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Why did it start? Did a mantle plume initiate exten- sion? Or was convergence to the southwest the cause of extension in the northeast, as appears to be hap- pening today with the Himalayan collision producing the Baikal rift? What happened in between? Did the arms develop contemporaneously? Did the western arm dominate the system as suggested by the strength of the College of Science and Engineering N.H. Winchell School of Earth Sciences Department of Earth Sciences ALUMNI NEWSLETTER Spring 2014 Looking Deep into the Mid-Continental Rift by Justin Revenaugh The phases of Wilson’s Cycle, supercontinent forma- tion and breakup, involve processes of continental collision and rifting active throughout the geologic record. Present-day examples include the Indo- Eurasian collision and the East-African rift system. Old mountain belts and continental margins record similar processes in the past. But not all rifting epi- sodes run to completion, with many (most?) never developing into fully-fledged oceanic spreading centers. There’s likely no one reason why rifts fail, nor one reason for why they start in the first place. All the same, there are lessons to be learned in under- standing why some rifts fail, both about the causes of failure and of the early stages of rift development. Minnesota is home to a major failed rift, the 1.1 Ga Mid-Continental Rift System that appears to have started near Lake Superior and grown to a length of nearly 2000 km along arms extending to the south- west through Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas and to the southeast into Michigan and Ohio. A possible third arm, the “aulacogen” of textbook glossary fame, may be responsible for the mafic volcanics of Lake Nipi- gon, Canada (Figure 1A). During its heyday, the rift produced a great abundance of volcanism and wide extensional basins filled deep with clastic sediments (Figure 1B), much as found in East Africa today. But nearly as soon as it started, it died. Volcanism shut down. Extension skidded to a stop. Why did it stop? Did the magmatic source “dry up?” Was the rift slammed shut by a change in stresses, resulting in the “inverted” normal faults in the rift? Figure 1A. Bouguer gravity anomalies with seismometers of the SPREE network (black circles), EarthScope (red circles) and USArray (red stars). continued on pg. 4

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Why did it start? Did a mantle plume initiate exten-sion? Or was convergence to the southwest the cause of extension in the northeast, as appears to be hap-pening today with the Himalayan collision producing the Baikal rift?

What happened in between? Did the arms develop contemporaneously? Did the western arm dominate the system as suggested by the strength of the

College of Science and EngineeringN.H. Winchell School of Earth Sciences

Department of Earth Sciences

Alumni newsletterSpring 2014

Looking Deep into the Mid-Continental Rift

by Justin Revenaugh

The phases of Wilson’s Cycle, supercontinent forma-tion and breakup, involve processes of continental collision and rifting active throughout the geologic record. Present-day examples include the Indo- Eurasian collision and the East-African rift system. Old mountain belts and continental margins record similar processes in the past. But not all rifting epi-sodes run to completion, with many (most?) never developing into fully-fledged oceanic spreading centers. There’s likely no one reason why rifts fail, nor one reason for why they start in the first place. All the same, there are lessons to be learned in under-standing why some rifts fail, both about the causes of failure and of the early stages of rift development.

Minnesota is home to a major failed rift, the 1.1 Ga Mid-Continental Rift System that appears to have started near Lake Superior and grown to a length of nearly 2000 km along arms extending to the south-west through Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas and to the southeast into Michigan and Ohio. A possible third arm, the “aulacogen” of textbook glossary fame, may be responsible for the mafic volcanics of Lake Nipi-gon, Canada (Figure 1A). During its heyday, the rift produced a great abundance of volcanism and wide extensional basins filled deep with clastic sediments (Figure 1B), much as found in East Africa today. But nearly as soon as it started, it died. Volcanism shut down. Extension skidded to a stop.

Why did it stop? Did the magmatic source “dry up?” Was the rift slammed shut by a change in stresses, resulting in the “inverted” normal faults in the rift?

Figure 1A. Bouguer gravity anomalies with seismometers of the SPREE network (black circles), EarthScope (red circles) and USArray (red stars).

continued on pg. 4

Page 2 Department of Earth Sciences

Greetings from the Chair

Photo from field work in Norway, August 2013: Haakon Fossen (PhD 1992), Christian Teyssier, Stacia Gordon (PhD 2009), and Megan Korchinski (current PhD student co-advised by Christian and me). Not shown: current PhD student Roxanne Renedo.

Dear alumni and friends,

I am very pleased to write this letter to you all in the midst of the cold winter of 2014, and in the middle of my second year as department head. We are still in Pillsbury Hall, although, as I mentioned in the 2013 newsletter, plans are afoot to try to convince the State of Minnesota to provide funding for the renovation of Tate Hall of Physics as a new home for the Depart-ment of Earth Sciences. The plan is for us to share the building with the part of the School of Physics and Astronomy that does not move into their new Physics & Nanotechnology Building. Later this spring we will know the results of those efforts.

If successful with funding this year, the earliest we would move would likely be 2017. As we await news about funding for the renovation project, many of us have mixed feelings about the possibility of leaving Pillsbury, the beautiful and historic home for our De-partment. Moving to Tate, however, is our best chance to have our classrooms and laboratories in one build-ing, and to have modern facilities for teaching and re-search. In Tate, for example, we would be able to have more flexible teaching space for in-class demonstra-tions and experiments, and our research labs would have reliable utilities, with back-up power so that long-running experiments and cold storage of fragile samples would not fail owing to electrical outages.

Pillsbury Hall continues to be a busy place, as the National Lacustrine Core Facility (LacCore) remains temporarily housed in the building while renovations of their usual space in the depths of the Civil Engi-neering building are completed. This year, we also have more students in core Earth Science classes than we have had in a long time (decades?); the enrollment in 2000-level courses in Mineralogy and Solid-Earth Geodynamics increased substantially this year. The Department is planning for a possible future of higher enrollments, and considering the likely impact on field courses. If you have contributed recently to our Field Experiences Fund, part of which provides schol-arships to students taking the required field courses in the summer, I am extremely appreciative of your support. We are always in need of funds to support students, now more than ever.

Another aspect of “Field experiences” is the annual May field trip organized by the undergraduates. Last May thirteen students toured parts of the US South-west, including Death Valley (see page 20), on a trip led by Annia Fayon. This coming May, 15-20 under-grads will travel to Iceland on a trip led by Carrie Jen-nings. Each field trip is accompanied by a dedicated seminar in the spring semester just before the trip.

A momentous change for our Department in the near future is the upcoming retirement of Kathy Ohler, ef-fective April 4. Kathy has been with the Department for nearly 35 years and has run the administrative of-fice for more than 30 years. To thank her for her many years of dedication, we are in the midst of planning various celebratory events. If any of you would like to participate, you are most welcome; please contact me for further details. I hope some of you will also be inspired to send a note to Kathy with personal thanks or memories from the past few decades.

Page 3Alumni Newsletter

Mid-Continental Rift .................. 1Greetings from the Chair ........... 2Awards ......................................... 5New Faculty ................................. 6Jim Stout Retires ......................... 7Rebirth of SAFL ........................ 8Room with a View .................... 11Gifts .......................................... 14Fellowships/Scholarships ......... 16Fast Start 4 Impact .................... 17Degrees Granted 2012-13 ......... 18Continental Scientific Drilling . 19Spring Trip 2013 ....................... 20Career Panel .............................. 23Alumni Notes ............................ 24In Memoriam ............................ 26Farewell from Kathy Ohler ....... 27Missing Alumni ........................ 28

IN THIS ISSUE

In faculty news: We will soon be joined by two new faculty colleagues – Professors Crystal Ng (hydrogeol-ogy; see p. 6) and Andrew Wickert (surface processes) – and a search is ongoing this year in the general field of solid-earth geosciences.

Jim Stout retired last year (see page 7 for pictures and news about his retirement party in May 2013), and Calvin Alexander will retire at the end of this year. Calvin’s party is in mid-May (see page 6 for details, and join us if you can for this event!). With regret, I note that Martin Saar will be leaving next year to take up a position at ETH-Zürich.

As I write this letter, we are celebrating the news that Assistant Professor Jake Bailey has been awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

Last spring, a committee selected the new recipients of the George and Orpha Gibson Chairs for 2013-18: David Kohlstedt and Bill Seyfried. And, for the first time, we have a Robert D. and Carol C. Gunn Profes-sor: Larry Edwards. We are very fortunate to have these prestigious endowed positions that provide vital support to outstanding faculty and their research groups. Have any of you been missing those Thursday department-seminars in room 110 in Pillsbury Hall? If so, you may be in luck. We started live-streaming some seminars (and, with the consent of speakers, recording and posting a few of the talks). Whether we live-stream/record is up to each speaker, but we have so far been able to broadcast a few talks. Check our seminar website at http://www.esci.umn.edu/semi-nars if you are interested in viewing some seminars. We hope some of you will enjoy being ‘virtually pres-ent’ at our department seminar series. (Unfortunately, you will have to provide your own cheese and crack-ers for an après-seminar snack.)

Thanks to all of you who turned up for the alumni party at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Denver in October 2013, and to all local alumni who braved the first major snow of the year in November to come to Pillsbury Hall for an alumni event we had here. We hope to continue this new tradition of alumni events in Pillsbury (the party, not the snow storm), so if you are in the Twin Cities area, please keep an eye out for postcards and e-mails an-

nouncing future events.

Even if you can’t visit in person, we in the Depart-ment always like hearing updates from you to include with our newsletters, so please stay in touch by e-mail ([email protected]) or via our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/groups/81943157076/). Also, if you ever want a quick update on what’s going on in the Department , you can read weekly news on our department webpage (http://www.esci.umn.edu/).

I hope that you will enjoy this newsletter. As always, I welcome comments, questions, suggestions, and miscellaneous news from alumni and friends.

Page 4 Department of Earth Sciences

magnetic and gravity anomalies? Or have the latter been modified over time?

