L. Perry, died at the age of 91 at his home on Cape Cod on February 22, 1994. Although geology had been taught at the college since the time of Amos Eaton in 1818, the major was not established until "Doc" Perry took over as department chairman in 1935 (a chairmanship that extended for 29 years!). Doc's teaching career at Williams spanned 40 years, from 1928 until his retirement to Cape Cod in 1968. As a young Princeton Ph.D. he was also one of the organizers of the Yellowstone-Bighorn Research Association (YBRA) field station in Red Lodge, Montana, where several Williams students still go each summer for a month-long course in geological field methods.
A superb teacher and an active researcher, Doc led field trips for his students all over the country. Although he published on subjects as diverse as glaciers and mineral deposits, he is best known for his interpretation of metamorphic rocks in central Vermont. In April, 1991, a group of Williams alumni and faculty (mostly former students of Doc's) held a special testimonial for the Perrys on Cape Cod, on the occasion of the establishment of the Elwyn L. Perry Fund and Endowment for geologic equipment and instruments by Phil Kalker '54.
The department that Doc Perry so admirably led has completed another busy and productive year, though without the teaching of Prof. Bill Fox, on sabbatical leave all year and, for the fall semester only, Prof. Paul Karabinos, who taught in the Associated Kyoto program in Japan. During Winter Study Period in January, we were pleased to welcome back Blake Martin '84 and his family. Blake, a consultant with Ground Water Associates in the Boston area, led a very timely Winter Study project entitled Clean Water: The Ultimate Resource. Also in January, Prof. Markes Johnson returned to Baja California with seven students to continue research on modern and ancient rocky shorelines, work that has led to several honors theses and published reports in the last few years. For those of us still on campus during a cold, snowy January there was a full complement of winter sports activities coordinated by senior geology majors Renee Bourgeois, Michelle Coombs, and Jake Russin.
During the spring semester a new course, GEOL/ENVI 166, Climates Through Time, was taught by Prof. David DeSimone. It will be taught again next year and will be joined, in the fall semester, by another new course without labs, Earth Catastrophes (GEOL/ENVI 107) to be taught by Profs. Dethier and Karabinos.
To commemorate the College's Bicentennial, the Geology Department issued a special edition of The Williams Geology Newsletter which contained articles about some of Williams' famous geologists during its first century - Amos Eaton, Chester Dewey, Ebenezer Emmons, and T. Nelson Dale. It also contains faculty and student news and current information from more than 200 alumni of the department, along with their addresses. (Copies are available on request from the Geology Office.)
Endowed programs continue to bring outstanding speakers to the department each year. This year's speaker in the Sperry Lecture Series was William F. Ruddiman '64, chairman of the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and formerly a research oceanographer with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He spoke on October 5 on "Plateau Uplift and Climate Change," a topic about which he has written for many geoscience journals and for Scientific American. Our two speakers in the Class of 1960 Scholars and Fellows Program addressed the theme, "Changes in the Biosphere - The Geologic Record." Prof. Bruce Saunders from Bryn Mawr College spoke on February 15 about "Nautilus: The Life and Times of a Living Fossil, and Implications for the History of Ammonoids." On April 12 Prof. Gerta Keller from Princeton spoke on the topic "Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary Mass Extinctions - Limited to Low Latitudes?" Other visitors who spoke at colloquia during the year included Helen Mango '85, a professor at Castleton State College in Vermont, and Suzanne O'Connell from Wesleyan. Topics of all the year's colloquia are listed later in this report.
Students and faculty seemed to be "on the road" to meetings and symposia more than usual this year. The national meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) was held in New England for the first time in decades, drawing over 6,000 geologists to Boston in late October. Among them were most of our faculty and seven of our twelve seniors, whose attendance was made possible by the McAleenan Family Fund for Geology (the establishment of which was reported in last year's Science at Williams). More than twenty alumni of the department were on hand, many of them presenting papers. (Abstracts of papers presented by current faculty members are found near the end of this volume.) In addition, Heather Stoll '94 presented a paper co-authored by Prof. Paul Karabinos and others, entitled "The New England Segment of the Laurentian Margin: Continuous Tectonic Activity from Early Ordovician Through Early Devonian. As a student speaker, Heather received a special grant from the New England Consortium for Undergraduate Science Education (NECUSE) to attend the meeting.
