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Letter from the Department Head ..................................................................................... Page 2

Faculty & Staff News ................................................................................................Pages 4 - 19

UC a Perfect Fit for Interdisciplinary Researcher, Amy Townsend-Small .............................. Page7

Plant Remains are Great Biomarkers for Clues on Ancient Climate Change, Aaron Diefendorf .........Page 11

Memories by Kees DeJong ..................................................................................... Pages 15 - 16

Student Awards ..................................................................................................... Pages 17 - 18

Military Service in Iraq Leads UC Undergrad to Hydrology ............................................... Pages 20 - 23

Truibute to Paul E. Potter ....................................................................................... Pages 22 - 23

Alumni News ......................................................................................................... Pages 24 - 53

freshwater, and terrestrial environments, and she uses elemental and isotopic signatures to identify human perturbations in these biogeochemical cycles. Aaron’s research interests are primarily in biogeochemistry, global climate change, organic geochemistry, stable isotope biogeochemistry, paleoclimatology, paleoecol-

ogy, stable isotope ecology and limnology. Our two new faculty members will be working hard in the coming years to establish their new laboratories for organic geochemistry and stable isotope geochemistry, and to develop new courses for our students.

In March, we successfully recruited Dr. Brooke Crow-ley who will join us as an As-sistant Professor of Quaternary Paleoecology. Brooke is a joint hire with the Department of An-thropology and her research

revolves around using stable isotope geochemistry to detect ecological differences among modern and ex-tinct communities of primates. In the coming year, we look forward to the possibility of searching for a faculty member in biogeochemistry that will be a joint hire with the Department of Chemistry.

Our Fall Fieldtrip was a great success this year. Dr. Ken Tankersley led us on a tour of key geologic and archaeological sites in Kentucky, including an excur-sion through Great Saltpetre Cave. We were able to camp in front of the cave and we enjoyed several eve-nings around a grand campfire catching up on stories of the summer’s exploits. Ken is a Quaternary scientist

Dear Alumni,

Hope you have all had a wonderful year. I cannot believe this year has gone by so quickly; it feels like it was just yesterday that I wrote last year’s letter for The Upper Crust. Writing this letter provides me with the opportunity to reflect a little on the past year and tell you about some of our achievements. However, please read through The Upper Crust to learn much more about what we have been up to over the past year. Also please do not forget to read about our activi-ties in our weekly informal news-letter, Rolling Rocks. I throw Rolling Rocks together in great haste every Friday morning and e-mail it out to members of our department and friends just to help keep them informed of our activities. Please let me know if you would like to be added to the e-mailing list. Rolling Rocks can also be downloaded from our Department website at: http://www.artsci.uc.edu/collegedepts/geology/pubs/.

We had a great year, despite some severe budget cuts. Two new faculty members joined us. The first, Dr. Amy Townsend-Small, started with us in Septem-ber, and then Dr. Aaron Diefendorf joined us in Janu-ary. Amy’s first official day on her job was in the Indian Himalaya where she joined several of us on project to examine landscape evolution and paleoenvironmen-tal change around Nanda Devi as part of a National Geographic Society funded project. Amy’s research focuses on carbon and nitrogen cycling in marine,

Military Service in Iraq Leads UC Undergrad to Hydrology

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from the Department of Anthropology and we are now lucky to have him as an affiliate professor in our De-partment.

Our graduate program is continuing to thrive. We were joined by nine new graduate students last September and will have ten more joining us this coming fall. We expect about ten of our graduate students to complete this year. Again this year, our graduates have been very successful in obtaining grants from such organizations as the Geological Society of America and the Pale-ontological Society; and many of our students have received several grants. Last June, Jason Dortch was awarded the “Outstanding Doctoral Student Award for 2010” from our College and this coming June, James Zambito will receive it for 2011. Graduate stu-dent attendance at national and international meetings is impressive, and they continue to publish their work in leading journals. Our graduate students never ceases to amaze us with their commitment to our Department and their enthusiasm for the geosciences. We are ex-tremely lucky to have such a great bunch of students.

We underwent a review of our graduate and under-graduate the programs in January, which including a visit from three external reviewers. The external re-viewers were very complementary about our program and offered great suggestions to help us improve in the coming years. Among the suggestions were the needs to increase our analytical facilities, enhance our growing Quaternary geology program, and boost our external grant funding. Fortunately, we have started to address these needs by hiring excellent young faculty. The external reviewers particularly praised us on our field training of undergraduate students and for pro-viding them with a broad and intense training in the fundamentals of geology. In the coming years we wish to enhance the field component of our program by de-veloping our own field camp so that we will not have to send our students to other schools for their field camp training.

Our undergraduate program continues to flourish, and we currently have about 71 majors; up 17 from last year! This healthy growth is probably due to the gen-eral rising interest in geology, and our proactive recruit-ing through our freshman seminars and the mentoring program that our graduates have been running.

Last June, Krista Smilek and Dave Meyer led a fieldtrip with about a dozen undergraduate and gradu-ate students to Florida and the Bahamas to examine the geology and biology of ocean margins. This is one of a series of three fieldtrips that we have started to expose students to a variety of different geologic and cultural environments. Each fieldtrip will be run every third summer. This summer it is the turn of our Hima-layan fieldtrip, which will involve taking students on a

three-week traverse of the Himalaya in Northern India. Next summer, it will be the turn of our Arctic fieldtrip, which will be held either in Iceland or Alaska. In addi-tion to these more exotic fieldtrip, we have local ex-cursions running nearly every weekend in the fall and spring. These range from fieldwork to examine classic stratigraphic and paleontological sections, to the geo-morphology of the Mid-West and to applied aspects of the local geology.

Our research is thundering along with projects that span distant parts of the globe, including such plac-es as Chile, Argentina, Tibet, India, United Kingdom, Spain and Costa Rica. The number of research papers that has been published in the past year is very impres-sive, with contributions appearing journals that include: PNAS; Paleogeography, Paleoecology and Paleocli-matology; Geomorphology; Quaternary Science Re-views; Journal of Geophysical Research; Earth and Planetary Science Letters; and Paleobiology.

We hope you will talk with our Alumni Advisory Com-mittee and us about what we can do to help you keep informed of our activities and/or any way that you can stay or become involved in our Department. And please do not hesitate to contact me to find out more about what is going on in our Department and how you might become more involved with our activities.

Finally, I should like to thank Warren Huff again this year for his extraordinary efforts to maintain contacts with you, and together with Tim Phillips for their hard work in compiling and producing this newsletter.

Best wishes,Lewis Owen

Military Service in Iraq Leads UC Undergrad to Hydrology

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F a c u l t y & S t a f f N e w s

DaviD Meyer

In the fossil-rich rocks of the Cincinnati region, a group of brachiopods known as strophomenates are found fossil-ized surrounded by tiny “moats.” It is believed that the brachiopods themselves made the moats, but it is not certain how they did so. Pa-leontologists think the animals needed to open their shells to a gape of more than 45 degrees to make the moats. To test the theories, scien-tists went looking for a similar but living animal.

Meyer, along with Benjamin Dattilo of Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (and a Ph.D. graduate of UC’s geology program), and two students went looking for a modern ana-logue to the Paleozoic brachiopods. They found a tiny modern brachiopod named Thecidellina meyeri in the waters off Curaçao in the southern Carib-bean.

“It’s a reasonably good analogue,” Meyer said. “They gape widely, and the internal anatomy shows similar struc-tures.”

Meyer, Dattilo, and UC students Tanya Del Valle and Christine Rahtz collected a fragment of coral covered with more than 30 Thecidellina specimens, and placed it in a tank with running seawater in the lab in Curaçao.

“They rapidly recovered,” Meyer said, “resumed normal feeding behaviors, and maintained a 90-degree gape.”

With video cameras recording, the paleontologists mea-sured the ability of the modern brachiopods to move water around, generating relatively sluggish feeding currents and

relatively strong currents when they snapped their shells shut.

Sometimes, the brachiopods would snap shut, stay shut, and then slowly open. At other times, they would open partially and shut several times in rapid succession.

The behavior of the modern animals provides a clue to ancient behaviors.

“By analogy,” Meyer said, “feeding currents of the ancient brachiopods were too weak to dis-turb sediments, allowing them to feed close to the sea floor.”

On the other hand, the powerful currents gen-erated by snapping their shells shut may have

formed the moats, or helped the brachiopods to excavate, particularly when snapped in rapid succession. It’s a tanta-lizing glimpse, but more work is necessary.

“Further studies will focus on hinge and muscle configu-ration, and may be extended to experiments on strength and fatigue limits of muscle,” Meyer said. “Also the ability to clear sediment.”

The modern brachiopods, Thecidellina meyeri, are named for UC’s Meyer, who provided specimens to the German scientists who described the new species in 2008. With R.A. Davis, Meyer is the co-author of A Sea Without Fish.

UC’s paleontology program was again ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News on March 15, 2011. q

UC news on 3-17-11 ran the following article about David Meyer’s work: Video of a modern shellfish by Univer-sity of Cincinnati paleontologists suggests a way to test theories about the behavior of fossilized specimens. Details at http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.aspx?id=13302

Paleontologists agree that it’s difficult to observe behavior in fossil specimens that are dead – even extinct – and petrified. One method is to find a modern, living, species that has some similarities to the ancient animal.

That’s the strategy adopted by David L. Meyer, University of Cincinnati professor of geology and colleagues as they study a group of ancient shellfish known as brachiopods. Although they resemble clams or other shelled mol-lusks, brachiopods are more closely related to marine worms. Relatively rare today, brachiopods were a dominant species in Paleozoic seas.

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Warren Huff

The past year has been a rewarding one in many respects. In addition to welcoming our new colleagues Amy and Aaron in the department I was privileged to have the as-sistance of several excellent graduate teaching assistants in courses that continued to grow in enrollment. My 8:00 section of geology 101-2-3 alone had 100 students in the fall while the online section grew to 150. Most of the students in the online section are, in fact, full-time UC stu-dents, but many of them have jobs, long-distance commutes, family responsibilities and other schedule conflicts that make class attendance a challenge. However, there were also a few in the military, several on co-op section, and one that plays in a local rock band that is frequently on tour (he still managed to take all of his weekly online quizzes on time!). I had eighteen students in clay mineralogy this winter, which is the largest number I have ever had in that class. It made finding sufficient laboratory supplies a real challenge.

Some other highlights of the year included participation in the Annual Meeting of the Clay Minerals Society, which was held in Madrid jointly with the Spanish and Japanese groups, participation in the Annual GSA meeting in Denver, and an invited presentation at the Mid-European Clay Conference in Budapest. Co-authored publications included a Clay Minerals paper with Polish and French colleagues on Paleozoic K-bentonites from the Baltic Basin, a review paper in a GSA special paper with long-time collaborators Stig Bergström and Dennis Ko-lata on Ordovician explosive volcanism, another with Berg-ström and colleagues on The Upper Ordovician Guttenberg

d13C excursion (GICE) in North America and Baltoscandia in the same GSA special paper, and a joint paper in the Chinese Science Bulletin with Chinese colleague Wenbo Su on SHRIMP dating of a late Precambrian K-bentonite from North China. But my proudest accomplishment for

the year was to be selected as the recipient of the Outstanding Educator Award by the East-ern Section of AAPG at their annual meeting in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

It was a particular pleasure to watch Brian Nicklen successfully defend his doctoral dis-sertation this spring. The three Global Strato-type Sections and Points (GSSPs) for the Middle Permian (Guadalupian) are located in Guadalupe Mountains National Park in west Texas and are contained within one of the most one of the most frequently researched carbonate margins in the stratigraphic record. However, time control for the type sections re-mains poor and key stratigraphic relationships are still debated. To address these problems, Brian has developed a tephrochronological

framework for several layers of bentonite beds that occur throughout the Guadalupian type area. Brian’s work has yielded some very welcome new zircon ages to a portion of the time scale that has historically been poorly constrained. Brian and his wife Keri (MS ’06) have two children and are in the process of moving to Texas where he will take a position in the petroleum industry.

Beyond this, I continue as an associate editor for both the American Mineralogist and Clays and Clay Miner-als as well as serving as Secretary to the Clay Minerals Society. q

Barry MaynarD

Things are much the same with me and the crowd up in the corner of the 6th floor. Continue to work on corrosion scales in water dis-tribution systems with folks at EPA and Cinti Water Works and David Mast in Physics. Matt Jones is currently doing a Master’s on magnetite in pipe scales. I think it may be a product of the activity of sulfate reducing bacteria using hydro-gen gas to reduce sulfate. They reduce some of the ferric iron in the process or else they create a favorable environment for iron-reducing bacteria. There is lots

of native sulfur with negative S isotopes, a signal of the sulfate reducers. What we would like to do next is pursue biomarker analy-sis (the scales yield lots of bitumen if ex-tracted with organic solvents). The redox gradient across the scale from the wall of the Fe pipe to the chlorinated water in the pipe has to be the steepest on Earth, and might make a good extraterrestrial analog so I think biogeochemical studies of this environment has great potential. q

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U p p e r C r u s t

LeWis OWen

It has been another fun packed year with lots of fieldwork. In July, we returned to westernmost Tibet to continue our NSF-funded project on the Karakoram Fault. This research involves work with Professors Alex Robinson (University of Houston) and Chen Jie (Institute of Geology, of the Chi-nese Earthquake Administration in Beijing) and their stu-dents. Kate Hedrick, who is doing her doctorate with me, also joined us. Kate is working on alluvial fans and this project gave her the chance to look at some really impressive ones form-ing along the big Tibet valleys.

Most of September was spent in Northern India undertaking re-search on glacial geology and landscape evolution around Nanda Devi, which is the highest mountain in India. The National Geographic Society funded this project and it al-lowed nine of us to work in the region, including our own Craig Dietsch, Amy Townsend-Small, Bill Haneberg, Jason Dortch and Todd Longbottom, and also Milap Sharma (JNU, Delhi), Marc Caffee (Purdue University) and Markus Fuchs (Bayreuth University). It rained nearly every day, but amazingly we got lots of great work done. We are now processing the samples in our laboratories at UC.

Then in March, Mad-hav Murari and I had the o p p o r t u n i t y to join Pro-fessors Jim Spotila (Vir-ginia Tech) and Jeff Marshall ( C a l i f o r n i a

Polytechnic Pomona) in Costa Rica to examine some of the marine terraces. That was a wonderful trip, including collecting samples along the coasts to define rates of neo-tectonic uplift, and a little bit of surf kayak-ing. We also had the chance to observe the Japanese tsuna-mi run up the beach near where we were lodged. Fortunately, it was less than a meter high.

The past year has been pretty produc-tive. Since last June, I have published 16 papers in peer-reviewed journals with colleagues and students, including papers in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Quaternary Science Reviews, Lithosphere, Geomorphology, Journal of Geophysical Research, Journal of the Geological Society and Quaternary International. If you are interest in reading some of this research then please check out my website at: http://www.artsci.uc.edu/collegedepts/geology/fac_staff/profile_details.aspx?ePID=MTA5NjI3

Jason Dortch graduated last year with his doctorate and moved to the University of Toronto to start a post-doctoral research position. Jason worked with me for the past six years, first on his Masters in Alaska and then his doctor-ate in Ladakh. Jason is still working with us on projects in northern India and we hope to see him back for many visits in the coming years. Todd Longbottom joined us from the University of Dayton last September. He is working on his Masters on glaciation in the Himalaya.

The coming year promises to be fun; with fieldwork planned in Tibet in June and our Geology of the Himalaya field course in September. Plus we have lots of writing to do in the coming year, mainly on our work in Argentina and Tibet. q

Kate enjoying examining a weathered boulder in Tibet.

Crossing a 16,500 ft-high pass with our porters in Northern India.

Serious discussions over how to date marine terraces in Costa Rica.

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New geology professor Amy Townsend-Small is one of the multiple Geographic Information Network hires in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences.

Amy Townsend-Small isn’t your typical scientist. As an un-dergraduate at Skidmore College in upstate New York, she double-majored in English and biology, then went on to work at a publishing agency after graduation.

But after three years, she burnt out and turned to science to jumpstart her ca-reer.

“This is going to sound funny but I just didn’t want to have a job anymore,” she says with a laugh. “I wanted to go back to school because I just wanted to live a life of the mind.”

So she applied to the PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin and spent five years taking classes and doing field research in marine science. Traips-ing through the Peruvian Amazon River and Alaska’s Kuparuk River for research data proved to be the perfect remedy for her 9 to 5 doldrums and she hasn’t looked back.

Today she is an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati with joint ap-pointments in both the Department of Geology and the Department of Geog-raphy in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, while also teaching in the Environmental Studies program.

“The really cool thing about the Col-lege of Arts and Sciences is that we have an interdisciplinary research fo-cus,” Townsend-Small says. “I was part of a joint hiring initiative along with pro-fessors in biology, chemistry, geography and geology, called the Geographic Information Networks (GINs) cluster. Our goal as a unit is to apply new technolo-gies to environmental problems.”

It works great for her, she says, because she doesn’t have a strict background in geology or geography—her research has been interdisciplinary since she started graduate school.

“My research is about how all the different sciences inter-act in the global cycle of elements,” Townsend-Small says. “I

study biogeochemistry, which is how chemical elements that are important to life are cycled between living things and the rest of the Earth.”

By studying elemental and isotopic signatures in marine, freshwater and terrestrial environments, she is hoping to gain understanding of human perturbations in both global and regional carbon and nitrogen cycles. During grad school at

Texas, Townsend-Small spent her time focusing on river research, but when she started her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California-Irvine, her focus shifted to urbanization and green-house gas emissions.

