From the Department Head
Iceland Rises as its Glaciers Melt
Introductions 4
2
3
George H. Davis Undergraduate
Research Fund
Donors 6
Economic Geology Student Chapter 7
5
With Your Support
Geosciences Wish List
Excellence in Economic Geology
GeoDaze 2015
8
9
1 0
12
T hanks to a research partnership with Hyperdynamics Corporation, the UA
Geosciences geophysics group has the unprecedented opportunity to work with a very large amount of sophisticated 2-D and 3-D seismic reflection data from a relatively unexplored area offshore Guinea, West Africa.
Hyperdynamics, an independent exploration and production company led by
Geosciences alumnus Ray Leonard (BS ‘75), has provided research support for our reflection seismology group to work to better understand the tectonic evolution, volcanism and subsurface structure of the area.
Outreach Highlights 1 4
2015 Distinguished Alumnus Award 1 5
Department News
Scholarships Awarded
1 6
1 8
Degrees Awarded 1 9
George Zandt and Chris Eastoe Retire 20
Alumni News 22
Memorials 23
Nancy Beckvar, ORR/NOS/NOAA
Regina Capuano, University of Houston
Timothy Demko, ExxonMobil
John Dreier, Private Consultant
Robbie Gries, Priority Oil & Gas, LLC
Stanley Hart, Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution
Ray Leonard, Hyperdynamics
Christopher Marrs, Western Alaska
Copper and Gold
Stephen Naruk, Shell Oil
Philip Pearthree, AZ Geological Survey
John Pekala, Ramboll Environ
Amanda Reynolds, ConocoPhillips
Marc Sbar, University of Arizona
Elena Shoshitaishvili, Private Consultant
William Wilkinson, Freeport-McMoRan
Perspective view of an interpreted Cretaceous paleo-seamount composed of rift-related volcanic rocks now at a depth of about 4000 m. The mapped surface represents the
Albian unconformity, which shallows to the right, under the continental slope of the
Guinea Plateau. The Albian unconformity marks the end of the main phase of Cretaceous rifting in West Africa. Colors represent relative depths. The paleo-seamount rises ~ 600 m above the surrounding surface and is buried by ~ 1,600 m of younger rocks in water depths of ~ 2,400 m. VE: ~ 4:1
“This is a great example of academic-industry partnering and the opportunities it provides for student engagement,” said Geosciences Department Head Peter W.
Reiners. “We have access to industry resources and experts, and we are doing real science and training students in cutting-edge technology of 3-D visualization and new geophysical methods at the same time.”
The UA Geosciences Newsletter is published by the Department of Geosciences, University of
Arizona, PO Box 210077, Tucson, AZ 85721
Alicia Saposnik, editor
Email: alicias@email.arizona.edu
Phone: 520-626-8204 www.geo.arizona.edu
The Guinea continental margin lies at the point of final separation between the
North American, African and South American tectonic plates. North America split away in the Early Jurassic Period (~ 180 Ma) forming the North Atlantic Ocean basin. Africa and South America began rifting apart from south to north to form the evolving South Atlantic Ocean, but a through-going Mid-Atlantic seaway was not established until the Early Cretaceous (~ 110 Ma) as rifting and separation between
Africa and South America became complete along the Guinea margin. The Atlantic
Ocean continues to widen as rifting persists between the continents along the Mid-
Atlantic Ridge.
Continued on page 20

A s the 2014-15 academic year winds down, professors and grad students get ready for fieldwork, temperatures start inching their way up, and snowbirds and undergrads begin their annual migrations. But an intrepid group of undergrads, many of them fresh from George Davis’ Field Camp Preparation Course (Geos 496) are just gearing up for the UA
Geosciences Field Camp experience. This year Jay Quade will lead a few dozen students into the wilds of Nevada, assisted by our own TV-geo-celebrity Martin Pepper and his amazing
6x6 retired-military field vehicle and video-producing drone for teaching and publicizing our exceptional field camp, as they learn to map and interpret the Cordillera of the western
US. Stay tuned to UA Geosciences’ website, as well as our Facebook site and Twitter feed, for news and pictures from field camp, and all the other latest and greatest about our
Department, alumni, and friends.
Our academic programs are strong. Our undergraduate majors are still at numbers not seen since the 1980s, and as in previous years, about two-thirds of the outstanding graduate students we admitted accepted our offers, maintaining a healthy and powerful cohort that is one of the strengths of our Department.
Department Head Peter Reiners
Both Jiba Ganguly and Susan Beck garnered AGU Fellow Awards in the last year, and Susan was also named AGU’s prestigious
Gutenberg Lecturer. In the fall we will welcome three new faculty to the Department (see page 4), and we are working on recruiting a fourth! Matthew Steele-MacInnis is a petrologist, thermodynamicist, and economic geologist who will be coming from ETH Zurich, where he just finished a postdoc. Jessica Tierney is an organic geochemist who develops and uses proxies to reconstruct paleoenvironmental conditions. She just won the prestigious AGU Macelwane Medal last fall and will be coming to us from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Also joining us this fall in her primary appointment is Mary Poulton, Director of the Institute for Mineral Resources, which is also moving to the College of Science. We are also searching for a new geophysicist and hope to have good news to share on that soon. Geosciences is clearly doing well with faculty recruitments, and we are very excited to bring all these outstanding new faculty and their ideas, energy, and enthusiasm to our Department.
