles traveled in a twelve-month period.

Professor and Chair Paul Karabinos was co-editor of a Geological Society of America Memoir entitled “From Rodinia to Pangea: The Lithotectonic Record of the Appalachian Region.” He also received an NSF grant to support his educational project “Visualizing Strain in Rocks with Interactive Computer Programs.”

Professor Wobus edited the autobiography of T.N. Dale, an extraordinary geologist who taught at Williams College and later worked at the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Geosciences Department continued to participate in the Class of 1960 Scholars Program. This year’s lecture series was organized by Rónadh Cox and Paul Karabinos. The fall speakers were integrated with Professor Cox’s tutorial Coral Reefs (GEOS 253T), and helped prepare the students for the January Winter Study project linked to the tutorial in which students mapped the St. Mary’s reef in the Virgin Islands. Spring speakers focused on topics related to the spring tutorial Tectonics of the Appalachians (GEOS 360T).

Geosciences faculty, students, and alumni published widely in scientific journals and presented numerous talks at the National Geological Society of America meeting in Portland, Oregon, the American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco, California, and the Northeastern Sectional Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Baltimore, Maryland. Allison Goldberg, Alice Nelson, James Trotta, and Rebecca Gilbert also gave research presentations at the Keck Symposium hosted by Exxon-Mobil in Houston, Texas.

The David Major Fund in Geology offered field camp scholarships to four of our majors during the summer of 2008. Katie Stack ’08, Ruth Aronoff ’07, and James Trotta ’10 all attended the YBRA (Yellowstone-Bighorn Research Association) field camp near Red Lodge, Montana. Sam Sterling (’09) attended the Juneau Icefield Research Program. The Keck Geology Consortium supported fieldwork by Allison Goldberg (’10) in Alaska. David Dethier, James Trotta (‘10), and Rebecca Gilbert (‘10) worked on another Keck project in Colorado. Alice Nelson (’10) joined a Keck project in Svalbard, Norway. Margaret Robinson was the recipient of the Lauren Interess Fellowship. She traveled to Dominica in January to study a ‘boiling’ lake related to hydrothermal activity near an active Volcano.

Five honors students presented their research results on May 17, and Alice Nelson (’10) won the Freeman Foote prize for the best thesis presentation. James Trotta won the David Major Prize in Geology, and Allison Goldberg received the Mineralogical Society of America prize. Allison Goldberg, Alice Nelson, Anne O’Leary, Peter Tierney, and James Trotta were inducted into Sigma Xi. Ryan Gordon ’05 won a NSF Graduate Fellowship in geology, which he will use at Cornell University.

Last summer, Mea Cook sailed on Leg 323 of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, a two-month expedition to the Bering Sea aboard the scientific drilling ship JOIDES Resolution. She is part of an international group of scientists studying the climate history of the subarctic Pacific, including the role of the Bering Strait and ocean circulation on climate changes during the last 5 million years. With sediments from this cruise, Anne O’Leary ’10, in a spring independent study project, reconstructed surface ocean temperatures from the last glacial period using assemblages of calcareous plankton. Thesis student Alice Nelson ’10 traveled to Svalbard last summer as part of a Keck project led by Al Werner from Mount Holyoke College and Steve Roof from Hampshire College. With varved sediment cores she collected from Lake Linné, Alice developed a 1000-y long record of varve thickness, and studied the relationship between varve thickness and climatology. Alice presented her work at the Keck Symposium in April. Jordan Landers ’09, who completed a Maritime Studies thesis with Mea last year, presented her work on ocean circulation and atmospheric carbon dioxide at the American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences conference in Portland, Oregon, in February. Mea gave an invited lecture at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in April on her work studying ancient methane seeps in the Bering Sea and their influence on climate.

In the past year, Rónadh has been continuing work on Aran Islands boulder ridges, Madagascar lavakas, and chaos terrain on Europa. The Aran Islands project—examining the origin of boulder ridges emplaced on cliff tops on the wave-swept Atlantic coasts of these limestone platforms—began on Inis Mór with the thesis work of Danielle Zentner ’09. This summer rising juniors Brian Kirchner and Nari Miller will join Rónadh on Inis Meain to look at deposits on the highest cliffs (up to 50 m a.s.l.) of the island group. We will look at the relationships between boulder size and cliff height, and map the orientation and extent of the ridges. These data will allow us to calculate wave energies required to emplace the boulders as we continue to investigate the connection between storm events, wave dynamics, and the formation of the spectacular megaclast deposits.