These are some of the questions that motivated the SPREE (Superior Province Rifting EarthScope Ex-periment) project. Beginning in 2011, 62 broadband seismic stations were installed along and crossing the rift in Minnesota and Wisconsin (Figure 1A) by my graduate students and me along with research-ers from Northwestern University and Washington University of St. Louis. An additional 14 instruments were installed in southern Ontario by Canadian part-ners at the University of Manitoba and the University of Quebec at Montreal. These were piggybacked on the EarthScope experiment (Figure 1A) providing a factor of 25 times greater density of coverage in the region (Minnesota and Wisconsin have only four broadband permanent seismometer sites). For the moment, the Minnesota-Wisconsin border was as well instrumented as California! The seismographs spent nearly 30 months in the field before being removed this past fall. During the deployment, they recorded thousands of earthquakes from around the globe (and one in Minnesota!).

Using SPREE data, the research team will develop high-resolution models of crust and upper mantle

Figure 1B. Geologic structure of the mid-continental rift.

velocity along and around the north stretch of the rift system. Discontinuities in the crust and below will be mapped. Seismic anisotropy, which often preserves evidence of old deformation events, will be estimated. Having had the better part of a billion years to cool, we don’t expect to see any lingering hot mantle mate-rial. Rather, we are looking for evidence of basalt de-pletion in the mantle to discern the volume of mantle affected, the depth at which melts originated (helping constrain temperatures) and, perhaps, the remnants of a mantle plume that could have started the rift. We will examine the extent of crustal thinning and under-plating and the deep expression of the segment ends that are so clear in gravity. Lastly, we hope to better understand why the rift is seismically quiet, unlike the Reelfoot rift to the south.

A number of graduate students from the department participated in SPREE: Brian Bagley (PhD 2011), Tao Wang (PhD 2013), Xiaoyue Ma, Jacob Moen, Sara Kowalke, Lauren Idleman (MS 2013), and Matthew Carter (PhD 2013). Wei Foo (BS 2013), the lone under-graduate, was a tremendous help in station decom-missioning.

To read more about SPREE, I recommend “Learning from failure: The SPREE Mid-Continent Rift Experi-ment,” GSA Today, volume 21, 2011.

Looking Deep into the Mid-Continental Rift-continued from page 1

Page 5Alumni Newsletter

Peter Hudleston received the Career Contribution Award from the Geological Society of America, in Structural Geology and Tectonics. The award was pre-sented at the 2013 annual meeting of GSA in Denver.

Graduate students Antoinette Abeyta (advisor: Chris Paola) and Becky Strauss (advisor: Josh Feinberg) both won Outstanding Student Paper Awards at the 2013 AGU Fall Meeting. Antoinette’s award was in Ocean Sciences for her presentation on “Transport dy-namics of mass failures along weakly cohesive clino-form foresets”. Becky won one of only two Outstand-ing Student Paper Awards in the Geomagnetism & Paleomagnetism Section of AGU for her paper, “The origin of magnetic remanence in stalagmites: Obser-vations from electron microscopy and rock magne-tism.”

Larry Edwards, according to the ISI Web of Knowl-edge, is currently the 3rd most cited earth scientist worldwide in the past decade. He has ~7700 citations on papers published in the past decade. Larry was highlighted in January 2013 issue of Smithsonian Magazine (see http://www.smithso-nianmag.com/science-nature/The-Secrets-of-Earths-History-May-Be-in-its-Caves-183829981.html).

Larry Edwards and Marc Hirschmann were named as 2014 Geochemical Society Fellows.

Chris Paola, Justin Revenaugh, Josh Feinberg and Kent Kirkby received a grant from the University to enhance e-learning in our under-graduate curriculum. We are just beginning to experiment with some of the new dimensions that e-learning can bring to our teaching, and will report more about what we find out in a future newsletter.

Renata Wentzcovitch, professor in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and a member of our graduate faculty, was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

At the 2013 GSA meeting last fall, it was an-nounced that Marc Hirschmann was selected as the recipient of the 2015 Dana Medal by the

Mineralogical Society of America. This award is for excellence given to mid-career researchers in the min-eralogical sciences. Marc was also elected a Fellow of the European Association of Geochemistry for 2014.

Harvey Thorleifson was national President of the Association of American State Geologists for 2012-13. Harvey is the 2013/2014 Chair of the Minnesota Sec-tion, Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration (SME), and US Department of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has appointed Harvey to the National Geospa-tial Advisory Committee.

Sam Sawkins, professor emeritus, was awarded Hon-orary Fellow status by the Society of Economic Geolo-gists in 2013 for his loyalty and many years of service to the SEG and the science and practice of economic geology.

Laura Vietti and Chao Qi received 2013-14 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships from the University of Min-nesota.

Jake Bailey was awarded a 2014 Sloan Research Fel-lowship. These fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and po-tential identify them as rising stars, the next genera-tion of scientific leaders.

Awards & Other Noteworthy Events

Announcing 2013-18 faculty endowed chairs and professorship: Bill Seyfried, Gibson Chair in Earth Systems Science, David Kohlstedt, Gibson Chair in Earth and Planetary Science, and Larry Edwards, Robert and Carol Gunn Professor.

Page 6Alumni Newsletter

New Faculty

Gene-Hua Crystal Ng

I will be joining the Department of Earth Sciences as an Assistant Professor of Hydrogeol-ogy in Spring 2014. I’m interested in how all the components of the hydrologic cycle – in-cluding the atmosphere, plants, soil, and ground-water – affect each other. Understanding the links between these elements helps us explain how

the environment will respond to changing conditions, including impacts of climate change, land use, and contamination. I use mathematical models to describe these connections and uncover complex interactions between the different components of the hydrological system. My work also focuses on statistical methods that merge models with data. These methods allow us to produce more reliable and informative results than could be achieved with either models or data alone.

I received a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathemat-ics from Harvard University and PhD in Environmen-tal Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For my doctoral dissertation, I analyzed soil, crop, and climate controls on groundwater re-charge in the southern High Plains using data as-similation (data and model integration). I also carried out research on data assimilation methods for chaotic models of the atmosphere. I am currently at the U.S. Geological Survey, where I developed a model to examine vegetation vulnerability and resilience in the Mojave Desert as a Mendenhall postdoctoral fellow. At the USGS, I have also been investigating chemical, mineral, microbial, and transport processes that affect water quality at contaminated groundwater sites near Bemidji, MN and Cape Cod, MA.

Calvin Alexander Retirement CelebrationWednesday, May 14, 2014

University of Minnesota Campus Club

Social hour begins at 5:30 pm

Please join the Department of Earth Sciences in celebrating Calvin Alexan-der’s forty-one years of outstanding teaching, research, and professional service at the University of Minnesota. You are cordially invited to a retirement celebration where we will gather to share good food, fond memories, a few testimonials, a humorous story or two, and images of Calvin’s illustrious career. In tribute to Calvin, Eric Mohring and Friends will provide musical entertain-ment during the evening.

Also consider contributing your stories, photos, and memories of Calvin’s impact on your career and life to be included in a book of memories and well wishes we are gathering to present to Calvin.

Dinner at the Campus Club $25/person, discount for students.Reservations by May 7, 2014 (contact [email protected] or 612-625-5068).

Jacob Phipps, a 2013 NSF REU summer intern ad-vised by Calvin Alexander, won the top Student Paper Award at the National American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) meeting in Denver, Colorado, for his poster on his summer research.

In April 2013, nearly 100 colleagues and students gathered to honor History of Science and Technology professor Sally Gregory Kohlstedt’s prolific career and commitment to teaching. The one-day conference was titled “Practicing Science, Engaging Publics” and was followed by a banquet in Sally’s honor, allowing ample time to mingle in a more informal environment and to reminisce. Sally’s book, “Teaching Children Science: Hands-On Nature Study in North America, 1890-1920” (University of Chicago Press), won the History of Science Society’s Rossiter Prize for 2013. Sally’s accepted an appointment as Acting Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Education, where she can focus her dedication on the importance of graduate studies at the university-level.

Page 7Alumni Newsletter

Jim Stout Retires

Jim Stout retired from the University at the end of the 2012-2013 academic year, after serving the department with distinction for 41 years. Over those years, many hundreds of geoscience students have taken his classes in mineralogy and petrology, as well as many more non-majors who have taken introductory geology or volcanology from him. At the same time, a succession of excellent graduate students has produced theses under his guidance and supervision.

Jim has been equally at home wielding a rock hammer and making a geologic map as deal–ing with the theoretical intricacies of phase relationships. The energy and motivation he brought to these activities he also brought to serving the department, which he did in many ways, including being the director of both the Graduate Studies Committee and Undergraduate Studies Committee. In helping generate esprit de corps, for many years he was a prime booster and active chef for the fall and spring departmental picnics.

In his research, Jim has combined field, experimental and theoretical approaches to addressing problems of phase equilibria, conditions of rock and mineral formation and deformation, and regional tectonics, with the heaviest focus on metamorphic rocks. He has made important contributions to the theory of phase equilibria. His research includes fruitful collaboration with colleagues in materials science. He has encouraged many undergraduates to undertake research projects. Jim’s graduate students are now found in senior positions in academia and broadly within the geological profession.

The most memorable experiences of Jim for many alumni will be linked to one of two places – the Colorado Rockies and Hawaii. For many years, starting in the mid-1970s, Jim, with Clem Chase, initiated a summer field camp based near Gunnison, Colorado. The philosophy of the camp was to have students mapping, in teams, different parts of the area in order to arrive at a compiled map based on the collaboration among the teams, with the area mapped expanding each year, building on what had been done before. Besides being a realistic mapping project, this was a true camping experience, with the base

camp moving around, and usually set up on Forest Service land far from modern amenities. All of this was character building! Over a longer period of time, every few years, Jim has led student field trips to the Big Island of Hawaii to experience volcanic geology in the raw. This has been one of the most popular of the GeoClub spring trips.

For all his efforts on behalf of students and his abilities and engagement as an instructor, Jim was awarded in 2009 the Horace T. Morse – University Alumni Association Award for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education.

Jim maintains an intermittent presence in Pillsbury Hall. His energy and enthusiasm remain strong, with much of it now directed towards his many other interests besides geology, including spending time with family and friends. He shares a passion for travel with his wife, Ann, and this is taking them to exotic places, with geology of course being a constant background. In his travels and in his other activities, we wish Jim, with Ann, a long and rewarding retirement!

by Peter Hudleston

Jim in a lava field with his 2013 Hawaiian class trip. Photo by Kelsi Ustipak.

