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Department of Geoscience • University of Wisconsin-Madison

Alumni Newsletter • 2013-14

The Outcrop

The IDOR

(Idaho-Oregon transect)

EarthScope Project

Basil Tikoffpage 14

2013-14 The Outcrop 1http://geoscience.wisc.edu

From the ChairDear Alumni and Friends–

We’ve had a beautiful Fall in Madison, and it’s time for another

issue of the Outcrop. Students, faculty, and researchers from

our department have ranged far and wide (and deep into the

laboratory) in pursuit of their studies this year. Their stories are in

these pages, along with kudos and honors, historical vignettes, and

new developments. I predict you’ll want to read it cover to cover!

I have just taken up the role of Department Chair as of the

Fall semester, taking over from Brad Singer who is enjoying a

well-earned sabbatical after three eventful years ably steering the

ship. He’s hardly resting though – Brad is immersed in launching

a major new research project at the Laguna del Maule caldera in

Chile. Involving nearly a third of the department’s faculty members

and a large cast of students and research staff, this $3 million

project is the NSF’s very first grant in the Integrated Earth Systems

program.

The most exciting new development is the hiring of two new

Assistant Professors: Shaun Marcott and Lucas Zoet (see profiles on

page 20). Shaun joined us in August; his focus is on glacial geology,

the history of Pleistocene glaciation, and paleoclimatology. Lucas

specializes in glacier and ice sheet mechanics and dynamics. He will

join us next summer after completing postdoctoral work. We have

a long history of excellence in Quaternary and glacial science, and I

am very pleased that we have a bright future in that area as well.

For me, stepping into the Chair’s role has been bracing,

coming directly on the heels of a busy and productive sabbatical

year. I spent the first half of the sabbatical preparing for, and then

going, an expedition as co-Chief Scientist on board the Japanese

research vessel Chikyu for seven weeks offshore Japan. After a brief

stopover in Madison during the depths of the Polar Vortex winter, I

escaped again to Zürich, Switzerland for a six-month stay as Visiting

Professor at ETH. There, I enjoyed stimulating collaborations

and immersed myself in spectacular Alpine geology at every

opportunity.

On my return, I found Weeks Hall buzzing with activity. The

number of undergraduate majors continues to grow (numbering

about 140 as I write this!), and our core courses are bursting at

the seams. It’s a real challenge to manage this growth, and to

continue to offer the hands-on and field-intensive curriculum that

has been the hallmark of

our program. We couldn’t

do that without the Field

Experience Funds and

other support donated

by you, our alumni and

friends. The endowment

provided by that fund in

particular now supports field trips to the tune of more than $40,000

a year! I want to express our deepest thanks to you all, because

we literally could not maintain the quality and rigor of our major

without those funds.

To build on that success, we are now focused on two areas to

maintain the quality of our program in the face of seemingly ever-

declining state funding. For graduate students, the number of TA

slots available to us is not what it used to be, and the competition

to get the best prospective Master’s and Ph.D. students is fierce.

Direct stipend support for more graduate students will allow them

to pursue their research goals more effectively and will help us

continue to attract the best students. Accordingly, I encourage

you to consider giving to the Jay Nania Memorial Fund to support

graduate study (see BOV letter, page 2, and “Clark’s section”, page

27). For the undergrads, my focus is on the challenge of keeping

the Summer Field Camp course healthy and affordable. It is

expensive to run, and we must charge students a fee, in addition

to the summer tuition they pay the university. Your support of

the Field Camp fund will go directly toward providing offsetting

scholarships to ease that burden for our students.

The role of department Chair comes with a lot of extra work –

the extent of which I’m just beginning to discover. The upside is

getting the chance to lead and represent our incredibly energetic

students, staff, and faculty. I hope you will enjoy every page of

this issue of the Outcrop, which is full of news, a little history, and

exciting new science. I think it will show once again that Badgers

really do make better geoscientists!

Sincerely,

Harold Tobin

2 Department of Geoscience • University of Wisconsin-Madison

Museum, including being named one of the best museums in Madison by Madison Magazine. Un-der Rich Slaughter’s leadership, the Museum continues to develop innovative programming, conduct paleontological field work, train future professionals, and generally punch well above their weight. Now going on their 166th year, it’s a great place to inspire future geoscientists. Our fund-raising emphasis over the last year have focused on graduate student support, and we’re gratified for the support many of you have provided to begin building the endowment for the Jay Nania graduate support fund; donations and pledges to the fund have exceeded its initial $200,000 goal, and the first award from the fund was distributed last spring. Your financial sup-port for the Department remains exceedingly important given continued decreases in state funding for the University’s teaching mission, and you can find a list of UW Foundation and Department Funds on the last page. Our contact at the U.W. Foundation, Chris Glueck ([email protected], 608-265-9952) can also assist you in exploring various approaches to support the Department. We want to express our thanks to Brad Singer, who in his role as Department Chair was one of our main contacts in the Department, and wish him the best of luck as he shifts his focus back towards teaching and research. We look forward to working with Harold Tobin as he takes on the job, which is not without its challenges these days. Finally, we look forward to continue adding enthusiastic alumni to our Board, and invite your nominations or expression of interest. Board members serve a four-year term and meet regularly with the Department’s faculty, staff and students in Madison. We are fortunate to act as your representa-

The Board of Visitors

Doug Connell, 2014-2015 BOV Board [email protected]

Geobadgers—On behalf of your Board of Visi-tors, thank you for your outstanding support for the Department over the past year. Your contri-butions and assistance to the Department make a real difference in the experience and education of the next generation of geoscientists, and are critical to maintaining the reputation and stature the Department has developed over the decades. The Board of Visitors is excited about the College of Letters and Sciences “Career Initia-tive” (htpp://go.wisc.edu/lsci), a program to help L&S students find avenues to explore career needs and ensure that their education equips them for life-long learning and career resilience. The effort resonates strongly with the BOV’s efforts to support and mentor students and assist them in exploring and pursuing geosci-ence careers. As an example, we partnered this fall with the College of Engineering’s Geological Engineering Program’s Board of Visitors to hold a career panel discussion where students could pose questions to professionals who have pur-sued various careers in geoscience and geologi-cal engineering. We hope to further assist the College in its efforts, and ask that you stay on the lookout for more communications on how you can participate in the initiative. Other ways we’ve assisted the department include continued support for replacing faculty who have retired or left the Department, and we’re grateful to see the Department be autho-rized to bring on Shaun Marcott (this fall) and Lukas Zoet in 2015 (see New Faculty, page 20). Getting administration approval for new faculty is no small feat and speaks to the excellent re-search and teaching conducted in Weeks Hall. We’re proud of the recognition the Depart-ment’s faculty members and staff receive, includ-ing emeritus professor Robert Dott’s selection by GSA’s History and Philosophy of Geology Division to be the recipient of its 2014 Gerald M. and Sue T. Friedman Distinguished Service Award. We also want to recognize one of our own, Jim Davis (MS 1956; PhD 1965), who was recently named the American Geological Insti-tute’s 2014 Ian Campbell Medalist in recognition of outstanding performance in and contribution to the profession of geology. The Campbell Medal is AGI’s most distinguished award. The Board is proud of the continuing com-munity recognition being gained by the Geology

Board Members / ContactDoug Connell, Chair [email protected] Tim Berge [email protected] Donald Cameron [email protected] Campion [email protected] Doe [email protected] Driese [email protected] Franseen [email protected] Hoffmann [email protected] Johannsen [email protected] Mora [email protected] Pietras [email protected] Sarg [email protected] Shields [email protected] Zinke [email protected]

Senior Advisors / ContactRick Sarg [email protected] Andrews [email protected] Carr [email protected] Ciriacks [email protected] Davis [email protected] Divine [email protected] Emerson [email protected] Erwin [email protected] Fricke [email protected] Holley [email protected] Johnson [email protected] Mack no emailCarol McCartney [email protected] Morgan [email protected] Morrison [email protected] Nauta [email protected] Rinaldo-Lee [email protected] Robertson [email protected] Solien [email protected] (Philip) Stark [email protected] Stephenson [email protected]

tives to the Department, and hope you’ll let us know your suggestions, opinions, and comments on how we can continue supporting its mission and reputation. On behalf of my BOV colleagues, thank you for your support of the Department of Geoscience. l

The Board of Visitors Meeting, October 3, 2014: Left to right seated: Mark Solien, Doug Connell, BOV Chair, Harold Tobin, Department Chair, Jim Davis. Standing: Tom Johnson, Tim Berge, Martin Shields, Steve Johannsen, Evan Franseen, Carol McCartney, and Jamie Robertson. Photo, Mary Diman.


Gifts to the department in 2013: Thank youKenneth Rolf & Ingeborg F. AaltoJohn Ernest & Renae Fjeld AccardoDaniel A. & Cynthia T. AlexanianGemma M. AlmueteAmerican Association of Petroleum

GeologistsAmetek, Inc.Charles F. & Mary P. AndersonJames Lawford Anderson &

Jean Morrison Lance Christopher AndersonHertzel & Dorita AronLawrence James & Donna Lee AsmusRichard Craig Aster & Jan Marie TarrShashank R. AtreDean Esmond & Diana R. AyresJack Arthur & Laurel BabcockJean M. BahrBrian Charles BallMichael Francis BarberMichael Arthur & Liz BarclayRichard Louis BeauheimGina R. BeltHugh Frederick &

Catherine Elizabeth BennettRoss Howard & Nancy BenthienTimothy Bryan S. &

Victoria Clancy BergeRobert Oliver BeringerJonathan Milton & Joann BerksonEdward & Elizabeth BerzinKarl Joseph BethkeMarcia Glee BjornerudRonald Clyde BlakeyCynthia L. BlankenshipRobert Hugh BlodgettJohn M. BlohmGeoffrey Clark BohlingMilton & Laurie R. BoniukLeo Eugene BourcierDewitt Francis BowmanBP North American, Inc.Scott BrandtMichael Robert & Kay Ellen BraunerDeena Grace BraunsteinGarrett & Susan W. BriggsSusan Carolyn BroenkowElwood Ralph & Della Ann BrooksFranz BrotzenWilfred Bottrill BryanThomas M. & Eloise ByrdDonald E. & Tammye R. CameronKirt Michael & Jean M. CampionDaniel M. & Linda R. CapliceTimothy Robert & Margaret CarrDavid Samuel Charlton &

Candace Pierson-CharltonRonald Russell CharpentierAmy I. Cheng & Charles H. SwordDean ChergotisLauren Matthews ChetelChevron Products CompanyKenneth W. & Linda CiriacksCory Christopher &

Elizabeth R. ClechenkoRobert Murri & Suzanne Gavlin CluffJonathan Lee & Doria CobbRobert A. CocchiarellaLorenzo Cohen & Alison JeffriesDouglas Edward ConnellJennie E. CookTheodore Francis CotaJ. Campbell & Dorothy D. CraddockRandy & Catherine CrathJames Kenneth & Nancy Lorraine

Crossfield

Oscar A. & Mary H. CruzSamir & Heeral DaliaDennis Arnold DarbyWilliam Edward Davies & Mary P. RossRichard Albert & Mary Ann DavisJames Clifford &

Caroline Weiss DawsonChuck DeMetsJason J. DiazMark & Liz DiceFrederick Edward &

Donna June DigertDavid Lee & Ruth A. DivineAmalia Celeste DoebbertRobert Schaff DollisonEugene Walter DomackRobert H. & Nancy R. DottSteven George & Marylaine H. DrieseSteven Robert Dunn & Jessica PlautMichael Everett & Jean Carol DurchNathan Charles EckJane Covington EdmondCraig E. EisenJanet Modene & Robert P. ElliottMark E. & Ellen EmersonDiana C. EnerioDaniel E. & L.inda C EpnerMaitri & Derick ErwinStanley Charles FagerlinKurt L. FeiglCharles FindlayD. Ramsey FisherWilliam Mills Fitchen &

Martha Deschamps FitchenSarah K. FortnerJohn H. FournelleDonald Hayes & Maryjean H. FreasGeorge FrederickFrederick August FreyHenry Chester FullerJames H. & Heather A. GamberDavid Anthony & Janice A. GardnerTerrence Melvin Gerlach &

Aniki Litasi-GerlachSteven John & Kay A. GermiatGary Lee Gianniny & Cynthia E. Dott Gregg Mark GibbsRobert Howard &

Linda Carol GillespieJanice L. GillinghamScott D. & Tania Lee GiorgisChristopher & Erin Oredson GlueckChristopher Godinich &

Anne Chang-GodinichAriel Marie GoerlJackson E. & Barbara E. GoffmanJustin Craig GossesJonathan David Greif &

Tamar Helen SmallChristine Marie GriffithDouglas B. & Lynn Macdonald GrohRic Robert & Mary A. GrummerStephen Jay & Linda GuggenheimRebecca A. HackworthCharles Albert HaddoxJohn P. & Betsey J. HagerDean & Eileen HahnDonald A. & Ethel R. HahnStanley Kerry HamiltonBruce HandleyEd Hanel & Ida OrengoJohn Warvelle HarbaughErin Lynne & Andrew HartOrville Dorwin & Helen Lou HartLaurie E. Hartline-Babb &

Robert F. Babb

James Austin HartmanRobert Joseph & Barbara M. HartmanPatricia Marie HartshorneTommye HeinemannFred George & Carol A. HeivilinDonald Ray & Carol Joan Hembre Darrell James HenryPaul Edward HerrEdward Leonard Hershberg &

Valerie Jill PorisRobert Gunn & Elizabeth W. HickmanGlenn Bunji HieshimaJohn Frank HilgenbergJulie Lynn HillThomas F. & Karen Jean HoffmanAdam & Barbara S. HoganThomas K. & Nancy Lynne HolleyDennis Milton & Judith Bertha HoweJeffrey Sheldon HudsonTerrance John Huettl &

Tracey WhitesellSteven T. IltisIsotopxTheodore Emil JacquesMogens & Candy JepsenClark M. Johnson &

Martha A. PernokasJesse C. & Marcy M. JohnsonWilliam Jeffery JohnsonJames Anthony JoyCharles John KaiserWilliam Richard KaiserRobert Frank KaufmannJerome Joseph KendallSally Wright & John W. KendrickKaren M. KennemerDennis Rolland KerrKeith Brindley & Donna Carol KetnerJoe Kington & JoAnn GageRodney Victro &

Joanne Margaret KirkhamHarry Louis Knipp &

Mary Ann OrtmayerJohn Michael &

Edith Hoffman KonopkaJohn Henry KopmeierFrank L. KretzerMark & Mardi KunikRoger & Barbara KussowJudy Sue La KindWilliam E. & Laura J. LaingPenelope Jane LancasterJohn Alan & Carol Mooring LarsonThomas V. & Arra J. LasseJohn LaudonThomas S. & Suzanne L. LaudonJason A. LaufenbergCherie J. LeePatrick Jon LehmannBrian J. & Colleen M. LeighDavid LeithSamantha Elaine LeoneDavid J. & Sheryl L. LesarKyle Thomas & Sherry S. LewallenRichard A. & Patricia N. LewisMing C. & Grace C. LiauEula M. LieberYu-Feng LinLance Robert LindwallGina L. LiuzzaChyrl L. LoweAnne M. LuckeEric Martin & Janet N. LuttrellSteve & Lori MachiorletteCarol Mankiewicz & Carl MendelsonRandall Steven Marquard

Charles Leo MatschKaren M. McCurdyAlice R. McPherson &

Anthony A. Mierzwa Louis R. & Debra S. MeisterDavid Melbourne & Elizabeth BonefasFrank MellenRichard Lewis MertinsTeresa Brandt & David M. MidthunWilliam H. MillsJames Douglass &

Patricia Donald MooreClaudia Ines MoraWilliam A. Morgan & Lori A. MilletJohn & Tashia MorgridgeBruce T. & Lisa MosesMaureen Ann MuldoonJames Arnold &

Elizabeth Davidson MunterRachel Ann MurphyRalph Hamilton NafzigerDavid Charles & Helen F. NagelJames Mark NaniaJay Calhoun Nania &

Silvia D. Orengo-NaniaEdward Adams & Linda S. NeedNewmont Mining CorpMichael Patrick NiebauerTina Marie Johnson NielsenNyal James NiemuthGordon L. NordRobert D. & Heidi A. NowakNu Instruments LtdJonathan Eugene Nyquist &

Laura Ellen ToranEric Kenneth & Casey E. OelkersBrian Joseph & Teresa M. O'NeillDavid Charles & Lisa Michele PadgetDavid W. & Julie T. ParkeDonald E. & Carol L. PaullLynn Ellen PaullRichard Allen & Rachel Kay PaullElizabeth M. Percak-DennettShanan E. PetersDaniel Thomas PetersonMyrtle Dawkins PhillipsWilliam Weston PidcoeJeffrey & Kuwanna Dyer PietrasMichael Lowry Porter &

Rebecca Jane ColeRobert N. & Martha L. PotterSkylar Lawrence & Stefanie M. PrimmSarah Marie PrincipatoRobert E. PyzalskiRaiza R. QuinteroBeverly RamirezE. Richard RandolphVasu & Claudia RaoNicholas Thomas RashidJames E. & Ieva RasmussenHayley RaymerDavid K. & Donna H. ReaHarold Sutton & Jeanne RebholzWilliam Richard Reise &

Dolores G. Ellis-ReiseArthur L. RiceKyle Adam RobertsJames D. & Stella M. RobertsonRae C. RoccaDennis Lee RoderEric P. & Melody RodriguezChristine Rossen & Thomas A. HaugeRoger E. & Celine M.RothenmaierRickie L. RyanMark & Terry L. RydbergNita Sahai

