GEOSCIENCES DEPARTMENT

After decades of stability in size and areas of emphasis, Geosciences has changed substantially during the past year. Rónadh Cox, our sedimentologist, received tenure and became an Associate Professor, the first senior woman ever to teach Geosciences at Williams! Heather Stoll ’94 has just finished her first year teaching as an assistant professor, focusing in the area of Earth Systems Science. Heather’s expertise is in climate change at various time scales and her class Climate Changes (GEOS/ENVI 215) is now a required course for the Geosciences major. Heather will be teaching in these areas, as well as in environmental geology and environmental sciences. Heather’s research involves using the geochemistry of coccoliths (marine algae) to help interpret records of past climate and atmospheric CO2. It is exciting to have her at Williams and to expand the department’s teaching and research horizons.

Geosciences faculty members and our research associates continue to be active in research, publication and applying for grants that help to fund research travel, analyses, equipment and the publication of joint student/faculty research. Nine of our students worked on summer research projects and continued these projects throughout the year as senior honors theses. Markes Johnson, who is on leave next year, reached two impressive milestones in the fall: he published his first book Discovering the Geology of Baja California: Six Hikes on the Southern Gulf Coast and he published his 100th scholarly work since arriving at Williams! Paul Karabinos organized the NEIGC meeting, field trips and field guide for the annual conference in September. Three faculty members (Dethier, Karabinos and Wobus) gave papers at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado, in October 2002. At least ten Williams alumni including Will Ouimet ’01 also presented results of their research at the conference. Mid-December saw another 20 alumni give papers at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California, where Professor Wobus acted as the Williams host and organizer for West Coast geology alums. During the Winter Study Period, Markes Johnson and Research Associate David Backus took Mike Eros ’04 on an extended geologic mapping and sampling trip to Baja California, and Gudveig Baarli, one of our Research Associates, taught a Winter Study course Dinosaurs and the Mesozoic World. The spring term was a busy time for the department as faculty and students presented their research results at the March Northeastern Sectional Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and at the 16th annual Keck Research Symposium in Geology held in early April in Beloit. Paul Karabinos gave two talks and presided as the Chair of the Northeastern Section. Chris Garvin and Nina Trautmann gave presentations at the Keck Symposium. Student participation in the various meetings was partially supported by the McAleenan and Labaree funds in the Geosciences Department and by the Keck Geology Consortium. The nine thesis students presented their work on 19 May; Nina Trautmann was awarded the Freeman Foote prize for the best thesis presentation. Karl Remsen received the American Mineralogical Society Undergraduate Award and was named an “Outstanding Teaching Assistant” by the National Association of Geology Teachers (NAGT).

Over the commencement weekend, Chris Garvin, Liz Mygatt, Karl Remsen and Nina Trautmann were inducted into Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society and Liz Mygatt was named the winner of the David Major Prize in Geology. Four rising seniors and several juniors will be working in the field this summer in areas ranging from Berkshire County and nearby Vermont to Colorado and Wyoming, Greece and Iceland. Their work is supported by the Sperry Research Fund, the Keck Geology Consortium, the Center for Environmental Studies and grants to individual members of the Department from the National Science Foundation and the Petroleum Research Fund.

Research Associate Gudveig Baarli organized a field expedition to Finnmark, northern Norway on the shores of the Barents Sea in July 2002 to study paleoislands preserved as monadnocks surrounded by 600-million-year old rocks. The mapping project became the focus of a senior thesis by Rebekah Levine ’03, with additional supervision by Professor Markes Johnson. The team enjoyed near-perfect summer weather and twenty-four hour sunlight in Arctic latitudes beyond 70º North. In May 2003, the long-awaited Bulletin 493 of the New York State Museum in Albany, NY, finally appeared with a major summary article on the Silurian stratigraphy and paleogeography of Baltica (including Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and western Russia). Gudveig is the first author of this report, which incorporates her extensive research on the Silurian of Norway. Her co-authors are Markes Johnson and Anna Antoshkina from the Institute of Geology at the Komi Science Centre in the Russian Urals.