Page 8 Department of Earth Sciences

The Rebirth of St. Anthony Falls Laboratory

I want to tell you about some exciting new develop-ments at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL). Before launching into this, though, I should explain a little why this is even part of the Earth Sciences newsletter. After all, isn’t SAFL part of civil engineer-ing? Actually, no. Apart from the fact that I and other members of Earth Sciences have conducted research at SAFL for many years, the laboratory itself is now part of the College of Science and Engineering (CSE), affiliated with all CSE departments but no one in particular. So in addition to having been a friendly place for Earth Sci-ence researchers for many years, and host-ing a wide variety of Earth-science research (including quite a bit done by our col-leagues in civil engi-neering), SAFL is now officially as much a part of Earth Sciences as any other depart-ment in the College.

The big news from SAFL is that in Sep-tember 2010, the University of Min-nesota was awarded a $7.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Academic Research Infrastructure – Recovery and Reinvestment (ARI-R2) program to renovate and enhance infrastructure deficiencies and key research facilities. An additional $8.7 million in funding from the state-supported Higher Education Asset Preserva-tion and Replacement (HEAPR) program simultane-ously supports essential improvements to building infrastructure for accessibility, health and safety, and indoor air quality. The main goals of the project included advancing fundamental research in wind power; water power; biofuels and environmental restoration of rivers, streams and deltas; and enabling interdisciplinary research, education and outreach through cybercollaboration.

Background. When it opened in 1938, SAFL was a traditional hydraulics laboratory dedicated to basic and applied research in hydraulic structures and engineering. This primarily involved model stud-ies of proposed or extant infrastructure – spillways, locks, intakes, harbor structures, etc. Along with the engineering community, SAFL has evolved since then from a focus on hard structures imposed on the natural environment to a broader view that includes restoration and sustainable management, working with natural tendencies rather than seeking to ignore

or control them. At the same time, ac-celerating societal interest in renewable energy sources leads in a similar way to understanding how energy can be harvest-ed from the natural environment without damaging it. These developments have led to much closer ties between engineering and the natural sci-ences, especially the Earth sciences and ecology. SAFL has evolved along with these developments. It

was recently renamed, dropping “hydrau-

lic” from its title to emphasize its place in the world as an interdisciplinary research facility focused on engineering, environmental, biological and geophysi-cal fluid mechanics. In addition to integrating across disciplines, the laboratory strives today to couple experiments with theory and numerical simulation, to combine basic and applied research, and to foster strong industrial interactions, with the aim of devel-oping innovative, physics-based, and sustainable en-gineering solutions to major societal problems related to energy and the environment.

The single largest and most transformative research activity that has occurred at SAFL was the creation in

Updating the stairs and elevator to current standards required removing back wall of the laboratory and excavation into (Ordovician) bedrock.

Page 9Alumni Newsletter

2002 of the National Center for Earth-surface Dynam-ics (NCED), a NSF Science and Technology Center (STC) devoted to quantitative, transdisciplinary study of the surface environment and headquartered at SAFL. NCED, which ended its run as an STC in 2012, involved engineers, ecologists, Earth scientists, and social scientists. NCED along with the increasingly transdisciplinary character of research activities at SAFL led naturally to research linkages across disci-plines and scales. For example, the traditional water cycle has now been integrated with geomorphologi-cal, chemical, biological, and human activities across a range of scales. Research efforts on this theme focus on understanding individual cycle components and integration from the scale of microorganism to the watershed in order to develop science-based approaches for sustainable management of water resources and landscapes. Well funded research pro-grams have been established in a broad range of areas, including: hydrological and geomorphological Earth surface processes, chemical-biological fate and trans-port in the environment, tectonically driven erosional and depositional systems, two-phase flows, and bio-logical fluid mechanics. SAFL researchers have also recognized the role SAFL could play in sustainable en-ergy: wind, water power, and biofuels. Thus through NCED was created the nucleus of a new research core whose common platform is the Earth-surface environment – not coincidentally, the central theme of NCED as well – with many different facets: landscape and river restoration; sustainable management; and renewable energy via wind, water, and even biofuels. In addition, SAFL researchers are pursuing themes in cardiovascular fluid flow and medical devices. These research activities are inherently interdisciplinary and involve synergies with multiple laboratory faculty, collaborators from around the nation and the world, and industrial partners.

The Renovation. The developments above provided the impetus for a major renovation of the laboratory. As I mentioned above, the scientific goals revolved around wind power, water power, biofuels, envi-ronmental restoration, and cybercollaboration. The funding came from the NSF ARI-R2 program and the University of Minnesota; principal investigator is Fotis Sotiropoulos, Director of the SAFL and James L. Record, Professor of Civil Engineering in the College of Science and Engineering. I and several colleagues from Civil Engineering were also leads on the pro-posal; writing it was a major collaborative effort that

occupied us for some months. The ARI-R2 renovation project was designed to address a set of long-standing infrastructure problems in the laboratory through a major, systemic upgrade of the building and its facili-ties. Essentially, we wanted to renovate SAFL to be what it has been evolving toward over the past few decades: a modern laboratory equipped for experi-mentation that is seamlessly integrated with theory in support of a sustainable Earth-surface environment. Major elements of research and training previously not feasible that are enabled by the ARI-R2 funding are: (1) dramatically improved access to SAFL for re-search visitors and the general public including safety and ADA upgrades; (2) building infrastructure to support acquisition of communication and visualiza-tion devices to allow virtual experiments using SAFL facilities; (3) research in hydrokinetics and hydro-power generation using the SAFL main channel; (4) research on the influence of wave and tidal processes on deltaic coasts linked to subsidence and sea-level changes; (5) biofuels research focusing on the opti-mization of algal bioreactors under variable environ-

A new topography scanner being tested on one of our educational models of dam removal. Scanners like this need only a few minutes to scan topography to high resolution.

Page 10 Department of Earth Sciences

mental conditions; and (6) wind-tunnel modification to study wind-power optimization in variable atmo-spheric boundary layers. As I write this, the project is largely complete: all building modification is done, and the remaining work is on finishing some of the research upgrades that could not be completed while the construction was going on. The major aspects of the renovation are: 1. New elevator and stairs, which required a com-

plete tear-down and rebuilding of the back of the building; now SAFL is handicap-accessible;

2. Fire and safety improvements including a sprin-kler system, new alarms, and building egress upgrades;

3. Major upgrades to the ventilation, heating, air conditioning and electrical systems, much of which was non-existent (A/C) or below stan-dard (ventilation and electrical);

4. New restrooms and locker rooms that meet mod-ern building codes;

5. Major repairs to degraded structural steel;6. New and remodeled lab spaces, including a major

upgrade to the ecofluids lab;7. Major upgrade to the wind tunnel to allow, for

example, temperature control for research on stable and unstable atmospheric boundary lay-ers;

8. Major upgrade to the Main Channel to allow for research on advanced hydrokinetic devices to capture energy from free-running rivers;

9. New, faster, computer-controlled measurement carts on the Delta and Experimental EarthScape basins;

10. A wide, fast computer-controlled measurement cart that turns essentially the entire Model Floor into scannable space in which customized ex-perimental rigs can be quickly built, used, and taken down;

11. Very fast broadband internet access throughout the experimental spaces to allow users any-where to control and collect data from experi-ments remotely via the internet.

We are quite excited about all of this! The upgrades to the research facilities combined with the quantum step in broadband through the building will make SAFL even more of a facility that transcends the borders of the University than it has been. (And this coincides with the launch of the worldwide Sediment Experimentalist Network (https://sites.google.com/site/sedimentexperimentalists/home), co-led by for-mer SAFLer and Earth Sciences alumn Wonsuck Kim (PhD 2007) now at the University of Texas at Austin.) You can follow events at the lab through our website, www.safl.umn.edu, which includes live webcams of some of our major operations. You are also welcome to visit – the lab is part of the University and the building is open during normal business hours. We are also having a celebration of the renovation and open house this spring, when everything is finished (and the Outdoor Stream Lab thaws out a little). I hope to see you there!

by Chris Paola

Page 11Alumni Newsletter

A Room with a View (to the Future)

Remodeling the Teaching Space in Room 125BJosh Feinberg and Kent Kirkby

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “The only constant is change itself.” While that may be true, Room 125B in Pillsbury Hall seemed to defy this adage for nearly fifty years. As many of you may remember Room 125B is the Department’s main laboratory teaching space, where students experience hands-on learning for classes like Mineralogy, Petrol-ogy, Structural Geology, and Sedimentology & Stra-tigraphy. Although Pillsbury Hall was built in 1887, to a remarkable degree, much of our major program

has been taught in this room using the same methods and infrastructure as when the building was new. Yet with the possible exception of the department’s main lecture hall, no other room in Pillsbury Hall plays a more pivotal role in our undergraduates’ earth science career preparation.

This inertia has finally started to shift thanks to a large grant from the College of Science and Engineer-ing’s Instructional Technology Committee (CSEITC), which has allowed to us to revitalize Room 125B and transform it into a modern learning environment.

Why was a change needed? There were logistical and pedagogical reasons for updating the room. The pre-renovation space was arranged to accommodate

Figure 1. Room 125 then and now. A) The newly renovated teaching space. LRC Manager Amy Myrbo and graduate student Cindy Frickle get a bunch of students (Alex Ludwig, front) started on a lab examining smear slides of lake sediments. The 70” touch-screen monitor and high-mounted shelving are visible in the back-ground (B) John Swiecichowski (left), Jacob Sherman (center), and Matt Rassert (right) discuss a lab exercise while imaging diatoms using the new microscope-mounted digital cameras. C) The Mineralogy lab in the mid-1990s with Sue Magda-lene (left), Cara Alferness (standing), and Elise Bekele (center).

