GEOSCIENCES DEPARTMENT

The academic year witnessed new milestones within the Williams Geosciences family. Rónadh Cox completed her third year of service in the department, and the CAP approved her contract for a second term as assistant professor. Her application for an assistant-professor leave during the academic year 1999-2000 also was approved, and she plans to take the first half of her sabbatical at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Research Associate Mark Brandriss completed a year as a sabbatical replacement in the Geology Department at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and accepted a part-time appointment in the Geology Department at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, for the next two years. Research Associate David Backus accepted a new position as science coordinator at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Both Mark and David will continue as research associates in our department, and we hope they will participate in our ongoing activities as time permits. Warm congratulations are extended to all.

By the end of summer 1998, five incoming seniors in our department completed field studies entitling them to commence work for formal credit as honors-thesis students. Erik Klemetti ‘99 and Jen Newton ‘99 accompanied Bud Wobus to coastal Maine under a Keck project. Jana Comstock ‘99 worked with Rónadh Cox and Martin Wong ‘99 worked with Paul Karabinos, all in Arizona under the same Keck project. Ethan Gutmann ‘99 also studied with Rónadh Cox in Arizona with support from Bronfman funds.

During the Fall Term and following Winter Study Period, our department renewed a pedagogical innovation from the previous year with the linkage of a tutorial course and a January travel course. Professor Markes Johnson taught a new tutorial course, GEOS 253T, Baja California Geology and Ecology, which provided eleven students with the prerequisite background for a WSP field course on GEOS 25, Baja California Field Geology. The department is poised to continue this tradition under the supervision of Professor Karabinos with a Fall 1999 tutorial titled GEOS 255T, How do Mountains Form?, tied to a January 1999 WSP course on GEOS 25, Hawaii Field Geology.

The latter part of the Fall Term brought with it the usual activities related to national professional meetings. October 26-29, 1998, three faculty members (Dethier, Karabinos, and Cox) attended the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Toronto, Ontario. Two students, Jana Comstock ‘99 and Ethan Gutmann ‘99, made presentations at the meeting. Support from the McAleenan and Labaree funds helped subsidize attendance at this meeting. A half-dozen Williams alumni also attended this conference and presented the results of their active research. December 6-10, 1998, saw another fourteen alumni present their research at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California, where Professor Wobus acted as the Williams host. The Spring Term was an especially busy time for the department as faculty and students prepared for the twelfth annual Keck Research Symposium in Geology held April 23-25 at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. The two students working on the Maine project with Professor Wobus presented posters, as did the two students working with professors Cox and Karabinos on the Arizona project. Taylor Schildgen ‘00, working with Grant Kaye at Colorado College, also presented a poster based on her sophomore Keck project, a GIS and GPS mapping project in Big Bend National Park, Texas. Prof. Wobus also served as her on-campus sponsor.

Several students will initiate fieldwork this summer in readiness for the senior honors program. Rebecca Atkinson ‘00 will participate in a Keck project under the title: “Petrologic and Structural Evolution of the Northern Rio Grande Rift, Central Colorado.” She will complete her on-campus work under the supervision of Bud Wobus, who will visit her in the field this summer. Carla Chokel ‘00. Patricia Hines ‘00 will join Rónadh Cox for fieldwork on quartz-pebble conglomerates in Ireland and Norway with support of Bronfman Funds. Cordelia Ransom ‘00 has already completed field work in Baja California Sur regarding the developmental history of Pleistocene coral reefs and will continue lab and office work in August under a CES grant. Her research was supervised by Markes Johnson with funding from the Petroleum Research Fund and departmental Sperry Funds. During the first part of the summer, Taylor Schildgen will join David Dethier on the Front Range in Colorado to map Pleistocene glacial deposits with support from Bronfman Funds. During the latter part of the summer, she will spend five weeks in East Kilbride at the Scottish Universities Research and Reactor Centre learning about different radiometric dating techniques with funding from CES and a Wilmers Fellowship. Anne Hereford ‘01 will take part in a sophomore Keck Project under the title: “Hydrology, Geochemistry, and Sedimentology of the Baker Woodlands Research Site, Lancaster, Pennsylvania,” with Prof. Wobus as her on-campus sponsor.

