What's Inside
Letter
from the Chair
Faculty Research Highlights:
Modeling Earthquake Ground Motion
Fuzzy Logic in Geology
Faculty News
Happenings Around the Department
Alumni Giving
Kent Johnson Memorial
A Letter from the Department Chair
Tim Lowenstein
The chairman’s baton has officially been passed from Bob Demicco to me. I am proud to say that the job has been made easy by a healthy and thriving group of professors, staff, graduate students and undergraduates. It is time to start showing off some of the great accomplishments by members of our department, beginning with highlights of research by two of our faculty: Jeff Barker and Bob Demicco on pages 3 and 5, respectively, of this Newsletter*. This year we nominated David Jenkins for the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and Jeffrey Barker for the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. They will (we hope) join recent awardees Dick Andrus, Steve Dickman and Tim Lowenstein. That is impressive considering our faculty numbers 13! More accolades to John Bridge for the publication of his exhaustive book “Rivers and Floodplains” and Bob Demicco’s (with BU professor George Klir) “Fuzzy Logic in Geology”. All of our faculty continue to do great research all over the world, along with advising and teaching, and you can read about that in the faculty news.
Graduate students Ramon Aguirre and John Rayburn have been awarded University Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Research this year. Congratulations to them and to all our students (past and present) who make things happen in Science 1. Without students, the halls of Science 1 would echo.
Other good news: Joe Graney was awarded tenure and promotion to associate professor. Joe, Karen Salvage, and Sid Mitra (who joined our faculty in January 2003) are the core of our growing program in environmental science that we are quite proud of. We continue to offer a strong graduate and undergraduate program in most disciplines of geology, and our graduates have been very successful in getting jobs or continuing their education. We really appreciate all the support from alumni who actively seek our help in placing our graduates in jobs with their firms.
I want to personally thank many of you who donated money for the “Van Fund” and to the department. That money will help us purchase a new van this spring and will add to our “fleet” such as it is. Many of you will fondly remember field trips in the 1980 brown van and the 1985 “Old Red” van. I recall a trip to Clarksville Cave when the water pump on “Old Red” exploded, leaving us shaken and stranded in Cobleskill. Believe it or not, those rusting hulks are still parked on campus, but we can’t really use them for more than local trips. You will be happy to hear that we will be offering a new course, “Field Methods in Geoscience” beginning next fall. I know that most alums probably found field trips one of the most enjoyable experiences of their education at BU, and we hope to expand that part of our program. Many of us regularly attend the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting and we usually have a pretty good party there. If you ever have a chance to go to GSA, please join us at the Alumni party. Finally, thanks to David Jenkins for putting together this Newsletter and to Jeff Barker who has added a huge list of alumni on our web page. Check it out.
*Editor's Note: Beginning this year the Geo-Bing Newsletter will be including the highlights of the research of several faculty members in our department, taken primarily in alphabetical order. We hope you find this slightly more in-depth view of faculty research to be an interesting addition to the Newsletter.
Modeling
earthquake ground motion
in 3-D sedimentary basins
by
Jeffrey S. Barker
A few years ago, when I was on sabbatical in Grenoble, France, I started analyzing data recorded on a seismic array right in downtown Mexico City.
by
Robert V. Demicco
For
the past ten years or so, my research has focused upon applications of
fuzzy logic in geology. Yes, I know what those of you who remember me
are thinking, “when wasn’t his logic fuzzy?” You may also re-member the
2000 presidential debates when Gore and Bush accused each other of “fuzzy
math”. Well, I am here to set the record straight. There is a sophisticated
body of engineering literature developed by systems sci-entists that is
based on what has come to be known as fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic was initially
developed for ro-botic control and, if you have recently bought an appliance
or automobile advertised as being “intelligent” or “smart”, you are the
proud owner of a silicon chip with a built in fuzzy controller.
Fuzzy logic provides a fundamentally different approach
toward modeling complex systems: an ap-proach based on common sense, intuition,
and natural language. In classical logic, a proposition is either false
(0) or true (1). The main idea of fuzzy logic is that a proposition can
take on intermediate “truth” values between 0 and 1. For example, the
“truth” value of the linguistic proposition “it is very cold outside”
might be 0.9 for twenty below zero, but only 0.1 if it is eighty degrees.
Fuzzy logic is sufficiently expressive to allow us to represent and deal
with propositions expressed in natural language. Such propositions almost
invariably contain vague linguistic terms that can be represented by appropriate
fuzzy sets and operations on those sets.