At UC, she hopes to continue both ar-eas of research. And Cincinnati, as an urban environment with the Ohio River as a major water source to the Missis-sippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, of-fers Townsend-Small a serendipitous overlay in both areas of research.

“Ohio is an interesting place to study rivers because we’re in the headwaters of the Mississippi. Because of places like Ohio, the Mississippi River is pretty polluted with nitrogen. It’s a good fit for my interest in studying nitrogen.”

It helps that other A&S faculty in the GINs cluster are interested in river ex-periments as well.

“The new hires in A&S are all interest-ed in all different kinds of research but the thing that really brings us all together is river research,” Townsend-Small says. She and her other colleagues in geology have already planned to conduct research on the Great Miami Riv-

er.

“It’s nice to find a university where people are accepting of my work. Not every place has a feeling for the importance of environmental and interdisciplinary research.”

But for this publishing professional turned scientist, UC is a perfect fit. q

UC a Perfect Fit for Interdisciplinary Researcher

By: Kim Burdett, Asst. Public Information Officer, Office of Marketing & Communications,McMicken College of Arts & Sciences. Photo by: M. B. Reilley

The really cool thing aboutthe College of Arts and Sciences is that we have an interdisciplin-

ary research focus.

Geology Professor Amy Townsend-Small works with Environmental Studies major Lily Soderlund in her lab.

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PauL POtter

This year saw no publications, but I taught Mud and Mudstones with the help of Professors Algeo, Brett, and Maynard. A formal shale course was last taught in the de-partment in 1991, I believe. We had three day-long field-trips, one to the core facility of Kentucky Geological Survey at Lexington and finished the day with a short visit to the nearby Core Petrology Laboratory of the Kentucky Energy center.

I attended both the annual meetings of the AAPG (Hous-ton) and the GSA (Denver). At the AAPG I participated in the Sequence Stratigraphy School, giving the introductory talk to some 60 participants. Locally, I went on a field trip to the fluorspar district of western Kentucky and on our four day trip in the Fall plus a visit to Southern Ontario and three

Wait, there’s more! Jay Zambito won the College’s Distin-guished Dissertation Award, so we have a two-fer, since Ja-

son Dortch won the award last year. More top honors: Sarah Kolbe won the Isabel & Mary Neff Scholarship this spring, which is awarded to the top female graduate student in the College. Grad students, you’re the best!

I had great adventures in research this past year. Last September, I was part of a re-search group that spent 3 weeks in India; along were Lewis Owen, our new faculty colleague Amy Townsend-Small, our re-search partners Marc Caffee and Markus Fuchs, Jason, and our friend and colleague from the JNU, Milap Sharma. Jason, Mi-lap, and I had the privilege to trek for about 10 days in the Nanda Devi Biopreserve en route to Nanda Devi, India’s highest peak.

The landscape there is absolutely incredible, with unparal-leled fluvial incision at “lower” elevations (below 4000m) and multiple glaciated valleys above. We did a second trek near the Chinese border from the village of Mana and collected samples on the active ice of one of these glaciers. Exhilarat-ing! (One does have to re-cross those glacial outlet streams.) Never mind that the subcontinent had its strongest monsoon in 30 years and that it rained nearly constantly (take this liter-ally). My morphing into tectonic geomorphology continues apace. Paco Martinez and I submitted our first paper on the geochronology and tectonic evolution of the Variscan basement here in northeastern Spain and the eastern Pyr-enees. I do mean here: Paco and I are now (early June) collecting pelitic rocks to date monazite included in garnet to learn about the timing of early(?) Variscan metamorphism. BTW, Harry, Ginny, Finnley, Alice, and now Ulysses are all doing great (Murphy RIP in early March). Please stop by and see me in my new digs: Kees DeJong’s old office and lab on the 6th floor. q

Craig DietsCH

The Department had its 5-year review this past year, and be-ing DGS, I spent some time last summer in collaboration with the rest of the faculty pro-ducing our review document, participated during the visit in January by our three exter-nal reviewers (who did an outstanding job), and wrote a response to the reviewers’ own written document. In short, the Department is in excellent shape. There can be no doubt that our graduate students are a large part of our success! This spring, with UC’s new provost and president carving out their own vision for the University (UC2019), we had to produce another detailed document. The accomplishments of our graduate students make much of the writing easy…

We judge the quality of our students in a number of ways, as exemplified by several recent examples:

• Their success in obtaining external funding from a va-riety of professional organizations in national competition. Over the past two years alone, our graduate students have been awarded 21 external research grants (from a total of 42 students), including grants of special merit: for example, the Stephen J. Gould Grant (to our current student Andrew Zaf-fos) and the Richard Osgood Grant (to our current student Kelsey Feser) from the Paleontological Society.

• Their publication of first- or co-authored, international peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and field guidebooks; 36 papers have been published since fall 2008. This is an average of 1.6 papers per student, most of which the graduate students are the lead authors.

• Their presentations of posters and delivery of talks at na-tional and international professional meetings. The national meeting of the Geological Society of America is one principle venue and for each of the past five years, 12-15 graduate students have presented their first-authored research.

and a half weeks in Brazil, where I incidentally worked on two research papers. I am currently helping Professor Nash with his computer studies of the watershed of the Licking River and continue with a “hobby” prospects of making a photographic appraisal of the watershed of the Little Miami River. Mark Bowers, Barry Maynard, and I are getting close to completing a paper entitled “Living with Sensitive Slopes in the Greater Cincinnati Region of Southwestern Ohio, Northern Kentucky, and Southeastern Indiana.”

Quite different from any of the above was a two day Exxon Mobil Field Safety Course last Fall at the GSA in Denver. Unbeknown to me, the second day involved an 800 foot climb of a hogback near Boulder on a rocky trail with practiced emergency responses. I just barely passed – thanks to an over 65 age handicap – and sympathetic instructors…… q

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CartOn Brett

During the past academic year I undertook research on rocks of four systems: Cambrian-Devonian and in the Mod-ern. I am working with amateurs from the local Dry-Dredgers on new Middle Cambrian trilobite localities in Utah. Current student Tony Kramer is completing his Master’s research based in part on these fossils. Or-dovician research in the classic Cincinnatian is ongoing. I am com-pleting an NSF project on trilobite biofacies and Taconic tectonics. Masters students Nathan Marshall, Tom Schramm and Aaron House are completing theses based on re-search in the local “natural labora-tory” of the Cincinnatian.

As for Silurian research, in early July, 2010, Pat McLaughlin (UC PhD, 2006) and I joined David Ray (UC PhD, 2002, presently work-ing for Neftex Petroleum Consult-ing company, Oxford) along with Brad Cramer (post-doc at Kan-sas). Dave organized an excellent and comprehensive overview of the strata of Wenlock Edge, Lud-low, Dudley and May Hill Inlier. We also visited classic quarry sections in Dave’s hometown of Dudley. In part, we checked out several field trip stops that will be featured when the Silurian Subcommission meets in Shropshire this coming summer (July, 2011). We are pursuing more detailed comparative sequence stratigraphic studies between these sections and North American Silu-rian successions in conjunction with Dave Ray. Brad Cra-mer just received funding for a new IGCP project on Silurian paleoceanography and bioevents. Next year we will host the IGCP participants in a meeting here in Cincinnati in July fo-cusing on the Silurian of the Tristates area.

I am working with two new graduate students who are studying the Silurian of the Tristates (Ohio, Indiana, Ken-tucky) area. Doctoral student James Thomka is working on the detailed cyclostratigraphy, sedimentology and com-parative taphonomy and paleoecology of diverse faunas, as-sociated with the mid Silurian Ireviken and Mulde bioevents, from Tennessee to central Indiana. Nick Sullivan is studying the early Silurian Valgu event. We hope to better constrain the physical events and faunal changes associated with the Valgu and early Ireviken bioevents in eastern North America.

During the past year, Pat McLaughlin and I have obtained much new data and have generated several new carbon iso-topic profiles that will provide significant insight in to Silurian correlations in eastern North America. We also continue to work with Brad Cramer on issues of geochronology and cali-bration of Silurian time scales.

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Devonian activities in summer 2010 were primarily focused on the International Palaeontological Congress (IPC), based in London. We all very much enjoyed John Marshall’s mar-velous trip in northern Scotland and the Orkney Isles. The many spectacular localities served to emphasize the intrigu-ing paleoclimatic events recorded in the Old Red Sandstone

of the Orcadian Basin and we could relate some of these events to the changes associated with the Mid-dle Devonian Kacák and Taghanic crises. Some magnificent fossil fish were found (most notably a remark-able fossil fish specimen found by Alex Bartholomew (UC PhD 2006) at Mey Beach, the summer home of the former “Queen Mum”). This trip, coupled with the very in-teresting sessions on Devonian bioevents at the IPC, made June a Devonian extravaganza. A highlight of the trip was a rigorous hike in to the famed angular unconformity at Siccar Point, where, it is often said, the great James Hutton, “father of modern geology”, discovered deep time, when he recognized the number of steps of mountain building, erosion, and sea level change that separated the vertical Silurian strata below from gently dipping Old Red Sandstone above the break. This hallowed place was made all the more mystical by mu-sic. Alex B. wore a kilt and hauled his bagpipes down (and then up) the very steep trail. None of us will ever forget looking down at the

rocks far below and hearing the melodious strains of Alex’s pipes echoing up the rock walls. It was a phenomenon to behold as we labored up the steep rocky cliff; somehow Alex made it out a bit later still playing the pipes, as he marched along the field at the cliff top.

A Devonian bioevents symposium held at the IPC, including a talk by present PhD student James (Jay) Zambito, will result in an edited volume, as will a symposium I co-chaired on time-specific facies- the interesting concept promoted by the late Otto Walliser. Pat McLaughlin and I, together with Annalisa Ferretti, Kathleen Histon, are working on an edited volume for Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (Palaeo-3), which will feature several papers on time-specific facies in the Paleozoic.

I spent some time in mid July examining Givetian and Frasnian successions in the Holy Cross Mountains of Poland with Michał Gruszczinsky (Kielce University) including the Zachełmie quarry from which, earlier in 2010, footprints of what appear to be the world’s oldest land dwelling tetrapod animal were discovered and, even more interesting, an angu-

Carlton E. Brett, Recieptrient of the “George Rieveschal Jr. Award for Distinguished Scientific Research”

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CarLtOn Brett (continued)lar unconformity to rival Hutton’s Siccar Point, between the Devonian beds and overlying Triassic redbeds (but no Alex to play bagpipes in Poland!). Michał also showed me the Mogiłki quarry of Frasnian limestones and shales that look so strikingly like the anachronistic black shale/stromatolitic limestone facies of the Silurian McKenzie Shale in Pennsyl-vania that we will make a comparative facies/paleoecologi-cal study of these two areas. We are also collaborating with Michał’s PhD student, Adrian Kin on fossilized migratory queues (rows) of the blind Upper Devonian trilobites.

Much of the rest of July was spent at the Senckenberg Museum where Eberhard Schindler, Peter Königshof, my wife Betty Lou, and I worked on final editing for 11 pa-pers for the special volume on Middle Devonian cycles and bioevents; the entire volume just came out in hard copy in Palaeo-3 in April, 2011. I am also working with graduate student, Jay Zambito, Dr. Brenda Hunda of the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and German colleagues on a manuscript on com-parative facies of rhythmic trilobite beds from the Emsian of SW Morocco and elsewhere, based on work initiated in 2007 on a National Geographic grant. This research attracted some surprising media attention mainly because I described some mass occurrences of fossil trilobites as “orgies”, as I think they were. (You never know where throwaway line will land you! Suffice to say, if you Google trilobite orgies you’ll find reference to dozens of reference news squibs reporting on “my” trilobite orgies).

Finally, our project on modern taphonomy, SSETI (Shelf and Slope Experimental Taphonomy Initiative), which com-menced in 1993 with deployment of experimental batches

of mollusk shells, crabs, urchins and wood on the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico seafloor in a broad array of environments from 2 to over 600 m on the continental shelf and slope is approaching its 18th year. We learned a great deal about the ways in which skeletons are preserved-or not-in varied modern environments as well as the hosts of organisms that encrust shells; we have just compiled a series of pa-pers documenting the results of study for the first 13 years (up to our last sampling mission in 2006), which will also be published as yet another special volume of Palaeo-3 later this year. Now we are hoping to return to the Gulf of Mexico sites for a 20-year sampling and to deploy some new experi-ments near to the BP oil spill of summer 2010. We are hop-ing to get funding from a large grant that BP Oil Company has established for research in the Gulf in the aftermath of the spill. Fingers crossed that this disaster will have a silver-if oily-lining.

As this academic year ends I am very pleased to report, as Director of Undergraduate Studies, that we have a re-cord number BS and BA majors: more than 70 in all, many of them outstanding students. Also, I am also very pleased to note that my PhD student Mike DeSantis completed his PhD on the early Middle Devonian bioevents of eastern North America in fall of 2010 and current PhD Jay Zambito will complete his degree (on later Middle Devonian Taghanic bioevents-note a theme here?) during the coming summer. He received the Distinguished Dissertation Award for the College of Arts and Sciences this year. q

Royal Geographical Society Awards PrestigousBusk Medal to Lewis Owen

A n d N o w F o r S o m e t h i n g C o m p l e t e l y D i f f e r e n t . . . . . .

Lewis Owen, department head and professor in the na-tionally ranked Department of Geology at the University of Cincinnati, has just received the Busk Medal, a prestigious award by the Royal Geographical Society for his field re-search in paleoenvironmental history and geomorphology in tectonically active areas.

At the RGS Annual General Meeting on June 6, Owen was presented with the award by Michael Palin, RGS president and original cast member of comedy troupe Monty Python.

“It was quite nice,” Owen says. “It’s a very prestigious award from the oldest geographic society in the world. The people who have received this medal before me are very well known in geography. It was quite an honor to get it.”

Owen has dedicated his career to studying the tectoni-cally active mountain belts in the Himalayas and the Cordil-leras. With more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, three

books, 16 book chapters, funding by important or-ganizations like the Na-tional Science Founda-tion and a fellowship with the Geological Society of London, he has be-come an important figure in tectonic research. His ultimate goal, he says, is to better understand and model the evolution of ancient mountains.

Owen, who is spending part of his summer in the Hima-layas conducting fieldwork, was also recently elected as a fellow of the Geological Society of America. q

By: Kim Burdett

Lewis Owen receiving the Busk Medal from President Michael, President of the Royal Geographi-cal Society.

F a c u l t y & S t a f f

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2011 GSA RECEPTIONThe Annual Meeting this year will be in Minneapolis,

Minnesota and we will host an alumni reception on Mon-day, October 10 from 7:30 – 9:30 pm. Further details on hotel location and room will be coming in July, so keep an eye out for your invitation.

Students in Aaron Diefendorf and Krista Smilek’s “Geology through Film” spring quarter class have been learning about real science as seen through a Holly-wood lens.

“We’ve watched some quality Hollywood movies, like Day After Tomorrow—which has terrible science,” says Diefendorf. “The cartoon Ice Age, on the other hand, is pretty accurate.”

The class—built for non-science majors—is fun to teach, Diefendorf says. But it also weighs heavy with importance.

“It’s critical to teach science to non-science majors because it interacts with their lives all the time. It’s important that if this is going to be the only science class they take, that we teach them the concepts that touch on their lives, like climate change, natural disasters and human impacts on the world,” he says.

Considering Diefendorf’s research in-terests in climate change, his urgency for science outreach and education are understandable. While earning a PhD in geology and biogeochemistry from Penn State, Diefendorf spent much of his time studying carbon isotope values of fos-sil plant remains from millions of years ago to better understand rising levels of carbon dioxide that caused rapid climate change.

In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Diefendorf and colleagues at Penn State found that environmental conditions and plant types have important controls on the ratio of car-bon isotopes in modern leaves and by using this infor-mation, you can better constrain ancient changes in the carbon cycle.

“By looking at fossilized organic matter, we can actu-ally use different molecules on different scales to re-construct what plants were there in the past and how

Plant Remains are Great Biomarkers for Clues on Ancient Climate Change.New assistant professor Aaron Diefendorf looks at carbon isotopes of fossilized leaves and plant chemicals to better understand past and present climate change.

climate influences different types of plants,” Diefendorf says. “They may be from 150 million years ago, but it has some pretty powerful applica-tions for today.”

He arrived at the University of Cincinnati in January as an assistant professor in the De-partment of Geology, but his research is only partly focused on the major Earth systems.

Leaning heav-ily on chemistry and biology, Diefendorf hopes to create a research group in the McMicken Col-lege of Arts and Sciences that focuses on reconstructing past climates through biogeochemistry. He is also collaborating with other A&S faculty to obtain an iso-tope ratio mass spectrometer which will help Diefendorf and others study carbon isotopes.

Even though he’s been at UC a short time, he is busy teaching, applying for grants, and preparing for field work this

summer in Tennessee, Florida and South Carolina.

“Right now I’m getting my lab going and finding grad-uate students,” Diefendorf says. “We’re already build-ing the analytic capabilities of the geology department, which is a lot of fun. The department has been really supportive and it’s great to be in a place that has a huge commitment to doing great research.” q

By: Kim Burdett, Asst. Public Information Officer, Office of Marketing &Communications, McMicken College of Arts & Sciences.

Professor Aaron Diefendorf

DaviD nasH

David Nash took a sabbatical leave during the fall and winter quarters of the 2009/10 academic year but was back with a vengeance this year. He is vig-orously pushing his plan for constructing a ground-water observatory adjacent to Great Miami River in Miami-Whitewater Forest. During his sabbatical year he put together a prospectus for the project which he “marketed” to organizations he thought might be interested in it. Kevin Savage, who is now back teaching high school but last year was with Bowser-Morner Environmental Inc., was an in-dispensible partner in the efforts to both refine the plans for the observatory and in marketing it. Mike Ekberg, now head of the Miami Conservancy Dis-trict’s Groundwater Subgroup, has been very sup-portive of the observatory both intellectually and financially.