As in past years, the Yellowstone-Bighorn Research Association’s summer field camp at Red Lodge, Montana, operated by the University of Pennsylvania, is in popular demand as a training center for Williams geology students learning field methods. Two incoming seniors, Rebecca Atkinson ‘00 and Cordelia Ransom ’00, and one junior, Marlene Duffy ’01, will attend one of two 1999 summer sessions. Carla Chokel ‘00 will take part in the Ireland field program sponsored by Boston University, and Stephen DeOreo ‘01 will attend the Indiana University field camp. All were awarded partial scholarships from the David Major Fund in support of this activity.

The department is proud to announce that Catherine Riihimaki ‘98 was the winner of a NSF Fellowship for support of graduate studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She began graduate work this past year at UC Santa Cruz under the direction of Prof. Bob Anderson ‘74. Jon Payne ‘97 was awarded a prestigious NDSEG Fellowship in support of his forthcoming graduate studies at Harvard University. Martin Wong ‘99 was the winner of the Mineralogical Society of America award this year for his outstanding scholastic record in the Williams mineralogy and petrology courses. Over the commencement weekend, Ethan Gutmann ‘99 and Martin Wong ‘99 were inducted into Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society.

Class of 1960 Scholars in Geosciences for 1998-99

Research Associate Gudveig Baarli took part in an international symposium on “Paleodiversifications: Land and Sea Compared” held in Lyon, France, July 6-8, 1998, at the University of Lyon. She was the co-author with Prof. Markes Johnson on a paper entitled: “Diversification of Rocky-Shore Biotas through Geologic Time.” Gudveig is a co-investigator together with Markes on a new grant awarded by the National Geographic Society for their summer 1999 field project on “Late Silurian Rocky Shores of North China (Inner Mongolia).”

In the summer of 1998, Mark Brandriss returned to southeastern Alaska as a faculty member in the Juneau Icefield Research Program. Also taking part in the program were Williams students Katherine Birnie and Kristine Taylor, who joined a group from colleges and universities around the country for seven weeks of field study and research on the active glaciers northeast of Juneau. David DeSimone’s summer travels brought him to the Juneau Icefield as part of a Keck group, but we were unable to cross paths despite spending many days within twenty miles of each other – chalk it up to the rugged terrain, which makes twenty miles a two-day trip. After the summer, Mark spent the academic year as a visiting professor at Union College in Schenectady, and he will become a Lecturer in the Department of Geology at Smith College this fall.

In January, Rónadh Cox received a grant of $180,000 from the National Science Foundation to fund research into the geochronology, sedimentology, and provenance of Proterozoic metasediments. The main objective of the project is to better understand the late Precambrian geology of Gondwana. This grant will fund student-involved research for the next three years.

Rónadh directed a Keck research project this year on the sedimentology, petrology, and structural geology of the Precambrian Mazatzal group in central Arizona. Additional Williams participants in the group of nine students and three professors were Paul Karabinos, Jana Comstock ‘99, and Martin Wong ‘99. Rónadh also spent part of the summer looking at quartz pebble conglomerates in Arizona and Rhode Island with Ethan Gutmann ‘99, to see whether their compositions can be attributed to post-depositional processes. Blake Bear ‘99 contributed to Rónadh’s ongoing investigation of the evolution of mudrock chemistry through time by compiling a large geochemical database for mudrocks and granitoids as part of his independent study project. Rónadh presented some of this work at the GSA annual meeting in Toronto. Her two thesis students, Jana Comstock ‘99 and Ethan Gutmann ‘99, also gave talks at the meeting.

In addition to her regular courses, Rónadh taught GEOS 166, Climates through Time, as part of the college’s Critical Reasoning and Analytical Skills initiative. The course, which was limited to first- and second-year students, was redesigned to include a substantial research component in which the students used system-modeling software to build quantitative, predictive models of climate-change processes. The course culminated with a symposium in which the students presented their research results.

Rónadh will be on leave for the academic year 1999-2000. Although she will not be teaching courses, she will supervise two thesis students, Carla Chokel ‘00 and Patty Hines ‘00. Patty and Carla will both be investigating conglomerate petrology, building on the research begun this year by Ethan Gutmann ‘99. Patty will do fieldwork in the west of Ireland, and Carla will work in western Norway. Rónadh will spend the summer and part of the autumn at Trinity College, Dublin, working with a research group there. She will also be working with Drew Coleman at Boston University to collect uranium-lead zircon ages for metasediments from Madagascar as part of the ongoing Gondwana project.

