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Page 2 Department of Earth & Environment December 2011Faculty News UpdatesTim Bechtel (visiting scholar and adjunct)Hard to believe another year has flown by. I am still delighted to be at F&M. Felicia hassuccessfully steered the Geophysics business through a terrible economy, Ellen has declareda Geology major at Wellesley, Marian wants to join her there next year and major in Physics.(Put those two words together and what do you get ☺?) Maddie is doing mostly musicat Hempfield High School. Research on identification of plastic antipersonnel landminescontinues (we have trained a neural network to recognize them on holographic radar images),and our continued expeditions to work out the hydrogeology of a portion of the MammothCave system have raised more questions than they answered. Switzerland was purelyfor fun. (photo) That is Dan Bechtel F&M ’54 on the right.Sarah DawsonThe Wohlsen Center has had another exciting year. We’ve gotten to host a series of amazingvisiting speakers, and helped to bring an environmental workshop series to campus forthe local community. Students in my “Tooth and Claw” course wrote an illustrated book ofbeautiful fairy tales in which predators were the heroes, instead of the villains. One hundredkindergarten and first graders came to F&M to hear the stories and meet the actual animals,provided by ZooAmerica! It was a memorable day for us all. My own research students areresearching the behavior of honeybees and our local red-trailed hawks. We hope to start upa coyote research program in the coming year.Andy de WetLast summer Andy directed a Keck NSF-REU funded project with Jake Bleacher ‘00(NASA-GSFC) and Brent Garry (Smithsonian) on the origins of sinuous and braided channelson Mars. Four students including Julia Signorella (F&M ‘12) spent four weeks at F&M,NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Hawaii mapping channels on Ascraeus Mons andcomparing these features to volcanic features on Hawaii. The results of this work will bepresented at the annual LPSC in Houston and the Keck Research Symposium at AmherstCollege in 2012.Carol de WetI am still serving as Associate Dean and one of my responsibilities is working with new faculty,helping them meet our standard for excellence in teaching, and keeping their researchand scholarship on track throughout the academic year. I have also been involved in theannual Central Pennsylvania Consortium (CPC) (F&M, Dickinson & Gettysburg colleges)workshop for new faculty, as well as two CPC conferences for department chairs, and mostrecently, a CPC workshop on shared faculty governance. I am delighted to announce the successof a multi-disciplinary proposal to the Sherman Fairchild Foundation for $500,000.00 tosupport environmental science, broadly defined. This includes research and teaching in geoscience,climate change science, ecology, physics, and chemistry. The grant has allowed usto purchase a new Scanning Electron Microscope and other pieces of equipment and instrumentationthat will be used by multiple natural science departments at F&M. My researchon tufas and travertines from Tanzania and Chile is providing interesting information onPlio-Pleistocene climate conditions, and a major paper on the Cambrian Ledger Formationin York Co., PA, will be coming out in an American Assoc. of Petroleum Geologists specialvolume in 2012. For those of you who remember the little de Wet kids around the departmentin the 1990’s, Greg is now a graduate student of Ray Bradley’s at UMass, Emily is anAnthropology major at Wheaton College (Mass.) and Cameron is a junior in high school. Ilove hearing about what you all are doing so please keep sending me your news updates forthe newsletter!Candace Grand Pré ‘03 (visiting)Professor Grand Pré graduated from F&M in 2003 (Geology & Astronomy) and went on toreceive her Ph.D. in Earth & Environmental Science from The University of Pennsylvaniain 2009. Her thesis was titled: The application of microfossils to reconstruct paleoenvironmentson passive and active margins: An examination of great earthquakes, hurricanes andrelative sea-level change, under advisor Dr. Benjamin P. Horton. Other research resulted inco-authorship of Late Holocene barrier island collapse: Outer Banks, North Carolina, USA(2007) in “The Sedimentary Record” (5: 4-8). She has also been co-principal investigator atthe EARTHWATCH SCAP project: Is sea level rising? from 2007 to the present.