Nash is delighted with our new colleague, Amy Townsend-Small who provides the envi-ronmental geochemistry ex-pertise that the ground-water observatory effort so badly needed. Amy’s interest in the nitrogen and carbon cycles compliments the needs of the observatory very nicely. Nash enthuses that Amy is an ideal research partner: she is ex-tremely energetic, productive, writes well, has a great sense of humor and, per-haps most important, shares his love of The Big Lebowski (and provides quotes from it much more accurately than Nash can). Amy and Nash are hopeful that Amy’s Environmental Education Grant

U p p e r C r u s t

proposal to the U.S. EPA will be funded so they can start an environmental education outreach project to local high schools focused on the field study of water. In addition, Nash is a big fan of Amy’s dog, Gomez (a.k.a., Geodog).

Nash and Matt Nemecek presented their work on the riverbed conductance of Paint Creek, Ross County Ohio, at last fall’s GSA meeting in Denver. Nash bunked with Warren Huff during the meeting and is still in awe of what a great job Warren did with the alumni cocktail party. He exclaims that Warren “sure knows how to throw a party… and knows the importance of good food (and plenty of shrimp)”. Nash says that he doubts there are few people who know more folks at GSA than Warren.

Few GSA passersby didn’t ei-ther hail Warren or were hailed by him! Nash was also de-l ighted by the number of al-ums with whom he was able to chat (too numerous to list). He and Danita Brandt went to the Denver Museum of Mod-ern Art (during the visit Nash’s mantra was a constant “I don’t get it”). He also had pleasant discussions on life and admin-istration with Sally Sutton. Sally was recently kind enough to notify him of the passing of

her colleague, Stan Schumm, of whom Nash was an ardent admirer.

Nash continues to Work with Paul Edwin Pot-ter on the morphology of the Licking River Basin. Paul and Nash are investigating the relationship

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Gerald Salyer, County Road Com-missioner and Paul Potter in Ma-goffin County, KY.

F a c u l t y & S t a f f

between morphology and underlying geology and the influence of Tertiary geomorphic changes on longitudinal profile of the river. A few months ago Potter and Nash journeyed to the source of the Licking River, a very picturesque spring in Magof-fin County, in the heart of Kentucky’s eastern coal basin. Here’s a picture of Paul with Gerald Salyer, the county road commissioner.

Nash was visited by a great many recent and not-so-recent alums… again, too numerous to list (and,

with his memory being what it is, he’s afraid he might leave some folks out). He does insist on mentioning a particular pleasant visit by Brigid Plummer who’s youngest son, Jacob, was con-templating attending University of Cincinnati next year. How time passes! Nash was amazed at how nicely Jake combined the personalities and physi-cal characteristics of both Brigid and Dave. You can judge for yourself from the picture.

The Plummers: Dave, Claire, Brigid, Walt, Jake, and Aaron (dog’s name was not provided).

2011 GSA RECEPTIONThe Annual Meeting this year will be in Min-

neapolis, Minnesota and we will host an alumni reception on Monday, October 10 from 7:30 – 9:30 pm. Further details on hotel location and room will be coming in July, so keep an eye out for your invitation.

Do you have any recollections of field trips, social events, classroom experiences or other

experiences during your UC days that you would like to share with your alumni colleagues?

Send them to Warren Huff, email: WARREN.HUFF@UC.EDU or Dept. of Geology, UC, Cin-

cinnati, OH 45221 and we’ll include them in next years’ issue.

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DaviD nasH (Continued)

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14

arnie MiLLer

As luck would have it, the deadline for con-tributions to this year’s newsletter is upon me, and I’m heading out early tomorrow with my graduate students for a ten-day trip to St. Croix, so this blurb will be unusually brief compared to most other years.

I am pleased to report that Annie Lago-marcino successfully defended her M.S. this past winter, and we welcomed three new Ph.D. students to the lab: Kelsey Feser, who completed an undergraduate-research thesis last year with Ben Greenstein at Cornell College; Gary Motz, who earned an M.S. with Lisa Park at the University of Akron; and Andrew Zaffos, who completed his M.S. with Steve Holland at the University of Georgia. All three are well engaged in defining their dissertation projects. In fact, our impending trip to St. Croix will pro-vide an opportunity to do an initial round of sampling for Kelsey’s dissertation.

Sarah Kolbe (Ph.D. candidate) continues to lead an interdisciplinary working group, including colleagues in biology and me, in a study of the nature of plant distribu-tions and abundances on an urban-to-wildland gradient in southwestern Ohio. She is currently working on GIS and analytical tools for integrating the quantitative plant distributional patterns we’ve delineated as an outcome of censusing with a wide spectrum of historical and physi-cal variables that interact complexly to produce the plant patterns.

In addition to continued research on epicontinental-sea versus open-ocean macroevolutionary dynamics and as-

sorted other projects, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year serving as Director of En-vironmental Studies, an interdisciplinary un-dergraduate major in the College. The main accomplishment for the year was the devel-opment of a new structure for the major as an outcome of several meetings and discus-sions involving some twenty faculty across nine different departments. The structure for the new major will be significantly more integrative across disciplines than its prede-

cessor. With this central goal of my tenure as Director accomplished, I am overjoyed to report that I’ll be step-ping down at the end of the summer! [Some of my more recent students are probably smiling…or smirking…a little as they read this, given that they are well aware of my love/hate relationships with administrative positions…]

Mary Jo is doing great, taking increasing responsibility for the ESL student contingent in her position as a Social Worker in the Cincinnati Public School system; Vanessa graduated from Tufts University this Spring with a degree in Political Science and Economics……and, of course, it follows logically from this that she is now pursuing a career as a chef (and doing very well at it)!; Nate just completed his second year at Bowdoin College, where he is majoring in Chemistry, minoring in Classics, with an interest in going to medical school ; and Chico lives on (albeit, a bit hard of hearing)!

I promise to provide a more extensive report on all of these themes next year! q

William Honsaker, MS (Lowel l )Defended Spring 2011, Thesis titled “Late-Holocene

Chronology of the Istorvet Ice Cap, Liverpool Land, East Greenland.”

Brain L. Nicklen, PhD (Huff ) Dissertation titled “Establishing a Tephrochronologic

Framework for the Middle Permian (Guadalupian Type Area and Adjacent Portions of the Delaware Basin and Northwestern Shelf, West Texas and Southeastern New

Mexico, USA.”

Matthew G. Nemecek, MS (Nash)Defended Spring 2011

Thesis titled “Determination of Variations in Streambed Con-ductance along Paint Creek through Riverbank Filtration

- Indirect Modeling Approach.”

Nadeesha H. Koralegredara, MS (Maynard)Defended Spring 2011

Thesis titled “Chemical, Mineralogical, Textural Properties of Kope the Formation Mudstones: How They Affect its

Durability.”

Scott A. Reynhout, MS (Dietsch)Defended Spring 2011.

Thesis titled “Slow Denudation within an Active Orogen:

Ladakh Range, Northern India.”

2 0 1 0 - 2 0 1 1Theses/dissertations defended

F a c u l t y & S t a f f

15

Kees aDriaan DeJOngBorn 5 December, 1939(Vleuten, The Netherlands, (Cincinnati, OH, USA)

I died on ? but this was written before. No voice from the grave! As noted repeatedly, most men with prostate cancer (PC) wil l die with PC rather than from PC. Although that has not been the case with me, it certainly was not a surprise. My prognosis when first diagnosed with PC in 1996 was dire – with a Gleason Score of 9, and a PSA of 24.5, and a doubling time of 4.5 months. Most patients with similar diagnostics would die within two years ac-cording the l iterature. Despite this, I have had 12+ years of fulf i l l ing l i fe subsequent to my grim progno-sis. Frequently good comes from what init ial ly ap-pears to be an unfortunate event.

This is i l lustrated by a Chinese proverb that al l Chi-nese know: Old man – frontier: A farmer l iving near the frontier is considered very well-to-do. He owned a horse, which he used for plowing and for trans-portation. One day his horse ran away. All his neigh-bors exclaimed how terrible this way, but the farmer simply said “Maybe.” A few days later the horse returned and brought two wild horses with it. The neighbors al l rejoiced at his good fortune, but the farmer just said “Maybe.” The next day the farmer’s son tried to ride one of the wild horses. The horse threw him and the son broke his leg. The neighbors al l offered their sympathy for his misfortune, but the farmer again said “Maybe.” The next week conscrip-t ion off icers came to the vi l lage to take young men for the army. They rejected the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. When the neighbors told him how lucky he was, the farmer replied “Maybe.” see also http://www.hypnosis-kids.com/metaphor-chinese-taoist-story.htm.

It is not diff icult for me to f ind a great deal of good that has come from my journey with PC. It has brought me even closer to my already close family,

introduced me to a community of remarkable people, and en-gaged in a, for me, fascinating new field of interest: the medicine of prostate cancer.

I have four sons, three of whom live in the Cincinnati area. Our relationship has always been close; more so at some times than other times (adolescence is generally a period of some es-trangement). I have used much of the time since my diagnosis with PC to get to know my wonderful sons (now in their forties) better.

Our oldest son is Onno, an adjunct professor at the New University in NYC and a computer consultant in commercial graphic arts . I actually visited with him the Netherlands the year before my diagnosis. With son Remco, a mechanical engineer, I visited the Pacif ic Northwest, hiked the spectacular scenery, took ferries between Victoria Island and the coast, and visited hydroelectric projects. With son Mark, a master plasterer with a small business (http://.....) and Tango dancer, I visited southern Buenos Aires, Montivideo, Colonia, and, in Chil i, Santiago and Val-paraiso, Son Robert, a project manager at a local construction company DBBB (http???) and I visited Central Africa and climbed Mt. Meranu (remarkably similar to Mt. Saint Helens in Oregon, USA). We saw Mt. Kil imanjaro with its glaciers. And we climbed Oldoy Lengai, the only carbonatite vol-cano in the world—it was having an eruption (http)!

I think every father intends to spend “quality t ime” with their children but PC helped me see the urgen-cy of doing it. That was certainly fortunate.

M E M O R I E S

U p p e r C r u s t

Since my diagnosis, my dear wife Els and I have made it a point to take our entire extended family (sons, children and step children) on summer vaca-t ions were would could al l stay together in pleasant surroundings concentrating on being together, esp. eating. One year we rented an enormous house boat with six bedrooms on lake Cumberland (KY) and an-other year a similar boat on Lake Norton (KY) The first family vacation year we rented a house near the Delaware Beach, and three other years a house at the beach in North Carolina. In a memorable family vacation the family f lew to Seattle where we all took a 1-week cruise to the quickly vanishing Alaskan gla-ciers with Holland-America’ cruiseship “Zaandam”. These extended family vacations have been marvel-ous experiences and provided wonderful adventures and memories, particularly for our grandchildren.

I have met some of the most remarkable men I have ever known in PCNG. Fran Stanton became a dear fr iend and mentor providing advice and encourage-ment, Tom Young is our leader at PCNG. I remem-ber others who succumbed to PC: Robert Young, Adrian Boie, Lou Stadler, Peter Hainline, Fran Stanton, Oscar Johnson, Dan Kip, Mike Marmo, and many others. These invaluable fr iendships, no doubt that much closer because of our association with PC, have been the most fulf i l l ing of my l i fe.

Informing myself about prostate cancer and its treatment has been fascinating. I have always en-joyed learning new things and in this case, I am convinced it has extended my l ife. I have used the Internet, particularly PubMed to keep myself up to date with the latest PC news and have done my best to share the knowledge gained with the PC com-munity through these pages. I chose intermittent hormone therapy, despite recommendations against it by my doctor, because of my current knowledge of PC treatment. I am convinced that an informed patient wil l l ive longer and better.

I am a geologist, a profession that involves a great deal of f ield work. I have worked in the Alps, Andes, and Himalayas. In the last few years this kind of f ield work became diff i-cult. I suggested a project to one of my colleagues involving field work in the local Miami-Whitewater For-est. The field work involved has been

tamer than work I’ve done in the past but interest-ing and productive nonetheless. It has also given me the opportunity to learn new things and work with several excellent and promising students.

I enrolled in the hospice program in September 2008. It’s diff icult but not impossible to f ind “posi-t ives” even in this. Hospice of Cincinnati is a won-derful organization fi l led with competent, compas-sionate, pleasant people. I realized immediately that I knew virtually nothing about hospice: how it worked, how it was funded, or what it would do.

In closing, dear fr iends, I encourage all of you to stay informed, stay positive, stay involved and, most important, enjoy l i fe!

Farewell,

Kees DeJong

See http://762betula.org for Memories II q

16

M E M O R I E S

Kees DeJong, 1974 Field Trip in Kentucky

Photo from Wayne Goodman

JuLia Wise

This year has been packed for the Geology Club: weekly meetings, community service, mentoring, build-ing a website, and consuming copious amounts of pizza, hosting the Holiday party — with a sing along lead by Dr. Huff and a performance by stu-dents, and sponsoring the spring picnic. (Not to mention braving the rainiest spring in Cincinnati history). The club continued to develop the Grad-uate-Undergraduate mentoring program. By involving the undergraduate advisors and building the program directly around student feedback we have become a model program for the college of arts and sciences. Our Geology Club continues to illustrate dedication to service and education through volunteering in the community by hosting edu-cation booths at the UC Science and Engineering Fair and at the Cincinnati Gem and Mineral Show. At these events we assisted with set up and tear down,

17

Greetings from the UC Geology Clubpresented UC student designed activities, and cracked geodes. We regularly participate in classroom visits

and continue to counsel Boy Scouts.This summer marks the launch of the Geol-

ogy Club’s new outreach website https://sites.google.com/site/ucgeoclub/home. Here you can travel with us on our research and field trips by reading field journals written by students, get your questions answered by geologists, and access resources designed for students and teachers. We are also planning the four day departmental field trip for the fall—a sojourn through the rivers in Minnesota, visiting glacial features in Wiscon-sin, and delving into paleontology in Illinois. Come

September we look forward to welcoming our new graduate students and embarking on another packed school year. q

Annual 4-Day Field TripL a k e C u m b e r l a n d , K e n t u c k y

F a c u l t y & S t a f f

Geology outreach visiting local Montessori School.

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intervieW WitH Dr. attiLa KiLiniCIndonesian Quake ‘incredibly major’The Cincinnati Enquirer, Mar. 12, 2011Written by: Cliff Peale

Do you have science questions for Professor Attila Kilinc? E-mail cpeale@enquirer.com and he’ll try to get them answered.

It took only 12 minutes this morning for shock waves from the earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific to reach Attila Kilinc’s seismograph at the University of Cincinnati.

Kilinc, a geology professor at UC, said the peaks from the readouts literally went off the chart.

“When I heard the news I thought immediately that this was incredibly major,” Kilinc said. He talked with The En-quirer to put the disaster in perspective.

How bad is this earthquake? This is what they call a Great Earthquake. It’s devastating, as you can see from the videos. It started shaking this area of the earth about two days ago and this morning the big one hit. I counted 41 aftershocks so far. Many of these aftershocks are not minor earthquakes. Aftershocks will continue for days or weeks or months. So the big one today is not the end of it.

Does an earthquake at sea always trigger a tsuna-mi? It can. There are other types of tsunamis. If part of a big island slips into the ocean, for example. But most tsunamis are trigged by earthquakes at sea. In this case, part of the Pacific Ocean is slipping under Japan. That’s uplifting the crust a little bit and raising the water level. That causes the tsunami.

How bad is this tsunami? Any tsunami is bad, but this one appears to be particularly devastating to Japan.

Do you expect significant tsunamis in Hawaii or on the West Coast of the United States? Definitely. I think the West Coast already has been alerted and I think it was in Hawaii earlier. Not as bad as in Japan. Tsunamis gener-ally travel about 500 or 550 miles an hour. Their amplitude is dependent on the depth of the water. In the deep ocean, they might be only three or four feet. But as they approach the shore, the water gets less deep. That slows them down and each wave starts colliding with the wave in front of it, and that increases the amplitude. q

GSAJulia Wisa & Kelsey Fesser

SiGmA XKelsey Fesser

PAleotonolGy Society

Kelsey Feser

GSGASarah Kolbe & Nicholas Sullivan

mcmicken DiStinGuiSheD DiSSerAtion AwArD

Jay Zambito IV

Dry-DreDGerS AwArD

James Thomka

iSAbel & mAry neff ScholArShiP

Sarah Kolbe

nSf DoctorAl DiSSertAtion enhAncement AwArD

Jay Zambito IV

centrAl ohio Gem & minerAl Show

Julia Wise

Student grants and awards

U p p e r C r u s t

Carl Brett and Katherine Finan.