Joanne SamsonJ. Frederick & Ann E. SargMichael L. SargentWilliam A. Sauck & Elen C. CutrimMadeline E. SchreiberRick & Lisa SchrimsherFrederic Lyon SchwabGerald Lee ScottDavid A. & Yvonne B. SearsJanet Ellen & Jean-Christophe SempereO.B. & Rita ShelburneShell Oil CoKirk Wayne & Elizabeth SherwoodMartin L. & Arlyn C. ShieldsKent Rodney SiegelLeon Silverstrom & Mary K. Mulvihill Jeremy John SimplotRichard W. & Maureen SlaughterBenita SlightGeorge Leo SmithMary Anne & Robert D. SobekMark A. & Carol Ann SolienGeorge L. & Ann Ward SpaethFrank SpenceRoger E. & Jeanne A. StahlScott Daniel StanfordEllen StankeDarrell StanleyPhilip H. StarkGeorge John StathisMichael William StephensThomas Edwin & Carol L. StephensonThomas Charles & Diane M. SullivanAlbert Yen SunMichael Louis & Lily A. SweetDaniel Lee & Sandra G. SzymanskiDavid Elias Tabet &

Mary Elizabeth BoudreauAlexander Carl TeelEmmanuelle N. TemplinThermo Fisher Scientific-GermaJeffrey Charles ThompsonClifford H. Thurber &

Judith M. HarackiewiczStephen P. & Susan L. ThurstonSarah Jessica TitusScott Arthur TroemnerAndrew Paul TrzaskusPaul John UmhoeferJohn W. & Andree T. ValleyJean-Paul & Rebecca Van GestelSandra J. Vander VeldenJohn F. & Lois H. VitcendaDale Charles & Laurita H. VodakMaurice A. WarnerRyan D. & Lacie WeberBruce Randall WeertmanWarren William & Judith Louise WegnerJames Lowell WelshJ. Michael WidmierRay Everett & Mary Marks WilcoxKirk R. WilhelmusKeith Evan WinfreeBrett Michael WingfieldMaryjane WisemanMichael Jacob & Caroline WoldenbergJohn Lee & Judith Edworthy WrayPatricia Donovan & Larry J. WrightHuifang XuNancy Neal YeendCharles Thomas & Lois S. YoungDonald Anthony Yurewicz &

Theresa Anne EinhornKurt Frederick ZimmermannPeter A. & Eileen A. Zwart


Distinguished Alumni Awards for 2014

For distinguished leadership in the petroleum industry in advancing technology development both within and outside ExxonMobil, and in providing support for students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

MARK SOLIEN (B.S. 1970, M.S. 1976) is a native of Wisconsin who went on to a distinguished career at Exxon and then Exx-onMobil where he achieved the position of Vice President of Technology at the Exxon-Mobil Exploration Company. After receiving his B.S. in Geology at Madison, Mark spent a few years in the U.S. Navy and then returned to Madison for his M.S. His M.S. thesis, under the guidance of Dave Clark, addressed the biostratigraphy of the Triassic-aged Thaynes Formation in Utah. This started Mark on a lifelong interest in sedimentology and stratigraphy that he applied at Exxon during his 30 year career with that company. Mark began his career in the offshore California Exploration group and followed that assign-ment with a Production stint in Kingsville,

Texas. He then moved into manage-ment with a series of supervisory and manage-rial positions that included Exploration Manager of

Esso UK. During his Production Supervisory assignment in Corpus Christi, he brought the new technology of sequence stratigraphy into that office resulting new reserve adds in a mature field area. Following the merger of Mobil and Exxon in 2000, Mark became the Vice President of Technology and was a key

MARK SOLIEN

For a seminal textbook and software that has transformed the groundwater consulting industry, and for distinguished research and sustained service.

figure in merging the technical strengths of each company that enhanced the merged company’s technical prowess. During his career Mark has remained dedicated to the Geoscience Department in Madison and has always been a great proponent of the Wis-consin Way and the idea of multiple working hypotheses promulgated by T. C. Chamber-lain. During and before his membership on the Board of the Department Geoscience, Mark has supported and continues to actively support the development of future genera-tions of geoscience professionals. Mark is retired to the Big Island in Hawaii and cur-rently volunteers as a geologic docent at the National Parks on that island. —Rick Sarg, Citationist

CHUNMIAO ZHENG (Ph.D. 1988) is a Chair Professor at Peking University and the Lindahl Professor of Hydrogeology, University of Alabama. He came to Wisconsin in December 1984, receiving the Ph.D. under Mary Anderson. After graduation he worked for S.S. Papadopulos & Associates, Inc. He is currently on extended leave from Alabama to pursue teaching and research in China where he is the founder and director of the Center for Water Research at Peking University, soon to be expanded to the Institute of Water Science. At Wisconsin, Chunmiao developed a computer program to trace groundwater flow lines. While with Papadopulos & Associates, he started working on a code for simulat-ing contaminant transport in groundwater (MT3DMS). This landmark code is a boon to researchers and has fundamentally trans-

sential to accurate prediction of transport. Chunmiao has received numerous awards and recognition. In China, he was a recipient of the “1000 Talents” program awarded by the national government. He last visited Madison as the Birdsall-Dreiss Distinguished Lecturer of the Geological Society of America (GSA). He is a fellow of GSA and a recipient of an Excellence in Science and Engineering Award from the National Ground Water Association (NGWA). In 2013, he was honored with both the O.E. Meinzer Award from the Hydrogeol-ogy Division of GSA and the M.K. Hubbert Award from the NGWA. He has served as an associate editor for four hydrology journals and for nine years was editor of the software column for Ground Water. He is currently a deputy editor-in-chief for Acta Geologica Sinica, the flagship English journal of the Geological Society of China. —Mary P. Anderson, Citationist

CHUNMIAO ZHENG

formed the groundwater consulting industry. His popular, extremely well written textbook on contaminant transport modeling is accessible to

both students and professionals. Chunmiao regularly uses MT3DMS in his research, for example to investigate preferential flow paths, which control the movement of contaminants in groundwater. His work demonstrated that field identification and description of small scale heterogeneities that form connected zones of high hydraulic conductivity are es-


Phil Brown

The 2014 Undergrad Spring Break field trip targeted the southern Appalachians for eight days of geology and fun — it was a success. The first Saturday’s drive ended with 25 undergraduates, a volunteer TA (Allie Macho) and me in a campground at Mammoth Cave N.P. On Sunday we continued south and east and were introduced to Appalachian structures west of Dunlap, TN. Here the 1km+ long outcrop exposes one of the westernmost Alleganian thrusts, the Dunlap-Cumberland Plateau Decollement. Thin coal beds and minor shales provide the preferred slip surfaces during the westward transport of the rock package. Two nights camping along the Ocoee River (just downstream from the Whitewater venue from the Atlanta Olympics) provided time to examine other examples of Appalachian deformation and the famous Ducktown, TN massive sulfide mining area. When mining ceased in the early 1980s, more than a

Students in the FieldSpring Break 2014Undergrads in the Southern Appalachians

Overview of the granite dimension stone quarry near Atlanta with our students, center, shows the scale of the operation. Photos, Phil Brown.

hundred square kms of land were effectively denuded following decades of cutting timber

for the mines and originally open smelting of the sulfide ore, the latter resulting in severe acid rain and the washing away of topsoil. In a testament to the humid subtropical climate (and the spread of the Kudzu vine) the last 30 years have revegetated the area nearly completely. On Tuesday we drove east to examine high-grade metamorphic rocks in the deeper portions of the Appalachian orogen and then south to camp two nights NE of Atlanta. Watson Mill S.P. provided a base allowing a visit to an abandoned kyanite mine (Graves Mtn) where some of the students collected ilmenite crystals several centimeters in size — spectacular. Wednesday afternoon we had a very informative tour of one of the granite dimension stone quarries and factories where tombstones were fashioned by skilled craftsmen working with both traditional hammers and chisels as well as modern computer controlled machines. (Wisconsin is still the third largest US

producer of dimension stone, Georgia ranks fifth.) Wednesday night we had dinner with Doug Crowe, now the Chair of the geology department at UGA and an Economic Geology PhD from UW. On Thursday we started back north visiting the famous Brevard zone in North Carolina — the Brevard records a classic transect across a ductile shear zone that marks a region of significant shortening during the Appalachian Orogeny. We had a large campground in the NE corner of the Great Smoky N.P. all to ourselves that night and on Friday we drove across the Smokies and returned to Mammoth N.P. for our last night before taking the Historic Cave Tour and returning to Madison. Trips such as this are important to the broad education of our undergraduates and the department thanks all our alumni who have contributed to the Field Experiences Fund. l

Undergrads examine Appalachian structures in a road cut west of Dunlap, Tennessee.


Phil Brown

In the fall of 2013, 68 students enrolled in Geosci 202 a course whose name perhaps disguises its true aim, that of helping all our undergraduates become more adept at 3D visualization and thinking. The three “lecture” meetings per week are peppered with hands-on small group work and are designed to ready the students for the meat of the course, the weekly labs and all-important field trips. The very first Saturday after school starts has half the class spending the day in western Dane County learning about topographic maps and landscapes dominated by erosional processes. The other half of the class travels east for a day in the glacial depositional terrain of Kettle Moraine. And on Sunday the two groups change destinations. The highlight of the course is the four-day trip to the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota. A Wednesday all-night coach bus ride (two coaches now!) deposits the bleary-eyed students and staff in a parking area at the eastern end of the Badlands for a stand-up, three-course breakfast of juice, fruit, and bagels. Much of the rest of Thursday is spent looking at the rocks and structures exposed

Students in the FieldGeoscience 202An Introduction to Geologic Structures

in the Badlands. The Cenozoic formations exposed there are largely fluvial in origin and record the Paleogene-Oligocene uplift of the Black Hills. Their most notable features include repeated development of brightly colored paleosols (fossil soil horizons) and the preservation of a rich assemblage of fossil mammals and amphibians. The day finally ends with the arrival at our campground at the base of Bear Butte, NE of Sturgis. Bear Butte and Elkhorn Peak to the west are examples of laccoliths, ‘flying saucer’ shaped igneous bodies that are intruded into the relatively flat-lying sedimentary succession and inflate and deform the

overlying strata. Elkhorn Peak provides the basis for one of the later labs in the course — the geological interpretation of an air photo of this nearly circular feature with its concentric bands of outcrop. Having seen the actual peak in the field provides an important link between the photos and the real world. Friday and Saturday are spent in the

northern Black Hills mapping sedimentary strata deformed by the uplift of the Precambrian igneous/metamorphic core of the mountain range. On the NE side of the Black Hills I-90 lies in the “race track”, the topographic depression that lies between the outer hog backs (flat irons) of Mesozoic Fall River sandstone and the inner ridges comprised of Paleozoic carbonate and sandstone units. The “race track” is also referred to as the Red Valley as it is underlain by the red shales of the lower Triassic Spearfish formation. This succession of dipping red and white clastic and carbonate

units provides an opportunity to map while hiking down section toward the Precambrian basement — this is the “Red Gate/White Gate” exercise. The city of Lead provides an opportunity for the students to examine the basal Cambrian Deadwood Fm (yeah — that Deadwood), the now closed Homestake gold mine, and one of many small enigmatic Eocene igneous intrusions that puncture the Precambrian through Mesozoic strata at the northern end of the Black Hills. The spectacular open pit of the Homestake Mine (1876-2002) overlies an underground development that reached more than 8000’ below the city and that has been used for scientific studies from rock mechanics to high-energy physics. Most years the trip does not find time for the classic tourist stops further south in the Black Hills (e.g. Rushmore, Crazy Horse) or visits to the famous pegmatite mines but last year we used a bad weather day to cross into Wyoming and see Devil’s Tower. We could easily keep the students busy for a week but the real world of other classes in Madison calls and Sunday morning finds the students back on the coaches for the 11-12 hour drive back to Wisconsin. Again the department thanks donors to the Field Experiences Fund for making trips like this possible, enriching the experiences of our undergraduate majors. l

Basil with the bullhorn on the first chilly morning in the Badlands. Photos, Phil Brown.

Homestake gold mine open pit with abundant intrusions.


Brad Singer

From August 23 to 31, 2014, faculty members Basil Tikoff, Brad Singer, and Laurel Goodwin co-led a field trip to Eastern California to explore several Mesozoic granitoid plutons and the Quaternary Bishop Tuff, which was created by the supervolcanic eruption that formed the Long Valley Caldera. Structural geologists and petrologists alike also contemplated mechanical and chemical controls on the character of faults and shear zones formed at different structural levels. This trip was supported by the Student Field Experiences Fund and followed a spring 2014 semester seminar on this topic. UW Student participants in this field trip were: Erik Haroldson, Alan Schaen, Christine Barszewski, Nicolas Garibaldi, Maureen Kahn, and Saurabh Ghanekar. Our group camped in the Sierra Nevada and White Mountains in California. We first visited the Cretaceous Tuolumne Intrusive Suite,

Student Field Experiences TripAssembly of silicic magma chambers—plutonic and volcanic perspectives.

Students in the Field

Fig. 1: Group on Tuolumne Instrusive Series. Photos, Brad Singer

Fig. 3: Brad with disaggregated basaltic dike in Half Dome Granodiorite.

Fig. 2: Basil pointing out Cathedral Peak Granodiorite.

Fig. 4: Curious cross cutting graded layers in Half Dome Granodiorite.

a plutonic complex that includes early granodiorites that grade inward to porphyritic granodiorite and granite spectacularly exposed in Yosemite National Park (Figures 1 & 2). The group spent time pondering the origins of internal pluton contacts, disaggregated basaltic dikes, and igneous schlieren, all of which might signal the intrusion of new magma into partly solidified magma/mush (Figures 3 & 4). On day two, following a time-consuming flat tire on U.S. 395, we visited four outcrops of the 650 km3 rhyolitic Bishop Tuff that erupted 767,000 years ago in a hemisphere-altering cataclysm. These deposits of airfall tephra and pyroclastic flows have influenced thinking about supervolcanoes and the

magma chambers that feed them for decades (Figure 5). We next headed for the Cretaceous Papoose Flat pluton in the Inyo Mountains that preserves a superb record of fabric development within the pluton and coeval deformation, including spectacular stretching and thinning of the Cambrian calc-silicate metasedimentary wall rocks (Figure 6). In the afternoon, we descended into Owens Valley and studied the lava flows of the Late Quaternary Big Pine Volcanic Field, a young basaltic complex that erupted deep crustal and mantle xenoliths in many of

its lavas. We then visited remote outcrops of the Eureka-Joshua Flat-Beer Creek plutonic complex adjacent to Deep Springs Valley (Figure 7). The traverse across the wall rock-pluton contact revealed highly sheared metacarbonate wall rocks, aplite dikes, quartz veins, and foliated granitoids. The afternoon gave us a rare opportunity to visit the world's oldest living things: the bristlecone pine trees in the Shulman Grove of the White Mountains in Inyo National Forest. We photographed trees known to be more than 4,600 years old. Linked to the dendrochronology from dead trees, more

(Continued, next page)


than 10,600 years of life are recorded in this grove. The next day we joined 30 students from the University of Arizona and Professor Mark Barton on a spectacular tour of the remote Birch Creek pluton in the White Mountain Range. Mark has spent >30 years mapping this pluton. In a remarkably clairvoyant fashion, he unveiled its many internal contact relations and wall-rock metasomatism as we peppered him with questions. We also connected with alumna Allie Macho (GeoBadger BS 2013, Outstanding Junior in 2012), one of Mark's current graduate students. Overall, everyone had a good time and agreed that we had seen some fabulous rocks. l

Fig. 7: Descending across border of the Beer Creek Pluton toward Deep Springs Lake.

Fig. 5: Bishop Tuff airfall beds and pyroclastic flows at Chalfant Quarry.

(Singer continued)

Fig.6: Basil explaining deformation in Papoose Flat Pluton

The Chair's Travels

From Summer 2014 e-news @geoscienceDuring the spring semester, 2014 Department Chair, Brad Singer traveled to connect with alumni in California, Texas, and Colorado. A key part of these alumni events, and his meetings with employers of large numbers of our graduates, was to update alumni on new or novel research underway across the Department, and importantly to discuss Departmental priorities for philanthropy during the next several years. Brad described plans by Department faculty that, to the extent possible, new gifts be used to strengthen support for graduate student Research Assistantships. On March 8th, Brad hosted a dinner at the Stanford Park Hotel, Palo Alto, CA attended by 25 alumni of the UW-Madison Geoscience and Physics Departments. Shanan Peters gave a keynote presentation on his GeoDeepDive project on data mining and the geoscientific literature that sparked a lively after-dinner discussion. In Houston, TX, alums Cory and Liz Clechenko graciously opened their home for a GeoBadger barbecue on May 10th. This turned out to be a great afternoon of Texas brisket (difficult to find brats in Houston!), beer, and a lot of catching up among more than 50 alumni spanning several generations of Department graduates. Brad then visited alumni

A barbecue at the home of Cory and Liz Clechenko in Houston on May 10th. Visible in this photo (from left) are Jenny Cook, JoAnne Gage, Cory in Badger regalia, Joe Kington, Kyle Fredricks, Alex Teel, Toni Simo, Bill Morgan, and Colin Walling. Photo, Brad Singer.

and recruiting staff at BP, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips on May 12-14 to give an overview of Department research salient to the energy industry and provide the companies with an inside view of our student demographics and graduate program.


