Newsletter of the Department of Geosciences

S P R I N G 2 0 1 2 V O L . 5 3 N O . 1

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A world-class, radiometric geochronology laboratory has opened in Guyot Hall, with facili-ties equipped to date Earth’s oldest rocks. As-sistant Professor Blair Schoene proposed the laboratory when he joined the faculty in June 2009, and has since overseen its design and preparation. The project brought together a team of engineers, architects, and contractors to build the 1300 square foot lab on the second floor of Guyot, in what was previously a large map room and before that the undergraduate mineralogy and petrology classroom. The reconfigured space has been subdivided into five rooms with

varying levels of climate control and clean air handling to suit particular needs. The lab will be used for geochemical and isotopic measure-ments applied to problems in tectonics, petrol-ogy, Earth history, and paleoclimate. The heart of the laboratory is a Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometer (TIMS), which measures the ratio of isotopes in rocks or single minerals. This type of mass spectrometer specializes in high-sensitivity, low-blank, and ultra-high precision analyses. TIMS instruments are commonly used for mea-suring isotopes of U, Th, Pb, Sm, Nd, Rb, Sr and Ca. “TIMS work is hard. There are only a

Princeton Geosciences Department Opens New Geochronology Laboratory

Professor Blair Schoene stands at Passo Del Forno in the Swiss Alps, mapping magmatic fabrics in the Bergell pluton. Inset: Grad students

Jon Husson (at computer) and Brenhin Keller (in lab coat) running the new IsotopX PhoeniX62 Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometer.

handful of labs doing it well,” Schoene explains, “so there are plenty of opportunities to make advancements.”

The new lab culminates a series of other renovations in Guyot that Schoene has coordi-nated over the past several years in his effort to build an all-inclusive geochronology program at Princeton. Before being analyzed with the TIMS, targeted mineral grains such as zircon, monazite, apatite, and titanite need to be charac-terized both compositionally and texturally. In order to do this, the grains are isolated by crush-ing of the host rock and then passage through magnetic and density separators. These steps used to be contracted out to other institutions, but can now be completed from start to finish within Guyot’s walls.

One of Schoene’s major interests is U-Pb geochronology, a dating technique that is capa-ble of measuring the ages of materials as young as a few hundred thousand years and as old as the solar system. By targeting minerals with high uranium content and maintaining very clean lab conditions, grains as small as 30µm in diameter can be analyzed. Such minerals commonly have <1 picogram of lead (that’s 10-12 grams!), and thus require an exceptionally clean mineral preparation environment with ultrapure air and reagents. A mineral age is calculated by correcting for the amount of non-radiogenic

lead and then using the ratio of radiogenic Pb isotopes to U isotopes in combination with well-established U-Pb decay constants. Though several in situ microanalytical techniques have higher spatial resolution, TIMS U-Pb geochro-nology is the most precise, and can now date mineral growth to precisions better than 0.1% (e.g. to within 10,000 years for a mineral 10 million years old). Further refinement of sample preparation techniques and instrumentation are pushing the limits of precision even further.

Schoene developed a passion for this type of work during his Ph.D. research at MIT and subsequent post-doctoral research at the Uni-versity of Geneva, Switzerland. Over the last ten years, he has been an integral part of the EARTHTIME (http://earth-time.org) international consortium of geochronology labs, which is dedicated to “calibrating earth history through teamwork and cooperation” through the development and sharing of laboratory methods, standard solutions, and expertise. This group includes sedimentary stratigraphers, magneto-stratigraphers, paleontologists, geochemists and other geochronologists (such as those utiliz-ing the 40Ar/39Ar technique of faculty member Tullis Onstott’s former Guyot lab), as well as cyclostratigraphers, who capitalize on Mila-nkovitch cyclicity recorded in sediments. The ultimate goal is the creation of a highly robust geologic time scale that is applicable across disciplines at the 0.1% level of precision or bet-ter. Defining these timescales with such high precision is necessary for quantifying rates of biologic and geologic change through time—as the saying goes, “you can’t get rates if you don’t have dates.” Ultimately, this leads to a better understanding of the evolution of life, the causes of mass extinctions, and why Earth looks the way it does today.

The chance to make such advancements in these cutting edge facilities has attracted a talented group of graduate students and post-docs to Schoene’s group. “I think we’re at a point where a lot of geoscientists are realizing the importance of time constraints,” says Bren-hin Keller, a graduate student who has been involved in the lab’s final preparations. “U-Pb TIMS is the most precise way to provide such constraints for almost all of geologic time, which makes setting up a new TIMS lab a really excit-ing opportunity.”

Schoene’s interest in understanding Earth’s history has grown through his collaboration with biostratigraphers who are investigating

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Cathodoluminescence image of zircons typically dated by U-Pb geochronology (in this case from Southern Australia), revealing internal zoning of grains, which is indicative of growth history. Textural pre-screening such as this is followed by dissolution of selected grains for TIMS geochronology. Field of view is about 1.5 mm.