Using fuzzy logic, knowledge expressed in natural
language can be represented by a system of condi-tional fuzzy propositions
(fuzzy if-then rules) such as, for example, "IF it is very cold and it
rains, THEN the roads are slippery." Systems of this kind are called fuzzy
inference systems. Given input conditions describing the situation, fuzzy
inference systems can infer an appropriate conclusion. I hope that you
can see why I was attracted to fuzzy logic. Think of how much geological
knowledge is expressed in statements such as “IF the water is shallow
and near a delta mouth, or if there is strong wave activity, THEN sand
will be deposited”. Fuzzy logic allows us to turn that kind of statement
into a mathematical expression, whereby for a given water depth, distance
to a delta mouth, and relative wave energy a given amount of sand should
be deposited. I use fuzzy logic in just such ways to model deposition
of sediment in three-dimensional forward models of how sedimentary basins
fill. Instead of using precise mathematical formulations of chemical and
physical processes, I replace then with inference rules in natural language
similar to the examples given above.
Below (Figure 1.) are two artificial stratigraphic
cross sections from one of my fuzzy logic models of deltaic deposition
in a basin 125 km by 125 km. The upper panel runs from onshore to offshore
whereas the lower section runs parallel to shore about 45 kilometers in
from the margin of the model. The colors depict a combination of grain
size and sorting. The hottest reds are the cleanest sands and deep blues
are pure muds. The oranges, yellows, greens, and blue-greens represent
various mixtures of muddy sands to sandy muds. Flu-vial deposits on the
upstream end interfinger with marine deltaic mouth bar deposits due to
a superimposed 20 m sea level oscillation. These models are capable of
making some very realistic-looking artificial deposits. So far, if we
wanted to model a specific deltaic deposit from the geologic record, we
would have to run many ex-periments, “hand tuning” the model after each
run to get closer to ground truth. We are currently working on ways to
exactly model any given real world deltaic deposit through inverse modeling:
stay tuned, this is real difficult. If anyone is interested in the gory
details, you can check out a book published by Academic Press last year
entitled Fuzzy Logic in Geology. This book was edited by yours truly and
George Klir, a system scientist from the Watson School who, it turns out,
is one of the world’s experts on fuzzy logic (funny how that works). When
I am not doing fuzzy logic modeling, I do good old algebraic number crunching.
One of the other areas of research where I do not use fuzzy logic is modeling
changes in seawater chemistry and atmospheric chemistry back through geologic
time. I do a lot of this stuff with Tim Lowenstein, his students, and
Herm Roberson. Tim and his students developed a technique to analyze fluid
inclusions trapped in ancient marine halites. These droplets of ancient
seawater-derived brines contain a clear record of how the major ion chemistry
of seawater has changed through time. Herm Roberson and I have been trying
to model these changes. I will let Tim give you the details in a future
newsletter. Yeah, I know, it is hard to imagine me sitting behind a computer
all day. I hope to get out to the Canadian Rockies for some more fieldwork
this summer. Ron Spencer and some upstart Canadian paleontologists think
that the Burgess Shale animals might be some kind of weird seafloor vent
community! You heard it here first!
| Figure 1. Artificial stratigraphic cross sections from one fuzzy logic model of deltaic deposition in a basin 125 km by 125 km. Upper panel runs from onshore to offshore. Lower panel is a section running parallel to shore about 45 kilometers in from the margin of the model. |
Dick
Andrus
Greetings
from the department non-geologist. I continue to teach at least a bit
of geology in most of my courses, including Envi 101, Ecological agriculture,
Forests, Wetlands, and Tropical Ecology.
I'm especially intrigued with the relationship
of tropical forests and stream hydrology. I'm still lobbying for geo grad
students to come to our reforestation site in Costa Rica.
I now spend about 7 weeks a year in Costa
Rica. Each spring Julian Shepherd from Biology and I take about 20 students
down on a spring break trip and each July I teach about 5-10 students
both ecology and restoration at our field station near the south Pacific
coast. On the first heavy rain (usually at least 5") we go out and observe
the behavior of several nearby streams that differ in the degree to which
their watersheds are forested. The differences are truly amazing.
I've been in the field working on my Sphagnum
moss lately in Maine, Ireland and Alaska. Always pick your research organisms
so that they grow in cool places!
