alumni reception - Syracuse Universe Department of Earth Sciences ...

Syracuse University Department of
E a r t h
S c i e n c e s
Fall 2010

FACULTY
Suzanne L. Baldwin – sbaldwin@syr.edu
Prof. Baldwin specializes in noble gas thermochronology, P-T-t evolution of crustal terranes,
plate boundary processes in the southwest Pacific, continental extensional tectonics.
Paul G. Fitzgerald – pgfitzge@syr.edu
Prof. Fitzgerald specializes in low-temperature thermochronology (fission track, U-Th/He)
applied to tectonics in extensional, convergent and strike-slip regimes. He has projects in
Antarctica, the Basin and Range Province, Papua New Guinea, Alaska and the Pyrenees.
Gregory D. Hoke – gdhoke@syr.edu
Dr. Hoke studies the interactions of climate and tectonics on the earth’s surface using
geomorphology and the stratigraphic record. His active research projects are in the southern
central Andes and SE Tibet.
Linda C. Ivany – lcivany@syr.edu
Prof. Ivany specializes in evolutionary paleoecology, geobiology, and paleoclimatology.
Jeffrey A. Karson – jakarson@syr.edu
Prof. Jeff Karson’s expertise lies in structural geology and tectonics of oceanic spreading centers
and the relationships between magmatic construction and mechanical extension.
Laura K. Lautz – lklautz@syr.edu
Prof. Lautz specializes in physical hydrologic processes and their influence on water quality and
movement through watersheds.
Zunli Lu – zunlilu@syr.edu
Prof. Lu specializes in low temperature geochemistry and uses a variety of methods (trace
elements, isotopes and models) to investigate crustal fluids, carbon cycle and global
environmental changes.
Cathryn R. Newton – crnewton@syr.edu
Prof. Newton’s scholarly work involves studies of modern and ancient biodiversity, including the
quantitative dynamics of ancient and modern mass extinction.
Scott D. Samson – sdsamson@syr.edu
Prof. Samson’s research includes U-Pb geochronology and Nd-Sr-Pb isotope geochemistry. These
techniques are used to address diverse topics ranging from tephrochronology, to unraveling the
evolution of orogenic belts, to tracking the birthplaces of suspect terranes.
Christopher A. Scholz – cascholz@syr.edu
Prof. Scholz specializes in sedimentary geology, the geologic record of climate change,
paleolimnology, and sedimentary basin analysis.
Donald I. Siegel – disiegel@syr.edu
Prof. Siegel is interested in peatland hydrogeology and geochemistry, contaminant transport in
groundwater systems, and competitive chess.

GRADUATE STUDENTS
James Andrew Beard – jbeard@syr.edu
Martin Briggs – mabriggs@syr.edu
Joseph Catalano – pjcatala@syr.edu
Timothy Daniluk – tldanilu@syr.edu
Tathagata Dasgupta – tdasgupt@syr.ed
Stoney Gan – sgan@syr.edu
Kwasi Gilbert – kngilber@syr.edu
Robert Gobell – rpgobell@syr.edu
David Gombosi - djgombos@syr.edu
Ryan Gordon – rpgordon@syr.edu
Nathan Graber – nrgraber@syr.edu
Jack Heitpas – jhietpas@syr.edu
Andrew Horst – ajhorst@syr.edu
Rebekah Holt – rnholt@syr.edu
Matthew Kissane – mkissane@syr.edu
Jessica Mantaro – jlchappe@syr.edu
Amy Morrissey – amorriss@syr.edu
Xiangyu (Sonya) Mu – ximu@syr.edu
Aleece Nanfito – afnanfit@syr.edu
Stephanie Perry – seperr01syr.edu
Soumitri (Mimi) Sarkar – ssarka03@syr.edu
Aaron Satkoski - amsatkos@syr.edu
Drew Siler – dlsiler@syr.edu
Tonny Sserubiri – tsserubi@syr.edu
Joshua Taylor – jtaylo03@syr.edu
Jessica Terrien – jjterie@syr.edu
Alina Walcek – aawalcek@syr.edu
Heather Wall – hlbaugh@syr.edu
Xuewei Zhang – xzhang39@syr.edu
Alex Zirakparvar – nazirakp@syr.edu
RESEARCH FACULTY
Marion (Pat) E. Bickford – mebickfo@syr.edu
Laura E. Webb – lewebb@uvm.edu
Bruce Wilkinson – eustasy@syr.edu
Gary M. Boone
James C. Brower
Dirk de Waard
Bryce M. Hand
John J. Prucha
Joseph E. Robinson
EMERITUS FACULTY
ADJUNCT PROFESSORS
E. Bruce Watson – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
RESEARCH ASSOCIATES
Daniel Curewitz – dcurewit@syr.edu
Jennifer Hargrave – jehargra@syr.edu
Melissa Hicks – mkhicks@syr.edu
Joseph Kula – jkula@syr.edu
James Metcalf – jrmetcaf@syr.edu
Aisha Morris – aimorris@syr.edu
Jocelyn Sessa – jasessa@syr.edu
LIBRARY – GEOLOGY BRANCH
Carol Cavalluzzi – Branch Asst. – cacavall@syr.edu
Elizabeth Wallace – Librarian – eawallac@library.syr.edu
Cover Photo: Curtain of fire eruption with spatter
rampart forming, Eyafjallajökul Volcano in Iceland
(RAGNAR AXELSSON/AFP/Getty Images)
Newsletter:
Marion (Pat) Bickford (editorial)
Julie J. Neri (editorial)
Daniel Curewitz (technical)
Staff
Bonnie Andrews – Office Coord. – bgwindey@syr.edu
Peter Cattaneo – Research Analyst – pkcattan@syr.edu
Michael Cheatham - Sr. Res. Specialist - mmcheath@syr.edu
Jacqueline Corbett – Lab. Tech. – jrcorbet@syr.edu
John L. Davis – Curator of Minerals
Jolene Fitch – Undergrad/Grad. Coord. – jofitch@syr.edu
Julie Neri – Administrative Assistant– jjneri@syr.edu
Joanne Ranz – Ed. Asst. GSA Books – jlranz@syr.edu

A LETTER FROM THE CHAIR
Dear Alumni & Friends,
As we start a new academic
year, it is a time for both reflection
and anticipation. I am ending my first
term as Chair of the Department and
have just agreed to another 3 years in
this position. I am very proud of the
accomplishments of the Department
over the past couple of years and
it is exciting to set some new goals that will keep us on a steep
trajectory. Since I became Chair we have engaged in strategic
planning, had an important External Review, and revamped the
administrative structure of the Department. Thanks to the efforts
of the faculty we have strengthened our research programs,
broadened our curriculum and developed much stronger ties with
alumni and friends of the Department. This continues to be a
very exciting and rewarding place for faculty and students alike.
Looking ahead, we plan to continue to hire new faculty, start
essential building renovations, and acquire new research facilities
that will allow us to extend the scope of our research programs. It
is going to be an exciting time!
The faculty continues to evolve. Connie Weyhenmeyer
left the Department in May and we wish her well in her future
endeavors. Hank Mullins will retire at the end of Spring 2011.
With these changes we look forward to making hires in the
general areas of paleoclimate, geophysics and petrology to
maintain the strength and balance of the faculty.
On the other side of the ledger, the Department is
proud to welcome new Assistant Professor Dr. Zunli Lu who is
currently a postdoctoral investigator at Oxford University. Zunli’s
specialty is aqueous geochemistry and his expertise will bring
additional breadth and depth to geochemistry and hydrology
programs across the SU campus. Zunli is married to Dr. Li Jin,
who earned her PhD with Dr. Don Siegel just last year, so they
are no strangers to the Department. We look forward to their
arrival in January 2011.
Changing faculty interests and laboratory needs will
require some renovations to the Heroy Geology Laboratory.
We are making space for a new TIMS for Dr. Scott Samson, an
ICPMS and supporting chemical labs for Dr. Lu. Creating these
spaces results in a domino effect that will cause a number of
other moves. These renovations are planned in the context of
a master plan developed by Mike Cheatham that we hope will
progressively transform the 1971 Heroy Geology Laboratory to a
much more modern and efficient facility over the next few years.
Many honors were bestowed upon the Department in
the past year. Don Siegel was awarded a prestigious Laura J.
and L. Douglas Meredith Professorship, which will allow him
to merge his research and teaching interests. Suzanne Baldwin
received a Chancellor’s Citation Award for Faculty Excellence
and Scholarly Distinction in recognition of her outstanding
research and leadership. Two graduate students, Kwasi Gilbert
and Ryan Gordon, won highly competitive National Science
Foundation Fellowships. David Gombosi received a coveted
NASA Fellowship. A number of graduate students and recent
grads had internships or received outstanding job offers in
industry and academic institutions. You will find details in the
pages that follow. The Department is very proud of these welldeserved
honors.
Research continues to be the driving force behind the
Department. In the pages that follow, you will find details about
the many funded research projects of the faculty, postdoctoral
investigators, and students ranging from Central New York to the
far corners of the Earth and beyond. Funding for these projects
comes from a wide variety of sources including various programs
at NSF, NASA, Syracuse University, major Foundations, and the
Petroleum Industry. Gifts to the Department and the Prucha Field
Research Fund continue to support graduate student research
opportunities. The results of these projects appear regularly
in major scientific journals and are reported at national and
international scientific meetings. Do not hesitate to contact any of
us for more information.
Thanks to the generosity of our many alumni and
friends, the Department has a family of endowments and funds
that allow the Department, faculty and students to take advantage
of research or educational opportunities that might otherwise be
missed. Recently the Department has received two new major
awards: the John J. Prucha, PhD, Endowed Fund from Dr. Carlos
Dengo (BS ’76) of ExxonMobil Corporation and the Shirley and
Donald Elston Endowed Fund from Shirley Elston of Flagstaff,
CO. These funds will provide support for faculty development
that will be a lasting tribute to their names. If you wish to make
a donation to any of the funds of the Department you will find
directions inside. Thanks to all of you for your contributions,
great and small.
As always, we are eager to keep the lines of
communications open with our loyal friends and alumni. In
addition to this Newsletter, you can keep abreast of the activities
of the Department at our website (http://earthsciences.syr.edu).
Please send along any news or images to Julie Neri (jjneri@syr.
edu) or to Dr. Cathryn Newton (crnewton@syr.edu), who is the
Department’s Alumni Coordinator.
We hope you will plan to join the Department at one
of our annual events. We will have an alumni get together on
the SU campus during Reunion (Homecoming) Weekend,
October 16 and we will hold our annual Alumni Reception at the
Geological Society of America Meeting in Denver, November 1
(details for both events elsewhere in this Newsletter). If you are
in Central NY, please drop by the Heroy Geology Laboratory.
We are always happy to show you around and reintroduce you
to the Department. Or you can simply take a self-guided tour of
the halls where there are numerous posters featuring ongoing
research projects. I hope we will see you here sometime soon!
In closing, I want to thank all those who contributed to
this Newsletter and especially to Pat Bickford, Julie Neri and Dan
Curewitz who brought it all together. I hope you will enjoy this
annual snapshot of the Department.
With warm regards,
Jeffrey A. Karson
Jessie Page Heroy Professor & Department Chair

Clean Water Initiative at Syracuse University
Water is becoming a limited resource for humans and ecosystems as human
populations and their activities increase. Changing climate and shifting land use exacerbate
limited water resources. For several years, those of us doing research in water-related fields
(hydrogeology, hydrology, limnology, sedimentology, paleoclimate, etc) have developed
significant collaborations at the grass-roots level, including joint research proposals,
graduate-level seminars and co-advising of graduate students. Although faculty and
students across many departments at Syracuse already work at the forefront of these issues,
the University plans to expand water science research to better address these and other areas
of study. This initiative will better organize those working in water-related disciplines and
market our strengths in the field for graduate student recruitment and national recognition of
our programs.
The Department of Earth Sciences is taking a leading role a new “Clean Water
Initiative” in the College of Arts & Sciences. Dean George M. Langford has charged a
committee to develop this initiative with Arts and Sciences faculty with members: Don
Siegel, Chris Scholz and Laura Lautz. As a first step to advance the program, the University
has authorized a senior-level joint-hire between Earth Sciences and the College of
Engineering. This new faculty member will develop an internationally recognized research
program and contribute fully as a scholar through service to the water sustainability
initiative. Don and Laura currently serve on that search committee, which will interview
candidates this coming year. The College has also provided seed grants to develop
collaborative projects in water-related fields. Don Siegel was awarded one of these to host
an American Geophysical Union sponsored Gordon Conference on the intersection of lakes
with urban areas this or next year.
The Clean Water initiative provides a strong opportunity for Earth Sciences to
strengthen its research program, increase faculty development, and recruit strong graduate
students to our program. Watch for more developments over the coming year as this
initiative develops.
icelandic rushing water. Photo by: J.A. Karson

Meet the Department’s Newest Faculty Member
Dr. Zunli Lu
Returning to up-state New York as a faculty member at SU is unexpected for me, but this only adds a
great amount of excitement to this new job. During my PhD study at the University of Rochester, I interacted
with both faculty and former students
in the SU Department of Earth Sciences
and all of the happy memories do make
me feel that I am coming back home. I
look forward to the formal start of my
career at SU in January 2011!
My interests in ocean chemistry,
crustal fluids, global climate changes,
and the carbon cycle will guide my
research projects in the near future. I am
currently investigating how the global
ocean became oxygen-depleted during
Mesozoic climate warming (Oceanic
Anoxic Events). It will be an important
part of my research activities at SU to
understand oceanic redox changes in
the context of climate and evolution.
Zunli Lu standing in front of Oxford University and the Ghost Forest: tree
stumps that traveled from Ghana to Oxford.
To make this and other lines of research
possible, SU has generously agreed to
set up a state-of-the-art clean lab and to
provide funds for purchasing an ICP-
MS. Both facilities are good additions to the current strength of geochemistry in our department, particularly
the new TIMS in Scott Samson’s lab.
Teaching is as valuable as research. I will teach Aqueous Geochemistry and will be happy to teach
other classes related to climate and
oceanography. In all of these courses, I
will emphasize the connections between
sub-disciplines of Earth Sciences as
much as possible. Like many other
scientists, I benefited from this type of
training in terms of stimulating research
ideas and interests. More importantly, it
helped me to learn the delicate balances
ubiquitously present in the natural
environment where we all reside.
I am actively preparing for a
smooth set-up of the lab and teaching
with lots of fun in January. When I wrote
on Facebook that I plan to move to
Syracuse in the New Year, someone said
to me:”are you nuts?” No, not really.
I know what a Syracuse winter is like,
but I also know the department will be
warm!
Zunli at the ICPMS Lab at Oxford