Work proceeds also on research into lavaka (gully) erosion in Madagascar. Emily Perry, also a rising junior, will spend her summer on a combination of GIS mapping and cosmogenic isotope analysis. She will use GIS to quantify distributions and sizes of lavakas over the last half century, using both 50-year-old air photos and high-resolution Google Earth orthophotos. The cosmogenic work (at the UVM lab of Paul Bierman ’85) will help measure the erosion rate of Madagascar based on exposure ages of quartz grains from river sediment. At the end of the summer we will greet Voary Voarison, who is coming from Madagascar to spend a year at Williams taking Geosciences classes and working on the lavaka research project. Voary’s visit to Williams (and associated lavaka research) is funded by the National Science Foundation.

In the planetary realm, Aaron Bauer ’11 is continuing hydrocode modeling of impact dynamics at Jupiter’s moon Europa. Rónadh presented initial results of this work—showing that impacting comets at Europa can fully penetrate through the ice crust—at a European Space Agency conference in the Netherlands this spring, and Aaron will be submitting an abstract for the Geological Society of America meeting in Colorado this October.

David Dethier continued his NSF-sponsored research in the Colorado Front Range, focused mainly on the measurement of processes in the Boulder Creek “critical zone” (CZO), which includes the mantle of soil and weathered material above fresh bedrock. In cooperation with the NSF CZO project, he supervised a Keck Geology Consortium project in the Boulder Creek area during July and August. With Paul Bierman ’85 (University of Vermont), Dethier continued investigations of Front Range weathering and erosion rates using cosmogenic radionuclide (CRN) techniques. Dethier worked in alpine zones of the Front Range with Matthias Leopold and other colleagues from the Technical University of Munich, using seismic refraction, resistivity and ground-penetrating radar to non-destructively image the shallow subsurface in a suite of study areas. Dethier supervised the honors thesis work of J.T. Trotta ’10 and the extended independent study of Rebecca (Bex) Gilbert ’10, both of whom worked in Colorado.

Dethier helps to coordinate ongoing collection of weather, streamflow, precipitation chemistry and other environmental data from Hopkins Memorial Forest and their analysis in the Environmental Science Lab in the Morley Science Center. Real-time weather and groundwater data and archived weather data from 25 years of monitoring are available at <http://oit.williams.edu/weather/>; archived watershed data (streamflow and temperature, stream chemistry and bulk precipitation chemistry) are at: <http://oit.williams.edu/weather/watershed/>.

Lisa Gilbert was on Assistant Professor Leave for the 2009-10 year. She was a visiting faculty member at both the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory of San Jose State University. While in California, she conducted fieldwork on an ancient seafloor volcano with students Kimberly Elson (Williams-Mystic fall ’07) and Susan Schnur (Williams-Mystic fall ’06). At the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting in San Francisco in December, she and Schnur co-authored a presentation on their work. Gilbert continues laboratory work on the formation of modern and ancient volcanic rocks. On the rocks from the deepest down-section hole yet drilled in seafloor crust, she has been working with Italian colleagues Paola Tartarotti and Laura Crispini to determine the direction of lava flows and intrusions and with Canadian colleague Matt Salisbury on the influence of porosity on seismic velocity. With the help of Jessica Johnson and Elizabeth Moncure (both Williams-Mystic spring ’10), she also began collaborating with Ben Surpless (Trinity University) and his students to understand the carbon dioxide sequestration capabilities of thin basalt flows on land.

Professor Markes Johnson took a full-year sabbatical in 2009-2010 for extensive travel and research in Asia and Europe. During the fall term, he and spouse Gudveig Baarli visited Japan, South Korea, China, and Viet Nam with partial support from the Class of 1945 Faculty World Fellowship and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation of Boston. The Whiting Foundation sponsored research on modern rocky shores around Hongdo Island in the Dadohae-Haesang National Park of South Korea, located 70 km from Mokpo in the Yellow Sea. Very little geological research of any kind has been conducted within the park, and the spectacular scenery with extensive sea stacks and sea arches eroded from quartzite cliffs is the main attraction that brings droves of Korean tourists to the region. Colleagues from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in Nanjing, Yunnan University in Kunming, and the South China Sea Institute of Oceanography in Guangzhou hosted the visitors during their lengthy stay in China. To help celebrate the bicentennial marking the birth of Charles Darwin in 1809, Markes gave lectures in Nanjing and Kunming on evolution in the Galapagos Islands. His talks were richly illustrated with images of the geology and wildlife from his visit there in March 2009 with students in GEOS 110T. Fieldwork was begun on a Silurian rocky shore near Quijing in Yunnan Province. In Viet Nam, the magnificent coastal karst towers of Ha Long Bay on the Gulf of Tonkin were cruised and photographed over a three-day visit.

