GEOSCIENCES

With Prof. David Dethier and Assistant Prof. Heather Stoll on leave this past fall semester, the Geosciences Dept. brought Prof. Joseph Pyle, Research Associate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, on board as a visiting professor to teach two courses. Joe taught The Interconnected Earth (GEOS 103) - a look at how the interrelated systems of the earth function and are affected by the activities of man and Earth’s Strategic Resources: Origin, Recovery and Control (GEOS 205) - a study of the geologic processes that control formation, distribution, and extent of strategic earth materials reserves.

Assistant Professor Heather Stoll (’94) received the Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the European Geoscience Union in recognition of her outstanding research on past climate and ocean changes. The Williams College community was able to learn about her contributions to this field during her two well-attended Sigma Xi lectures during April. Heather brings the excitement and intellectual rigor of her climate research into her classes. She is expanding her research interests to include cave speleothems from Spain as recorders of climate change. Associate Professor Rónadh Cox continued her research on the development of lavakas (steep gullies) in Madagascar with Danielle Zentner (’09) and Paul Bierman (’85) at the University of Vermont. She also worked with Kate Scheider (’07) to investigate the origin of chaos structures on Jupiter’s moon Europa and with Becca Lawrence (’07) to test the age population variations in detrital zircon from different sedimentary environments in a single dune.

Photo: Stratigraphy Field trip to John Boyd Thacher State Park, New York.

Professor Markes Johnson continued his research on Baja California by bringing students and faculty from Mexico’s Universidad Autonoma de Baja California to Williams College where they worked on a Geographic Information System project with our students and faculty. He also conducted field research in Baja during Winter Study and Spring Break. Professor Wobus continued to serve as the Williams College representative to the Keck Geology Consortium, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this spring. He helped write the successful proposal to the National Science Foundation that will fund the consortium for another three years. His work on the original grant to the Keck Foundation with Professor Emeritus William Fox was recognized at the Keck Symposium this spring at the College of Wooster. Bud also organized a workshop in November for Williams College students by bringing together six recent alumni from diverse backgrounds to discuss careers in geosciences and related fields.

Geosciences faculty, students, and alumni published widely in scientific journals and presented numerous talks at the National Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, the Northeastern Sectional Meeting of the Geological Society of America, and the Rocky Mountain Sectional Meeting of the Geological Society of America.

Five honors students presented their research results on May 14, and Kate Scheider won the coveted Freeman Foote prize for the best thesis presentation. Sam Tuttle won the Mineralogical Society of America prize, and Elizabeth Pierce received the David Major Prize in Geology. Becca Lawrence, Elizabeth Pierce, Kate Scheider, Ashley Sewell, and Sam Tuttle were inducted into Sigma Xi. Elizabeth Pierce was also inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and Andrew Stevenson won a prestigious Fulbright fellowship. Four rising seniors are conducting research this summer on cave speleothems in Spain, giant garnets in the Adirondacks, evolution of the Front Ranges in Colorado, and the effect of geology on wine production in Washington. Their work will be supported by the Keck Geology Consortium and the Sperry Family Geosciences Fund.

Research Associate and part-time lecturer David Backus continued his collaboration with Markes Johnson on the study of ancient and modern coastal ecosystems in the Gulf of California. During the summer of 2006, Backus taught students from UABC- Ensenada, Mexico, as well as Williams College student Caroline Doctor ’07 the principles of remote sensing. Using Landsat and ASTER satellite images and Google Earth, these students surveyed the rock types found along the coastline of Baja California and looked for sand deposits. In addition, Backus helped Ashley Sewell ’07 in her thesis work, a morphometric study of the fossil echinoderm, Dendraster granti.

During Winter Study, Backus participated in a research trip to the Islands of Isla Carmen and Isla Coronados in the Gulf of California that included Williams students Charles Cao ’08 and Patty Liao ’08. Backus also participated in a second trip to Baja California that occurred during spring break and included research on Isla Angel de la Guarda accompanied by Williams student, Peter Tierney ’10. Identifying the biological and mineralogical contents of dune sands is now a specialty of Peter Tierney ’10 who spent the year analyzing sand as part of a program for under-represented students at Williams College interested in science.

During the spring semester, Backus taught Introduction to Remote Sensing & Geographic Information Systems (ENVI 214). Student projects included tracking the movements of box turtles in Hopkins Forest, mapping exterior lighting on the Williams campus, analyzing the carbon footprint of buildings on the Williams campus, and mapping and analyzing the distribution of lavakas on Madagascar using information derived from Landsat satellite images.

Professionally, Backus attended the Northeastern Regional Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Durham, NH, participating in a session on the uses of Google Earth in geologic research. He presented a paper on using Google Earth to identify the dunes and sand fields of the Baja California peninsula. This summer Backus will participate in a multi-disciplinary program designed to teach local teachers about evolution. The program will be taught on campus but organized through STEM at MCLA.