David Backus, Research Scientist in the Department of Geosciences, has continued to work with Markes Johnson on the Pliocene basins and tectonics of the Baja California Peninsula and the Gulf of California region. Backus has contributed a chapter on “Life Lines: A Geoscience Perspective on Historical Losses of Biodiversity” to a new book titled Exploring Environmental Challenges: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Due out in September, this college-level text is an introductory look at current environmental issues from both the natural and social science perspectives.

This past spring, Backus was also a visiting part-time lecturer at Williams, teaching the Geographic Information Systems portion of GEOS/ENVI 214. Taught in the GIS Lab of Schow Library, a successful new teaching format was used that combined hands-on exercises using the software ARCVIEW 8.2 with short lectures on the geographic principles that underlie these powerful information systems.

In summer 2002, Rónadh Cox went to Ireland to visit Chris Garvin ’03 who was sampling glacial-age and post-glacial lake sediments as part of a Keck project on paleoclimate, and made some forays into upstate New York with Nick Nelson ’03, to look at event sedimentation in the Silurian-Devonian Manlius Formation. Back at Williams, Chris received lots of help from Heather Stoll in the painstaking and arduous procedures of sample preparation and chemical analysis. Previous thesis work bore late fruit in December, when the Geological Society of America Bulletin published a paper on the sedimentology and stratigraphy of Proterozoic quartzites in central Arizona, containing the results of a 1998 Keck project in the Mazatzal Mountains. The coauthors on this work include Jana Comstock ’99, as well as class of 1999 students from Amherst, Colorado College, and the College of Wooster.

Summer plans for this year include investigating cratering dynamics on icy surfaces with Lissa Ong ’04. We are trying to duplicate the unusual impact crater shapes that characterize the icy moons of Jupiter, with the aim of seeing how crater shapes relate to ice temperature and thickness—which basically means that we will spend a lot of time inside a walk-in freezer, throwing ball-bearings at tanks full of ice. What a way to spend the summer...

David Dethier continued as Chair of the Geosciences Department during 2002-03. His research focused mainly on the measurement of long-term erosion rates and sediment storage in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Wyoming, supported by grants from NSF and from the Petroleum Research Fund. In conjunction with Taylor Schildgen ’00, Will Ouimet ’01 and Paul Bierman ’85 (University of Vermont), Dethier continued measuring erosion using cosmogenic isotope techniques. His students, Jamon Frostenson ’03 and Matt Jungers ’03, completed honors theses that used GIS techniques to help quantify and portray long-term rates of erosion in the Front Range and adjoining basins of Colorado. With former thesis students Schildgen and Ouimet, respectively, he published papers in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, and Northeastern Geology and Environmental Sciences. Dethier and his co-authors presented results from the cosmogenic studies at the Geological Society of America National Meeting in Denver, Colorado, in October 2002.

Dethier also worked with Matt Jungers ’03 on contemporary and historical sediment transport and storage in the Ford Glen catchment, Hopkins Memorial Forest. These geomorphic studies are part of long-term hydrogeochemical studies in the Forest. Dethier coordinates ongoing collection of weather, streamflow, precipitation chemistry and other environmental data from the Forest and their analysis in the Environmental Science Lab in the Morley Science Center. He is also working, with Nick Hiza ’02 and Sam Arons ’04, on a project to analyze the potential for a wind energy development on College-owned land at Berlin Pass.