During spring vacation in March, Prof. R. A. Wobus and Michelle Coombs '94 attended the meeting of the Northeastern Section of the GSA in Binghamton, New York. Michelle made a poster presentation entitled "Petrology and Geochemistry of the Southern Intrusive Breccia Zone, Cadillac Mountain Pluton, Mt. Desert Island, Maine." This study was part of a Keck Intercollegiate Geology Consortium project, begun in summer, 1993, for which Prof. Wobus was one of the three faculty leaders. Michelle received a travel grant from GSA to attend the meeting.
The annual Keck Research Symposium in Geology was held at Trinity University in San Antonio in early April. Seniors Michelle Coombs and Mike Seckler, juniors Laura Libbey and Demian Saffer, and faculty members David DeSimone and Bud Wobus were part of the delegation of nearly 100 students and faculty from among the 12 colleges of the consortium who attended the symposium. They presented the results of research they began in the field last summer on two different projects: the petrology and geochemistry of plutonic and metavolcanic rocks on Mt. Desert Island, Maine (Coombs, Seckler, and Wobus), and the deglaciation of southwestern Vermont and adjacent states (DeSimone, Libbey, and Saffer). In addition, the group went on a day-long geological excursion of the Hill Country of central Texas, including the Enchanted Rock granite batholith of the Llano Uplift. A volume of extended abstracts was published for the symposium.
The Keck grant to the 12-college geology consortium is entering its eighth year, and thus far the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles has given $2.6 million to support collaborative geological research projects by students and faculty from the 12 consortium colleges coast-to-coast. Created in 1986 in response to a proposal by Williams professors Fox and Wobus, the consortium was coordinated for its first four years by Prof. Fox. A proposal to renew the grant for two more years is in preparation under the direction of the new coordinator, Dr. Cathryn A. Manduca (Williams '81), now at Carleton College.
This summer five Williams geology majors and three professors will continue research under the Keck grant on several intercollegiate projects around the country. Incoming junior Rebecca Thomas will work with Prof. Bill Fox on a remote sensing project being conducted at Trinity University and in nearby parts of Texas. Willard Morgan '96 will study geologic structures in the Quetico wilderness of southern Ontario. Mike Montag '95 will join Prof. David DeSimone to study alpine glacial deposits in northwestern Wyoming. Prof. Bud Wobus will work with incoming seniors on two different Keck projects this summer: Pete Taylor will be part of a team investigating young volcanic rocks and structures in the southern Cascade region of Oregon, and John Phipps will study metamorphosed volcanic rocks in the Coastal Maine Magmatic Province east of Mt. Desert Island.
Supported by Prof. Markes Johnson's grant from the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society, Laura Libbey and Max Simian (both '95) will undertake a study of rocky shore processes and communities in Baja California, beginning in the lab and library this summer and with field work planned for January of next year. With funding from the Bronfman Summer Student Research account, Michele Koppes and Jeff Schmidt (both '95) will study glacial processes and products in the Puget Sound area of Washington state with Prof. David Dethier, continuing a project begun last summer. Also with Bronfman support, Sarah Mills '95 will work at the Univ. of Connecticut Marine Station at Avery Point, CT, on a sedimentation project in Long Island Sound under Bill Fox's direction. And Demian Saffer '95 will work with Prof. Paul Karabinos studying stress near active faults, work that will be supported by funds from the Sperry endowment.
Six incoming juniors and seniors have been selected to work for three weeks in June with four Dartmouth faculty members under a project funded by the New England Consortium for Undergraduate Science Education (NECUSE). The students will spend the first week in tutorials on the Dartmouth campus involving remote sensing, mineral deposits, volcanology, and structural geology. They will then fly to Wyoming for two weeks of field work involving the same topical areas of geology. Those chosen under the grant are Pat Barnard and Jeff Schmidt (both '95) and Jim Heyes, Myra Hill, Mary Ann Hirshfeld, and Willard Morgan (all '96).