On a recent note, the snow here this year has
been the best for cross-country skiing in years. Its such a treat to just
run out the building, go skiing in the CIW woods, and then come back to
teach a class. Where else could one do this!
And speaking of that, we have a major project
going on now to develop a real management plan for the Nature Preserve
and other undeveloped campus land. To date this has all basically been
done on a volunteer basis, with geology grads playing a big role, but
we need something more substantial for the long haul. A web site is also
being created and it will have geology as well as ecology on it. Watch
for it coming soon to a computer in your neighborhood. We may even have
camping in the Preserve!
Jeffrey
Barker
I’m so
happy! For many years I didn’t have much of an opportunity to get to know
the undergraduate Geology majors. The classes I taught were either at
the non-major introductory level, or at advanced undergrad or graduate
level. Most of the Geology students didn’t take advanced Geophysics classes,
since everyone knows that geophysicists speak in equations. But now I’m
the undergraduate program director, so I get to meet, get to know, and
advise ALL of the Geology majors. Not only that, but this year I’ve joined
Francis Wu in teaching GEOL 214, our “core” sophomore-level course covering
Geophysics and Structural Geology. Francis and I are both very impressed
with the students’ willingness and capability in manipulating data and
modeling concepts using MATLAB. Apparently they haven’t developed equation
phobia yet.
At the graduate level, we’re initiating discussions
with colleagues at Cornell, Syracuse and RPI on the feasibility of offering
combined, advanced graduate courses in Geology using internet video-conferencing
technology. At each university, there may be only one or two students
prepared for and interested in advanced coursework within a particular
subdiscipline. By combining students from multiple universities, we can
reach critical mass for a meaningful course. While distance learning is
not as conducive to discussion as face-to-face meeting, the new internet
videoconferencing is the next best thing. Hopefully this process can add
four or five new, viable advanced courses to each university’s graduate
Geology offerings.
We’re also working with the School of Education
on a combined program allowing our students to earn the Geology BS or
BA and the Earth Science MAT in five years. This is quite possible since
so many of our upper level-undergraduate courses are cross-listed as graduate
courses. Students can satisfy the state requirements for graduate coursework
with the same courses they would have used to satisfy the undergraduate
major. Hopefully we’ll be giving this a test run in the next year or two.
You can read about my research activities elsewhere
in this newsletter. My kids are now grown and moved away. Carolyn is in
college in Florida, and Steve is now living in Illinois. I keep very busy
playing French Horn in a variety of ensembles large and small. What other
free time I have is spent learning and practicing fencing. It’s a blast
whacking people with a sabre. It’s even better if you can beat them with
finesse. I’m looking forward to helping organize the fencing competition
at the Empire State Games, which will be held here in Binghamton this
summer.
Robert
V. Demicco
I
got to describe my research elsewhere in this newsletter, so this blurb
will mainly be updates on my family. My wife Karen has had a number of
shows, including one this spring in a Binghamton gallery. She has sold
a few of her pieces (mainly to friends) and she is really getting good.
I still do not understand why she will put one or two birds on some of
her clay sculptures, but a little mystery between people is a good thing.
Edward, my eldest, is now a blackjack dealer at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut.
Some day I will recount the story of how this all came about. He attended
a twelve-week training course to learn all the ins and outs of blackjack
and certain other games, and now he is a full-fledged dealer (except for
poker which requires another training course). He says he wants to learn
craps next. David lives at home and goes to Broome Community College.
He is also a pretty talented artist although his drawings are a bit too,
shall we say, esoteric, for me. Finally Molly, my faithful mutt, gets
grayer around the muzzle every day. I suspect that she finds Tim’s new
dog pretty annoying. Hope to see all of you at a G.S.A. meeting soon!
Steve
Dickman
The
big academic news for me this year is that I have taken on the responsibilities
of Graduate Director for our department. Within weeks I was appreciating
how hugely busy that position had made my predecessors; but despite its
consuming nature the thrill of playing a central role in shaping our incoming
graduate classes and graduate program still emerges now and then from
the fog of my perpetually tired consciousness.
My teaching activities, as usual, include a large
intro’ course on climatology and my general geophysics course for geo
seniors and grad students. This past semester I also had a chance to teach
Geophysics II for the first time in a while the extreme pleasure of
which was matched only by the expressions on the faces in the class as
we covered that very difficult material.