C

BA

Figure 1. Room 125B then and now. A) The newly renovated teaching space. LRC Manager Amy Myrbo and graduate student Cindy Frickle get a bunch of students (Alex Ludwig, front) started on a lab examining smear slides of lake sediments. The 70” touch-screen monitor and high-mounted shelving are visible in the background. B) John Swiecichowski (left), Jacob Sherman (center), and Matt Rassert (right) discuss a lab exercise while imaging diatoms using the new microscope-mounted digital cameras. C) The Mineralogy lab in the mid-1990s with Sue Magdalene (left), Cara Alferness (standing), and Elise Bekele (center).

Page 12 Department of Earth Sciences

a lecture format, with three rows of long thin tables directed towards a single whiteboard. This configura-tion made it difficult for students to access lab materi-als at the front of the room and made it equally dif-ficult for teaching assistants to reach students in need of help. With no permanent digital projector, there was no convenient way for instructors or students to give electronic presentations, and when a portable digital projector was used, the pull-down screen would obscure nearly all of the available whiteboard space. Additionally, the pre-renovation space was cluttered with several decades’ worth of discarded teaching materials, outdated maps, chemicals, and the perennial clutter of discarded ‘favorite rocks’ from past teachers and students.

Who helped design the new space? Given the wide variety of classes taught in Room 125B, we polled all the faculty, graduate and undergraduate students that currently teach or take classes in the room. We asked people to describe their class’s activities, as well as their perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the physical infrastructure and instructional technol-ogy available in the room. We wanted to get a sense of the particular parts of the room that they would most like to change.

It’s remarkable how broadly the room is used. De-pending on the class, our students can find them-

selves using petrographic microscopes, working with large-format geologic maps, participating in complex demonstrations in Sedimentology & Stratigraphy and Fluid Dynamics, or viewing specialized videos. In renovating the room we tried to create a dynamic space that met most of the department’s diverse needs in the most advanced way possible. Both students and faculty recognized that the arrangement of the tables and excessive clutter made it difficult to move about or organize group projects, and even gave the space a somewhat oppressive atmosphere. At the same time people also recognized that the room had a lot of potential. The seven, southeast-facing 12-foot tall windows allow sunlight to stream into the room throughout most of the day, providing welcome natu-ral light, especially in wintertime.

Beyond infrastructure, the faculty and students also identified a number of ways to improve the quality of instruction. Both undergraduates and former teaching assistants expressed a need for a way to allow both students and instructors to “see” down petrographic microscopes at the same time. Faculty wanted more white board space as well as a permanent electronic display. Students wanted the ability to work in groups and faculty and teaching assistants wanted to intro-duce computers more directly into the lab setting.

Figure 2. An example of a typical figure made by an Earth Science major after only their second lab using the petrographic micro-scope. The Fall 2013 Mineralogy class used the new computer workstations in Room 125B to go completely “paperless” in its lab exercises, thereby saving ~9000 sheets of paper.

Minerals: Olivine (Upper Left) Plagioclase (Lower Right)Rock: Gabbro

Find a field of view that contains both olivine and plagioclase, take a photomicrograph in XPL of the pair and insert an Annotated Photomicrograph below. (8 pts)

Figure 1.1 (a) Cross polarized light photomicrograph of mafic igneous rock composed of olivine and plagioclase. (b) Schematic diagram of an individual olivine crystal and twinning inside an individual plagioclase crystal.

Figure 2. An example of a typical �gure made by an Earth Science major after only their second lab using the petrographic microscope. The Fall 2013 Mineralogy class used the new computer workstations in Room 125 to go completely “paperless” in its lab exercises, thereby saving ~9000 sheets of paper.

Page 13Alumni Newsletter

Striking a balance. One of our main aims for the new layout was to improve students’ and instructors’ ability to walk around the room. Circular tables re-placed the older row tables, with one of them centered around a large support col-umns. In an effort to make the space more collabora-tive and less like a lecture hall, we removed the large front table that previously separated the students from the instructor and placed a teaching station at the center of the room (Figure 1). This allowed students to ask questions more easily, and it enabled instructors to quickly go to where help was needed most. One pleasant and unexpected outcome from this new ar-rangement was an increase in the seating capacity of the lab from 14 to 17 stu-dents. In addition to changing the room’s furniture, we also added digital cameras to each petrographic micro-scope, which in turn were integrated into brand new 27” touch screen computer workstations. This al-lows students to view and manipulate thin sections on large screens, and transforms what used to be an isolated, individual activity into something that is more amenable to group exploration. Further, in-structors can more easily help students make critical observations by simply pointing to an area of interest on the student’s monitor. High-resolution publica-tion quality images and videos can be collected by the students and are already being incorporated into their weekly lab exercises (e.g., Figures 2 & 3). In addition to the microscopy software, these computers are also installed with Adobe Creative Suite, ArcGIS, Crystal-Maker, Mathematica, Matlab, Microsoft Office, and Steronet for Windows. Thus, the room can now serve the majority of our undergraduates’ computational needs.

Additional renovation features include a 70” touch screen monitor, an 8’ x 8’ table for lab experiments, expansive white boards covering the two largest walls, and high-mounted shelving to organize and store lab materials, such as atomic mineral models. The touch screen monitor allows faculty and TAs to begin their lab sessions with short 10 to 15 minutes mini-lectures, and also allows students to practice delivering oral presentations.

Transformation is seldom ever perfect, and mixing computer displays with fluid-based demonstrations convinced us of the need for an additional ‘wet’ facility. Overall though, the room’s reincarnation has proven to be remarkably suc-cessful.

A view to the future. We’re grateful to the CSEITC for providing the funding to renovate this room. The changes that were made to Room 125B have pro-foundly improved the ways in which we will be able to teach our students, and to be honest, it will take a few years to learn how best to incorporate all of these new capabilities into our undergraduate curriculum. But this is a wonderful problem to have, and I think all of us in the department are looking forward to discovering new and exciting ways to teach and learn about our Earth!

Who helped? This renovation required a Herculean effort to clear out old furniture and materials in Room 125B. We will forever be in debt to several dauntless graduate students, including Will Nachlas, Roxanne Renedo, Matt Carter, Antoinette Abeyta, and Zhou “Johnny” Zhang, who helped relocate multiple tons of rock samples and microscope cabinets. We are also grateful to the undergraduate students who took the time to express their opinions about how the space could be improved. Over the summer of 2013, Mark Griffith single-handedly led the effort to repaint the room, clean the carpets and install the new white boards and high shelving.

Figure 3. A typical lab question on the biaxial optical properties of muscovite. (images courtesy of under-graduate John Swiecichowski, Jr.)

(3) Insert the accessory plate. Capture a photomicro-graph of the interference figure in each of the 4 quad-rants, showing how the interference figure changes with rotation of the stage. Group all 4 of these images together and insert them below. (you do not need to draw anything on them) (8 pts)

Figure 1.2 Interference figures of muscovite sheet in all four quadrants.

Figure 3. A typical lab question on the biaxial optical properties of muscovite. (images courtesy of undergraduate John Swiecichowski, Jr.)

Page 14 Department of Earth Sciences

*multiple donations

We wish to express our gratitude to alumni and friends who continue supporting the department with generous donations. Your financial support provides scholarships and fellowships enabling students to carry out their stud-ies, conduct field and analytical research, and present papers at professional meetings. Listed on these pages are gifts received from January 2013 through January 2014. Many of those listed here have given multiple donations.

Gifts to the Department

Department of Earth Sciences General FundMargaret G. Aldrich Irrevocable Trust U/WGeorge S. Austin Jack R. Banttari Henry A. Baski Sandy A. Beitsch Carl S. BensonMichael Berndt Marcia G. Bjornerud Bill Bonnichsen Joy M. Branlund Marlee & William BriceKeith A. BruggerPaul K. Buchanan*George V. Bulin, Jr. Jon A. CarlsonThomas W. CarlsonStanley Chernicoff & Julie Stein*Ronald K. Churchill Brian Cohen Kevin V. CookJacqueline M. Couillard Harry M. Crawford Joseph T. Cropsey Elizabeth O. Doyle Fletcher G. Driscoll James J. Dulian Mark S. Ebert Denis & Karol EricksonJohn & Carol FreeburgJudith Friedman & Scott RiceBen M. Frieman Thomas A. Gardner William J. Gelineau Peter A. GintautasLaura J. Gislason Barry Goldstein & Marian Schwartz Charles R. GruenenfelderLeah Gruhn & Jere MohrJane HagedornC. Bruce Hanson Gilbert Hanson *Milo I. Harpstead John W. Hjerpe Ryan & Catherine Hoffman Peter Hudleston*Derek A. Jaakola Hope Jahren & Clinton ConradDavid R. Janecky

Robert G. Johnson *Kerry L. Keen Julie A. Kinyon James A. Knox*Bradley J. Korkowski Craig B. Larson Steven & Lauren Levine Mrs. A. M. Levorsen Matthew L. Mannick Seth E. MattersSusan M. Mullin Clarence & Geraldine NelsonDavid A. Nemetz Sarah K. Noble Thomas J. O’Neill Dean M. Peterson Gary & Sharon PetersonMichael & Julie Plante *John M. Prutzman, Jr. Andrey V. Pyatigorets John J. ReadPeter & Rebecca RecksWilliam L. Rohrer Robert & Tara Ruffner Matthew .J Sauter Thomas C. SersenBill & Carol SeyfriedDouglas L. Smith Rebecca Seal Soileau Donald Sprowl Ryan D. Swanson Richard E. ThillJohn A. Thomas Edward C. Thornton*Leif Tokle *Robert F. Werner Lowell E. Wille*Michael A. Young Karl N. Zenk

Banerjee Fellowship Fund*Subir Banerjee & Manju Parikh Sally & David Kohlstedt Mary E. Wilkosz

Berg Scholarship FundJosephine F. Berg

Donath Honors Scholarship Fund*Fred & Mavis Donath

Field Experiences FundRichard J. Callaway Jon A. CarlsonDyanna M. CzeckChristoph GeissDonald & Pamela JakesFred J. Ronicker John C. TacinelliEdward C. Thornton

S. S. Goldich Geochemical Research FundCarl S. Benson*Warren C. Day

John W. Guner Fellowship FundCarl S.. BensonTerence T. Quirke Jr.Fred J. Ronicker Robert L. Sundeen

Subir Banerjee with Becky Strauss, 2013-14 recipient of the Banerjee Fellowship.

