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| Department News Faculty Search The Department has received approval from the College to initiate a search for a new faculty member to join the Department in Sept. 2003. The hire will be a tenure-track position at the level of assistant professor in the area of Quaternary Geology (for more information regarding this position, go on-line to: http://www.uc.edu/geology/geo_fac_position.html). This is one of only nine new positions that the College has approved for the current academic year, a remarkable fillip for the Department given that many academic units in the College have lost faculty in recent years (the Geology faculty has remained stable at 13 and will rise to 14 with the new hire). The Department’s success in garnering a new position is attributable to the national prominence of its academic programs and to clear articulation of a vision for its future in a recent Five-Year Plan submitted to the College. Headship Change The current Department Head, Prof. Attila Kilinc, has announced that he will step down from his position as head in August, 2003. Prof. Kilinc has served as Department Head continuously since 1989 and, before that, from 1974 to 1985. During his tenure, the Department has undergone many changes, including construction of a new building (the present Geology/Physics Building, completed in 1987), addition of seven new faculty members (Meyer, Nash, Miller, Lowell, Dietsch, Algeo, and Brett), reorganization of the undergraduate curriculum, and a substantial increase in the departmental endowment. The Dean has formed a search committee to consider candidates for the headship; applications are due Dec. 16th, 2002, and a decision is expected in early 2003. The new head will assume duties in Sept. 2003 and will have his work cut out for him to match the record of achievement established by Prof. Kilinc. Departmental Showing at Annual GSA Meeting in Denver, October 27th-30th, 2002 The Department had a fantastic turnout at the recent Annual GSA Meeting in Denver, Colorado. Many students, faculty, and alumni gave talks or posters (p) there. Abstracts and web links for these presentations are available on-line at: http://oz.uc.edu/~algeot/stuff/abstractsGSA2002.htm. The list below is almost certainly incomplete, especially with regard to presentations by alumni; if I overlooked your presentation, my apologies (drop me a note)! A highlight of the meeting was the Monday night alumni reception at the Marriott. There was quite a turnout at the U.C. station, with many old and new acquaintances made there. I personally enjoyed talking with Hans Hoffman, a former departmental faculty member, and Larry Goldman, an alumnus from about the time that I joined the Department. U.C. Geology Dept. Presentations at GSA, Denver 2002 Carlton Brett, faculty, Predation short course Frank Ettensohn, alumnus, Lexington Limestone tectonics (p) Rich Krause, M.S. student, Size of early bivalves vs. brachs Colin Sumral,l adjunct faculty, Sampling bias, rhombiferans Andre Webber, Ph.D. student, Faunal patchiness in Kope Fm Warren Huff, faculty, K-bentonites (p) David Meyer, faculty, Curacao and Bonaire reefs Sally Sutton, alumnus, Fluid mixing, Zambian copper belt Jocelyn Sessa, M.S. student, Devonian biotic turnover William Garcia, Ph.D. student, Tetrapods Keri Craven, M.S. student ,Haleakala Volcano, Hawaii (p) Patrick Applegate, B.S. student, Ohio glacial soil (p) Paul Potter, emeritus faculty, Grenville origin in South America (p) Brian Nicklen, M.S. student, Penn. clastics, Nemaha Uplift (p) Russell Kohrs, M.S. student, High-resolution paleo Thomas Algeo, facult,y Degree-of-anoxia, Penn. shales Susan Barbour, Wood M.S. student, High-resolution paleo Timothy Agnello, alumnus, Landslides in Cincinnati Arnold Miller, faculty, Seafood through time Lisa Fay, B.S. student, Hualalai Volcano Hawaii (p) Katherine Glover, M.S. student, Last glacial max Ohio (p) Kees DeJong, faculty, Structure in Pakistan (p) Patrick McLaughlin, Ph.D. student, Distribution of seismites Barry Maynard, faculty, PC atmospheric evol., S isotopes Faculty News 