Degrees AwArDeD, December 2013-August 2014Undergraduate Degrees

December 2013Erin C. Berns (GLE)Peter W. Boettcher (GLE)Brigitte L. Brown (GLE)Paul B.Crossett.Christopher W. Dawson (GLE)Matthew R.FoxKevin M. Gildea (GLE)Justin J. HillebrandCarl T. Holtan (GLE)Benjamin J. LinkSam J. PatrickJohn D. PeperBrigitta L. RongstadHillary A. SchmidtBenjamin L. Tanko (GLE)

May 2014Jackson S BorchardtNicholas A. BurgerJohn F. ChenKyle D. ErdmannChristopher D. ErlandsonRichard R. FenskeErik D. Friede (GLE)Erin N. Gross (GLE)Steven R. Henning (GLE)Jesse D. HolmAdam M. JannkeShelby T. KailBrett D. Kravitz (GLE)Lauren L. LandeKara D. McClement (GLE)Brendan L. McGarityMichael J. MillerAmanda J. MontgomeryRaymond V. NechvatalThiruchelvi R. ReddyKyle W. RomensSarah E. Sager (GLE)Cara P. Sandlass (GLE)David R. SandvigLindsey V. ShanksNicholas P. Stefani (GLE)Jacob R. Wolf

August 2014Paulo E. Florio (GLE)Kyle J. Groves (GLE)John N. MaloneyChristopher J. Perez

Ph.D. DegreesDecember 2013Shannon E. Graham, DeMets, Earthquake Cycle Deformation in Mexico and Central America Constrained by GPS: Implications for Coseismic, Postseismic, and Slow Slip

May 2014Elizabeth Percak-Dennett, Roden, Microbial Iron Redox Cycling in Terrestrial Environments

Tao Wu, Roden, Microbial reduction of iron oxides and phyllosilicates in natural sediments

August 2014Wasinee Aswasereelert, Meyers, A quantitative evaluation of orbital influence on lacustrine and marine environments during the Cenozoic, with case studies from the Green River Formation (Eocene) and the world’s ocean (late Paleogene-present)

Deborah L. Rook, Geary, Unearthing Evolution: Connecting Geological and Biological Histories in the Fossil Record of North America

Kelsey Winsor, Carlson, A chronology of late Quaternary southwestern Greenland ice sheet retreat using terrestrial and marine records

Master's DegreesDecember 2013Miao Du, Meyers, Comparing Nonlinear Climate Responses to Orbital-Insolation During the Pleistocene and Early Miocene: A Bicoherence Study

Ray J. Ostrander, Geary, Effects of Climate Variability on Evolutionary Tempo and Mode in Cretaceous and Neogene Marine Mollusks

May 2014Tamara N. Jeppson, Tobin, Multi-Scale Analysis of San Andras Fault Zone Physical Properties

Dana M. Smith, Goodwin, Pseudotachylytes of South Mountains metamorphic core complex, AZ: a record of low-angle normal fault seismicity

August 2014Ethan E. Castongia, Wang, An Experimental Investigation of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) on Lake Ice

Erik L. Haroldson, Brown, Fluid inclusion and stable isotope study of Magino; a magmatic related Archean gold deposit

Megan J. Haserodt, Bahr, Effects of roads on groundwater flow patterns in peatlands and implications for nearby salmon streams on the Kenai Peninsula, AK

Xintong Jiang, Xu, Investigation of Calcite and Mg-bearing Calcite Growth Rate by Using Flow-through Fluid Cell

Sarah A. Lemon, Thurber, Ambient Noise Tomography of the Katmai Volcanic Cluster

Minglu Liu, Xu, Study on microbial biomass-mediated crystallization of dolomite in a hypersaline lake

Christopher J. Rawles, Thurber, Microseismicity near the central Alpine Fault, South Island, New Zealand: Focal Mechanisms and State of Stress

Allen J. Schaen, Singer, 40Ar/39Ar geochronology and geochemistry of the Eocene-

Pleistocene Delarof Islands, Aleutian Arc

Allison M. Wende, Johnson, Identifying distinct mantle and crustal influences in individual cone-building stages at Mt. Shasta using U-Th and Sr isotopes

Our recruitment booth at national meetings now has a beautiful GeoBucky tablecloth thanks to the efforts of alum John Naranjo at BP. Photo, Michelle Szabo.


R.H. Dott, Jr. (Emeritus)

There was an important, but forgotten, chapter in the Department’s history during the early 1980s. Of the present faculty, only Phil Brown, John Valley, and Herb Wang were here. I refer to a brief period when, soon after the opening of China in the late 1970s, we hosted six Chinese scholars, each of whom was with us for two years of remedial education. They were in their forties and had suffered the deprivations of Mao Tse Tung’s decade-long Cultural Revolution when intellectuals were forced into farm labor or other menial tasks. Consequently, they had been unable to practice their professions, much less to keep up with new developments. For example, during a visit to China in 1977, UW Chancellor Irving Shain learned that the chemistry department at Beijing University had been occupied by street people, who had broken up the lab benches for firewood. The new Chinese government recognized the serious setbacks in all intellectual fields, but especially science and engineering, so it responded enthusiastically to proposals by a UW delegation led by Chancellor Shain in 1979 to provide remedial studies for more than 400 Chinese scholars here at Madison. The scholars came for two years, leaving families at home in China. They received modest stipends from China, but most of them lived communally by crowding together in apartments to economize. UW faculty mentors planned a program of study and research. Some of the programs led to the awarding of MS degrees and/or publications. Huazhao “Henry” Mai worked with me and did a subsurface study of the St. Peter Sandstone in Wisconsin utilizing well records and samples kept by the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey. The results were published in 1985 by the Survey. Qinbao “Bob” Chin presented results of his conodont studies with Dave Clark at the 1983 North Central GSA meeting. Besides their formal programs of study and research, the scholars experienced social interactions with faculty families and fellow students. Henry and other scholars visited our home several times, especially

at holidays. After they returned to China, we received regular holiday greeting cards and occasional letters. Henry even phoned. Personal interactions were doubtless as educational as the scientific ones. I witnessed one very heated exchange between Geoffrey Zhu and a bright woman student from Taiwan about the merits of communism versus capitalism. Field trips were of special value and on one occasion two scholars accompanied Lloyd Pray’s trip to the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas and New Mexico. The group flew to El Paso and overnighted there before starting the field trip. Our students went across the border that evening to see Juarez, Mexico and the two scholars went along. No one thought of the problem of returning into the USA. Being naive about immigration matters the scholars had not brought passports on the field trip. Professor Pray was awakened in the wee hours by a call from the border crossing and fortunately he was able to vouch adequately for them with the proviso that the two men must report to the Milwaukee U.S. Immigration Office immediately after returning to Wisconsin. When a scholar returned to China after two years, his or her UW mentor received an invitation to come with spouse for an all-expense paid lecture and sightseeing tour. Professor Craddock was the first to be invited. It was early in the program so China was barely emerging from the Mao era and facilities were basic and rudimentary. I recall Craddock telling of freezing in an unheated dormitory room at night in spite of donning all of the clothes he had brought including a heavy coat. The padded, blue Mao jackets were everywhere and dress was uniformly drab, he reported. My turn came in August of 1986 when Nancy and I spent three wonderful weeks on the trip of a lifetime. We flew to Beijing and were met by Henry Mai. To our delight he was to be our guide and translator for my lectures. This was ideal as Henry had become almost a member of our family. The blue jackets were rarely seen now and there was a little variety of dress. Buses were prominent, but the few autos belonged only to the government and could be driven

only by specially authorized drivers. Bicycles were countless and dominated even the major highways. We saw everything from furniture to a huge slaughtered hog draped over the back. Photos we see of Beijing auto traffic today as well as the forests of high-rise buildings seem otherworldly to us. The rapidity of the changes is breathtaking. Before going to China, I had been invited to name places we wished to visit. I presented a list of about ten sights and guessed that we would be lucky to get to even a fraction, but, lo and behold, we were taken to all of them! For my lectures, I offered four different topics from which I expected one might be chosen at each place, but they wanted all four everywhere that I lectured. At Xian they wanted me to lecture on a very sunny morning in a large, gymnasium-size auditorium with very large windows, but with no way to darken the room. I suggested that this presented a problem for projecting

Forgotten HistoryTHE ARCHIVIST’S CORNER

Chinese Scholars in the Department of Geology & Geophysics, 1981-84

CHIN, Qinbao “Bob”, 1981-83, Institute of Petroleum Exploration & Production in Hubei Province—Conodont research with David Clark.LIN, Chengyi “Charlie”, 1981-83, Nanjing University—Studied mineralogy with Sturges Bailey.MAI, Huazhao “Henry”, 1982-84, Bureau of Marine & Petroleum Geology in Wuxi—Studied stratigraphy and sedimentology with Robert H. Dott.SUN, Ying, 1982-84, Amoy Oceanographic Institute—Studied marine geophysics with Clarence Clay.WANG, Yunyu, 1982-84, Acoustics Institute of Academica Sinica, Beijing—Studied geophysics with Clarence Clay.ZHU, Guoqiang “Geoffrey”, 1981-83, Chengdu University—Studied structural geology with Campbell Craddock.

Translation:Chasing the Memory of a Piece of History


here at Madison. I recall a particularly large banquet here. The banquets were an experience! Typically they featured six courses, any one of which could fill us, and they always finished with a very large fish (carp). There were many toasts using three different powerful beverages. It took a very strong constitution to rise to these culinary challenges. We travelled by train to Wuxi near Shanghai. Wuxi is the silk culturing center of China and Henry’s place of employment at that time. From there we flew to Guilin to see the famous Chinese Karst region. It was a special thrill to see from a boat along the Lin River those towering cliffs carved by groundwater solution in a humid climate from a plateau of Devonian carbonate rocks. Sure enough, those seemingly impossible vertical cliffs with black staining and cave openings high above valley floors so common in many Chinese paintings actually do exist. The last lecture stop on our tour was Guangzhou (Canton) in the southeast of China. It was from this region that early

slides, but they did not appreciate my comment until they witnessed hardly visible images on the solar-lighted screen. For my afternoon lecture, we were ushered into a different room with what appeared to be a variety of bedspread and drapery materials taped over the windows in a kaleidoscopic fashion. At Wuxi the power failed in the middle of one of my lectures, which I learned was a common problem. While some men were sent off to organize a portable generator, the group adjourned outdoors for a smoke and what dedicated smokers they were! At Xian, the ancient capital, we saw the famous terra cotta soldiers and the ancient Qin Ling tomb. I had asked for some field trips if possible, so from Xian we took a two-day trip by vans north about 300 km to Yan‘an where Mao had organized his 1949 revolution while living in cave houses carved into the famous thick loess deposits. For this trip into the outback, we had to have special passports. En route, we stayed overnight in a small city where blue jackets were abundant and the people had never seen westerners. They stared unabashedly and my blonde wife was a particular curiosity. At Yan’an, several young men stopped us during a walk to practice speaking English. Our field trip was a bit of a disappointment for we made only four stops during the two days and only looked closely at one outcrop. However, we got to see a lot of countryside. At Nanjing, we were re-united with Charlie Lin, who had been with Henry Mai

Chinese immigrants came to California. Here we bade fond farewell to Henry and flew to Hong Kong. What a trip it had been! When our scholars left the United States, most of them took electric appliances such as stoves and small refrigerators. I wondered if these gadgets would be compatible with their home circuitry. Henry was delighted with the home ice cream maker he had seen at my home (photo) and bought one to take back to China. After Henry returned to Wuxi from Madison, he was promoted to his bureau’s office in Beijing. For a time, he then served in Houston when the company was considering investing in American petroleum ventures. Clearly his Scholar’s experience at Wisconsin stood Henry in good stead. He retired a few years ago and now resides in Sydney, Australia, where his two sons live. The Chinese Scholars Program was a great success both intellectually and socially, a fine people-to-people venture. It was a great tribute to the vision of Chancellor Irving Shain, who directed what was to be the very first Chinese exchange program in the U.S. Ms. Marjorie Johnson, who was the coordinator of the International Program of Scholarly Exchange in the Graduate School, deserved a great deal of credit for the successful implementation of the program and for so warmly welcoming all of the scholars while they were on campus. After the fifth year of the program, the Chinese government shifted its support to younger, undergraduate students. l

Chinese Scholars and their advisors, September 1982. L to R: Zhu Guoqiang, J.C. Craddock, Yunyu Wang, Qinbao Chin, C.S. Clay, D.L Clark, Ying Sun, Huazhao Mai, Lin Chengyi, R.H. Dott, S.W. Bailey. Photo, Department archive.

Henry Mai, left, and Bob Chin making ice cream, cranking an old fashioned ice cream maker at a holiday party at the Dotts' house, winter 1983.Photo, Bob Dott.


Richard B. Alley, Evan Pugh Professor at the Pennsylvania State University (UW-PhD 1987, Distinguished Alumnus 2005), is the 2014 recipient of the Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship. Alley is being honored for his innovative studies of the flow of ice sheets and ice streams, which have important implications for the stability of Earth's major ice masses in Antarctica and Greenland. He greatly enhanced the ability to date and interpret annual layers in ice cores and thus added precision to understanding of past variations in climate. The Day Prize is awarded every three years by the National Academy of Sciences to an individual who has made lasting contributions to knowledge of the physics of the Earth.

Assistant Professor Samantha Hansen, at the University of Alabama, was one of 102 researchers to receive the highly prestigious “Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers”. Professor Hansen studies mountain building and geodynamics. She received two degrees from UW-Madison, a BS in Geological Engineering (2000) and an MS in Geology and Geophysics (2002), before obtaining her PhD at UC Santa Cruz.

Professor Jean Bahr was named one of the Senior Editors for the prestigious AGU Journal: Water Resources Research.

Philip Gopon won an AGU Best Student Paper Award at the Dec. 2013 Meeting, one of the five Awards in VGP, for his paper on Low Voltage electron microprobe analysis of Fe-silicides from the Earth and Moon.

Steve Sellwood received the graduate student best presentation award at the Wisconsin Section of the American Water Resources Association Meeting in March 2014.

Sharon McMullen received honorable mention for her poster presented at the 10th North American Paleontological Convention held in Florida in February. The paper was titled "Controls on the stratigraphic distribution of non-marine fossils: a case study in the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation, western USA".

Professor Emerita Mary Anderson received the 2014 College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Award from the University of Buffalo, as a distinguished aluma.

In the News: Honors and Acknowledgements

Emeritus Professor Bob Dott, received the Friedman Distinguished Service Award of the History and Philosophy of Geology Division of GSA, at the 2014 Vancouver Meeting. The award recognizes Bob "for his teaching and mentorship which have proven unmatched in instilling an appreciation for and encouraging studies in the history of the geosciences among students and colleagues both within and well beyond the Division."

Emeritus Professor Dave Clark was recently awarded the Pander Medal of the conodont society (see photo).

YaoQuan Zhou received third place in the Geosyntec Student Paper Competition for her paper: "Imaging Subsurface Properties Using Oscillatory Hydraulic Tomography: Testing the theory using a Sandbox.”

Andria Ellis was awarded an NSF-sponsored fellowship for her ongoing research with Global Positioning System data from the newly completed CoCoNet geodetic network in the Caribbean and Central America.

Board of Visitors Senior Advisor James Davis (MS 1956; PhD 1965) was awarded the 2014 Ian Campbell Medal. The AGI award, in Memory of Ian Campbell, for Superlative Service to the Geosciences is awarded in recognition of outstanding performance in and contribution to the profession of geology. The Campbell Medal is the most distinguished AGI award.

Three alumni have been elected to GSA Fellow and were recognized at the 2014 meeting in Vancouver: Charlie Andrews (MS and PhD), Distinguished Alumnus Carl Fricke, and Bob Sterrett (MS and PhD).

Professors Chuck DeMets and John Valley received the UW University Housing's 2013 Honored Instructor Awards. They were nominated by students in introductory classes.

Professor Shanan Peters received the Charles Schuchert Award from the Paleontological Society, which is awarded to

Ray Ethington (U of Missouri), left, former president of the Christian Pander Society, presents the Pander Society Medal to Dave Clark. The medal is presented periodically for significant contributions to conodont research, but usually this is done at a GSA meeting, not in the field, in this case on an outcrop of the Opohonga Formation (Ordovician) in west-central Utah, September 13, 2014. Photo, Dave Clark.

“a person under 40 whose work early in his or her career reflects excellence and promise in the science of paleontology and thus reflects the objectives and standards of the Paleontological Society.”

Professor John Valley has been named to the Board of Governors of the Gemological Society of America. GIA is a non-profit organization whose mission is to “ensure the public trust in gems and jewelry” through education, research, and evaluation and grading of gems. GIA publishes the influential magazine Gems and Gemology. John will be the only physical scientist on the Board.

Heather Macdonald (MS 1979, PhD 1984, Distinguished Alumna 2011), Chancellor Professor of Geology at William & Mary, has been honored with AGU's 2014 Excellence in Geophysical Education Award for "advancing and communicating science" and the Robert Christman Award of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers.

Fred Frey, (PhD 1987 Chemistry), of MIT, will receive the Distinguished Geologist Career award at the 2014 GSA meeting in Vancouver. The award emphasizes a geologic and multidisciplinary approach. Dr. Frey was a recipient of our department's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2006. l


Student Awards and Scholarships for 2014George J. Verville Fund, with BP

Ben Linzmeier, Jody Wycech

The Stanley A. Tyler Excellence in Teaching Awards

Nathaniel Fortney, Michael Johnson

The Thomas E. Berg Excellence in Teaching Awards

Christine Barszewski, Ad Byerly, Allison Wende

The James J. and Dorothy T. Hanks Graduate Student Award in Geophysics

Hélène Le Mével

The Mark & Carol Ann Solien Research Assistantship

Steven Sellwood—Presenter, Mark Solien

The Dean L. Morgridge Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in Geology

Richard Becker

The S.W. Bailey Distinguished Graduate Fellowship

Zhizhang Shen

The S.W. Bailey Scholarship

Nathan Andersen

The Jay C. Nania Graduate Student AwardsBen Linzmeier, Marshal Tofte

—Presenter, Silvia Orengo Nania

The S.W. Bailey Distinguished Graduate Student

Meagan Ankney

The Wasatch-Uinta Field Camp Scholarships—Funded by:

Herbert & Alice Weeks Fund; BP Jackson Borchardt, Chase Kresl,

Lindsey Shanks Mike Bahrmasel, Jasiu (Jas) Raczynski,

Hannah Maas, Ben Stark Kyle Erdmann, Jacob Krause, Mike Schiltz,

Calvin (Cal) Schubbe Zarek Boutaghou, Matt Schallinger,

Austin Cary, Muyuan Han

The Outstanding Sophomore Award Kelley Korinek

The Winchell Scholarships to Foreign Students

Philip Adoe, Yihang Fang, Junzhe Liu, Bharat Madras Natarajan

Salsabila Nazari, Tuan Syazana TuanAbRashid

The James J. & Dorothy T. Hanks Undergraduate Award in Geophysics

Kara McClement

The Carl and Val Dutton Scholarship Sean Strasser

The Paull Family Undergraduate Scholarships

Margaret Butzen, N. Scott Hagar, Steven Henning, Melissa Meyer Jasiu Raczynski, Kyle Romens,

Alia Schroeder

The Lowell R. Laudon Outstanding Junior ScholarshipsEleanor Bloom, Patrick Heiman,

Chase Kresl

The S.W. Bailey Outstanding Student Research Paper Awards–First Author

Elizabeth M. Percak-DennettIron isotope geochemistry of biogenic magnetite-bearing sediments from the Bay of Vidy, Lake Geneva. Chemical geology. 01/2013; 360-361:32-40.