SU LAVA Project
In a fusion of science and art, Dr. Jeffrey
Karson (Earth Sciences) is collaborating with SU
Sculptor Dr. Bob Wysocki (Art Department), to make
basaltic lava flows right here in Syracuse. Since early
2010 they have been melting basalt and pouring lava
flows a few feet across. This is the only academic
setting in which basaltic lava flows are being created
on a natural scale.
morphologies commonly found in natural lava flows,
including sheet flows, levied flows, ropey pahoehoe,
hyaloclastite, etc. They provide an interesting and
informative perspective on natural flows, numerical
models and analog experiments. The flows draw
excited crowds to the SU foundry at the ComArt
Bldg. Get a glimpse of one of these events at: http://
earthsciences.syr.edu/Research/TectonicsOceanLitho/
TectonicsOceanLithoReasearch.html.
The experiments focus on key parameters
that determine the final morphology of flows. In
Geology 101 everyone learns about the blocky “aa”
and smooth “pahoehoe” forms of lava typical of
Hawaiian eruptions. But many other forms occur in
nature, and the forms reflect differences in physical
processes during their eruptions. Perhaps the most
widespread, but rarely seen, type of lava flow on Earth
is pillow lava that covers the seafloor and is erupted
along the mid-ocean ridges. Only carefully controlled
experiments will link lava shapes to their composition,
temperature, flow rate, slope, vesicle and crystal
density, etc.
Using only basaltic material (so far) they have
made multiple lava flows over rock slabs, sand, ice,
dry ice, and into water. Flow rates and slopes have
also been varied. The results show a wide range of
Drs. Karson & Wysocki plan a cross disciplinary
class for both science and art students to explore the
physical properties and aesthetics of lava for Spring
2011.

New Endowments in the Department of Earth Sciences
The Department of Earth Sciences is pleased and thankful to announce the establishment of two new endowed
accounts within the Department.
John J. Prucha PhD, Earth Sciences Endowed Fund: Created in 2010 by Dr. Carlos Dengo (BS ’76), this
fund honors Professor Emeritus John J. Prucha. It is intended to enhance the quality and academic breadth of
the faculty of the Department of Earth Sciences. It stands side-by-side with the Prucha Field Research Fund that
supports student research.
Donald P. and Ruth Shirley Elston Earth Sciences Endowed Fund: This endowed fund is named for alumni
Donald (BA ’50, MS ’51, Geology) and Shirley (BA ’50, History) Elston. It will support research and faculty
development in the Department of Earth Sciences.
Both of these new endowments will be formally presented at the 2010 Fall Reunion Weekend festivities on the
SU Campus. Contributions to these and other funds are welcomed.
Opportunities to Contribute to Your Department
Geology Endowed Development Fund: This fund may be used at the discretion of the Chair for any activities
that enhance the Department.
John James Prucha Field Research Fund: This endowment is used to help our graduate students cover the
costs of their field studies.
Geology Department Gifts Account: Gifts to this account are used to purchase software/hardware upgrades
for our student computer lab, new maps and displays, field equipment or other needed items.
K. Douglas Nelson Memorial Fund: This endowed memorial fund supports research/recruitment of outstanding
graduate students.
Alec G. Waggoner Memorial Fund: This fund is used to support graduate student research proposals.
Earth Sciences Field Camp Fund: This fund is used to assist students with respect to attending field camp.
Geology Endowment for Student Research Fund: Gifts to the account are used to assist graduate students in
funding research projects which can include travel assistance to national meetings and publication charges.
Donations to any of the above funds can be made by mail. Please make your check payable to Syracuse
University and indicate the fund to which you are contributing on the memo line. Mail to: Syracuse University,
College of Arts and Sciences, Office of Advancement, 307 Hall of Languages, Syracuse, NY 13244-1170.
Donations to the Department 2009-10
Mr. Martin Acaster
Mr. Russell M. Agne
Mr. E. Louis Amber
Mr. Nicholas A. Azzolina
Dr. Charles E. Bartberger
Mr. Ronald M. Belak
Mr. Michael J. Bellotti
Dr. Marion E. Bickford
Mrs. Susan Guhl Browne
Mr. George V. Bulin, Jr
Mrs. Sara L. Clement
Dr. Maurice A. Cucci
Mr. George E. Duchossois
Mr. Thomas R. Eschner
(Donations from July 2009 – June 2010)
Dr. Paul G. Fitzgerald
Dr. Richard M. Forester
Dr. Ennis P. Geraghty
Mr. Matthew Gubitosa
Mr. Daniel G. Jaffe
Dr. Richard L. Kroll
Mrs. Hildred H. Lasser
Mr. Hannes E. Leetaru
Mr. Walter T. Levendosky
Dr. John R. Lewis
Mr. Milton R. Marks
Mrs. Ruth H. Major
Mr. Harold N. Meaker
Prof. Katharine F. Nelson
Prof. Cathryn R. Newton
Mr. John M. Noble
Dr. John J. Prucha
Nancy E. Spaulding
Mrs. Linda R. Sternbach
Dr. Irving H. Tesmer
Mr. Michael G. Thonis
Mr. William P. Tolley, Jr
Dr. Victor K. Vere
Mr. John Weikart
Mr. Walter C. Woodmansee
Mrs. Margaret Prucha Yarka

Departmental Awards of
Distinction in 2010
Suzanne Baldwin received the Chancellor’s Citation
for Academic
Excellence in a
ceremony last
April. Suzanne
was recognized
for both teaching
and research
excellence in the
geosciences and
Suzanne Baldwin (l) receiving the
Chancellor’s Citation from Chancellor
Nancy Cantor (r).
for her devotion
to encouraging
and supporting
women to
enter and achieve success in science. Among her
high-profile projects in this area of science, she is
the lead principal investigator for an international
group of collaborators and a research team at SU
working with a $3.5 million grant from the National
Science Foundation Continental Dynamics Program.
The collaborative project involves four other leading
U.S. institutions and several leading international
scientists investigating major tectonic processes in
eastern Papua New Guinea using the region as a field
laboratory to examine the rheological, petrological
and thermal evolution of the lithosphere during the
transition from subduction to rifting and seafloor
spreading. This year Suzanne was one of only six to
receive this prestigious award.
Carlos Dengo – BS ’76 was awarded the Alexander
Winchell Award
at a seminar that
was held in the
Department of Earth
Sciences on October
29, 2009. Dr. Dengo
is the Geoscience
Vice President
of ExxonMobil
Upstream Research
Company. We, in the
Department, look
Dr. Jeffrey Karson presenting Dr.
Carlos Dengo the 2009 Alexander
Wincell Alumni Award.
forward to Carlos’
return to campus this
fall for the 2010 Fall
Reunion Weekend when the John J. Prucha PhD,
Earth Sciences Endowed Fund is formally presented
to the Department.
M. E. (Pat) Bickford was honored by his Alma
Mater, receiving
the Alumni
Achievement
Award from the
Department of
Geology at the
University of
Illinois, where he
received his MS
(‘58) and Ph.D.
(‘60) degrees.
Linda Ivany received the American Federation of
Mineralogy Societies Scholarship Foundation 2010
Honorary Award for Distinguished Achievement in
the Field of Earth Sciences at the recent convention
of the Eastern Federation of Mineralogical and
Lapidary Societies, The award includes 2 EFMLS
Scholarships of $2000/year normally for 2 years for
the recipient’s Department. Linda and the Department
were pleased to present these scholarships to Kwasi
Gilbert and Jack Hietpas. Congratulations to Linda,
Kwasi and Jack!
Donald I. Siegel was honored by being named the
Laura J. and L.
Douglas Meredith
Professor. This
distinguished
three-year
appointment
beginning Fall
2010 recognizes
(l-r)Vice Chancellor Eric Spina, Don
Siegel, and Chancellor Nancy Cantor at
the Meredith Ceremony.
Pat (r) receiving his award from Wang-
Ping Chen (l), Head of the Department
of Geology, University of Illinois.
Don’s outstanding
teaching at
Syracuse
University and
comes with a stipend and funding to expand on his
course offerings. Don, as part of his Meredith project,
has expanded his Honor’s course in “World Water”
to include a trip to China for interested students, and
his undergraduate offering this fall will be a general
course in the “Science of Water.” Don, also through
his Meredith efforts, formally linked his graduate
course in “Contaminant Hydrogeology” with the
Syracuse Law School trial practice class offered by
the Federal District Attorney for Central New York. In
this class, his science students provide environmental
expert testimony in an authentic jury trial situation.

GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH
Martin Briggs
My first year as a graduate student with the
Syracuse University Earth Sciences Department has
been very positive and productive. During the fall
of 2009 I worked along with my advisor, Dr. Laura
Lautz, and Dr. Jeffery McKenzie of McGill University
to determine the spatial distribution and magnitude
of contaminated groundwater inflow to a stretch of
lower Nine Mile Creek, not far upstream of Onondaga
Lake in Syracuse. This work was done in conjunction
with the consulting firm O’Brien and Gere, and we
were able to identify a focused groundwater input
and quantify the incoming volume per time using
several methods including a relatively new fiber optic
Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) method. I
then travelled to the professional conferences of GSA
in Portland, AGU in San Francisco, EGU in Vienna
and CUAHSI in Boulder to present these and related
findings.
Currently I am working near Lander, WY using
both innovative DTS applications and other cuttingedge
tracer methods to determine flux patterns and
associated biogeochemical patterns and microbial
reactivity around beaver dams. I am working alongside
Danielle Hare, a very determined undergraduate from
the department.
Tim Daniluk with sledge hammer!
trout within walking distance of the bunkhouse,
also helps the cause! None of this would have been
possible without funding from the Syracuse University
Graduate Research Fellowship and the National
Science Foundation’s CAREER grant awarded to Dr.
Lautz. I look forward to presenting this summer’s
research in both manuscript form and personally at
further scientific conferences.
Joe Catalano
I begin my second year of my M.S. degree
at Syracuse this fall. I am working with Suzanne
Baldwin on the Magmatic Evolution of the Woodlark
Basin in Papua New Guinea. I am in the process
of gathering 40Ar/39Ar ages and whole rock
geochemical data from a spread of volcanic rocks
from the Milne Bay Province. I also was a part of
the field work, in March 2010, collecting samples,
Danielle Hare with the “catch of the day”
We have also had field assistance from Tim
Daniluk, local community college professors and
students, and Dr. Laura Lautz. Danielle and I are
staying on a 40,000+ acre ranch owned by the Nature
Conservancy, an organization which has been very
supportive of our efforts. The amazing red rock
walled canyon and field site, teeming with rainbow
Joe at field camp this June overlooking the geology of the
Proterozoic granite and slate at the Black Canyon of the
Gunnison River National Monument.
structural data, and characterizing rock relationships

from the outer islands of Milne Bay.
In June 2010 I attended field camp through
the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in the San
Juan Mountains near Silverton, Colorado to fulfill the
deficiency required to graduate. This trip would not
have been possible without the financial support that
I received from the department – which is backed by
support from generous alumni to whom I would like to
thank. It was a valuable learning experience.
This December I plan to present some of my
preliminary data at the annual meeting for Papua New
Guinea as well as at A.G.U. in San Francisco.
Timothy Daniluk
For two weeks from June 27 until July
10, 2010, I taught surface water hydrology at the
University of Missouri’s Branson Field Laboratory in
Lander, Wyoming. There were 39 students at the camp
from all over the country, and these were divided into
four smaller groups for instruction.
During the first week, I instructed students how
to gauge stream discharge using a variety of methods
of varying complexity. Students were lectured on
the basics of hydrology such as determining the
cross-sectional area of a stream, stream velocity, and
stream discharge. Estimation methods included timing
an orange floating down the channel, flow meter
calculations, dilution gauging using a slug test, and
dye tracer tests.
more, less, or the same amount of water (and dye)
exited the canyon at the rise as it entered at the sinks.
The students also sampled surface and subsurface
geochemistry and water table elevations to generate
a water table map for the island on which the camp
is located. The final exam was a comprehensive,
synthesizing surface water, groundwater, and
geochemical methods to characterize surface and
subsurface flow in a mountain tributary creek through
an alluvium floodplain.
Now back in Syracuse, I will return to my
research with Dr. Laura Lautz on hyporheic exchange
in restored streams in Upstate New York. I am using
temperature to quantify fluxes into and out of the
streambed, and geochemistry to identify oxygenated
and low oxygen environments in the hyporheic zone
of the streambed.
Tathagata (Ted) Dasgupta
Last Spring I have successfully defended
my PhD thesis, which probably has the longest title
in the history of this department: ‘Geochemistry
and Geochronology of Alleghanian and ‘atypical’
Alleghanian granites from south-central Appalachians:
Tim (left) with student group at Branson Field Lab.
During the second week, 11 students elected
to take part in advanced hydrogeology projects.
These included a trip to the Fremont County Landfill,
creating a water budget for Dry Lake and Gauging the
Middle Fork of the Popo Agie River, then performing
a dye test through the underground karst network
in Sinks Canyon. The students calculated whether
Dr. Dasgupta’s link from the Geology
Department at Kent State.
Implications for magma evolution and late Paleozoic
terrane accretionary history in the southern
Appalachians’! I would like to take this opportunity
to thank my supervisor Dr. Scott Samson, all my
committee members, especially Dr. Marion Bickford,
for teaching me how to enjoy writing science articles,