Graduating senior Jake Russin was selected to participate in the SAGE program (Summer of Applied Geophysical Experience) at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. This NSF- sponsored program, which accepted only 14 undergraduates last year, provides field experience with geophysical instruments in a variety of geologic settings in New Mexico. And incoming junior Aengus Jeffers will be involved in a remote sensing project at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Five geology majors, including one graduating senior, are enrolled in a month-long field geology course at the Yellowstone-Bighorn Research Association station near Red Lodge, Montana. Returning students Mary Ann Hirshfeld '96, Sarah Mills '95, Mike Montag '95, and Max Simian '95 all received partial scholarships from the David Major Fund. They will be joined by Renee Bourgeois '94.
The 12 graduating seniors in Geology received a variety of awards and honors during the 1993- 94 academic year. Emily Cooper and Heather Stoll were elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the end of their junior year. On the basis of especially original senior theses and for promise in a scientific career, Michelle Coombs and Heather Stoll were elected to Sigma Xi, the scientific research society, at the end of the year. Heather Stoll also received the Horace F. Clark Fellowship from Williams and fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research for graduate studies in geoscience. Jake Russin was selected by the geology faculty to receive the David Major Award, presented each year to an outstanding geology senior in memory of David N. Major of the Class of 1981. Heather Stoll won the Freeman Foote Prize for giving the best oral presentation of her senior thesis results at the final departmental colloquium in May, at which time she also received an award from the American Mineralogical Society as the outstanding student in mineralogy and petrology classes.
Six seniors were selected earlier in the year as Class of 1960 Scholars; they are:
Class of 1960 Scholars in Geology
Next year the department will be at "full strength," with no sabbaticals, for the first time in several years. We look forward to welcoming back our 25 returning junior and senior majors and a group of sophomores who already show great promise!
Research Associate Gudveig Baarli visited the Paleontologisk Museum in Oslo, Norway, in June before continuing on to Russia with her husband, Markes Johnson, for consultations on the Silurian stratigraphy of Siberia (see below under Johnson). In Oslo, she repatriated to the museum the last of her large brachiopod collections from the Lower Silurian of southern Norway. The total collection consists of 1,800 fossils representing about 100 species of brachipods. Near the end of the fall term she completed a monographic work describing 41 species belonging to 27 genera among the Orthocea and Strophomenida. Among these, 2 genera and 9 species are new to paleontology. Submitted to the journal Fossils and Strata, the monograph was accepted for publication in April, but will not appear for at least another year. During the spring term, she co-authored with Markes Johnson and James Scott, Jr. '92 a paper on a late Pleistocene rocky shore and fringing reef from Western Australia. The project was supported by a joint grant to Johnson and Baarli from the National Geographic Society for field work completed in 1991.
David DeSimone (CES and Geology) directed a Keck-NSF research project in June to study hydrogeology and glacial geology in the vicinity of the Williams campus. He presented "Glacial Geomorphology and Applied Hydrogeology, MA-NY-VT Tri-State Region" at the Seventh Keck Research Symposium in Geology held in San Antonio during April, 1994. Bob Newton of Smith College was co-author and second faculty member on the project. Scott McMillin ('93) was the project's research assistant. Ten students worked in pairs and participated in a poster session during the first session of the symposium. Four-page abstracts of their research results were published in the symposium volume. The project titles and authors were: "Hydrogeochemistry of the Batten Kill Headwaters" by John Barrera (C.I.T.) and Joy Rosen (Beloit); "Surficial Mapping and Glacial History of Notch Brook Valley" by Jessica Butler (Washington U.) and Heather Petcovic (Smith); "Surficial Geology of the Shaftsbury, Vermont, Region" by Laura Libbey (Williams) and Ana Pierson (Whitman); "The Flood Channel History of Glacial Lake Bascom: A Miniature Scablands" by Demian Saffer (Williams) and Edwin Madera (Wesleyan) and "Ground water Analysis of the Pownal Landfill, Pownal, Vermont" by Delano King (VA State) and Sheetal Singh (Pomona).