Carl Brett and Adam Leu.Kelly LaBlanc (PhD ‘07)& Sara Derouin (PhD ‘08)

GRADUATE STUDENT AWARDSGRADUATE DIRECTOR

Craig DietsCh

aLuMni graDuate funD

Jeff Hannon

graDuate teaCHing assistant aWarDs

Thomas SshrammNicholas Sullivan

DePartMentaL gOOD sPirit aWarD

Julia Wise: Geology Club President

KennetH Caster aWarD

Zhenzu Wan

UNDER GRADUTE STUDENT AWARDS

UNGERGRADUATE DIRECTORCarLton. e. Brett

PryOr-MOtL aWarD

Cameron Schwalbach & Dominique Haneberg-Diggs

JOHn L. riCH OutstanDing seniOr aWarD

Andrew Schneider

COOK sCHOLarsHiPs tO rising unDerCLassMen

Rising sophomore: Cheyenne HassanRising junior: Sean Fischer

Rising senior: Katherine Finan

COOK funD fOr unDergraDuate sCHOLarsHiPs

fOr suMMer CaMP

Louis Feldman: University of MinnesotaEvan Krekeler: Kent State UniversityMike Lees: Southern Illinois University

Andrew Leitholf: Southern Utah UniversityAdam Leu: University of Minnesota, Duluth

Kerstin Liederbach: University of Alaska, FairbanksKegan McClanahan: Kent State University

Christine Rahtz: University of Minnesota, Duluth Brian Vonderhaar: Kent State University

Lauren Wasserstrom Southern Oregon University

Spencer Young: University of Minnesota, Duluthn

MyLes reDDer aWarD

Nick Bose

reCOgnitiOns

Graduating with Departmental HonorsLiz Cola & Dan Sigward

Graduating with High HonorsAdam Leu

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Craig Dietsch and Nicholas Sullivan (right). 2010-211

Geology AwardWinners (below).

Craig Dietsch and Julia Wise.

Developing water resources in Salah ad Din Province inspired Andrew Schneider to pursue research in hydrol-ogy through the Department of Geology.

While UC geology undergraduate Andrew Schneider was stationed in Balad, Iraq during his military service, he and his Platoon were responsible for providing security, economic and social development for a specific area southwest of his base. Part of this development included improving the ir-rigation system that provided water to outlying farmland.

Though existing canals were in great disrepair and work was needed to get them functioning properly, Schneider found there was another, much tougher challenge he and his Platoon faced.

“We were on a Sunni-Shi’ite split,” he said. “The Sunnis were located close to the river banks while the Shi’ites were further out. The Sunnis could control the water access to the further out farms [run by the Shi’ites] and there was huge economic disparity.”

Though the split between the two religious sects wasn’t violent, it was definitely a so-cial and economic cooperation problem.

“There wasn’t a lot of open animosity, but it was more like ‘We don’t talk to them and they don’t talk to us.’ We worked for a long time trying to convince both sides that it was in everyone’s best interest to provide water to the Shi’ites and this meant the Sunnis had to spend money on updating the irrigation system.”

Eventually Schneider and his Platoon got through to both sides. “We got them to understand that they didn’t have to talk everyday or all the time, but when there were problems of that magnitude they needed to get together and sort it out.”

At one point after the irrigation system was up and run-ning, the canal broke when a six-foot section of concrete collapsed and allowed all the irrigation water to flood out into an empty field. While it cut off the water supply to a lot of farms, Schneider saw great benefits: “What was great

about it was that we didn’t have to fix it. They [the Sunnis and Shi’ites] saw the problem for what it was and realized what it meant and they went out and took care of it. The fact that they understood the effects and actually talked to each other enough to restore the water access was amaz-ing.”

When Schneider first arrived in Iraq he would drive through the streets and it looked like a ghost town. There were no street markets and people would shut their doors and win-dows because they were terrified of the Army presence. But by the time he left, the streets were overflowing with people and street markets and restaurants were thriving.

“It was really a great feeling to go through and see this change. People felt confident in their community, in their country, enough to have these kinds of things.”

Schneider’s problem-solving acuity and ability to bridge cultural divides have not gone unno-ticed during his time at UC. Geology Professor Carlton Brett says, “Schneider is extraordinarily gifted with excellent communication skills and the ability to grasp the most difficult concepts very readily.”

It’s no surprise the U.S. Army promoted him to captain and awarded him six medals, including the Bronze Star.

Schneider has also been described as “honest, humble and reliable,” traits he displayed when he experi-enced first-hand the effects of the water problem. Besides being used for irrigation purposes, the canal water was also used as drinking water.

“I was out talking to one of the shaikhs living further out and he said they desperately needed new water treatment facilities because the kids were all getting sick from drinking the water. So I tried to bring them bottled water whenever I was out there along with putting in a request for a new treatment facility. One time I was offered a glass of the ca-nal water to drink and I had to drink it. If I was really doing everything I could and truly understood what was going on, then drinking the water should be no big deal. I was laid up

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Military Service iniraq leadS Uc Undergradto Hydrology

By: ryan VarneyOffice of Marketing & Communications,McMicken College of Arts & Sciences

U p p e r C r u s t

Schneider will get to see the difference almost immedi-ately as he’s scheduled to participate with various geology departments this summer in a project run by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) addressing arid region hydrology.

“I’m going out to San Diego with the USGS to look at the Salton Sea and the aquifer under the sea there. We’ll be try-ing to figure out if it’s possible to pump the aquifer and use the water for agriculture and what the effects will be.”

Nash—who has worked with the USGS for 25 years—recommended that they hire Schneider, saying, “Until this year I have only recommended the USGS hire one of my students. Based on Andrew’s superlative performance in the two water-related courses he’s taken from me this year, I urged the USGS to hire him to work with them this sum-mer.”

While Schneider is looking forward to the USGS project, he is equally as excited to start his master’s work.

Due to his experience in Iraq, Schneider is most interested in studying groundwater development in developing nations, especially arid re-gions like sub-Saharan Africa and even central Asia. “I think both those areas are in critical need for groundwater re-sources and development.”

So far Schneider has spent time with Nash stream gauging, a process that measures the amount of water going through a stream at a given time. Stream

gauging helps them to see how much water is available and how to budget it for individual and industrial use, a key as-pect in groundwater development.

Says Schneider, “Cincinnati has some of the best water resources in the country, mostly because it is glaciated ter-rain around here. There are very thick, good aquifers, so this is a great place to study groundwater. Very few places in the world have these types of resources.”

No matter what direction Schneider ultimately pursues, he will attack it with the same rigorous work ethic that has served him in his past achievements. “In truth, he could ex-cel at virtually any subject he chose to pursue, but he has a strong interest in hydrogeology and will follow through with excellent graduate research, and I would predict, a brilliant career,” says Brett. q

for three straight days. Sickest I’ve ever been.”

The experience really demonstrated the severity of the water problem and steered Schneider toward pursuing a career in geology and hydrology.

When he finished active duty two years ago, Schneider moved to Cincinnati with his wife Maggie who was enrolled as a MD/PhD student in neuroscience at UC. It was a per-fect time for him to go back to school. With his previous degree in history, he couldn’t just jump right into the geol-ogy master’s program. So Schneider has spent the past two years taking undergrad classes as prerequisites to get into graduate school.

“It’s uncomfortable [being a non-traditional student]—I’m 29, an undergrad and it’s confusing. Someone asked me the other day when I was graduating? Well, I’m not really graduating, I’ve already graduated seven years ago.”

But Schneider is still glad to be where he is. “The Post-9/11 GI Bill has allowed me to take the steps to get into a graduate program so I can get my master’s in geology. It’s really helped the transition from being in the military to pursuing a civilian career.”

Schneider continues to use his military experience to bring people together. In one of Brett’s lecture classes, Schneider invented a game called “Brett Bingo.” The game helped students become more en-gaged in the lectures by listening for key lines and catch phrases.

“Indeed, he is an outstanding role model and mentor to other students,” Brett adds.

Fellow professor David Nash is impressed as well. “Last fall, Andrew asked if he could be an undergraduate TA in geomorphology. Given his performance in the course when he took it, I was delighted to accept his offer. He’s been stellar…an absolutely indispensable teaching assistant.”

Now that Schneider’s finishing up his undergraduate classes, he’s looking forward to pursuing his master’s, es-pecially since it means working with a remarkably cohesive group that is the Department of Geology.

“The geology department has great professors and a great cadre of students who all get along really well with each other. I actually heard this first from some of the graduate students I talked to. They’ve spent time traveling around, working with other geology departments, and all of them commented about how well our department gets along. Apparently it’s quite a rarity.”

F a c u l t y & S t a f f

One time I was offered a glass of the canal water to drink and I had to drink

it... I was laid up for three straight days. Sickest I’ve

ever been.

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Krista smilek (academic Direc-tor & Kate Cosgrove (Financial administrator).

22

U p p e r C r u s t

TRIBUTE TO PAUL E. POTTER

(L. to R.) Larry Wickstrom, John Steinmetz, Lewis Owen, Paul Potter, Bill Shilts, Donald E. McKay and James Cobb

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F a c u l t y & S t a f f

Paul Potter brings students to KSG Core Library for geol-ogy class. (L. to R. Thomas Schramm, James Thomka, Paul Potter and Nadessha Koralegedara.

Paul Potter and J. Barry Maynard.

Wayne Goodman (MS ‘76) and Mary Lou Motl at the Geology Spring Banquet.

Paul,Sorry I coundn’t be tehre to honor you on this special evening, You are truely a gentleman and a scholar. Con-gratulations! All of The best.

Steve Greb

Kate Cosgrove at Yosemite Na-tional Park. Spring 2011

Krista Smilek’s photo from St. Croix trip research trip.

U p p e r C r u s t

24

From Jeff Spencer’s collection.Department of Geology’s post card (circa 1960s or 70s?) depicts the “Walter H. Bucher’s Model of the

Serpent Mound Cyrpto-Explosion Stucture, Ohio. This model resided in the Old Tech Geology building for many years.

Woodcut of Kenneth Caster from 4-Day Trip, Northern Indiana, 1962. Artist unknown.

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BOB frenCH (bS ’59)

Bob is the current CEO of GTL Energy Ltd, which made the following announcement in July, 2010:

Australia-based GTL Energy (GTLE) officials an-nounced July 12 that they’ve commissioned what they’re calling a “first-of-a-kind” low-rank coal (includ-ing lignite) upgrading plant near South Heart, North Dakota. The scheme could boost the thermal efficiency of future gasification and other clean-coal plants. “GTL Energy’s technology provides significant opportunities to utilize low rank coal in an environmentally responsi-ble way,” said GTL Energy chief executive Robert French. “It will enable stranded resources to be monetized and help to meet the world’s ever growing demand for energy.” GTLE hopes the plant will provide the platform for a roll out of its technology across the globe. The high energy, low moisture briquettes produce lower emissions when burned and are easier to transport and handle, according to GTLE. Small samples of high moisture, low value coals from the US, Indonesia, New Zealand and Australia have been successfully upgraded so far. The company said its first large-scale upgrade of lignite from North Dakota re-duced moisture by an average of 65%, and lifted energy content

by approximately 40%. A second production trial of New Zealand lignite in January this year reduced mois-ture by 65%, and raised the energy content by 50%.

And Bob adds: It has taken some time and effort but the need was there and we are attracting a lot of inter-est from overseas. We are now in the process of team-ing up with Roberts & Schaefer Co. They have been in the coal plant construction business for over 100 years and were looking for new technology to deploy

We had an interesting visit last week. A lady that was a class-mate of Ruth’s at Christ Hospital School of Nursing stopped by with her husband. They live in Hillsboro, Ohio, and are friends with Dick Bowman. He ran the quarry operation at Peebles where I worked on my MS. He was a great help collecting sam-ples etc. Small world! They are also friends with the couple that live in the old Collins home. Col. Collins was CO at Fort Laramie, WY, in the late 1800’s and Fort Collins, Colorado, was named af-ter him when there was a detach-ment of cavalry stationed here to guard the stage coach line.

Regards,

Bob

Aureal T. Cross (MS’ 41) and Paul Potter at UC Geology Alumni reception, GSA 2010 Annual Meeting & Expo-sition, Denver Colorado.

2011 GSA RECEPTIONThe Annual Meeting this year will be in Min-

neapolis, Minnesota and we will host an alumni reception on Monday, October 10 from 7:30 – 9:30 pm. Further details on hotel location and room will be coming in July, so keep an eye out for your invitation.

A l u m n i N e w s

U p p e r C r u s t

tHOMas gerrarD (bS ’56)

From the 4/24/2010 edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer.

Gerrad, Thomas A. PhD. beloved husband of The-

resa Deters-Gerrard (nee Dattilo) devoted father of

Jeremy (Karen), Joshua (Maryjo), and the late Jason

Gerrard, step-father of Robert L. (Jean MD) Deters

MD and William A. (Felice) Deters, dear brother of

Jill (Michael) Koehler, John (Faye), William (Dianne),

and the late Doug (Rose) Gerrard, loving grandfa-

ther of Joshua & Jake Gerrard, Robert, Michael, &

Ella Deters, Lewis & Bailey Kerns, also survived by

many nieces and nephews. April 21, 2010. Age 77

years. Residence Cherry Grove. Mass of Christian

Burial at Guardian Angels Church Mt. Washington

on Tues. April 27, at 10 AM. Friends may visit at T

P WHITE & SONS Funeral Home 2050 Beechmont

Ave. Mt. Washington on Mon. from 6-8 PM. Thomas

was Professor Emeritus of Geology. q

WiLLiaM giBsOn (mS ’50)

Gibson, William C. (Bill) died April 29, 2009 at his

home in Denver, Colorado, at the age of 85. He was

born in Norwood, Ohio, and grew up in the fam-

ily home on Robertson Avenue, where he and his

parents were long-time members of the old United

Methodist Church. Bill graduated from Norwood

High School in 1940. He enlisted in the U.S. Army

Air Corps during World War II, piloting a C-46 air-

craft for the Air Transport Command in North Africa

and Italy. After the war, his GI Bill benefits enabled

him to enroll in the University of Cincinnati, where he

graduated with degrees in Geology in 1950. Later

in that year, he married Shirley Sullivan, another

Norwood High School graduate, and began a long

career with the Shell Oil Company. His career took

him to Denver, Houston and New Orleans, and in-

volved onshore and offshore exploration as well as

mining ventures. He retired in 1989 and moved to

Colorado. He is survived by his children, Tim, Todd

and Tina; and grandchildren Brody and Tyler. q

I n R e m e m b e r a n c e

William & Joyce Macke (MS ‘52) John Warn (PhD ‘74) Erwin Single (MS ‘56) & Deborah Plytynski (A&S Fundraising)

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A l u m n i N e w s

JOHn POPe (PhD ’66)

Hello Warren,

It is great to hear from you and to realize that I am still remembered somewhere. After retirement, now 18 years ago, with a few exceptions I left geology almost completely. My attention has been directed to the bi-ology, taxonomy and growing of orchids, a hobby that gets Gracia and me around the country and into Cen-tral America. I had developed an interest in orchids back in the 1950’s and as I approached retirement I realized that pursuing them could take us around the country and the world, and if that wasn’t possible, into the greenhouse, and if that was too much, just into the picture windows of our house.

We still live in the same house, which is a bit old, rundown and worn, but comfortable. We have always tried to live a shade below our means, which has meant that the recent recession has had little impact on us. The big activity this month is a project to completely rebuild a bathroom, just a little one. When I think of the cost I have to remind myself that my grandmother used to talk about pork chops at 7 1/2 cents per pound when she was young (She was born when Grant was president). Our children are quite successful, and of course we try to see them whenever possibly. Jona-than is a physician specializing in infectious disease at a hospital in mid-Pennsylvania. That is nice because we can drive there in a day and it is about half way to Boston. Susan is a microeconomist (Ph.D. from Har-vard) with a large consulting firm in downtown Boston.

She specializes in electrical energy economics, specifi-cally deregulation of the various power pools here and overseas. Both have children, an added attraction for drives to the east coast.

I am concerned about the security of the Miami sys-tematic fossil collection. It is not the size of the col-lection Caster assembled, but parts complement weak areas in the Caster collection. At present, our collec-tion sits in deep storage in a building removed from the Geology Department. Bob Frye and I are the only remaining persons who know the little secrets that lie in our collection. I can show Dave M. echinoderms otherwise known only from the Ordovician of Iowa and Illinois. There is one very special brachiopod collec-tion that I never had an opportunity to document. I can’t get any response from the department to pleas to merge the collection into the Cincinnati Museum of Nat. Hist. collection, which will always be the first stop for any visiting paleontologist.

I was sorry to learn of the passing of Harry Whitting-ton. He was a good friend. I don’t know if he was still at Harvard when you were there.

Enough rambling. Thanks for contacting me. If you ever drift by this corner of the Tri-state, your are always welcome to stop for a visit and lunch.

John Pope

Mr s. We n d y Ha rt Be c k M a n

Mr. Le L a n d W. Bu rt o n

Jo H n L. ca rt e r, PH.d.Mr s. kat H e r i n e co s g r o v e

Ms. an n e t t e M. cr o M P t o n

Mr. Jo H n a. cr o M P t o n

cr a i g di e t s c H, PH.d.es tat e o f Lu c i L e a n d ri c H a r d du r r e L L

ro B e rt J. eL i a s, PH.d.dr. Ma rt i n en g L i s H

Mr. Mi c H a e L n. fe i n

Mr. ro B e rt fe r r e e

Mr. Ma r k P. f i s H e r

Mr. Way n e r. go o d M a n

Ms. an d r e a J. Ha a s

Mr. Jo H n d. Ho H o L i c k

La u r e n c e H. Lat t M a n, PH.d.

Mr. Wa Lt e r a. La u f e r

Mr. dav i d a. L i e n H a rt

Mr. Jo H n M. Ma s t e r s

Mr. Jo H n P. Mcan aW

dav i d L. Me y e r, PH.d.Pa u L e. Po t t e r, PH.d.Mr s. co r n e L i a k. ri L e y

Mr. to d W. ro u s H

Mr s. Ma r i a r. ru f e

ri c H a r d B. sc H u Lt z, PH.d.fr e d e r i c k e. si M M s, PH.d.Mr. J. to d d st e P H e n s o n

Wi L L i a M a. va n Wi e, PH.d.dr. ro y B. va nar s d a L e

Ms. ra e Ly n e. We L c H

Mr. Wi L L i a M L. M. Wi L s e y

Thank You!

