GEOSCIENCES Department

After decades of stability in size, areas of emphasis, and teaching style, Geosciences has made some substantial changes during the past few years. We are trying to teach three tutorials in most years and are continuing to increase our offerings in “new” areas of geoscience. Associate Professor Rónadh Cox has been the main force behind establishing the new Maritime Studies Concentration and has expanded her work about planetary topics. Assistant Professor Heather Stoll ’94 has finished her second year of teaching, focusing on Earth Systems Science. Heather’s expertise is in climate change at various time scales, and her class Climate Change (GEOS/ENVI 215) is now a required course for Geosciences majors. Heather also teaches a tutorial on the carbon cycle. Heather’s research involves using the geochemistry of coccoliths (marine algae) to help interpret records of past climate and atmospheric CO2. Heather and Alberto Tapia are the proud parents of Nicolas, born May 2, 2004.

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. Five of our students worked on extended research projects based on field studies and presented their work as senior honors theses. Markes Johnson was on sabbatical leave and he and Gudveig Baarli traveled widely as they continued their research on ancient and modern rocky shores. Paul Karabinos helped to organize and lead two field trips for the NEIGC annual conference in September. Four faculty members (Cox, Dethier, Karabinos, and Wobus) gave papers at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle, Washington, in November 2003. At least ten Williams alumni including Karl Remsen ’03 also presented results of their research at the conference. Mid-December saw another 20 alumni (including Heather Stoll) attending 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. 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 (Karabinos) in Washington, D.C., at the 17th annual Keck Research Symposium in Geology (Ackerly, Lazarus, and McClanahan) held in early April in Virginia, and at the annual meeting of the Geological Association of Canada (Eros and Rebekah Levine ’03) held at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, in May. 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 five thesis students presented their work on 17 May; Paige McClanahan was awarded the Freeman Foote prize for the best thesis presentation and Eli Lazarus the Mineralogical Society of America award.

Over the commencement weekend, Katie Ackerly, Emily Clinch, Mike Eros, Eli Lazarus, and Paige McClanahan were inducted into Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society; Mike Eros and Paige McClanahan were named the winners of the David Major Prize in Geology. We also had three of our students elected to Phi Beta Kappa this year – Katie Ackerly, Eli Lazarus, and Paige McClanahan. Seven rising seniors and several juniors are working in the field or laboratory this summer in areas ranging from Berkshire County and nearby Vermont to Colorado and Madagascar and on topics from coccolith growth rates to Appalachian geology. 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.

In February 2004, Cathy (Allen) Manduca ’80 was named the 2004 winner of the American Geophysical Union’s Excellence in Geophysical Education Award. The award is given to an individual or group who have had a major impact on geophysical education, have been outstanding teachers and trainers, or who have made a long-lasting, positive impact on geophysical education through professional service. Bud Wobus attended the awards ceremony at the spring AGU meeting in Montreal when Cathy received her award. She was also elected president of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT).

The Keck Geology Consortium, of which Williams is a member, was awarded a $532,732 grant from NSF for the next three years. The consortium comprised of 12 liberal arts colleges coast-to-coast, funds collaborative student-faculty research. It was established in 1987 by a $450,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation in response to a proposal submitted by Professors Bill Fox and Bud Wobus. The NSF grants have allowed for extended participation in research to undergraduates and faculty at other colleges and universities.

In January 2003, Rónadh Cox went to Madagascar to collect field data on the enigmatic erosional features known as lavaka, with Malagasy colleague Professor Michel Rakotondrazafy and student Nathalie Bakoariniaina. Natalie spent the fall semester of 2003 at Williams as a “special student” and took geosciences courses while also analyzing the field data and beginning GIS-based air-photo analysis of the distribution of lavakas in the field area. Initial results of this work were presented at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in October. In August 2004, Rónadh will return to Madagascar with Jane McCamant ’05 and Tyler Corson-Rikert ’06 to gather data on the rates of formation and growth of lavakas, to evaluate whether their formation is caused or influenced by farming, livestock-grazing, or road building.

Astrophysics major Lissa Ong ’04 worked with Rónadh on a planetary geology project, trying to understand the origin of surface features of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Lissa spent January 2004 at the Institute for Low-Temperature Science at Hokkaido University in Japan, impacting ice projectiles at velocities of 100-400 m/sec into icy targets. She integrated her results with data collected from surface images of Europa, to construct a hypothesis that bolides hitting Europa may completely penetrate the crust and disappear into a fluid layer beneath.