Tom Algeo: I am currently working on controls on the stratigraphic architecture of the Kope Formation in collaboration with Prof. Carlton Brett, Brian Kirchner (Ph.D., ant. 2005), and Russell Kohrs (M.S., ant. 2003). In the past, the Cincinnatian Series has been interpreted as a series of limestone tempestites (storm deposits) separated by mudstone layers representing background sedimentation. However, our recent work has shown that this model is oversimplified, and that both lithologies had more complex depositional histories than previously reported. For example, most of the shelly limestones in the Kope Formation lack features commonly associated with tempestites (e.g., simple normal grading, concave valve orientation) while exhibiting other features suggestive of multiple episodes of reworking (e.g., internal amalgamation surfaces, extensive shell fragmentation and corrosion, exhumed concretions). This suggests that these limestones are "time-rich," representing prolonged episodes of reworking and condensation. Reexamination of this classic succession is offering new insights on shallow marine sedimentation processes and controls on stratigraphic accumulation. Some of our results are in a guidebook published by the Kentucky Geological Survey: Algeo and Brett, eds., 2001, Sequence, Cycle & Event Stratigraphy of Upper Ordovician & Silurian Strata of the Cincinnati Arch Region. I am also continuing work on the geochemistry of black shales with a view to understanding their origin and their role in geochemical cycling and global events. This work has led to a number of student theses and dissertations over the past five years: Jacek Jaminski (Ph.D., 1997), Patrick Mickler (M.S., 1998), Mikhail Cherny (M.S., 1998), William Hartwell (M.S., 1998), and David Hoffman (M.S., 2000); additionally, Thomas Kuhn spent a year with us at U.C. and completed his M.S. at the University of Erlangen in Germany in 1998. One aspect of black shales that particularly interests me is the origin of widespread anoxic events such as the one dating to the Middle to Late Devonian. This interval is also characterized by other events of global consequence, such as the Frasnian-Famennian mass extinction, a sharp drop in atmospheric pCO2, and strong climatic cooling leading to glaciation. I am investigating the relationship of these changes to the coeval spread of vascular land plants; in particular, whether paleobotanic developments may have contributed to elevated rates of chemical weathering and enhanced nutrient fluxes to contemporaneous shallow marine areas. One recent publication deriving from this work is: Algeo, Scheckler, and Maynard, 2000, Effects of early vascular land plants on weathering processes and global chemical fluxes during the Middle and Late Devonian; in Gensel, P., and Edwards, D., eds., Plants Invade the Land: Evolutionary and Environmental Perspectives: Columbia University Press. In recent years, I have also supervised several projects involving carbonates. Blaine Watson (M.S., 1997) studied the sequence stratigraphic distribution of aragonitic and calcitic ooids within Missourian Stage limestones of Kansas; this work provided insights on changes in the physico-chemical characteristics of seawater at a sequence scale. Eric Winhusen (M.S., 2001) studied depositional facies and oxygen isotopic compositions of Late Archean ooids from the Hamersley Basin of Australia; this work provided constraints on paleotemperatures and other conditions of formation of these deposits. For more information on any of these studies, please visit my website: http://oz.uc.edu/~algeot/index.htm. On the personal front, Andrea Dale and I were married in June, 1999, and bought a house in Clifton. Andrea works in college textbook publishing, formerly with Southwestern Publishing and now as a contract freelancer from home. We have a two-year-old son Nicholas Ryan who is, as his grandparents warned us he would be, now “lord and master” of the household. 