2 0 1 0 – 2 0 1 1 D o n o r L i s t

U p p e r C r u s t

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geraLD sCHaBer (mS ’62)

Warren

I just got around to reading the spring 2010 issue of the Upper Crust and was shocked to see the “In Re-membrance” to Frank Koucky. His career write-up didn’t mention his extended knowledge of geochemis-try, mineralogy and crystal structure that he shared with many of us as graduate students at U.C. What gives? The “In Remembrance” to Frank only stated that he be-came a professor at U.C.; and then goes on to stress his archaeology work--of which I was totally unaware. I would never have recognized him. Frank Koucky, like Larry Rowan (PhD ‘64), was very influential in my ca-reer path that led me to the U.S. Geological Survey, Branch of Astrogeology in Flagstaff, Arizona after re-ceiving my Doctorate in Geology at U.C. back in 1965. I am keeping busy these days writing my memoirs and researching my paternal and maternal genealogy. The new DNA analytical techniques that are being used to trace the migration of early man are quite fascinating to me. I had my paternal and maternal DNA tested and it appears that both ancestral lines can be traced to one of the first couple of groups of Humans that left East Af-rica about 50,000 years ago, emerging in the region of Western and Central Asia between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago, and starting to head west towards the Eu-ropean subcontinent about 30,000 years ago, eventu-ally becoming part of the Cro-Magnon culture in Western Europe during the LGM (last glacial maximum). Although my father and mother were historically of German descent, I find it interest-ing that nearly 95 percent of the many hundreds of living persons who I have found (so far) that share most or all of the short tandem repeats (STRs) in my paternal DNA line live in the British Isles, dominantly in Ireland.

I have recently theorized that this could have been the result of geolog-ic conditions during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) when the region sep-arating the British Isles from the West-ern European continent became dry land (called “Dog-gerland”) due to the lowering of sea level as a result of the massive volume of ice that covered much of the

northern hemisphere prior to about 6,000 to 12,000 years ago (when this Doggerland was submerged once again.) Recent under water archaeological excavations have verified many Paleolithic living sites in the area that was Doggerland (English Channel, etc.). It is very possible that some groups sharing my paternal DNA (presently highly concentrated in the British Isles and Europe) travelled freely throughout the region that in-cluded the British Isles, Doggerland, and Western Eu-rope during the LGM when Doggerland was a dry land bridge. Some human groups that share my paternal DNA probably migrated east from the British Isles into the Western European subcontinent “prior to” the end of the last glacial period (say prior to about 6,000 to 10,000 years B.P.) when the Doggerland land bridge flooded once again; thus preventing them from migrat-ing westward back into the British Isles. This could ex-plain why most of the people who share my Cro-Ma-gnon DNA patterns (and most present-day Europeans do), but whose Paleolithic ancestors did not leave the British Isles prior to the LGM, still reside there. It is just a wild theory at this point.

Given that the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s final flight was in May 2011, I also wanted to share a personal story about my participation as a Co-Investigator on NASA’s SIR-C/X-SAR imaging radar experiment which was flown on two separate flights of the Space Shuttle Endeavour in April (SRL-1) and October 1994 (SRL-2).

My colleagues and I at the U.S. Geo-logical Survey, Branch of Astrogeol-ogy briefed both SRL crews on our Sahara desert Shuttle imaging Radar experiments in Flagstaff in May and Sept. 1993, respectively. As a part of these briefings, we took both six-per-son crews on a two-day field trip up into Navajo country in Northern Ari-zona to see actual desert landforms. It was during our briefing of the first SRL mission crew in May 1993 at the U.S. Geological Survey field cen-ter in Flagstaff that I showed Astro-naut Thomas D. Jones and his five crewmates an Acheulian hand axe

(made by Homo Erectus between about 150,000 and 200,000 years ago) that I had brought back from the

29

A l u m n i N e w s

Sahara Desert in southern Egypt during my first expedi-tion there with my colleagues in the Fall of 1982. SIR-C/X-SAR Mission Specialist/astronaut Tom Jones called me from Houston a day or so following that first SRL briefing in Flagstaff. He asked me if I would agree to let him use my hand axe as a “prop” during his planned onboard (live) NASA Science briefing to describe the Sahara “radar-river” and sand-penetration experiments of my colleagues John McCauley, Carol Breed and myself at the USGS, Branch of Astrogeology in Flagstaff. I told Tom that I would be happy to lend him my Acheulian hand axe to take on the first SIR-C (SRL-1) flight in April 1994 with the stipulation that he take a few pictures of the hand axe floating in the cabin in zero gravity. He did remember! In fact, he sent me a number of beautiful, personally inscribed photographs of him both holding the handaxe, and of it floating inside the cabin of Endeavour in front of him as I had requested (see photographs). In addition, Tom sent me a forty-five-minute videotape that docu-mented his entire on-board NASA press conference describing our Sahara desert radar experiment. Tom Jones subsequently wrote a book called “Skywalking-An astro-naut’s memoir” that was published in 2006 by Smithsonian books. He sent me a personally annotated copy. In this book (pages 76-77) he says:

“A few weeks later, in May 1993, we joined researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff for a firsthand look at desert landforms, volcanic cones and lava flows, and an active sand sheet in the val-

ley of the Little Colorado River. Over dinner, Jack McCau-ley, Carol Breed and Jerry Schaber, all veteran geologists, recounted their explorations of Egypt’s western desert in a ground search for the radar-rivers revealed by SIR-A and SIR-B. On the banks of one of these buried Saha-ran stream channels, they found hundreds of crude stone hand axes made by our distant ancestors nearly 200,000 years ago..............”

Tom Jones has been a fixture on the TV networks and cable stations as a commentator during Shuttle flights ever since his retirement from NASA. Tom was a crew member on four shuttle mis-sions, including his final flight in February 2001 to the International Space Station. I contacted Tom about a year ago to let him know that I have thoroughly enjoyed his commentaries on television during the shuttle flights. He brought up my hand axe and said that he has recently been thinking about how to best present a media story about his taking it on his first SRL-1 flight (STS-59). As far as I know, my Ach-eulian hand axe is the oldest man-made artifact ever to fly in space. As I watched Space Shuttle En-deavour launch on its last flight this May on television, I thought about what the Homo Erectus man who crafted my hand axe would think if he could have watched his handi-work launched into space aboard a loud and fiery rocket 150,000 to 200,000 years after he fabricated it.

One could only imagine!Best regards, Jerry

geraLD sCHaBer (mS ’62) continued

The Annual Meeting this year wil l be in Minneapolis, Minnesota and we wil l host an alumni reception on Monday, October 10 from 7:30 – 9:30 pm. Fur-

2 0 1 1 G S A R E C E P T I O Nther details on hotel location and room wil l be coming in July, so keep an eye out for your invitation.

30

U p p e r C r u s t

steve WarsHauer (mS ’69)

Warren;

Currently on a field trip with Juan Carlos (Garcia) in the Cantabrian Mountains. Great shale outcrops.

Steve & Juan Carlos

JOHn POJeta (mS ’61, PhD ’63)

(Editor’s note: This announce-ment was published by the Pale-ontological Research Institution in October, 2010)

The Gilbert Harris Award is pre-sented annually by Paleontological Research Institution in recognition of career excellence in systematic paleontology. It is named after the founder of PRI, Gilbert Dennison Harris (1864-1952), whose commitment to systematic paleontology was legendary. The recipient is a scientist who, through outstanding research and commitment to the centrality of system-atics in paleontology, has made a significant contribu-tion to the science. PRI is pleased to announce that this year’s recipient is John Pojeta, Jr., of the United States Geological Survey at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

John’s distinguished career with USGS spanned more than 30 years, from 1963 to 1994. He served as Chief, Branch of Paleontology and Stratigraphy, from 1989 to 1994, and as Chairman, USGS Geological Names Committee, from 1990 to 1994. John remains active in research as a USGS Emeritus Scientist and as a Re-search Associate in the Department of Paleobiology, a post that he has held since 1969. In reviewing John’s career, one is struck by the centrality of systematic pa-leontology in his accomplishments. Among them, we note especially:

1) Identification of new taxa and clarification of estab-lished ones;

2) Curation of fossils at the National Museum of Natu-ral History;

3) Mentoring of students visiting the Paleobiology Di-vision of the museum interested in paleontology [and even moreso if there were even a glimmer of curiosity

about pelecypods (bivalves), but not to the exclusion of other mollusks such as chitons]; and

4) Application of systemic pa-leontology to projects assessing the validity of ideas on accreted terranes, and correlation of eco-nomically important formations.

Among his nearly 150 publica-tions, there are myriad illustrations of how his systematic work in pa-leontology has informed the fields of geology and paleobiology.

John’s main research interests are Lower Paleozoic mollusks. Although now retired, John volunteers assistance for USGS and for other sci-entists, using fossils (pelecypods in particular) to help solve geological and biological problems. His research interests both before and following retirement have taken him to much of the United States, Antarctica, Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Senegal, Sweden, and the UK. Taxonomy, morphology, ontog-eny, variation, phylogeny, and ecology of early pelecy-pod faunas, especially comparison of these forms to Recent pelecypod faunas, still dominate his research as do more general issues in paleoecology and bio-stratigraphy. His publication record shows an excep-tional breadth of interests and approaches, both geo-graphically and among molluscan groups. John has served the community as an active member and offi-cer of several societies, especially The Paleontological Society and American Malacological Society, and has been a Trustee of PRI (since 1976), President of the Board of Trustees (1980-1982), and this year notably celebrates his 50th anniversary as a member of PRI. John enjoys the singular distinction of having had a significant geographic feature named for him: Pojeta Peak, in the Ellsworth Mountains of Antarctica. John and his wife Mary Lou reside (appropriately) in Rock-ville, Maryland.

It is with pleasure and honor that the Paleontologi-cal Research Institution presents its 2010 Gilbert Harris Award to Dr. John Pojeta Jr. q

Steve Warshauer (PhD ‘73) & Juan CarlosGarcia Y Barragan (PhD ‘92).

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31

Do you have any recollections of field trips, social events, classroom experiences or other

experiences during your UC days that you would like to share with your alumni colleagues?

Send them to Warren Huff, email: WARREN.HUFF@UC.EDU or Dept. of Geology, UC, Cin-

cinnati, OH 45221 and we’ll include them in next years’ issue.

Dave anD DOnna LienHart (bS’61, mS ’65)

Hi Warren,

A Happy Belated Birthday, Warren! I’m just a little over 2 years behind you. How time flies when you’re having fun!

It is amazing, but I have now been retired from the government for over 16 years and the job offers continue to roll in. I cur-rently have jobs lined up in Florida (Corps of Engineers), Oklahoma (Shannon and Wilson), and the Queen Charlotte Islands (private owner of an old copper, gold and silver pit). With Paul’s help, I was able to get some good references for the Queen Charlotte geology at the old copper pit. I was also able to obtain an excellent geo-logic map of the Islands from the Canadian Natural Resources folks in Vancouver. Looking forward to go-ing back. This time I am taking Donna. I worked there in November of 1997 and it was quite a ride on the plane from Vancouver to Sandspit. We are going to try

to do this in July this time so maybe the weather will be better (but the mosquitoes will be out in droves).

Donna and I are still roaming the country-side. We will be in the Four Corners area in June for a couple of weeks and then on to the Queen Charlotte Islands, and we are already planning our trip to Minneapolis for the GSA Meeting in October. We have been talking about going back to Paris again maybe sometime in the fall. We have been to Paris 8 or 9 times and never tire of it. The French still love Americans because of what our fathers did for them in WWII and the French have always been very kind

to us.

Hope to get up to see you before school ends.

Kindest regards,Donna and Dave

Attila Kilinc with Dr. Barbu “Bobby” Lang of the Geological Survey of Israel at the 2010 GSA meeting. Dr. Lang was a visiting scholar to our department in 2000.

Warren Huff on Banjo, 1962.

U p p e r C r u s t

32

He’s not just a geologist, Esteban Sagredo says. He sees his research on glacial fluctuations as much more than that. Studying the perturbations of the past to understand our climate’s future, he sees his work not just on a scientific level, but also on the level of a detective studying whodunits about the earth’s history.

“I basically am getting paid to be an in-vestigator. I get to put together different clues to reconstruct the past and it’s really fun to do,” Sagredo says.

A doctoral student in the Department of Geology, Sagredo came to the University of Cincinnati from Chile where he studied the history of fluctuations of Patagonian glaciers since the last Ice Age. When his advisor recommended he get in touch with glacial ex-pert and UC geology professor Thomas Lowell, Sagredo visited UC for a four-month residency—and even though aca-demically he fit right in, he was not yet sold on the city of Cincinnati.

“Coming from Santiago, the city of Cin-cinnati felt like a small town. Even though Tom and I worked well together on re-search, I told him I did not want to live here.”

Fast forward a few months when Lowell came to Chile for a research project. He met up with Sagredo so the two could conduct fieldwork together. That, Sagre-do says, is when he changed his mind about Cincinnati.

“The experience was great. He’s one of the best people I’ve seen work in the field. He always has more questions than answers,” Sagredo says.

So he applied for a Fulbright Doctorate Fellowship through the Chilean government and earned a four-year fellowship at UC.

“The great thing about my Fulbright is that Chilean gov-ernment pays for my salary while UC pays for my tuition. I get to focus solely on my research.”

Since arriving at UC, Sagredo has made a name for himself with glacial research. Already he has published in Andean Geol-ogy and Geomorphology, and he has pre-sented his work at six conferences.

What’s timely about his work in the Andes is that there is a lot of research to be done, and a lot of questions re-garding the history of glacial fluctuations to be answered.

Most glacial research to date has focused on areas the Northern Hemisphere—places with varying climate histories that don’t necessarily depict glacial history in South America.

“So far, most of the discussions on glacial fluctuations have been based on comparisons of chronologies of different sites in vastly different areas,” Sagredo says. “We have tons of chronologies but don’t yet have a clear pattern. We still don’t understand what’s going on based on that chronology. So my question is: What if not all the glaciers respond with the same magnitude to similar climatic signal? Maybe that is what’s causing the perturbation in chronologies.”

Sagredo studies four distinct areas in the mountain range for his research: Patagonia, central Chile, the Atacama

PHd StUdent WarMS UP to cincinnati WHile StUdying glacierS

What if not all the glaciers respond with

the same magnitude to similar climatic

signal?

Cordillera Vilcanota, Peru

Esteban Sagredo studying Cipreses glacier in Central Chile.

A l u m n i N e w sA l u m n i N e w s

33

Desert and the Peruvian Andes. Due to their diverse An-dean climates, some glaciers could be more sensitive than others to certain climatic changes.

Preliminary results from his research showed that, above a certain threshold, all glaciers across the Andes would respond to climate change in a similar manner. However, certain glaciers may be insensitive to climate changes under that threshold. Sagredo is planning a trip to Utah to run mass balance models to see if these re-sults are sound.

Ultimately, Sagredo hopes his research contributes to understanding former glacial fluctuations and paleocli-mates, though he plans to keep his career focused on glacial histories in South America. He returns yearly to do

field work, and he will move back after earning his PhD in 2012 as part of his Fulbright agreement.

However, one thing has changed since he first arrived in Cincinnati: he has fallen in love with UC and the city. Like a slow-forming glacier, his appreciation for the Queen City has gradually formed, and now he enjoys exploring the city, listening to live music and making friends with a diverse group of people on campus.

“The scale of the city is really manageable. I love Cincin-nati now,” Sagredo says. “It helps that the department is really friendly. The professors do a great job of creating an open and friendly environment.” q

Tapado Glacier, NorthernChile.

Esteban in Canada. Photo by Scott Reynhout.

Durrell’s IGA trip. 1968.

U p p e r C r u s t

34

BOB LenHart (mS ’74, PhD ‘79)

Dr. Huff,

I just finished reading thru the latest issue of Upper Crust:

In the section where you’re searching for lost alumni I used to see Steve Woodward’s name. I met him while work-ing at Exxon in Houston and lost track of him after that. He attended UC after I left but we became good friends while working at Exxon. His vivid sense of humor helped me thru those challenging days. Reading through the Upper Crust is always an interesting experience. Especially when I see a letter from an old friend, like E.J. Webb.

I hope you’re doing well and I would love to hear you play bluegrass music sometime. If I remember correctly you play guitar, right? Tom Gardner, Greg Wahlman and I used to go down to a club near Skyline Chili and listen to a group called Appalachian Grass. I miss those days. One of my favorite tunes by them was “Too Much Fun”.

Can you play a few bars of that?

I would love to meet up with you and your student if you are in El Paso. I could show you some of my favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican food places.

Best Wishes,Bob Lenhart

BOB BaBBs (bS ’73)

Hello Friends and Family,

This summer’s vacation took a few turns of the unexpect-ed. After we found Lassen Volcanic National Park to be closed due to snow we had to alter our route a bit. This put us into Redding, CA for the evening and let us enjoy the views of the “famous” Sun Dial Bridge there over the Sac-ramento River. It was worth the change, so enjoy today’s pictures of that Bridge. Also, I’ve included one from our trip to Lassen.

Enjoy and have a good week.Bob

I n R e m e m b e r a n c e

raMan singH (PhD ’71)

Dear Warren,

We are saddened to hear that Chung-Hung Hu (PhD ’68) passed away on September 15. His son, Luke, wrote from Hong Kong that Chung died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Taipei, Taiwan. ROC. He was 86.