DeSimone returned to the San Juan Mountains of Colorado in August, 1993, to locate new areas of research into Holocene climate change as evidenced by retreating alpine glaciers along the Continental Divide. Demian Saffer ('95) and Nate Lowe ('96) accompanied him on this reconnaissance mission partly supported by a Keck Global Studies Grant. This grant also supported the development of a new course in paleoclimatology and climatology taught in the spring of 1994. Finally, DeSimone's work in consulting geology continued with court testimony, work on the Bennington Landfill Superfund site, and ongoing participation in an archaeological survey to identify early PaleoIndian sites in the Hoosic Valley of eastern New York and southern Vermont.
David Dethier continued his mapping of late Pleistocene glacial deposits in the San Juan Islands of Washington as part of research about the climatic, eustatic, and isostatic processes that resulted in rapid retreat of the most recent continental ice from the area about 13,500 years ago. Chris Brookfield '94 and Dan White '94 joined Professor Dethier in the field and conducted the field portion of their senior thesis investigations of evidence for direction of ice flow and distribution of thick deposits of glacial drift, respectively. Dethier will be one of the leaders of a field trip through this area after the Geological Society of America National Meeting in Seattle in October, 1994.
Dethier also continued to serve as a consultant for the Environmental Restoration Program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, investigating the long-term stability of low-level radioactive wastes buried at the edge of White Rock Canyon, New Mexico. His work with Steve Reneau and others from the Laboratory shows that some of the large landslides that flank the Canyon have moved repeatedly in late Pleistocene time, damming the Rio Grande and forming extensive lakes. Some of this work was presented as a paper "Chronology of Late Pleistocene Landslide-Dammed Lakes along the Rio Grande, White Rock Canyon, Northern New Mexico" at the Rocky Mountain Sectional Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Durango, Colorado, in May, 1994.
While on sabbatical leave during the 1993-94 academic year, Professor William Fox worked on the results of a Keck research project in Gaspé, Canada, and developed a new course on remote sensing and G.I.S. (Geographic Information Systems) which will be offered in the spring of 1995. In September he attended the "Second International Conference/Workshop on Integrating Geographic Information Systems and Environmental Modeling" held in Breckenridge, Colorado. In October he attended the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America held in Boston, Massachusetts. A paper entitled "Penouille Spit, Evolution of a Complex Spit, Gaspé, Quebec, Canada" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Coastal Research.. The paper, based on a Keck research project in Gaspé in the summer of 1989, was co-authored with Rebecca Haney and Professor H. Allen Curran of Smith College. The spring semester was devoted to research and development of the new course GEOL 214, Remote Sensing and G.I.S. Several new computer programs, including MultiSpec, Dimple, and Map Factory, were tested on the Apple Macintosh computers. An image processing program, LINKWINDS, from Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was installed on the Silicon Graphics IRIS II workstation in Jesup Hall to analyze three-dimensional models of the Earth's surface using LANDSAT images and Digital Elevation Models. A paper entitled "Wave Refraction as a Tool in Coastal Management: An Example from Hurricane Elena in Pinellas, County, Florida," co- authored with Richard A. Davis, Jr. and Margaret Andronaco of the University of South Florida, was published in the Proceedings of the 1993 National Conference on Beach Preservation Technology.
Professor Markes Johnson began the summer season with several weeks of field work in Baja California during May and June, supervising the research of seniors Hovey Clark '94 and Jenn Zwiebel '94. Concentrating in the Punta Cabras area on the Pacific coast, Hovey surveyed a 22 km extension of the late Cretaceous rocky shoreline previously studied at Las Minas by Marshall Hayes '92. Jenn surveyed an equally extensive late Pleistocene rocky shoreline superimposed directly over the Cretaceous shoreline. Comparison of these two time slices with respect to the region's contemporary rocky shores suggests that little has changed in terms of coastal dynamics over the last 100 million years. In contrast, the rocky-shore biota evolved markedly over that time. Based partly on their thesis work, Hovey and Jenn have completed separate manuscripts co-authored with their advisor and submitted them to the Journal of Coastal Research for possible publication. Hovey and Jenn's work was supported by the first year of a two-year grant to Johnson from the Petroleum Research Fund (American Chemical Society).