December 2009, Prof. Johnson was accompanied by co-authors Gudveig Baarli and Peter W. Tierney ’10 to Brazil for the Third International Rhodolith Workshop and Conference, held in Búzios, near Rio de Janeiro. Rhodoliths are coralline red algae that take on a spherical shape and roll around unattached on the sea floor. The Williams participants made three presentations on fossil rhodolith deposits from Mexico during the conference.

In February 2010, Markes organized and led a research trip to Baja California Sur, Mexico, for colleagues from Portugal and Spain with whom he is partnered on new research regarding Miocene rocky shores in the Balearic Islands of Spain and Madeira Islands of Portugal. In Mexico, the group focused on limestone deposits produced by rhodoliths in preparation for comparative studies in Madeira. In Loreto on February 16, a reception was held at the Caballo Blanco Bookstore for Markes and his co-editor Jorge Ledesma in honor of their new book Atlas of Coastal Ecosystems in the Western Gulf of California (University of Arizona Press). The event was attended by more than 60 townspeople and expatriate Americans. The month of March was split between field studies on the islands of Minorca and Majorca in the western Mediterranean Sea and the Madeira Islands in the North Atlantic Ocean.

During the course of the year, Prof. Johnson wrote reviews on manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Coastal Research and the Bulletin of the Paleontological Society of Italy and evaluated a grant proposal for the National Science Foundation (Division of Earth Sciences).

Professor and Chair Paul Karabinos, along with R. Tollo, M. Bartholomew, and J. Hibbard, edited a volume to be published as a Geological Society of America Memoir entitled From Rodinia to Pangea: The Lithotectonic Record of the Appalachian Region. It contains thirty-six new articles tracing the geologic history of eastern North America from 1200 to 200 million years ago.

Karabinos received a three-year $144,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support an educational initiative “Visualizing Strain in Rocks with Interactive Computer Programs.” This project, in collaboration with Chris Warren from the Office of Information Technology, aims to create new computer programs written in Java, and accompanying modules for classroom and laboratory use, to enhance student learning of fundamental concepts of strain analysis in rocks.

Karabinos attended the National Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon, in October 2009, where he gave a presentation at a theme session titled “Spatial Skills in the Geosciences.” He also attended the Geological Society of America Northeast Section meeting in March 2010 in Baltimore, Maryland, where he gave an invited lecture, with coauthors Eliza Nemser (’98) and Ruth Aronoff (’09), in a symposium “It All Starts in the Field: In Honor of Wallace A. Bothner.” In May 2010, Karabinos attended the Structural Geology and Tectonics Forum in Madison, Wisconsin, where he gave a presentation showing how to use Google SketchUp for teaching students in structural geology how the stereographic projection works.

Prof. Reinhard A. (Bud) Wobus is editor of the autobiography of one of Williams’ and the Northeast’s most prominent early geologists. The Outcomes of the Life of a Geologist by T. Nelson Dale was published by the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences after Wobus discovered the rough manuscript, completed by Dale in his 90’s during the 1930’s, in material presented to him for the Williams archives by the Dale family several years ago. Wobus was a friend of Dale’s youngest daughter, Margaret (Peggy) Dale, who lived in Williamstown most of her 105 years and was well known in the community and an inspiration to many generations of Williams students.

Wobus was also co-author of a paper published by the Geological Society of America in their Special Paper 461, Field Geology Education. The paper, “Twenty-two Years of Undergraduate Research in the Geosciences – The Keck Experience” summarizes the accomplishments of the Keck Geology Consortium from its creation in 1986 in response to a proposal to the Keck Foundation submitted by Wobus and Prof. Emeritus Bill Fox. Co-authors of the paper are three previous directors of the Consortium – Andrew deWet, Cathy Manduca (Williams ’80), and Lori Bettison-Varga. They cite the programs directed and research accomplished by the Consortium’s 1100⁺ alumni from colleges across America – undergraduates collaborating with faculty to complete hundreds of projects leading to publishable results.