A Keck workshop investigating modern glacial environments was held in August 1998 on the Juneau Icefields in Alaska. David DeSimone proposed the workshop and secured the grant while Bob Carson (Whitman College) organized the Alaskan activities. Jay Fleisher (SUNY/Oneonta), a veteran of the Juneau Icefields Research Program and co-founder of the Bering Glacier Research Group, acted as guide for the participants. The team evaluated three glaciers as sites for a Keck project for the year 2000.

David Dethier worked with the Middle Rio Grande Basin Project of the U. S. Geological Survey during his sabbatical leave in 1999. He continued his USGS-supported field studies of late Cenozoic deposits and climate change along the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico, focusing along the Rio Grande near White Rock Canyon. Dethier also continued research about late Pleistocene deposits in the San Juan Islands and northern Puget lowland of Washington. This work is concerned with the climatic, sea level, and isostatic processes that resulted in rapid retreat of continental ice from the area about 13,100 years ago. Dethier presented a talk (with Taylor Schildgen ‘00 and Robert Nelson of Colby College) summarizing some of the Puget lowland work at the Geological Society of America (GSA) Meeting in Toronto in October 1998. Studies in the Puget lowland were supported by a grant from the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society.

Dethier initiated a study, with Taylor Schildgen ‘00, on the Pleistocene evolution of Boulder Canyon, one of a series of steep canyons that drain the Front Range in Colorado. Schildgen and Dethier will work in cooperation with Paul Bierman ‘85 (University of Vermont) to date alluvial terraces in Boulder Canyon using surface-exposure (cosmogenic) techniques.

Professor Markes Johnson attended the biennial field meeting of the Sub-commission on Silurian Stratigraphy conducted in Spain and Portugal June 15-18, 1998. As chairman of the SSS, he convened the organization’s biennial business meeting on June 16 at the Monastery of Cazalla de la Sierra. The Iberian trip offered opportunities to visit other Spanish colleagues interested in research on ancient rocky shores and coastal paleoecology. During June 12-14, professors Jordi Martinell and Rosa Domenech were visited at the University of Barcelona and an invitation was extended to them to join the Williams field course offered in Baja California in January 1999 (which they subsequently attended). Colleagues at the University of Granada also were visited, and Prof. Johnson delivered a talk on “Diversification of Rocky-Shore Biotas through Geologic Time” on June 23 in the Departamento de Estratigrafia y Paleontologia.

During July 6-8, Markes and co-investigator Gudveig Baarli attended an international symposium on “Paleodiversifications: Land and Sea Compared” held in Lyon, France, at the Université Claude-Bernard. Markes presented their joint research on “Diversification of Rocky-Shore Biotas through Geologic Time” on July 7. Their paper was subsequently accepted and published as part of the symposium proceedings in the June 1999 issue of the journal Geobios. The same topic was the subject of the first departmental faculty seminar of the academic year on September 30. During the Fall Term 1998, Markes and Gudveig were awarded a grant from the National Geographic Society in the amount of $11,500 for a field project on “Late Silurian Rocky Shores of North China (Inner Mongolia).” Fieldwork in northern China is scheduled for July 1999 in cooperation with Dr. Rong Jia-yu (Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology).

During the 1999 Winter Study Period, Prof. Johnson and Research Associate David Backus led nine students on a three-week field course in Baja California, Mexico. After visiting ancient rocky shorelines ranging in age from the Cretaceous to the Pleistocene on the Pacific and gulf coasts of the peninsula, the group focused on a new mapping project at El Mangle near Loreto in Baja California Sur. The field course was linked to a new Fall Term tutorial, Baja California Geology and Ecology. February 12-14, Markes attended a conference on “Cenozoic Paleobiology: The Last 65 Million Years of Biotic Stasis and Change” held in Gainesville, Florida. He gave a talk entitled “Pliocene-Pleistocene Rocky Shorelines Trace Coastal Development of Bahía Concepción, Gulf Coast of Baja California Sur (Mexico)” on February 13 and subsequently delivered a manuscript under the same title for publication in the symposium volume. His co-author on this project is Prof. Jorge Ledesma-Vázquez (Universidad Autónoma de Baja California). Prof. Johnson revisited Baja California during Spring Break, March 18-April 5, for supervision of field work by Cordelia Ransom ‘00 on the development of Pleistocene coral reefs and their environmental significance. During the academic year, research papers on ancient rocky shores were published in Geobios and the Journal of Paleontology. A manuscript also was accepted for publication in the journal Palaios. Published in 1999 by Oxford University Press, the multi-volume reference work, American National Biography, contains five entries on American geologists written by Prof. Johnson. Amos Eaton (1776-1842) and Ebenezer Emons (1799-1863) are two former Williams alumni and faculty members covered in Johnson’s treatment of nineteenth-century geologists.