Major media splashes from UA Geosciences this year included work led by Kat Compton on Iceland’s accelerating uplift caused by melting glaciers—a story that caught fire with a huge range of news sources (see page 3). Karl Flessa and colleagues’ historic, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural work on the pulse flow of the Colorado River also caught the attention of communities and media throughout the US and Mexico, earning Discover Magazine’s 14th top-100 science news story of 2014. Less splashy but hugely important was the publication of GSA Memoir 212 “Geodynamics of a Cordilleran Orogenic System: The Central Andes of Argentina and Northern Chile,” edited by Pete DeCelles et al., containing 22 chapters, almost all by UA Geosciences authors, describing results of our fruitful “COSA” collaboration with ExxonMobil.
We are also happy to report that ConocoPhillips will sponsor several important events for Geosciences next year, including a Welcome and Alumni Party in the fall that we are excited about, as well as a spring field trip bringing together faculty, grad students, and ConocoPhillips geologists to learn from one another in the western US.
This year saw the 43rd Annual GeoDaze conference, led by our hypercapable graduate students, in particular Kat Compton and
Jonathan Delph. Paul Hoffman gave a great talk on Snowball Earth, Dean Joaquin Ruiz led a great field trip to Biosphere2, and
Jon and Pamela Pelletier hosted another wonderful party at their house.
On the eve of GeoDaze, we hosted a lovely Alumni Reception in the newly refurbished lobby of Gould-Simpson that brought together many of our friends and family and members of our Advisory Board. We also announced the “pre-launch” of our
George H. Davis Undergraduate Research Fund and the generous support of our Advisory Board and a few key alumni who have already brought in enough to establish an endowment. This fund will provide critical support for our students to take their undergraduate experience to the next level, and help the research projects in the department at the same time (see page 5).
I hope that this newsletter finds you well and that you will consider coming back to Tucson (or one of several other cities that we will tell you about) for an alumni event soon. I also hope you recognize how much your financial support means to UA
Geosciences right now. We really appreciate your support for all of our endeavors and hope that you might consider giving outside the regular cycle this year, to help with everything from field supplies to scholarships to staff support to outreach. All the best from Tucson!
-Peter Reiners
Page 2 • Geosciences Newsletter

By Mari N. Jensen, UA College of Science
A team led by UA geoscientists reports that the Earth’s crust under Iceland is rebounding as global warming melts the island’s great ice caps. Kathleen Compton, a UA geosciences doctoral candidate, Richard Bennett, a UA geosciences associate professor, and Sigrún Hreinsdóttir, a geoscientist with GNS Science in Avalon, New Zealand, who was a UA Geosciences postdoctoral researcher from 2005 to 2009, reported their findings in the
February 2015 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
The paper, “Climate driven vertical acceleration of Icelandic crust measured by CGPS geodesy” is the first to show the current fast uplift of the Icelandic crust is a result of accelerated melting of the island’s glaciers and coincides with the onset of warming that began about 30 years ago, the scientists said.
Some sites in south-central Iceland are moving upward as much as
1.4 inches per year — a speed that surprised the researchers.
Vertical crustal motions observed in Iceland by GPS geodesy.
Map by Kathleen Compton
“Our research makes the connection between recent accelerated uplift and the accelerated melting of the Icelandic ice caps,” said first author Compton.
Geologists have long known that as glaciers melt and become lighter, the Earth rebounds as the weight of the ice decreases.
Whether the current rebound geologists detect is related to past deglaciation or modern ice loss has been an open question until now, said co-author Bennett.
“Iceland is the first place we can say accelerated uplift means accelerated ice mass loss,” he said.
The story has received national and international media interest since the release of the paper's findings on Jan. 28.
To figure out how fast the crust was moving upward, the team used a network of 62 global positioning satellite receivers fastened to rocks throughout Iceland. By tracking the position of the GPS receivers year after year, the scientists “watch” the rocks move and can calculate how far they have traveled — a technique called geodesy.
The new work shows that, at least for Iceland, the land’s current accelerating uplift is directly related to the thinning of glaciers and to global warming.
“What we’re observing is a climatically induced change in the
Earth’s surface,” Bennett said.
He added there is geological evidence that during the past deglaciation roughly 12,000 years ago, volcanic activity in some regions of Iceland increased thirtyfold.
Others have estimated the Icelandic crust’s rebound from warming-induced ice loss could increase the frequency of volcanic eruptions such as the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, which had negative economic consequences worldwide.
Some of Iceland’s GPS receivers have been in place since 1995.
Bennett, Hreinsdóttir, and colleagues had installed 20 GPS receivers in Iceland in 2006 and 2009, thus boosting the coverage of the nation’s geodesy network. In central and southern Iceland, where five of the largest ice caps are located, the receivers are 18 miles or less apart on average.
The team primarily used the geodesy network to track geological activity such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
In 2013, Bennett noticed one of the long-running stations in the center of the country was showing that site was rebounding at an accelerated rate. He wondered about it, so he and his colleagues checked the nearby stations to see if they had recorded the same changes.
The GPS station at Bú ðarháls is part of the Central Highlands
Iceland (CHIL) GPS network constructed by the Tectonic
Geodesy Laboratory in the Department of Geosciences in 2006.
Vatnajökull ice cap is visible in the distance. Photo courtesy of
Richard Bennett
Continued on page 13
Geosciences Newsletter • Page 3

G eosciences faculty, students, and staff are delighted to welcome these faculty members for fall, 2015.