Rónadh Cox worked on three separate projects in the last year, each with student researchers. In summer 2006, she went back to Madagascar, with Danielle Zentner ’09, colleague Michel Rakotondrazafy from the Université d’Antananarivo, and Malagasy student Rija Rafamantanantsoa. They traveled across much of the country, collecting river sediment samples in a variety of different geomorphological contexts, which Paul Bierman ’85 is now analyzing for cosmogenic isotopes (specifically ¹⁰Be). The object is to evaluate regional erosion rates, as recorded by ¹⁰Be abundance in river sands. Work from the previous year’s sampling—which focused on local erosion rates in lavakas (gullies)—was presented at GSA in October of 2006 (abstract included in this volume).

In spring semester, Danielle Zentner ’09 continued working on the Madagascar project but from the less exciting confines of her computer chair. Using GIS, she counted and recorded lavakas in Madagascar's central highlands, building on work begun by visiting student Fara Rasoazanamparany the previous year. Danielle quantified the relationships between lavaka density and topographic elevation, as well as seismic activity.

Becca Lawrence ’07 did her senior thesis on sand from the Amazon River, using U-Pb analysis of zircon grains in the sand to test whether a single dune provides a representative sample of the source areas from which the sand was derived. Her results showed that in fact samples from different parts of the dune give different results, demonstrating that it is unwise to expect a single sample to fully record the sediment provenance. This has important implications for sampling strategies in big regional studies, and we hope to refine the data and publish the results.

The final project on which Kate Scheider ’07 worked for her senior thesis involved mapping small impact craters around chaos areas on Europa and also conducting impact experiments in ice-over-water targets. Kate spent part of Winter Study at NASA's Ames Vertical Gun range, where she conducted her hypervelocity (5 km/sec) impact experiments. She showed that not only do impacts into ice over water produce features that look a lot like chaos on Europa, but also that at least one large europan chaos area is surrounded by a field of secondary impact craters, suggesting that it formed by impact.

Rónadh’s plans for summer 2007 are to work on the backlog of data she has amassed over the last few years and get some papers written. She will also be working on polishing the lavaka map, and growing corn in the back yard!

David Dethier was on sabbatical leave but in residence during 2006-07, focusing on writing about previous research in the western United States and on long-term monitoring data from Hopkins Memorial Forest. His research focused mainly on the measurement of long-term weathering and erosion rates in the Rocky Mountains. In conjunction with Paul Bierman ’85 (University of Vermont), Dethier continued investigations of Front Range weathering and erosion rates using geochemical and cosmogenic radionuclide (CRN) techniques. Dethier worked in alpine zones of the Front Range with Matthias Leopold and other colleagues from the University of Regensburg, using seismic refraction, resistivity and ground-penetrating radar to non-destructively image the shallow subsurface in the area.

Dethier also continued his study (with chemists David Richardson and Jay Thoman) of groundwater and perchlorate contamination at Mt. Greylock Regional High School in Williamstown and helped supervise a research project by Jen Menzies ’07 on perchlorate. Dethier coordinates ongoing collection of weather, streamflow, precipitation chemistry and other environmental data from Hopkins Memorial Forest and their analysis in the Environmental Science Lab in the Morley Science Center. Real-time weather and groundwater data and archived weather data from 20 years of monitoring are available at http://oit.williams.edu/weather/ and archived watershed data (streamflow and temperature, stream chemistry and bulk precipitation chemistry) are at http://oit.williams.edu/weather/watershed/. Dethier also serves as Project Director for the Luce Foundation grant for Renewable Energy and Resource Sustainability at Williams College (http://www.williams.edu/resources/sustainability/index.php).

Professor Markes Johnson coordinated a 2006 summer-science project on satellite reconnaissance of rocky shores and coastal sand dunes around the Gulf of California in collaboration with Prof. Jorge Ledesma-Vázquez and students from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California using the remote-sensing facilities at the Schow Science Library. During the January 2007 Winter Study period, Markes led a research team to Marquer Bay on Isla Carmen in the Gulf of California that included Dave Backus and WIT students Patty Liao and Charles Cao, all of whom participated in the summer research program. Results of the summer survey on rocky shorelines were presented in March at the Northeastern Regional Meeting of the Geological Society of America.

At the close of the academic year, Markes and research scientist Gudveig Baarli attended the International Yangtze Conference on the Ordovician and Silurian Systems in Nanjing, China.