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the cause and duration of the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction event. “Geo-chronology of the highest-precision is required for this project because the biostratigraphically-calibrated extinction event and the commonly implicated flood basalt eruptions are not found in the same stratigraphic intervals,” says Schoene, “but through U-Pb geochronology we have demonstrated that these events occurred within 100,000 years of each other. To confirm a temporal relationship between these events, however, we need to show correlation at the 10,000 year level, so we’ve still got a lot of work to do.”

Through Schoene’s close collabora-tion with faculty member Adam Maloof, undergraduate and graduate students are being trained at Princeton to be both earth historians and geochronologists—something that is rare but of increasing importance given the need for time con-straints on important events in the stratigraphic record. “Every year, new fossils are found, and our understanding of the coevolution of life and climate increases,” remarks Maloof. “However, as geologists generate more detailed records of these evolutionary events in Earth history, the single biggest unknown remains time. The causes and consequences of some of the most formative events in Earth’s history, like global glaciation, massive reorganization of the global carbon cycle and even the extinction of the dinosaurs, remain hotly debated because we do not know precisely how long certain events took, or even their timing relative to one another.”

Absolute dating of events recorded in the stratigraphic record is most commonly done by dating magmatic minerals in volcanic ash beds as thin as several millimeters and assuming that those dates represent the timing of the erup-tion of a volcano—a geologically instantaneous event. Thus, the art of identifying and sampling volcanic ash layers is of great interest to stratig-raphers. Graduate students Jon Husson and Catherine Rose are currently busy processing dozens of potential ash beds from Australia in order to assess changes in environmental con-ditions and geochemical cycling related to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, which proposes that the Earth’s surface became entirely or nearly entirely frozen at least once during the Neopro-terozic.

Another area that has intrigued Schoene since his undergraduate days at Colorado Col-

lege, is understanding magmatic processes in Earth’s lithosphere. Though granitic batholiths such as those displayed so magnificently in Yosemite Valley are the building blocks of con-tinental crust, the rates and processes of magma generation, transport, and final emplacement are still not well understood. Integrating pre-cise U-Pb zircon dates with geochemistry and detailed field mapping can demonstrate how the geochemistry of magmas evolves through time, and ultimately place constraints on the geo-chemical and thermal budget of the crust during continent formation and modification.

Precise rates of magma transport into the upper crust are also necessary to evaluate volca-nic periodicities, and with them, volcanic haz-ards. Schoene and graduate student Kyle Sam-perton are currently leading a project to develop a time and space model for the construction of a 30 million-year-old pluton located in the central Alps of northern Italy, an area of magnificent alpine terrain near Lake Como. The pluton is tilted on its side to expose a cross-section of 15 vertical kilometers through a magmatic system. The area was also investigated in the 1990’s by Cam Davidson *91 during his post-doc at the University of Bern in Switzerland; additional field mapping and high-precision geochronology builds on Davidson’s work and will bring a new depth of understanding to the system. Post-doc Mélanie Barboni, a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow, is conducting similar work on a 10 million-year-old magmatic system in Elba, France.

Graduate student Jon Husson uses ion exchange chemistry to extract uranium and lead from zircon crystals recovered from volcanic ash beds.

From the Chair

GEO undergrads enjoy a variety of class field trips as integral components of their classes. Freshman Seminar courses (FRS) taught by GEO faculty make this experience available to all under-graduates in their first year, regardless of their eventual course of study. The FRS curricu-lum benefits students across the University, and while some of them go on to become GEO majors, the impact of the courses is much wider than the Department and much wider than the

field of Geosciences. The FRS program was

initiated twenty-five years

Bess Ward

Because the interpretation of dates derived from igneous minerals depends on the processes of mineral growth in magma, as well as the pro-cesses of emplacement and eruption, Schoene’s work is focused on integrating mineral geochem-istry with U-Pb geochronology. “The reality is that the ages we measure in the lab tell us when the mineral grew in the magma—which may or may not correspond to the processes we’re inter-ested in dating, such as eruption of an ash bed or the emplacement of a granite pluton,” explains Schoene. “In this regard, it is becoming increas-ingly important to understand the growth his-tory of the minerals we’re dating by using many analytical techniques in conjunction with TIMS geochronology.”

Such an approach is a giant step toward reporting ages that are as meaningful as the data are precise. Schoene’s radiogenic isotopes lab is poised to contribute to under-standing the rates and timing of Earth processes from the microm-eter scale to the scale of the whole Earth. “From a philosophical level,” Schoene explains, “under-standing geologic time is one of the biggest contributions that the earth sciences can make to hu-manity. It allows us to understand where we come from, and how our home has evolved.”

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Top left: A serpentinite vein within an dunite outcrop on Mount Olympus—this is a chunk of Earth’s mantle! Top right: Postdoc Alain Plattner, UG Patrick Ding ’15, and Grad Student Catherine Rose and UG Preston Kemeny ’15 prepare for electrical resistivity imaging. Bottom: “Make way for the ducklings?”—undergraduate Yuem Park, Professor Frederik Simons, and graduate student Jon Husson conduct a magnetometry survey at the Peristeres plateau.

ago with nine seminars; this academic year over 80 FRS courses are offered across the cur-riculum with about 65% of the freshman class participating. The Department’s involvement began in 1993 when “Active Geological Pro-cesses” taught by now-emeritus faculty mem-bers Ken Deffeyes, Bob Phinney, and Jason Morgan, started taking freshmen on week-long fall-break trips to western California. And this spring marks the fourth time Chemistry Research Scholar Anne Morel-Kraepiel has taken a FRS class to Florida to study “The Everglades Today and Tomorrow: Global Change and the Impact of Human Activities on the Biosphere.”