Jessica Tierney will be an Associate
Professor,with focus areas in paleoclimate, organic geochemistry, biogeochemistry, reconstruction and modeling. Jess comes to Geosciences from the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution.
Matthew Steele-MacInnis will be an
Assistant Professor. His interests are the properties, distribution and roles of fluids in Earth and planetary systems.
Matt recently completed his postdoc at the Institute of Geochemistry and
Petrology in Zurich.
Although already a UA Professor, Mary
Poulton will be joining Geosciences as her primary appointment. Mary is Director of the Lowell Institute for
Mineral Resources, which is also moving to the College of Science.
S tan Hart is a geochemist, retired from academia and living in Green Valley, AZ since 2009. He was born and grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts and has degrees in geology/geochemistry from MIT (B.S., Ph.D.) and Cal Tech (M.S.). He started his career at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (1960-1975), was a Full Professor at MIT from 1975-1989, and was a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, retired in 2007.
Stan’s research interests have varied widely: the effects of metamorphism on geochronologic ages; the nature of water-rock interactions and the control of seawater chemistry; the isotopic signatures of volcanism along the mid-ocean ridges; measurement of terrestrial heat flow in lakes; measurement of element partition coefficients and diffusion rates; the isotope and geochemical evolution and taxonomy of Earth’s mantle via studies of volcanic hotspots associated with deep mantle plumes; active volcanism along the Samoa hotspot lineament; and fluid dynamic modeling of mantle plumes.
Hart is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Geophysical Union, Geochemical Society,
Geological Society of America, and the European Union of Geosciences. He has been awarded the Goldschmidt Medal (Geochemical Society), the Hess Medal
(American Geophysical Union), the Arthur L. Day Prize (National Academy of
Sciences), and a Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Paris.
Hart has published 245 papers, with over 25,000 citations. When he is not writing, he enjoys running, hiking, woodworking, back-country driving, and target and trap shooting.
Stan Hart joined the Geosciences Advisory
Board in April.
Page 4 • Geosciences Newsletter

R ecognizing the importance of real research opportunities for our growing number of undergraduate students, Geosciences launched the George H. Davis Undergraduate
Research Fund on April 8 at a pre-
GeoDaze reception in Tucson. The fund honors the legacy of Regents’
Professor Emeritus George Davis, who has dedicated much of his career to personal mentoring and enriching the student experience in and out of the classroom.
Mariah Armenta (BS ‘14) worked on her own research with Professor George Gehrels and the Arizona LaserChron Center facilities.
Ge0sciences wants more of our undergraduate students to participate in real research.
Currently, about one-quarter of
Geosciences’ undergraduate majors work with faculty, researchers and graduate students in research.
The goal of the George H. Davis
Undergraduate Research Fund is to dramatically increase both the number of students who engage in a research project and the quality of their research experience, because doing real research alongside experts in the field or in the lab is crucial to our undergraduates’ overall success.
“Just like faculty and graduate students, undergraduate majors learn and grow the most when engaged in original research,” said Regents’ Professor
Emeritus George Davis.
“This is where things
‘come together.’ This certainly was the case for me when I was a senior in college, working away on an independent study in structural geology.  And of course I am very grateful, and pleased, that the department chose to attach my name to this meaningful endowment, which will make a big difference in a lot of lives.”
Regents’ Professor Emeritus George H. Davis (standing at center) has dedicated much of his career to mentoring students. Here he poses with undergraduate students from his field camp preparation course.
Research experience helps undergraduate students develop said Department Head Peter Reiners.
“It not only recognizes the legacy of a living legend of our field and our department, but it also dramatically enhances our students’ experiences and training, while helping faculty, grad students, and others who benefit from undergrad involvement in the practical, analytical, and teamwork skills, teaches them resourcefulness, field and lab.” initiative, and perseverance, and can ignite scientific curiosity that may transform their careers. It’s also correlated with retention, especially
Donations to the George H. Davis
Undergraduate Research Fund may be sent to the University of
Arizona Department of Geosciences for members of underrepresented groups, graduate school success, and a key measure of future success: personal connection with a faculty
Development Office, PO Box 210077,
Tucson, AZ 85721 or made online using the fund link at www.geo.arizona.
edu/support. Please make checks member or other experienced researcher. payable to the University of Arizona
Foundation/Geosciences.
When we meet our endowment goal of $250,000, Geosciences will be able to fund many more of our majors to participate in fieldwork, analyze samples in a lab, use a high-performance computing cluster, or present results at a meeting.
“The George Davis
Undergraduate Research
Fund, which quickly became an endowment thanks to a healthy kick start from a few generous alumni and Advisory
Board members, is a great example of the kind of collaborative engagement that UA Geosciences is all about,”
Over 90 Geosciences alumni, friends, and faculty helped kick off the George H. Davis Undergraduate Research
Fund at a reception the evening before GeoDaze.
Geosciences Newsletter • Page 5

( Gifts listed below were received between 5/1/14 and 4/30/2015.)
Gary L. Ahrens
Megan L. Anderson
Anonymous
John and Betty Arenson
Patricia and Stanton Ballard
Nancy Beckvar and Steven Brady
Robert and Theresa Bingham
Margaret Whiting Blome
Gail S. Bock
BoxLee, Inc .