Professor Johnson and co-authors (including former students from the classes of ’00, ’03, and ’04) had research papers published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, Acta Palaeontologica Sinica, and Ciencias Marinas. During the academic year, he reviewed manuscripts for the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, Sedimentology, and Pacific Science. He also reviewed research proposals for the Petroleum Research Fund (American Chemical Society), and the National Science Foundation.

During the summer of 2006 Paul Karabinos continued fieldwork in the Berkshire massif in western Massachusetts. He worked with honors student Elizabeth Pierce to measure strain in a well-exposed conglomerate in the Dalton Formation in the Day Mountain thrust sheet. They presented their results at the Northeastern Section of the Geological Society of America meeting in Durham, N.H., in March. Karabinos also conducted detailed fieldwork on the Rattlesnake fault in Pownal, VT, with Joe Pyle (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). They used the electron microprobe at RPI to date a metamorphic mineral called monazite to determine when the fault was active. Karabinos also used global positioning system (GPS) and geographic information system (GIS) methods to make an extremely detailed geologic map of the Pine Cobble area in Williamstown. This goal of this project is to understand the southern termination of the Green Mountain massif.

Karabinos attended the national meeting of the Geological Society of America in Philadelphia, PA, in Octobe. In March, Karabinos co-authored a paper at the Northeastern Section Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Durham, N.H. with Elizabeth Pierce ’07. Karabinos also organized and presented a talk with co-authors at an all-day session of the meeting “From Rodinia to Pangea—The Lithotectonic Record of Plate Convergence in Eastern North America.” He also gave an invited talk at a symposium in honor of Rev. James Skehan, S.J.

The lab of Heather Stoll celebrated the news this spring of Heather’s receipt of an Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the European Geoscience Union, one of two such awards given this year. The award recognized the innovation of a new indicator to learn about past climate and ocean changes from the chemistry of shells produced by marine algae known as coccoliths. Stoll traveled to Vienna in April to receive the award at the annual meeting of the European Geoscience Union, and deliver an award lecture “Using Coccolith Chemistry to Track Coccolithophore Productivity Response to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.” Former senior honors student Andrea Burke ’06 also attended the meeting where she presented results from her senior honors thesis “Glacial/Interglacial Variations in the Range of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone and the Resulting Changes in Paleoproductivity in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea,” for which Alicia Arevalos ’05 was also a co-author. This spring marked the publication of work from several student collaborative projects in a series of journal articles.

At Williams, Stoll delivered the Sigma Xi lectures in April, “Much Ado about CO2.” In “Part I: The Fickle Ocean,” Stoll described the development of new ways to measure the chemistry of coccoliths and two studies employing these methods to assess past changes in the behavior of the tropical monsoon system, which affects a large portion of the world population. These records of past changes in the monsoon system can be used as targets for climate models: If current climate models can reliably simulate the past changes in monsoon behavior, we are more confident in their skill for predicting future changes in the monsoon system. In “Part II: What Happened at the Last Great Greenhouse Gas Release?” Stoll described how the oceans and climate were affected by a large natural release of methane 55 million years ago, and lessons for the modern changes expected to result from fossil fuel use. Research on both of these projects is described in two articles published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

For the 20^th year, Prof. R. A. (Bud) Wobus has served as the Williams representative to the Keck Geology Consortium, the membership of which recently expanded from 12 to 18 of the top liberal arts college geology programs in the country. As a member of the Consortium’s executive committee, he contributed to the preparation of the renewal proposal submitted to NSF/REU last fall that secured a grant of $650,000 to continue the Consortium’s research participation program for undergraduates for another 3 years. He participated in both meetings of the Keck board of representatives, at the annual Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall and at the 20^th Keck Research Symposium in Geology at the College of Wooster in the spring. At the anniversary dinner at the latter meeting, he was recognized for his role in conceiving the idea for the Consortium two decades ago and for co-authoring, with Emeritus Professor Bill Fox, the initial proposal to the W. M. Keck Foundation that established the organization. After 15 years and $5 million of support from Keck, the research program is now funded by NSF and by contributions from the member colleges.

Last summer, he led a weeklong field seminar for the Geological Society of America’s Geo Ventures program in Colorado. “From the Peak to the Park – the Geology of Pikes Peak Country and South Park” included daily field trips and evening seminars on all aspects of the geology of the Southern Front Range. Local attendees were Tom Ennis and Joe Madison, regular auditors in Williams Geosciences courses. While in Colorado he again led a weekend field seminar for the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.

Photo: Geosciences Careers Panel, November, 2006

This academic year, he and Prof. David Dethier have been co-advisors for Sam Tuttle ’07, who completed a Keck research project and senior thesis on the water resources of Vinalhaven Island in Maine. Sam was co-author of a poster at GSA in the fall and presented a poster and a talk at the Keck Symposium in the spring. Beginning this summer, Bud will advise Katie Stack ’08 in a Keck-sponsored study of the origin of the famous garnet deposits near Gore Mountain, in the New York Adirondacks.