In Fall 2011, Geosciences faculty members Frederik Simons and Adam Maloof initiated a new FRS course, “Earth’s Environment and Ancient Civilizations.” The seminar retains the grounding in fundamental geology and geophysics and the use of cutting edge instru-mentation for field exploration that has been a successful approach for previous geology field trips. The field work was carried out in the area of Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus, in coordina-tion with the Department of Art and Archae-ology, whose faculty have worked for many years excavating tombs, city walls, and other structures in the area. The Geoscience group brings their expertise to bear on the questions of the location of the coastline in ancient times and the silting in of the nearby Chrysochou River delta.

In Spring 2011, perhaps the most innova-tive of recent Geosciences courses, a FRS course entitled “The Hedgehog and the Fox: How Nelson Mandela can help us cope with Global Warming” was led by Professor

George Philander. The course included a spring break trip to South Africa, preceded and followed up by Skype-based collaboration with South African students. The course used the remarkable geography of South Africa to promote science education and to share per-spectives about stewardship of the Earth and its peoples. While the highpoint of the course was the trip to South Africa, the beneficiaries included students from both South Africa and Princeton, and for many the projects they un-dertook together were life-changing.

Innovation and community building have also been in evidence among the GEO gradu-ate student body this year with the first-ever Graduate Student Symposium. Conceived and implemented entirely by graduate students in the Department of Geosciences, the event took place on November 11 in the Lewis Library. The goal of the symposium was to connect graduate students from geoscience departments in the New Jersey/New York/Pennsylvania area. Speakers included students from Rutgers University, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and New York University, as well as from Princeton.

In addition to seventeen 15-minute talks, thirty-three posters were presented. If you attended every talk and at least scanned every poster—you would have learned a lot! The presentations were consistently excellent and the high energy level at the informal sessions was evidence of the success of the meeting. The hope is that the symposium will become an annual event, with the host rotating among the participating institutions. The local orga-nizing committee from Princeton consisting of Andrew Babbin, Jessica Hawthorne, Jenna

Left: Freshmen in the FRS158 class and their compatriots from Khayelitsha township near Cape Town, visit excavations at the West Coast Fossil Park in South Africa, where 5.2 million-year-old fossils of over 200 animal species are exception-ally well-preserved. Right: Khayelitsha student converse with the FRS students via Skype, prior to the March 2011 trip.

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Losh, Audrey Yau, and Sarah Fawcett did an outstanding job this year, and set the standard for a terrific event.

And illustrating that innovation even exists at administrative levels, in the Spring of 2012 we look forward to the first-ever official gradu-ate alumni event, sponsored by the Department of Geosciences and the Princeton University Graduate School. The GeoGrad Reunion will be held April 29 - May 4, kicking off with a mini-symposium in the department and in-cluding a field trip and other adventures. See page 14 for further information and registration instructions.

around the departmentThe Department welcomes new faculty

members Stephan Fueglistaler in the atmo-spheric sciences, and John Higgins in the area of geochemistry and paleoclimate. Fueglistaler comes to the Department after postdoc work at the University of Washington, the ETH Technical Institute in Zurich, and Cambridge University. After his Harvard Ph.D, Higgins has been a Harry Hess Fellow in the Depart-ment. Stay tuned for more on both in future Smilodons.

The August 23, 2011 M5.9 earthquake in Virginia was in-deed felt by those of us in Guyot Hall that summer morning. The Lamont Cooperative Seismographic Network seismic station PANJ on the grounds of Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart (3 miles from Guyot) has been operative since 2008 and recorded the event. (See seismogram below)

Science can lead to many things: after hearing a BBC in-terview in which Adam Maloof (faculty) discussed work that he and his Earth History Research Group have been doing on fossils from southern Australia, composer and jazz pianist Lora Perrin was inspired to write a musical piece entitled “Startpiece” and two nar-rative films. See http://geology-ofmusic.blogspot.com to hear an extract of “The Geology of Music.”

Lincoln Hollister (emeritus), Glenn MacPherson*81 of the

Smithsonian Institution, Paul Steinhardt (Physics faculty), and Nan Yao (Princeton Material Science Institute) have teamed with other researchers to present evidence that a naturally-occurring specimen of the quasicrys-tal mineral icosahedrite (Al63Cu24Fe13) is part of a meteorite formed in the early solar system. Quasicrystals do not have structure that can be described by single three-dimensional unit cells, but do have “crystallographically forbid-

Madhavi Parikh (Rutgers University) presents her poster about microbialprocesses to Geosciences Chair Bess Ward, and symposium co-organizer Jessica Hawthorne.

Ground acceleration from the August 23, 2011 M5.9 earthquake in Virginia, as recorded at the PANJ station near Princeton.

den” rotational symmetries. This specimen from eastern Russia is the first naturally-occurring quasicrystal ever found; a key piece of evidence point-ing towards its extraterrestrial origin was its occurrence within a grain of stishovite, a polymorph of silica that only forms at extremely high pressures and temperatures. For more details see http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S32/64/02A32/index.xml?section=topstories.