Accompanied by Gudveig Baarli, Professor Johnson took advantage of his position as Chairman of the Subcommission on Silurian Stratigraphy (under the International Union of Geological Sciences) to broaden scientific contacts in Russia in preparation for the 1996 International Symposium on the Silurian System. They arrived in St. Petersburg on June 21, where they were hosted at the All Union Geological Research Institute by Dr. Nikolai Predtchensky. Work days spent reviewing Siberian stratigraphic records at the Institute were punctuated by a half day at the Hermitage and several evening excursions to the Marlinsky Theater to see opera and ballet. On June 28 Johnson and Baarli left St. Petersburg for Novosibirsk, in southeastern Siberia, where they were hosted in that unique "Science Town" by Yuri Tesakov. An unusual 4th of July was observed with a swim party on the broad Ob River. The work in Novosibirsk was much more intense, and by July 8 they concluded a three-year agreement for cooperative research with their hosts. The first phase of that agreement comes into effect in mid-July, 1994, when Predtchensky and Tesakov are expected to visit Williamstown and then be conducted on a month-long field excursion to the northern Michigan Basin. The project is jointly funded by an internal grant from the Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and a grant from the National Geographic Society (announced in May, 1994).
The late summer and early fall was an unusually busy time for attendance at professional conferences. August 8-12, Prof. Johnson attended the 1993 Annual Meeting of the Society of Sedimentary Geology at Penn State University in University Park, PA. There he gave a poster session on "Stable Cratonic Sequences and a Standard for Silurian Eustasy." October 15-17, he attended the 20th Annual Meeting of the International Communal Studies Program at New Harmony, Indiana, where he was an invited speaker on "William Maclure's Impact on Geological Science after the New Harmony Experience." In reading through some of Maclure's voluminous travel diaries in preparation for this conference, it was not a little unnerving to realize that the St. Petersburg visited by Maclure in 1810 suffered from many of the same political pressures observed in 1994! October 23-28, Johnson attended the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Boston, MA, where he convened a theme session on the "Paleogeography of Silurian Taconica" - the narrow stretch of land which extended from present-day Quebec to Alabama along the margin of Laurentia. Thirteen papers were presented at the afternoon session on October 27, with the final paper on "Coastal Relationships in the Red Mountain Formation (Lower Silurian: North-Central and Northeastern Alabama" presented by Prof. Johnson representing himself and co-authors Gudveig Baarli and Chris Bolton. At a meeting of the "Friends of the Silurian" immediately following the session, the decision was reached to formally announce the 2nd International Symposium on the Silurian System, to be held in Rochester, New York, in August, 1996. The Subcommission on Silurian Stratigraphy will be the primary sponsor of this program. The symposium announcement was subsequently published in the December issue of Lethaia.
Effective January 1, 1994, Prof. Johnson was appointed the Charles L. MacMillan Professor of Geology. This science professorship, created in 1972 through the bequest of Norman S. MacMillan '24, becomes the third endowed chair presently held in the Geology Department.
January 3-26, 1994, Prof. Johnson led his third Winter Study field course in geology to Baja California, Mexico. The program was jointly supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and Mexico's CONACYT. Participating students from Williams College were Cassity Bromley '96, Brett Dalke '95, Tim Farnham '96, Aengus Jeffers '96, Will Morgan '96, Max Simian '95, and Pete Taylor '95. The Williams party was joined at Concepción Bay by Prof. Jorge Ledesma- Vazquez and a group of five students from the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California (Ensenada Branch). On the way to and from Mexico, some of the group stayed with John Welty '79 in Tucson, Arizona. The grant continues for another year, during which research on Pliocene and Pleistocene rocky shorelines will be undertaken by incoming seniors Max Simian '95 and Laura Libbey '95.
April 14, Prof. Johnson received his second grant through the International Programs section of NSF. The award for research on a "Silurian Rocky Shoreline In South China" is also supported by Academia Sinica, and will facilitate field work in Guizhou Province in conjunction with Dr. Rong Jia- yu (Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology). The field work is scheduled for June, 1994.