Beth and John Boyd
BP America, Inc.
Larry and Linneth Bradfish
Elwood and Della Brooks
Jonathan and Marilyn Browne
Jeffrey and Mary Ann Bryant
Carlotta B. Chernoff
Anthony and Nancy Ann Ching
Brooke and Juanita Clements
Jessica Conroy and William Guenthner
Kurt N. Constenius
Edward A. Cross III
John and Paula Cunningham
Raj Herbert and Cynthia Daniel
Robert and Phyllis Davis
Peter Day and Marilyn Tennyson
William and Sarah De Witt
Lida Gail Dever
J. Christopher Eckhart
Rolfe C. Erickson
Karl W. Flessa and Mari N. Jensen
Scott J. Friedman
Anne F. Gardulski
Carmala N. Garzione and
C. Douglas Haessig
GeoDecor, Inc
Bernice Gin
James and Robin Gleason
Jeffrey and Elena Grana
Redge and Linda Greenberg
Paul and Roberta Handverger
Jerome B. Hansen and Kim Stevens
Julie and Howard Harlan
Patricia M. Hartshorne
C. Vance Haynes
James and Diane Hays
Elaine H. Hazlewood
Gary and Yvonne Huckleberry
Susan B. Jones
John and Patricia Kerns
Susan M. Kidwell
James and Jamie King
David J. Kistner
Page 6 • Geosciences Newsletter
Constance and Roger Knight
Cullen Kortyna
Peter L. Kresan
Claudia and Jeffrey Kunath
Michael P. Kutney and Sarah Tindall
Francis B. La Sala
Robert and Barbara Laughon
Lawrence and Wendy Lemke
Scott and Debra Lewis
Walter D. Lienhard
Joseph C. Lysonski, Jr.
John R. Matis
Leslie D. McFadden and
Roxanne Pacheco
Norman M. Meader
Robert and Carolyn Metz
Mary Ellen Morbeck and John Hoffman
Bruce and Lucina Myers
Nancy and Charles Naeser
Jack Dale and Audrey Nations
Frank and Eleanor Nelson
Don and Reta Olsen
John W. Peirce
John and Beth Pekala
Robert H. Peterson and Barbara Bohn
Richard and Martha Pfirman
Bernard and Faye Pipkin
Helen Price
Richard Pugh
William and Susan Purves
David and Donna Rea
Richard C. Robinson
Seth and Laura Rose
William A. Sauck and Elen M. Cutrim
Marc and Helene Sbar
John and Helen Schaefer
Alexander and Laura Schauss
Nancy Schmidt and Joseph O’Connell
Eric Seedorff
John and Alison Sturgul
Dee and Patricia Trent
Arthur Trevena
Tucson Gem & Mineral Society
James K. Turner
Karen A. Vandiver and Mary Jo Vandiver
Al Vaskas and Susan Bernstein
Margaret E. Venable and Noel J Chavez
Thomas Westervelt
Isaac and Linda Winograd
Michaela N. Young-Mitchell
$500 - $999
Anonymous
Darlene Coney
Michael and Marian Fellows
Anna A. Felton
John M. Guilbert and Dorothy J. Harelson
James and Judith Hardy
Kenneth and Siew Bee Hartman
Corolla K. Hoag and Kevin Horstman
Wenjie Jiao
Terry and Virginia Katzer
Thomas E. McCandless
Roberta J. McCarty
Steven G. Natali and Jeanne R. Lee
Philip and Marie Pearthree
S. Lynn Peyton and Rich Bottjer
Bruce M. Prior
Douglas and Dawna Silver
Sonshine Exploration
Kelly K. Umlauf
Frank and Jennifer Wagner
Anonymous
Gerard and Byoung Sun Beaudoin
John and Wilhelmina Dreier
Thomas A. Earl
Eric W. Fritz
Terrence M. Gerlach and A. Litasi- Gerlach
Robbie Gries
Tom and Georgia Heidrick
Owen Hurd
Richard D. Jones
Ray Leonard and Cheryl Phillips
Steven and Deborah Lingrey
MAG Silver Corporation
Christopher and Joan Marrs
Keith H. Meldahl
Midland Valley Exploration Ltd.
Peter W. Reiners and Juliet M. McKenna
Jeffrey and Arlene Seekatz
Lawrence and Teresa Sumpter
Herbert and Diane Welhener
William and Pamela Wilkinson
Kenneth and Carolyn Yeats
$5,000 - $9,999
BP Corporation
ExxonMobil
Tekla A. Harms
Miles G. Shaw and Mary Anne Niarchos
Elena Shoshitaishvili and Richard Clarke
John and Linda Sumner
Mark and Mary Lou Zoback

Chevron
Havenor Operating Company
The Arkenstone Ltd.
EMX (USA) Services Corp.
$50,000 - $100,000
ConocoPhillips
Larry and Iris Dykers Family Trust. In memory of John Edward McKay, Class of 1942.
Over $100,000
Ajax Ltd.
Freeport-McMoran Exploration
Newmont Mining Corporation
Gifts In Kind
Fran Christensen
Edward and Ann David
William and Christine Durboraw
Geology Adventures, Inc.
Robert M. Hazen
Kleinfelder, Inc.
Eugene and Rosalind Meieran
Harvey and Gillian Meieran
Wallace M. Meyer, Jr.
