eNewsletter

Department of Geoscience E-Newsletter, December 2013 <!– a:link { color: #990000; text-decoration: none; } a:visited { text-decoration: none; } a:hover { text-decoration: underline; } a:active { text-decoration: none; font-size: 11px; } body,td,th { font-family: Verdana, …

As the fall professional meeting season rapidly approaches, we would like to highlight the critical need to assist students in attending these meetings, where they present their research results, exchange ideas, network, and hunt for jobs. Meetings such as AAPG, GSA, and AGU and others are more significant than ever for professional development of our students, and an increasing proportion of our graduate and undergraduate students participate in professional meetings each year. Grants often provide some funding for students to attend meetings, but the demand has far outstripped grant resources, and gift funds are increasingly important.

Many Geobadgers will remember that nine years ago we created the Sharon Meinholz Graduate Student Fund to remember Sharon, who passed away unexpectedly in 2004, and the main purpose of this fund was to support student travel to professional meetings. Numerous Geobadgers knew Sharon, who served as our Department Student Records Secretary from 1990 to 2004. To many students, she was like a second mother, keeping track of them from the application stage to final thesis completion. We chose to honor Sharon by creating a fund to help student professional development, in recognition of Sharon’s great love of all of the students she worked with.

We have regularly provided awards for student support from this fund. Sharon’s family as well as many alumni have regularly given to the fund. But the fund has become depleted as the need has grown. We hope those of you who knew Sharon, and even those who did not, will consider a special gift to this fund so we may continue to support students in the coming year.

To make a gift to support student travel to meetings, click the article title to follow the link and replace the text “Geoscience Unrestricted Fund (1242116)” with “Sharon Meinholz Fund #12424096,”,then check the box for “Memorial Gifts.”

Prof. Brad Singer led a three week field campaign in the Chilean Andes in March and April, 2013 aimed at learning more about what drives unrest at the Laguna del Maule volcanic field. The research team included Prof. Basil Tikoff and graduate students: Nathan Andersen, Erin Birsic, Hélène Le Mével, and Tor-Stetson Lee, as well as Prof. Glynn Williams-Jones of Simon Fraser University, Canada. The spectacular concentration of post-glacial rhyolite lava flows and explosively erupted ash, coupled with an astonishing rate of uplift of nearly 30 cm per year since 2007, have attracted this group’s attention to the possibility that a large body of silicic magma is growing in size at shallow depth. Brad, together with Cliff Thurber, also met with scientists at Chile’s national volcano observatory in Temuco to discuss our research at Laguna del Maule. The team was accompanied by science writer David Tenenbaum as they collected samples of lava flows from around the lake for geochemical analysis, mapped faults and paleo-shorelines, installed a network of gravity stations to measure changes related to magma intrusion, and measured CO2 emissions.

The dating of sedimentary deposits via Astrochronology has become one of the most important tools for construction of the state-of-the-art geologic time scale. This method utilizes the geologic record of climate oscillations – those ascribed to quasi-periodic changes in the Earth’s orbit and rotation – to measure the passage of time directly from repetitive sedimentary layers. In this issue, Assistant Professor Steve Meyers discusses his work in the field, which addresses fundamental challenges to the field of deep-time Astrochronology using a new computational approach, with the goal of enhancing the accuracy and precision of an astronomically tuned geologic time scale. Follow this link to the full article on Steve’s research.