and friends and colleagues of this department for
helping me complete this long and exciting journey.
Fortunately the end of the tunnel looks bright enough.
From fall 2010, I will start working at the Kent State
University, Department of Geology as an Assistant
Professor, teaching introductory as well as advanced
undergraduate and graduate level courses.
Simultaneously, I plan on collaborating with
my supervisor Scott and other scientists from Kent
State University to continue with my geochemistry
research. Currently I am in the process of submitting
my manuscripts for publication and hopefully they
will see the light of day soon.
David Gombosi
This year marks the approximate mid-point
in my PhD program, and the year has been a busy
and productive one. On the NASA-Astrobiology
project I’ve been working on with Dr. Baldwin, I’ve
been characterizing Apollo 16 impact glass samples
on the basis of their structure and geochemistry,
using microRaman spectroscopy and the electron
microprobe at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
The goal of the project is to assess how quickly
radiogenic 40 Ar diffuses out of impact glasses at
ambient lunar temperatures. I’m trying to determine
how this diffusive loss may alter the measured 40 Ar/
39
Ar age of impact glasses from the lunar surface,
potentially yielding anomalously young ages of impact
events. I’ve also succeeded in producing a beta version
of a stochastic modeling routine to predict the range of
fractional loss of Ar from these impact glasses.
The second phase of my PhD research is
developing the electron microprobe zircon fissiontrack
dating technique. This new method allows us
to date the mineral zircon (ZrSiO 4
) and allows both
older and more heavily radiation damaged material to
be dated than previously possible. This new tool will
have applications to the low temperature evolution
of basins, sediment dispersal pathways, and tectonics
– particularly in Precambrian terranes.
The first part of this project involved working
with nine labs across three continents to acquire and
synthesize the required standard materials. As this
phase of the project nears completion, I now possess
one of the most complete collections of zircon-group
mineral standards in existence. In the next phase of
the project I will use RPI’s electron microprobe to
start producing ages based on this standard material.
Generous funding from the department’s Geology
Student Research Fund has allowed me to purchase
analytical time on the instrument, without which this
project would not have been possible.
In December I published my first paper,
Dave in front of a piece of sandstone from the Atoka
Formation, Ouachita Mountains, Oklahoma. Shown are
sole marks (Flute casts) on the sandstone.
in Terra Nova entitled “New thermochronometric
constraints on the rapid Paleogene uplift of the
Cordillera Darwin complex and related thrust sheets in
the Fuegian Andes” ,which won a department student
publication award.
This summer I’ve taken an intern position
with ExxonMobil’s Upstream Research Company
in Houston. My research here is with the reservoir
quality group examining the spatial extent and textures
of microquartz growth on detrital quartz grains in the
North Sea. This summer I was also awarded a NASA
Earth and Space Sciences Fellowship to examine the
diffusion of Ne and Ar in lunar impact glasses.
Ryan Gordon
I am a graduate student working towards my
master’s degree with Dr. Laura Lautz. For the last
year, I have been studying the interaction between
surface water and groundwater in restored streams in
Central New York State. I am interested in the spatial
patterns of water exchange between streams and
shallow aquifers through gravel streambeds. During
the warm months, I conduct field research in restored
streams near structures called cross-vanes. Crossvanes
are low, stone, dam-like structures that are built
throughout the United States to restore the ecological

services of stream corridors. I am investigating how
patterns of water flow in the streambed are affected
by cross-vanes and the pool and riffle bedforms that
develop around them.
My field methods involve the use of heat as
a tracer of water movement. In order to measure the
direction and amount of water flowing through the
streambed, I install arrays of temperature sensors
that detect the movement of heat through saturated
gravel. I use the records of temperature through time
at a variety of points in order to model the patterns of
water movement at my field sites. I also take water
samples from the streambed sediments and analyze
them for indicators of biogeochemical processes that
take place in the streambed.
that were either significantly underrepresented or
completely missed by the more commonly utilized
detrital zircon methodology. Given the extremely
valuable information we gained from detrital monazite
ages my next step will be to measure both the bulk
elemental chemistry and the Nd isotopic composition
of the same monazite crystals that were previously
dated. The outcome of this research will provide a
valuable framework for understanding the utility
of monazite as a provenance indicator. In addition
to examining detrital monazite, my research also
investigates the strengths and limitations of the
microchemistry of detrital garnet as a provenance
proxy. This research is being financially supported by
very generous grants from the Prucha fund and the
Gem and Mineral Society of Syracuse.
This past spring, my advisor Scott Samson
and I attended an FBI-hosted meeting in Washington,
D.C. This meeting was focused on utilizing isotope
ratio mass spectrometry to aid criminal investigations
Ryan taking streambed temperature in Boyer Creek.
In April 2010, I was awarded a Graduate
Research Fellowship from the National Science
Foundation. This award will support my research and
studies at Syracuse University for the next academic
year and summer. I would like to thank the National
Science Foundation for this financial support, and
Dr. Laura Lautz for helping me submit a successful
application to the Graduate Research Fellowship
Program.
Jack Hietpas
My research is focused on assessing the utility
of detrital heavy minerals as provenance indicators.
Following the success of utilizing the crystallization
ages of detrital monazite, derived from modern river
sediments, to record the complex tectonic history of
the southern Appalachians, I turned my attention to
assessing the ability of monazite isolated from ancient
sedimentary rocks to record tectonic events. In several
samples detrital monazite recorded tectonic events
X-ray map showing the distribution of calcium within
a single garnet crystal. Such information will be used
to attempt to “fingerprint” garnet donor source rocks
and potentially link detrital garnet back to their specific
source.
and for intelligence purposes. This was a very exciting
meeting that demonstrated an atypical application of
the techniques and principles that we use to investigate
geological problems.
Andrew Horst
In the wake of my qualifying exam last fall, I
press forward as a Ph.D. candidate to finish my three
projects. All three are at different stages: writing for
publication, data acquisition, and sample collecting;
however, the overarching theme of my research
involves a combination of structural geology with
applied magnetic techniques to understand processes

of crustal accretion at mid-ocean ridges. I am
primarily investigating aspects of magmatic intrusions,
crustal structure, and transform fault deformation in
Iceland as an analog for other high-magma-supply
spreading systems.
This past academic year, my third here
at Syracuse, I was back on the Graduate School
Fellowship. This was wonderful because it freed
up more time for my research. I also took a couple
of classes this past year, Geographic Information
Andrew (right) in Iceland collecting samples.
Systems and Learning and Teaching Science in
an Undergraduate Setting, both of which really
introduced me to new perspectives and techniques
that will be quite useful down the road. I had the
opportunity to present some of my research on
Icelandic crustal accretion at the annual American
Geophysical Union meeting last December. I
also attended a conference this past May, with
fellow graduate student Jack Hietpas, on Electron
Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) held at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison. EBSD is a
fascinating technique to determine crystallographic
information from samples in a scanning electron
microscope. I am particularly interested in using
this method in the future to identify and quantify
preferred crystallographic orientations in some of
my samples. In addition to research, writing, classes,
and conferences, I have been out to California on two
occasions in the past year to acquire data at Scripps
Institution of Oceanography paleomagnetics lab.
During the past summer I spent about seven
weeks in Iceland continuing fieldwork to finish up
one of my projects. The main focus for this year’s
work is to collect samples for paleomagnetic analysis
and fault kinematic data to constrain models of
deformation near a transform fault zone in northern
Iceland. This work has been supported through several
sources including an NSF grant to Dr. Jeffrey Karson
(Syracuse University) and our colleague Dr. Robert
Varga (Pomona College), an ExxonMobil Global
Geoscience Student Grant (2009), two consecutive
years of support from the John James Prucha Field
Research Grant (2009 and 2010), and the K. Douglas
Nelson Award (2010). Without such generous support,
this project would not have been possible.
I look forward to this upcoming year as I
will be a TA for Oceanography, taught by Dr. Daniel
Curewitz in the fall, and I hope to finish writing
another paper for publication too. I expect to make a
trip out to the paleomagnetics lab at Scripps soon after
my field season this summer. I will also be working
with the Geology Club to organize our 6 th annual
Central New York Earth Science Student Symposium
next spring. The coming year will surely keep me
running!
Kwasi Gilbert
I work with groups of prehistoric whales that
inhabited the waters surrounding the United States
Atlantic Coastal Plain (ACP). Belonging to the family
Physeteridea (sperm whales), these whales speciated
sometime in the mid -Miocene, and apparently
persisted until the early Pliocene, when a combination
of environmental perturbations and competitive stress
precipitated their extinction. I study the fossils of
these early whales, specifically their teeth, which are
often the only remains at ACP sites. I’m interested in
reconstructing life history and ecology, an objective
that is somewhat complicated by the lack of cranial
and post cranial material. Fortunately, sperm whale
teeth are very valuable information repositories and
can potentially tell a great deal about these amazing
organisms. In the past few decades a number of
techniques have been developed which exploit these
important properties of sperm whale teeth to better
understand characters of the extant species. My

advisor, Professor Linda Ivany, and I have modified
these methods specifically for this project. Our
research involves the application of these modern
techniques to prehistoric whale taxa. For instance, we
are looking at growth banding in the teeth of these
whales. These bands represent changes in the rate of
dental hard tissue accumulation, are associated with
seasonal phenomena, and can thus be used to estimate
age. This technique was developed in the late 1950’s
and is currently the most accurate method of aging
stranded sperm whales, as their teeth grow continually
and thus provide a record of lifespan. My advisor
and I have adapted this method for use in these early
whales with the goal of reconstructing the age makeup
of the prehistoric Atlantic coastal plain populations.
To this end we section the teeth longitudinally to view
banding patterns. We are in the process of exploring
Mandible and teeth of a prehistoric sperm whale (genus:
Physeterula) from the Lee Creek Mine, North Carolina.
Though smaller than their modern relatives, these whales
were probably more deliberate predators, apparently
feeding on fish and smaller whales as indicated by wear
faceting on the teeth. The abundance of remains at
the mine suggests it played some important ecologically
role to these whales.
a new promising technique: micro-computed
tomography (Micro-CT). Micro-CT scanners use X-
rays to take high resolution cross sections of objects,
the X-rays detect minute density differences in the
scanned object which manifest in the images as
discreet features, and these density discrepancies can
then be quantified and graphed. Contiguous growth
bands have significantly different densities; hence
theoretically this technique can be used to count
growth bands and age our whales. Moreover, because
the X-rays can easily resolve the internal features of
the teeth, sectioning is precluded.
We are also interested in tooth chemistry,
which may be used as a proxy for ecology. Teeth
record the conditions at hand during their formation.
Chemical signatures in teeth can represent certain
characteristics of the environment or be indicative
of particular biological and/or behavioral traits.
With the proper tools to extract these signatures and
understanding of their dynamics it is possible to
reconstruct environmental parameters or determine
the biological/behavioral inclinations of an organism.
In this study we are attempting to determine whether
or not these whales were migratory groups, looking
specifically at carbon isotopes.
I am tremendously grateful to all the programs
that are helping to fund, not only this research, but
my scholarship. They are: The Eastern Federation
of Mineralogical and Lapidary Society, The
Paleontological Society’s Stephen Jay Gould Student
Research Grant, the National Science Foundation’s
Graduate Research Fellowship, and The McNair
Scholars fellowship, as well as contributions from
The Syracuse University Office of Research and
the Graduate School. I would also like to thank
my advisor, Linda Ivany, for being a great mentor,
colleague, resource and friend. I again sincerely
extend thanks to all these programs and people,
without which this research would not be possible.
Nathan Graber
I came to Syracuse University to start my
Masters last fall. Since my arrival I have worked
towards completing my thesis research and have
made a great deal of progress towards completing my
sample analysis. For my project I will use (U-Th)/He
thermochronology on apatite as well as DEM analysis,
to study the uplift history of the Frontal Cordillera of
the Andes, near Mendoza Argentina.
I completed my field work, in Argentina, last
January. While there I collected two suites of rock
samples. Each set of samples consists of a vertical
transect spanning approximately 2,500 meters of
elevation change. The samples I collected come from
the Rio Mendoza and the Rio Tunuyan, river valleys.
These samples will help constrain the timing of uplift
by indicating when erosion significantly increased.
This summer has been spent preparing the
samples I collected in Argentina to run helium
analysis. This preparation consists of crushing and
sieving my samples before separating the minerals
on the basis of density, using LST. Finally I will
hand-pick apatite crystals which fit the specifications

necessary for running helium analysis. I have also
Nate collecting samples in Argentina
begun to analyze the regional DEM for the area which,
coupled with the helium data, will help piece together
the complex history of the Andean, Frontal Cordillera
in Argentina.
African Rift, in efforts to constrain the sedimentary
patterns and history of subsidence of the lake’s
southern basin.
During my first year at Syracuse, I focused
mainly on completing my classwork. I took a wide
range of classes within the department. Some classes
covered topics that directly apply to the research I
am doing, while other classes helped to broaden my
geological knowledge. Many of my classes included
field trips to places like the Finger Lakes region of
New York and all the way to coastal Maine.
After the end of my first year, I got to travel to
northern Kenya in East Africa to do my field work for
my Master’s thesis. Lake Turkana is well known for
its sites of hominid fossil discovery, but it is also an
area with a diverse geologic history and a rich record
of past climate change. Our research group spent a
total of about 3 months in and around Lake Turkana
collecting two types of seismic data and core, dredge,
and rock samples. My trip to Africa is an experience
that cannot be repeated, and I look forward to the
analysis and interpretation phase of my work here at
Syracuse.
Xiangyu Mu
Recently, I have spent two months doing
Amy Morissey
I started graduate school at Syracuse last
Amy with Lake Turkana in the background.
August under the advisement of Dr. Scholz. My
industry-funded research for my thesis will mainly
focus on the interpretation of several vintages of
seismic reflection data from Lake Turkana, in the East
Xiangyu on Lake Taihu
field work on Lake Taihu in China, sampling water