Professor Markes Johnson joined Rebekah Levine ’03 and Research Associate Gudveig Baarli for fieldwork on monadnocks surrounded by the Late Precambrian Smallfjord Formation of Finnmark, northern Norway during July 2002. The project was carried out with support from the department’s Sperry Fund. During the January 2003 Winter Study Period, he was joined by Mike Eros ’04 and Research Associate David Backus for a reconnaissance study on the geology of islands in the lower Gulf of California. Islands visited in order to reconcile satellite images with the surface geology include Carmen, Monserrat, and San José. Unconformable relationships between Miocene volcanics and onlapping Pliocene limestones were of particular interest, and new grant proposals have been submitted to support future studies in the region.

During the first week of Spring Break (March 23-29, 2003), Professor Johnson returned to Mexico joined by Hank Art from the Biology Department to lead an alumni trip to Punta Chivato on the Gulf of California. Eighteen alumni and friends of the College participated in the excursion, which followed four of the six hikes described in Markes’ book Discovering the Geology of Baja California: Six Hikes on the Southern Gulf Coast (University of Arizona Press, 2002). In addition to the geology, the group enjoyed ample opportunities for bird watching, whale watching, and plant identification. While at Punta Chivato, a book-reading and book-signing event was organized on behalf of Markes at the Posada de las Flores and attracted a crowd of sixty American residents. They were particularly interested in learning more about the negative effect of ongoing land development on the water table in the San José de Magdalena Basin, described in his book.

Professor Johnson had a research paper published in the December 2002 issue of Geobios. He was the junior author on a paper published in the September 2002 issue of The Journal of Geology. He also was the co-editor of a volume on Silurian stratigraphy and paleogeography published by the New York State Museum. The volume includes a report on Silurian strata from the paleocontinent of Baltica, which Markes contributed to as second author in cooperation with Gudveig Baarli and Anna Antoshkina. Over the course of the academic year, Markes reviewed grant proposals for the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation, and the NOAA Undersea Research Program. He also reviewed a manuscript for Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. In February, Markes was one of two geology consultants who participated as members of a visiting committee that reviewed the geology program at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He also maintained a busy schedule giving guest lectures on his research at other institutions, including the University of Iowa, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago. Prof. Johnson will be on sabbatical leave for the academic year 2003-04. He and Gudveig plan extensive travel for fieldwork on recent and paleoislands in Australia, the Seychelles Islands, Spain, and Italy.

During the summer of 2002, Paul Karabinos worked with Liz Mygatt ’03 on a research project in southeastern Vermont entitled “Acadian Extension in the New England Appalachians.” This two-year project is funded by a grant from the Petroleum Research Fund, administered by the American Chemical Society. Karabinos also worked with David Morris ’03 in southern Berkshire County studying the geochemistry and geochronology of igneous rocks. This project, entitled “How Do Orogenies End? A Case Study from the Taconic Orogen,” is funded by a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation.

Karabinos served as chair of the Northeastern Section of the Geological Society of America for the 2002-2003 academic year. He will serve on the board of the society for one more year as Past-Chair.

In August 2002, Karabinos presented an invited paper with coauthor Matthew Student ‘01 at the Penrose Conference in Ascona, Switzerland. Karabinos and James McLelland (Colgate University) organized a joint meeting of the New England Intercollegiate Geologic Conference and New York State Geological Association. The meeting was held in Lake George, New York, on September 27-29, 2002. Approximately 600 people attended this three-day field conference. Karabinos edited the guidebook that contains twenty-seven field trip guides, including one of his own: “Acadian Extension around the Chester Dome, Vermont.” Karabinos attended the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado, in November 2002. He also attended the Northeastern Sectional Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in March 2003 where he presented two invited talks.

After spending several years calibrating a new indicator for marine productivity based on the chemistry of coccolith shells produced by marine algae, Heather Stoll has moved on to applying this indicator to study past changes in the marine carbon cycle. This past year, she focused on testing whether marine productivity helped the climate system recover from a transient greenhouse warming event at the end of the Paleocene 55 million years ago. Research assistant Alicia Arevalos ’05 helped analyze Paleocene marine sediment samples from two additional cores taken in the North Atlantic and Pacific. Stoll presented results from this study (with Arevalos as co-author) at the joint meeting of the European Geophysical Society, European Union of Geosciences, and American Geophysical Union in Nice, France, in April 2003.