To continue in the extraterrestrial realm, postdoc Kevin Lewis has been selected to join NASA’s latest Mars mission, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, which launched successfully in November 2011. After Curios-ity lands at Gale crater in August, Lewis will spend three months at the Jet Propulsion Labo-ratory in Pasadena, CA on “Mars time,” helping to guide exploration by giving advice on drive paths, choosing outcrop targets, and analyzing returned data. In particular, he’ll be working with the camera team and the ChemCam instru-ment—a laser ablation spectrometer capable of assessing bulk chemistry by vaporizing rock sur-faces from several meters away—and looking for evidence of Milankovitch cycles in the 5 km-thick pile of sedimentary strata at the landing site. Unlike the last few rovers which have been solar-powered, Curiosity is powered by Plutonium-238 and can thus work in the dark, which makes us wonder how much sleep Lewis will get! After his three months “behind the wheel” of Curiosity, Lewis will return to Princeton to continue work-ing on data from the mission.

The Department is pleased to have Visiting Professor Alfonso Pardo Juez *98 teaching GEO203: “Geology” for the Fall 2011 semester. He’s on leave from the Universidad de Zarago-za in Spain. One of Pardo’s research projects involves scuba-diving in “ibones,” or glacial lakes, of the Spanish Pyrenees in all seasons,

including winter! This work aims to track and characterize human impacts on the lakes over the last century, by sampling the water column and bottom sediments throughout the year. See http://vimeo.com/31904772 for a 15-minute video documenting this unusual and demanding fieldwork.

Jeroen Tromp’s research group welcomes postdoc Hom Nath Gharti, graduate student Rafael Abreu, who is visiting from the An-dalusian Institute of Geophysics in Spain, and Karolin Firtana Elcomert, a visiting student research collaborator from the Geophysical Engi-neering in Istanbul Technical University, Turkey.

Postdocs Rebecca Sanders from Penn State and Maggie Lau from Hong Kong University have joined Tullis Onstott and Satish Myeni (faculty) in working on their DOE-funded project on the impact of global warming on Arctic per-mafrost.

Danny Sigman’s group welcomes visiting postdoc François Fripiat from The University of Brussels, who works on biogeochemical cycles in

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Visiting professor Alphonso Pardo *98 during winter sampling on el ibón de Sabocos, a glacial lake in Panti-cosa, Spain. He is conducting a final gear check before the dive. Pardo reflects: “I was about to plunge down without the regulator in my mouth. If you breath through the regulator in the cold surface air, the moisture coming from your lungs can freeze and make the instrument not work properly while submerged. You have to start the dive holding your breath, and then once under water, you put the regulator in your mouth and start breathing.”

the polar open-oceans and in sea ice.Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

(CIFAR) Postdoctoral Fellow Glenn Steren-borg is working on thermal evolution of early solar system planetesimals and their potential for magnetic fields. Using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data, he is also studying ice loss in Greenland and Ant-arctica. He is collaborating with faculty mem-ber Frederik Simons and Jerry Mitrovica at Harvard University.

The Department bids a fond farewell to Col-lections Specialist Jesse Chadwick ’08, who’s been cataloguing and digitizing the Depart-ment’s rock and mineral collection. Chadwick is now a graduate student at the University of Montana.

Incoming 2011-2012 GEO graduate stu-dents include Pathikrit Bhattacharya, University of Western Ontario; Qixing Ji, Zhejiang University; Maria Paula Mateo Fernandez Caso, University of Buenos Aires; Yanhua Yuan, Chinese Academy of Sciences.They are joined by new AOS graduate students Todd Mooring, MIT; Hannah Zanowski, University of Arizona; Jeffrey Strong, Univer-sity of Virginia; Jaya Khanna, University of Western Ontario; Junyi Choi, Peking Univer-sity; Spencer Hill, UCLA; and Geeta Persad, Stanford Unviversity.

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Wie geht’s? Last September, the Fragile Earth Inter-national Conference at Ludwig Maximilians Univer-sity (LMU) in Munich, Germany was the site of this gathering of Princetonians past and present. From left, Nadine McQuarrie, faculty 2004-2011 (University of Pittsburgh); Laurel Goodell *83, technical staff member; Karin Sigloch *08 (LMU); Sara Carena *03 (LMU); Peter Bunge, faculty 1998-2003, (LMU); and John Suppe, emeritus (National Taiwan University).

CHASA middle school students learn about rocks, minerals and gems from PUGS president Christine Chen ’13.

The Princeton Undergraduate Geosciences Society (PUGS)

A motivated group of GEO majors have started a new student organization on cam-pus—the Princeton Undergraduate Geosci-ences Society (PUGS), dedicated to fostering a sense of community among undergraduates interested in the geosciences. Activities will include field trips, outreach activities, study breaks, dinners and speakers.