In November, he organized a Geosciences Careers Day and invited six recent alumni to be part of a panel about career opportunities and their professional trajectories after Williams. The Saturday event, co-sponsored by OCC, drew 18 students from the classes of ’07 through ’10. In December, he and Prof. Heather Stoll hosted a reunion of nearly 20 Williams geosciences alumni at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Other activities with alumni will include a two-week visit to New Zealand in July, where he will give several presentations on the geology of the islands, and a talk to the Maine Alumni Association in mid-June on “The Volcanoes of Coastal Maine.”

Closer to home, he continues on the board of the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation and on its Education Committee, which sponsors a winter seminar series and coordinates several activities with the Williamstown Elementary School (where he is an annual classroom visitor).

Wobus also edited the autobiography of one of Williams’ most prominent early geologists, T. Nelson Dale, who taught here at the end of the 19^th Century. The book, The Outcomes of the Life of a Geologist, is being published by the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Peter Schultz, Brown University

“Digging a Comet: Results of NASA’s Deep Impact Mission”
Dr. Guy Narbonne, Queen’s University, Sperry/Five College-University Lecture

“Precambrian Reefs: Template for the Modern Reef Ecosystem”
“The Ediacara Biota: Neoproterozoic Origin of Animals and Their Ecosystems”
Michael Hulver (Williams ’81), Saudi Aramco

“Ice in the Desert? Evidence for Paleozoic Glaciation in Saudi Arabia”
David Rudkin, University of Toronto and Royal Ontario Museum

“Bugs, Slugs, and Microbial Rugs – New Tales from the Burgess Shale”
Dr. Ed Landing, New York State Geological Survey

“The Peritidal Origin of All Skeletalized Metazoans (Except Trilobites) Late in the Cambrian Evolutionary Radiation”
Dr. Jonathan Payne (Williams ’97), Stanford University

“End-Permian Mass Extinction and Triassic Recovery: Lessons from a Carbonate Platform in Southwest China”
Dr. Markes E. Johnson and Dr. David Backus, Williams College

“Exploring Coastal Dunes and Lagoons around the Gulf of California”

Henry “Ted” Kernan ’09, Lauren Interess Fellow

“A View of the Geology of Peru, Bolivia, and Northern Chile”
Rebecca L. Lawrence ’07

“Testing for Hydrodynamic Fractionation of Zircon Populations in a Sedimentary Microenvironment”
Elizabeth L. Pierce ’07

“Strain Gradients in the Day Mountain Thrust Sheet, Western Massachusetts”
Kate C. Scheider ’07

“Impact Processes on Jupiter’s Moon Europa”
Ashley A. Sewell ’07

“Population Dynamics of Pliocene Echinoderms from Baja California, Mexico”
Samuel E. Tuttle ’07

“Water Resources of a Part of the West Coast of Vinalhaven Island, Penobscot Bay, ME”

Rónadh Cox, Williams College

“Just How Fast Does Madagascar Erode? Evidence from ¹⁰Be Analysis of Lavaka, Slope, and River Sediment”
“U-Pb dates from Madagascar Detrital Zircons Constrain Tectonic Models for Gondwana Assembly”
Geological Society of America Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado
Markes E. Johnson, Williams College

“Survey of Rocky Shores by Lithology in the Gulf of California (Mexico)”
Northeastern Regional Meeting of the Geological Society of America, Durham, New Hampshire

“Topography and Depositional Environments at the Ordovician-Silurian Boundary in the Iowa-Illinois-Wisconsin Region, U.S.A.”
International Yangtze Conference on the Ordovician and Silurian Systems, Nanjing, China
Paul Karabinos, Williams College

“Intracrustal Wedging and Emplacement of External Basement Massifs in the Northern Appalachians”
“Formation of New England Gneiss Domes”
Northeastern Regional Meeting of the Geological Society of America, Durham, New Hampshire
Heather M. Stoll, Williams College

“Coccolithophore Productivity Response to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum”
American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting, San Francisco, California

“Using Coccolith Chemistry to Track Coccolithophore Productivity Response to the PETM”
European Geoscience Union Annual Meeting, Vienna, Austria
R. A. Wobus, Williams College

“What’s under the Dirt? The Geologic History of the Northern Berkshires”
Sweetwood Spring Lecture Series, Williamstown, MA

“The Volcanoes of Coastal Maine”
Williams Alumni Association of Maine, Portland, Maine
Elizabeth L. Pierce ’07

“Strain Gradients in the Day Mountain Thrust Sheet, Western Massachusetts”
Northeastern Regional Meeting of the Geological Society of America, Durham, New Hampshire