My research life (such as it is) has lately
focused on determining the extent of rotational coupling between the mantle
and core on different time scales. In the course of re-examining previous
formulations of the rotational theory, it occurred to me that the standard
parameterization of elastic earth deformation in these situations was
inconsistent and, when corrected, implied that the Earth was about 13%
more ‘compliant’ than previously viewed a small amount, but one with
major implications for mantle rheology. I completed the manuscript on
this work last Fall and am currently awaiting word from the geophysical
community (or at least from the journal) on whether I need new geophysical
glasses or everyone else does.
Susan DeLeonardo recently finished her
master’s work on a novel way to improve atmospheric corrections to the
rotational data I use to infer core-mantle coupling. As we wrote up the
work for publication it turned out that her technique resulted in some
neat detection of tidal signals in the data, including a nine day tide
not previously seen. At the Spring AGU meeting last year held in Nice!
I got a chance to chat with Susan Webb, one of our geophysics majors
from (some) years ago. She’s now working on her PhD in seismology while
teaching at the University of Witswatersrand in South Africa. On the personal
front, my wife power-walked more than 700 miles really! during 2003
(I managed to do about 20% with her…); amazingly, most of it was in Greater
Binghamton. My daughter continues to take college seriously (for some
reason) and is still hard at work there, racking up more honors than I
ever did.
Joe
Graney
Joe Graney
and his students are managing to keep busy. Erin Wood and Karen Garrett
are due to complete their watershed based projects in Spring of 2004,
and Melissa Oberhaus and Glendon Hunsinger are also actively involved
in watershed studies in the Upper Susquehanna River Basin. Many of these
projects are related to a new research center at Binghamton University,
the Center for Integrated Watershed Studies, for which Joe has been named
Associate Director. Joe would also like to note that he has survived the
tenure process, and as of January 2004 he has been promoted to rank of
Associate Professor. Joe's wife Dawn is also grateful that the tenure
process has been completed, and tells him that the increasing percentage
of gray hair on his head just makes him look distinguished! Dawn continues
to work at the Guthrie Clinic in Sayre, PA and has taken on the added
workload of teaching a Medical Records course during the Fall Semester
at Broome Community College. Joe and Dawn frequently travel back to Wisconsin
and Michigan to visit relatives and rekindle partisan rivalries at sports
events. Joe and Dawn encourage all to stop by when your travels take you
to Jensen Road in Vestal, where you can catch up on stories about air
travel adventures, as well as a few tall tales concerning salmon fishing
on the Great Lakes...
Dave
Jenkins
Research
is going well in the Hydrothermal Lab here at Binghamton. There are three
new students working in the lab this year.
This summer an undergraduate student, Josh
Sandberg, started working on a project to see if there is any correlation
between variations in the Al or Si content of phlogopite-rich micas and
their water content, using infrared spectroscopy. As with many research
projects, the real battle has been establishing the reliability of the
analytical technique (infrared spectroscopy in this case). Josh continues
pursuing this topic as a Distinguished Independent Research project.
Two new graduate students started this
fall. Bridget McCollam has begun pioneering research on a whole new class
of silicate minerals known, for now, as triple-chain silicates. These
are minerals that are still more a mineralogical curiosity than a garden
variety mineral and have the properties midway between an amphibole (double-chain
silicate) and a layered silicate. She is currently determining where the
reaction boundary for the breakdown of a Na-Mg-rich triple chain silicate
to a Na-Mg-rich double chain silicate (an amphibole). This work will help
establish some fundamental thermodynamic data for this particular triple-chain
silicate, for which there are no data currently available. Finally, Juan
Carlos Corona started working this fall in the lab on the stability of
the amphibole glaucophane. This mineral is the key index mineral for the
blueschist facies (high pressures, low temperatures). Juan and I are both
working on glaucophane related projects so we have been routinely breaking
the piston cylinder pressure plates by using them at their highest pressure
rating.
Jean and the boys are all doing well. William
is now in 11th, Kenneth in 9th, and Andrew in 3rd grade. Please send me
a short e-mail at dmjenks@binghamton.edu
to let me know where you are and how you are doing. I would love to hear
from you.
Peter
Knuepfer
The ES program continues to hum along (OK, survive), though with only
the minimum of offerings. Still, the Dean is looking for creative ways
to help us grow in the areas we need, particularly in policy and law.
Meanwhile, an alumna of the ES program has been hired by Physical Facilities
as recycling coordinator. Dr. Juliet Berling has brought a lot of expertise
and energy to her position, quickly establishing herself as a driver for
improved resource management on campus. She has involved students as interns.