Zhizhang ShenSTEM investigation of exsolution lamellae and “c” reflections in Ca-rich dolomite from the Platteville Formation, western Wisconsin. American Mineralogist (April 2013), 98(4):760-766.

C.F. Schiesser Outstanding Student Research Paper Awards–First Author

Meagan E. AnkneyDistinguishing lower and upper crustal processes in magmas erupted during the buildup to the 7.7 ka climactic eruption of Mount Mazama, Crater Lake, Oregon, using 238U–230Th disequilibria. Mineralogy and Petrology 166 (2), 563-585.

Chloë E. BonamiciIntragrain oxygen isotope zoning in titanite by SIMS: Cooling rates and fluid infiltration along the Carthage-Colton Mylonite Zone, Adirondack Mountains, NY, USA. Journal of Metamorphic Geology. Volume 32, Issue 1, pp 71–92, January 2014.

Ian J. OrlandSeasonal climate signals (1990–2008) in amodern Soreq Cave stalagmite as revealed by high-resolution geochemical analysis. Chemical Geology 363, 322-333.

Recently at our GeoBadger reception, GSA 2014 in Vancouver: Jonathan Carter, left, hydro grad student Steve Sellwood, center, and Dave Malone. Photos, Michelle Szabo.

At GSA 2014 in Vancouver: Grad students in structure, Bridget Garnier Hanna Bartram.


because the geology is fascinating. Much of the western edge of North America consists of accreted (or suspect) terranes that have been added to North America (Figure 1). Nowhere is the boundary more obvious or abrupt than in western Idaho. Imagine Boise as waterfront property in the Early Cretaceous. Nowadays, however, near the towns of Riggins or McCall, Idaho, you can literally stroll from accreted terranes to granitic rocks that intruded North American in a short distance (about 5 km). That boundary is also demarked by a 5 km wide zone of mylonitic rocks of the western Idaho shear zone (WISZ). The Outcrop cover photo (Figure 2) shows Nicole Braudy measuring some of these mylonitic rocks. It turns out that the boundary also has sharp geochemical gradients (Sr, O) that were studied by Elizabeth King (PhD 2001) working with John Valley, Clark Johnson, and Brian Beard (King et al. 2007). Prior to the EarthScope funding, I was fortunate to have two very talented graduate students work in the area (Scott Giorgis, PhD, 2004; Bryn Benford, MS, 2008). Scott worked out the exact kinematics (dextral transpression) of the western Idaho shear zone, and constrained the timing of movement and exhumation (Giorgis et al., 2008). We also speculated that the cause of the abrupt transition from accreted terranes to North America was that the WISZ modified

an original boundary (Giorgis et al., 2005). Bryn Benford demonstrated that the western Idaho shear zone continued south of the western Snake River plain, into the Owyhee Mountains of SW Idaho (Benford et al., 2010). Interestingly, the shear zone was oriented 20 degrees differently in this area (NNE-oriented, rather than NS-oriented as by McCall, ID). I should also say that many undergraduates — most notably a very nice senior thesis by John Gillaspay — worked in this area. These students really laid the groundwork for the EarthScope proposal. So, what did we do? Most of the work consisted of a 450 km-long, EW-oriented active-source seismic line that went across the western Idaho shear zone and the adjacent Idaho batholith (Figure 3). This aspect involved deploying 1600 seismometers in three days, blowing up the explosives to make a seismic source, and then taking out 1600 seismometers in three days. Oh, and there was a major forest fire on the eastern end of the line that almost caused us to postpone the whole deployment (My experience is that active source geophysics is a stressful activity). It took 61 student volunteers from

The IDOR (Idaho-Oregon transect) EarthScope Project

Basil Tikoff

For the last ten years, the EarthScope program at the U.S. National Science Foundation has been in the process of understanding the three-dimensional tectonic evolution of North America. In both breadth and scope, EarthScope was a step-function increase in projects for the solid Earth Sciences. Discover magazine in 2011 called EarthScope the “most epic” science project of the year (I assume that is a good thing). The Department of Geoscience at University of Wisconsin-Madison has been well represented in the EarthScope program, and multiple faculty members have participated in the activities. I have been heavily involved in the EarthScope program from its inception, in an attempt to insure integrated geological, geophysical, and geochemical studies were part of EarthScope. This commitment involved multiple meetings, workshops, and helping write the most recent EarthScope science plan (Williams et al., 2012). EarthScope has done well in delivering high-quality scientific results, despite having happened at a very poor fiscal time for the US Government and the world economy. I am the lead Principle Investigator for a major EarthScope project that is occurring in Idaho and eastern Oregon. The other co-PIs are John Hole (Virginia Tech), Ray Russo (University of Florida), and Jeff Vervoort (Washington State University). Since nearly all geophysics-based projects seem to require an acronym, we chose the somewhat staid IDOR (for Idaho-Oregon project). We considered, but ultimately rejected, the somewhat frivolous acronym IEIEO (for Investigation of EarthScope in Idaho and Eastern Oregon). Idaho, in many ways, is a forgotten part of the US Cordillera. Although the Idaho batholith has approximately the same areal extent as the Sierra Nevada batholith, it is largely not considered in our understanding of mountain building in the US West. For this reason, we were somewhat surprised to get funded on a large, integrated EarthScope project for Idaho and adjacent Oregon. We were funded by “stimulus” funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This led one of the PIs to suggest that it only took a major worldwide financial meltdown to get Idaho science funded. And it was great to be funded,

Figure 1: A geological map showing the location of the Idaho batholith. The present boundary between the accreted terranes (west) and cratonic North America is the the Western Idaho shear zone (WISZ), which was the focus of the structural geology studies. The dark black line shows the approximate portion of the central and eastern portion of the active source seismic line.


22 universities to make the active source seismology project a reality. The Department of Geoscience at UW-Madison was well represented in the seismic crew by Nicole Braudy, Joey Lane, Will Montz, and Tina Porter. The goal for the UW-Madison team was to provide the geological context for the seismic results. Nicole Braudy (MS 2012) did a very thorough job of mapping the area of the WISZ where it is crossed by the seismic line. Among other achievements, she: 1) Corroborated Scott Giorgis’ interpretation of dextral, transpressional kinematics; 2) Constrained when the WISZ started (after 105 Ma) and ended (before 90 Ma) by working with geochronologist Rich Gaschnig; and 3) Located exactly where the WISZ shifts orientation from NS to NNE, and demonstrated that the bend was present during shear zone movement. Ad Byerly is currently working on a MS degree characterizing the internal fabric of the Idaho batholith, using the geochronological framework of Rich Gaschnig, to determine the structural history. His work suggests that

there is essentially no internal fabric in the main part of the Idaho batholith (Atlanta lobe). Ad is also becoming a rock magnetics expert, and working with Paul Kelso (Lake Superior State University), has been critical in helping us evaluate the post-deformational rotation of the WISZ. We did not expect this result, but it appears as if the entire WISZ has rotated

30 degrees clockwise about a vertical axis (yep, that’s right, the entire margin of North America is apparently rotated in Idaho). Tor Stetson-Lee, also working on a MS degree, is documenting a 90° reorientation of fabric in the northern part of the WISZ. Will Montz did a very nice senior thesis on constraining the timing of one of the intra-Idaho batholith shear zones (before going to Boston College with Seth Kruckenberg for graduate school). Annia Fayon has also recently joined the effort; her role is to constrain the exhumation history along the IDOR transect (those results are also fascinating). Finally, a group of UW-Madison undergraduates (Austin Carey, Joey Lane, Erica Larsen, Allie Macho, Will Montz, Matt Walker) and graduate student Saurabh Ghanekar have also pitched in to help conduct a detailed gravity survey along the whole seismic transect (Figure 4). This has truly been a group effort! And, the next question: What did the geophysics find out? This is the best part — it is not what we anticipated. In the original proposal, we postulated three models of how a suture zone would be affected by

subsequent tectonic activity. The geophysical results, although preliminary, are showing us that none of those models are correct. Figure 5 is from the work of Kathy Davenport (PhD student at Virginia Tech)— it is a preliminary figure and there is a lot of complexity in the data. However, it is pretty clear that the WISZ continues straight down and offsets the crust-mantle boundary (Moho). Further, the crust of the Idaho batholith appears to be thicker than surrounding crust. We are waiting for the broadband results to arrive from the University of Florida, but the preliminary data are also showing interesting and unexpected patterns. We are just at the stages of writing all the individual datasets for publication – there will be a lot of activity in the upcoming year. More importantly, however, is that we will start to synthesize between the different sets. I am very much looking forward to this aspect of the project, as we are very likely to discover new things about how the process of terrane accretion and how accretionary margin modification occurs along continental boundaries. It is an exciting time and it emphasizes the reason that it is great to be at UW-Madison. As a professor, you have the ability to work with talented undergraduate and graduate students to address fundamental issues about how the Earth operates. And, in the case of the IDOR project, we’ve had a really fun time doing it.

References Cited:Benford, B., Crowley, J., Schmitz, M., Northrup,

C.J., and Tikoff, B. (2010) Mesozoic magmatism and deformation in the Owyhee Mountains, Idaho: Implications for along-strike variations in the western Idaho shear zone. Lithosphere, v. 10, p. 93-118, DOI: 10.1130/l76.1.

Giorgis, S., McClelland, W., Fayon, A., Singer, B., and Tikoff, B. (2008) Timing of deformation


Figure 3: A map showing the location of the broadband seismometers (pink diamonds), active source line (black), and small explosions used for a signal for the active source study (red stars).

Figure 4: Badgers in the IDOR gravity crew: Erica Larsen, Austin Carey, Will Montz, Maureen Kahn (Carleton College), and Joey Lane.

Figure 5: A preliminary interpretation of the active source results from K. Davenport (working with J. Hole at Virginia Tech). The colors represent different seismic velocities and the dark lines are seismic reflectors. Thanks to the Virginia Tech scientists for letting me show this diagram.


Craig H. BensonWisconsin Distinguished Professor and Chair

Greetings from Geological Engineering (GLE) at UW-Madison! We expect another big year for GLE. We have more students than ever, have hired new faculty, and our existing faculty and students are winning top awards. Undergraduate enrollment in GLE continues to grow due to the exceptional employment demand in a range of industries, especially the energy industry. The Atlanta Constitution refers to GLE as one of “the few majors for which there seem to be no danger of unemployment.” This fall we have 140 un-dergraduate students enrolled in GLE. These students also get degrees in Geology, and we are working with the Department of Geosci-ence on strategies to manage the increase in enrollment in both units. Our students and faculty continue to excel in all areas. GLE and Geoscience alumna Dr. Samantha Hansen received the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award from President Obama. Samantha is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama. GLE Graduate student Faith Zangl received the teaching assistant of the year award from the College of Engineering, and also received second place in the student poster competition at the 2014 GeoCongress. GLE graduate student Idil Akin received the fourth place post award and former graduate students Chris Bareither and Ron Breitmeyer, along with Professors Tuncer Edil and Craig Benson won the Middlebrooks Award from the Geo Institute for the top journal paper of the year. GLE doctoral student Kuo Tian won the best poster award at the Waste Management 2014 conference. There is plenty of exciting faculty news

too. Associate Professor Bill Likos won the 2014 Norman Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The Nor-man Medal is given annually to the top paper published in all disciplines within ASCE, and is regarded as the top paper award worldwide by geotechnical engineers. Bill is only one of five persons in the 142-year history of the Norman Medal to win the award more than once. He also received the 2014 Huber Re-search Prize and will assume the role of Chair of Geological Engineering in July 2015. GLE also hired Hiroke Sone to join the faculty as an assistant professor in July 2015. Hiroke completed his PhD under Mark Zoback at Stanford and is currently completing a post-doctoral assignment at the German Research Center for Geosciences at the Helmholtz Center in Potsdam, Germany. Other important news is James Tinjum being promoted to associate professor with tenure. Jim led GLE’s NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates Site in Geothermal and Energy Geotechnics for the third consecutive year. During the

10-week program, undergraduate students from across the country engaged in research at UW-Madison related to energy geotechnics. GLE’s connections with industry remain very strong. This past year GLE began a new and special relationship with Apache Corpora-tion, which has been hiring GLEs as their company grows. Through a generous gift, GLE is now offering four Apache Undergraduate Scholarships in Geological Engineering as well as undergraduate research grants through the Apache Corporation Undergraduate Research Program. The next round of Apache scholar-ships and research grants will be awarded in November. I hope you find this news as inspiring as I do. We have great students, exceptional faculty, engaged industry, and great alumni! As Chair, I could not ask for more. Please stop by and see us if you are in Madison, check out our website (www.gle.wisc.edu), and look for our new electronic newsletter coming out this fall. l

GLE

Geological Engineering students Ayse Ozdogan, Mozhdeh Rajaei, and Lauren Meyers participate in drilling geothermal exchange wells instrumented with fiber-optic distributed temperature-sensing cables in Grand Marsh, WI. Photo, Craig Benson.

and exhumation in the western Idaho shear zone, McCall, Idaho. Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 120, p. 1119-1133.

Giorgis, S., Tikoff, B., and McClelland, W. (2005) Missing Idaho arc: Transpressional modification

of the 87Sr/86Sr transition on the western edge of the Idaho batholith. Geology, v. 33, p. 469-472.

King, E.M., Beard, B.L., and Valley, J.W. (2007) Strontium and oxygen isotopic evidence for strike/slip movement of accreted terranes in the Idaho Batholith. Lithos, v. 96. p. 387-401.

Williams, M.L., Fischer, K.M., Freymueller, J.T., Tikoff, B., and Trehu, A.M. (2010) Unlocking the Secrets of the North American Continent: An EarthScope Science Plan for 2010-2020, 78 pp. l

(Tikoff continued)


Alumni News —2013-141950sWayne R. Zwickey, BS 1953 I often play golf with Tom Laudon, Lowell Laudon's son. He is retired from UW-Oshkosh. I retired eons ago from Kimberly Clark Corp. where I had been VP for Mineral Resources.

John H. Harbaugh, PhD [email protected] continue to manage family-held oil and gas operations in Oklahoma and Texas. It is an interesting time to be in the industry. I also maintain ties with Stanford University where I've been a professor for 59 years, now emeritus. (Ed. note: Dr. Harbaugh was honored with the Distinguished Alumnus Award from our department in 2003.)

John (Jack) F. Hilgenberg, BS, 1956I am a retired USAF officer/pilot (1987) and a retired associate professor of Aeronautical Science (1997). I am the current Commissioner of the Greater Daytona Beach Senior Softball Association (2000-present).

Thomas P. Wollenzien, BS 1956I am retired now (Sheridan WY) and just fish and golf. My wife of 54 years died last year.

Robert O. Beringer, MS 1958Edging toward 93 my trekking ability scaling mountains to gain knowledge of the rocks diminishes with every year. I retired from Conoco in 1985 after serving many years as West Coast Operations Supervisor. I enjoyed a very interesting and satisfying career in geology for which I am indebted to my outstanding professors, namely: Cline, Emmons, Tyler, Laudon, Gates, Bailey, Batten, and Wollard.

60sTheodore E. Jacques, BS 1961I am a retired petroleum geologist. My family enjoys traveling and we had a good trip to Wyoming to relive my UW roving field camp sites of 1961 like the Badlands, Devil's Tower, Big Horn Mountains, and the Grand Tetons. We also located the Branding Iron Saloon where we undergrad geology students "relaxed" after a day in the field. Now it's called The Outlaws, but it looks the same inside!

Richard "Skip" Davis, Post-doc 1964-65I published another book, Beaches of the Gulf Coast with Texas A&M Press and I received the M.P. O'Brien Award for career achievement form the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association at the annual meeting in October. We have six grandkids, four in college. We are all getting older.

David Harper, BS 1964I recently published Roadside Geology of New Jersey (Mountain Press, Missoula MT, 2013).

L. Cameron Mosher, MS 1964; PhD [email protected]'m teaching geology at Salt Lake Community College and I'm still conducting personal development and empowerment training. And at my age still vertical and active! In April I married my long-time partner and sweetheart Adeline (Eddie) Jonflas.

Lloyd C. Furer, PhD 1966I am retired but still work on subsurface stratigraphy with Northern Rocky Mountain Geological Surveys. My wife Jackie and I are active with our children and especially with our eleven grandchildren.

James F. Mayr, BS [email protected] am a retired MD from the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, FL. We devoted the summer of 2013 to travel, making a major trip by car to the West Coast. We enjoy spending time with the families of our five children, including six grandchildren.

Larry Asmus, BS 1968I am a retired grandpa of four, Rotary president, and on the San Fernando Airport Commission.