Page 15Alumni Newsletter

*multiple donations

Kraft Scholarship FundJohn C. Kraft

Harold M. Mooney Fellowship FundMuawia Barazangi Carl S. BensonJohn A. Holmquist Jane G. IversonLane R. JohnsonMorris & Judy Kaufman John E. KossJames J. OlsonScott G. Schulz Nigel & Jane WattrusCraig A. Williams

Sidney Parkans Scholarship Fund (gifts in memory of Sidney Parkans)Michael & Louise Beldon Marsha L. Brown The Bruennig FamilyJanice Finkelston Reba M. Freedman Philip & Jeanette Getz Goodykoontz Family TrustJoAnn D. Klar Eleanor Komet Arnold & Joan Kort Irvin & Barbara Levine Rosemary Mannino Margie & Gary Morgan Teri & Kenneth Sackin Steven Steinkeler

Quaternary Paleoecology Minor Program Fellowship FundKerry L. Keen

Rama Murthy and Janice Noruk Fellowship for Women Graduate Students FundEville Gorham

Rita Paquette Memorial Scholarship FundRene M. Averett Michael W. Block Linda B. BruemmerCaroline Chinquist Michael & Lynn ConveryJudith Friedman & Scott RiceMyrna M. Halbach Donald & Pamela JakesMarguerite & Robert McCarron Scott L. Murchie*Mary E. Wilkosz

Frederick Swain Fellowship FundBeltman-Miller Foundation Richard N. BensonDonald L. Hansen, Sr. Larry J. Nutter Michael Paisner & Sarah Charnes *Kenneth & Marilyn Quarfoth

H. E. Wright Footsteps FundCarl S. BensonChristoph GeissDora & Noah Hanft

Zoltai Fellowship FundThomas C. Sutton

Corporate DonationsBoeing Company, matching gift of Michael Paisner Chevron Humankind Foundation, matching gift of Thomas and Rebecca Carlson Schlumberger CompanyShell Oil Company Foundation, matching gift of Jerry LuciaUnited Technologies Corp, matching gift of Steven Levine Wells Fargo Foundation, matching gift of Sharon & Gary Peterson

David G. Rensink contributed a gift providing University of Minnesota faculty and students with perpetual access to the AAPG Archives database, Datapages. This includes articles and abstracts from the AAPG Bulletin 1917-present, 230+ volumes of AAPG Special Publications, SEPM’s Journal of Sedimentary Re-search 1931-present, Journal of Petroleum Geology 1978-2005, GCAGS Transac-tions 1951-present, Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin (CSPG) 1953 to present, and those of many other smaller publishers.

Page 16 Department of Earth Sciences

Fellowships, Scholarships, and Awards 2013-14Fellowship and scholarship support has grown significantly over the last decade because of our alumni. Your generosity has been the tipping point in many cases, where better financial packages enable us to attract the best undergraduate and graduate students to the University of Minnesota and to the department.

GRADUATE STUDENTS

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Outstanding TA Awards

Noah Keller Caitlin OlejniczakAlana Bartolai Will Nachlas

Subir Banerjee FellowshipBecky Strauss

Dennis Graduate FellowshipsMellissa CrossPaul McKinneyHonghuo Zhang

Warren Fisher Memorial FellowshipsWill NachlasRoxanne Renedo

Forrest FellowshipChris Crosby

Francis Gibson FellowshipBecky Strauss

Samuel Goldich FellowshipWill Nachlas

John Gruner FellowshipDrew Syverson

Kerry Kelts Travel AwardLucas Gloege (LLO)

Allan and Eleanor Martini FellowshipBen Tutolo

Harold Mooney FellowshipZhang (Will) Li

V.R. Murthy/Janice Noruk Fellowship for Women Graduate Students

Becky Strauss

Thomas & Margaret Aldrich AwardAlexis Iverson

Robert R. Berg ScholarshipMeagan Harold

Dennis Undergraduate ScholarshipsDarren CheahBrian DemetEmily Falksen

Fred Donath Honors ScholarshipMathieu Pythoud

Chris Kraft ScholarshipChristopher Novitsky

McMillen Undergraduate ScholarshipsBenjamin HeinleAdam KubatAlec Schubick

Rita Paquette Memorial AwardsMeagan HaroldEmma Young

Sidney A. Parkans ScholarshipChristopher Novitsky

Walter and Joyce Rembold ScholarshipKatie Rempfert

2013 Field Camp ScholarshipsCaitlin CastnerJeff EricksonEmily FalksenWey Yi FooBenjamin HeinleAn An HuaAdam KubatJack LangreeSean LindenCatharine McCookJohn MunsonBrandon MutschlerEmma YoungJacob Zahn

Quaternary Paleoecology Minor Program Fellowships

Andrew HavelesKathryn ResnerMax Torbenson

H.E. Wright “Footsteps” AwardAndrew Haveles

Zoltai Graduate FellowshipsAdam SchaenMichele Stillinger

Page 17Alumni Newsletter

Some recipients of 2013-14 departmental awards. Seated: Michele Stillinger, Alexis Iverson, Emily Falksen, Emma Young, Brian Demet, Ben Tutolo; first row: Becky Strauss, Caitlin Olejniczak, Darren Cheah, Adam Kubat, Chris Crosby, Paul McKinney, Drew Syverson; last row: Mathieu Pythoud, Ben Heinle, Chris Novitsky, Andrew Haveles, Adam Schaen, Will Nachlas, Alec Schubick.

Fast Start 4 Impact

Within each issue of the Winchell School of Earth Sciences’ newsletter we are excited to highlight the accomplishments of our amazing students. We are ever grateful to the many who give of your time, tal-ent and resources to help make their accomplishments possible.

Now through December 31st, alumni and friends have a unique opportunity to support students with the University’s Fast Start 4 Impact initiative. Fast Start 4 Impact is designed to get more scholarships and fellowships in the hands of deserving students now when they need it the most. For each new endowment gift or four-year pledge of $50,000 or greater, the Fast Start 4 Impact initiative will pay the first four years of annual scholarship or fellowship awards to students, while the earnings on the new endowment fund are re-invested for growth.

Benefactors immediately see the impact of their gift to students while their endowed fund accumulates

earnings in its early years. Moreover, the endowed fund becomes a permanent source of income for the depart-ment to recruit and retain the best students now and in the future.

I look forward to visiting with many of you as I travel for the department or when you are on campus. In the meantime, please contact me if you are interested in learning more about Fast Start 4 Impact or additional ways to support the Earth Sci-ences department, the College and our students.

Shannon WeiherSr. Development Officer

612.624.5543 [email protected]

Page 18 Department of Earth Sciences

Degrees Granted 2012-13

Graduate Degrees

Brooke A. White, PhD Earth Sciences, December 2013, A three-dimen-sional model of Lake Superior with ice and biogeochemistry: investigating interannual lake trends and the deep chlorophyll maximum, Advisor: Katsumi Matsumoto.

Autumn J. Haagsma, MS Earth Sci-ences, October 2013, Seismic re-fraction analysis of east river flats, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Advisor: Justin Revenaugh.

Eric W.N. Stevens, MS Earth Sciences, October 2013, Barite crusts from a brine pool in the Gulf of Mexico and the role of sulfur oxidizing bacteria in the precipitation of bar-ite (BaSO4), Advisor: Jake Bailey.

Matthew J. Carter, PhD Geology, October 2013, The role and fate of fluid inclusions in natural and ex-perimental deformation, Advisor: Christian Teyssier.

Anna K. Lindquist, PhD Geophysics, September 2013, Dislocations in magnetite: experimental observa-tions of their structural, magnetic, and low-temperature effects, Advisor: Joshua Feinberg.

Apryl Marie Jennrich, MS Geology, September 2013, Plan C, Advisor: Calvin Alexander.

Dylan J. Blumentritt, PhD Geology, August 2013, Reconstructing the erosional history of the Upper Mississippi River from magnetic, isotopic, and geomorphic evi-dence, Advisors: Vaughan Voller, Herb Wright, and Dan Engstrom.

Gregory A. Brick, PhD Geology, Au-gust 2013, The nitrate deposits of rock crevices n the Upper Mis-sissippi Valley, Advisor: Calvin Alexander.

Kimberly E. Yauk, MS Earth Sciences, July 2013, Using magnetism to characterize and distinguish high coercivity iron oxide and oxyhy-droxide minerals in atmospheric dust. Advisor: Bruce Moskowitz.

Tao Wang, PhD Geophysics, June 2013, Seismic structure around the 660 discontinuity in subduction zone and its implication, Advisor: Justin Revenaugh.

Patrick T. Hastings, MS Geology, June 2013, Stability of reduced carbon in the mantle, Advisors: Marc Hirschmann and Tony Withers.

Lauren Idleman, MS Earth Sciences, June 2013, Burial and exhumation cycles tracked by 40Ar/39Ar and apatite (U-Th)/He thermochro-nology in a strike-slip fault zone, central Turkey, Advisors: Christian Teyssier and Donna Whitney.

Christie J. Villanueva, MS Earth Sci-ences, June 2013, Evolution of a metamorphic gradient in the foot-wall of the northern Snake Range detachment, Nevada, Advisor: Christian Teyssier.

Jennifer B. Wright, MS Earth Sciences, June 2013, Plan B, Advisor: Donna Whitney.

Eamon P.M. Donovan, MS Earth Sci-ences, January 2013, Plan C, Advisor: Calvin Alexander.