from the lake and its tributary. Lake Taihu is the
third largest freshwater lake in China, with an area of
about 2338 km 2 and a mean depth of 1.9 m, a typical
shallow lake located in the delta of the Yangtze River,
the most industrialized and urbanized area in China.
Its main function is supplying drinking water for
the surrounding cities, such as Wuxi, Suzhou, and
Shanghai, but tourism, aquaculture, fisheries, and
navigation are important as well. However, with the
economic development and increased population in
the lake basin, Lake Taihu has suffered increasingly
from serious eutrophication. The main reasons for
the continued deterioration of the environment of
Lake Taihu are increased water use and discharge;
changes in agricultural practices and in fisheries and
aquaculture; insufficient wastewater treatment; and an
unsuitable management system.
In order to figure out where the main sources
of contaminants which stimulate blue algae bloom
come from, we assume that different land use
has a strong relationship with different halogen
concentration ratios, which could be used for tracing
the contamination sources. The result should have
great meaning for pollution control. Also, from
our water samples, after the quality monitoring is
analyzed, we could get the general picture of the
contamination distribution in Lake Taihu Basin which
could provide necessary data information source for
further research.
Aleece Nanfito
Last summer I spent in the field working in
southwest Iceland on an enigmatic strike-slip fault
zone that is parallel to the rifts. I received generous
Aleece (left) in Iceland with colleague Amanda Loman.
support from a John J. Prucha award, which allowed
me to have a field vehicle and also purchase epoxies
needed for sample collection. My master’s work is
focusing on the Glufjura Fault Zone, which is a N-S
oriented, right-lateral fault. The fault zone cuts through
nearly flat-lying Tertiary lavas and is defined by a
tabular band of highly deformed breccia and gouge.
It has also been injected by almost 50 dikes that
span the life of the fault. Fault-scaling relationships
suggest km’s of displacement, significantly more than
previously estimated. Overall, this fault is far more
complex in 3-D structure than other faults in Iceland.
Other rift-parallel, strike-slip faults have been noticed
elsewhere in Iceland, but have not been addressed in
classical interpretations of rift processes.
This year I also participated in a lesson study
group, which focused on updating a glaciers exercise
in one of the introductory Earth Science courses.
Members from the Department of Earth Sciences and
the Department of Science Teaching worked together
to create a lesson that was more inquiry-based and
allowed the instructor to observe how the students
were learning. As the new lesson was delivered,
observers in the classroom collected feedback on
student thought processes. With the data collected on
student answers and discussion in class, the lesson
can be modified to ensure the objectives of the lesson
are met. The results are currently in preparation to be
submitted to the Journal of Geoscience Education.
Steve Riccio
My advisor Paul Fitzgerald and I conducted
research in the Eastern Alaska Range during June
2010 near the West Fork and Susitna Glaciers, the
location of 2002 Denali Fault earthquake epicenter
and initial rupture zone. We sampled granitoids on
the North and South of the Denali Fault, and on the
hanging wall and footwall on the south-splaying
Susitna Glacier thrust fault. Samples were collected
in several vertical profiles through plutons and along
a horizontal transect from the Denali fault across the
Susitna fault, in order to be able to understand the
exhumation patterns and relations between the two
faults.
I was awarded funds from the John Prucha
Research Fund in May 2010, intended for our
upcoming work in Alaska. The funding received was
put towards helicopter time, used for supply drops,
camp moves, reconnaissance, and sample collection.
With the funding I received we were able to sample
at a number of locations great distances along our
intended horizontal transect, and move our camp to

where we could better target granitic rocks necessary
for the thermochronometers I plan to use. I am
very grateful for the award, because without it our
field season would not have been as complete or as
successful as it was.
I have completed my field work and am now
assistance related to environmental problems and I am
excited to be a part of the team. Simultaneously, I plan
Mimi atop Mt Joe capturing photo of Mt Marcy
on continuing my collaboration with Dr. Siegel for
research projects on peatland hydrology and isotope
geochemistry.
Steven hiking Pyramid Peak – Alaska
processing my samples and familiarizing myself
with the thermochronometers I will be using to date
my samples. I am currently learning the fission track
system, involving counting fission tracks left in apatite
crystals from the spontaneous fission of uranium. I
will be learning the (U-Th)/He system, also using
apatite crystals, in which [He] is measured in order to
determine isotope parent/daughter ratios and from that,
the crystal age. Using the two thermochronometers,
I plan to interpret time-temperature and exhumation
histories of the rocks in relation to the major faulting
in this area of the Eastern Alaska Range.
Soumitri (Mimi) Sarkar
I conlcuded my four-year journey through
graduate school and defended my dissertation
successfully in May 2010. I am grateful to the
department, faculty and the graduate students for their
warmth and support. It was a fun ride and I owe it
all to them. I would like to take this opportunity to
especially thank Dr. Don Siegel for being a friend,
philosopher and guide. I want to extend my gratitude
to the Siegel family for being my family here in
Syracuse.
Currently I have joined the Environmental
Law Clinic at University of Pittsburgh, School of Law
as a consulting staff scientist. The Clinic provides to
the community a broad range of legal and technical
Aaron Satkoski
This last year has been one of my toughest,
yet also most productive and rewarding. Since my
last newsletter update I managed to present a talk at
the national GSA meeting, publish a paper, complete
my preliminary exam, go on a field excursion to
collect rock samples with the USGS, and travel to the
University of Arizona to analyze over 1,200 detrital
zircons.
The national GSA meeting was a great
experience, and my talk on the Archean rocks of the
Minnesota River Valley was well received and also
stirred up a little controversy over how rocks that are
3.5 billion years old were formed. Thus, I consider the
talk a complete success! This project is still ongoing,
and I am still collecting more isotopic and chemical
data to help resolve this ongoing controversy.
In March my first paper, along with co-authors
Sandra Barr (Acadia University) and Scott Samson,
was published in the Journal of Geology. The worked
showed that a part of the Appalachians (a terrane
known as Avalonia) originated in South America and
traveled to Africa before finally ending up on the
eastern part of North America. My co-authors and I
are still studying Avalonia and its long history and
hope to have a follow up paper soon.
Just as I was beginning to feel a small bit of
confidence, it became time to take my preliminary
exam, which is the sink or swim time in a PhD
program. This also tends to be a time when people

ealize they do not know as much as they thought
they did, and I was no different. After was all said
and done, I passed, and came away with a much more
focused idea of what I need to do to accomplish my
research goals.
Once my exam was over I traveled to the
University of Arizona to analyze U-Pb in detrital
zircons as part of a collaboration between SU and the
USGS. The rock samples were collected from Vermont
to Virginia. The trip was a huge success, and has
started to give my collaborators and me much insight
into where Cambrian sedimentary rocks along this
part of eastern North America originated. This project
is still ongoing, as I hope to analyze several thousand
more zircons, this time from Virginia to Missouri.
Combined with the previous data, the new study will
give us a picture of how the entire eastern part of
North America formed in the early Cambrian.
Finally, I would like to thank the department for
recognizing my efforts with several awards: a Student
Publication award for my paper in the Journal of
was a very busy year for me. In addition to serving as
Head ta for the department, I also made considerable
My exploration and field work in Iceland.
Sampling ancient gneiss in the Minnesota River Valley.
Geology and the Newton C. Chute award for my
service to the department and professional promise. I
would also like to thank donors to the John J. Prucha
field fund for awarding me money to collect ~1 billion
year old rock samples along the eastern US. By
collecting and analyzing these rocks I hope to learn
more about potential sources to the Cambrian rocks
mentioned above, and gain a better understanding of
how the eastern US might have looked approximately
500 million years ago.
Drew Siler
I’m starting the fifth year of my dissertation
research at Syracuse in the Fall of 2010. Last year
progress on my research. In addition to presenting a
poster at AGU in December, I published my first, firstauthored
publication with my advisor Jeff Karson.
I also went to the SIMS lab at UCLA and collected
the last of my data, U/Pb in zircon geochronology
data from Icelandic rhyolites. In May, I attended the
ExxonMobil Big Horn Basin Field Trip, where we
learned the basics of petroleum geology and play
elements. This summer I am an intern at Chevron in
Houston, TX, working in a reservoir management
team on an oil field off the coast of Angola. I plan to
finish my research and defend my dissertation in the
Spring of 2011.
Tonny Sserubiri
It has been a great first year for me at the
Heroy Geology Laboratory with lots of new things to
marvel at. I’m thankful to the various Professors at
the Department, especially my advisor Chris Scholz
and graduate students who have made my stay here
memorable.
Having completed my first year of Graduate
School, my current focus is my Master’s thesis, which
will comprise various sedimentological aspects,
ranging from seismic data analysis and interpretation,

During a field seminar Green River Basin,
Rock Springs, WY.
chemostratigraphy, lithostratigraphy, and well-log
analysis. This research is to be done using data and
samples from the Albertine Graben of Uganda, a
largely lacustrine sedimentary basin.
Josh Taylor
I am going into my final semester of graduate
work here at Syracuse, during which I plan to defend
my dissertation. The past year was a productive
one; I presented numerous aspects of my research
at professional meetings and had a manuscript on
my masters research accepted for publication. I am
continuing to write my dissertation as I collect the
last bits of data I need to finish up. This has been
an exciting time of interaction with colleagues for
comments, insight, and suggestions, as I discuss with
accommodation of deformation in Asia in response to
collision with India. The second presents petrography
and zircon U-Pb dating results that constrain the
protoliths to metamorphic tectonites in southern
Mongolia, which has bearing on the existence of
the South Gobi microcontinent. A third manuscript,
that will present the results of a low-temperature
thermochronology study along basement blocks within
southeastern Mongolia, will be in the works shortly.
After the Fall semester I will join the many
students from Syracuse who have accepted job offers
from the petroleum industry and move to Houston. I
am eager to take on the challenges that will come with
this new work.
Alina Walcek
Since starting at Syracuse University last fall,
I have made much progress towards my Master’s
degree. My work involves determining the uplift
history of the southern Argentine Precordillera through
studying geomorphic features. I will be measuring
Josh “hitting” the road in Mongolia.
them my interpretations and conclusions. I hope to
submit at least two manuscripts for publication in the
coming months, with a third in the works. The first
manuscript describes the Cenozoic fault history of
southeastern Mongolia and its implications for the
Alina & Nathan Graber in Argentina.
cosmogenic nuclide concentrations of relict landscapes
in addition to analyzing river response to uplift.
This past winter, I completed an awesome
season of field-work in Argentina. We successfully
collected samples from several paleosurfaces, in
addition to sediment from various streams collected
to determine erosion rates. These samples will be
analyzed for multipe cosmongenic nuclides in order to
piece together the uplift history of the Andes.
This past year I have been lucky enough to
receive funding from the GSA Student research fund,
in addition to the Geology Endowed Student Research
Fund of the Syracuse University Department of Earth
Sciences, for travel to Purdue University’s PRIME
lab to prep samples for cosmogenic nuclide analysis.
The funding paid for travel expenses while in Indiana

doing this work, and I would like to thank those who
have contributed to the Endowed Student Research
Fund, as well as the Department of Earth Sciences, for
awarding me this grant.
Xuewei Zhang
I worked for Anadarko China as an Exploration
geologist prior to being enrolled in the Ph.D. program
in Earth Sciences at SU in fall 2009. From Insider
Anadarko, I had the opportunity to take a close look at
many of Anadarko sponsored G&G consortia projects
with universities and academic institutes around the
world. The Lacustrine Rift Basin research program
directed by Prof. Scholz was one of those projects.
I was very interested in the cool research done by
the group and wanted to get involved, and that’s
why I made my way to Syracuse. I found Syracuse
University by chance, but I chose to be here following
my heart.
As expected, my first year in the Dept. of
Earth Sciences has been pretty exciting and fruitful:
the courses I have taken, the exposure to various
department colloquia and activities, all the field trips
we made, and of course the research in which I have
participated within the Lacustrine Rift Basin group,
all helped reshape the way I am thinking as an Earth
scientist. One particular project, probably one of my
Ph.D. projects, I am currently working on is a global
study on sublacustrine channel and fan systems. The
key issues we want to address include: what favors the
initiation of sublacustrine channel and fan deposits;
what accounts for the architectural and morphological
differences (e.g., sinuosity of subaqueous channels)
among these deep lake channel-fan systems; and are
there quantitative relationships between channel-fan
morphologies and geological parameters. It will be
very challenging to characterize these sublacustrine
channel-fan systems that show a wide range of age,
location, and post-depositional process. Hopefully we
can find some interesting results.
Alex Zirakparvar
During the past year, I have continued to
make progress towards completing my PhD degree.
I am working under Suzanne Baldwin, who has an
NSF grant to study the formation and exhumation of
metamorphic rocks in Papua New Guinea.
In October, I passed the PhD qualifying exam.
Jeff Vervoort, who is a faculty member at Washington
State University, was my former M.S. advisor, and is
currently a member of my PhD committee, attended
the examination. During Jeff’s visit to Syracuse, we
were able to finalize the preparations to a manuscript
that we submitted to Earth and Planetary Science
Letters. As of this time, the manuscript is still in
review, but I hope that it gets accepted, as this will
bring me one step closer to completing my degree.
During the last year, I also finally published the
results of my Masters thesis in the Canadian Journal
of Earth Science (see Zirakparvar et al., 2010 in CJES
vol. 47). In February of this year, I was also chosen
to attend a National Science Foundation sponsored
workshop for the ion microprobe at the University of
California, Los Angeles. I learned a lot about the use
of ion microbeam techniques during this workshop,
and decided to present a bit of what I had learned at
the department’s informal graduate seminar after I
had returned from this workshop. I will be traveling
to UCLA again in July of this year to perform U-Pb
analyses of zircons, and will be making use of some
of the latest developments in resolving the spatial
distribution of U-Pb ages in single zircon crystals that
the team at the UCLA has been working on. I also
traveled to the GeoAnalytical lab at Washington State
University to perform geochemical analyses. At this
Alex collecting samples and data in
Papua New Guinea.
time I would also like to thank the Graduate Student
Publication Award and Marjorie Hooker Award funds,
since I received cash awards from both of these
sources this year.