Wobus continued for the 24^th year as Williams’ representative to the Keck Consortium’s board, which includes one member from each of the group’s 18 colleges. He attended their meeting in Portland, OR, in the fall during the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, where he also hosted a gathering of Williams alumni at the meeting. In December he hosted a similar reunion of about 20 alumni attending the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

In April, his senior thesis student, Allison Goldberg, presented the results of her yearlong research on the youngest pyroclastic deposits at Makushin volcano in the Aleutians at the 24^th annual Keck Consortium research symposium held at the Exxon Mobil Research Labs in Houston. Allie spent a month the previous summer doing fieldwork at the volcano, on Unalaska Island, with a 6-student, 3-faculty research group funded by the Consortium. In November he chaired a review panel for the Geology Department at Bowdoin, where one of his former thesis students, Rachel Bean ’93, is on the faculty. The report of the committee has already prompted several significant shifts in the structure and staffing of the Geology major at Bowdoin.

Dr. Pamela Hallock Muller, University of South Florida
Geosciences Class of 1960 Scholar Speaker and Sperry Lecture Speaker

“Goldilocks and the Three Biogenic Carbonate Minerals: What Determines ‘Just Right’?”
“Coral Reefs in the 21^st Century: Is the Past the Key to the Future?”
Dr. Laura Robinson, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Geosciences Class of 1960 Scholar Speaker

“Deep Sea Corals and Climate”
Dr. Nancy Rabalais, Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium
Geosciences Class of 1960 Scholar Speaker

“Nutrients in the Ocean: the Other Global Change”
Dr. David West, Middlebury College
Geosciences Class of 1960 Scholar Speaker

“The Ancient Tectonic History of New England as Revealed through Studies of Some Very Weird Rocks in Maine”
Dr. Greg Baker, University of Tennessee
Geosciences Class of 1960 Scholar Speaker

“Fire and Ice: Applications of Near-Surface Geophysical Imaging in Jordanian Archaeology and Alaskan Glaciology”

Allison R. Goldberg ’10

“Petrologic and Volcanic History of the Point Tebenkof Ignimbrite, Unalaska Island, Alaska”
Alice H. Nelson ’10

“A Varved Sediment Analysis of 1,000 Years of Climate Change: Linnévatnet, Svaalbard”
Peter W. Tierney ’10

“Pleistocene Reef Succession and the Role of Coralline Algae on Isla Cerralvo, Baja California Sur”
James R. Trotta ’10

“The Distribution of Tors in Gordon Gulch, Front Range, Colorado”
Anne M. O’Leary ’10

“Detecting Dansgaard Oeschger Events across a Laminated Interval in a Marine Sediment Core from the Bering Slope”

Mea Cook

“Methane Release from Bering Sea Sediments during the Last Glacial Period”
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Rónadh Cox

“Hydrodynamic Fractionation of Zircon Age Populations”
Geological Society of America Annual Meeting, Portland, OR

“Possible Impact Origin for Chaos Terrain on Europa: Evidence from Shape, Size, and Geographic Distribution”
Geological Society of America Annual Meeting, Portland, OR

“Crust-Penetrating Impacts on Europa?”
Jupiter System Mission Science Meeting, European Space Agency, Netherlands
Lisa Gilbert

“Controls on Seismic Layering in Superfast Spread Crust: IODP Hole 1256D”
American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA

“What Motivations and Learning Strategies Do Students Bring to Introductory Geology?”
Geological Society of America Annual Meeting, Portland, OR

“Constructing Crust along a Super-Fast Spreading Ridge: Are Pillow Basalts Required for Seismic Layer 2a?”
Univ. of California, Santa Cruz Earth & Planetary Sciences Whole Earth Seminar

“Geology of the Central California Coast”
Williams-Mystic, California, field seminar

“Practical Marine Meteorology”
Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, San Jose State University

“Volcanic and Hydrothermal Controls on Early Life in an Archean Greenstone Belt”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Markes Johnson

“Charles Darwin: Geologist in the Galapagos Islands 1835”
“What We Learned about the Geology and Biology of the Galapagos Islands since Darwin’s Time”
Nanjing Inst. of Geology and Palaeontology, Nanjing, China

“What Darwin Didn’t Know about Evolution in the Galapagos Islands”
Yunnan University Geology Department, Kunming, China

“Rhodolith Stranding Event on a Pliocene Rocky Shore from Isla Cerralvo in the Lower Gulf of California (Mexico)”
“Pliocene Stratigraphy at Paredones Blancos: Significance of a Massive Crushed-Rhodolith Deposit on Isla Cerralvo, Baja California (Mexico)”
Third International Rhodolith Workshop and Conference, Búzios, Brazil
Paul Karabinos

“3-D Visualization of Stereographic Projections Using Google SketchUp”
Structural Geology and Tectonics Forum, Madison, Wisconsin