She'll also be teaching environmental planning for us in the fall (and
we hope other courses in the future, when funds permit).
I continue to be involved in faculty governance,
both at Binghamton and at the State-wide level. I'm completing a two-year
term on the Executive Committee of the University-wide Faculty Senate,
spending a lot of time with other faculty trying to fend off some of the
more obnoxious and intrusive policies that SUNY's Board of Trustees seeks
to implement, including a continued fight over assessment and mandated
exams (I don't think the Regents exam system works very well for high
schools, and such an approach would be truly counter-productive in a University
setting). I'm involved in a wide range of committee activities on campus
as well. My graduate students (and under-graduates, for that matter) know
when it's "meeting day" by my coat and tie...
John Rayburn's Ph.D. work on the pro-glacial
lakes of the Champlain basin is winding up, and John and I hope to continue
to collaborate on studies to refine the timing of major outflow events
from that area that may have contributed to the initiation of the Younger
Dryas climate event around 12,000 years ago. Other students are engaged
in studies of the effects of dams and reservoirs on rivers in the Catskills.
And of course I continue to look for opportunities to continue studies
of river responses to active mountain building in places like Taiwan and
New Zealand.
Tim Lowenstein See Chair's Letter.
Bill
MacDonald
Bill
MacDonald visited Colombia in August '03 where he gave an invited talk
at the Colombian Geologic Congress on paleomagnetic evidence on Andean
tectonic evolution. He used that opportunity to visit with former students
Juan Jose Estrada and Gloria Sierra, and to accompany them and current
MA student Daniel Maeso in several field trips to the Cauca valley region
where he has made several previous studies going back to the early 70s.
In July he sampled the Syljan impact structure in Sweden. With M.A. student
Christina Poulos, he continues to explore the Vargeao impact structure
of southern Brazil. Work with several colleagues (H.C. Palmer, C.S. Gromme,
A. Deino) on the Caetano ignimbrite, its emplacement and correlation,
is nearing completion. At the western AGU meeting in Dec. '03 he organized
a session on magnetic anisotropy and its applications. A paper on the
fabric origins of the Diana Syenite, Adirondacks, headed by former student
Graham Baird (MA 01), who is now a PhD student at Univ. Minnesota, is
now in press at the GSA.
Sid
Mitra
I'm pleasantly
surprised that an entire year has gone by already since my last entry
into the newsletter. Much progress has occurred on the personal and professional
fronts since last year. On a personal note, my wife Paula and I are continuing
to settle into the area. Paula has gotten herself a job teaching 3rd graders
at St. Patrick's Elementary School in Owego. We managed to continue our
pursuit of the American Dream by buying a house and immersing ourselves
further into debt - take your pick as to which is more appropriately entitled
the American Dream. The house is at 920 Lehigh Avenue and is within walking
distance of the campus. The house was our dog Angel’s top choice as her
first priority was to have a leisurely walk past the Nature Preserve on
the way to/from work on a daily basis.
On the professional side of things, the
past year was fairly productive in terms of important research. For example,
a paper delineating methods of analysis of natural water samples for pharmaceutical
chemicals was published. Along these lines, a pilot grant investigating
the environmental fate and transport of endocrine disrupting pharmaceutical
chemicals has received funding from the NY Chapter of the Great Lakes
Protection Fund. I'm pleased to say that I have two great undergraduates
already committed to this project. All of the momentum from these things
must have inadvertently influenced Binghamton University's Physical Facilities
since lab renovations by Physical Facilities are finally complete. Most
of the equipment I have purchased has also arrived. So, by the next newsletter,
I hope that I have much progress to relate in the way of research coming
out of my lab group. So, stay tuned....
Dick
Naslund
Everything
is well in the Naslund household. Our five kids, dog, and cat keep us
on our toes, but it would be boring without them. Skye and Sterling are
now in 10th grade, Neelam is in 6th, and Kalindi and Cambria are in 5th.
I had a busy fall teaching Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology, and the
volcanoes half of Volcanoes and Earthquakes. I also managed to get out
to GSA in Seattle where I saw a number of old friends. This semester I
am teaching Introductory Geology and a graduate course in Igneous Petrology.
My graduate students and I have been busy analyzing ore samples from deposits
in Chile and Mexico, and diabase samples from the Palisades sill. We have
also been doing some experimental work on the role of S and other volatiles
on the formation of immiscible liquids in Fe-rich systems.