RESEARCH ASSOCIATES
Daniel Curewitz
Introductory
Oceanography (EAR
117), Volcanoes and
Earthquakes (EAR
200), and Earth’s
Climate (EAR111)
have rounded
out my teaching
schedule quite
nicely. In addition
to developing and
modifying lectures
Plaid shirt - icon of a geologist! for the courses, I
am working on new ways to give students hands-on
exposure and practical experience with the concepts
and ideas that underlie the teaching material, mostly
through the development of recitations and in-class
activities. One aspect of teaching these courses
that has been particularly rewarding is the focus on
visual learning and the interpretation, deconstruction
and creation of diagrams, charts or other means
of absorbing and communicating Earth Sciences
concepts.
I continue to delve into long- and shortterm
mechanical connections between faulting and
hydrothermal activity through detailed investigation
of more than 40 years worth of maps and data from
the mid-ocean ridge hydrothermal systems exposed
in the rift zones along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where
it emerges and forms the Eurasian-North American
plate boundary in Iceland. Transporting the insights
gained from investigation of on-land, heavily mapped
and monitored areas into the deep frontiers of
hydrothermal research along the submarine sections
of the mid-ocean ridge system is the next phase of
the work, and it is just over the horizon and will
continue through the next year of investigation.
Ultimately, the work is intended to incorporate ideas
and results from previous research into structural
control of hydrothermal activity, the geological impact
and expression of dike intrusion at divergent plate
boundaries, and fault population analysis of active rift
systems.
Jennifer Hargrave
I’ve completed my first year at SU as part of
the Lacustrine Rift Basins research group led by Dr.
Chris Scholz, which included a second trip to the
southeastern shores of Lake Turkana, Kenya. For
this trip, I spent two months around the village of
Loiyangalani in search of lacustrine carbonates. Our
living conditions improved from last year, from palm
huts in a campsite to the Oasis Lodge which was
complete with a warm spring-fed pool. We were
able to interact more with the villagers, and several
were employed to help us with our research. A group
of us also visited a local secondary school to share
with them our interest in Lake Turkana. A few of the
students were particularly interested in geology and
had rocks to share with us.
The trip was a very successful one, as we
doubled our study area and collected and mapped
numerous outcroppings of stromatolites, as well as
ash layers which we will use to date and correlate our
sections. In addition to the onshore fieldwork, I also
assisted in the collection of offshore cores, acquisition
of multichannel seismic data, and dredging.
Jen is discussing the rocks that are commonly
found around Lake Turkana at a local secondary
school in Loiyangalani. Photo by M. Hicks
We presented our preliminary findings at the
annual AAPG meeting in New Orleans in April and
generated a lot of interest among our sponsors last
November. We are currently analyzing our newly
collected data to produce a depositional model of the
lake system.
Joseph Kula
It has been a challenging and exciting
year working here at Syracuse University, and
in conjunction with the New York Center for
Astrobiology. Degassing experiments on crystalline
jarosite have been started to constrain the diffusion
kinetics of radiogenic 40 Ar through the mineral. A
primary goal of these experiments is to determine the
argon closure temperature for jarosite and to evaluate
any potential diffusive loss from the mineral over

illion year time-scales. As a potassium-bearing
mineral, jarosite is a potential chronometer for
dating the presence of liquid water near the surface
of Mars. To prepare for future Mars sample return
missions where Martian jarosite will be analyzed, we
are looking to understand how to properly interpret
measured ages in the context of Mars geology.
Additionally, we have completed fieldwork in
the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming where we collected
a series of jarosite, hematite, and goethite-bearing
samples from the Paleocene Fort Union and Eocene
Willwood Formations. These units consist of
ancient paleosols (soils preserved in the rock-record)
that underwent a
post-depositional
environmental
transition from
water-saturated to
drained and arid;
very similar to that of
the Burns Formation
at Meridiani Planum
on Mars. As a nearsurface
geological
analog for Mars, we
Joe intently looking for Martian
analogs in Wyoming.
are investigating the
possibility of dating
the transition from
wet to dry, and then apply the methodology to future
Mars missions. Ability to construct a time-scale for
the past wet environments on Mars has important
implications for the possibility of life to have
developed on the planet.
In the background of these studies we are
gearing up to run some simple experiments seeking
to gain insight towards questions about the degree to
which basalt outgases and re-equilibrates atmospheric
argon when melted and recrystallized, if there is a
mantle contribution toward excess argon in highpressure
amphibole, and what is the mantle argon
signature recorded in various ultramafic rocks from
the Late Paleozoic through the Mesozoic.
James Metcalf
I had another full year working as the noble
gas thermochronology lab manager and research
associate. This year marks the end of the NSF grant
Paul Fitzgerald and Suzanne Baldwin received that
I was originally hired on, investigating along- and
across-strike patterns of uplift and exhumation in the
Pyrenees. We used a variety of thermochronometers
(apatite fission-track, apatite (U-Th)/He, and K-
feldspar 40 Ar/ 39 Ar) on samples collected throughout the
core of the range and identified three primary episodes
of exhumation in the Pyrenees. Our current methods
best constrain the middle exhumation event that began
in the Late Eocene (~40 Ma), and continued until the
Early Miocene (~17 Ma). Working with our Spanish
colleague Professor Josep-Anton Muñoz (Univ. of
Barcelona), we are currently preparing manuscripts
that discuss how this exhumational event fits into
the overall orogenic history of the Pyrenees. We are
hoping to continue our research in the Pyrenees, and
are in the process of applying for additional grants to
support our work.
In addition to the Pyrenees research, I am kept
busy with a variety of activities in the research group.
We are implementing some upgrades to the noble gas
lab, which will hopefully make sample analyses more
efficient.
Working
with Suzanne
Baldwin, I
therefore had
a busy year of
maintaining
and updating
the hardware
Jim spending a little “quality time” in the lab.
in the noble
gas lab. I am
impressed by the diversity of projects that the faculty,
post-docs, and students in our group are pursuing; it
certainly keeps the days interesting!
Aisha Morris
This past year has been a busy and exciting
one for me here in the Department of Earth Sciences,
as well as in the SU community as a whole. Over the
past year, I have submitted two research proposals
(one to NSF with an education and outreach focus and
one to NASA examining glaciovolcanism in British
Columbia), and have two more in the pipeline for
submittal in the coming months. My latest research
paper, examining the morphology, distribution and
proposed formation of impact melt and debris flows
on Tooting Crater, Mars, has been accepted for
publication in the planetary science journal, Icarus. I
have also had the opportunity to teach the EAR105
course during the first summer session of 2010, and I
had a blast interacting with the students in my class!

I will be teaching EAR111 in the fall, and I am truly
looking forward to continued interaction with the
students. I know now that teaching will play a major
role in my future career plans.
In
addition to my
departmental
and researchrelated
activities, I have
been able to
participate in
several different
Aisha (l) with students from Girls Get It!
community and
outreach-related
activities. I spent many of my Saturday mornings
during the 2009-2010 school year volunteering with
the Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP)
in the School of Education. During my time with
STEP, I worked with one of the Syracuse City School
District (SCSD) Earth Science teachers to facilitate an
earth science academic enrichment program for ninth
and tenth grade SCSD students. In early July 2010, I
was the Camp Director for the inaugural Girls Get It!
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
camp here at SU.
With the cooperation of JP Morgan Chase,
SCSD and SU, we brought 32 middle school girls to
campus for a week of exciting science and engineering
activities, as well as exposure to life on a college
campus. The students enjoyed the camp immensely
and many have already requested to come back next
year!
Jocelyn Sessa
I have just finished an enjoyable first year as
a post-doc with Linda Ivany. My research focuses
on quantitatively assessing the effects of climatic
perturbations on factors such as faunal turnover,
origination and extinction rates, and geographic
range during the late Cretaceous through Paleogene
of the Gulf Coastal Plain (GCP). I primarily work
with mollusc fossils. I recently submitted a paper
on the environmental and biological controls on the
diversification and ecological reorganization of GCP
marine ecosystems.
A wealth of data on the geographic occurrences
of taxa through this time interval for the GCP are
published in monographs, and for the past year I have
supervised the creation of a taxon-locality matrix from
these sources. I supervise six researchers (high school
through postdoc) in generating this dataset, which
has evolved into an online database. The database
currently contains ~15,000 localities and nearly 3,000
taxa. Once the database is completed it will be freely
available online.
Climate is characterized using stable isotopes
of mollusc shells, including seasonal reconstructions.
We have generated mean and seasonal temperatures
for most of the early Paleogene, as virtually no data of
this kind exist for the GCP. I have supervised Trevor
Schlossnagle in the collection and analysis of these
data. Along with Linda, Scott Samson, and Trevor,
we are working on combining strontium isotope ratios
with oxygen
isotope data
to evaluate the
influence of
paleosalinity on
shell chemistry
and to assess
the potential of
87
Sr/ 86 Sr for age
control in shelf
Jocelyn showing off her “Orange
Pride” even in Africa!
settings like
the GCP.
I have
begun working with colleagues in southern Africa
and Portugal to reveal a record of molluscan diversity
from the tropics. Many modern mollusc genera arose
following the K-Pg extinction, when certain bivalve
and gastropod clades underwent an explosive global
radiation. The tropics are frequently implicated as
being the ‘cradle’ of this speciation burst, but are
severely undersampled in relation to North America
and Europe. In February, 2010, I spent three weeks
in Angola with two Portuguese colleagues on a
reconnaissance trip. We identified numerous Late
Cretaceous and exceptionally preserved Miocene and
Pleistocene sections for further study. We are planning
a return trip in early 2011. I will begin a fellowship at
the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
in November, 2010.

FACULTY RESEARCH
Suzanne Baldwin
Another exciting year has flown by and we
celebrated many successes in our research group.
For me, the highlight was being honored with a
chancellor’s citation at an awards ceremony in April,
during which time I was recognized for leading
collaborative NSF and NASA funded research
programs, and co-coordinating the Women in Science
and Engineering faculty mentoring program, among
other achievements.
Fieldwork in Papua New Guinea this year took
Profs Paul Fitzgerald, Laura Webb, and MS student
Joseph Catalano and me to the remote islands of the
Woodlark Rise in the Milne Bay Province. There we
collected volcanic samples that will give us clues as
to the timing and conditions (e.g., source, P, T) of
magmatism associated with rifting. The field season
was made even more exciting by a category 5 cyclone
that threatened to “take us all out”, a close encounter
with a shark, and running aground on a coral reef.
There was never a dull moment.
Suzane near some uplifted pillow basalts on the northern
rifted margin of the Woodlark Rift.
This fall I am especially looking forward
to convening a new research seminar on
Thermochronology of planetary surfaces”. Invited
talks at the Tectonics Crossroads GSA Global
Meeting, in Turkey and at the NSF sponsored
GeoPRISMS Rift Initiation and Evolution workshop
in Santa Fe, New Mexico are also planned. And, I¹m
looking forward to convening sessions at the 2010
annual GSA meeting with Dr. Joseph Kula, and at the
2010 fall AGU meeting with Dr. Laura Webb. If you
plan to attend any of these meetings I look forward to
catching up with you then.
Paul Fitzgerald
Topping this summer was a tremendously
successful field season in the eastern Alaska Range
with new MS student Steve Riccio and colleagues
Collecting rocks close to the Susitna Glacier
from the University of Alaska and UC Davis.
In this newly funded NSF project, we are
investigating the formation of the Alaska Range, with
fieldwork focusing along the Denali fault. Steve and
I mainly worked in the Susitna Glacier region where
in 2002 a major thrust fault was discovered, but only
because a M7.9 earthquake initiated there.
We were in incredible country and geology,
but maximum satisfaction was due to zero bear
encounters. In March we (Suzanne Baldwin, Joe
Catalano and Laura Webb and I) had three weeks
fieldwork in eastern Papua New Guinea on our NSF
funded Continental Dynamics project investigating the
development of the Woodlark rift and the exhumation
of the world’s youngest eclogites. Initially we were
based on Woodlark Island with fantastic support (the
executive quarters!) by the gold mining operation
there, followed by visiting selected islands over a large
region, the first time many of these remote islands
have seen geologists since the 1960’s. This trip was
successful, scenic and eventful – as we avoided a
category 5 hurricane and only hit one reef. I have
also been working on papers for our NSF supported
Pyrenees project with post-doc Jim Metcalf, co-PI
Suzanne Baldwin and our Spanish colleagues from
the University of Barcelona, prompting submission
of another proposal in July. The fall of 2009 was a bit
of a blur as I taught three classes, two of those being
new, and attended 5 conferences/workshops including
the 1 st International Conference on Antarctic Climate