Undergraduate Degrees

BS Earth Sciences Silvia H. Ascari, with distinction Colin G. Cervantes Brian P. Demet Wey Y. Foo Megan A. Horst David H. Humphrey Alexis A. Iverson Benjamin L. Jessen Sanna J. Ojanen-Goldsmith Caitlin M. Olejniczak Cassandra R. Roper Michael J. Weinacht Nurbek Yessetov

BS Geology Peter M. Putzier

BS Geophysics Wan M.L. Wan Mohn Zani

BA Earth Sciences Melissa A. Bardal Kelsey J. Blazer Max E. Gilbertson Elliott W. Ingram Jr. Rachel F. Kane Jack R. Langree Lori J. McCloud James K. Parry

BA Geology Leif E. Tokle

2011-12* BS Geology Aslam Bin Ab Fatah John L. Barland John M. Bowar Cynthia M. Frickle Benjamin R. Harkins Spencer Niebuhr Courtney J. Sprain Muhammad Niram Md Zin Mur Fatin Mohd Zin BS Geophysics Aslam Bin Ab Fatah Benjamin R. Harkins Courtney Sprain Muhammad Niram Md ZinBS Earth Sciences Ian S. Keifer Justin P. Michael BA Geology Laura J. Gislason Jesse W. Krzenski Kelsi R. Ustipak *(undergraduate degrees inadvertently missed in last newsletter)

Page 19Alumni Newsletter

LacCore, the National Lacustrine Core Facility, oper-ated by the Limnological Research Center, will signifi-cantly expand to become the new Continental Scien-tific Drilling Coordination Office (CSDCO), funded by the National Science Foundation through a coopera-tive agreement. The CSDCO manages and supports all stages of continental scientific drilling (CSD), from a project’s inception through sample curation and reuse. These ser-vices are a natural extension of LacCore’s current support of lake sediment drilling and coring operations, and will now be provided to all types of CSD projects, including tectonic, magmatic, geother-mal, hydrogeologic, critical zone, impact structure, and others. The CSDCO’s staff form the essential translational link be-tween the scientists who wish to answer academic questions, and the drillers, funding agencies, permitting bodies, and governments that make it possible – or can become roadblocks. Because of the massive scale of these projects, most principal investigators (PIs) will only do one CSD project in their careers, so a tremendous amount of institutional memory rests with the CSDCO staff. The CSDCO will also bring a renewed focus on including the broader commu-

The New Continental Scientific Drilling Coordination Office

nity in discovery, and in the development of research questions and approaches – whether local agencies, Native American tribes and indigenous people worldwide, schools, museums, or the general public. A new summer internship program will train students and young investigators in CSD best practices.

These new duties won’t affect LacCore’s level of attention to lacustrine research, but it will mean new responsibilities for each of its scientific staff. Anders Noren will become the Director of the CSDCO, and Kristina Brady (MS 2006) will replace him as LacCore Curator. Amy Myrbo (PhD 2006) will split her time between LacCore research and CSDCO Outreach,

Diversity, and Education. Jessica Heck (BS 2008), Ryan O’Grady (BS 2008), and new

postdoc Jessica Rodysill (BS 2008) will divide respon-sibilities for visitor and student training, lab manage-ment, database development, field support of coring and drilling projects, and a thousand other duties. LacCore Director Emi Ito will guide the CSDCO’s governance structure.

Drilling a 500,000 year record of climate change and human evolution at Olorgesaille, in the Kenya Rift Valley. Photo by Jenny Clark.

Drilling from the frozen surface of Lake El’gygytgyn (commonly known as “Lake E”), a lake formed by an extraterrestrial impact 2.8 million years ago in northeastern Siberia. Photo by Addie Rose Holland.

Page 20 Department of Earth Sciences

by Mathieu Pythoud and Annia Fayon

When dawn came about Minneapolis on May 19, 2013, Prof. Annia Fayon set sail with a fleet of three suburbans bursting with camping gear and enthusias-tic undergrads. Answering the call of the wild, Darren Cheah, Emily Falksen, Robin Feakins, Max Gilbertson, Alexis Iverson, Rachel Kane, Stefanie Mayer, Hifzhul ‘Arif Ahmad Munif, Caitlin Olejniczak, Mathieu Py-thoud, Alex Seeling, and Mike Weinacht turned to the west and let Pillsbury Hall fade away.

Our troop spent the first day of our journey riding across the Great Plains and therefore got very ac-quainted with the evenness of the scenery. The next day, we were suddenly stunned as we saw the Rocky Mountains in the horizon beyond the city of Denver to greet us from their snowy peaks. We enjoyed this breathtaking mountainous landscape throughout the entire day. The sun eventually dropped behind the horizon and we stopped to set up camp in the Pine Valley in southeastern Utah.

The third day, everyone awoke early and eager to explore our first geologic destination: Zion National Park. Following a winding road through the high sandstone cliffs, we got a first impression of the desert that lied here about 150 million years go. Only after hiking through the deep gorges were we able to fully appreciate the scale of the aeolian structures and their story of ancient features once rivaling today’s tall-est dunes. Having just completed a sedimentary and stratigraphy course, everyone was keen on sedimen-

tary structures and the story they told. Amazed by the dis-play of nature that we had seen that day, we decided to spend the following morning exploring Zion further. People broke off into smaller groups and undertook hiking in various parts of the park: from the bottom of the Narrows to the spooky heights of Angel’s Land-ing.

We left Utah in awe, drove down the terrific Highway 15, and crossed Nevada. We bypassed Las Vegas with not the slight bit of desire to give up the wild, so we gladly left the skyline of the decadent city dim in the horizon and pressed on to California. That night we arrived in Shoshone, CA, a town with a population of about twenty. We met our host, Jordan, who led us to the Amargosa Conservancy education center. While some of us set their tents and hammocks at the edge of the desert behind the building, others made them-selves comfortable in the dorms. This was to be our home for many a night, and we all came to cherish it greatly.

Dawn on the fifth day - the big moment. We all geared up and drove down the hill from Shoshone to our ul-timate destination: Death Valley National Park. Only driving down the hill was more than it seemed since we dropped from an elevation of 1,585 feet to 282 feet below sea level, to essentially the lowest point on dry land in North America. Death Valley proved to be

Spring Trip 2013: California, there we went...

Panorama of Death Valley looking west-southwest from Dante’s view. Photos shown here were taken by Stefanie Mayer.

Page 21Alumni Newsletter

everything we had hoped. We had been cautioned about the late-May weather in the valley, when tem-peratures can soar to 100°F or more. As luck would have it, temperatures never exceeded 95°F. Even the park rangers commented on how lucky we were to have such beautiful weather. An amusing side note: when we stopped at the visitor center, we saw a coy-ote and a roadrunner, although the situation would have been more comical if the former was chasing the latter.

Okay. Enough about the weather and cartoons. The geology was spectacular. During our visit we worked our way from the southern part of the valley to the north, observing everything from Proterozoic meta-morphic rocks to recent sediments, not to mention the lovely structures throughout. We spent some time hiking across fantastic alluvial fans whose deposits are offset by recent faulting; we also observed con-glomerates displaying beautiful imbrication features. We drove along strike of the main normal fault that defines the eastern part of the valley, stopping at amazing outcrops along the way. Hiking up the slot canyons, we could see some of the normal faults bounding the famous Death Valley turtlebacks.

More highlights of our visit to Death Valley include hiking the sand dunes (half hoping to find R2D2; it was an eerie place) and up Mosaic Canyon. The sand dunes once again allowed everyone’s inner sedi-mentologist to shine through as experiments were conducted to observe how sediment is transported by wind. Mosaic Canyon appealed more to the struc-

tural geologist in all of us. This canyon is a must-do in Death Valley National Park. The trail starts at the apex of an alluvial fan and follows a narrow gorge up the mountain. After walking through the marble brec-cia that gives the canyon its name, we came across the beautifully eroded massive marble. Higher up, the gorge opens and gives access to a variety of side channels harboring real geologic gems, structural gems, that is. In a channel we found a wall displaying beautiful swirling tight folds in the marble.

Outside the park, our ‘host’ Jordan introduced us to the Amargosa River watershed. The Amargosa River flows south in Nevada then north in California before completely evaporating in Death Valley. The water-shed is home to a number of endemic animal and plant species. One interesting location, Devil’s Hole, a flooded limestone cave, is host to a unique species

Students helping the footwall along a normal fault, Mormon Point turtleback. From left: Caitline, Zhul, Mathieu, Rachel, Alexis, Mike, and Emily.

Annia Fayon at large recumbent fold in Mosaic Canyon.

Page 22Alumni Newsletter

of pupfish. After walking up to the well-protected Devil’s Hole, we decided to go for a swim in the local reservoir to forget about the burning sun for a little while. During our last day in the area, we visited a date farm a few miles south of Shoshone, and some of us even tried their “famous” date shake. After five days in Shoshone and Death Valley, we were a bit sad to leave but it would be a long drive home and we had so much more to see.

Our route back to Minneapolis took us through Ari-zona, New Mexico, and Colorado; our stops included the San Francisco volcanic field north of Flagstaff, AZ, the Rio Grande gorge in Taos, NM and Great Sand Dunes National Park, CO. In Arizona, we camped at a lovely site among cinder cones in a pine valley whose floor was covered with volcanic ejecta. We spent two nights there and had a complete day of hiking around the cinder cones marveling at their size.

After Arizona, we drove through New Mexico to the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado. We awoke to the gran-deur of the dunes and the mountains bounding the valley. The fiercest among us undertook climbing the

Group shot in Badwater Basin. From left: Mathieu Pythoud, Max Gilbertson (holding Mathieu), Alexis Iverson, Emily Falksen (kneeling), Rachel Kane (standing), Mike Weinacht, Caitlin Olejniczak (kneeling), Zhul Ahmad Munif, Robin Feakins (on ground….). Not pictured: Darren Cheah, Stefanie Mayer, Alex Seeling, and Annia Fayon.

giant dunes while most of us preferred hiking along the river. Once again, we conducted experiments on sediment transport, comparing transport in wind to transport in water. Following our dune adventures, we regrouped at our campsite, had a fantastic break-fast that couldn’t be beat, packed up and headed on back to Minneapolis. Some would argue this breakfast signified the end of our fantastic journey to South-western U.S.

We must not fail to mention that every member of the group contributed to the good humor and positive learning experience throughout the trip, and the cook-ing groups outdid themselves night after night to the delight of everyone.

We also must thank the Department of Earth Sciences and the College of Science and Engineer for helping us making this trip a reality. We all will cherish the memory of this journey through nine states, over 4000 miles, and millions of years of Earth’s history. Thank you to all who made this a wonderful experience.