Next Fall I will be busy helping to organize
a field trip/workshop at El Laco, Chile, which will run from November
8 to 13, 2004 in conjunction with the International Association of Volcanology
and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior (IAVCEI) meeting in Pucon, Chile.
El Laco is one of the most spectacular ore deposits in the world. It is
located at about 5000 m elevation in the scenic Andes Mountains of northern
Chile, and contains what appear to be massive magnetite lava flows and
layered hematite volcanic ash. The origin of the deposit is the subject
of a current debate between those who suggest that it formed from Fe-rich
magmas and those who suggest that it formed by hydrothermal replacement.
If you would like to decide for yourself, go to the IAVCEI meeting website
at www.sernacgeomin.cl/iavcei and sign up. We will also visit the world’s
largest open pit copper mine at Chuquicamata, Chile. I will provide the
Chilean wine for any Binghamton alums that want to come.
Karen
Salvage
It is difficult to believe that another year has passed. Once again I
taught Hydrogeology (for GEO students) and Environmental Hydrology (for
ENVI students) last fall. This spring, I am teaching my “groundwater modeling”
class and am enjoying it thus far. I have six graduate students: two doctoral
candidates, Jean Jolicoeur and Yong Wang, and four Masters students, Charlann
Walker, Lynette Vayo, David Heuer, and Glendon Hunsinger. Jean Jolicoeur
and Yong Wang are conducting numerical modeling studies into contamination
and remediation of groundwater, Jean into nitrogen pollution and Yong
Wang into uranium. Each of the Masters students is pursuing a research
project into a different aspect of local hydrology: Charlann is examining
the impact of the Broome County municipal landfill on the surrounding
watersheds; Lynette is conducting an aquifer assessment for the Town of
Vestal; David is investigating the hydrology of constructed and natural
wetlands; and Glen is examining the physical and chemical hydrology of
headwater watersheds in the Catatonk Creek basin. I am going to have to
make a major adjustment when Charlann, Lynette, David, and Glen all graduate
this spring!
A few alumni updates: Luke Salogar
survived and perhaps even enjoyed the start of his career as an Earth
Science Teacher. Luke and Emily married last August. Mike Alfieri
has relocated to Rochester and is now Staff Hydrogeologist with Haley
and Aldrich. Congratulations to Mike on passing his PG exam this year.
Daniel Michaud is still with The Chazen Companies in Poughkeepsie
as a Hydrogeologist and GIS Analyst. Rumor has it that Dan has purchased
his first property and is on his way to becoming a real estate mogul.
I had the pleasure of meeting two other BU alums, Scott Hulseapple
and Bill Prehoda, for the first time at a meeting of the American
Water Resources Associa-tion. Bill is an Associate and Hydrogeologist
with Leggette, Brashears & Graham in Ramsey, NJ and Scott is a Project
Hydrologist with URS in Clifton Park, NJ. Sedimentologist Ian Lunt
cannot stay away from Binghamton. After a year in California, he has returned
as a post-doctoral researcher working with my colleague, John Bridge.
Sin Senh and Craig Werle, both of Roux Associates, made
their annual recruiting visit to BU last fall and gave a great presentation
about one of their larger remediation projects. I enjoyed a great Spring
Break last year back-packing in Joshua Tree National Park, where I received
a crash course in the hydrology of arid areas. Only one half of an inch
of rain received in the prior twelve months! At present, I may be dreaming
of spring, but snow and more snow are our reality here in Binghamton.
My dog, Hunter, and I have been enjoying snow shoeing through the woods
this winter (actually, I’m the only one with the snow shoes!). After his
early years as a country dog, Hunter has become quite domesticated and
loves the daily trek to Science 1 to play with his fellow Geo-dogs.
Jim
Sorauf
Life is good! This note is being left behind in Carol's office in late
October, as I prepare to go south for the winter. Going south gives everyone
the impression that I become a sloth in the sun, but the truth of it is
that now that I am well established as being in my 70's, my joints complain
a lot when the weather gets cold, and I go south out of self defense.