From mid-June to mid-July, 1998, Paul Karabinos joined project director Rónadh Cox in a combined sedimentological/structural investigation of the Mazatzal Mountains in Arizona sponsored by the Keck Foundation. Karabinos worked with Martin Wong ‘99 and David Schneider (Carleton College) on the origin and tectonic significance of quartz veins in the Mazatzal thrust belt. Martin Wong used this project as the basis for his senior thesis and discovered that the quartz veins record interesting details of the internal deformation of thrust sheets during faulting. During August, Karabinos continued his study on the origin of graphite in rocks in the Taconic thrust belt, mostly on Mount Greylock. He is testing the hypothesis that high concentrations of graphite in schists and marbles reflect fluid mixing near fault zones rather than unusual accumulations of organic material. After a twenty-year hiatus, Karabinos returned to the Siluro-Devonian rocks of the Connecticut Valley trough in central Vermont to examine the stratigraphy of this belt in light of a new tectonic model that the trough formed as a back-arc basin west of the Bronson Hill arc.

Karabinos attended the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in Toronto, Ontario, in October, 1998, where he presented a talk entitled “Tectonic and Stratigraphic Development of the Connecticut Valley Trough in the New England Appalachians” based on new work in Vermont and western Massachusetts. Karabinos gave lectures at the University of Connecticut and Middlebury College on the Shelburne Falls arc and the Taconian orogeny. He also published “Taconian Orogeny in the New England Appalachians: Collision between Laurentia and the Shelburne Falls Arc: Reply” in Geology. In July, Karabinos will begin a three-year term on the NSF Tectonics panel.

Jim McKenna joined the Geosciences Department in July 1998, as an adjunct professor and assistant professor of marine sciences with the Williams-Mystic Program. During the summer he had an article on “The Natural History of Sperm Whales” published in a special whaling issue of the magazine Historic Nantucket. September and the start of the semester found him leading the Williams-Mystic offshore field seminar aboard the SSV Corwith Cramer. Students spent ten days sailing from Woods Hole, MA, to Rockland, ME, comparing geological, chemical, physical, and biological oceanographic conditions in continental slope, George’s Bank, and the Gulf of Maine waters. McKenna also participated in additional Williams-Mystic field seminars to the northern California coast, Nantucket, and New York City. In California, the class was given a guest lecture on the “Geology of the Point Lobos Region” by Catherine Riihimaki ‘98. During the semester, McKenna advised a diverse group of science research projects by Williams-Mystic students. Biology major Josh Goldstein ‘00 conducted a study on “Storm Pulsing and Nutrient/Primary Productivity Dynamics in the Mystic River Estuary.” Josh will return to Mystic this summer to continue his work with McKenna in anticipation of a senior honors project with support from the Bronfman Fund.