Page 23Alumni Newsletter

Earth Sciences Career Panel

To help our undergraduate and graduate stu-dents learn about career paths for Earth scientists in the private sector and with government agen-cies, the department hosted an Earth Sciences Career Panel organized by Peter Hudletson and David Fox on April 2, 2013 in the Winchell Read-ing Room. The four panelists were all alums of the department and were chosen to represent important career paths in Earth Sciences both nationally and in Minnesota. The participants included Jennifer Engstrom (MS 2005), the Manager of the Mineland Reclamation office in the Division of Lands and Minerals in the Min-nesota Department of Natural Resources in St. Paul, MN; John Martin (PhD 2007), a geologist with Shell in Houston, TX; Dean Peterson (PhD 2001), the Senior Vice President of Exploration with Duluth Metals in St. Paul, MN, one of the mining companies heavily involved in the efforts to begin Cu-Ni mining in northern Minnesota (Dean is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of Minnesota-Duluth and a Research Associate of the UMD Natural Resources Research Institute); and Ben Sheets (PhD 2004) a Geoscientist with Barr Engineer-ing in Minneapolis, MN. Although Ben was invited as a representative of the regional environmental consulting industry, prior to joining Barr he was with ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company and then an Assistant Professor at the University of Washing-ton, so Ben could speak to a range of careers in Earth Sciences.

When the program began, the Reading Room was packed with about 65 undergraduate and graduate students from Earth Sciences, the Geological Engi-neering program in Civil Engineering, and probably other programs as well. Each panelist spoke for about 10 minutes about their training and background, what they do in their job, and opportunities going forward in their respective industries. All agreed that field experiences are critical part of the training of Earth scientists and that writing in various forms comprises a substantial and critical component of their regular workload. These comments highlighted two aspects of our program that have been the focus of ongoing curriculum development efforts lately in the depart-ment, which should insure that we can continue to prepare our students for a range of careers in Earth sciences. A lively Q&A session followed the opening comments and continued a bit beyond the planned two hours for the event before we broke for refresh-ments. However, the students were so eager to contin-ue discussions with the panelists that at least a couple of our guests never made it to the food and drinks! Overall, the Earth Sciences Career Panel was a great success and we plan to continue these in some man-ner each year going forward.

by David Fox

Panelists: Jennifer Engstrom (left), Dean Peterson (standing), John Martin (far right), and Ben Sheets (behind speaker).

Page 24 Department of Earth Sciences

Alumni Notes

Paul Lindberg, BS 1956, has been active in mineral exploration programs ever since receiving a degree in Geological Engineer-ing in 1956. He spent 20 years with the Ana-conda Company in Utah, Montana, New York, northern Ontario, British Columbia, Peru, and Chile and in 1971 was transferred to Jerome, Arizona to conduct an exploration program on Paleoproterozoic volcanogenic massive sulfide ore deposits with mentor Dr. Charles Meyer of the University of California, Berkeley. From 1976-1978 he was exploration manager for McIntyre Mines Ltd. in Toronto with programs across North America and Australia. A con-sulting geologist since 1978 he has continued doing detailed structural mapping and evalu-ation of copper, gold, silver and iron deposits throughout western U.S., Alaska, and north-ern Canada. Most recently he spent the past 4 summers in Baffin Island, Nunavut Territory, Canada mapping the structural geology of high grade Mary River magnetite/specularite replacement deposits of Archean banded iron formation. One highlight there was encountering outcrops of museum grade grune-rite, an iron silicate mineral named after John W. Gruner, his mineralogy professor at the U of M back in 1953. For those familiar with Archean high grade iron formation replacement deposits in northern Min-nesota at Soudan, the Mary River deposits are of the same age but many times greater is size and amenable to open pit mining. In 1954-55 Paul was the president of the geology club at a time when Drs. George Thiel, George Schwartz, John Gruner, Sam Goldich, Fred Swain, Herb Wright and Hal Mooney led the troops. Even Dr. Grout, emeritus, would appear occasionally in the corridors of Pillsbury Hall. What a spectacu-lar cast! Over the past 4 decades Paul has led over 60 field trips through the historic mining district at Jerome, Arizona and built museum geology models and displays about the area’s economic and physi-cal geology. Most recently he led a tour for Jim Miller (PhD 1986) and his UMD students to get an in-depth look at the Jerome volcanogenic ore deposit setting as well as a week’s worth of touring Arizona’s diverse geology for students from Ottawa, Canada. Lately he’s been involved with local hydrological studies

and field trips and has recently completed an Arizona Geological Survey report CR-10-C (www.azgs.az,gov) describing recent Sedona area sinkhole activity. He is now working on a book describing the nearly 2 billion year old physical and economic geologic history of this mixture of plateau and basin and range terrain in and around the colorful Sedona, Arizona area, where he and his wife Phyllis have resided over the past 42 years. Wonderful geology, spectacular scenery, archaeological sites and great nighttime star view-ing through his backyard telescope make this a most exciting place for semi-retirement. ([email protected])

Allan F. Schneider, PhD 1957, sent us this story:Dr. Robert Rutford’s story about the 1972 GSA Pleis-tocene field trip (which I attended) in the last issue of the alumni newsletter reminded me of an incident that occurred 30 years ago (in 1983). During the return from a field trip to Wyoming for our students and faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, my colleague Prof. Gerald Fowler had made arrange-ments for a special private tour of Wind Cave on the west side of the Black Hills. As we were waiting for our naturalist leader to arrive, I noticed a VW bug with a Minnesota license plate pulling into the park-ing lot. A single gentleman emerged from the vehicle,

Photo of Paul Lindberg taken in Northwestern Baffin Island, Nunavut Territory, Canada north of the Arctic Circle. Paul is standing on high grade replaced massive magnetite iron ore; one of several ore deposits that are currently being readied for production. The iron ore will be shipped to Europe for smelting. Paul worked in this area as a consultant during the summer months of 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Page 25Alumni Newsletter

neering Academy of Science and Engineering in 2013. The academy was established to give public recogni-tion to distinguished UND alumni who have brought distinction to themselves through their participation, commitment, and leadership in their chosen profes-sion.

Terry Zien, BS 1983, is with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in St. Paul. Terry is the project manager for their National Committee on Levee Safety and pro-gram manager for Flood Plain Management Services and Planning Assistance to States.

Gary Huss, PhD 1987, is the Director of the W.M. Keck Cosmochemistry Laboratory at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Haakon Fossen, PhD 1992, received the Nordic Geoscientists Award in 2012. It is a biennial award given at the Winter Meeting of Nordic geoscientists, and goes to a geoscientist - in any branch of the discipline - in the Nordic countries (Scandinavia plus Iceland) who has made significant contributions to the

and a short time later he asked if he might join us for the tour. During the two-hour tour, he and I engaged in a few pleasant conversations and it became appar-ent that he was quite interested in geology. So at the end of the tour as we were leaving the cave entrance, I asked him about his interest in geology. He replied that he had taken an introductory geology course 30 years earlier (1953) at the University of Minnesota. At that point the wheels began to turn in my head, as I may have been the only instructor who taught the introductory course at Minnesota in 1953. So I asked the gentleman if by any chance he remembered the name of the instructor, realizing that few undergradu-ates can recall the names of their college professors only a year or so after the end of the course – much less 10 or 20 or 30 years earlier. But to my surprise and to all who were listening to our conversation, he answered instantly (and I still remember his exact words) “Yes, I do, his name was Schneider.” I simply replied “I am that person” and our conversion contin-ued.The reason why Dr. Rutford’s tale brought this story to my mind is because Bob also took his first geology course from me in Room 110 Pillsbury during the early 1950s. Perhaps he was in the same class as my cave friend -- whose name I will never know. But of course I’d like to think that I had a little something to do with Bob’s illustrious career.

Wendell Tangborn, BS 1958, worked as a Research Hydrologist with the USGS from 1958 to 1979, pri-marily on Pacific Northwest glaciers. After he retired in 1979 he founded HyMet Inc, a consulting firm working on water-related projects in the western U.S. and worldwide. HyMet’s focus is on computer fore-casting models for streamflow, snowmelt, runoff and glacier mass balance. Wendell presented a climate poster at the Fall AGU meeting. Further information on his current research can be found at www.crosscut.com/2013/03/18/environment/113390/wendell-tangborn-glacier, and www.hymet.com, www.pta-agmb.com.

Kazuo Saito, Postdoc 1976-79, has retired from Yamagata University and moved to Yokohama. The three years he and his wife spent in Minnesota are full of sweet memories.

Klaus Schulz, PhD 1977, was inducted into the Uni-versity of North Dakota College of Science and Engi-

GSA celebrated its 125th anniversary with stories of its founders including Newton Horace Winchell -- see details at: http://geosociety.wordpress.com/2013/12/27/the-geological-society-of-america-and-its-founders-newton-horace-winchell/

Page 26 Department of Earth Sciences

Send Us Your News and Comments

Please send comments on this newsletter, reminiscences of your days at the University of Minnesota, and/or news of your career or family to [email protected]. Your updates could also be sent by using the Alumni News form found at http://www.esci.umn.edu/alumni/contact.html.

field. Haakon received the very first of these awards.

Michael Lamb, BS 2001, received the 2012 Luna B. Leopold Young Scientist Award at the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting. The award recognizes “a young scientist for making a significant and outstanding contribution that advances the field of Earth and planetary surface processes.”

Yongli Gao, PhD, 2002, is the Acting Director of the Center for Water Resources at the University of Texas San Antonio.

Chris Gonzalez, BS 2011, won best poster at the Lith-osphere Dynamics Workshop held in Perth, Western Australia in November 2013. Chris is a PhD student at the Centre for Exploration Targeting at the University of Western Australia.

Jess Till, PhD 2011, recently moved to Germany after finishing two years as a postdoc in Paris. She received a postdoctoral fellowship from the von Humboldt Foundation to spend two years working in the geo-mechanics lab at GFZ Potsdam in Germany. Jess is looking forward very much to starting her new position as soon as she finishes her German language courses.