Lorraine Mitchell
Marcus J. Origlieri
Desmond Sacco
Anonymous
Thomas Earl
Kenneth and Karen Evans
Gary and Joan Lee Jones
Dieter and Beth Krewedl
Ray Leonard and Cheryl Phillips
Christopher and Joan Marrs
John Sutter and Elaine Padovani
By Hayley De Witt (Professional Science Master’s student)
T he Society of Economic Geologists (SEG) student chapter at the
University of Arizona currently includes 15 graduate students, and we are in the process of recruiting undergraduates to expand our membership and increase awareness about the relevance and importance of economic geology. A newly elected executive team will be in place as of September 2015 and includes Hayley De Witt
(President), Jennifer Dabbs (Vice President), Alexandra Macho
(Secretary), and Carson Richardson (Treasurer). Fundraising for our
2015 year-end trip has been ongoing through a variety of methods, including mineral, t-shirt, and book sales. We are currently designing a rock hammer to supplement our fundraising, and we hope that the hammer will soon be available for sale and become a permanent feature of the chapter’s fundraising efforts. The rock hammer, which will be hand-forged in Southern California and available in a variety of sizes, was designed by our graduate students and is modeled after a 1970’s USGS hammer. It has been put to the test by several geologists and looks to be a necessary and exciting addition to any geologist’s toolbox!
Three of our members, Alexandra Macho, Dan Favorito, and Hayley De
Witt, were recently awarded SEG Fellowships, and Simone Runyon,
Carson Richardson, and Dan Favorito also were awarded research grants from the Geological Society of America, all of which will help to fund their graduate research and ease the burden of being a poor grad student!
SEG student chapter members Jason Mizer, Simone
Runyon, Christian Rathkopf, Zack McIntire, and Aryn
Hoge on the May 2014 SEG field trip to New Zealand at Karangahake Gorge, North Island.
Our chapter was also awarded $1,500 from the SEG after applying for the Stewart R. Wallace Fund, which supports related field-based educational activities. This money, along with a generous donation of $500 from the Mining Foundation of the
Southwest, will directly fund seven of our members on a 10-day geological tour of the western US. We will visit a variety of deposits, new and historical mines, and other geologically interesting sites in Nevada and California, and thereby broaden our understanding of mineral deposits. In spring 2014, five members of our group travelled to New Zealand, where they visited
Newmont’s Waihi open pit, as well as several active and prominent geothermal sites, including the Champagne Pool in the
Waiotapu geothermal area in the North Island.
Continued on page 11
Geosciences Newsletter • Page 7

M y name is Jason Mizer and I am a Geosciences PhD student. I am the 2014 recipient of the Keith L.
Katzer Graduate Scholarship. First and foremost, I want to give a very sincere thank you as this year’s awardee for the scholarship.
I am a non-traditional PhD student, returning to school after a ten-year hiatus to finish my Bachelor’s degree in geology. Continuing with my Master’s degree and into a PhD as a single father presents financial challenges that constantly threaten the continuing advancement of my knowledge and understanding of geology.
Though my dissertation research is focused on mineral deposits here in the Southwest, my Katzer Scholarship funds were used to support my research interests in the hydrogeology of the
Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky.
The Mammoth-Flint Ridge Cave System is the longest cave system in the world, with over 400 miles of passages that lie in a limestone karst setting. Over the past sixty years, mapping and exploration have linked numerous small systems into what is known today as “The Longest Cave.”
Written by Roger Brucker in 1976, The
Longest Cave summarizes decades of cave system exploration and mapping, all of which led up to the connection of multiple, previously unexplored systems to the known commercial cave of the Mammoth system. At least two early explorers recall accessing a significant underground river in the 1960s through a crawlway beneath a ledge in Swinnerton
Avenue on the upper level of the Mammoth
Cave system just southeast of the famous Duck-Under, through which the historic connection was made. However, there is no mention of this discovery in
Brucker’s book or supporting maps.
Keith L. Katzer Graduate Scholarship recipient Jason Mizer emerging from an undisclosed underground location after retrieving samples for research in March, 2015. Photo by Tony Potucek
Expeditions in the 1990s and 2000s by the original explorers failed to relocate this crawlway. geomorphology and hydrologic system of Swinnerton Avenue of the Flint Ridge system in Mammoth Cave National
Park.
My involvement in this project stems from my longstanding interest in caves as both a hobby and a scientific resource. On an invitation from one of
As a father (and an older student in the department), I strive to lead by example for my children and fellow students by diligently displaying professional the original explorers, I have visited this portion of the cave three times: in 2010,
2011 and 2014. My most recent trip to
Mammoth Cave utilized microgravity integrity, selfless leadership, and a continuing thirst for knowledge in my field of study. geophysics to identify anomalies along the floor of Swinnerton Avenue in an attempt to locate any passages that may lie below it, i.e. the ‘Lost
River.’ This research will contribute significantly to the understanding of the
Thank you very much for your support of student research and for supporting my research with your contributions to the University of Arizona. It is my honor to be added to the long list of recipients.
O ver the last year, the William R. Dickinson Field Trip Support Fund enabled Geosciences students to get into the field on four separate trips. These included two field mapping trips as part of George Davis’ field camp preparation course, one to the Catalina Mountains in May of 2014, and one to Davidson Canyon in March of 2015. (To learn more about the field camp preparation course, see the cover story in the Summer 2014 Geosciences newsletter.)