Chung joined the Geology Department in September 1963, along with me and 2 other graduate students (Bruce M Bell, Osborne B Nye Jr.), to work with Dr. Kenneth E Caster. We had joined the then existing graduate students, Richard Osgood, Ronald L Pars-ley and Kenneth A Shubak, to make the largest paleon-tology group to work with Dr Caster. Chung worked on the ontogeny and dimorphism of Welleraspis lata Howell (Trilobita)Upper Ordovician. Chung received his PhD in

1968. He began his teaching career at the Nanyang Uni-versity, Singapore. He then taught at the National Cheng Kung University and Taiwan Normal University in Taiwan. He served as a consultant to various government and academic institutions. He received numerous awards throughout his career, the most notable being the first foreigner to receive the Best Paper Award from the Ja-pan Paleontology Society in 1971.

He leaves behind his wife, Grace Hsi-Jen Tao and son Luke (born in 1964 at the Deaconess Hospital) and two grandchildren, Patricia and Thomas. Luke is also a graduate of UC, from the Computer Engineering Department in 1989.

Raman

A l u m n i N e w s

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BiLL HarMOn (mS ’74)

Hi Barry!

In latest “Upper Crust”, your coring-logging geology/engi-neering project was described as a complete Cincinnatian section. By combining the Raymond Walters section that would be fantastic. Also, with regard to your logging needs, you might try some of your alumni still in the “oil biz” for their contacts in the logging side of the business (Halliburton, Dresser, Schlumberger, etc.) for them to contact for you to donate their services in return for “your gracious thanks to them”. Another thought is that if there is still drilling activity in the Lima Field area of Ohio, one of the logging companies may still have offices in the area.

Good luck with the project. It sounds fascinating & I would like to be kept updated on its progress & future results.

Thanks!!!Bill

JOHn Warn (mS ‘71, PhD ’74)

Thanks for the invitation Warren. I would love to attend the reception and will do so if I am in town. Incidentally, I just published a book on the underwater world of Fiji. Go to http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1250420. Or you can search the bookstore using my name or title: John M. Warn or Fiji Photo Underwater. You can look at the entire book there.

Best wishes,John

(Editor’s note: This is quite a spectacular book with some marvelous underwater photos)

John M. Warn has spent over 35 years using inno-vation and technology to find oil and gas. From 1974-1978 Warn was involved in Shell’s effort in Sacramento Basin, California to fuel their Martinez refinery with natu-ral gas from Northern California. Using seismic Direct Hydrocarbon Indication (DHI) technology developed by Shell in the Offshore Gulf Coast Region, Warn, as part of a team of four G&G professionals, discovered over 150 BCF of gas reserves, nearly half of the total in Putah Sink Field. Until Warn discovered Elkhorn Slough Gas Field for EOG in 1993, Putah Sink was the deepest Winters gas field in which DHI was the primary discovery tool (6800’). From 1979-1986 Warn explored for oil and gas for Thomas (Tom) N. Jordan, founder of Trend and Filon, as part of his personal team of four G&G professionals. Warn was a primary prospect generator using both ge-ology and geophysics and served as the geologist on a geological-geophysical team that toured the US garner-ing financial support for drilling ventures for Jordon Oil & Gas Co. and Simpson Oil & Gas Co., a wholly owned subsidiary. Warn was involved in the generation of more than 100 exploration prospects, the promoting of more than 50 prospects, the drilling of more than 150 wells, and the proving up of more than 40 BCF of gas reserves through the drill bit. He caused significant discoveries to be made in Oklahoma at Tribbey Field, in Illinois at Treva and Assumption Fields, and in California at Stegeman Field.

In 1989, in conjunction with M. Ray Thomasson (Tho-masson Partner Associates) and Pendleton Land and Exploration, Warn put together and sold a $15MM Cali-

fornia exploration venture with Texaco and Enron Oil and Gas Company. Warn, as geological/geophysical consul-tant, became the exploration staff leader. He was hired by Enron Oil and Gas Company (now EOG Resources) in 1990 and moved to EOG’s Denver office in 1993 to work for then EOG Exploration Manager Jim Lightner (past President and CEO of Tom Brown, Inc.). In that year, Warn’s Elkhorn Slough discovery became the deepest success (by 2000’ at a depth of 8650’) for any DHI tech-nique in Winters turbidites. Elkhorn Slough has proved and produced reserves of over 25 BCF from three wells. Largely due to Warn’s efforts with DHI technology EOG, having started in late 1990 with zero California produc-tion, was producing 22 MMCFD by April 1998. During that time period EOG passed such notable companies active in the area as Chevron, Amerada Hess, Vintage, Texaco and Calpine to become the largest gas producer in Sacramento Basin (with all production from explor-atory drilling and subsequent development off explor-atory discoveries). Warn also was instrumental in put-ting together a series of new exploration plays in a lightly explored portion of Sacramento Basin and convincing a partner to acquire a 235 square mile 3D seismic survey at its expense (over $10 MM), while reimbursing EOG for 50% of EOG’s land costs on 40,000 acres for 50% working interest in those plays.

Fourteen of the first sixteen exploratory wells have been successful, and the play continues (EOG’s 50% WI was acquired by OXY in conjunction with the trade below).

(Continued on page 37)

B I O G R A P H Y

U p p e r C r u s t

36

tOM KLeKaMP (mS ’71)Warren,

This is an excellent quick reference to the flood control on the Lower Mississippi. At the end is an interesting reference to the”Fuse Control Levee.”

There is quite a bit of excitement around here as the Corps preps for the biggest flood since the 1927 deluge. The Corps opens the Bonnet Carre’ Spillway Monday morning and I plan hopefully to get some camcorder clips. It’s an awesome sight to see 250,000 cfs pour through those sluices.

Please pass this along to whoever is teaching geomorph or engineering geo. http://www.americaswetlandresources.com/background_facts/detailedstory/LouisianaRiverCon-trol.html

Long live the Corps!Tom Klekamp

Wayne gOODMan (mS ’76)Hi, Warren,

Ed O’Donnell and I had a terrific time last week visiting with the students and faculty as part of the Alumni Advisory Council. There is never a time in the department with the as-pirations and history of U.C. Geology that doesn’t bring chal-lenges, but I liked a lot of what I saw last week. As the faculty will continue to turn over at a quicker-than-usual pace over the next few years, we both feel it’s very critical to maintain a core departmental strength in the areas of sedimentology-basin analysis, structural geology, and low temperature geo-chemistry. (Add clay mineralogy if you are DARING to think about retirement in the near term!)

The attached WH picture from Ed’s camera is probably in your archives, but wanted to make sure it was if not. Ed O’Donnell has been going through his U.C. photos from the 1960’s, and has some priceless stuff. If he’s not forwarding these treasures to you, I’ll cattle-prod him to make sure he does! I have also attached a couple that I took in 1974 when we celebrated a Ken Caster birthday (# 70, I think) during

a Paleo Seminar class. The cake is a carpoid, Ken’s pet echinoderm project at the time. More frosting than cake to ensure at least some level of paleontological accuracy! The long arm with the funky shirt holding the cake is that of the inimitable John Warn. (Now living in Denver, but with a sec-ond home in Fiji where he spends a lot of time diving—his wife is an expert underwater photographer who films docu-mentaries.)

Enjoy the rest of the spring and keep in touch! I’ll probably be back on campus sometime in the fall if not earlier.

Cheers, Wayne

BOB POHOWsKy (mS ’69, PhD ’74)

Hi Warren,

The photo below shows a permafrost area in Canada’s North-west Territories, very close to the Beaufort Sea. The many triangular, sometimes heart-shaped lakes are mainly 1-3 km long and invariably have the pointed end directed southward. The coordinates of the marker in the photo are 69 deg. 58’ 20.46 N ; 130 deg. 24’ 00.31 W.Regards,Bob

(Editor’s note: A follow-up comment from Ken Hinkle in Geography: Hi Warren: The image shows classic triangu-lar thaw (thermokarst) lakes in the Mackenzie delta region, first described by J. R. Mackay. Developed atop perma-frost, they are oriented. Often, oriented lakes are elliptical in shape due to a 2-cell water circulation pattern that devel-ops in response to prevailing summer winds. The triangular shape has to do with a binary wind pattern in summer. The appropriate reference is cited below. Hope this helps.

Best, Ken

A l u m n i N e w s

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Dr. LinDa ivanySyracuse University

“Permian Bivalves, Paleoclimate, and the Oxygen Isotopic Evolution of Phanerozoic

Seawater”

PauL e. POtterUniversity of Cincinnati

“U-Pb Ages of Zircons & Paleo-Continental Tilt in Southwest Ohio”

Dr. Max COLeManNASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA.“Biogeology meets Astrobiology at NASA JPL:

Research Work in Progress”

Dr. J. tyLer faitHCenter for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology

Department of AnthropologyThe George Washington Unviversity

“The late Quaternary mammals ofsub-Saharan Africa: new evidence for ecological change, extinctions, and modern human origins”

Dr. s. KatHLeen LyOnsDepartment of Paleobiology

Smithsonian Institution“Moving the debate forward:

The consequences of the loss of~200 million mammals at the terminal Pleistocene”

Dr. aLisOn g. BOyerDepartment of Ecology and

Evolutionary BiologyYale University

“Using the Past to Predict the Future: Extinctions and ecological change on Pacific islands”

Dr. reBeCCa terryDepartment of Biology

Stanford University “The dead don’t lie: raptors, rodents, and

conservation paleobiology”

Dr. tHOMas K. rOCKWeLLDepartment of Geological Sciences

San Diego State University“The 2010 El Mayor-Cucapa earthquake rupture: oblique extension at the transition between rifting

and transform faulting”

Dr. setH yOungDepartment of Geological Science

Indiana Unversity“A Volcanic Weathering Hypothesis for the Late Ordovician Greenhouse to Icehouse Transition:

Isotopic Evidence from North Amercia”

Dr. BrOOKe CrOWLeyDepartment of Anthropolgy

University of Toronto“Where have all the lemurs gone? Ecological

ramifications of extinction and habitat transformation in Madagascar”

Dr. JaMes BauerDepartment of Evolution, Ecology, and

Organismal BiologyThe Ohio State University

“Constraining continent-to-ocean carbon fluxes and transformations using isotopic and organic

geochemical approaches”

Dr. natHan BrOOKs engLisHEarth and Environmental Sciences Division

“A High-resolution Terrestrial Climate Proxy in the Stable Isotope Ratios of Cactus Spines”

Dr. eLLen CuranODepartment of Geology

Miami University“Multi-proxy reconstructions of climate,

landscape, and terrestrial ecosystems for the late Oligocene of northwestern Ethiopia”

MiKe LOuDinExxon/Mobil

Manager for Global Geoscience Hiring and Development

“Energy in the 21st Century”

Dr. rOBert riDingEarth and Planetary Sciences

University of Tennessee, Knoxville“What happened when atmosphericCO2 declined in the Late Devonian?”

Dr. aMy tOWnsenD-sMaLLDepartment of GeologyUniversity of Cincinnati

“Vulnerability of Soil Organic Carbonin the Ganges River Headwaters,

Indian Himalayas”

WiLLiaM C. HaneBerg, PH.D.AEG-GSA Jahns Distinquished Lecturer

Adjunct Professor of GeologyUniversity of Cincinnati

“The Landslide That Ate Laprak”

Dr. neiL sHuBinRobert R. Bensley Professor

Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy“Your Inner Fish: A Journey Through the

3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body”

C o l l o q u i u m S p e a k e r s 2 0 1 0 - 2 0 1 1

38

U p p e r C r u s t

I n R e m e m b e r a n c e

KODJOPa attOH (MS ’70)

Published in the Ithaca Journal on February 19, 2011

Kodjopa Attoh died peacefully at home surround-ed by family and friends on February 7th, 2011 at the age of 66 after a long battle with stomach cancer. He was a well-respected and extensively published geologist, a loyal and loving father, hus-band and friend with a passion for soccer, ten-nis and politics. Kodjopa was the son of Ephraim Attoh and Ellen Bansah of Taviefe, Ghana, born on March 29th, 1944 in Tav-iefe where he began his schooling. After his middle school education at Bishop Hermann School in Kpando, Ghana, he completed his secondary education at the prestigious Achimota College. He then went on to ob-tain a Bachelor of Science (Geology), a Masters of Science (Geology) and a Ph.D (Geology) from the University of Ghana, University of Cincinnati North-western University , respectively. He returned to Ghana from the United States in 1974 to teach and conduct research at the University of Ghana as a senior lecturer (Assistant Professor) between 1974 and 1978. Thereafter he moved to Ottawa, Cana-da after successfully competing for a post-doctor-al fellowship at the Geological Survey of Canada. Life in Canada was good. He made many lifelong friends there and learned the joys of ice skating on the frozen Ottawa River. But after two years (1978-80) he left to accept a position at Hope Col-lege in Holland, Michigan where he worked, mar-ried Sandra Greene and began his family. During his years among the Dutch of western Michigan (1981-1993), he regularly hosted the African for-eign students enrolled at Hope College and at the theological seminary in town. His enthusiasm for teaching found great expression in leading stu-dents on field trips throughout North America and West Africa. Many a student remembers him clam-bering over outcrops and through road cuts, point-ing out how to read the rocky landscape. In dem-onstrating his excitement about the world’s oldest formations, he inspired many students to continue their study of geology into graduate school. This was true wherever he taught. In 1993 he moved to

Cornell University where he worked first as an As-sociate Professor and later as a Senior Research Associate, expanding his record of publications and expertise in the geology of Ghana through collab-orative research with colleagues at both Cornell and Syracuse University.

Kodjopa took great pride in his family’s accom-plishments and constantly preached to his children the importance of doing their very best, especially in school. He was equally passionate about politics, seeking out oth-ers to debate and discuss the latest devel-opments in the U.S. and around the world. He empathized with the disadvantage of the world and because of this was an early volunteer with the Durfee Tutoring Project,

working with Ithaca students to improve their perfor-mance at school. He was also a regular contributor to such organizations as UNICEF and the NAACP, and to development projects in Ghana. His love of travel and his desire to share his passion for geol-ogy led him to work at Mekele University in Ethiopia (1997-1998), the University of Kuwait (1999-2001) and back to the University of Ghana on a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship (2002-2004) where he taught geology.

He is predeceased by his parents and his brothers, Albert Okai and Kwame Attoh. He is survived by his wife, Sandra E. Greene; two sons, Kafui and Kwaku Attoh; eleven brothers and sisters; a mul-titude of nieces and nephews and a host of friends in the United States and around the world, from Austria to New Zealand, from Ghana and Croatia to Ethiopia.

A memorial service to honor the life of Kodjopa At-toh will be held on March 5, 2011 at 2:00 PM at First Presbyterian Church, 315 N. Cayuga Street, Ithaca, NY 14850. In lieu of flowers, please send contributions to any of the following: First Presby-terian Church Memorial Fund (Please see address above), Hospicare and Palliative Care of Tompkins County, New York, 172 East King Road Ithaca, NY 14850 American Cancer Society , P.O. Box 22718, Oklahoma City, OK 73123

39

A l u m n i N e w s

Warn’s greatest achievement at EOG was to play an in-tegral part in convincing management to make separate acquisitions in San Joaquin Basin of 240,000 fee min-eral acres and 404,000 fee mineral acres (644,000 fee mineral acres, over 1000 square miles of minerals) for a combined $13 MM. EOG later traded those minerals to OXY for great increase in value while retaining what EOG considered the best prospective acreage, now North Shafter Oil Field. (The HBP and exploratory acre-age taken in trade supplied the EOG Oklahoma City and Tyler divisions each with two years of drilling—over 400 drillsites, mostly PUD’s—a probable 20-fold increase in value.) In 2001-2004, Warn was involved at Tom Brown, Inc. in the purchase of Desert Springs and Mulligan Draw Fields in the Green River Basin, Wyoming. He served as the geophysicist responsible for 3D seismic discoveries at Ruger (North Dripping Rock), Lookout Wash, CEPO and Gambler’s Reservoir, all in the Green River Basin.

In 2005 Warn founded Exploration Earth Corporation and began consulting for The Mitchell Group (Sacra-mento Basin), McElvain Oil and Gas Properties (Uinta Basin) and Occidental Oil and Gas Company (OXY – Rocky Mountains basins). He joined with Daniel R. Cook, Seismic Insight Inc. in research applying mathematical techniques for processing brain waves to applications for gleaning more information from seismic waves (see Cook and Warn, American Oil and Gas Reporter, Feb-

ruary 2005). He started consulting for OXY full-time in March 2005, continuing that relationship until accepting a position with Stephens Energy Company in August 2006. From August 2006 to January 2009 Warn spear-headed Stephens’ efforts to gain entry into the Southern Rocky Mountains Basins. Warn initiated plays and pros-pects in Greater Green River Basin and screened out-side deals relating to over 100 plays/prospects in nearly all Rockies basins. Four significant wells are presently drilling, or about to spud, as a result of that effort. Those wells will test large potential in the Wyoming Folded Belt, the thrusted overhang of the north flank of the Uinta Mountains, deep Nugget Sandstone and Baxter Shale in Vermillion/Powder Wash Basins and a Lewis strati-graphic trap in Washakie Basin. In March 2009 Warn joined Thomasson Partner Associates as Vice President of Geoscience, where he is responsible for developing new exploration plays and prospects as well as aiding in the geological and geophysical technical evaluation of plays and projects at TPA developed by others. Warn is a member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the Rocky Mountain Association of Geolo-gists, the Denver Geophysical Society and the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. Warn has been active in the Denver oil and gas community since 1986, and he is today widely known and respected.