On December 8, PUGS hosted middle school students from the Princeton’s Com-munity House After School (CHASA) Acad-emy, who came to Guyot Hall to examine specimens from the Department’s collections. In February, they are running a trip to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

And they have convinced three grad stu-dents to lead a “Field Camp 101” trip to the Delaware Water Gap. To learn more about PUGS, contact Society president Christine Chen ’13 (cyc@princeton.edu).

MASTERING ART and SCIENCE

Kalliopi (Kapi) Monoyios ’00 has used her Princeton geology degree in a unique way. Rather than pursue black gold in the wild west, after graduation she moved to Chicago to work as a fossil preparator in the University of Chicago lab with paleontologist and evolutionary

biologist Neil Shubin. After just a year picking away at Devonian rocks, she discovered she had a knack for illustration and has been a scientific illustrator ever since. In 2006, Monoyios illustrated several papers in Nature that an-nounced the discovery of Tiktaalik roseae (a lobe-finned fish from the Devonian that sheds light on the water-to-land transition for verte-brates). “It’s funny,” she says, “but most profes-sors think of illustrations as an afterthought. Shubin is unique in that he starts a paper by map-ping out the figures he needs and then he writes the paper around them.” It makes a lot of sense, she points out, considering the first thing people look at to get an idea of what the paper is about are the figures and the abstract.

In addition to illustrating Shubin’s fossils for journals and monographs, she creates websites and imagery for the public in the form of press releases and journal covers (her work has appeared on the covers of Nature, Science, and Genesis). In 2008, Monoyios provided the illustrations for Shubin’s popular science book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. “It was my first real foray into illustrating science for the general public,” she says. “Serious books used to be illustrated all the time and at some point that just stopped. Why?” After Shubin’s book, she was approached by Jerry Coyne, also a professor at the University of Chicago, to illustrate his book Why Evolution is True. Both books were very successful, being published in multiple languages and ending up on the New York Times Best-Sellers List for non-fiction.

Monoyios is currently working on another book with Shubin, scheduled for publication in 2013.

This winter, Monoyios will be wrapping up what she considers to be her unofficial gradu-ate education in Shubin’s lab to strike out on her own and offer her science visualization skills to a broader community of scientists. She is also co-writing the blog Symbiartic for Scientific American (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/symbiartic) on the intersection of science and art. You can see more of her work at http://kalliopimonoyios.com and follow her on Twitter @eyeforscience and @symbiartic.

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In Memoriam

Peggy Cross passed away on June 30, 2011 at the age of 95 at her home in North Branford, CT. She is remembered fondly by several generations of Guyot denizens.

After raising five children, Peggy’s love of geology blossomed when she took a few courses at the University of Pittsburgh, close to where she and husband Dr. Richard (“Dick”) Cross were living. When she and Dick moved to Princeton in 1963, she began volunteering in the Geology Department. The late Professor Glenn Jepson ’27 *30 put her on payroll in 1967 and after his death in 1974, Peggy continued working in the Department in a variety of capacities. Peggy had to “retire” in 1985, but kept right on working as a volunteer until 2003 when Dick died and then moved to Con-necticut to be closer to family.

Peggy took on many tasks that were instrumental in making the Department run smoothly during her 40 years at Princeton. For

Jepsen, she cleaned fossils and curated his large reprint collection. Along with Vincent Maglio (fac-ulty 1971-1973), she compiled a comprehensive Bibliography of the Fossil Mammals of Africa 1950-1972. She helped Jack Horner (assistant curator 1975-1982) reconstruct a complete specimen of a baby Ma-iasaurus from remains of a fossil dinosaur nest that Horner uncovered in Montana. She changed the paper on the Guyot seismograph, a daily task. Peggy also constructed exhibits on the Geology of New Jersey for the Natural History Museum and on Arnold Guyot for the Great Hall. She had an ency-clopedic knowledge of the Department and its faculty, students and staff—developed as she compiled, organized and indexed the departmental archives, which are an invaluable resource to the Department. And Peggy edited The Smilodon for 30 years, from 1973-2003. We recognize with appreciation and gratitude all of Peggy’s contributions to the Department.

Dr. Donald Baird died at his home in Pittsburgh, PA in June 2011, at the age of 85. He was a vertebrate paleon-tologist, anthropologist, 17th and 18th century firearms authority and for thirty-one years, one of Guyot Hall’s paleon-tological experts. The Society of Ver-tebrate Paleontology will honor Baird’s memory at their fall 2012 meeting in Raleigh, NC with a special symposium on Cretaceous Faunas of Appalachia: Systematics, Paleoecology and Taphonomy.

Baird’s interest in paleontology manifested itself early; during high school he worked as preparator and cura-torial assistant for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in his hometown of Pittsburgh. His undergraduate years at the University of Pittsburgh were inter-rupted by World War II, during which

don Baird 1926-2011

Dr. Donald Baird in his Guyot 3nd floor paleontology laboratory in 1983, a period of major dinosaur research at Princeton. The large dark bones surrounding Baird are from duckbill dinosaurs that he, Jack Horner and David Parris *40 were studying at the time, and include some from the first nearly-complete dinosaur skeleton ever found - the Hadrosaurus foulkii specimen from Haddonfield, NJ, discovered in 1858. The room is now Professor Gerta Keller’s micropaleontology laboratory.

peggy Cross 1916-2011

Peggy Cross at her Connecticut retire-ment home in 2008.