The fund also supported two field experiences for the Economic Geology group, who went on an outreach trip with the Oro Valley
Rotary Club to Saguaro National Park West in February and for the Economic Mineral Deposits class trip in April 2015. Here,
Professor Mark Barton describes the Economic Mineral Deposits trip:
An essential part of learning about mineral deposits, ore-forming systems, and their broader geologic context comes from field experiences, particularly where all these facets can be integrated. The Dickinson Fund supported a four-day field trip to northwestern Arizona for a group of 12 students in GEOS 446/546. Apart from an unexpected late April thunderstorm in Parker, and a bike rally of world-class proportions in Oatman, the trip highlighted tectonics and deposits from the Paleoproterozoic to the late Cenozoic. The focus included the 1.75 Ga Yavapai terrain, with its ancient arc and back arc rocks and copper, iron, gold, and zinc deposits from Jerome to Bagdad, plus the Laramide porphyry Cu-Mo and 1.4 Ga W(-Be) deposits at Bagdad, and the Miocene epithermal Au(-Ag) district at Oatman, concluding with Fe-oxide-Cu-Au mineralization in the Buckskin-Rawhide core complex.
Page 8 • Geosciences Newsletter

W e teach, do research, and serve our community in important ways that matter to our state, our country, our disciplines, and our partners. We don’t take shortcuts, and our students know that they can be proud of the rigorous training they receive as they move from UA to industry, academia, government, and other areas. With your help we can maintain the legacy, reputation, and impact of UA Geosciences. Please consider your own positive impact on our program with a special gift this spring in one of these areas.
Funding for mission-critical needs such as staff or IT support, field trips, and graduate student research opportunities.
Student support is particularly important right now. Consider helping a student with research or summer assistantships.
We desperately need new quality microscopes for mineralogy, petrology, economic geology, and sed/strat class use.
Help support the visiting distinguished UA Geosciences Colloquium Series.
Honor the legacy of a living-legend of UA Geosciences by helping students engage in real research projects alongside faculty and graduate students.
Geosciences Newsletter • Page 9

The 2014 Ore Deposits Mapping class hikes up to the Greenwood Breccia in the Yerington district of Nevada. Photo courtesy of Mark Barton
By Isabel Barton (PhD ’14 and research scientist with the Lowell Program in Economic Geology)
F ounded in the midst of southern Arizona’s giant copper deposits, the University of Arizona soon became a center for research in economic geology and mining. Nearly a century later, the UA is still at the forefront of American mineral resources research and education. This year, three new hires extend the UA’s economic geology resource. Drs. Matthew Steele-
MacInnis and Pilar Lecumberri-Sanchez, both currently finishing post-doctoral work at ETH-Zurich, will bring geofluids and geostatistics research to the Geosciences department and to the Institute for Mineral Resources, as well as adding to existing expertise in thermodynamics, ore deposits, and modeling. Dr. Alex Andronikov, transferring from Planetary Sciences, has studied a wide range of topics but focuses mainly on igneous petrology and geochemistry. All three will bring new dimensions to ore deposits research: Stay tuned for future developments!
This year there will also be many new faces among the economic geology students. Between May and December 2015, nearly half of the students in the economic geology research group will be graduating, including seven Professional Science Masters students (Sarah Baxter and Sean O’Neal in May; Matt Wetzel, Christy Caudill, and Christian Rathkopf in August, and Hayley
DeWitt and Juan Fajardo in December). Over the coming academic year, three MS (Allie Macho, Jenny Dabbs, Dan Favorito) and two PhD (Caleb King, Jack Gibbons) students will also graduate. We’ll miss them, but we’re also excited to welcome five new students this fall: Roy Greig and Wyatt (“Boomer”) Bain are starting in the PhD program, along with new MS students
Jason Burwell, Drew Barkoff, and Andrew Early. The new students will have a tough record to match after the April 8 meeting of the Technical Advisory Committee to the Lowell Program in Economic Geology, when our 17 current graduate students gave presentations on their interests, research, and plans and finished in less than the 80 minutes allocated. Now if only the faculty could lecture with equal efficiency!
The 30 participants in the Technical Advisory Committee meeting, including 15 representatives from the mining industry, also heard about some of the ongoing research projects in economic geology, in particular our 4-D investigation of the metallogeny and tectonics in the Cordillera of North and South America. This ongoing large-scale project, funded through the academia/ industry consortium in the Institute for Mineral Resources, ranges through all dimensions of geology from structural reconstructions and arc magmatism to sediment chemistry, ore deposit formation, and paleoaltimetry. The many individual graduate projects associated with this receive funding through a variety of sources. We particularly appreciate continued gift support from Newmont, Freeport-McMoRan, BHP-Billiton, Professional Minerals Development (Dykers Family Trust), and
Bronco Creek Exploration (Eurasian Minerals), and the additional support of Pilot Gold, Desert Star Resources, and ASARCO.
These funds allow us to continue these research projects, to collaborate with our industry and academic colleagues, and to maintain the UA’s economic geology program at a level second to none in the US today.
There’s always more to learn about rocks, and the Lowell Program in Economic Geology has been helping teach this since 2005.
Working with the campus-wide Lowell Institute for Mineral Resources and building on a long UA tradition of mineral resource geology, the Lowell Program offers advanced and continuing education in economic geology, mineral resources, and related topics to students and professionals across the mining industry.