Lars Hansen, PhD 2012, is a university lecturer in mineralogy and petrology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford. Lars won the AGU Mineral and Rock Physics Graduate Research Award.

Brooke White, PhD 2013, received the 2013 Elsevier Student Award for best paper published in the Jour-nal of Great Lakes Research.

Orville G. Lundstrom EM’1938, †11-23-2011 Orville was proud of his mining engineer

degree from the university and spent his pro-fessional career of 41 years as a geologist and geophysicist in the petroleum industry.

George Gryc BA’1940/MS’1942, †4-27-2008 Sidney A. Parkans BS’1946, †6-23-13 Sidney worked for over 50 years as a consult-

ing geologist based in the Texas area. In 2006 his daughter Dana and son-in-law Marc Katz established the Sidney A. Parkans Scholarship honoring Sidney’s numerous career achieve-ments, which he based on his education at the University of Minnesota.

Donald A. Brobst PhD’1953, † 7-3-2011 John A. Thomas BA 1954/MS 1960, †June 27, 2013Olgerts L. Karklins MS’1961/PhD’1966, † 7-11-2010 Paul G. Schmidt MS ‘1962, †2-25-2013

In Memoriam

The department has initiated informal gath-erings held in the fall for alumni and friends to meet with faculty to learn about the latest geoscience research and teaching activities in the department. These meetings provide an opportunity to discuss issues of mutual interest, including ways in which the depart-ment can better serve the community and interact with Earth scientists in the region. In November 2013, Jake Bailey gave a brief presentation on “Exploring the role of bac-teria in the formation of phosphatic mineral deposits.”

Date and details of the 2014 event will be mailed and posted on our website early in the fall. We hope you consider attending.

Page 27Alumni Newsletter

In 1979, Department Head Rama Murthy asked me to commit to work in the Department of Geology and Geophysics for two years should I accept the job he was offering me. At that time it seemed like a long commitment to make, but nearly 35 years later I can simply say it was an easy promise to keep. I’ve been blessed to not only work with other staff who are ded-icated to providing a departmental environment in which education and research are supported, but also to interact with some of the most inspiring faculty whose love for their vocation is shared with bright and enthusiastic students.

In these 35 years I have seen the end of the mimeo machine used for producing class materials, the intro-duction of the first word processors (the behemoths) with little capabilities compared to the desk top computers, to the present day where nearly everyone is walking around with tablets or laptop computers. I’ve actually seen the Information Age evolution first hand.

My career in the department has been filled with more opportunities than I could have envisioned. In the 1980s, I spent several summers in Gunnison, Colorado, cooking for the large field camps of that era. It didn’t take me long to learn that both the stu-dents and faculty could easily concentrate on geology 24/7. Those were the days when everyone slept in tents, and we cooked on Coleman stoves (unlike the

present-day field camps that enjoy the comforts of lodges). Over the years I have been given opportuni-ties to join departmental field trips from Hawaii to Italy, rafting the Grand Canyon, and learning of the geological wonders in Minnesota as well. Faculty and students alike welcomed this non-geologist on their adventures.

Like so many alumni of the department, I have come to love and appreciate Pillsbury Hall – even with all its faults and lack of modern conveniences – maybe because of its lack of modernity. I will miss coming to my office past the rock displays that really haven’t changed much in 35 years. But most of all, I will miss the daily interactions with the ESCI community of people.

As I retire, I look forward to more travel, especially in the spring and fall that really wasn’t possible during the academic year. And who knows? Maybe in my travels I’ll stop for visits with the many alumni and visi-tors who have crossed my path here in Pills-bury Hall. Thank you all for the cherished memories.

Farewell from Kathy Ohler

Kathy Ohler – An Appreciation

Kathy Ohler has been part of our department for longer than all other staff members and all but a few of the faculty – in fact all but Calvin Alexander and the two of us. She worked closely with us during our consecutive tenures as head of the school from 1983 to 2006, and in that time rose from word processing spe-cialist (using the clunky and noisy machines we had back then) to departmental administrator, with key responsibilities for helping the head with the busi-ness of running the department. Kathy has worked hard, much of the time behind the scenes, to ensure a smooth operation. She was quick to learn the office skills needed to function in the digital age – which arrived on her watch - getting up to speed with email before many of the faculty. One visible sign of her

work is this newsletter, the production of which she has overseen since its inception and helped transform from its simple beginnings to the polished document you have in your hands today. In addition to all her official tasks, Kathy has demonstrated skill and cre-ativity in organizing the many events that have bene–fitted students, faculty, and staff for so many years, and in so doing she has played a key role in making the department the pleasant place it is.

Kathy, for all your good work on behalf of the depart-ment and the school over all those years,

Thank you,

Peter Hudleston Bill Seyfried

We continue the search for missing alumni and friends. Your help in locating these missing persons would be greatly appreciated. Do you know the whereabouts of...

Missing but not forgotten...

This newsletter is available in alternative formats upon request. For additional information or comments contact:

Alumni NewsletterDepartment of Earth SciencesUniversity of Minnesota310 Pillsbury Drive SEMinneapolis, MN 55455phone: 612/624-1333fax: 612/625-3918e-mail: [email protected]

The watercolor of Pillsbury Hall on the front cover is a gift from Nicole Sabatier of Manurewa, New Zealand. The original artwork is on display in the departmental administrative offices.

The University of Minnesota shall provide equal access to and opportunity in its programs, facilities, and employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, gender, age, marital status, disability, public assistance status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

Department of Earth SciencesUniversity of Minnesota310 Pillsbury Dr. SEMinneapolis, MN 55455

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John B. Botelho, BS’1946Elmer D. Anderson, BS’1948John E. Boettcher, BA’1949James W. Joyce, EM’1949Clarke R. Lewis, MS’1949Roy T. Sorenson, EM/1949/MS’1952Robert W. Timm, EM’1949Mary E. Lugsdin, BS’1950William H. Becker, EM’1951John H. Goodrich, EM’1951Kenneth H. Johnson, BS’1951Wayne H. Kelly, BS’1951Russell A. Nelson, BS’1951Douglas M. Sheridan, MS’1951Edward S. Hughes, MS’1952Gene M. Olson, EM’1952Allan Kiliman, BA’1953Richard P. Maley, MS’1953Murray Lloyd Miller, PhD’1953Eugene L. Palusky, EM’1953Orville J. Pardau, BS’1953Charles J. Beaupré, EM’1954Rudolf R. Moen, EM’1954Howard W. Blakely, BS’1955Bernardo A. Taborda, MS’1955

Iwan Tkatchenko, EM’1955Ashiq Ali, MS’1956Roy W. Hillmer, EM’1956Jack D. Arthur, BA’1957Robert H. Barton, MS’1957Robert C. Kaase, EM’1958Leslie G. McDowell, BS’1958Warren C. Miller, BA’1958Gary C. Stamman, BA’1959Reynaldo Ayala, BA’1960Arthur E. Anderson, EM’1961John R. Guenther, EM’1961Conrad E. Maher, BS’1961Pundalik Kulkarni, MS’1962Barton D. Gross, MS’1963Naiding Wang, MS’1963Dennis G. Deischl, MS’1964Harold A. Johnson, BS’1964Charles E. Knigge, BA’1967Douglas B. Moore, BA’1968Jacques Becker, MS’1969Robert E. Smith, BS’1969Dale Wikre, BA’1969Dominique Rey, MS’1971Richard K. Covill, BS’1972Sally Wright Kendrick, MS’1972Douglas O. Phair, BS’1972John E. Puffer, BS’1972Sudarshan Singh, MS’1972Mark Markowitz, MS’1973Larry D. Douglas, MS’1974James Carl Engstrom, MS’1974William Thomas Gill, BS’1974Bruce H. Burton, MS’1975William J. Loye, BS’1976Carolee Berge, BS’1977Robert G. Bowman, BS’1977Stephen R. Elkins, MS’1977Ann Hubbs, BS’1977Benjamin A. Arogundade, BS’1978Randall R. Atchinson, BS’1978Michael Bower, BS’1978Thomas Geskerman, BS’1978

John A. Miller, MS’1978Lorene Gergen, BS’1979Steven A. Meger, BS’1979Thomas F. Woods, BS’1979Paul W. Loaney, BS’1980James Paulson, BS’1980Dong Jin Kim, MS’1982Michael A. McCrum, BS’1982Dora B. Barlaz, MS’1983Brian A. Ross, MS’1985Chongmi Suk, MS’1985Dongwoo Suk, MS’1985Ahmad B. Ibrahim, BS’1986Kevin E. Miller, BS’1987Wendy Lynn Tormanen, BA’1987Janice M. Lawhead, Ed’1988Richard T. Wilkin, BA’1988Ellen K. Kirschner, BS’1989Mary J. Lynch, BA’1989Christopher Manydeeds, BS’1989R. Jonathan Paetz, MS’1989Jacqueline Black Jiran, BS’1990Kurt S. Pfaff, MS’1991Anbin Yu, BS’1992Jennifer Mackenzic, BS’1993Elizabeth E. Bembenek, BS’1995Kriste M. Davenport, BS’1995Scott Rubin, MS’1995Sanghamitra Sahu, MS’1995/PhD’1997Jon Paul Jones, BS’1996Susan Ginsberg Hamm, MS’1997Gideon Norbert Ngobi, MS’1998Garrett Mark Kramer, BS’1999Jennifer York, PhD’2000Michelle M DiGirolamo, BS’2001Kelly A. Wheaton, BS’2001/2002Bilikisu Davies, BS’2002Nicole R. Elgethun, BS’2002Ross D. McNeil, BS’2003Lily M. Wood, BS’2003Nicholas R. Bonow, BS’2004Yongsul Cho, MS’2004Travis Charles Kennebeck, BS’2004

Matthew L. Rheinhart, BS’2005Richard A. Cargill, BS’2006Djuna Maria Gulliver, BS’2006Yiwen Pan, MS’2007Junmin Shi, MS’2009Jenillee A. Pajewski, BS’2010Su Yi Chai, BS’2011James Kenneth Parry, BA’2013