Kenneth R. Neuhauser, BS [email protected] years later I still return to the UW campus to see Tripp Hall, attend football and basketball games, to enjoy a brat and brew at both unions, the Terrace, and State Street. Since 1973 I have taught geology to both undergraduates and graduates at Radford University (six years) and at Fort Hays State University for 34 years including developing, teaching and directing FHSU's summer Geology Field Camp course. I received the university's highest teaching honor—the

Pilot Award, as well as the highest university accolade—the President's Distinguished Scholar Award....I hope to instill the same excitement of geology in our son Kris (4th year geology BS at FHSU) as Drs. Craddock, Dott, and Laudon did for me. Thus, I wish to thank the faculty from 1964-69, the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and the University of Wisconsin. Many thanks also go to the GSA alumni reception organizers and the Outcrop staff. It truly has been "A Wonderful Life being a Geobadger. On Wisconsin!

Roger Wolff, MS [email protected] am a lighting scientist in Larkspur, CO.

70s James C. Dawson, PhD [email protected] just finished my year as chair of the GSA History and Philosophy of Geology Division. I continue to teach in my 44th year at SUNY Plattsburgh and worked on the INHIGEO (International Commission on the History of Geological Sciences) conference this summer (2014), sponsored jointly by GSA. My spouse of 43 years continues to work on her PhD, a late in life endeavor.

John A. Larson, MS 1973; PhD 1977I retired in December 2012 after 35 years working on OCS (Outer Continental Shelf) geology with BOEM (Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Department of the Interior). My wife works as a civil engineer for the Alaska State Department of Transportation, in highway design.

Dale Vodak, BS 1979I participate at the East Texas Geologic Society here in Tyler, Texas and I am a member of a larger committee of professional geoscientists. We are currently actively discussing the impact of geoscientist licensing on the work product of agency's employees.

Robert Freymuller, BS [email protected] am working as a licensed geologist at the Texas Railroad Commission permitting injection and disposal wells.



Stuart Rojstaczer, BS 1977I am enjoying my post-geology professor career (Duke 1990-2005) as a novelist. My novel, The Mathematician's Shiva has been published by Penguin Press (fall 2014) and is off to an excellent start. My blog (stuartr.com) has information about the book and details of my book tour. My wife and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary in January 2014.

Barbara Goldman Grundl, BS 1977, MS [email protected] have retired from working as a hydrogeologist and begun teaching 2nd grade in Milwaukee Public Schools. I am at a school that is an International Baccalaureate with an Environmental Science emphasis. My husband Tim is currently a professor in the School of Fresh Water Science at UW-Milwaukee. We are thinking of celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary with a trip to Machu Picchu.

80sMarjorie Chan, PhD 1982Distinguished Alumna (2010) Marjorie Chan is the 2014 GSA Distinguished International Lecturer. She recently shared this with Bob Dott: In three months of international travel she gave 51 lectures in India, New Zealand, Austalia, Japan, and China. "My two lecture selections were Mars for Earthlings: Using Earth Analogs to Decode the Sedimentary History of Mars, and Eolian Explorations: Dunes, Diagenesis, and Deformation. However, I also spoke about other hot topics in sedimentary geology, as well as graduate programs in the U.S. and the application process. In total, the lectures reached about 2,500 scientists, students, and public citizens."

Didier Pennequin, MS 1984, left, and Ken Bradbury (WGNS), in Paris. Didier is Director of the Water Divi-sion of BRGM, the French Geological Survey. Photo courtesy of Mary Anderson.

Amy Cheng, MS 1984, PhD 1988 recently established the Klaus Westphal Public Education Fund to honor Klaus and his passion for teaching others about geology. Amy spent several semesters as a TA for Klaus who taught his beloved course, "Life of the Past" more than 50 times in his career. (See photo, below.)

Richard Aster, MS 1986I've changed institutions and am happy to announce that I am a professor and department head in the geosciences department at Colorado State University.

00sKate (McColgin) Bower, MS 2002This year we welcomed a daughter, Lydia Willow Bower

Toni Simo(Ed. note: Bob Dott was pleased to hear from former Professor Toni Simo this summer. Here is Toni's message with a few minor edits.) Hi Bob What a nice surprise to get your email.... I am now returning from Seattle where we hiked part of Mt Rainier and few other great alpine hikes. All is well, busy with very interesting projects and responsibilities to interpret all sorts of data. I am very happy with my work. Early in August, Julia and I went to visit Edgar in Toronto where he was spending four months finishing his PhD. It was a good visit. Edgar is planning to move to Japan once he finishes the dissertation, around the end of year. He is now fluent in Japanese and goes there often. Julia has finished her MS

and is working in the DC area at the Virginia department of transportation. She is possibly coming to Texas as her boyfriend may start a PhD at A&M. Jana is becoming a star in the company, which makes her happy and all of us happy. I had a good visit with Brad Singer, both during AAPG and at the alumni gathering. It was good to have an update of what is going on in Madison and also to catch up with Brad's life. During the Houston alumni reception at Cory and Liz Clechenko’s house, it was fun seeing many old faces, but I was surprised to see so many young and new faces that graduated after I left. Cheers, Toni l

(Alumni news continued)

Emeritus Museum Director Klaus Westphal still visits the museum regularly to work on its collections and give tours to special guests. Here Klaus shares his love of fossils during an outreach event. (Editors' note: Read Amy Cheng's news, top of page.) Photo, the Geology Museum.

Recently at GSA 2014 in Vancouver, sed/strat grad student M'Bark Baddouh, BOV member Jeff Pietras, and Professor Nita Sahai (The University of Akron) enjoy GeoBadger hospitality at our alumni reception. Photo, Michelle Szabo.


In MemoriamGeorge J. Verville died August 5, 2014. He was born May 4, 1921 to Ruby and Armand Verville in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. George earned a BS, MS and PhD in geology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In December 4, 1943, he married Elinor Trout in Madison. They had three children, Ann, Tom and Barbara. George joined the U.S. Army in 1943 and became a 2nd lieutenant in the infantry. After attending mule pack school, he was member of the 1st Calvary Division, in the Philippines and Japan, retiring with the rank of Captain. In 1951 he began work for Stanolind Oil and Gas Co. (later Amoco Production Co.) in Tulsa, as a research geologist and supervisor. He also worked at the Casper and Denver Divisions. He specialized in the biostratigraphy of fusulinids and authored many scientific papers. He was a member of six geological societies and served as treasurer of the Paleontological Society. George is survived by his wife of 70 years, Elinor, of Kiefer, OK. In 2000, he established the George J. Verville Fund with matching support from BP to assist graduate students at UW-Madison in paleontology. The 2014 Verville Awards went to two PhD candidates at UW-Madison: Ben Linzmeier: Water column behavior of ammonites from the Cretaceous western interior seaway (advisers Peters & Valley); Jody Wycech: The effects of diagenesis on foraminiferal calcite (advisers Kelly & Valley).

Harvey C. Sunderman, PhD, 1951Died Nov. 1, 2011 in College Hill, Ohio, at the age of 91. He was a retired University of Cincinnati geology professor and had studied optical mineralogy under Con Emmons at UW-Madison. During World War II he was a B-24 pilot and flew several missions in the Pacific. He was an avid musician, photographer, fisherman, and outdoorsman. He was preceded in death by his first wife Margaret and his second wife Rosemary. He is survived by two sons.

John (Jack) Weihaupt, BS 1952; MS 1953, died in Evergreem, CO, on September 15, 2014 at the age of 84. He was born in LaCrosse, WI. An emeritus professor of geophysics at the University of Colorado-Denver, he held a commission as Captain

in Naval Intelligence. He was a geophysicist and geologist who had lived or traveled in some fifty nations. conducted geological, geophysical, and geographic explorations in the Arctic, Canada, Chile, and Antarctica. As a member of the Antarctic Victoria Land Traverse in 1959-1960, Dr. Weihaupt’s eight man team was commissioned by the United States National Science Foundation to conduct a four month 2,400 kilometer journey into the unexplored hinterland of East Antarctica. He authored several books about his adventures and discoveries, including, “Impossible Journey: The Story of the Victoria Land Traverse 1959-1960, Antarctica” published by the Geological Society of America (GSA). His most recent book is "Of Maps and Men: The Mysterious Discovery of Antarctica," a research oriented analysis of Antarctic polar exploration. He also had two research papers just published, "Origin(s) of Antarctica's Wilkes Subglacial Basin," in the journal Antarctic Science, and "Impact crater morphology: Origin of the Mertz and Ninnis Glaciers, Antarctica," in the journal Geomorphology".

Andrew Frank WalchWalch, 80, of Las Cruces, NM, died Dec. 8, 2013. Andrew graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor and Master’s Degrees in Geology. He received his law degree from South Texas College of Law and was admitted to the Texas Bar in 1971. He served in the U. S. Army from 1953 to 1955. He worked for Continental Oil Company as a geologist prior to obtaining his law degree, and thereafter worked as a natural resource and water rights attorney for the United States Department of Justice in Washington, DC and Denver, CO in its Environmental and Natural Resources Division. He won numerous awards including two John Marshal Awards for outstanding work in litigation and the Muskie-Chafee Award for helping protect our “nation’s environment and natural environment and natural resources.” He handled litigation throughout the country in both state and federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court. He is survived by his friend and wife of over 22 years, Janey

Walch; daughter Laura Devin of Newcastle, Maine; son Bruce Walch of Long Branch, New Jersey; and two grandsons.

Lee Clayton, 76, died on May 7, 2014, after living with Parkinson's disease for 25 years. Lee's curiosity about and love for the natural world, qualities he developed during childhood, formed the center of his being, Lee studied geology as an undergraduate and master's student at the University of North Dakota. He continued researching glacial geology in New Zealand as a Fulbright Scholar. He completed his PhD studies at the University of Illinois and began his career as a glacial geologist at the University of North Dakota. There he met and married Barbara Harris. In 1979, after a sabbatical year in England, they settled in Madison. Lee looked forward to full-time research as Professor of Geology at the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, where he worked until his retirement in 2007. Lee used his exceptional observational ability to develop the story of how the landscape and the geology beneath it was formed. The maps, reports, and journal articles that he wrote will long be studied by those interested in learning about the origin of the landscape. Lee is survived by his wife Barbara, their daughter Anna, and other family.

James Bell Benedict, PhD, 1968Died March 8, 2011 in Jamestown CO at the age of 72, "in the guardian shadow of the Sawtooth Peak." He was an acclaimed Colorado geologist and archaeologist. Although a pacifist he served in the Marine Corps. He studied geomorphology and glacial geology with William Bradley at the University of Colorado before attending UW-Madison, where he received his PhD in geology. He was a member of the Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa. He received Colorado University's W.A. Tarr Award, and the prestigious Kirk Byant Award from GSA. His research was multidisciplinary and his colleagues referred to him as one of the "giants of Colorado archeology." He survived by his wife Audrey, his former wife, two sons, and several grandchildren. l


Shaun MarcottShaun joined the faculty of the Department of Geoscience in August 2014.

Post-doc, Oregon State University (2011-2014)PhD Geology & minor in Oceanography, Oregon State University (2011)MS Geology, Portland State University (2005)BS Geology & minor in Mathematics, Oregon State University (2002)

He describes his research interests as spanning a broad range of geological and climatological questions largely related to late Quaternary climate change and dating glacial landscapes. Specifically, Shaun’s expertise is in the field of glacial geology and paleoclimatology with a firm rooting in geological, mathematical, and geochemical techniques. He works with a number of paleoclimate archives including glacial deposits, marine sediment cores, and ice cores as well, and uses numerical and statistical models to evaluate large data sets. This research

is primarily focused on understanding the interplay between climate and glaciers, and is useful in placing modern climate-glacier interactions into a prehistorical context for understanding modern and future changes. “Part of the satisfaction I receive from my research comes from working on new approaches to long-standing problems, and the ability to devote considerable time in the outdoors and laboratory for conducting my research.”

LucaS ZoetLuke was hired by the Department of Geoscience in 2014 and will join the faculty in August 2015.

Postdoc, Iowa State University Glacial Geomorphology / Glaciology (2012-Present)PhD Geosciences, Penn. State (2012)MS Geosciences, Penn. State (2009)BS Geology & Geophysics, Michigan State (2005)

While attending MSU, Luke focused on shallow geophysics around the state of Michigan,

which is dominated by glacial geomorphic landforms. His interest in geophysics and glacial processes led him to Penn. State, where he completed a MS that concentrated on previously undetected seismicity in Antarctica. Following his MS, he completed a PhD at PSU, which primarily focused on quantifying the mechanisms that facilitate the sliding of a glacier over its bed. This work led him to Iowa State, where he has continued to concentrate

on the quantification of subglacial processes. His research at ISU incorporates a newly designed experimental apparatus that slides ice over a range of simulated bed types in order to isolate and quantify variables pertaining to glacial sliding. Luke has spent significant time in the field including four seasons in Antarctica, two seasons in Iceland, and one season in Norway. He is primarily dedicated to combining quantitative field data with laboratory data in order to test and develop theoretical treatments that can be applied in the fields of glaciology and glacial geomorphology. l

Introducing New Faculty

Shaun Marcott Lucas Zoet

UW-Geoscience Hosts the 2014 IsoAstro Geochronology Workshop

U-Pb and 40Ar/39Ar geochronology provide the backbone of the latest geologic time scale, while astrochronology has emerged as one of the most important tools for enhancing the accuracy and precision of high-resolution time scales, especially through ash-poor intervals that cannot be directly dated with radioisotopic methods. These three techniques are broadly used, but there exist many conceptual barriers between the historically disparate fields. To address this issue, Stephen Meyers (UW-Geoscience), Bradley Singer (UW-Geoscience), and Mark Schmitz (Boise State University) convened a week-long summer workshop and short course titled “IsoAstro Geochronology Workshop:

The integration and intercalibration of radioisotopic and astrochronologic time scales”. In attendance were undergraduate students, graduate students, post-docs and faculty from 28 institutions located in eight countries. The IsoAstro workshop reviewed the basic theory underlying each geochronologic method (U-Pb, 40Ar/39Ar and astrochronology — see the article in the 2013 Outcrop titled “Clock Around the Rock, the Future of Astrochronology”), with an emphasis on understanding the challenges inherent in the interpretation of radioisotopic and astrochronologic data, and the power of combining multiple chronometers. As a key component of the workshop, our investigation of each method included new interactive “lab” practicals to provide hands-on experience with data analysis. This included astrochronology tutorials with the free software “astrochron:

An R package for astrochronology” (designed by Stephen Meyers, the official beta release of this new computational tool coincided with the workshop), a new web-based interactive U/Pb practical (designed by Mark Schmitz), and the analysis of Ar/Ar data with the software IsoPlot (led by Bradley Singer). Participants also delivered 22 research talks that explored a wide range of questions for which an understanding of geologic time is essential, and toured geochemistry labs in Weeks Hall, including those used for geochronologic research. The 2014 IsoAstro workshop was supported by a U.S. National Science Foundation grant to Stephen Meyers (CAREER: Deciphering the Beat of a Timeless Rhythm- The Future of Astrochronology”). The website for the workshop is http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~smeyers/IsoAstro.html. l


Faculty News —2013-14Jean BahrMy big adventure for the year was a visit to China as part of a delegation from the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. We spent a week in Beijing meeting with scientists and engineers from a number of agencies responsible for Chi-na’s nuclear energy program and then travelled to a site in the Gobi desert of Gansu Province where the Chinese are planning to construct an underground laboratory in granite as a first step towards developing a repository for long-lived radioactive waste. We also had the opportunity to visit the western end of the Great Wall and the Mogao Caves with beautiful Buddhist paintings, some of them over 1500 years old. At the end of the official visit, I was able to spend some ad-ditional time in Beijing courtesy of distinguished alumnus Chunmiao Zheng who directs the Center for Water Research at Peking University. I enjoyed meeting with Chunmiao’s lively group of students and post-docs to learn about their research. Chunmiao also took me to a section of the Great Wall, where we hiked up many steps and then went back down via toboggan, and treated me to a number of wonderful meals, including traditional Peking duck. MS student Meg Haserodt spent time in Alaska to collect additional data in the early summer before successfully defending her thesis on impacts of road construction on groundwater in peatlands. In September she started a posi-tion with a consulting firm in Duluth where she hopes to apply her hydrogeologic expertise to a variety of real world problems. Steve Sellwood is continuing his PhD research on heat tracing for aquifer characterization this fall with support from a new graduate assistantship established through the generosity of alumnus Mark Solien. Steve will be giving an invited presentation in a session on geothermal energy systems at the GSA meeting in Vancouver. The hydro group expanded significantly this fall with the arrival of new graduate students Jake Krause, Josh Olson, Claire Sayler, and Elisabeth Schlaudt. Each of them is still in the process of identifying a thesis topic, but we expect they will be working in some combination with me, Mike Cardiff, Eric Roden and col-leagues at the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey. Stay tuned for their news in the next Outcrop.