Stoll continues to work on interpreting the causes of stable isotope variation in coccoliths, which may help elucidate how different species of algae are adapted to acquire carbon for photosynthesis. This work was highlighted in an invited presentation, “Controls over the Chemistry of Coccolith Calcite,” which Stoll delivered at the Goldschmidt Geochemical Society Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in August 2002. A publication with principal collaborator Patrizia Ziveri (Vrije University Amsterdam) and several other European scientists involved in growing the algae in the laboratory was published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters in May.

In June 2002, Stoll visited Nina Trautmann ’03 on a Keck project in southern Ohio and directed Nina’s senior thesis which used geochemical and sedimentological records of cores from bogs to examine the record of environmental changes during the last deglaciation, between 20,000 and 14, 000 years ago. Nina presented results of her work at the Keck Symposium held in Beloit in April 2003, a meeting attended by Stoll.

In the spring semester, Stoll introduced a substantially revised version of ENVI 102, Introduction to Environmental Science, which she co-taught with Jay Thoman from Chemistry with guest lectures by Manuel Morales from Biology. The new course retains the hand-on approach of learning environmental science by going out and collecting data locally. It uses a project-centered approach to look at local analogues of five themes of global importance: climate change and the carbon cycle, acid deposition, metals in the environment, water quality, and waste treatment and remediation.

In spring 2003, Stoll was invited to join the Editorial Board of the journal Geology for a three-year term. Stoll continues to be active reviewer for several journals including Earth and Planetary Science Letters; Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems; Journal of Sedimentary Petrology; Marine Micropaleontology; Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology; and Paleoceanography and this year also reviewed NSF grant proposals.

During the summer of 2002 Prof. Reinhard (Bud) Wobus worked with Karl Remsen ’03 in the Colorado Front Range, mapping and sampling one of the only known Proterozoic ultramafic plutons in Colorado as the prelude to Karl’s senior honors thesis. The work was supported by the Sperry Family Fund in Geology at Williams. While in Colorado Wobus also led the 17th “Williams Alumni College in the Rockies,” the program that inaugurated the Alumni Travel-Study Program in 1981. He led a weekend field seminar for the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, exploring the mid-Tertiary Thirty-nine Mile Volcanics Field which was the source of lavas and ash that created, then filled, Lake Florissant, preserving its rich variety of insect and plant fossils.

In the fall, he attended the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, where he was co-author of a paper. He also served as Williams’ representative (for the 16th year) at the semi-annual meeting of the governing board of the Keck Geology Consortium, held in conjunction with the GSA meeting. In December, he attended the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, where he organized a reunion of some 20 Williams geology alumni at the meeting and in the Bay area.

At the end of January, he was the faculty liaison on a 10-day natural history tour of the Hawaiian Islands for Williams alumni. In the spring, he was co-author of a paper presented by Christine Dektor (Denison ’03) and her advisor at Denison, Prof. David Hawkins, at the Northeastern Section meeting of the Geological Society of America in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The paper was the outgrowth of a Keck Geology Consortium research project in which Nate Cardoos ’02 also participated.

Wobus continues as campus representative for the Geological Society of America as departmental liaison for summer field course opportunities, and as a member of the selection committee for the Keck Geology Consortium, which chooses 50-60 undergraduate students nationwide each year to participate in research projects which the Consortium oversees (with funding from NSF and the twelve member colleges of the group). He is currently on the board of directors of the Colorado Outdoor Education Center and the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation, where he provides geological advice in the education and outreach programs of these organizations.

His senior thesis students for next year, Katie Ackerly and Paige McClanahan, will work this summer on a new Keck Geology Consortium research project in northern Iceland, studying the geology of an abandoned oceanic rift on the Skagi Peninsula.