Evolution in Grenada, Spain and a workshop on
thermal modeling in Aussois, France. Despite that,
and the ever expanding job as Director of Graduate
Studies, we managed to publish papers on the Basin
and Range Province (Tectonics, GSA Special Paper),
the Pyrenees (Earth and Planetary Science Letters),
the Transantarctic Mountains (Tectonics) and the
Adirondacks (GSA Bulletin) with other papers
(Pyrenees, Alaska) in various stages of revision. The
summer of 2010 will end with a group of us attending
the 12 th International Thermochronology Conference
with activity, including new non-toxic, water-based
mineral separation techniques.
Perhaps the biggest news from Hoke’s corner
is that I landed my first major NSF grant from
Campsite close to the Sesitna Glacier.
in Scotland where I am one of the keynote speakers.
PhD students Josh Taylor and Stephanie Perry are
in the final stages of writing up their extensive
thermochronology-tectonic PhD’s with both accepting
positions at Exxon.
Gregory Hoke
I just finished my first full academic year at
Syracuse, complete with two graduate students to
guide though their respective M.S. projects in tectonic
geomorphology. Needless to say, it was an eventful
year. Both of my students are working at elevations
≥ 3000 m (9,900 ft) in the Andes near Mendoza,
Argentina. In order to take advantage of the warm
summer conditions at these altitudes, we all spent New
Year’s Eve in the air on our way to Argentina for 3
weeks of very productive fieldwork.
While in Argentina, I also began a pilot project
with a collaborator at the University of Washington,
instrumenting soil pits over a range of elevations and
collecting samples to measure the temperature of soil
carbonate formation, using a relatively new technique
called “clumped isotope thermometry.” Back at
Syracuse, the tectonic and geomorphology lab is busy
Advisor, field guide and cook!
the Tectonics Program. The project titled, “Basin
evolution and elevation history of the SE margin
of the Tibetan Plateau: constraints on the timing
and mechanisms of surface uplift”, is a three-year,
$365,000 (SU part) endeavor with collaborators from
the University of Rochester, University of Michigan
and the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research in
China. Last fall I was invited to participate in a oneday
symposium on mountains at Cornell University,
chaired a topical session at the annual GSA meeting in
Portland Oregon, and gave an invited talk on my work
in the Altiplano at AGU. I am a co-author of a paper
in press in the journal Tectonics and am currently
contributing to several manuscripts. This fall I will
attend the IAS congress in Mendoza, Argentina where
an Argentine undergraduate I helped supervise will
present her work.
Linda Ivany
I took a semester-long sabbatical this past
spring after ten years and four consecutive semesters
teaching the Department’s largest survey course, EAR
105, Earth Science. During the sabbatical, I made
significant progress on manuscripts with students
and colleagues. A paper with former student Andrew
Haveles (M.S. 2009) is in press at Palaios. Derived
from Andrew’s thesis, the paper uses high-resolution
stable isotope analysis on fossil mollusks from the US
Gulf Coastal Plain to reveal how changes in growth
rate led to larger body sizes in a famous Eocene
unit called the Gosport Sand. A paper stemming

from Caitlin Keating-Bitonti’s thesis (B.S. 2009)
is also submitted for publication, and relates work
with Prof. Scott Samson, and also colleagues at
Yale University (Hagit Affek and Peter Douglas), to
establish paleotemperatures in the Gulf Coast during
the early Eocene climatic optimum, the warmest time
in the Cenozoic. Caitlin’s high-resolution isotope
work on fossil bivalves, combined with multiple other
independent geochemical proxies for temperature,
provides one of the most strongly supported estimates
yet published, and yields values somewhat cooler
than expected at low latitudes during this interval.
Manuscripts with two other former students, Christy
Visaggi (M.S. 2004) and Patrick Wall (Ph.D. 2009)
are currently in revision as well. Christy’s paper
in Palaios documents paleoecological patterns in
Oligocene mollusk faunas from the US Gulf Coast.
Patrick’s paper, in Paleobiology and with coauthor
Carlton Brett (University of Cincinnati), quantifies the
effect of the geographic distribution of paleontological
samples on the turnover rates calculated from them in
the Devonian Hamilton Group in NY. Carl’s colleague
at Cincinnati, Arnold Miller, and one of his students
visited our paleo lab this past summer to microsample
mollusks for stable isotope analysis to evaluate
differences in growth rate among populations of the
bivalve in the Caribbean.
long-lived fossil bivalves and wood from Antarctica
offer evidence for the existence of ENSO variation
during the Eocene greenhouse climate. Work with
post-doc Jocelyn Sessa progresses on building a large
comprehensive database on the faunal and climate
record of the US Gulf Coast Paleogene. A paper on
the K-T extinction and recovery is currently submitted
to Paleobiology, and work with Jocelyn, Trevor
Schlossnagle (B.S. at ESF 2009) and Scott Samson
on oxygen and strontium isotope variation along the
early Eocene Gulf Coast paleoshoreline is nearing
completion. Finally, work with colleague Bruce
Runnegar at UCLA comes to fruition with a paper in
press at Geology exploring the significance of stable
oxygen isotope values from a large Permian bivalve
called Eurydesma. The data offer tentative support for
the hypothesis that the oxygen isotope value of global
oceans was more negative in Earth’s past. Bruce,
his graduate student Dan Petrizzo and I recently
completed three weeks of field work in SE Australia,
collecting additional specimens from early Permian
rocks to further test that hypothesis.
Jeffrey Karson
Over the past year administrative
responsibilities have continued to take up much of
my time, but thanks to collaborations with research
associates Dan Curewitz and Aisha Morris, and
graduate students Andrew Horst, Aleece Nanfito, and
Drew Siler, our research programs have stayed on
track and grown. Our group focuses on the Tectonics
A pair of wombats stand in for the more typical Estwing
hammer as scale in this shot of an early Permian
bedding plane covered with large Eurydesma bivalves;
Maria Island, Tasmania. Photo by Linda Ivany.
A paper submitted with Tom Brey (Wegener
Institute for Polar and Marine Research), Matt Huber
(Purdue University), former student Devin Buick
(B.S. 2004), and Bernd Schöne (University of Mainz)
proposes that patterns in growth increment widths in
Research group in Iceland.
of Oceanic Lithosphere and related processes.
Ongoing projects include studies of subaerial seafloor
spreading in Iceland, core complexes on the Mid-
Atlantic Ridge, and upper crustal construction along

the East Pacific Rise. We are also focusing on the
details of faulting in basaltic materials, fault control
of hydrothermal systems, and parameters that control
basaltic flow morphologies. One of the highlights of
the year was a fieldtrip around Iceland for our group
with co-investigator Dr. Bob Varga (Pomona College),
and undergraduates Yexary Rodriquez and Amanda
Loman.
In the coming year, we look forward to
continuing these studies and to the publication of the
results of recently completed work. Aleece (MS) and
Drew (PhD) will finish their degree work and move on
to the next stages of their careers. Matt Kissane (BS’
2010 from Union College) will be joining our group
in the fall after spending some time in the field in
Iceland.
Laura Lautz
Research in the Lautz group has ramped up
this past year with the addition of three new graduate
students who began their programs in Fall 2009.
Martin Briggs (PhD) is doing research on heat tracing
in hydrologic systems, with funding from my NSF
CAREER grant. He has developed new methods
using fiber optic Distributed Temperature Sensing
(DTS). We wrap bend-insensitive fiber optic cable
around a 2-inch rod, which is then installed in stream
sediments. Using the wrapped cable, we can measure
temperatures instantaneously every 1.5 cm along the
rod, taking measurements in vertical profile every
few minutes for weeks at a time. These detailed
temperature profiles are then used to model rates of
water flow through the subsurface. Marty is also using
a new “smart” tracer, resazurin, to measure microbial
activity in streams and their streambeds. Marty’s first
manuscript for his PhD is currently in review with
Hydrological Processes.
Tim Daniluk (MS) and Ryan Gordon (MS)
are doing research on how stream restoration projects
affect stream-groundwater interaction around
restoration structures, with funding from NSF that
started in January 2010. Billions of dollars are
spent annually on stream restoration in the U.S., but
assessments of impacts on subsurface hydrology
are practically absent. Tim and Ryan will use a
combination of heat and geochemical tracing to
determine the degree to which restoration projects
induce rapid stream-groundwater interaction. They
will also assess associated impacts on physical,
chemical, and thermal patterns in streambeds.
Preliminary results of their work were presented
at the EGU (European Geosciences Union) annual
conference in Vienna in May.
Laura and Sharon Lautz hiking – twin brother Aidan
was also along only on Dad’s back!
I continue to work on the broad research areas
of heat tracing in hydrologic systems and streamgroundwater
interactions by mentoring my graduate
students on the aforementioned projects and working
with colleagues. I recently completed a modeling
study of how non-ideal field conditions impact the
accuracy of heat tracing, work that appears in the
journal Water Resources Research. I also have several
papers co-authored with graduate students in 2010,
including a paper co-authored by Syracuse alum
Nate Kranes (MS ‘07) that appears in Hydrological
Processes.
Cathryn Newton
After eight years as Dean of the College of
Arts and Sciences, and a total of 16 consecutive years
in administration, it is thrilling to have the chance
to write and to teach as a full-time faculty member
again. I continue to teach in the Renée Crown
University Honors Program (as I did as dean). For
four iterations, I have co-developed and co-taught
a course with Honors Director and Philosophy
professor Samuel Gorovitz, “Linked Lenses: Science,
Philosophy, and the Pursuit of Knowledge”. The
fourteen students in the course do serious readings
in both science and philosophy – Gould, Margulis,

Hansen, Doidge, along with Hume, Popper, Peirce,
and others. They also do quite a bit of writing and
revising. The class is intense and demanding for both
professors and students. We use visitors in both the
sciences and the arts, to stimulate and to challenge the
Honors students, who come from fields that include
Architecture, Engineering, English, Bioengineering,
Math, Philosophy, Biology, Management, and
Women’s Studies. Our experimental course – and
especially the approach of really pushing the students
to sharpen their detectors and to strengthen their skills
of associative thinking -- has been profiled by the
University, College in Honors Program in articles this
year:
http://honors.syr.edu/TheCapstoneMagazine/
TheCapstone_S10.pdf (see p. 21) and http://thecollege.
syr.edu/pressrelease/trischkadiffee2010.htm.
been successful with the broad range of students in the
course. It was a bit hectic at moments, as for example,
when the Chile earthquake occurred on Saturday
morning and the mini-lab on convergent margins was
scheduled to begin on Monday morning.
The shipwreck project has gone quite well
and I am working to finish the first draft of the book
in the months ahead. I have also been doing a series
of public lectures on the project, including the AAAS
keynote address in San Francisco last year. The
database of 2038 shipwrecks from North Carolina is
complete and fully searchable – using terms ranging
from “brigantine” to “gold bullion”! – and has
already drawn a great deal of attention in the marine
archeology and maritime history world. The book also
centers on marine and atmospheric processes as they
relate to shipwrecks; the database has documented a
remarkable history of hurricanes during the span 1526-
1984. NOAA scientists sailing out of Woods Hole
have recently used the Newton shipwreck database to
search for and re-locate the wreck of YP-389, a tiny
patrol boat that courageously held off the famously
aggressive U-701 for several hours, in a nautical
version of David and Goliath. One NOAA director
wrote to me that using the LORAN-C coordinates
from the database they “sailed right to the shipwreck”.
I am serving as the Department faculty’s
Alumni Liaison this year and am enjoying hearing
from you. Please write to me: crnewton@syr.edu.
Cathryn Newton reacts to the surprise unveiling of a
glass sculpture dedicated in her honor.
On the other end of the spectrum, I taught
approximately 390 students in Spring, 2010, in Earth
Sciences 105. Outstanding TA’s Dave Gombosi,
Aleece Nanfito, Josh Taylor, and Nathan Graber
worked with me to create a more interactive, minilab
curriculum that was tightly integrated with the
lecture material. We used the earthquakes in Haiti
and Chile in the mini-labs, and in general developed
a curriculum that was much more hands-on. We are
currently developing a manuscript to submit to GSA
TODAY on this approach. This real-time approach
-- in which we imported examples from breaking
geologic events during the semester and enfolded them
in the experiments and assignments -- seems to have
Scott Samson
The past year was a very busy one for the
isotope geochemistry group. After trips to England and
Germany to ‘shop’ for mass spectrometers, I decided
to purchase one from the English company Isotopx.
The new instrument arrived in May 2010 and after a
too-exciting evening we had it off the loading dock
and up on the third floor (see action photo!). Most
of the summer is dedicated to thoroughly testing the
instrument (with the occasional break to watch world
cup soccer matches). The instrument is truly state-ofthe-art
and we encourage all alumni, potential new
students, and friends of the Department to come and
see the new laboratory.
As for ongoing research we continue to
pursue our detrital zircon studies, including getting
a grant from the US Geological Survey to study
earliest Cambrian sandstones from the length of the
Appalachians – one of many projects PhD student

Aaron Satkoski is working on. We are also continuing
with detrital monazite and garnet studies. We were
very pleased to have undergraduate Cheryl Nath, who
is doing a minor in Earth Sciences, join our group
this past year to work with PhD student Jack Hietpas
on garnet chemistry. Cheryl and Jack presented their
of Skaneateles Lake this spring, and his results are
contributing significantly to our understanding of
bottom habitats and invasive species of that Finger
Lake system. Graduate students Xuewei Zhang
A collective sigh of relief as the mass spectrometer
makes it from the loading dock to the third floor of
Heroy. (l-r: Ted Dasgupta, Jack Heitpas, Damian
Tootle (IsotopX) and Aaron Satkoski)
results at the joint NE-SE GSA meeting in Baltimore.
Jack’s research on detrital monazite was not only
published in the February issue of GEOLOGY, but his
paper was chosen as the topic of Research Focus in
that issue – well done Jack!
In terms of geological meetings I was delighted
to see alumna Patricia Clay, now a PhD candidate at
The Open University in England, at the Volcanic and
Magma Studies Group (VMSG) meeting in Glasgow,
Scotland in January. As Patricia was my undergraduate
advisee, I was particularly pleased to see her win the
Geoff Brown Award for best scientific poster!
Christopher Scholz
Our Quaternary paleolimnology group has
been busy this year with lots of new faces arriving,
others departing, and plenty of new field work
underway, mainly on Lake Turkana in the northern
Kenya Rift Valley. After nearly a decade at Syracuse
– first as a double major undergraduate, and then
as a graduate student - Bob Lyons successfully
defended a Ph.D. dissertation focused on the Lake
Malawi scientific drill cores. He has several papers
published or in the works from his dissertation, as he
pursues new horizons with Chevron-New Ventures.
MA student Robert Gobell wrapped up his studies
Research group aboard the Kilindi
(most recently at Anadarko –China), Amy Morrissey
(University of Missouri), and Tonny SSerubiri (most
recently from the Uganda Petroleum Exploration and
Production Department) all settled into new research
projects this year.
As our Lake Turkana field work kicked into
high-gear this winter, Amy and Tonny joined Chris,
post-docs Jennifer Hargrave and Melissa Hicks, and
technical staff Jacqueline Corbett, Peter Cattaneo,
Jack Greenberg, Douglas Wood, Phil Arnold and
30 Kenyan colleagues on an extended offshore field
program. As the largest lake in the world in a desert,
Turkana poses numerous challenges - including
vicious winds, extreme isolation and lots of crocodiles
- making small research-vessel data collection a new
candidate for an X-games extreme sport. The R/V
Lake Turkana storm.
Kilindi, our 40’ modular catamaran skippered by
Jack Greenberg, collected 46 piston cores, vibrocores

and dredge samples during the field program, from
a variety of environments in Lake Turkana’s South
Basin. The 24-foot zodiac Hurricane inflatable
was skippered by Douglas Wood, and this versatile
vessel was fully outfitted for collecting sidescan
sonar, CHIRP high-resolution seismic and small
airgun seismic reflection data. It was also helpful for
investigate the geochemistry of Taihu Lake the water
supply for tens of millions of people. This research
collaboratively ties SU’s Earth Science Department
with the Biology and Oceanography departments
in three universities in China, including Nanjing
University. My new PhD student, Xiangyu Mu, heads
up this effort.
Tied to my new interest in large lakes, I
received funding from the Dean to mount an AGU
Chapman Conference at SU on: “Environmental
Intersections of Urbanization and Lakes.” I hope
to attract major speakers from around the world
to this conference. Last year I was also appointed
as Chairman of the National Water Science and
Technology Board of the National Research Council
(the working arm of the NAS). I expect to be traveling
around the nation advising committees on multiple
water quality and quantity problems as part of this
task.
Windy?! Try it with contacts! (Jacqueline
Corbett and Melissa Hicks).
transporting the onshore geoscience team to remote
outcrop areas and as a back-up boat to the larger and
slower Kilindi. The region of the Turkana Rift is the
original homeland for our own species, and all these
new data sets will contribute to new discoveries, and
to understanding the past environmental variability of
this remarkable system.
Donald Siegel
This past year, I have gotten into the public
arena while spending time educating people on the
science of the shale bed methane--as well as the
pseudoscience being presented as science by some.
The Natural Gas industry wishes to produce trillions of
cubic feet of gas from the New York and Pennsylvania
Marcellus and Utica Shale formations. I have advised
the USEPA and the State of New York DEC on this
matter, and have been speaking on various media
outlets at many levels about the process. I also hope to
initiate a large scale research program, in collaboration
with the Jackson School of the University of Texas, to
forensically characterize the fluids produced with the
methane throughout the nation to be able to clearly
evaluate potential contamination in the future of water
supplies.
Along with ongoing peatland research of
now 35 years (!), I have initiated this year a new
multidisciplinary research program in China to
The next “Iron Chef”?
As part of my Meredith Professorship, I am
now focusing more on different kinds of teaching
initiatives for the Department and University. For
example, after 28 years, I handed over the reigns of
my core hydrogeology class to Dr. Laura Lautz, and
my Earth Science class for non-science major students
to others in the Department. I now teach an Honors