PhiL BrownDuring 2013-14 Erik Haroldson completed his MS thesis focusing on fluid inclusions in an Archean gold deposit in Ontario north of Sault Ste. Marie. Erik had been the project geologist

on this historic mine that was being evaluated for reopening by a small company. Malia Lehrer continued to work on her MS examining the relations among some Sn-W occurrences in NW Argentina and defended her thesis at the end of the summer. In March I again chaired an evalu-ation of over 100 graduate research proposals for the Society of Economic Geology — mineral deposits research is a popular field worldwide.After teaching the Economic Geology course in the spring (37 students in the last two years), I directed five weeks of the Wasatch-Uinta Field Camp in Utah. Enrollments continue to be strong with 62 total students including 15 UW students. Funding for camp from the university continues to be a challenge – potentially putting this cap-stone experience in jeopardy. This fall the Mineralogy class has 84(!) stu-dents – a big jump in enrollment in part due to the continued expansion of the Geological Engineering program. Simultaneously I am teach-ing our Introduction to Geologic Structures class that has an enrollment of 86 — all indications are that these large enrollments will continue for the next few years at least. From my point of view the biggest problem with these huge classes is when we try to go to the field for labs or overnight trips — busses instead of vans and our inability to interact with all the students in the field as they work to improve their observational skills. Our teaching assistants are great but budgetary con-straints mean there really aren’t enough of them to optimize learning. My immediate family is well — and now larger. Kris and I are now grandparents, twice! Jason and Liz had a baby boy in September 2013 while Peter and Abbey also had a baby boy in early January 2014. Jason lives in Madison so we get to see his little one regularly while Peter and Abbey have moved to Cleveland — we are keeping in touch best through FaceTime. Karin has begun her second year as the Associate Head Coach for the MIT swim team and is embracing that new chal-lenge. Kris retired from her job as the librarian at Memorial High School in June 2014 after her 16th year in the trenches.

aLan carroLLSince 2006 I have been teaching Energy Resourc-es, an upper level undergraduate course that in the past was taught by John Steinhart and Herb Wang. Along the way I found that few text-books provide balanced coverage of this subject (many focus solely on renewables), so in 2009 I undertook to write one. Five short years later it is finally done, and will be published by Cambridge University Press in early 2015. Rather than using a textbook format per se, I aimed for a more infor-

mal treatment that hopefully will be of interest to a wider audience. The title is “Geofuels: Energy and the Earth”. The book’s central theme is that all energy systems, both renewable and fossil, ultimately rely on geological resources. Next year I will also carry this interest into the relatively new arena of MOOCs, which stands for “Massive Open Online Course”. UW offered several MOOCs this past year through Coursera, and will offer six more next year. Enrollment is free (and typically reaches into the tens of thousands), and content is delivered entirely online. MOOCs have become well established but remain somewhat controversial, due to doubts about their educational value and an uncertain business model. While free to students, they are expensive to produce. I view them as an interest-ing experiment however, and as an opportunity to provide thousands of people with a broader perspective on energy resources. My research continues to focus mainly on the Eocene Green River Formation in the western U.S., including ongoing collaborations with Clark Johnson and Steve Meyers. Lately this work has focused on the record that these lake depos-its provide of warm climate, and on connections between the lake systems and their surrounding watershed.

chuck DeMetSAlthough those who are superstitious might think that 2013 would have been the first unlucky year of the new millennium, it was a fantastic year for my research program. In late 2013, my talent-ed advisee Shannon Graham, who was widely known within the department as a role model for hard work, defended her PhD on earthquake cycle studies of the Mexico subduction zone. She recently began a post-doctoral position at Har-vard University, so her hard work paid off! Shortly after she defended, I flew to Guatemala City, where I spent two weeks as the sole instructor of two workshops that I designed as a practicum in the collection and analysis of high-precision Global Positioning System data for hazards and tectonic research. Twenty-four Guatemalan scien-tists and students attended. The experience was a great primer for workshops I will hold in 2015 and 2016 in El Salvador and Honduras. I’ve spent the past six months on sabbatical putting the final touches on two papers that have now been pub-lished in top geophysical journals, completing and submitting three more manuscripts that are now in review, writing a 5-yr NSF proposal that was recently funded, and initiating work on three additional manuscripts that will hopefully see the



light of day later this year or in 2015. My sabbati-cal was productive and rejuvenating—just what I needed. My research agenda for the next 3-4 years is full and includes funded field programs in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico; modeling and field efforts in Jamaica; and newly funded modeling of global plate motions since 20 Ma with Russian and French scientists. Keeping up with the flow of data and coordinating new measurements in these countries is demanding (as are the training workshops, which are held in two languages). Scientifically, three magnitude 7+ earthquakes have occurred off the coasts of Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala since mid-2012, each close enough to our geodetic networks in those countries to move the mark-ers that we use to measure crustal deformation in those regions. Modeling of the coseismic and post-earthquake movements that we measured in our networks has occupied most of my graduate students’ time since late 2012 and has lead to five papers about the earthquakes, all published or in review. Since earthquakes usually delay and complicate our intended efforts to measure and model long-term deformation in those regions, I’m hoping for a “quiet” 2015….

kurt FeigLThe volcanic field at Laguna Maule in Chile con-tinues to deform at a spectacularly rapid rate (see page 13 of The Outcrop for 2012/13). As of June 2014, the rate of vertical uplift was still faster than 200 mm/yr, just as it has been since sometime be-fore 2007, according to geodetic measurements analyzed by graduate student Hélène Le Mével. In addition to support from the Weeks and Wool-lard families, Hélène received The James J. and Dorothy T. Hanks Graduate Student Award in Geophysics this year. We are looking forward to studying the processes driving the deformation as part of a multi-disciplinary study led by Brad

Singer. Thanks to his heavy lifting, the project will be funded by NSF. In June, graduate student Elena Baluyut started work on applying mathematics, including graph theory and Bayesian inference, to analyze geodetic data from satellite interferometric syn-thetic aperture radar (InSAR) with support from an NSF Graduate Fellowship. I am enjoying serv-ing as a member of the Science Definition Team for a satellite mission dedicated to InSAR. Called “NI-SAR”, the mission is now in Phase A and thus on track for launch by the end of the decade. Working with Herb Wang, Cliff Thurber, Mike Cardiff, and (GLE professor) Dante Fratta, we were able to obtain funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for Integrated Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) Research and Development, in a grant entitled, “Poroelas-tic Tomography by Adjoint Inverse Modeling of Data from Seismology, Geodesy, and Hydrology”. We’re calling the “PoroTomo” for short. Interest-ingly, Elisabet Metcalfe (BS 2005), works on the program management team at the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy in Golden, Colorado.

LaureL gooDwinThis summer, I stood with grad students Christy Barszewski and Nick Roberts in noticeably thin air, over 11,000’ above sea level. The eight mile, >3000’ climb up was challenging, but worthwhile. The exhumed rocks of the Sierra Ne-vada offer extraordinary exposures of deformed rocks, cut and polished by glaciers, and we were ready to parse their secrets. Christy’s PhD re-search is focused on quantifying the rheology, or mechanical behavior, of shear zones. Nick—a new MS student supervised by collaborator Professor Basil Tikoff—was assisting to see a research project in action. It can be hard to obtain funding at the early stages of projects like this, which are

really good but represent a distinctly new path. Christy’s work to date has been facili-tated by alumni donations to the department and Leith Fund. A heartfelt thank you to our alumni for this support. In another tectonic space, in a different state, we have been tackling a problem that has eluded resolution for decades: how faults strongly mis-oriented with respect to the maximum principal stress fail. Our focus on controversial low-angle normal faults uses the frictional melt produced during earthquakes—pseudotachylyte—as a record of paleoseismicity. Alumna Dana Smith, MS 2013, laid the foundation for this research be-fore joining Chevron. Dana found tantalizing evidence suggesting these faults produced earthquakes at low dips, and showed that they record >1million years of seismicity.

New graduate student Jack Hoehn will pick up where Dana left off, working with Professor Brad Singer, Dr. Brian Jicha, collaborators Professor Josh Feinberg (Univ. Minnesota), Dr. Matt Heizler (New Mexico Tech), and me to follow the trail of clues left in the rocks of Arizona. Faults, of course, also cut the shallow crust, our source of water and hydrocarbons, and a potential repository for CO

2. PhD student Randy

Williams is working to unravel the record of fluid-fault interactions over space and time in the poorly lithified sediments of the Rio Grande rift. Diagenetic effects on fault seal and fault mechan-ics are not well understood. Randy is evaluating these effects by combining microstructural, geochemical, and geochronologic studies of fault-zone calcite cements. We are working with Professor Peter Mozley (New Mexico Tech), Dr. Warren Sharp (Berkeley Geochronology Center), and Professor Kate Huntington (Univ. Washing-ton) as well as internal collaborators Professor Clark Johnson, Dr. Brian Beard, and Professor John Valley to read this rock record. Stay tuned for new developments!

StePhen MeyerSIt was yet another busy and eventful year! Wasinee Aswasereelert successfully defended her PhD thesis in June, on the topic of “Astro-nomical and Stochastic Influences on Lacustrine and Marine Environments during the Cenozoic”. Wasinee is now a Lecturer at Kasetsart University, Thailand in the Department of Earth Sciences. Graduate Student Chao Ma passed his PhD preliminary exam in April, and he published his MS thesis in the July/August issue of Geological Society of America Bulletin. Chao’s MS research conducted a new astrochronologic analysis of the Cenomanian/Turonian boundary interval and Oceanic Anoxic Event 2, using high-resolution scanning-XRF data from the Western Interior Ba-

Participants in one of two bilingual GPS training workshops held in January 2014 at Universidad Mariano Galvez in Guatemala City. Sponsored by the NSF and conducted by UW Professor Chuck DeMets, the workshops trained ~40 Guatemalan students, faculty, and government scientists how to gather and process Global Positioning System data for a broad range of research needs. Photo, Chuck DeMets.



sin (USA). His PhD work continues on the theme of Cretaceous astronomical cycles. This summer, graduate student Andrew Walters departed the PhD program (MS 2013) for an incredible op-portunity at BP. And in September we welcomed graduate student Lindsey Shanks (Geoscience BS 2014) to the research team; Lindsey’s MS proj-ect will addresses Oligocene paleoceanography at Rio Grande Rise, and will be co-advised by Clay Kelly and myself. As for other news, my promotion to Associate Professor with tenure became official as of July. Three active NSF grants kept me very busy over the past year. And in August I ran the first IsoAs-tro geochronology workshop and short-course, a week-long event that is a ‘broader impact’ component of the NSF CAREER award (see the article in this issue of the Outcrop). As another key component of the CAREER award, I released the first public beta version of new software titled “astrochon: An R package for Astrochronology”

Shanan PeterSThe 2013-2014 school year marked my first-ever sabbatical, and it was both productive and invigorating! In the spirit of extending academic connections and doing something out-of-the-or-dinary, I spent most of the year off campus as an invited guest at other institutions. Most of the fall ’13 was spent at my alma matter, the University of Chicago, in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences. There, I was able to participate in de-partment life and give a Friday department semi-nar, but this time as a faculty member! Chicago was great, but the highlight of my sabbatical was a stint as a Blaustein Visiting Professor at Stanford University, where I was hosted by Jon Payne in the Dept. of Geological and Environmental Sciences in the School of Earth Sciences. I was appointed at Stanford for two quarters (January - June ’14), but I lived in San Francisco, right off of Market and 8th Street in the top floor of a high-rise apartment overlooking the city. I spent time at UC-Berkeley and made the trip down the bay on CalTrain. It was a great experience, made even better by the fact that I missed a rather relentless winter back in Madison (I thought of this regu-larly while running on Ocean Beach!). Back in Madison, things kept moving along in my research group. Sharon McMullen took home honorable mention for her poster pre-sented at the North American Paleontological Convention, a once-every-four-years affair, where I also delivered one of three Keynote Addresses. Sharon then went on to pass her preliminary ex-amination in fine fashion at the end of the spring semester. Scott Hartman took his qualifying exam and passed as well. In his pursuit of am-monite biology and Cretaceous Western Interior

Seaway environments via WiscSIMS analyses, Ben Linzmeier has been lining up some interesting collaborations, which come with some funding! Finally, John Czaplewksi and I also made good progress on several database-related projects, but we still have a long way to go. You can keep an eye on macrostrat.org to see what we are doing (and check out macrostrat.org/map for a working example of things to come). Other people are also keeping an eye on our work, including an iOS developer, who has made a geological ap-plication called Mancos that allows you access to the geologic map, stratigraphic, and fossil record data for North America that we host here in our department. If you have an iOS device and spend time wandering the US, download it! It will tell you what bedrock you are on, something every good GeoBadger should always know!

eric roDenA good starting point for this year’s Outcrop en-try is the field trip to the Chocolate Pots (CP) hot springs in Yellowstone National Park (YNP) that myself and two members of the Geomicrobiology Laboratory (Nathan Fortney, a PhD student in the NASA Astrobiology Institute-supported Wisconsin Astrobiology Research Consortium (WARC), and Brandon Converse (research scientist at WARC) took in fall 2013. We met up with WARC co-PI Eric Boyd (Montana State University) in Bozeman, MT and traveled to YNP for a three-day field trip. The central goal of the campaign was to collect a series of small cores from the iron oxide-silica deposits that form as reduced, neutral-pH subsurface fluids reach the surface and react with atmospheric oxygen. The sampling locations are along the flow path of fluid that emerges from the spring vent en route to its discharge into the Gibbon River. Nathan and Brandon have worked steadily to process the samples for iron geochemistry (including iron isotope composition in collaboration with WARC PI Clark Johnson and co-PI Brian Beard) and microbial community analysis (conducted using high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies available through the UW-Madison Biotechnol-ogy Center), and Nathan has already presented selected results from work at two scientific conferences. Additional, more detailed “metage-nomic” analysis of potential iron redox cycling pathways in the hot spring deposits is slated for the coming year. Meanwhile, Nathan will defend his MS thesis on the potential for microbial iron oxide reduction and associated iron isotope fractionation in CP deposits this fall. Another key highlight of the past year is graduation of the first two PhD students from the Geomicrobiology Lab in May 2014. Liz Percak-Dennett defended her thesis on microbial iron cycling in terrestrial

sedimentary environments in March, and two papers (one in Chemical Geology, and the other in Environmental Science and Technology) from that work are now in print, with one more in the pipeline. Tao Wu defended his thesis on microbial reduction of iron-bearing phyllosilicate minerals (in competition with iron oxides) in April, and has two more papers (in addition to his 2012 Environmental Science and Technology) in the works. New projects related to the me-tabolism of dissolved organic carbon in the river-water/groundwater mixing zone in the Hanford reach of the Columbia River in Washington state (DOE-supported research in collaboration with colleagues at Pacific Northwest National Labora-tory), and on carbon cycling in analogous mixing environments in the lower Wisconsin River (a col-laborative project with UW-Madison colleagues including Jean Bahr) are on tap for next year.

BraD SingerI wound down my final year as Department Chair by hosting receptions for alumni in Palo Alto, CA; Houston, TX; and Denver, CO. More than 600 GeoBadger alums live in these three areas alone. I met alums who obtained degrees from our Department in every decade since the 1940's and it was a privilege to share with them all the current activity in Weeks Hall. Especially, I want to thank Liz (PhD, '07) and Cory (MS, '01) Clechenko for hosting a BBQ at their home in Houston in May. This brought together 50 alums and is something I hope we can do many more times in the future. I am now taking a sabbatical year during which I will begin to lead a five-year-project, funded by the NSF Integrated Earth Systems Program, to investigate the dynamics of the youthful, large rhyolitic magma system at Laguna del Maule, Chile. Geodesy and geophysics have revealed an astonishing rate of surface uplift of 25 cm per year since 2007 in this rhyolitic dome field, driven most likely by the active intru-sion of magma at a depth of about 5 km. My talk at GSA Denver last year garnered a wired science article (http://www.wired.com/2013/11/a-caldera-eruption-in-the-making-the-curious-story-of-laguna-del-maule/) and a GSA Today paper that will be published in December, 2014. This project involves 28 scientists and students from eight universities and four government agencies in Chile, Argentina, Canada and the US. Nathan Andersen and Hélène Le Mével are pursuing PhD theses for this project. UW-Madison col-laborators also include Cliff Thurber, Chuck DeMets, Kurt Feigl, Basil Tikoff, Ninfa Bennington, Brian Jicha, Clark Johnson, and Brian Beard. I have begun another col-laboration with Basil Tikoff focused on the



assembly of late Miocene (6 Ma) granitoid plutons that crop out 20 km west of Laguna del Maule. Allen Schaen recently finished his MS thesis on Eocene-Pliocene magmatism in the central Aleu-tian arc and will pursue a PhD on the petrochro-nology of these granites. Allen will work closely with new PhD student Nico Garibaldi who will focus on fabric development in the plutons. I also just welcomed Paola Martinez into my research group. Paola and Nico hail from Chile. Paola's MS thesis will aim at reconstructing the Pleistocene-early Holocene growth and collapse of Villarrica Volcano in the Southern Andes using 40Ar/39Ar and 14C dating. In addition to the three major projects in Chile, I continue to pursue research on the history of Earth's magnetic field and was at Haleakala Caldera in July with my wife Teri to visit lava flows that record the last polarity reversal (see photo). With Alan Carroll, I have a new NSF grant to establish a chronostratigraphy of a core, now being raised by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Project (http://www.icdp-online.org/home/highlights/), that will span the entire lower Cretaceous period in the Songliao Basin, NE China. Collaboration with several Chinese scientists will begin in early 2015. The inaugural IsoAstro workshop held in Weeks Hall August 18-23, 2014 was a great success thanks to the efforts of Steve Meyers. This workshop brought together 45 students and faculty from China, Europe and the US to learn state-of-the-art techniques in astrochronology and radioisotopic (40Ar/39Ar and U-Pb) dating. The workshop will be convened again in 2015 by Mark Schmitz at Boise State University.

cLiFForD thurBer This has been a truly exciting year. Two major multi-disciplinary research projects have recently been funded: a study of the Laguna del Maule volcanic center in Chile, led by Brad Singer and supported by NSF, and a study of the Brady geothermal site in Nevada, led by Kurt Feigl and supported by the Department of Energy. Two other new projects were also funded this year, a study of volcano structure and nonvolcanic trem-or at Unalaska Island, Alaska, supported by NSF, and an investigation of the deep crustal structure in the Parkfield, California region, supported by the USGS. Over the summer, grad students Sarah Lemon and Chris Rawles finished their M.S. theses on the shear wave structure of the Katmai region of Alaska and earthquake focal mechanisms and stress along the Alpine Fault, NZ, respectively; Summer Ohlendorf is near-ing the completion of her PhD thesis on seismic studies of Okmok Volcano, Alaska; Bin Guo is working on his MS thesis on the P- and S-wave velocity structure of the crust along the Alpine Fault; and new grad students Crystal Wespestad

and David Watkins started up in the fall. Under-grads Lauren Abrahams and Ashley Dinauer spent the summer working with Chris and I on the application of Chris's automatic S-wave arrival picker to several volcano and fault zone datasets. His automatic picker is so good, WARF is pursuing a patent for it. Assistant Scientist Ninfa Bennington and post-doc Xiangfang Zeng are working on a variety of projects and have been of invaluable assistance in helping me supervise the students. Some personal highlights include participating on the NSF Geophysics Program proposal review panel in April, present-ing a report on the use of seismic methods to infer the state of stress in the subsurface to the Jason Group in June, publishing a suite of papers on state-of-the-art seismic analysis methods (joint inversion, phase-weighted stacking of low-frequency earthquakes, multi-scale double-difference regional-teleseismic tomography, GPU acceleration of seismic tomography), and giving an invited talk on seismic studies of Alaskan volcanoes at the annual Seismological Society of America meeting in Anchorage in May.