JOHM M. Warn Biography (Continued)

1973 Group. Photo courtesy of Wayne Goodman.

U p p e r C r u s t

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tOny LiMKe (BS ’84)

Hello David and Warren,

It’s great to hear from you, and it’s great to see this old photo. I’ve added the names I can remember on the at-tached, less the folks you’ve already ID’d. Tom Dye-house became the doctor; he’s in Vancouver, WA, and his profile, http://www.swmedicalcenter.com/body.cfm?id=7&action=detail&ref=1071

is less silly than from the ‘83 photo. Eva Dupuis is in town and doing health physics for a DoE contractor. I drink beer with Mike “Scruffy” Davis regularly; he’s a gem and fos-sil wholesaler, as is Ron Ruschmann. Beth Leamond is working for EPA in DC, and Chris Goetz is working for

U R S in Santa Ana, CA. That’s all I know; perhaps the others cc’d can fill in some blanks.

Hope you’re all doing well.Tony

eva DuPuis-nOuiLLe (BS ’84)

Hello!

That is a wonderful picture! It’s truly another lifetime ago, and with good memories. And, it’s good to hear from ev-eryone.

Best regards,Eva

The Annual Meeting this year wil l be in Minneapolis, Minnesota and we wil l host an alumni reception on Mon-day, October 10 from 7:30 – 9:30 pm.

2 0 1 1 G S A R E C E P T I O NFurther details on hotel location and room wil l be coming in July, so keep an eye out for your invitation.

A l u m n i N e w s

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BetH LeaMOnD (BS ’84)

Wow that is a f lash from the past. It looks so long ago and so famil iar at the same time. thanks for passing this on. I wil l put it on my facebook page. I wil l look for you all on facebook.

I loved that tr ip to Mammoth cave. The thing that I remember about it were that we never went in a cave ( it was a geomorphology class field trip). That looks l ike Salem limestone. and Stephanie is in there too. Dave Ramos played music. Does he sti l l play music?

Beth

CHristOPHer gOetz (BS ’84)

Hey all, this is a hoot! Thanks for brightening my day. I could be totally off base here but is Tim Ral-ston the guy that is standing next to Eva Dupuis?

Cheers,Chris

Jeff sPenCer (BS ’80)

Dr. Huff,

In case you are not a member, here is the most recent newsletter of the OGS. From time to time, I contribute an Ohio postcard with some oil-related or geology-related topic. I sent the Bucher model postcard (see page 22) that we had discussed and Amy included it in this issue.

All the best,Jeff Spencer

greg WaHLMan (PhD ’85)

(editor’s note: greg published a paper in the september 2010 issue of The Sedimentary Record entitled, “Reflux Dolomite Crystal size Variation in Cyclic inner ramp res-ervoir Facies, Bromide Formation (ordovician), arkoma Basin, southeastern oklahoma)”

Warren,

Good to hear from you. I hope all goes well in Zinzinnati! Thanks for the nice comments regarding the Bromide paper. I worked on the Bromide for BP for the past several years, and continue to look at new cores for them as a “retired” consultant. Its been fun playing the Ordovician again, though the Arkoma Basin Bromide warm arid updip facies are quite different from the Ordovician in the Cincinnati area.

I have also been doing carbonate consulting work for other companies, including projects on the the Pennsylvanian of the Midcontinent, the Lower Permian of the Permian Basin, and the Jurassic of the Gulf Coast. I have had a few inter-national consulting projects too (e.g., Mexico-Guatemala, South America, West Africa), but have turned down a few other overseas jobs which would have required travel to rath-er undesirable places like Pakistan. And, I am also involved in both a number of carbonate and biostratigraphic research projects with various academic colleagues, including studies on Late Paleozoic mounds and reefs, and fusulinid biostratig-raphy. I presently have two fusulinid biostrat papers in review. So, I am working fulltime and really don’t feel very “retired”.

There is a distinct possibility that Joani and I will be mov-ing up to Austin in the next year or so. I’ll let you know if it happens.

Thanks again, take care, and keep in touch,Greg

Do you have any recollections of field trips, social events, classroom experi-

ences or other experiences during your UC days that you would like to share with your

alumni colleagues?

Send them to Warren Huff, email: WAR-REN.HUFF@UC.EDU or Dept. of Geology,

UC, Cincinnati, OH 45221 and we’ll include them in next years’ issue.

U p p e r C r u s t

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JOHn Haynes (MS ’85, PhD ‘89)

John provided a photo of the Best Poster award he re-ceived at the 2009 Eastern Section AAPG meeting in Evansville, IN. Congratulations John!

aLMériO frança (PhD ’87)

Almerio has posted some photos of his UC memories at

http://homepages.uc.edu/~huffwd/Cincin-nati_Memories/1984-1987.htm.

Hi Profs. Maynard and Potter,

I am retired from Petrobras since March 31st. I am now back home in Curitiba where I will be with the University Federal do Parana as a consultant at one of their sedimentological labs, and also teaching occa-sionally and advising some graduate students. Also I will be somehow linked with Petrobras as a consultant.

I took this picture in the 1985 four-day field trip in Ken-tucky (pine mountain???) I can recognize some of the students: Tom McComb, Tom Hudson, John Haynes, Kevin McIntire, Rob Ferree, Zeki Camur, Chuck Zax and Jim Beaujon.

All the best,Almerio

JiM BeauJOn (MS ’87)

Jim stopped by the department in October and followed up with a few photos:

Warren,

I too enjoyed my visit. Attached are a few images you might like from slides I took dur-ing the 6-9 October 1983 Departmental Fieldtrip to Southern Illinois. Being scans of slides they lack some of the original clarity.

Take Care,Jim

A l u m n i N e w s

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MiKe triPPi (MS ’86) PhotoHi Dr. Huff,

Just writing to say congratulations for the AAPG award for excellence in teaching. My boss Bob Ryder was at the awards ceremony (I missed it) and saw Dr. Potter ac-cept the award for you. I can’t think of anyone else that deserves an excellence in teaching award more than you. Sorry you couldn’t be there. As you must already know John Haynes, Doug Jordan, and a few other UC graduates were there. It was a good conference. Of course most people were there to learn about the Marcellus and other gas shales in the Appalachian and Michigan basins. Bob Ryder and I had a poster with our most recent cross section, I-I’, in the Appalachian Basin. It won’t be published for a year or two so this was just a “sneak peek” for everyone. I just sent copies of 2 of our already published cross sections, C-C’ and D-D’, to Dr. Potter who stopped by our booth and asked me to send him copies. It’s nice to know that people are interested in our work.

Well, not much else is new. Hope all is going fine with you and best of luck with all your work. Take care and talk to you soon.

Mike

riCHarD fLuegeMan (PhD ’87)

Rick was the 2010 recipient of the GSA Cole Award and also the Joseph A. Cushman Award.

The Joseph A. Cushman Award was established in 1979 to honor researchers who have made outstand-ing contributions in the field of foraminiferology. The award consists of recognition of the awardee in the pages of the Journal of Foraminiferal Research, and a plaque embossed with the Foundation’s seal, the awardee’s name and date of the award.

The W. Storrs Cole Memorial Research Award was established to support research in invertebrate micro-paleontology. It will be given each year to a GSA Mem-ber or Fellow between 30 and 65 years of age who has published one or more significant papers on micropa-leontology.

BrigiD WiLKins PLuMMer (BS ’82)

Dear Dr Meyer,

I Hope this note finds you well.

Just a quick note of thanks to you to let you know that your Paleo class, waaay back in the late 70’s, is still being applied. Yes, Your teaching did sink in and stuck!! I am currently teaching Biology in our homeschool Co-op. Fun facts of invertebrate bi-ology are still being used.

Thank you again for your dedication to your field and to teaching.

Dave and I live in Cleveland, and are about to launch our 3rd child into college next fall!!!

Sincerely yours, Brigid Wilkins Plummer

tatsuO OJi (Visiting Post-Doc, late 80s)

Dear Arnie,

Good to hear from you! Thank you for asking how my family and I are.

I have moved from University of Tokyo to Nagoya Universi-ty since last June. I now belong to the University Museum, with a close relation to the earth science department. On the 11th, just before the earthquake hit Japan, I left Japan for the US to attend a seminar in the University of Milwau-kee where one of my students is visiting for two months. Then I came to Ann Arbor where I am visiting Tom Bau-miller. So, I caught all the news about the tsunami tragedy after I came to US.

My family members are all safe. They live in Fujisawa, about 60 km south of Tokyo, and they felt a strong shock, but there was no damage to my house. Since my former field area was on the Pacific coast of northern Japan, I was really overwhelmed by the news and really worried about the local people who helped my study. I feel guilty by not being able to do anything for this tragedy. This time I cannot visit Cincinnati (because I have to return on the 16th), but I would like to send my best regards to you, Marie-Joe and Dave.

Best wishes,Tatsuo Oji

(L. to R.) Bill Harrison, Tom Partin, Mike Trippi, John Haynes, Paul Potter and Doug Jordan

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steven HOLLanD (BS ’85)

Hi Warren,

This has been a big year for me. I’ve finished the book I’ve been writing with Mark Patzkowsky. It’s called Stratigraphic Paleobiology and will be published by the University of Chicago Press late this year. I’ve also finished fieldwork on the Ordovician in the Big-horn Mountains, and I’m starting a project with a new graduate student on sequence stratigraphic control on the preservation of marine vertebrates (plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs!) in the Jurassic Sundance Formation of Wyoming. I’ve also started work on a new NSF grant on how changes in sea level affect the diversity of shal-low marine communities. I still get back to Cincinnati from time to time (loading up on Skyline, Christian Mo-erlein, bratwurst, Graeters, and goetta), and it’s always great to see everyone in the department!

Best,Steve

anDreina isea DuBuC (MS’85)

Andreina came to Cincinnati in 1983 after working for the Venezuelan National Oil Company in its research laboratory as a junior manager. At UC her thesis topic was entitled, Sedimentology and Depositional Mod-el of the Holocene Coastal Sequence of Sinamaica, Northwest Venezuela, and dealt with a coastal beach sequence near Lago de Maracaibo, close to the Co-lombian border. Her company supported her thesis research. Her committee consisted of Professors Pot-ter, Pryor and Nash.

Andreina grew up in a small town in the Venezuelan Andes and earned her BS degree in geology at Central University in Caracas. After completing her MS degree at UC in 1985 she returned to her company in Venezu-ela and continued to work there until sometime after Colonel Chavez became the nation’s president. How-ever, due to changes in her company’s management system, she decided to move to Colombia, where she joined the Pacific Rubiales Energy Corporation, a very successful oil company in South America. Pacific Ru-biales Energy Corporation engages in the exploration, development, and production of heavy crude oil and natural gas in Colombia and Peru. Its principal prop-erty includes the Rubiales field, which consists of 79 producing wells located in the southeastern portion of the Llanos Basin of Colombia. Andreina is currently its

Exploration Manager and has played an important role in increasing its production to close to 100,000 bar-rels/day, mostly from oil sands. Pacific Rubiales En-ergy Corporation, which also has investments in gold, was incorporated in 1985 and is headquartered in To-ronto, Canada. Please see the attached full page from Barron’s for more information about Pacific Rubiales Energy Corporation.

For those of you who might remember her and would like to say hello, her email address is aisea@pacificru-biales.com.co.

Paul Potter and Warren Huff

Wayne Goodman’s photo of Paul Potter, 1975.

Steven Holland (BS ‘85)

I n R e m e m b e r a n c e

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KennetH fenDer (BS ‘80)

Kenneth “Ken.” Snatched from us unexpectedly on Saturday, May 14, 2011. Ken leaves behind loving wife Gayle Nyswonger, children Jason and Rachel Fender, and their mother Kathleen Fender. Also survived by siblings Eldon (Tonia) Fender, Jr., Lyn (Robert) Leary, stepmother Shirl Fender, step-children Stuart and Carmen (Sarah) Nyswonger, and numerous nieces and nephews. He was pre-ceded in death by his parents Eldon Fender and Al-ice Beebe. Ken was a lover of people, life, and new experiences and challenges. He graduated from Reading High in ‘77, where he excelled in basket-ball and football, and the University of Cincinnati in ‘80 with a Geology degree. Later, he returned

to UC for a degree in Information Technology, and became a successful project manager with sever-al area firms, most recently LexisNexis. Ken was a Fifth Dan Master in Tae Kwon Do, and loyal mem-ber of the Eastgate Martial Arts Club. A licensed boat captain, Ken was an enthusiast of all things aquatic. His sudden loss is felt profoundly, and he will always be missed. A Memorial Service will be held at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church on Friday May 20 at 10AM. Donations are suggested to Habitat for Humanity Eastside Coalition, 4910 Para Drive, Cincinnati, OH, 45237.

Published in The Cincinnati Enquirer May 17, 2011.

We do not have current mailing addresses for the

following alumni.Can you help?

WHO, WHeN AND WHeRe?

1.2.

3.

4.

6.

7.

8.5.

Ms. Susan ParrettMr. Paul R. Schuh

Mr. Kenneth SparksMr. James I. Streeter

Dr. Mary BremerMs. Rebecca CarterMr. David J. Green

Mr. Glenn KingMr. Shuguang Mao

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MarK KreKeLer (MS ’98)

Hi Warren - How are things?

I am seeking graduate students (M.S. or Ph.D.) for transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and environ-mental investigations of natural or synthetic minerals related to pollution remediation. One project is inves-tigating the variability of synthetic cryptomelane, an octahedral molecular sieve structure (OMS-2) that has been shown to be a very promising catalyst. Another project involves investigating palygorskite-sepiolite for use in pollutant removal in a variety of settings. Stu-dents may be supported for these projects by teaching assistantships or from Research assistantships from pending grant proposals.

Our electron microscopy facility has no beam charges and is a great facility for teaching high-end microscopy. The centerpiece is a new JEOL JEM-2100 TEM/STEM, which operates in brightfield, darkfield, selected area electron diffraction, scanning transmission electron microscopy and energy filtered transmission electron microscopy modes. The instrument is equipped with a Gatan 833 Orius camera, A JEOL BF STEM detector, a Gatan HAADF STEM detector, a Gatan GIF Tirdiem post-column energy filter EELS/EFTEM and a Bruker Quantax 200 STEM XEDS with a SDD detector. We have a wide array of other instruments available at no cost including powder and single crystal X-ray diffrac-tometers, an atomic force microscope, amongst sev-eral others.

Our department is a very vibrant and friendly environ-ment and the web page is (http://www.units.muohio.edu/geology/). Please have interested students con-tact me at krekelmp@muohio.edu.

Sincere thanks,Mark

steWart eBersOLe (MS ’97)

It boggles my mind that I’ve been graduated from UC for almost 13 years, but I still look back at my time there as being a very defining time for my own person growth and evolution as a geology scholar. I still drop in on the department, unannounced generally, on my yearly trip to visit friends, and my favorite tattoo artist, in Cincinnati. I never know who I might see on my vis-its, and on my last one I was quite excited to see both David Meyer and Warren Huff.

Last years trip was quite different from all of the years past because, as you may have read in the Spring 2010 version of this publication, I am currently writing a book about something near and dear to my heart; tattoos and underground music. But before I go off on that tangent let me tell you all about what I’ve been doing since graduation. I will preface it by this; I am an Aquarius. I will ask you to do the research, but I am pretty typical for the sign as you will see. We bore quite easily.

Upon leaving UC I bypassed an amazing opportunity to attend the University of Chicago for my Ph.D. (trust me Arnie, I still am feeling the sting of that one). In-stead I opted to move back to Philadelphia and be closer to my family. Upon my arrival I was feeling a bit intellectually warn out and so I opted into the job that helped pay my way through my undergraduate career, that of an urban Bicycle Messenger. I worked that job for almost two years while trying to decide whether I wanted to go back and finish my Ph.D. or not, and ultimately found an awesome job teaching Earth Sci-ence, Physics, and Biology at a school called CFS; The School at Church Farm in Exton, PA. What a great experience that was.

While I got to teach a lot of kids a lot about Planet Earth, I was also super excited about teaching Phys-ics. Through physics I got into Architecture and Engi-neering, and as a result of that I decided to go back to my roots as a carpenter and builder. After seven years as a teacher I decided that that teaching wasn’t really my passion any longer, and so I moved back into the city of Philadelphia and worked as a commercial car-penter on-and-off, and now am building my own small design house. Inside the envelope of this business is not only “boutique” building, but also graphic design and photography, and whatever else falls loosely under the category of art/design. While it is not a big busi-ness, it is generally fun and gives me enough free time to pursue my many passions.

While on a trip to Italy in 2004 or 2005 to house-sit for a friend, a man named Davide Valentino, the co-owner of a local restaurant and wine shop, asked me that if since I live so close to the ocean have I ever surfed..? Interesting question, but the answer was a big, fat NO. In fact, in the many years that I spent living so close to

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George Rieveschl Jr. Geo Lecture Series: In-terdisciplinary lectures for the physical and life sci-ences on earth processes and their consequences for humanity. Each lecture is sponsored by two or more disciplines from the physical and life sci-ences, open an free to all the University community and general public. There will be ample opportunity to meet the speaker. This series is named for Dr. George Rieveschl, Jr., a Cincinnatian, UC PhD in chemistry and inventor of Benadryl.

the ocean I think that I might have found myself there only a few times… Upon my return to the United States I called my friends in New Jersey and within the week I was learning to surf. Since that day I’ve traveled up and down the coast many times chasing hurricanes, and venture occasionally to Puerto Rico to surf in the wintertime when it is too cold to do so here. Anyway, surfing has been demanding a lot of my time ever since that question was put to me so many years ago.