In January 2004, Rónadh led a Winter Study field course on St. John, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Ten students, all of whom had spent the fall semester together taking a tutorial course on coral reefs, spent two weeks re-mapping a reef complex. The Mary Creek reef complex had previously been studied by other Williams Geosciences groups, led by Rónadh Cox in 1998 and Markes Johnson in 1984. The students mapped the reef at a very fine scale, collecting data at 5m intervals. They recorded water depths, organisms present, and the type of sediment on the sea bottom. Emily Clinch ’04 collated the data and spent the spring semester creating a detailed GIS database from which she constructed a series of reef maps. She combined this with analysis of air photographs of the reef complex spanning three decades and was able to demonstrate that the back-reef lagoon is filling with sediment and that the reef lobes have decreased progressively in size since the mid-1960’s. Emily’s thesis is the first submitted under the new Program with Concentration in Maritime Studies, which is very exciting.

David Dethier continued as Chair of the Geosciences Department during 2003-04. 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 Paul Bierman ’85 (University of Vermont), Dethier continued to investigate weathering and erosion rates using cosmogenic radionuclide techniques and rock chemistry. His student, Eli Lazarus ’04, completed a study of weathering depths in the Boulder Creek watershed using 1872 well logs and GIS techniques. With former thesis student Taylor Schildgen ’00 and others, Dethier helped to lead a field trip in the Front Range for the International Quaternary Association 2003 meeting. Dethier coauthored two papers and published a geologic map during the past year (see the Faculty Publications section for further information.) Dethier and his co-authors presented results from the weathering depth and cosmogenic studies at the Geological Society of America National Meeting in Seattle, Washington, in November, 2003.

Dethier also worked with Nick Hiza ’02 and Sam Arons ’04, on a project to analyze the potential for a wind energy project on College-owned land at Berlin Pass. 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. Both real-time weather data and archived data from 20 years of monitoring are available on http://cf.williams.edu/public/hmfweather/.

Professor Markes Johnson was on sabbatical leave for the full academic year 2003-04. He and spouse Gudveig Baarli (Williams Research Associate) traveled widely for fieldwork on modern islands and paleoislands in the U.S., Australia, Japan, the Seychelles Islands (western Indian Ocean), and the Balearic Islands (western Mediterranean). Islands visited included Catalina and San Clemente off southern California; Lizard, North, and Magnetic islands on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia; Shikoku Island in Japan; Mahé, Praslin, and La Digue in the Seychelles; and Mallorca and Minorca off the south coast of Spain.

During Winter Study, Professor Johnson traveled to Mexico and joined Mike Eros ’04 and Research Associate David Backus for research on the geology of the Arroyo Blanco Basin on Carmen Island in the lower Gulf of California. On the way, he stopped at the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography on January 11, where he was invited to participate in “Ocean Authors Day” to promote his book Discovering the Geology of Baja California (Univ. of Arizona Press, 2002). Similar presentations on the geology of Baja California were made earlier at the Wrigley Marine Science Center (University of Southern California) on Catalina Island and the Research Station of the Australian Museum on Lizard Island.

A summary of Johnson’s sabbatical research was given as a keynote lecture for a special session on “Rocky Shorelines in the Geological Record: Paleobiological and Sedimentological Signatures” on May 12, 2004, during the annual meeting of the Geological Association of Canada held at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. The special session also featured presentations by Williams Research Associate David Backus, Mike Eros ’04, and Rebekah Levine ’03. Johnson attended the Gulf of California Conference June 13-16 in Tucson, Arizona where he presented a poster in collaboration with David Backus on “Marine Productivity Linked to the Ecology of Carbonate Deposits on Carmen, Monserrat, and Coronado Islands: A Five-Million-Year Continuum in the Lower Gulf of California.”

Professor Johnson had a research paper entitled “Offset of Pliocene Ramp Facies at El Mangle by El Coloradito Fault, Baja California Sur: Implications for Transtensional Tectonics” published by the Geological Society of America in tribute to geologist R. Gordon Gastil. Another paper was published with Jonathan L. Payne ’97 under the title “Lower Cretaceous Alisitos Formation at Punta San Isidro: Coastal Sedimentation and Volcanism” in Ciencias Marinas. During the academic year, Johnson also reviewed manuscripts for Quaternary Research and for the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

During the summer of 2003, Karabinos did field work with Robert Hahn ’05 in the Berkshire Hills of southwestern Massachusetts. This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. They collected many samples for petrographic analysis, geochemistry, and geochronology. Karabinos also continued his work on the Chester dome in southeastern Vermont funded by the Petroleum Research Corporation. He is working with Joe Pyle from RPI to date monazite from shear zones to determine the age of deformation in the region.