Course on “World Water”, and will be teaching a new
large lower division course on “The Science of Water”
for the A&S curriculum. I plan to take undergraduate
students to China in May 2011 to see firsthand the
major water problems that nation has to deal with.
Finally, I insist on mentioning that last May,
I took a comprehensive exam in the culinary arts at
the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu.
There, I was the first westerner invited to give a
Chinese-style cooking demonstration to the master
chef of the Institute. Video of the demo will be on
Youtube sometime in the fall. The Institute’s master
Chef commented that my knife skills were excellent,
and that my presentation and order of cooking in
the massive wok were fine. As to the taste, the Chef
was sufficiently satisfied to invite both Bette and me
(for baking) to give a set of presentations on western
cooking. My appraisal was a “C” grade--but I passed!
Bruce Wilkinson
This past year, I became a paleontologist. For
the past couple of decades, I have been making light
of stratigraphic types who see “cycles” in sedimentary
successions (Emperor’s New Clothes). One way
to look at the issue is to measure vertical distances
between supposed cycle bottoms (e.g. sandstone bases
of Carboniferous “cyclothems”). If indeed periodic,
then distances should look like waiting times at a bus
stop; regular recurrences in space or time. But, it
turns out that “cycle” recurrence is largely random;
cycle base separations are unpredictable, like the
durations between goals in a World Cup soccer match
turns out that patches of different carbonate facies
across a depositional region like the Persian Gulf or
the Bahamas is also well-described as being largely
random; areas of patches are much like the pieces of
a broken plate; lots of small pieces, relatively few big
areas. Sizes of countries look exactly the same.
This all bears on paleontology because
numbers of smaller fossil groups belonging to larger
fossil groups (taxonomic membership frequencies)
exhibit exactly the same distributions; groups with
fewer numbers of subtaxa are more common than
those with more subtaxa. Why should a broken plate
model of random division of geographic depositional
area also serve to describe taxonomic memberships?
The reason may be that taxonomic identity (e.g.
Mammalia, Primates, Hominidae, Homo sapiens) is
dependent on morphological attributes; on the basis
of what an organism looks like. Just as depositional
surfaces are partitioned among different facies, the
division of biologic morphospace serves as the basis
of classification for various organisms. Fun stuff.
Taxonomic membership distributions resemble the
distribution of fragments of a broken plate.
or the decay of radioactive elements; lots of short
durations, few relatively long waiting times. That
brings up the related question: if vertical stratigraphic
distances are random, what do horizontal areas of
sediment on modern surfaces look like? Well, it

EMERITUS CORNER
James Brower
I have just completed a study of the
paleoecology of the crinoids and other suspension
feeding echinoderms from the Upper Ordovician
(Trenton Group) Walcott-Rust Quarry near Trenton
Falls, New York. The quarry represents a classic
classic Lagerstätte that contains the most diversified
Ordovician fauna in New York State. Approximately
75 species are known, belonging to seven phyla and
three problematic groups. The exquisite preservation
reveals detailed information about the life history and
paleoecology of the fauna.
Two crowns of the camerate crinoid Rhaphanocrinus
simplex several associated bryozoans, and a trilobite
with incrusting bryozoans. The height of the stem
and larger crown is about 14 cm.
The crinoid and rhombiferan assemblages lived
at the base of a carbonate ramp in moderately
deep water, which was below wave base for all or
most storms but still within the photic zone. The
inhabitants of the soft substrate were buried rapidly
by distal carbonate turbidity currents or mudflows.
Because of the episodic sedimentation, the organisms
were opportunistic. The suspension feeding
echinoderms include nine crinoids, a rhombiferan,
and a paracrinoid. They occur with a variety of
filter feeding bryozoan colonies, a few brachiopods,
and numerous trilobites. Most suspension feeding
echinoderms were attached by small holdfasts to hard
shelly substrates, some of which lay on the seafloor,
whereas others may have been elevated when the
larvae settled. Other types of holdfasts are distal
stems that are tightly and permanently coiled around
crinoid stems, open distal stem coils that lay on the
substrate or were wrapped around soft objects, and
recumbent stems running along the seafloor. The
echinoderms occupied levels from the seafloor to
almost a meter above it, whereas the bryozoans and
brachiopods ranged from the seabed to a maximum
height of about 10 cm. The sizes of the echinoderm
food grooves and comparisons with their modern
analogues along with filtration theory indicate that
they ate food particles that were mostly larger than
those taken by bryozoans. In general, the different
taxa of suspension feeding echinoderms living at
the same elevation above the seafloor collected food
particles of different maximum sizes; however, they
overlapped greatly with respect to smaller food items.
The various crinoid species were able to feed at
different ranges of ambient current velocities, which
also tended to separate them ecologically. Crinoids
having narrow food grooves were restricted to feeding
on small food particles, but they caught food items
over a wide range of current velocities; the converse is
also true, which suggests an evolutionary or behavioral
tradeoff. As in most Ordovician crinoid communities,
predation was comparatively low. Regenerated arms
in crinoids reflect predation on less than two percent
of the individuals in the fauna, and the most likely
fossilized culprits are trilobites and straight nautiloids.
Competition for space and attachment sites within
and between species of the Walcott-Rust Quarry
crinoid and rhombiferan assemblages does not seem
to have been significant in regulating their ecological
structure. Comparison with shallow-water crinoid
assemblages of roughly the same age demonstrates
that the Walcott-Rust Quarry faunas were less diverse
and less complex, possibly reflecting lower average
current velocities, the episodic sedimentological
disturbances, higher suspended sediment content in
the water, and softer substrates.
Marion (Pat) Bickford
Although I have been retired since 1997,
I continue to enjoy an active professional life. I
have an active research program in collaboration
with Abhijit Basu (Indiana University) to study the
chronology of the Chhattisgarh Basin in peninsular
India. Chhattisgarh is one of a number of so-called
“Purana” basins, all of which have previously been
thought to be latest Neoproterozoic (ca. 500-600 Ma).
Chhattisgarh has accumulated more than 2 km of
sediment, including sandstones, shale, and carbonate
units, all of which are completely unmetamorphosed
and mostly undeformed, a remarkable circumstance
for any Precambrian basin. About 4 years ago we

dated a rhyolitic tuff near the top of the succession
at 1000 Ma, thus establishing that the basin is
Mesoproterozoic. This was published in 2007
(Patranabis-Deb, Sarbani, Bickford, M. E., Hill,
Barbara, Chaudhuri, Asru K., and Basu, Abhijit, 2007,
SHRIMP ages of zircons in the uppermost tuff in
Chattisgarh Basin in central India require ~500 Ma
adjustment in Indian Proterozoic stratigraphy; Journal
of Geology, v. 115, p. 407-415.)
We have also dated detrital zircon populations
in several of the sandstones, determining the sediment
provenance and depositional history; a paper detailing
with these studies is under review for the Journal of
Geology (Depositional History of the Chhattisgarh
Basin, Central India: Constraints from New SHRIMP
Zircon Ages: M. E. Bickford, Abhijit Basu, Sarbani
Patranabis-Deb, and Pratap C. Dhang; under review
for Journal of Geology). The depositional history also
has important tectonic significance, and yet another
paper is under review for Precambrian Research
(Timing of assembly and break-up of India-East
Antarctica: Constraints from detrital zircon and
monazite geochronology of Proterozoic sedimentary
rocks in central India; Abhijit Basu and M. E.
Bickford). I have done the dating through use of the
SHRIMP instrument at Stanford University.
Another major activity is my work as Science
Editor for Books for the Geological Society of
America. I am now in my fifth (and final) year of
this work, in which I work with various authors
and editors, worldwide, to produce GSA Special
Papers and Memoirs on a wide variety of topics.
Interestingly, Don
Siegel became my
co-editor about three
years ago. We are
ably assisted by Mrs.
Joanne Ranz, our
Editorial Assistant.
This appointment
has also brought
me membership in
the Publications
Committee of GSA.
Much more
important than these
professional activities
are my time with Betsy,
Pat relaxes with his guitar
my wife of 55 years, our three children, and our four
grandchildren.
Geological Society of America Books Edited at Syracuse University
Beginning in January 2005, The Department of earth Sciences
became the home for the editorial offices of GSA Books.
Science Editors M. E. (Pat) Bickford and Don Siegel handle
publication of both Special Papers and Memoirs for the
Geological Society of America. Special Papers are booklength
publications on a diversity of geological topics that are
expected to have a “shelf-life” of at least five years. Memoirs
are expected to have a shelf-life of at least ten years. Typically,
scientists wishing to publish books with GSA will propose
either to assemble, as editors, a book with multi-authored
chapters, or to submit a long manuscript written by one or more
authors. If the proposal is accepted, editors of multi-authored
books will solicit chapters and arrange for reviews, or in the
case of manuscripts written by one or more authors, the science
editors will arrange for reviews. The Science Editors have
the responsibility of insuring that submitted books meet the
scientific standards of GSA.
Science Editors Bickford and Siegel are ably assisted by
Editorial Assistant Joanne Ranz, who keeps records of books
in preparation, communicates with editors and authors, arranges submitted books for the review of the Science
Editors, and sends accepted volumes to GSA Headquarters in Boulder, Colorado for publication. The editorial
office is located in room 305 Heroy, between Siegel’s office in 307 Heroy and Bickford’s office in 304 Heroy.

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY ROCKS & ROLLS
Story by: Daniel Curewitz
An interesting occurrence on June 23, 2010
(coincidentally, my daughter’s birthday) saw a
somewhat surprising
change in the behavior
of the normally
solid, quiescent earth
beneath the City of
Syracuse … The early
afternoon of that day
was interrupted by a
rush of students and
faculty into the halls
(and outside!) as
the building started
Zoe Curewitz - Birthday girl!
swaying, shelves rattling,
chairs rolling around… “What’s that!??” The calls
started rolling into the office, several professors
(Baldwin and Karson in particular) made cameo
appearances on local TV and radio programs, and the
questions from students, faculty and staff came fast
and furious. My 10 years in Tokyo came back in a rush
… “It’s a small earthquake somewhat far from us!”
1) the Grenville mountain building event about 1
billion years ago, followed by
2) the opening of the Iapetus Ocean about 600
million years ago, which then was closed by
3) the collision between North America,
Eurasia, and Africa to form Pangea, and the
Appalachian mountain chain about 400 to 200
million years ago, and lastly,
4) the opening of the present day Atlantic Ocean
starting about 200 million years ago
All of these events left large scars, cracks, fractures,
volcanic rocks and rift basins behind that have shaped
the geography and geology of the East Coast of the
Jeffrey Karson appearing on local Channel 9 News.
A small office pool was quickly organized,
seeing who could best predict the size and location
of the earthquake. (Congrats to Jim Metcalf!) It turns
out that there was a magnitude 5 earthquake about
200 miles north of the city, in Canada along the St.
Lawrence River valley. Surprising? Not really. The St.
Lawrence River valley is actually set in a rift system
that is a remnant of several tectonic cycles (Wilson
Cycles, named for famed geophysicist/geologist J.
Tuzo Wilson) of opening and closing of oceans:
The earthquake was centered near Ottowa, Canada.
US – the Connecticut River, the Hudson River, the St.
Lawrence River and many more rivers and basins from
Nova Scotia to Georgia are reflections of that billion
year history. Where the Earth’s outer shell is cracked,
thinned, and rifted, it is easier for small stresses to
cause earthquakes. The St. Lawrence region from
Upstate NY and Ontario through Quebec, Vermont,
New Hampshire, Maine and into the Canadian
Maritime provinces is actually host to quite a few
(mostly small) earthquakes every year. There have
been several quite large events, as large as magnitude
6.7 (1925) or estimated magnitude 7 (1663) have taken
place in the region. For interesting information and
excellent visual aids visit http://earthquakescanada.
nrcan.gc.ca/zones/eastcan-eng.php (but I wouldn’t
worry too much about “the big one” it’s pretty stable
here in the middle part of the continent!)