Carlton Brett: During this past summer, I spent a month in Australia organizing and chairing three sessions, as well as presenting a talk, at the 1st International Paleontological Congress in Sydney (July 5-11, 2002). I also attended a pre-meeting field conference run in part by one of my new Ph.D. students, Austin Hendy, on the north island of New Zealand. With graduate student Alex Bartholomew (who also presented a talk), we participated on field trips in the Broken River area (Queensland) and Canning Basin (Western Australia) regions of Australia to compare sequences and depositional environments with those in the Appalachian Basin and North American midcontinent. I gratefully acknowledge support from the U.C. Geology Department’s Walter Bucher Fund for this travel. In mid-August, I ran a field excursion as part of a summer course (GEOL 207—Historical Geology Fieldtrip) for undergraduate and graduate students in western New York and southern Ontario. The theme of this trip was facies, depositional environments, sequence stratigraphy, and foreland basin dynamics in the Silurian-Devonian succession of western New York State. Among some 30 classic sites visited were Taughannock Falls in the Finger Lakes, Niagara Falls, and the Gorge and Lake Erie cliff sections. I am pleased to report that my research funding from the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Science Foundation was renewed during the past year. The U.S.G.S.-N.Y. State Geological Survey provided a grant through the Statemap Program for fieldwork on the USGS Oran and DeRuyter 7.5' Quadrangles. This work was carried out in collaboration with two undergraduate students, Bryan Shephard and Erick Wysong, and graduate students Alex Bartholomew and Pat McLaughlin. The NSF renewed a grant (co-PI-ed with Karla Parsons Hubbard, Eric Powell, and Sally Walker) to study "Mechanisms and Rates of Preservation of Organic and Skeletal remains in Continental Shelf and Slope Environments." I was also honored to receive several awards during the past year. In September, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists conferred on me its 2001Outstanding Educator Award. Earlier in the year I was co-awarded (with Hans Peter Schonlaub and Susanne Pohler) a Senckenberg Medal for Outstanding Presentation at 15th Annual Senckenberg Conference, in Frankfurt, Germany. I am pleased to note that two of my advisees, Patrick McLaughlin and Alexander Bartholomew, completed their Master’s degrees during the past year, and that Patrick McLaughlin, now a Ph.D. student in our Department, was the recipient of a prestigious three-year University Doctoral Fellowship. 
Craig Dietsch: Business first…I continue as Director of Undergraduate Studies, ably helped by Warren, Tom Lowell, and Carl. Please let us keep up-to-date on what you are doing and where you are doing it. Send e-mail, please. The College of A&S is our master of budget cuts, “rationalizations”, and strategic plans and we need to keep getting the word out on your successes. In addition, the changes we have made to our undergraduate curriculum demand that we keep making improvements to our courses, their content, and how they are delivered. I encourage you to tell us about the strengths and weaknesses of our undergraduate program from your perspectives of life beyond the 5th and 6th floors. Thanks initially to a University Faculty Development Grant, I have been using the microprobe at UMass to do age mapping and U-Pb dating of monazite. The technique represents a significant advance in geochronology because it is rapid, much more simple than standard methods of isotope dilution mass spectrometry, and allows for in situ age determinations. The facilities there are superb and UMass geoscience faculty Mike Jercinovic and Mike Williams are outstanding collaborators. I have been trying to determine the timing of terrane accretion in southwestern New England by dating monazite in high-grade metamorphic rocks that record overthrusting and deep tectonic burial. But wait…are those ages of 569 Ma(!) real? Stay tuned…See also Chocyk-Jaminski, M. and Dietsch, C., 2002, Geochemistry and tectonic setting of metabasic rocks of the Gneiss Dome Belt, SW New England Appalachians: Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, v. 27, p. 149-167. Thanks to Marzena’s persistence, not to mention her excellent research, this paper gets it right. In teaching, a couple of years ago, Warren took advantage of rumors that Zimmer auditorium was going to be renovated and escaped teaching in that dark and gloomy cavern. We now teach three sections of GEOL 101-2-3 each quarter in 201 Braunstein (which was renovated) to about 110 students each. The students just love doing quantitative problems in my section of intro! 