While I am there, I work at the U.S.G.S. in St. Petersburg, as an unpaid
member of the Coral Reef Research Group, spending most of my time on their
new and wonderful Scanning Electron Microscope, studying modern corals,
their skeletal structure and biomineralization. The final aim will be
to try to determine whether we can see symptoms of the illnesses and stresses
that are killing many of the corals in Florida. In addition to my work
in St. Pete, I also spend time at the Univ. of South Florida with paleontological
colleagues, where we are gearing up for some exciting times studying Pliocene
and Pleistocene stratigraphy and faunas in South Florida. The Federal
government is spending big money to carve new canals to lead fresh water
into the Everglades. The new canals mean new outcrops, even if ephemeral,
which is where we hope to have some impact on preserving and studying
data from them. Simone and I continue to live in Tarpon Springs during
the winter months, and enjoy it greatly, as we have plenty of warmth and
sunshine there. Our favorite sport is watching the weather channel in
January and February.
We have had a wonderful summer 2003 here
in Binghamton, although it was a bit cold until July. I finished up writing
several papers having to do with corals, and also got several talks ready
for the quadrennial Fossil Coral and Sponge Symposium, this August in
Graz, Austria, with great field trips to the northern Alps and to Moravia
in the Czech Republic. Since my grandparents Sorauf emigrated from Austria
to the U.S., it is a pleasure for me to go there, and tell all the locals
who are interested about my grandfather. He was an eighteen-year-old who
wanted to go to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he had friends. There was
no boat for there, but there was one for Baltimore. Grandpa asked if that
was in America also, and got on the boat when he was assured that it was.
Continuing on the summer 2003 theme, let me also note that this September
has seen the opening of the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca. This is an
outgrowth of the Paleontological Research Institution, a serious interest
of mine since 1982. One of the most gratifying things for me personally
has been to see the new museum come to fruition, designed by first class
architects, with first class scientific input. Every geologist who comes
near upstate New York should save a day to visit M.O.T.E.
This year I won't be at the GSA meetings
in Seattle, but had a great time at the Binghamton party in Denver last
year, and look forward to seeing lots of you at the GSA next year (2004).
Any of you folks who go on down to Florida for a vacation or whatever,
stop and see us.
Francis
Wu
One of things I am doing this semester is to participate in the teaching
of an “open-source computing” course. I dreamed up this course one afternoon
last Spring and got a sociologist and two computer science colleagues
to join. This course “Anarchy and Order in Computing”, is offered on an
experimental base as UNIV140 for Spring 2004 and has 13 students from
every school on campus, except SOM. We discussed the issues of open-source
and proprietary programs and the use of Gun/linux operating system from
installations to applications. The lectures involve a great deal of student
participation and most of them decided to put linux on their own computers.
Two undergraduate geology majors are taking it. We hope that this course
will offer students an easier channel to do scientific programming, not
having to pay a few hundred dollars just to write a fortran or C (and
C++) program for your work. I still have Sun workstation in my office
but when I do serious computation I actually run it on my laptop, at about
8 times the speed with my old (1.2 GHz) machine and another few times
faster on my new machine. I can now do a lot of computing even when I
am doing field work.
GSA Alumni Reception
An alumni reception is tentatively planned for the Annual GSA Meeting in Denver, Nov. 7-10. If you are attending GSA this year, please plan to visit with your fellow graduates!
Photo by David Tuttle
Happenings Around the Department
Graduate Student Excellence Awards
Please join with me in congratulating
the following two graduate students for receiving Graduate Student Excellence
Awards from the University this year. They are:
John Rayburn Graduate Student
Excellence Award for Research.
Ramon Aguirre Graduate Student
Excellence Award for Teaching. John Rayburn has continued the department's
long record of receiving awards for Excellence in Research, but this is
the first year in which one of our graduate students, Ramon Aguirre, has
received an award for teaching. We congratulate both of them for their
hard work!
Recent Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations
Ian A. Lunt
(PhD, 2002) A three-dimensional, quantitative depositional model
of gravelly braided river sediments : with special reference to the spatial
distribution of porosity and permeability.
Susan M. DeLeonardo (MA, 2003) Isolation of atmospheric
effects on rapid polar motion through Wiener filtering.
Jonathan M. Kramer (MA, 2003) 127 ka paleotemperature
record from fluid inclusions in halite, Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia.
Luke A. Salogar (MA, 2003) Determining the range of hydraulic
conductivity of modern braided river de-posits on the North Slope of Alaska.
Cindy L. Satterfield (MA, 2003) Paleoenvironments of Michigan
Basin f-unit halites, Detroit, Michigan, and the waste isolation pilot
plant salts, Carlsbad, New Mexico: signifigance in the search for microorganisms
in brine inclusions in halite.