BaSiL tikoFFWhen I sat down to composing what happened in 2013-14, my mind was a bit of a blank. What in the world did happen? It was a bit of a blur. Here are some of the things that I remember. We were joined in March 2013 by post-doctoral fellow Vasilis Chatzaras from Greece, who has become a nearly ever-present figure in the isolation ward. He is working on ultramafic rocks in California, Greece, and New Caledonia. He and graduate student Zach Michels are the core of the working group on deformation of the lithospheric mantle (and sorry about that little sewage leak in your office in the middle of winter — and what a winter that was). We also had weekly, worldwide Skype meetings with our larger group of mantle deformation collabora-tors. Many of these people have been through Weeks Hall at some time in their careers, includ-ing Seth Kruckenberg, Virginia Toy, Eric Stewart, Will Lamb, and longtime colleague Julie Newman. I think we may be getting somewhere on understanding deformation of the lithospheric mantle – stay tuned for some exciting papers.The Idaho-Oregon (IDOR) project continues to go well (see article in this Outcrop). We were joined by Annia Fayon who will study exhuma-tion along the IDOR transect. Graduate students Ad Byerly and Tor Stetson-Lee continued to work on their project and we are making some major progress on understanding what exactly is going on in the interior of the Idaho batholith (Ad’s project) and along its 90° bend at Orofino (Tor’s project). We were also joined, somewhat

unexpectedly, by Saurabh Ghanekar who will be working on some of the geophysical aspects of neotectonic deformation along the IDOR transect. Maureen Kahn did a senior project at Carleton College, working with Annia and myself on the exhumation studies. I’ve also enjoyed working with Brad Singer, including on the successful effort he led to get a large NSF proposal funded at Laguna de Maule. He and I also worked on another project related to young plutons in the Andes and taught a seminar together on the internal fabrics of plutons. The latter involved a very nice fieldtrip to California with Laurel Goodwin and a group of students (see summary in this Outcrop). It is hard to know why a field trip turns out so well, besides seeing spectacular rocks, but it is really nice when it does. The project on the neotectonics of central America, working with Chuck DeMets and grad-uate student Andrea (Andi) Ellis, is also going well. Bridget Garnier joined that effort in Janu-ary, to assist with the more geological aspects of the project. Bridget has been around Weeks Hall for the last year. She was funded by SILC (Spatial Intelligence Learning Center) to help design Ar-tificial Intelligence teaching aids for introductory classes. This AI project is just part of our ongoing work with Cognitive Scientists, most notably Tim Shipley of Temple University. Bridget had done a senior thesis with me before doing a Masters at the University of Wyoming, so she sort of knew what she was getting in for. Richard Becker is also doing well, continu-ing to work on faulting and geomorphology in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Otherwise, now that I can remember, I had a nice year. I didn’t even mind the winter, since I got away to Guatemala in the middle of it.

John VaLLey2014 has been the year to solve old questions. It started in January with publication of a paper culminating a 6-year study of 3.9 to 4.4 Ga zir-cons from the Moon that Mike Spicuzza and I discovered in lunar regolith collected by Apollo astronauts. We estimate that the NASA sample repository contains up to 100,000 of these disag-gregated zircons, representing a previously un-recognized treasure trove for study of magmatic activity on the Moon and possibly elsewhere in the early Solar System. These results indicate that lunar magmas were hot and dry, a conclusion that has recently received much interest. A sec-ond paper in February finally resolved the Pb-mo-bility question for U-Pb geochronology of a 4.4 Ga zircon from Earth. Pb-mobility would cause erroneous ages and has been used to question our proposal of a Cool Early Earth. We reported


a new 4.4 Ga crystal with less radiation damage than the previous record holder (see the Out-crop for 2000), making it the oldest reliably dated sample from Earth. In addition to WiscSIMS, we used atom probe tomography to analyze and locate each atom at 0.2 nm-scale in a small piece of this zircon in collaboration with Tom Kelly and others at the CAMECA factory in Madison, where atom probes are manufactured. These results show that the zircon age is correct and reinforce our 2001 proposal that the surface of the Hadean Earth was cool enough for liquid water oceans and was hospitable to life 800 myr earlier than the oldest known microfossils. These results have been universally accepted by professionals and ignited a media storm of popular interest. In ad-dition to traditional print and broadcast outlets, there were some surprising new venues includ-ing 100’s of new web-site pages in various lan-guages and even a very popular instagram from Beyonce Knowles. For more information, see: http://geoscience.wisc.edu/geoscience/people/faculty/john-valley/john-valley-incle-on-zircons/. In June, astrobiology grad-student Jake Cam-mack and I went to Western Australia where he is studying the sedimentary environments of 3.4 Ga stromatolites in the Pilbara craton. While there, I collected 20 kg of 3.4 Ga quartz arenite, from which we have selected 1500 detrital zircons that we will date in the hope of finding the first Hadean zircons in the Pilbara, which would have

importance for theories of the genesis of the first continents. In other projects, Adam Denny and Maciej Sliwinsky have established links be-tween carbonate diagenesis, quartz overgrowths and the burial history of the Illinois basin; Ryan Quinn completed his study of oxygen isotope thermometry in the Adirondacks and in August collected garnets from the famous Dora Maira eclogite locality in the Italian Alps where meta-morphic coesite was first discovered; Tyler Blum analyzed a 4.35 Ga zircon from the moon by atom probe; Ben Linzmeier continues study of nau-tiloids and the Cretaceous seaway with Shanan Peters; David McDougal is completing his oxygen 3-isotope study of chondritic meteorites with Noriko Kita; and Jody Wycech is investi-gating the effects of diagenesis on foraminiferal calcite with Clay Kelly and Reinhard Kozdon. We are happy that Selin and Reinhard were married in August, but sad that this caused him to move to Rutgers.

herB wangMy current research is in a fiber-optic technology called Distributed Acoustic Sensing using equip-ment developed by Silixa, Ltd. The research team includes Geological Engineering professor Dante Fratta, electronics engineer Neal Lord, and graduate students Ethan Castongia (MS, 2014), Chelsea Lancelle (MS, 2013, PhD x2016), and Alex Baldwin (MS, x2015), and Silixa engineers Athena Chalari and Michael Mondanos. Our group has experimented with test arrays on fro-zen Lake Mendota and at Garner Valley in south-ern California. The next anticipated deployment will be at the Montana Tech student mine as part of an NIOSH project led by Mary MacLaughlin, a geological engineer there. This will be followed by an array at Bradys Hot Springs, a geothermal field northeast of Reno as part of a DOE geother-mal project led by Kurt Feigl. On the teaching side my courses over the past year include Rock Mechanics and a freshman seminar called Oil, Water and Climate. Rosemary and I have been spending a month here and a month there in the Menlo Park, CA area where our daughter Michelle lives. Thanks to Jean Bahr, we were invited to Stuart Rojstac-zer’s (BS 1977) New Year’s Day party in Palo Alto. Stuart went on a book tour in September promoting his first published novel The Math-ematician’s Shiva, which is set in Madison (see more about Stuart in Alumni News).

huiFang XuGraduate student Zhizhang Shen (co-advised by Phil Brown) has being working on possible natural catalysts that can enhance dolomite growth at low temperature using density func-tional theory method. One of his recent papers

demonstrates that adsorbed hydrogen-sulfide can weaken the bonding between surface water and Mg ions on dolomite surface, and promote surface water removal and dolomite growth. Graduate student Minglu Liu has investigated the roles of microbes and polysaccharides in enhancing dolomite crystallization in the Deep Springs Lake (a modern hypersaline lake) in California. Graduate Seungyeol Lee has been working on Fe-hydroxide and Mn-oxide mineral nano-phases and their structural and chemical evolutions in Fe-Mn-nodules from Lake Michigan area using X-ray micro-diffraction and transmis-sion electron microscopy. These Fe-Mn-nodules have an important role in absorbing heavy met-als. Graduate student Xintong Jiang and Xin Deng have finished their MS theses. Xintong’s thesis is about growth kinetics of calcite in highly saturated solutions using the in-situ fluid-flow reaction cell. Her in-situ observation of calcite growth avoids interference from aragonite co-precipitation. Xin’s thesis is about kinetics of hydromagnesite-to-magnesite transformation in aqueous solutions. Magnesite is one of the stable carbonate minerals for immobilizing carbon di-oxide. Graduate student Nick Levitt (co-advised by Clark Johnson) has continued his clumped isotope study of synthetic calcite crystals in con-trolled growth environments. Visiting graduate student Chengxiang Li has investigated altera-tion of a Cu-bearing chlorite and thermal stability of titanite nanotubes using X-ray diffraction. New graduate student Shiyun Jin just joined my research group. Lab manager of the S. W. Bailey X-ray Diffraction Laboratory, Dr. Rie Fredrick-son has been studying structural modulations in intermediate plagioclase. The incommensurate modulated structure of the intermediate plagio-clase feldspar has puzzled mineralogists for de-cades since it was recognized in 1940. In the past year, I have worked on developing a method for solving crystal structures of nano-minerals using an aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) and the ab-initio study method. Our aberration corrected STEM can provide chemical images with better than 0.1nm resolution. The method has been success-fully applied for determining crystal structures of laihunite (a ferric iron-dominated olivine), mono-clinic Fe

3S

4, “d”-superstructure in sedimentary

dolomite, and nano-precipitates with intermedi-ate composition between orthopyroxene and clino-pyroxene. These mineral phases occur as nano-precipitates within their host minerals or intergrowth with other mineral phases. Tradi-tional methods do not work well with this type of mineral. l

False-color cathodoluminescence image of a 400-micron zircon and the 3-D map made by atom-probe tomography of ~10-nm clusters of radiogenic atoms of 207Pb (yellow) and 206Pb (green) from the core of this crystal. Conventional U-Pb geochronology shows this is the oldest known (4.4 Ga, billion years) concordant zircon from Earth (Valley et al. 2014 Nature Geoscience). At nm-scale, the 207Pb/206Pb ratios show that clusters formed by heating and diffusion 1-Ga after crystallization of the zircon. These first nano-geochronology results rule out Pb-mobility biasing of the Hadean age and confirms chemical homogenization of the silicate Earth before 4.4 Ga. Image, John Valley.


Mary anDerSonA highlight of late 2013 was being the citationist for my former PhD student Chunmiao Zheng who was awarded the O.E. Meinzer Award at the GSA meeting in October. Chunmiao also received a 2014 distinguished alumni award from our department and I was pleased to host a reception in his honor, which was attended by many local hydrobadgers. Another fun event was the first (and possibly last!) Pillars Confer-ence organized by the National Ground Water Association in Phoenix in November 2013. I was one of four “pillars” of hydrogeology invited as a guest speaker. Hydrobadgers Randy Hunt and Chunmiao Zheng joined me for a session on “What’s new in Groundwater Modeling”. Most of 2013-14 was focused on preparing the 2nd edition of “Applied Groundwater Modeling” with co-author (and hydrobadger) Bill Woessner and new co-author Randy Hunt. We are antici-pating publication in early 2015. Charles and I continue to enjoy our vacation home in Door County, Wisconsin, and travels around the USA and Canada including Toronto, New York City, and New Orleans.

DaViD L. cLarkOur study of the Paleozoic unconformity in the central Wasatch Mountains of Utah is now published and available online: "The major pre-Mississippian unconformity in Rock Canyon, central Wasatch Range, Utah." This is the initial publication of the online journal "Geology of the Intermountain West," v. 1, 2014. A similar small scale study concerning the precise age of the Opohonga Formation in west central Utah is a new project. Louise and I enjoy living in the Utah mountains with family and friends following our great eight-year adventure in the northern California wine country. After 15 years away from Madison and without close contact with the De-partment, would like to know how/where/what my 80+ former graduate students are doing! If you encounter one, ask them to send me a few lines: [email protected]

roBert h. Dott, Jr.Life goes on for Nancy and me at the Oakwood retirement center with lots of little ups and downs of a medical sort. We partake of some of the many activities offered here and I continue to offer occasional rock walks around the grounds and a lecture now and then. I still try to attend most guest lectures at the Department and I once again acted as Chair of the Wisconsin Survey’s Geological Mapping Committee. State Geologist Jamie Robertson does all the work

while I lend some sort of window dressing to this annual occasion. I also join five other Archean Retirees for a monthly lunch. We swap lies and reminisce about this and that. I shall attend the GSA again this year where I shall be honored to receive the Friedman Distinguished Service Award from the History and Philosophy of Geology Division of GSA. I hope to see many alumni at the meeting in Vancouver, BC.

gorDon MeDariSHas another year already gone by? Where does the time go? I guess it's because I've been im-mersed in research and travelling. My interest in the mantle continues apace — two papers on the petrology and geochemistry of peridotite xenoliths in the Eger Graben (Czech Republic) with my Czech colleague, Lukáš Ackerman (and others) are in press with the International Journal of Earth Sciences — these papers present an exceptionally complete view of the composi-tion of lithospheric mantle in central Europe. Another paper with Czech colleagues on an orogenic garnet peridotite in the Bohemian Mas-sif is under review for a special volume of Lithos stemming from the 10th International Eclogite Conference in 2013. With research on mantle rocks completed (for the time being), I've returned to a consid-eration of Precambrian paleosols in the Lake Superior region. A paper on "Metasaprolite in the McGrath Gneiss, Minnesota, USA: viewing Paleoproterozoic weathering through a veil of metamorphism and metasomatism" with Terry Boerboom, Brian Jicha, and Brad Singer has been submitted to Precambrian Research, and a review of Precambrian paleosols in the Lake Superior region is underway. Nancy and I continue to enjoy snorkeling, paddling, and biking. We spent much of January in central Florida for paddling and biking, February in Belize for snorkeling, April in Grand Cayman for snor-keling with my daughter and grandsons, who declared it to be "the best vacation ever!", fol-lowed by a week on Little Cayman for snorkeling by ourselves. This summer found us enjoying the pleasures of biking and paddling in the Midwest, including Door County,

the Root River in Minnesota, the Black River (Wisconsin), and the Upper Iowa River. We'll return to Europe in September for our annual sojourn there, this time sea kayaking in Croatia, followed by biking along the Danube from Buda-pest downstream to the Croatian border, where we'll stop, being rather nervous about the many land mines that remain there….

DaVe MickeLSonLife continues to be interesting and busy! A time consuming project has been evaluating changes in Lake Michigan shoreline bluffs that have taken place since Larry Acomb, Carl Fricke and others, helped with a survey of the bluffs in the mid-1970s, and since John Chapman re-measured the bluff profiles in 1995. In those days many hours were spent climbing bluffs and measuring distances and slope angles. Now Lidar, flown by the Corps of Engineers, can be used to draw slope profiles in much more detail in only a few of minutes. This also has the advantage of look-ing through the vegetation, so I’m convinced we get much better profiles in a fraction of the time. I’m now working with Tuncer Edil (GLE) on analysis of the changes. In another project, Chin Wu (GLE) and I are working with a student to measure rates of longshore sediment transport along the shore of Lake Michigan. Volunteer work on boards of the Ice Age trail Alliance and the Friends of the UW Lakeshore Nature Preserve continues to allow me to use my geologic background to help with interpreta-tion and solving some land-use problems. I also continue to give quite a few lectures around the state for the UW Speakers Bureau. Since June, garden work and two trips to our summer cottage in New England have kept Vin and me busy. I hope to see many former students at GSA in Vancouver! l

Emeritus Faculty News —2013-14

At the 2014 Spring Awards Banquet: Ben Linzmeier, left, with Mark Solien, center, and Marshal Tofte. Mark, BOV Senior Advisor, received the Distinguished Alumnus Award, and Ben and Marshal, both graduate students, were recipients of the first Nania Awards. Banquet photos, Neal Lord.


Fundraising Highlights

Clark Johnson

Our department is fortunate to have a dedicated group of GeoBadger alumni who recognize the financial challenges facing today’s undergraduate and graduate students. We know that many of you have a favorite fund you have contributed to over the years, and these funds remain valuable sources of support for our students. In this issue of the Outcrop, we highlight two current needs:

Undergraduate Student SupportWe have regularly highlighted the continued need for scholarships to help our students attend Field Camp. As the number of our majors con-tinues to grow, this need will be more important in the future. Increasingly, a large number of our majors must work during the academic year and summer to help with their undergraduate education, and this makes it especially difficult to attend Field Camp, not only in terms of the camp costs, but also the lost work time. We have tried to provide scholarships in the range of $1,000 to $2,000 per student. A $2,000 scholarship per student, at 15 students/year, requires a sustained giving level of $30,000/year, and we have come close to this level of support through a combination of alumni gifts and industry sponsors. The large increase in our majors, however, will require an increase in dona-tions in the future. Please consider helping future GeoBadgers in this capstone course through a donation to the Department’s Field Camp Scholarship Fund.