Warren Huff: I am continuing to work on bentonite and K-bentonite mineralogy and stratigraphy. Janet Bertog (Ph.D., 2001) completed her Ph.D. dissertation on Cretaceous bentonites in the Sharon Springs Member of the Pierre Shale in the Western Interior, and currently holds a temporary teaching position at Miami University in Oxford, OH. Funda Toprak (M.S., ant. 2003) and Brian Nicklen (M.S., ant. 2003) are both in the process of completing their MS research projects. Funda is working on the detailed chemostratigraphy and geochronology of the Lower Silurian Osmundsberg K-bentonite in Baltoscandia. This K-bentonite is a one of a sequence of ash beds that occurs throughout Baltoscandia and parts of northern Europe. Currently available data suggest that the Osmundsberg K-bentonite represents the largest volcanic ash eruption during Silurian times. Such a widespread ash bed may be used as a unique time plane for a variety of regional geological studies. A number of samples have been collected from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Estonia, Ireland and Wales that will form the basis for a clearer assessment of regional and intra-continental chemostratigraphic correlation. Current correlation is based on uncertain biostratigraphic data. However, the Osmundsberg contains mineralogical and chemical characteristics whose preliminary investigation suggest a potential for high-resolution regional correlation in sections in Sweden as well as Norway, Estonia, Denmark, and Great Britain. Brian is establishing a ramp to basin stratigraphic framework using K-bentonite correlations in the Permian Guadalupian Series of west Texas. The Permian Capitan reef complex of the Guadalupe Mountains and with the hydrocarbon production potential of the area, controversy still remains regarding stratigraphic correlation and specific sequence stratigraphic boundaries within the depositional system. Of these controversies, shelf-to-basin correlation issues stand to gain the most from this study. Bentonite beds can be chemically fingerprinted and subsequently correlated over local, regional, and global scales. To date, bentonite beds and proposed bentonite beds have been described in both the shelfal and basinal units of the Permian Capitan reef complex. In the basinal strata, bentonite beds generally overlie carbonate members of the three formations within the Delaware Mountain Group. It is important to note that, although chemical and mineralogical data exists, there is a noticeable dearth in information regarding not only the Manzanita beds, but also beds in shelfal strata and those seen up- and down section in the basin. This study aims to identify key physical and chemical parameters that will allow for shelf-to-basin and intrabasinal correlation of the bentonite beds, leading to subsequent refinement of current applied sequence stratigraphic models. I continue to collaborate with my colleagues Stig Bergström (OSU) and Dennis Kolata (Illinois Survey) plus South American colleagues on the Ordovician tectonic history of the Argentine Precordillera, and on C-13 chemostratigraphy in the Middle and Late Ordovician of N. America and northern Europe. 
Tom Lowell: My research and over the last several years has been directed towards understanding the interplay between glaciers and climate. This is taken on renewed interest because of the recent emphasis in the understanding of timing and mechanisms of so-called to the abrupt climate changes. These appear to be a highly amplified during glacial conditions but apparently an underlying rhythm exists in both glacial and non-glacial times. To contribute toward this end we are trying to understand the chronology of glacial behavior in the middle latitudes of both polar hemispheres. Our long-standing work in the Lake District of Chile was wrapped up a couple of years ago and moved operations to the Southern Alps of New Zealand. There we have been attacking the glacial chronology and environmental reconstruction for a series of times slices including the last glacial maximum, the end of the last ice age, the climate reversals after the end of the last ice age and for the first time attacking the so-called Little Ice Age. The apparent worldwide expansion and contraction of glaciers over the last few hundred years seems to reflect a general cooling and warming trend that sets the stage for the current warming of the globe. The opportunity to study this recent event in New Zealand has augmented our study of past glacial changes. Toward that end, Katie Schoenenberger (M.S., 2001) completed a master's thesis by undertaking the data of moraine complexes around the Godley and Claussen Glaciers with lichen techniques. Last winter Janelle Sikorski (B.S., 2001) undertook a senior thesis by study of the moraines outside the Little Ice Age limit. The opportunity to study glacial landforms less than a few hundred years old has certainly changed our perspective of how some of these features formed during the Ice Age in Ohio. To augment the emerging record from the Southern Hemisphere it has become necessary to better document the retreat pattern of glacial systems here along the southern margin of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. In this effort the last two summers we have been involved with the Keck Geology Consortium summer field program for the training of undergraduate students. As a group project the effort was to understand the chronology and timing of ice margins retreat. However each basin tells a story and Lisa King (B.S., 2002) and Patrick Applegate (B.S., 2003) studied two sedimentary sequences recovered from depressions on top of the glacial drift. In addition to Katie Glover (M.S., ant. 2003), who is making environmental reconstructions from a core near Mechanicsburg, two new Ph.D. students, Kelly LaBlanc, and Alexander Stewart (B.S., U.C. 2000) are ramping up to investigate the distributions of land forms associated with subglacial processes. 