During the spring term, several manuscripts were completed for submission to professional journals. In addition to the two papers co-authored with current thesis students, two other projects on ancient rocky shores were concluded. A manuscript on "Colonization and Reef Development on a Late Pleistocene Rocky Shore and Abrasion Platform in Western Australia" was co-authored with Gudveig Baarli and Jim Scott, Jr. '92, and submitted to Lethaia. A manuscript entitled "Debating the Sutton Stone: Life on an Early Jurassic Rocky Shore at Southerndown, Wales" was co-authored with W. Stuart McKerrow (Bernard Prof. of Geology at Williams College in 1992), and submitted to Paleontology.
Research papers published during the fall term in 1993 include two co-authored with former student Marshall Hayes '92, one with former student James Scott, Jr. '92, and one published with field partner Jorge Ledesma-Vazquez (see section on Faculty Research). All relate to field projects undertaken in Baja California, Mexico, from 1991 to 1992. In addition, two book reviews were published during the academic term. A review of Geomorphology of Rocky Coasts (T. Sunamura) was written for the Journal of Geology. A review of The Jurassic of the Circum-Pacific (edited by G.E.G. Westermann) was written for Northeastern Geology.
Associate Professor of Geology Paul Karabinos and Heather Stoll '94 continued their research on Paleozoic volcanics in Vermont and the Shelburne Falls Arc, a newly discovered magmatic arc that collided with ancient North America during the Ordovician Taconian orogeny. They collected samples in the field and extended their studies into western Mass. They, along with co-authors J Hepburn (Boston College) and R.D. Tucker (Washington University), presented the findings of this NSF funded project at the Geological Society of America Meeting in Boston, Mass. in October, 1993. Heather worked very independently during the fall semester because Paul was on leave at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, where he taught a course on Environmental Geology for American students at the Associated Kyoto Program. While in Japan, Paul took many field trips, attended a conference on tectonics of Japan, and gave a series of talks on New England geology at Kyoto University. He also began a new research project on crustal stress near active faults.
Professor and Chairman Bud Wobus was co-leader last summer of a Keck Geology Consortium research project on Mt. Desert Island, Maine, working with a group of students and faculty from 7 of the consortium colleges (including Williams seniors Michelle Coombs and Mike Seckler). Later in the summer he was the faculty representative on a 10-day Williams Alumni tour of the Canadian Rockies. He was also the editor of the Bicentennial Edition of the Williams Geology Newsletter, which was mailed to over 200 alumni of the department during the summer. In October, at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Boston, he presented a paper "T. Nelson Dale: Diminutive Giant in New England Geology" and was co-author of a poster presentation by Marnie Sturm of Trinity University and others entitled "Geochemistry of Late-Stage Alkaline Intrusions of the Pikes Peak Batholith, Colorado."
To commemorate the arrival of T. Nelson Dale to teach at Williams a century ago, he gave a departmental colloquium in November on Dale's career as a geologist. He attended the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December, where he was co-author of a poster presentation by Rachel Beane '93 on the "Field Relations, Petrography, and Geochemistry of the Sugarloaf Intrusive Center, Colorado." In February he participated in the selection meeting in Chicago for student participants in the Keck Geology Consortium research projects for the coming summer. The following month he attended the meeting of the Northeastern Section of the GSA in Binghamton, New York, where one of his honors students, Michelle Coombs '94, made a poster presentation. In April he was one of six Williams participants in the Seventh Annual Keck Undergraduate Research Symposium in Geology at Trinity University in San Antonio, where he continued as the Williams representative on the consortium's planning board. At the May meeting of the Rocky Mountain Section GSA in Durango, Colorado, he presented an invited paper, "The Precambrian Basement of the Florissant Area, Central Colorado" and was co-author, with Stan Mertzman of Franklin and Marshall and Glenn Kroeger of Trinity, of another: "The Thirty-nine Mile Volcanic Field of Central Colorado - The Guffey Volcanic Center." He and Mertzman were also co-leaders of a post-meeting field trip and contributors to the guidebook for the trip. This summer he will again be a co-leader of a Keck project on the Maine coast, and later in the summer will direct the Alumni College in the Rockies in central Colorado.