In January, McKenna traveled to Baja California, Mexico, and the Gulf of California as a faculty representative on a Williams Alumni trip. He joined 19 Williams alumni exploring the geology, oceanography, and natural history of this unique and dynamic environment. He returned to Mystic in February and two days later headed to the Caribbean with the Williams-Mystic Spring ‘99 class for their offshore trip aboard the SSV Harvey Gamage. The itinerary included stops in the U.S. and British Virgin Islands and discussion on the interwoven science, history, policy, and literature of the Caribbean region. Other field seminars during the semester included trips to the Pacific Northwest and Nantucket. In April, McKenna attended the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Rochester, New York, where he was the faculty advisor for a paper presented by geosciences major Cordy Ransom ‘00 and biology major Christine Whitcraft ‘99 entitled “Predation Pressure by Introduced Snails on the Spring Rocky Intertidal Community.” He has also spent time this spring setting up a new organic carbon analyzer in his lab with start-up funds provided by Williams College and Mystic Seaport. His analyzer is ready to go and will be busy this summer with samples from the Mystic River estuary, as well as ground-water samples from the coastal ponds of Rhode Island and from Nauset marsh in the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Professor R.A. (Bud) Wobus continued, for the 13th year, as the Williams representative to the governing board of the national twelve-college Keck Geology Consortium, of which Williams was the founding member. This year saw the awarding of an additional $750,000 to the consortium by the W.M. Keck Foundation, bringing the total support for student and faculty research to $5.4 million since he and Prof. Emeritus Bill Fox submitted the initial proposal to the foundation in 1986. In addition to assisting in the preparation of this newest proposal, Wobus served on Keck subcommittees to select this summer’s participants for 8 research projects, to evaluate the consortium’s director (none other than Dr. Cathy Manduca ‘80, a former student of his now at Carleton College), and to seek additional funding sources for the future. Again in charge of recruiting Williams geosciences majors into Keck research projects, he also served as student advisor this past year for three year-long Keck projects, two at the senior level and one at the junior level. He spent a month in the field last summer with Erik Klemetti and Jen Newton, both ‘99, studying Siluro-Devonian metavolcanic rocks on Vinalhaven Island, Maine. Both students completed senior theses on aspects of this study and presented their results at the 12th Annual Keck Research Symposium at Carleton in April. Also reporting on her results at the symposium was Taylor Schildgen ‘00, who worked as an incoming junior on a Keck-sponsored field-based GIS/GPS study of part of Big Bend National Park, Texas, and for whom Wobus served as campus sponsor. He was also a co-author at the symposium, with Professors R.A. Wiebe (Franklin and Marshall) and David Hawkins (Colorado College), of a progress report on the Vinalhaven project.

As organizer of this year’s Geosciences Colloquia and Class of 1960 lecture series (along the theme of modern and ancient volcanism), Wobus brought a half-dozen visitors to the campus and also contributed two additional presentations himself: a departmental seminar about Iceland (in the fall) and a College Faculty Lecture in February entitled “Some Explosive Moments in Geologic Time.” In April, he presented the annual Strock Lecture at Skidmore College on the topic of geochemical signatures in modern and ancient volcanic rocks. With Kate Wearn ‘98, he contributed a section on Proterozoic metavolcanic rocks of the Arkansas River Canyon in Colorado to a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Toronto in October, and also attended the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December. This was his third and final year on the national Committee on Membership of the GSA.

Prof. Wobus is co-author of a paper in the GSA Bulletin this year with Prof. Sheila Seaman at U Mass/Amherst (and others) on the Cranberry Island metavolcanic series in coastal Maine and of two papers about the geochemistry of Colorado’s Pikes Peak batholith in Rocky Mountain Geology –one with Rachael Beane ‘93 (now in her first year of teaching at Bowdoin College), the other with Professors Diane Smith at Trinity University and Jeff Noblett at Colorado College, along with Dan Unruh of the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver. All are results of Keck-sponsored projects.

While in Maine with his Keck project last summer, Prof. Wobus co-led a field trip and gave a lecture on the local geology to the Vinalhaven Land Trust and other interested citizens. In August, he was the leader of a 10-day Williams alumni trip to Iceland. This summer (1999), he will continue research on the Vinalhaven metavolcanics, lead the week-long Williams Alumni College in the Rockies in Colorado for the 17th time, and sponsor two Williams students on Keck research projects: Rebecca Atkinson ‘00, whom he will visit in the field in Colorado in July as she begins a project on volcanics in the upper San Luis Valley, and Anne Hereford ‘01, who will work on the hydrology and geochemisty of the Baker Woodlands Environmental Research site near Lancaster, PA.

GEOSCIENCES DEPARTMENT

Class of 1960 Scholars in Geosciences for 1998-99

GEOSCIENCES COLLOQUIA

GEOSCIENCES FACULTY SEMINARS

SENIOR HONORS THESIS PRESENTATIONS

OFF-CAMPUS COLLOQUIA

POSTGRADUATE PLANS OF GEOSCIENCES MAJORS