Barry Maynard: Some of our long-standing projects are winding up and some radically new ones are beginning. AAPG will soon publish the last of the papers that Almerio Franca (Ph.D., 1987), Paul Potter, and I have been doing on the Botucatu Sandstone of Brazil. It's a very deep freshwater-bearing formation that we think is an important model for secondary porosity formation. Adam Flege (M.S., 2001) has completed a nice piece of work on constructed wetlands for control of acid mine drainage in Indiana and Ohio, which we presented at SE GSA in Lexington, Kentucky. I continue to work with Sally Sutton (Ph.D., 1987), who is at Colorado State University, on clastic rocks from the Precambrian of southern Africa. She made presentations on our work recently at the IAGOD conference in Namibia and at GSA in Denver. Erika Elswick (Ph.D., 1998) is on the faculty at Indiana University and we recently published a paper on thermal maturity of some rocks from the Jurassic of Cuba in Coal Geology (v. 47, p. 161-170). New projects are work on Neoproterozoic deposits of China and scaling of water distribution systems. I know these couldn't sound more different, but they actually involve very similar chemistries. The Chinese deposits are Mn ores and black shales that were originally worked on by Tie-bing Liu (Ph.D., 1988) for his thesis, but he and I are now revisiting these samples with help from John Alten (B.S., 2002). They have extraordinary sulfur isotopic compositions, up to + 60 ‰ (see our abstract in the proceedings from the Denver GSA). The Geophysical Lab people will be studying them for signs of fractionation of the other isotopes (33S and 36S), which is the hot new technique for studying Precambrian atmospheric conditions. The pipe scale problem involves USEPA and the Cincinnati water works and deals with several questions including excessive CaCO3 build up in the Cincinnati system, Pb oxide formation (thesis work by Kym Stonesifer working jointly with Craig Dietsch), and As incorporation into Fe oxide scales. The Fe oxide scales turn out to have startlingly high S contents as both native S and as pyrite, which was totally unexpected, and we are initiating S isotopic studies of those samples. We speculate that As may be controlled by solid solution in the S phases rather than adsorption onto the Fe oxides as everyone has thought. On the home front, my wife Emmaly and I are now more than a year out from a kidney transplant (from me to her) and things have gone wonderfully. Our son Jim is in Seattle working for ADIC, a computer peripheral manufacturer, and our daughter Lisa is here in town with Great American Insurance (owners of the Reds!).  Dave Meyer: I spent most of the summer in Cincinnati, writing two papers dealing with the coral reefs of Curaçao where I have been working with my grad students for a long time, most recently with Pete Lask (Ph.D., abd 2000), Jill Bries (M.S., 2001), and Allison Cornett (M.S., abt 2002). These papers were developed from Jill Bries’ Masters thesis, completed last year. This work is leading me into some new research on the effects of hurricanes on preservation of reef facies in the fossil record. Over the summer another paper resulting from the collaboration between me, Arnie Miller, alums Steve Holland and Ben Dattilo was published in the Journal of Paleontology: Crinoid distribution and feeding morphology through a depositional sequence: Kope and Fairview Formations, Upper Ordovician, Cincinnati Arch region, Journal of Paleontology, 76(4):725-732, 2002. I continue to work on a book about the Ordovician fossil treasures of the Cincinnati region in collaboration with Richard Davis. It feels great to embarking on my 28th year of teaching at UC! 