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Happy anniversary yBraLast August, the Yellowstone-Bighorn Research Association (YBRA) marked the 75th Anniversa-ry of the opening of its field station on Mt. Mau-rice near Red Lodge, Montana. Activities started at the camp in the 1930’s by Princeton faculty members Taylor Thom and Richard Field for the “furthering of fundamental geological science and the training of students under exception-ally favorable conditions.” In its early days, the 120-acre property served as a base for geological field work, which resulted in numerous research

papers and over three dozen Ph.D. theses. Start-ing in the 1950’s and continuing today, YBRA has been the base from which several thousand undergraduates from Princeton and other uni-versities have learned field work. In recent years, programs at the camp have further diversified to include workshops and conferences, outreach pro-grams and alumni colleges. Consider becoming a member of the YBRA, joining past and present faculty, field course alumni and others interested in the continuation of the Association, by going to http://www.ybra.org/.

he fought with the 609th Tank Destroyer Battal-ion in central Europe. After the war, he finished up his B.S in Biology in 1948 while continuing to work at the Carnegie Museum. He then moved west to earn a M.S. in geology from the Univer-sity of Colorado before returning east for a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard in 1955.

Arriving in Princeton in 1957 as Assistant Curator, Baird went on to become the Depart-ment’s Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and the Director of Guyot Hall’s Natural History Museum until his retirement from Princeton in 1988. It wasn’t much of a retirement, though —he moved back to Pittsburgh, and continued working as a Research Associate at the Carn-egie Museum, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He served as President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontol-ogy in 1984-85 and in 1996 received the Society’s J. T. Gregory Award for “outstanding service to the welfare of the Society.”

Throughout his long career, Baird’s pale-ontological field work took him throughout the mid-Atlantic states and also Montana, Colorado and Nova Scotia. He authored over 100 papers on a wide range of topics, including fossil arthro-pods, fossil mammals, and historic firearms; he is especially noted for highlighting the importance of late Paleozoic and Mesozoic vertebrate assem-blages from eastern North America. His mode of expression was brief and clear, even in his tech-nical publications. One of his best known is a co-authored 1967 paper in Science with the title, and also effectively the abstract, of “Romeriscus, the oldest known reptile.”

Baird was also a specialist in vertebrate ichnology (the study of trace fossils) and docu-

mented many Mesozoic trackways. He is respon-sible for the tracks behind the mounted Allosaurus specimen in Guyot Hall and even published an ar-ticle describing how so-called Sasquatch (Bigfoot) footprints could indeed be faked by enlarging hu-man footprints with a latex expansion technique.

Another interesting problem took Baird back in American history. In 1787, a dark, mineral-ized bone excavated from Woodbury, NJ was presented to Benjamin Franklin, then president of the American Philosophical Society, as the thigh bone of a large man. Nearly 200 years later, Baird correctly identified the bone as the left metatarsal bone of a duck-billed dinosaur. This was likely the first presentation of a dinosaur bone to a North American learned society, even though Franklin didn’t know what it was.

Baird’s advice and support were essential to paleontology and archaeology at the New Jersey State Museum and to other institutions with ac-tive excavation programs. Perhaps remembering those who guided him as a youngster, he was especially pleased to encourage others at an early age, such as now-Professor Paul Olsen (Columbia University), who was a New Jersey high school student when he first received Baird’s mentorship.

Dr. Donald Baird never formally had a stu-dent, nor did he teach any formal classes while at Princeton. But he will be remembered as a man who made important contributions in a variety of fields, and who generously mentored and influ-enced all who came his way—students, amateurs and colleagues alike.

Many thanks to David Parris *40 of the New Jersey State Museum and Robert W. Hook of The University of Texas, Austin for contributing to this memorial.

neWsAfter defending their Ph.D. theses Yves

Plancherel leaves for a postdoctoral position at the University of Oxford; Daniele Bianchi (AOS) for a postdoctoral position at McGill University; and Ying Li (AOS) for a postdoc-toral position at Colorado State University. AOS graduate Ian Lloyd has been awarded a Congressional Science Fellow sponsored by AGU, and is working in the office of Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), advising on science issues.

Gabrielle Dreyfus *08 has joined the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Policy and International Affairs as an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education Climate Change Technology Policy Fellow. Prior to starting at the DOE, Gabrielle was a Ameri-can Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 2009-2011. Princeton Geosciences has been well represent-ed at DOE by former postdoc Bob Kopp who completed a stint as AAAS Science & Technol-ogy Policy Fellow before joining the Rutgers faculty (and also becoming Associate Director

of the Rutgers Energy Institute) and Bryan Mignone *06 who currently serves at DOE as a senior policy advisor.