Graduate Student SupportOur graduate students serve as TA’s to our un-dergraduates in a wide array of classes, conduct research, and move on to careers in industry and research. The role graduate students play in meeting our educational mission is steadily increasing, and the needs of society for geosci-entists with advanced degrees also continues to increase. However, our ability to support our graduate students has declined dramatically due to cuts in the TA budget. This year we are focusing our fundraising efforts in graduate student support on the Jay C. Nania Endowment Fund. As a number of our alumni know, Jay Nania (B.S. 1984, M.S. 1987) was a strong supporter of the Department, but lost his battle with cancer in 2013. Jay’s wife Silvia has established an endowment fund aimed at supporting graduate students in the department, and she and her family presented the first awards from the fund at the 2014 Spring Banquet.

2014 Nania Fund Awardees

Ben Linzmeier Ben earned his B.S. in Geology at Bowling Green State University in 2009, and then returned to his Wisconsin roots for graduate work in the department. He completed his M.S. in paleobiology in 2012 and is currently pursuing the Ph.D. in the department. Ben’s thesis research, co-advised by Professors Shanan Peters and John Valley, is aimed at understanding the ecological transitions of

Late Cretaceous ammonites from the Western Interior Seaway of North America using high spatial resolution stable isotope sampling. This work promises to provide new insights into thermal stratification of the seaway. His award from the Nania Fund was used to attend a major international conference that also included field sampling for comparison to the Western Interior Seaway. His hope is to pursue a research career in paleobiology.

Marshal Tofte Marshal completed his B.S. at UW-Madison in 2013, and then began the M.S. program in the department in fall 2013. His research, advised by Professor Alan Carroll, focuses on basin-scale analysis of organic matter enrichment in the Eocene Green River Formation. Explora-tion interests in the Green River Formation have increased significantly in recent years, and Marshall’s work will provide important constraints on the distribution of organic matter in the basin. Marshal’s award from the Nania Fund was used for travel to the USGS Core Research Center in Denver, CO and follow-up chemical analyses. His hope is to pursue a career in the oil and gas industry.

Our goal in the coming year is to reach ~$375K for the fund, which would be a sufficient endowment to allow us to expand awards to include a one semester Research Assistantship and a research fund. As can be seen in the graph below, we are well within reach of this goal over the next year. The long-term goal is to reach a level that would generate sufficient income to support a 12-month RA and research fund. Please consider a gift to the Jay C. Nania Endowed Graduate Support Fund. l

Your help is needed to support undergraduate and graduate students

Silvia Orengo-Nania with her daughter Julia Nania and Brad Singer at the 2014 Spring Awards Banquet in the Great Hall. Silvia and Julia presented Nania Awards to Ben Linzmeier and Marshal Tofte.

The Jay C. Nania Endowment Fund for Graduate Students.


Lowell R. "Doc" Laudon was a legendary figure, who had an enormous influence on both students and faculty colleagues over a career that spanned 45 years. Doc joined our faculty in 1948 and is remembered as a charismatic teacher, both in the lecture hall, where he taught Introductory Geology to capacity crowds, and in the field, where he led a celebrated field trip to Tagish Lake in the Yukon Territory from 1967 to 1975. I first went to Tagish Lake as Doc's assistant in 1969, where he taught me, and the students, how to survive in the wilderness. He was the perfect man to do this, possessing an exceptional array of outdoor skills – I still have a vivid memory of his starting a fire with a single match in a torrential downpour. Tagish Lake was (and remains today) a wilderness region. Despite precipitous and dangerous terrain, an abundance of grizzly bears, and the frigid (and often turbulent) waters of Tagish Lake with the threat of hypothermia, Doc never lost a student. This commendable record was achieved by following the "Laudon Laws" (and with a little luck).

Doc and Florence Laudon at Tagish Lake in 1969.

Doc, seated right, at Alfred Butte, Tagish Lake, in 1977. Photos this page, courtesy of Gordon Medaris.

Surviving the Yukon with Doc Laudon

The 338 pp. biography of Doc Laudon, Bushels of Fossils, by James S. Parks, is available from the Geoscience Department. Information and an order form may be found at http://www.geology.wisc.edu/alumni/LRLaudon/.


UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSINGeology 150

GENERAL RULES AND REGULATIONS

Because a considerable portion of the summer will be spent in mountainous terrain or traveling over large bodies of water whose temperature is only slightly above freezing, very stringent rules of conduct must be rigidly adhered to by all members of the party. Work in the mountains offers mainly two possibilities of a tragedy. One is from rolling rocks through the party on the slope below and the second a fall. Because of the lack of mountain experience by most of the members of the party, the following regulations are always in force. Infraction of regulations will lead to immediate dismissal. 1. Climbing in the mountains. Experience in the area has allowed us to choose routes up the mountains that involve absolutely no vertical climbing on bare rock. All traverses will be essentially on trails and grassy slopes. This means the party must stay together. Speed demons will have to wait for the slow pokes. No trip is so long that speed is necessary. Mountaineer type climbing will not be allowed. 2. Rolling rocks through the party on the slope below. To avoid this hazard the entire party will climb in a series of switch backs. Hence a rock kicked off does not roll through the party below. 3. The return back down the mountain. No helter skelter race back down the mountain can be tolerated. It is possible to split the party in a fast and slow party provided they are separated by enough time to avoid danger. In general the same switch back traverse rules must be applied in the return. 4. No student will ever under any circumstances be allowed to travel through the bush, or up and down mountains, alone. Parties of three individuals under some circumstance can be allowed to leave camp. In case of accident one stays with the injured man and the other goes for help. A party of four would be better. Students who insist on going off through the bush alone will be sent home. It should be kept constantly in mind that the woods contain Grizzly Bears and that there is always the chance of running onto a cow moose with a calf. 5. Travel on the lake. Since the temperature of the water in Tagish Lake is only a few degrees above freezing, a swamped boat is a catastrophe. There are many stretches on the lake over ten miles in length and mid-afternoon winds often produce 8 foot waves. Long experience has taught us that it is best to sit it out on the bank until the wind goes down. Much of the travel will often be close to the shoreline. In many cases we will move camp at night. We are in no hurry and there is no set schedule. We have been known to sit on the bank for two days waiting for the wind to go down. 6.Regulations concerning gear on the lake. Cut your gear to an absolute minimum before leaving Ten Mile Ranch. No beer, pop, whiskey or beverages of any kind are allowed on the lake because of the weight problem. Don't cheat by hiding a bottle of whiskey in the middle of your duffel bag. You can wash your clothes along the way so don't take everything you have in the car. Gear left in the car at Ten Mile ranch will be perfectly safe. 7. Use of drugs. Since perfect physical coordination on the mountain depends on perfect attunement of your senses, no drugs will be allowed. Even use of drugs as mild as Pot will not be tolerated. Anyone caught with drugs will be escorted off the lake immediately and given F in the course. Please NoteA case of essential suicide took place in the Oshkosh party where a student fell over 1000 feet to his death. Had this individual been in control of all his good senses, he would not have left the party alone against all regulations. Also, he would not have tried to go down a slope that could not have been traversed by a mountain goat. Thehistoryofgeologicfieldcampsformanyuniversitieshavebeenmarredbytragedy,usually by falls or by drowning. We at Wisconsin have had two accidents. Both demanded helicopter evacuation of the injured student. One fell down on the point of his hammer and had to beflowntoFt.Nelson.TheothertriedtosplitaboardforhisfireatEngineerMinewitharock.Theboardflewupandhithiminthehead.Hewasstillunconscious6hourslater.

I have to be honest after all these years and admit that I carried a bottle of Canadian Whiskey hidden deep in my backpack, as did some students, I suspect. One of Doc's favorite ploys was to send his assistant and students out to measure a section, while he went fishing. At times, measuring sections became a bit vexing, as expressed by one student in her field notes, "Today we did an absolutely ridiculous columnar section that went on for feet and feet of massive greywacke. Everybody was a bit perturbed, but I am developing patience." However, one benefit of this ploy for the students was to find a lake trout dinner waiting upon their return to camp. I inherited the Yukon Field Trip when Doc retired in 1975, and for the following two years he continued on the trip to show me the ropes. Despite his tutelage, there were some things I never mastered, such as sitting around the campfire and reciting the "The Cremation of Sam McGee" in its entirety. Doc remained vigorous at the age of 70, and many of us had difficulty in keeping up as he led our daily hikes, some of which involved an elevation gain of 4,000 feet, as seen here at Alfred Butte (photo, left). Going to the Yukon with Doc Laudon was a life-shaping experience, and myriad students and I count ourselves truly fortunate to have known and been influenced by such a remarkable man. The editors thank Karen Roesler and Mark Kurz who sent recollections of their 1974 Yukon trip with Professor Laudon and a copy of the Geology 150 Rules. by Gordon Medaris

Doc with students at Tutshi River, Tagish Lake, 1974. "We gathered on the top of the second plateau on an ant hill for a short lecture. We soon all had ants in our pants, literally." Photo and comment, Nan Zimdars.


Wasatch-Uinta Field Camp 50th Anniversary: Party and Reunion in 2016

The summer of 2016 will mark the 50th year of the award winning Wasatch-Uinta Field Camp hosted by the iconic Chateau Après in Park City, Utah. Wisconsin joined the consortium in 1972 and in the past 43 years Badgers have accounted for just over 25% of the 2733 (and counting) students who have tackled six weeks of challenging geology while becoming friends with future peers from other Midwestern universities. As the Director of the camp for the past ten years, a duty now shared with Kurt Burmeister (Univ of Pacific, Univ of Illinois), we would like to plan some events surrounding the 50th summer of operation and are soliciting ideas and interest from camp alums of all ages. A special reception/party at the Denver GSA in 2016 seems like an obvious event. We also think a several day-long

reunion visit to the Chateau Après immediately following the end of Field Camp in 2016 (July 23-26?) would be a blast. Check out your old room (not much change, I bet), share stories from your year, visit some of the field areas on foot (how about Bonanza?) or by vehicle (likely prime wildflowers in Albion Basin). Observe first hand the incredible growth and gentrification of the once wild mining town Park City into one of the most expensive places to own a tiny historic house or beautiful new condo. Please email me ([email protected]) with ideas, questions and expressions of interest in being kept abreast of

ongoing developments. Updates to the planning will be available on the WUFC website: www.fieldcamp.org. Thanks to a very talented MSU student last summer, we now have some fantastic field camp stickers to get the celebration started. The stickers are a new take

on Anasazi petroglyphs from SE Utah that we see every summer and help remind us of some of the "challenges" surrounding this shared capstone experience. The design is silkscreened in UV resistant blue ink onto high quality, heavy-duty vinyl stickers that are suitable for extended outdoor use. (3.75" x 7.5") These stickers can be purchased through our online store (http://mkt.com/WUFC). Future anniversary memorabilia such as hats? can cozies? T-shirts? (your suggestions?) will also become available here. l

GGSA ReportNathan Fortney

The Geoscience Graduate Student Association has enjoyed a philanthropic and social year! The fall 2013 picnic celebrated a new batch of graduate students at Marshall Park, overlooking Lake Mendota. Tradition instilled students and faculty every Friday with Weeks End following the Weeks Lecture. GGSA celebrated the Earth’s Birthday on October 23rd with a culinary fundraiser entitled “Cakes for a Cause.” Eight geologically-themed creations were entered for judgment and consumption. Prizes were awarded to the most delicious cake as well as the most geological cake. Proceeds were donated to the Dane County Humane Society. Pi Day (March 14) was also celebrated with mathematical, geologi-cal, and tasty pies to raise money for the “Geobadgers Against Cancer” Relay for Life Team. GGSA raised $1,000 for the American Cancer Society!

The red carpet was rolled out for visiting students during prospec-tive graduate student recruitment weekend in February. Individual meetings with faculty and lab tours took place on Friday, followed by dinner in the atrium of Weeks Hall and drinks at the Essen Haus. Special events on Saturday for students included excursions to Devil’s Lake, Cave of the Mounds, and running tours around Madison. Thanks to gen-erous donations from industry sponsors, GGSA organized the annual fall field trip with camping at Governor Dodge State Park and caving at Pop’s Cave. The Spring Banquet celebrated the conclusion of another successful year and the issuing of both serious and comical awards. The Spring picnic was held in Brittingham Park on an unseasonably cool day during finals week. GGSA provided burgers, brats, and bever-ages while sides and desserts were potluck. Some folks enjoyed a game

GGSA Officers for 2014-15 President: Nathan Fortney; VP: Marshal TofteTreasurer: Alex Baldwin; Secretary: Adam DennyFaculty Liaisons: Zach Michels and Ryan QuinnOmbudsperson: Tyler BlumWebmaster: Ben LinzmeierElucidator: Nathan AndersonRecruitment Coordinator: Mike JohnsonField Trip Coordinator: Sharon McMullen, with assistance from Jake Cammack

of Frisbee, others kept warm by the grill, and some simply enjoyed the scenery and beverages. Planning is currently underway for both the 2015-2016 fall and spring picnics, as GGSA looks to build on past success. GGSA wants to formally thank the graduate students involved in planning the events as well as BP, Hess, Conoco-Philips, Chevron and independent donors who allow for traditions like the fall field trip and Weeks End to continue.

“Geobadgers Against Cancer” Relay for Life Team, (L to R) Steven Henning, Sarah Lemon, Buckingham Badger, Andrew Ruetten, Ian Mosbrucker. Photo, Nathan Fortney.


Prepping for the FutureAfter nine months of renovation, our overhauled fossil preparation lab opened in April. New air handling equipment, lighting, and safety measures were installed as well as a microprep station for delicate work on tiny fossils. Thanks to a video camera and a 60-inch flat panel display, visitors can now get at even better view of specimens being cleaned and restored. Museum Scientist Dave Lovelace taught a course on fossil preparation in the spring and maintains a thriving group of students in the lab. We thank the College of Letters and Science, and the Instructional Laboratory Moderniza-tion Program for making these upgrades possible.

Fizz Boom Read!As part of the Wisconsin Astrobiology Research Consortium (PI-Clark Johnson), we partnered with the Madison Public Library to inject science into their summer reading programs. Our efforts included purchasing a set of astrobiol-ogy and earth science books for each of the nine Madison library branches, providing 20 one-hour long science programs, training librarians to deliver their own science programs to their patrons, and hosting a science writer-in-residence. To help close the achievement gap, Brooke Norsted received NASA funding to create a city-wide summer reading marketing campaign that successfully reached low-income and minority families.

Sweet HonorsTo celebrate the museum’s 165th anniversary, we held a competition to develop and name a new flavor of Babcock Dairy ice cream. The winning entry came from a nine year old boy who invented “Fantastic Jurassic” after being inspired by the geologic period that is one million times older than the museum. His concoction has a chocolate ice cream base (representing Jurassic rock) with inclusions of white chocolate chips (fossils), dark chocolate shavings (coal), and swirls of caramel (amber). The flavor was dished out at Babcock Dairy and Daily Scoop stores on campus throughout the summer. We also were honored this year to be voted

one of the best museums in Madison Magazine’s “Best of Madison” contest.

A Journey Through TimeA new attendance record was set this spring at our annual open house when 1,500 people traveled the depths of geologic time with museum staff and students. Addition-ally, Stephen Meyers gave a talk entitled “How to Tell Time with a Rock Clock” while John Valley, Mike Spicuzza, Tyler Blum, and Ryan Quinn wowed visitors with the oldest known terrestrial object — a 4.4 billion year old zircon crystal. On top of advanc-ing our educational mission on this one day Rich Slaughter, Carrie Eaton and the Friends of the Geology Museum flexed their muscles to scoop out over 150,000 calories worth of Fantastic Jurassic ice cream. l

John Valley and Tyler Blum chatting about Earth’s oldest zircons with some of the 1,500 visitors to the museum’s open house this spring. Photos, the Geology Museum.

Rich Slaughter dishes out some “Fantastic Jurassic” alongside Chancellor Rebecca Blank at this year’s campus ice cream social.

Archeology graduate student Jess Senjem carefully cleans a piece from a Triceratops skeleton excavated in Montana by Geology Museum personnel.


Please consider making a gift to the Nania Fund for graduate student research support, the Field Camp scholarship fund for undergraduates, or to your favorite fund. UW FOUNDATION FUNDS Give online or make checks payable to the UW Foundation. amount Geoscience Annual Fund Geoscience Community Fund Student Field Experience Fund Jay C. Nania Endowment Fund – graduate student support Field Camp Scholarships – for undergraduates Sharon Meinholz Graduate Student Fund – supports travel to professional meetings James J. and Dorothy T. Hanks Fund – supports an annual "Best Geophysics Student" award C.K. Leith Fund for Structural Geology Lloyd C. Pray and J. Campbell Craddock Fund -‐ supports grad students in sed or structural geology Hydrogeology Research Fund L. Cline/L. Pray/R. Dott Sedimentary Geology Field Fund George J. Verville Award in Geology and Geophysics (Paleontology) Paleontology Program Fund in Geology Eugene N. Cameron Scholarship Fund (Economic Geology, Mineralogy, Petrology, Geochemistry) Sturges W. Bailey Scholarship Fund (Mineralogy and Petrology) George P. Woollard/Sigmund I. Hammer Memorial Fund (Geophysics) Robert and Ramona Sneider Museum Fund – enhancing museum exhibits L.R. Laudon Scholarship Fund -‐ used for award to the Outstanding Junior major S. Tyler -‐T. Berg Scholarship Fund – support awards to outstanding TAs Geology Museum Fund Museum Student Field Experience Fund Klaus Westphal Public Education Fund in honor of Klaus & his passion for teaching about geology

TRUST FUNDS & DEPARTMENT GIFT FUNDS Please make checks payable to the Dept of Geoscience. amount amount Charles R. Van Hise Fellowship Library Fund Mack C. Lake Scholarship Petrology Fund McClintock Geophysical Research Fund Quaternary Fund

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