Arnie Miller: Jeez, it’s been five years since I last wrote one of these? A lot has happened, so here is five years of news IN BRIEF (sort of), including some tidbits that you won’t read about anywhere else in this newsletter: Work on the Ordovician Radiation has continued, including some new quantitative approaches to investigating underlying causes of global diversity trends, done in collaboration with Sean Connolly (James Cook University, Australia)….I am now studying a variety of questions related to various aspects of Phanerozoic diversification and extinction…..funding from NASA’s Exobiology program continues for my global diversity work …..several of my colleagues and I began a new initiative a few years back to assemble a web-hosted paleontological database, which seems to be morphing into an international paleontological database center/initiative (you can access the database at http://paleodb.org). …..we obtained a large grant from NSF’s Biocomplexity Program to fund a set of research questions related to these data, and it now appears that NSF is interested in “permanently” underwriting the database…I was a Co-P. I. on the Biocomplexity grant, along with Charles Marshall (Harvard University) and John Alroy (National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis)….the best thing about the database is that I get to go to meetings in Santa Barbara every six months or so, although our next meeting will be in Berlin….on the local front, our ultra-high resolution analyses of stratigraphy and faunal gradients in the Kope Formation, done in collaboration with Steve Holland (University of Georgia; UC alum), Dave Meyer, and Ben Dattilo (University of Nevada, Las Vegas; UC alum), has produced a stream of papers in the past few years….you can access several of my most recent papers (as PDFs) directly at my new and improved website (thanks Evelyn….): http://www.uc.edu/geology/faculty/miller.html. …..new collaborations are planned in the coming year with Mike Kowalewski (Virginia Tech), as well as Linda Ivany (Syracuse University) and Bruce Wilkinson (University of Michigan)…..I was also invited to participate in a new working group that will investigate changes in food web structure throughout the history of life…the initial meeting was held last March at the Santa Fe Institute…more on the new stuff next year. I think I’ve threatened in the past to write some books, but now I might actually do so….Michael Foote (University of Chicago) and I are about to sign a contract with Freeman Press to do a new edition of Principles of Paleontology, authored previously by Raup and Stanley….when that one is done, I’ll try to finish up another book, already partly written, that will be centered on a seminal paper in our field, published by Sepkoski et al. in 1981 (know in the field as The Consensus Paper, which will also be the title of the book)…..the book will be partly biographical, partly an object lesson about how a group of prominent scientists can coalesce around an important issue, and partly a discussion about various things that paleontologists do besides hunting for dinosaur bones. We were very happy to observe that our graduate program in paleontology has climbed into the top ten nationally, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report……I have been remarkably fortunate to be surrounded over the past several years by a noisy bunch of students, who have discovered how to harass me effectively and keep me in line…..among my students to finish degrees since 1997 are Stewart Ebersole (Global-scale geographic and environmental patterns among Late Permian articulate brachiopod genera: implications for the end-Permian mass extinction); Bob Gaines (Paleoecological comparisons among four Late Silurian reefs of the Lake Michigan area: implications for coordinated stasis); Neal Doran (Morphological diversity of the brachiopod Platystrophia through changing paleoenvironments in the Cincinnatian Series (Upper Ordovician); Phil Novack-Gottshall (Comparative geographic and environmental diversity dynamics of gastropods and bivalves during the Ordovician Radiation); Karen Bezusko (Biotic interaction versus abiotic response as mediators of biodiversity in the Middle Devonian (Givetian) Upper Hamilton Group of New York State; and Susan Barbour Wood (Microstratigraphic analysis of an amalgamated horizon in the type Cincinnatian: Implications for spatio-temporal resolution in the fossil record)….Andrew Webber, who is currently teaching at Washington and Lee University, is