It was great to see Wayne Narr *90 and family when they swung by Guyot Hall last summer. For the last 12 years, he has been the lone geologist on Chevron’s Reservoir Simula-tion Research Team in San Ramon, CA, work-ing on naturally fractured reservoirs. He

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The Department of Geosciences introduces

Three New Research WebsitesThe Ward Lab at www.princeton.edu/nitrogen

Theoretical and Computational Seismology Research Group at www.princeton.edu/seismology

The Trace Metal Group at www.princeton.edu/morel

yOUr FeeT Were HereAfter 103 years of mechanical weathering

by countless footsteps, several stair treads be-tween the 1st and A floors on both the Geosci-ences and the Ecological and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) sides of Guyot Hall have been replaced due to concerns about safety. The serpentinite that is used for the stairs was re-placed with stone from the original quarry in southeastern Pennsylvania. If you are reading this, your footsteps undoubtedly contributed to the erosion of the steps!

The building’s designers didn’t know it, but using serpentinite turned out to have been an appropriate choice. Fifty-six years after Guyot opened, the late Harry Hess *32 discovered and named underwater seamounts “guyots” (after the similarly flat-topped build-ing in which he worked)—and the serpentinite used for the stairs in Guyot Hall is interpreted to be metamorphosed ocean crust! Interest-ingly, the treads on the EEB side show more wear than those on the Geosciences side. Has there been more foot traffic on the EEB side, or are we just lighter on our feet?

reports that Don Medwedeff *88 is also work-ing at Chevron (ever since Arco was consumed by British Petroleum) doing mainly fault-seal prediction work.

Kathy Hansen Simonson *89 and Kristi-na Rodriguez Czuchlewski ’98 are colleagues at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquer-que, NM. Simonson has been with Sandia since completing her Ph.D. on statistical ap-plications in geophysics and structural geology, which involved research with John Suppe (faculty emeritus, now at National Taiwan University), Bob Phinney (faculty emeritus), Geoffrey Watson (Statistics faculty, deceased) and John Tukey *39, Hon. Doc. *98 (Sta-tistics faculty, deceased). Czuchlewski came to New Mexico following her 2005 Columbia University Ph.D. for which she applied radar remote sensing algorithms to natural hazard mapping; she joined Sandia in 2008. At San-dia, Simonson and Czuchlewski have been collaborating on projects related to the process-ing and exploitation of data collected from air-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors. Czuchlewski is leading a new Sandia initiative on the use of complex sensor data to support analysts in making high-consequence deci-sions under severe time constraints. Simonson also sees John Lorenz ’81 regularly, as he and Kathy’s husband are both avid pilots, and own two small aircraft together.

Harold Stowell *87 and Kim Ouderkirk send heartfelt thanks to all who contributed to their recovery from the April 27, 2011 tornado that largely destroyed their home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Stowell writes, “This action on the part of all of you reinforces a great feeling about people and friends that has been growing since the disaster in Tuscaloosa. You know me well and therefore realize that my nature tends toward cynicism about society and people. During and after the tornados, Kim and I have learned that people will pull together under ad-versity and help one another! The meaningful gift that all of you gave will always be remem-bered by us as a signal of friendship and giving in a time great loss. So, with your help we will continue and this will include rebuilding the house that we love… and the garden that we cherish.”

Lora Jaffin Peters ’82 loves teaching sci-ence to K-1st graders in Baltimore, MD and considers the outdoors her best classroom. She worries that kids don’t go outside to play much

anymore, and takes them outside to pick up rocks, look at trees, and spark their awareness of the natural world.

honorsAdam Maloof (faculty) has been awarded the

American Geophysical Union’s 2011 MacElwane Medal which “recognizes significant contribu-tions to the geophysical sciences by an outstand-ing young scientist.” In his citation remarks, Prof. Paul Hoffman recognizes Maloof as “a new breed of field geologist, operationally engaged with geophysics, geochemistry, and geobiology and ranging up and down the geologic column.” See http://sites.agu.org/honors/winners/adam-maloof for the full citation and Maloof’s acceptance response.

Francois Morel (faculty) has been elected to the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti (Venetian Institute of Sciences, Arts and Letters).

Susan L. Brantley ’80 *87, has received the Geological Society of America’s 2011 Arthur L. Day Medal for “outstanding distinction in con-tributing to geologic knowledge through the ap-plication of physics and chemistry to the solution of geologic problems” at the GSA annual meeting last October. Brantley’s research has success-fully applied “chemical kinetics to the interpreta-tion and synthesis of observations of geochemical processes in natural systems.” See http://www.geosociety.org/awards/#day for Brantley’s award citation and response, including slides from her Gold Medal lecture which included dis-cussion of her time as a graduate student in the

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In February, five graduate alums reunited at a Graduate School alumni dinner in Houston. Bottom left to right: Enrique Novoa *97, Don Medwedeff *88, Wuling Zhao*85. Top: Lifan Yue*07 and Ramon Gonzales *07.

RegistRation open now! April 29 – May 4, 2012

GeoGrad Reunion Graduate school alumni are invited to a week-long series of events celebrating

The Evolving Geosciences at Princeton. Hosted by the Department and the Graduate School. http://www.princeton.edu/gradschool/alumni/events/2012-geosciences-reunion/

Sunday, April 29: Pre-conference canoe/kayak trip in the New Jersey Pine BarrensMonday, April 30: Talks by alumni and faculty, Prospect House banquetTuesday-Thursday, May 1-3: Appalachian field trip led by Don Wise *59 and Ed Cotter *63Friday, May 4: Visit to the Sterling Hill Museum, tours of Guyot Hall, and closing dinner

Department and photos of key mentors such as the late David Crerar, faculty 1973-1994; the late Rob Hargraves *59, faculty 1961-1994; Lincoln Hollister, faculty 1968-2011; and Maria Borcsik, staff geochemist 1947-2002.