Northern Appalachian Fieldtrip
amphibolite facies metapelitic rocks (metamorphosed
shales) in the Casco Bay area. There we made
petrologic and structural observations that allowed
estimation of pressure-temperature conditions of
metamorphism, and interpretation of the geologic and
tectonic history of the area.
In April the combined Petrology and Tectonics
classes, along with several graduate students, took a
field trip to examine the Paleozoic eastern margin of
North America (Laurentia), as well as the composite
Paleozoic magmatic arc terranes and accreted
continental Avalon terrane of eastern MA and ME.
The trip was jointly led by Emeritus Professor M.
E. (Pat) Bickford, Professor Suzanne Baldwin, and
Departmental Chairman Jeff Karson.
On Friday, April 23 the group examined the
Pleasant Bay, ME igneous complex, a major gabbroic
pluton first studied by Bickford, as his doctoral
dissertation research, in the late 1950s. Evidence for
magmatic processes such as rhythmic layering and
magma-mixing between gabbroic and granitic magmas
were studied. Mt. Desert Island, in Acadia National
Park was also visited to examine granitic plutons and
associated volcanic rocks.
On Sunday, April 25 the group was joined
by alum Mike Thonis, of Wellesley, Massachusetts.
The field study moved westward through the
Jurassic Connecticut River Valley rift system, and
to a talc mine where mantle remnants within a
suture zone were examined, and finally on into the
Mesoproterozoic Berkshire massif.
On Saturday, April 24, Professor Baldwin
led the group in a study of beautifully exposed
Throughout the field trip, students assessed
the tectonic setting in which the rocks were formed.
Chairman Karson, in particular, made abundant use
of a large white board and numerous colored pens to
draw cross sections that made for lively discussions of
the interpretation of field observations!

GRADUATES – Undergraduate
Bachelor of Arts
Phillip G. Curtis
Yexary M. Rodriguez
Bachelor of Science
Elani J. Kimler
Morgan J. Kortlander
Curtis W. Bixler
GRADUATES – Graduate
Master of Arts
Emily B. Feinberg
Master of Science
Jessica L. Meeks
Doctor of Philosophy in Earth Sciences
Robert P. Lyons
Bryan K. Sell
Departmental Awards
Undergraduate Awards
Faye E. Merriam Award
(Undergraduate major for academic achievement,
extra-curricular contributions, and professional
promise)
Curtis W. Bixler
Thomas Cramer Hopkins Award
(Outstanding junior or senior major in Geology)
Danielle K. Hare
Estwing Award
(Oustanding Earth Sciences student)
Dale C. Ringham
Graduate Awards
Newton E. Chute Award
(Outstanding graduate student for scholarship, service
to the Department and professional promise)
Aaron M. Satkoski
Marjorie Hooker Award
(Outstanding Thesis Proposal)
Nasser A. Zirakparvar
Chairman’s Award
Drew L. Siler
K. Douglas Nelson Award
(Outstanding Graduate Research in Geophysics and
Tectonics)
Andrew J. Horst
John J. Prucha Award
(Support for student field research projects)
Aaron M. Satkoski
Andrew J. Horst
Jack Hietpas
Steven J. Riccio
Student Publication Award
Martin A. Briggs
David J. Gombosi
Jack Hietpas
Aaron M. Satkoski
Drew L. Siler
Joshua P.Taylor
Nasser A. Zirakparvar
The entire Department of Earth Sciences congratulates
all of our graduates (and their families) and our award
winners.

ALUMNI NEWS
Khalifa Abdulla (M.S. ’83)
Khalifa will give the keynote address, “Reviewing
the latest policy developments for the Libyan
mining industry”, at the international MENA Mining
Conference 2010 in Dubai this upcoming October.
The address will present an overview of the regulatory
developments and investment trends in Libya, and the
regulatory outlook and foreign investment policies for
the exploration and mining sector in the country. He
has had a tremendous career in economic minerals,
and is currently Chairman of the National
Mining Corporation of Libya.
Nick Azzolina (M.S. ’05)
Today Nick is a Hydrogeologist with Foth
Infrastructure & Environment, LLC in Green Bay,
WI. Life is busy for the Azzolina family (Nick & Julie
foreground and their three great children on vacation
at Custer State Park).
Susannah Ceraldi (B.S. ’01)
Susannah is finishing up
year 3 of teaching Urban
Ecology at a high school
in Brooklyn. She says
it is now hard even to
recall back when she was
just beginning this new
endeavor, after having
served in admissions
at the Sea Education
Association in Woods
Hole and in a science
education camp in the Bay Area. Susannah writes, “I
absolutely LOVE teaching, having a blast.”
Patricia Clay (B.S. ’04)
Patricia
defended
her thesis,
entitled ‘Ar-
Ar Dating of
Young Volcanic
Glass’ this past
March, and
was awarded
her PhD degree
May 2010.
Her research
focused mainly on the application of Ar-Ar
geochronology to volcanic glass from diverse
eruptive environments, and correlating the Ar-isotope
information with chemistry, volatile contents, etc.
She plans to submit a paper or two for publication in
the next few months. Patricia just started a new job
on Monday at the University of Manchester in the
Isotope Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry group
for a two year PDRA position. She’s working on
correlated chronology (Ar-Ar, I-Xe, Rb-Sr) of enstatite
chondrites. Patricia received her BS from SU and MS
from BU where she worked with Ethan Baxter.
Matthew Heumann (B.S. ‘02, M.S. ‘04)
Matthew J. Heumann
successfully defended
his PhD dissertation at
the University of Utah
on Sept. 3rd. The title
of his dissertation is
“Paleozoic-Cenozoic
Evolution of the East
Gobi Fault Zone,
Southern Mongolia: A
Protracted Record of
Intracontinental Deformation
and Basin
Evolution, With Implications
For Tectonics
of Eurasia”. Matt
will start working for

ConocoPhillips in the Exploration side of the company
beginning in October 2010. Recall that Matt received
his BS and MS from our dept.
Douglas Patchen (Ph.D. ’72)
Doug has recently
retired from the
West Virginia
Geological Survey,
where he had an
extraordinarily
successful career
for 43 years, as
one of the movers
and shakers
in developing
hydrocarbon
resources of the
East. He continues
to be active
professionally. He
still has SU season tickets for football, so we look
forward to seeing him in Heroy before one of the
games this fall!
Joel Thompson (Ph.D. ’89)
Joel is professor
of Marine
Sciences at
Eckerd College,
where he has
been deeply
involved in both
interdisciplinary
sciences and
the programs
abroad. He also
has established
a lineage of
Eckerd students
who have done
publications from undergraduate research with him
on microbial processes and then have gone on to
complete doctoral research in the Earth Sciences. He
returns to central New York from time to time to visit
us. This summer, he did an intensive visit to England,
retracing the steps of Charles Darwin and others
critical to the development of evolutionary theory.
(Photo from Eckert College website)
Geraldean H. Lantier (B.S. ’01)
The Department wishes to extend its sincerest
congratulations to Geraldean H. Lantier (BS ‘01)
and her husband Greg on the arrival of their bundles
of joy, Augusteen & Ida, on March 24, 2010. If
Geraldean were not busy enough, she is also the owner
of Skaneateles 300 a women’s boutique in beautiful
Skaneateles, New York.
Michael Tedeschi (B.S. ‘06)
Michael Tedeschi
received his MSc
in May 2010 from
Colorado School
of Mines. The
title of his thesis
was “Geology of
the Cerro Verde
Iron Oxide-Copper-Gold
Prospect:
San Javier,
Sonora, Mexico”.
Mike is currently
employed with
Alaska Earth Sciences
out in the
Kuskokwim region of south west Alaska doing gold
exploration. Mike received his BSc from our department.
This photo of Mike as an undergraduate- with a
smile as wide as the ocean- is of him collecting uvite
crystals on a mineralogy trip in the Adirondacks.
We at the Department of Earth Sciences would love to
hear from (or about) any and all of our alums. Send us
a note, or a picture, stop by for a visit! Contact Julie
Neri email: jjneri@syr.edu

In Memoriam
John F. Heaney
John F. Heaney, 81, died Sunday, August 22,
at Crouse Hospital. He was a life resident of Syracuse.
He retired from the U.S. Postal Service as a letter carrier
from the Colvin St. Station. He was a parishioner
of St. Andrew the Apostle until its closing in 2006. He
was predeceased by his wife, Rosemary, in 2002 and
his brother, James, Heaney Jr. in 1998. He is survived
by his sisters, Joyce Heaney and Blanche Mosher of
Phoenix, NY, and Jane Carr of Liverpool, NY, and
his brother, Thomas, of Syracuse. He is also survived
by his sister-in-law, Julie Sharpe of Skaneateles, and
several nieces, nephews and friends.
John’s trademark was his compassion and generosity.
John was a generous donor to the Department
of Earth Sciences, and his presence will be sorely
missed. (from the Syracuse Post Standard, August 25,
2010)
Samuel Thomas Pees
Samuel Thomas Pees, 83, of Meadville, PA,
respected geologist, oil field historian, writer and lecturer,
died Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009, at Meadville Medical
Center.
Born Nov. 16, 1926, in Meadville, Sam Pees
was the son of Henry Chester and Dorothy M. Cook
Pees. A 1944 graduate of Meadville High School, Sam
graduated in 1950 from Allegheny College with a
bachelor of science in geology and in 1959 from Syracuse
University with a master of science in geology.
He also attended Colorado College, Colorado Springs,
Colo., and the University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Okla.
He served in the U.S. Army in the Philippines
and South Korea during World War II. After the
war in 1948, he worked in the Cape Yakataga area of
Alaska with the U.S. Geological Survey. Beginning
in 1953, Sam worked as a petroleum geologist for
leading petroleum and oil companies, traveling extensively
to South America, including Venezuela, Peru
and Argentina; southeast Asia, including Indonesia;
Australia; and the South Pacific. In 1978, Sam opened
an oil and gas consulting company (Samuel T. Pees &
Associates) in Meadville, which specialized in deep
gas exploration in the northern Appalachian Basin. He
retired in 1998.
Sam Pees was a prolific writer of geological
and historical papers, which were published in numerous
journals, including the Petroleum History Institute
Journal, the American Association of Petroleum
Geologists Bulletin, and Pennsylvania Geology. He
also contributed numerous ideas, research and text
for bronze historical markers placed by the Pennsylvania
Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC)
commemorating significant individuals, events and
landmarks in northwestern Pennsylvania. Sam enjoyed
exploring the Oil Creek valley, where he documented
and photographed the artifacts of the early oil industry
that thrived around Titusville and Oil City. He served
as president of the Drake Well Foundation for several
years.
Sam Pees also shared his knowledge, insights
and findings through lectures. He was an engaging
speaker and educator, thanks to his passionate interest
in his subject. He was a member of the American
Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) and
received its highest honors. In 1987 and 1996, he was
awarded the AAPG George V. Cohee Public Service
Award, which recognizes distinguished service and
achievement. In 2000, he received the AAPG John
T. Galey Memorial Award. In 2003, Sam Pees was
recognized for lifetime achievement in the oil and gas
industry with the Col. Edwin L. Drake Oilman award
from the Petroleum History Institute. In addition,
Pees was a Senior Fellow of the Geological Society of
America and a trustee of the Paleontological Research
Institute. He compiled an extensive international art
collection. Portions of his collection have been exhibited
in many institutions. Parts of his collection
have been donated to Syracuse University, Allegheny
College and other organizations. (from the Meadeville
Tribune, Dec. ‘09)
The Department of Earth Sciences wishes to
pass along our condolences and best wishes to the
family and friends of these important members of our
extended academic family.

New Arrivals!
There are several brand new members of the Earth Science community!
Congratulations go out to Greg Hoke and his wife
Barbara on the arrival of Teodor Krzysztof Hoke on
Monday, May 24, 2010 at 14:16, he weighed 5 lbs 14
oz (2.66 kg) and measured 19 in (48.26 cm).
Graduate student Tonny Sserubiri met his daughter,
Eliana Godriver Nassiwa, for the first time after
returning to Africa with his advisor, Professor Christopher
Scholz, while they were doing research at Lake
Turkana, Kenya.
On My Own Time
Syracuse University has a program that it runs every year called “On My Own Time” where faculty, students
and staff submit their original artwork and are judged by all the visitors to the exhibit. The winners are put
on display for a month at the downtown Everson Museum. We are pleased to show off the entries from Earth
Sciences that were on display.
Alina Walcek’s oil pastel, titled Henry Lawson,
drawing was one of the winners and was on display.
Scott Samson: Photography and geology go hand
in hand, and Professor Scott Samson’s passion for
photography has landed this photo from Tasmania on
the cover of this year’s EAR 101 textbook.

Save the Date!
GSA 2010 – Alumni Reception
On November 1, 2010 the Department of Earth Sciences will host an alumni reception at the Geological
Society of America National Meeting in Denver, CO. Our reception will be at 7:00pm in the Hilton Regency
across the street from the Convention Center.
Hotel Address
Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center
650 15th Street,
Denver, Colorado, USA 80202
Tel: +1 303 436 1234 Fax: +1 303 486 4450
Directions
FROM DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
(approximately 23 miles)
Take Pena Blvd to I-70 West. Take I-70 West to I-25
South; exit at Colfax Avenue ( exit #210a) Take a left off
the exit ramp, heading East, to Welton Street. Turn left onto
Welton St. Proceed 3.5 blocks and turn left onto 15 th Street.
Make an immediate left into hotel’s circle drive.
In recognition of our own Man in Black’s birthday, the faculty, students and staff honored Jeff Karson’s sartorial
habits last fall with a wear black day!

Annual Fall Pignic
Hosted by
Drs. Ivany and Wilkinson
High Valley Farm
Erieville, NY

Syracuse University
Department of Earth Sciences
204 Heroy Geology Lab
Syracuse, NY 13244
Save the Date!! -- Homecoming 2010
OCTOBER 16, 2010
On October 16, 2010 the Department of Earth Sciences will once again host an alumni reception in the lobby
of Heroy Geology Laboratory beginning at 11:00am. Please come at 10:00am if you wish a tour of the facility.
Come and reconnect with the professors past and present – we’re all looking forward to seeing you. After
visiting the Department don’t forget to head to the Carrier Dome to cheer on the Orange vs. Pittsburgh.