One annual short course in Ore Deposits Mapping takes participants on a 10-day tour of ore deposits and hydrothermal and geothermal systems in southern Nevada, where they hone their skills in recognizing and recording alteration mineral suites in bench and outcrop maps. The course is entirely field-based and, besides the mapping, focuses on understanding the spatial scale, timescale, and geochemical context of hydrothermal systems from their roots to their tops. Led by UA Geosciences professors Mark Barton and Eric Seedorff, Ore Deposits Mapping has become one of the most popular short courses in the
Institute for Mineral Resources.
Page 10 • Geosciences Newsletter

A second 10-day course, Topics in Ore Deposits Geology, combines lectures, hands-on laboratory exercises, and field trips to southern Arizona’s historic (and still-operating) porphyry copper and skarn mines. The labs and lectures cover the geology and geochemistry of porphyries, skarns, IOCGs, and alkalic gold deposits. The teaching team, led by Geosciences professors Mark
Barton and Eric Seedorff, is a multidisciplinary array of professors, researchers, and industry experts in metallurgy, geology, geophysics, engineering, and economics.
In 2014, 29 exploration and mining geologists represented more than 10 different countries at these two short courses. The
Lowell Program and the Institute for Mineral Resources are also developing new continuing-education courses: Look for
Geological Inputs to Mine Planning in November 2015, Structural Analysis in spring 2016, and more to follow!
For more information about the Lowell Program short courses, including the 2015 offerings, contact Rocio Brambila (brambila@ email.arizona.edu) or Eric Seedorff (seedorff@email.arizona.edu).
Over the last decade, mineral trace-element compositions have become increasingly important in a range of applications, from fundamental petrologic and geochemical studies to finding orebodies. Now the UA’s economic geology research group and colleagues in industry will be able to carry out trace-element studies for a variety of academic, exploration, and geometallurgical applications, thanks to a state-of-the-art single-collector Thermo Element2 inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS) acquired this April. The ICP-MS comes with a CETAC LSX-100 213-nm Nd-YAG laser-ablation (LA) front end, enabling precision in-situ analyses of mineral and fluid inclusion compositions in addition to the standard bulk ICP-MS analyses of dissolved samples.
The lab’s near-term focus is developing and refining analytical techniques for in-situ fluid inclusion analyses and for traceelement analyses of minerals and solutions. The development team includes Geosciences researchers Frank Mazdab (PhD
‘01), who designed mineral in-situ trace-element analytical techniques for the USGS and ASU before returning to the UA; Alex
Andronikov, who has 20+ years of experience with a variety of geochemical instruments, and Isabel Barton (PhD ’14), who teaches and researches applied mineralogy and geometallurgy. The team is optimizing analytical routines and conducting pilot studies of compositions in different minerals and mineral groups.
The new LA-ICP-MS will be integral to several ongoing and upcoming research projects in economic geology and geometallurgy, including trace-element vectors to ore deposits, process mineralogy, rare earth element patterns in carbonates, and the global distribution and cycling of thallium and arsenic. Further developing capabilities will also place the UA among the few worldwide institutions able to conduct direct measurement of fluid inclusion compositions—a part of the setup for Matthew
Steele-MacInnis when he joins the Geosciences faculty this fall.
The LA-ICP-MS facility is available for contract or collaborative work. Contact Isabel Barton (fay1@email.arizona.edu) for details.
The University of Arizona SEG student chapter has also been well represented at a variety of conferences, both nationally and internationally, including the SEG 2014 conference in
Keystone, CO, the 2014 GSA Annual Meeting and the 2015
Mineral Exploration Roundup in Vancouver, BC, the PDAC
Convention in Toronto, ON, and Mines & Money Hong
Kong 2015. Several of our members will be presenting at the
GSN 2015 Symposium in Reno, NV, and our chapter will be subsidizing our members for the conference.
Three of our members made a special trip to Ms. Higgins’ third grade class at BASIS Elementary to teach the students about a day in the life of a field geologist. Students learned the basics of mineral identification as our members guided them in identifying their own samples. The students were extremely enthusiastic and most were excited to meet a real life geologist, with many stating that they would like to become geologists when they grow up! The students all showed enormous aptitude for understanding the earth, asking relevant and thought-provoking questions, although it was really the rock hammer that most were interested in!
Economic Geology students Matthew Wetzel (PSM), Jennifer Dabbs
(MS), and Alexandra Macho (PSM).
Our Page:
University of Arizona
Geosciences uageosciences
Our Group:
University of
Arizona
Department of
Geosciences
Geosciences Newsletter • Page 11

• 35 oral presentations
• 27 poster presentations
• $6,700 in prize money awarded
• 37 individual and corporate sponsors
• EarthWeek Oral Plenary Session “Linking the spheres of our dynamic Earth”
• EarthWeek poster session with posters from Atmospheric
Sciences, Geosciences, Hydrology & Water Resources, School of Natural Resources & the Environment and Soil, Water &
Environmental Science displayed simultaneously
• GeoDaze Keynote Speaker: Paul Hoffman, Professor Emeritus of
Geology at Harvard University. “Dates and dynamics: Snowball
Earth comes of age”
• EarthWeek Plenary Speaker: James P. Collins, Arizona State
University. “Emerging infectious diseases, synthetic biology, and two faces of extinction”
• GeoDaze field trip to Biosphere 2, led by Dean of the College of
Science and Geosciences Professor, Joaquin Ruiz
GeoDaze 2015 co-chairs Kathleen Compton and Jonathan
Delph with GeoDaze keynote speaker Paul Hoffman. Photo by
Shaunna Morrison
50 local middle school students attended the GeoDaze poster session to learn about the research being done here, thanks to the coordination efforts of MS student Dakota Isaacs. Photo by Shaunna Morrison
Graduate students Saba Keynejad, Nicollette Buckle, and
Shana Wolff welcomed GeoDaze attendees at the registration table. Photo by Shaunna Morrison
Registration committee Dominik Kardell and Daniel Portner, with co-chair
Jonathan Delph photo bomb. Photo by Shaunna Morrison
Page 12 • Geosciences Newsletter
Master of Science student Emma Reed discusses her poster,
“Linking climate variability and coral health through Great
Barrier Reef coral records” during the GeoDaze poster session.