The American Geological Institute (AGI) has named Ian D. MacGregor *64 as the 2011 recipient of the William B. Heroy Jr. Award for Distinguished Service for his long-standing service to AGI in the education area. His contri-butions include his current roles as Chief Techni-cal Advisor to AGI’s Education and Outreach Departments, Chair of AGI’s Education Advisory Committee, Co-Principal Investigator on AGI’s new NASA Triad project, co-instructor for three years on AGI and ExxonMobil’s K-5 Leadership Academy. It also includes his role as co-instructor with AGI on the Geological Society of London’s Teacher Academy, and Chief Advisor on the NSF-supported K-12 Earth Science Education Summit in 2010.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowl-edge Award in Climate Change was recently granted to Isaac Held, a senior research scien-tist in the AOS program and at GFDL, “for his fundamental and pioneering contributions to our understanding of the structure of atmospheric circulation systems and the role of water vapor the most important greenhouse gas in climate change.” Held has also received the 2012 Edi-tor’s Award for the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, “for high-level and insightful reviews for a number of editors.”

Congratulations also to AOS Faculty Mem-ber Isidoro Orlanski, who was awarded the RAICES Prize by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Argentina, given to Argentinean scientists working in foreign institutions for their exceptional scientific contributions and efforts in promoting science development in Argentina.

Books

The End-Cretaceous Mass Extinction and the Chicxulub Impact in Texas

SEPM Special Publication 100ISBN: 978-1-56576-308-1Edited by: Gerta Keller and

Thierry Adatte

deaths

Donald BairdJune, 2011

Samuel Boehm II ‘71 July 16, 2011

Margaret W. CrossJune 30, 2011

Alan Marshall *68 July 16, 2011

Paul K. Sims *50October 29, 2011

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Reunions Reception Friday, June 1, 2012 3:30-5:00 p.m. Informal poster session and visiting with faculty and friends in the Great Hall

15

Doctor of Philosophy

Brian Gertsch, Biostratigraphy, Paleoen-vironment and Geochemistry of the Late Cenomanian Oceanic Anoxic Event 2 and the Cretaceous/Tertiary Boundary

Silvia Elena Newell Bulow, Nitrogen Cycle Processes in Low-Oxygen Marine Environ-ments

Sean Patrick Long, Pushing the 123KA Bar-rier in Greenland: A Revisitation in the Re-construction of the Disturbed Section of GISP2/GRIP

Haojia (Abby) Ren, Development and Paleoceanographic Application of Planktonic Foraminifera bound Nitrogen Isotopes

Master of Arts

Andrew Russell Babbin

Nathan Wiliam Eichelberger

Gregory Joel Finkelstein

Jonathan M. Husson

Sarah A. Johnston

Brandon T. Stackhouse

Jue Wang

Hejun Zhu

Bachelor of Arts, Membership in Sigma Xi

Michael Patterson Eddy

Sean James Byrne McGinnis

Conor Lachlan Myhrvold

Yifeng Wang

Nora Lan Xu

Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship

Haojia (Abby) Ren

National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship

Andrew Russell Babbin

National Science Foundation Fellowship, Graduate Research

Jonathan M. Husson

Silvia Elena Newell Bulow

Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni Teaching Award

Silvia Elena Newell Bulow

2010-2011 Arnold Guyot Graduate Teaching Prizes

Jessica Hawthorne

Catherine Rose

Amanda O’Rouke

Certificates of Proficiency

Sean James Byrne McGinnis, Environmental Studies

Yifeng Wang, Finance and German

Highest Honors

Nora Lan Xu

High Honors

Yifeng Wang

Honors

Michael Patterson Eddy

Arthur F. Buddington Award

Michael Patterson Eddy

Edward Sampson, Class of 1914, Prize in Environmental Geosciences

Nora Lan Xu

The Bonthron Trophy (Track)

Michael Patterson Eddy

Benjamin F. Howell, Class of 1913, Junior PrizeOwen Larrabee Coyle ’12

degrees and aWards as OF COmmenCemenT may 31, 2011

Non-Profit Org.U.S. Postage Paid

Permit No. 186Princeton, NJ

Princeton UniversityGuyot HallPrinceton, New Jersey 08544-1003

GeosciencesDEPARTMENT OF

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The Smilodon is published by the Department of Geosciences

with support from the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni

Write or e-mail us your news or address change.

Editor: Laurel Goodell *83 Editor’s Contact:

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A Publication of Princeton University In the Nation’s Service and in the Service of All Nations

© 2011 The Trustees of Princeton University

Send us your e-mail address if you would like to receive an electronic copy instead of a print copy of The Smilodon at smilodon@geo.princeton.edu.

Looking up at Guyot Hall’s tower through the cherry blossoms, spring of 2011. Photo by postdoc Max Werner.

Newsletter of the Department of Geosciences