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

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