on the cusp of finishing; you can read Chapter 1 of his dissertation in the December issue of Palaios (available soon on newsstands)….my current students, some of whom are co-advised with Carl Brett (signified with an asterisk), are Donna Carlson-Jones, Austin Hendy*, Jocelyn Sessa*, Chad Ferguson, Kate Bulinski, and Stephanie Fuentes*….Chad, Jocelyn, Andrew, Stephanie and I had a wonderful trip to St. Croix last June to do fieldwork for Chad’s thesis….it was my first time back to St. Croix since the “Hugo” trips of 1989….the island has changed dramatically, except perhaps a certain study area in Smuggler’s Cove….Chad will let us know soon. Vanessa is 14 and Nathan is 11 (sigh)….both are doing wonderfully, as is Mary Jo….and we have a new addition!....his name is Chico, a Jack Russell Terrier whom we adopted in March of 2001….yes, after several years of lobbying for a dog, Vanessa finally wore me down…..and he’s so cute and smart! Hasta la vista! Student News Brian Kirchner: I am a second-year PhD student under the advisement of Carl Brett and Tom Algeo. I am working on testing various models developed to explain limestone-mudrock cycles observed in the Upper Ordovician (lowermost Cincinnatian) Kope Formation in the Cincinnati region. Right now I'm prepping limestone and calcareous siltstone samples collected during summer fieldwork for laboratory analysis of lateral intra-bed variations in characteristics indicative of depositional process. The work is currently being supported by grants from GSA, AAPG, and Sigma Xi. In April 2002 Russell Kohrs, another graduate student, Carl Brett, and I presented a poster at the Northeastern GSA meeting in Lexington, KY showing preliminary results of our correlations of one submember of the Kope across the Cincinnati metro area. The poster showed the use of highly distinctive marker beds (e.g., obrution beds of the trilobite Triarthrus) to achieve cm-scale correlation. On the personal side my wife Rachel and I have a 3-year-old son, Jaime, and a 1-year-old daughter, Sabrina. Both are happy and healthy and enjoying Cincinnati life; they occasionally even allow me a little time to do my research. Brendan Merk: I am a second-year graduate student and a second-year citizen of Cincinnati. I am appreciative of the faculty within the geology program as I work toward my Master's in geology, with a focus on hydrogeology. My advisor, Dr. David Nash, and committee members, Dr. Barry Maynard and Dr. Tom Lowell, have been very flexible with me as I try to work a full-time job at Handex, take a full class load, prepare my thesis and raise our daughter Caroline (fifteen months old) with my wife, Leslie. This is an aggressive schedule, but still we have found the time to move into a new home, have the sewer line that backed up into our basement replaced and file a claim against the previous owners for property disclosure "omissions". My thesis deals with a water treatment plant in Ohio. I am working to prepare a working groundwater model as part of their groundwater protection plan, and will be used to install "early-warning" monitoring wells and to study the effectiveness of river bank filtration in the natural attenuation of potential biological contaminants. Staff News Michael Menard (Instrumentation Specialist): While the department seeks funding to upgrade our analytical equipment, my job continues to require creativity and an occasional piece of duct tape to keep things going. I really can’t complain, our equipment has produced research quality data for many years. One new (new to us anyway) addition to our analytical capability is a ISI SEM. In a joint venture with the Physics Department, the SEM was acquired from the Air Force and moved to sixth floor, Geology. We are still debugging the system but should be imaging in the near future. Matt Fenwick (Systems Coordinator): “Nyë shënim.” This summer I went with the University of Cincinnati’s classics department to Albania. I provided computer support for their GIS efforts. The computer room is housed in a fourth century Greek monastery. We had electric power for the Macintosh notebook computers for only part of each day. On the days I was not needed in the computer room, I was walking the fields with the field crew picking a pottery shards and stone tools. The temperature reached in excess of 100 degrees daily with little relief at night. Albania has given me a real appreciation of what is meant by “Third world”, a simple agrarian life. |
Department
of Geology tel:
513-556-3732 fax: 513-556-6931 |