Karabinos’ term as chair of the Northeastern Section of the Geological Society of America, ended at the March 2003 meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He remained on the board of the Section through March 2004, as Past Chair and served as Chair of the Nominating Committee for the organization.

Karabinos attended the 2003 New England Intercollegiate Geologic Conference in October and ran two field trips. One was with co-authors Chris Hepburn and Heather Stoll ’94 called “The Shelburne Falls Arc- Lost Arc of the Taconic Orogeny.” The other was with David Morris ’03, Mike Hamilton, and Nicole Rayner entitled “Geochemistry and Geochronology of Middle Proterozoic and Silurian Felsic Sills in the Berkshire Massif, Massachusetts.”

Karabinos attended the national meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle, Washington, in November 2003, and presented a talk with co-authors Liz Mygatt ’03 and Joe Pyle. In June 2004, Karabinos presented a talk at the 17th International Basement Tectonics Association Conference in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Heather Stoll’s research continues to focus on developing new methods to infer past changes in the marine carbon cycle and climate using the chemistry of marine coccolith fossils from coccolithophorid algae and applying these methods to key intervals of climate change.

During the summer of 2003, Stoll worked with Susie Theroux ’05 and Nina Trautmann ’03 investigating how coccolithophorid algae responded to climate variations in the eastern Mediterranean over the last 10,000 years. This project applied new techniques of laboratory analysis on sediment cores collected by several oceanographic cruises in the 1990’s. In the second half of the summer, Susie Theroux traveled to Vrije University in the Netherlands to work with our European collaborator Patrizia Ziveri to apply these methods to similar research questions on sediments from the Arabian Sea.

In December 2003, Stoll presented an invited paper at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Stoll will publish a synthesis of research on coccolith geochemistry in the summer of 2004 as a chapter in the book Coccolithophores: From Molecular Processes to Global Impact (Springer Verlag).

This past year, Stoll has pioneered a new technique to pick individual coccoliths from sediments and analyze them using an ion probe mass spectrometer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Seth Zeren ’05 learned the technique over winter study and is now the second person in the world to have picked individual coccoliths from sediments! Stoll and Woods Hole collaborator Nobu Shimizu will present the ion probe technique and initial results at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Copenhagen in June 2004.

Work continues on refining the calibration of relationships between coccolith chemistry and algal productivity. Summer plans for this year include growing several species of coccolithophorid algae in the laboratory, conducted by Susie Theroux ’05 and Seth Zeren ’05, work funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Andrea Burke ’06 will study the effect of the Asian Monsoon on algal productivity in the Bay of Bengal, a project funded by a grant from the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society.

During the past academic year, Bud Wobus was advisor for two senior thesis students, Katie Ackerly and Paige McClanahan, who studied volcanic rocks from north-central Iceland. Sponsored by the Keck Geology consortium, their work was part of a larger study of an abandoned rift on the Skagi peninsula, where the geochemical imprints of both plume and mid-ocean ridge processes can be documented.

During the fall, Wobus took several students on two days of field trips in conjunction with the New England Intercollegiate Geology Conference (NEIGC) in western New England. In November, he attended the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle, where he represented Williams (for the 18th year) at the board meeting of the Keck Geology Consortium. He was also co-author with Karl Remsen, his honors student of a year ago, of a presentation entitled “Early Proterozoic Ultramafic and Mafic Rocks of the Badger Flats Region, Central Colorado.” Later in November he was co-author of a paper presented by Steve Vatch at the 24th Annual New Mexico Mineral Symposium in Socorro, “The Godsend Claim: Lake George Pegmatite District, Colorado.”

In December, he attended the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, where he again organized a reunion of some 20 Williams geosciences alumni who were at the meeting. He went to Washington & Lee University in Virginia in April with three seniors (Katie Ackerly, Eli Lazarus, and Paige McClanahan) for the 17th Annual Keck Geology Symposium. At the invitation of one of his former students, Cathy (Allen) Manduca ’80, he attended the awards ceremony and banquet at the spring AGU meeting in Montreal in May, where Cathy received the AGU’s Excellence in Geophysical Education Award.

This summer Wobus will be the faculty leader of a 10-day Williams alumni trip to Iceland, his 26th alumni travel-study group. He will also begin two projects which will carry over into his mini-sabbatical during the fall term: documenting the tectonic signatures of Proterozoic plutons in central Colorado, and editorial work on the as yet unpublished autobiographical manuscript of one of Williams’ (and the Northeast’s) most famous geologists, T. Nelson Dale, who taught at the college from 1893 to 1901. While on leave he will continue in his annual roles as GSA representative, Keck Geology Consortium representative, and liaison for summer field geology programs for geosciences students, as well as helping to coordinate the department’s colloquium series for 2004-05.