So, back to the beginning. About four years ago I was returning from a trip to Cincinnati, and I decided to drop in on my friend Naomi at her tattoo studio in Co-lumbus. During this visit the foundations for the book that I am currently photographing and writing were forged. Some additional information may be necessary for this current endeavor to make any sense to those of you who don’t really know me.

Many of you that shared office space, or brief bits of time with me outside of my never-ending days in Arnie’s lab, know that I was in a few bands and had toured the US a few times before coming to UC. May-be even stranger is that most of the bands that I was either playing in or promoting were of the Punk Rock genera. I know that sounds sort of strange, but it was the music and culture that most fit my attitude toward life. While I’ve grown out of the angsty parts of the culture, the DIY, or Do It Yourself ethic, stuck with me, and so I decided to write a book dedicated to one of the bands that introduced that ethic to that particular music culture; a band called Black Flag.

For my part in it all that I had to do was organize a three-month, forty-stop photo tour, which required me to leave my job with the City of Philadelphia and basi-cally uprooting my life. From October through Decem-ber of 2009 I toured all over the world and kept a run-ning blog (with tons of photos) about my experience. The blog can be found at www.barred4life.blogspot.com. I photographed and interviewed over 300 people for the book called Barred For Life, and am in the midst of writing and organizing the publication. In the three years where I was researching the information for the book I benefited greatly from working with an amazing photographer named Jared Castaldi and graphic de-signer Matt Smith. Barred For Life has been, from its inception, a group effort.

So, yes, that is what I’ve been doing. For the time be-ing there is not a whole lot of Geology in the mix, but that might soon change. At any rate, as I said before, I still view my time at UC as possibly the most influential time in my life. I learned so much while I was there and still speak fondly of all my experiences.

In the event that you might want to know more about the book or see pix of some of the strange graphic and building projects that I’ve taken on, feel free to contact me at stewart.dean.ebersole@gmail.com.

ThanksStewart Dean Ebersole

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MiKe Lutz (BS ’99)

Dr. Huff,

I hope all is well with you and the Department. You may recall that I graduated in 1998-1999 from UC with a BS degree in geology. Our class was the last prior to the curriculum and program changes. I still rely on the solid geological knowledge the UC education pro-vided. I have often found myself ahead of many peers because of the teaching style and coursework taught at UC.

I am currently working for a small environmental con-sulting firm in Westerville, Ohio, GT Environmental, Inc. I have been working as an environmental consultant for the past ten years. I was writing to see if you know any new grads or recent grads (1-3 years professional experience doing environmental site assessment) who may be interested in the environmental consulting in-dustry. Interested persons should get in touch with me.

Best Wishes,Mike

taMaKi satO (MS ’98)

Dear Arnie:

Thank you very much for your caring message. My parents and I are in Tokyo where the shake was fairly

intense but nothing like the disaster in northern Ja-pan. This area includes many fossil localities, such as the ones Tatsuo Oji has been studying for long, or others that yielded the specimens I described. It’s heartbreaking to get updates on the lost lives. The combination of earthquake and tsunami is so typical yet devastating.

But we are slowly recovering with so many kind hands from overseas, including the US rescue team and emergency goods. Thank you!

Tamaki

DeBBie anD BLaine WatsOn (MS ’97)

Hi Warren,

That’s great news about the department growth. We made a rush trip back to Illinois and Cincinnati in March for a couple family matters, but it was too short to do any other visiting. Hopefully we can get back down to the department sometime and say hi to old friends! We welcome any UC folks to visit us out here in the four corners if their travel plans take them near us. I’ll pass along your regards to Debbie.

Blaine

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Graduate Students: Zack Mergenthal andWilliam Hunsaker.

Filed work in Curacao. Tanya Cox, Dave Meyer and Christine Rahtz.

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PatriCK aPPLegate (BS ’03)

Dr. Huff,

Are you still publishing an alumni newsletter? I al-ways enjoyed getting the Upper Crust. I don’t think I ever updated you on my contact information when I moved to Sweden, so here it is:

Patrick ApplegatePhysical Geography and Quaternary Geology (INK)Stockholm UniversityS106 91 StockholmSWEDEN

patrick.applegate@natgeo.su.se

Sweden is excellent -- I have good colleagues at SU, and I am learning to work with ice sheet models. Eu-rope is a nice place, as you know. So far I have visited Bergen, Norway; Uppsala, Sweden; and Copenhagen, Denmark in quick succession. I gave talks in Uppsala and Copenhagen, so I think the trips were productive.

I saw Jocelyn Sessa at AGU. I think she’s really en-joying her postdoc at Syracuse. I also ran into Becky Reverman on the street in Vienna, which was a real pleasure. We Cincinnati alums are in all kinds of good places!

Patrick

DeirDre MCCartney WHitLey (BS ’07)

Hello Dr. Huff,

If you still have a copy of last year’s newsletter lying around I would like one sent. I am still in the army, now at Fort Lee, VA, in the Logistics Captain’s Career Course. Everything is going fine here. My greetings to all.

Deirdre Whitley

saLLy sCOtt (BS ’09)

Greetings Dr. Maynard,

I am writing to give you an update. After a year out of school, I have just started at Texas A&M as a Master’s student. I’m enjoying it quite a bit so far, it’s pretty exciting to be a grad student and have an office and keys and everything. I received a pretty good financial package also, all my tuition and fees, and insurance are paid, and I’m a TA so I get a monthly stipend for that. I teach the 101 geology lab and we’re using the same lab manual I used at UC, probably 5 years ago

which was a strange coincidence. I wanted to thank you for your letter of recommendation that certainly helped me get accepted as well as get paid. Thanks also for your teaching expertise, I was afraid I would be lost getting back into classes but I’ve found my-self quite prepared and able to answer questions in class. I don’t have an exact thesis topic yet, but I have been researching paleo buried valley aquifers and ap-plications in hydrogeology, with Dr. Hongbin Zhan as my main advisor. I also became interested in aqueous geochemistry in your classes and am hoping I could incorporate some aspects of that as well. I wish you the best for the new school year!

Sincerely,Sally Scott

austin HenDy (PhD ’07)

Volume 1, Number 2 (may 2011) of the Newsletter from the Nsf program partNership for iNterNatioN-al ReseaRch and education (PiRe) on the Panama canal PRoject caRRies a RePoRt of austin hendy’s leadeRshiP Role in a PRoject entitled, to the Rescue of fossils at the Panama canal caRibbean locks.

“The New World Tropics (NWT) today contain an extraordinarily high biodiversity that is threatened by global climate change, human impacts, and extinction. Little is known about when this biodiversity originat-ed and how it evolved. During the initial excavations for the Panama Canal a century ago, the Smithsonian Institution made natural history and geological col-lections that documented modern and ancient biodi-versity in the NWT. A century later, in 2007, Panama initiated extensive excavations to expand the Canal over the next decade. Consequently, highly fossilifer-ous deposits are now being uncovered that potentially yield important clues to ancient biodiversity. Over the next five to 10 years we will capitalize on these new excavations and develop a long-term international re-search and education program called “PCP” (Panama Canal Project = Proyecto del Canal de Panama). Much of the focus during the PCP PIRE field activities are on the rocks of the canal area close to Panama City on the Pacific side of the isthmus. Here numerous bones and teeth provide information about changing terres-trial paleoenvironments some 23-15 million years ago. Excavations associated with construction of new locks and canal widening are also taking place near Colon, on the Caribbean side of the isthmus. Much younger

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rocks of the Gatun Formation (approximately 9 million years old) are exposed in this area, and they offer geolo-gists a glimpse of marine environments prior to closure of the Central American seaway.

A team of paleontologists led by Dr. Austin Hendy at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has been bus-ily working in the immense hole that is the Gatun Third Locks. Austin jokingly refers to this construction site as the Grand Canyon of Panama when describing the area to his colleagues. In reality the hole in the ground is smaller than the Grand Canyon, but the immense and steep walls of the locks stretch out for over a mile, allowing these lucky geologists the opportunity to measure and collect from rocks that are typically exposed only in small and dispersed local quarries.”

CHristy reuter (bS ’05) anD CHris Davis (bS ’04)

We’re getting married!! (10-7-10)

Can’t wait to see everyone tomorrow and Friday! If you have lost information or still need directions, here is the link to the wedding website.

http://www.theknot.com/ourweddingchristyreuter&chrisdavis

Christy Davis (that looks different)

tODD rOBerts (mS ’01)

Warren,

Good to hear from you. I managed to slip in a last min-ute poster presentation at GSA this year. I have been working on geothermal (geoexchange actually) system development, particularly regarding new methods for de-sign. We want to publish our initial findings and continue analysis on the large sample set that is currently archived. It has been fun and I hope to continue this work.

I hope to drop by on Monday night for the reception.

Regards,Todd

MattHeW fOrney (bS ’04)

Good Morning Dr. Nash and Dr. Huff,

I hope all is well in Cincinnati. I wanted to share a great opportunity for students. This is a scholarship and in-ternship program through NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). See the link below:

http://www.oesd.noaa.gov/Hollings_info.html

Please pass this along to the students. It would be great to see UC students get out there and show NOAA what Cincinnati has to offer. Surprisingly few people apply for these opportunities, not because it is a bad program, but because it is not advertised. I appreciate your time and hope you have a great day.

These two “hats” that I wear as the Navigations Manager of Alaska and Alaska Geodetic Advisor are new positions since we last spoke. I have rotated off the NOAA Ship Fairweather and I am getting my land legs back. I am now living and working in Anchorage, Alaska. I am the NOAA representative for the Office of Coast Survey (OCS) and National Geodetic Survey (NGS) for the Alaska Re-gion. My main duties are to listen to the requests and needs of the stakeholders and customers of NOAA prod-ucts and make them priorities within NOAA. Some of the hot topics on the NGS side right now are establishing more Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) and the establishment of a new national Vertical Datum. The vertical datum is being established by the GRAV-D project currently be conducted now in central Alaska with Alaska being complete in FY 2012. More info on this proj-ect can be found at the following link: http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/GRAV-D/.

austin HenDy (Continued)

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MattHeW fOrney (Continued)

Some of the hot topics in OCS are the updating of charts in the arctic. With the northwest passage (waters from the Bering Strait east through Canada and into the North Atlantic) becoming ice-free this is now a viable option for the shipment of goods and conducting commerce. The creation of new charts with up to date surveys will ensure the resources and waters of Alaska are safe for both wild-life and ships. Alaska has more shoreline than the rest of the lower 48 states, Puerto Rico, and the pacific islands combined. The need to protect those are here and now especially with ships and oil tankers operating in areas with surveys that date back over 100 years or have never sur-veyed. Vertical Datum is also a hot topic on the OCS side as well. The modeling of Tides in northern Alaska is non-existent. An effort is being made to model those tides so surveys with sea level rise are relevant and up to date for longer periods of time. NOAA has the ability to reference surveys to the ellipsoid. Without a quality tidal datum, these efforts are futile, hence the need for additional tide observa-tion stations. These are just a small number of items that students participating in the internship program may be as-sociated with. I hope I did not provide you with too much useless info or put you to sleep. Please do not hesitate to contact me for any additional information or with questions. Hope you have a great day.

Regards,

LTJG Matthew ForneyNOAA Office of Coast SurveyNavigation Manager - Alaska Regionand Alaska Geodetic State Advisor

JOCeLyn sessa (mS ’03)

Hi!

I am just finishing an enjoyable year and a half post doc with Linda Ivany at Syr-acuse University. My research focuses on quantitatively assessing the effects of climatic perturbations on factors such as faunal turnover, origination and extinc-tion rates, and geographic range during the late Cretaceous through Paleogene of the Gulf Coastal Plain (GCP). I primar-ily work with mollusc fossils.

A wealth of data on the geographic occurrences of taxa through this time interval for the GCP are published in monographs, and for the past year I have supervised the creation of a taxon-locality matrix from these sources. I

supervise six researchers (high school through postdoc) in generating this dataset, which has evolved into an online database. The database currently contains ~15,000 locali-ties and over 4,000 taxa. Once the database is completed it will be freely available online.

Climate is characterized using stable isotopes of mollusc shells, including seasonal reconstructions. With colleagues at Syracuse, we have generated mean and seasonal tem-peratures for most of the early Paleogene, as virtually no data of this kind exist for the GCP. I supervised a masters student in the collection and analysis of these data. My col-leagues and I are working on combining strontium isotope ratios with oxygen isotope data to evaluate the influence of paleosalinity on shell chemistry and to assess the potential of 87Sr/86Sr for age control in shelf settings like the GCP.

Along with fellow UC alumnus Austin Hendy, I have begun working with colleagues in southern Africa and Portugal to reveal a record of molluscan diversity from the tropics. Many modern mollusc genera arose following the K-Pg extinc-tion, when certain bivalve and gastropod clades underwent an explosive global radiation. The tropics are frequently im-plicated as being the ‘cradle’ of this speciation burst, but are severely undersampled in relation to North America and Europe. In February, 2010, I spent three weeks in Angola with two Portuguese colleagues on a reconnaissance trip. We identified numerous Late Cretaceous and exception-ally preserved Miocene and Pleistocene sections for further study. We are planning a return trip in 2011.

Speaking of Austin - Kate Bulinski, Steph Fuentes, and I will be grooms-women for his wedding in December 2010! It will be a very happy occasion as well as a nice Cincinnati

reunion, as the wedding is going to be at the Newport Aquarium. I’m sure some photos will make it into this newsletter :).

In January 2011, I will begin a fellowship at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. I’m terribly excited to live in DC and work in such an exciting and stimulating place.

If anyone will be in the DC area in 2011, or wants to take a trip to the museum with their students, please let me know! I’d love to catch up with other UC folks.

All the best,Jocelyn Sessa

Jocelyn Sessa

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aLexanDer steWart (PhD ’07)

(Editor’s note: The following is the first paragraph of an interview with Alexander that appeared in the April 2011 issue of Earth Magazine http://www.earthmaga-zine.org)

Sgt. Alexander Stewart was brought up to believe serving in the military was an obligation all young men should fulfill. In 1991, at the age of 17, he answered the call of duty and joined the U.S. Army, which took him to Alaska with the 6th Infantry Division (Arctic) (Light). The state’s endless snow and ice fascinated Stewart, and after he left active duty, he pursued a bachelor’s degree in geology. In 2007, he completed a doctorate at the University of Cincinnati - in glacial geology, of course. Now he teaches the subject at St. Lawrence University in New York.

(The rest of the article can be seen at http://homep-ages.uc.edu/~huffwd/Alumni/Alexander_Stewart.pdf)

eriC sPerBer (BS ’07)

Hi Warren,

I have now been with Alt & Witzig Engineering, Inc. in West Chester for over 6 years as a senior project man-ager in their construction testing and inspections de-partment. Also, with periodic involvement in geotech-nical investigation projects, including projects involving geophysical exploration (ie. seismic, soil resistivity, GPR, etc.) I have also had some limited exposure to the environmental operations here with a couple Phase I investigations. On the personal side, my daughter is now 5 years old (WOW how that came around quick!) and getting set to start Kindergarten. I am alive, happy, and healthy.

Hope you are well, Eric

Justin WiLKins (BS ’07)

All is going well here. I have to prepare a presentation on our Arctodus CT research. That will be for the new TerQua (http://www.caspercollege.edu/tate/) meeting the first week of June. Also got lucky enough to snag what I think is a prehistoric llama molar out of some stray Cheyenne River gravel just tonight!

Justin

Alexander Stweart spent a year in Afghani-stan as part of a Texas National Guard Ag-ricultural Development Team. Stewart, a glacial geologist, spent four years in Alaska with the Arm’s 6th Infantry Division (Arctic) (Light).

Do you have any recollections of field trips, social events, classroom experi-

ences or other experiences during your UC days that you would like to share with your

alumni colleagues?

Send them to Warren Huff, email: WAR-REN.HUFF@UC.EDU or Dept. of Geology,

UC, Cincinnati, OH 45221 and we’ll include them in next years’ issue.

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2 0 1 1 G S AR E C E P T I O N

The Annual Meeting this year wil l be in Minneapolis, Minnesota and we wil l host an alumni reception on Monday, October 10 from 7:30 – 9:30 pm. Further details on hotel location and room wil l be coming in July, so keep an eye out for your invitation.

DaviD HOffMan (MS ’00)

Dr. Huff,

A quick hello and update – it’s been over 10 years! I hope you are doing well!

I’ve been living in Fort Myers, Florida, for the last 10+ years and working as a hydrogeologist for Schlum-berger. Schlumberger has a small group devoted to water resources and water supply development work. My work is diverse and includes exploration of new wa-ter supplies in south Florida and the Caribbean. Other work includes construction and testing of deep injec-tion wells and development of alternative water sup-plies including brackish groundwater. I also do a good amount of work for attorneys engaged in local water related litigation. I am presently working on a water supply exploration project (surface geophysics and test well construction) in the British Virgin Islands. I

got married 5 years ago to Elena, and have two young boys, Aidan (3 y.o.) and Ian (1 y.o.). Aidan is good at identifying limestone, but that’s really all we got down here. A good part of my free time is spent playing with them in the backyard and digging holes or just plain child rearing, which is a heck of a lot of work. Father-hood is one the greatest joys in life – I’ve never enjoyed anything more. I recently went back to school full time while working and got a M.B.A. My passion continues to be geology followed closely by economics – I enjoy and seek out any opportunity to combine the two.

Please say hello to all in the department.

Regards,David L. Hoffman, P.G.

PhD student Kelsey Feser (advisorArnie Miller) collecting samples inSt. Croix.

Arnie Miller and Kelsey Feser oper-ating the airlift to collect samples,St. Croix.

Arnie Miller in St. Croix.