Photo by Shaunna Morrison

Award
Best Overall Presentation
Recipient
Devon A. Orme
Best Runner-up Presentation
Best Undergraduate Talk
Andrew K Laskowski
Mariah C. Romero-Armenta
Best Economic Geology Talk (Session 1) Caleb A. King
Prize Award Sponsors
$2,000 Montgomery & Associates
$1,000 Chevron
$500 BP
$400 Carlotta B. Chernoff, John M. Guilbert
Best Economic Geology Talk (Session 2) Sarah Elizabeth Baxter
Best Geophysics Talk Kevin M. Ward
Best Climate and Paleoclimate Talk Cheryl Peyser
Best Tectonics and Geochemistry Talk Lucia Profeta
(Session 1)
Best Tectonics and Geochemistry Talk Andrea Stevens
(Session 2)
Best Overall Poster
Runner-Up Best Poster
Becky Beadling
Melissa Harrington
Second Runner-up Best Poster
Best Undergraduate Poster
Emma Reed
Michelle Dafov
$400 John M. Guilbert & Dorothy J. Harelson
$300 Terrence Gerlach & A. Litasi Gerlach
$300 S. Lynn Peyton
$300 Gerard & Byoung Sun Beaudoin
$300 Sonshine Exploration
$500 ConocoPhillips
$300 Douglas & Dawna Silver
$100 Mari Jensen & Karl W. Flessa
$300 Miles G. Shaw, Owen Hurd
“The striking answer was, yes, they all do,” he said. “We wondered what in the world could be causing this?”
The team began systematically analyzing years of signals from the entire network and found the fastest uplift was the region between several large ice caps. The rate of uplift slowed the farther the receiver was from the ice cap region.
Other researchers had been measuring ice loss and observed a notable uptick in the rate of melting since 1995. Temperature records for Iceland, some of which go back to the 1800s, show temperatures increasing since 1980.
To determine whether the same rate of ice loss year after year could cause such an acceleration in uplift, Compton tested that idea using mathematical models. The answer was no: The glaciers had to be melting faster and faster every year to be causing more and more uplift.
Compton found the onset of rising temperatures and the loss of ice corresponded tightly with her estimates of when uplift began. “I was surprised how well everything lined up,” she said.
Bennett said, “There’s no way to explain that accelerated uplift unless the glacier is disappearing at an accelerated rate.”
Estimating ice loss is laborious and difficult, he said. “Our hope is we can use current GPS measurements of uplift to more easily quantify ice loss.”
The team’s next step is to analyze the uplift data to reveal the seasonal variation as the ice caps grow during the winter snow season and melt during the summer.
The National Science Foundation and the Icelandic Center for Research funded the research.
Geosciences Newsletter • Page 13

By Carson Richardson, PhD student
2 014-2015 has been another banner year for Geosciences outreach to the southern Arizona community! Phil Stokes has passed the torch of coordinating department-wide outreach to me after coordinating the Tucson Festival of Books event for the past two years. Fortunately, Phil has not moved far away in his new position as Undergraduate Advisor and continues to offer sage guidance as the Obi-Wan Kenobi to my Luke Skywalker.
We continue to support our four major events, assist with classes and programs at local schools, and give talks to local organizations. Highlights from this year include:
• Teacher Training Symposium (Kate Metcalf, coordinator).
Kate put on a workshop for local teachers with an emphasis on water in earth systems with support of Arizona MESA
(Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement). The event is designed to give teachers tools and activities that they can take with them and integrate into their classes. Eleven local elementary through high school science teachers participated in the four sessions: 1) Generating and Reading Weather/
Climate Maps, 2) Weather Hazards Impacts, 3) Fluid Pressure and Faulting, and 4) What Tree Rings Tell Us About Colorado
River Flow. Joellen Russell, climate professor extraordinaire in our department, graciously served as the keynote speaker and gave an overview talk on global climate patterns and their effect on Arizona.
PhD student Kim Fendrich (l) works with elementary and middle school students to learn about minerals at the
Saturday Science Academy. Photo by Marc Sbar
• Science Saturday Academy (Gary Trubl, coordinator). Gary put on another successful half-day of hands-on activities for 100+ local elementary and middle school students. Events included
Past Life, Soil Beneath Us, Radioisotopic Dating (put on by our very own chief, Pete Reiners!), Astrogeology, Earth Habitability,
Geologic Time, and capped off with a liquid nitrogen volcano demonstration.
• Tucson Gem and Mineral Show (Gloria Jimenez, coordinator).
Gloria (with the able assistance of the undergraduate SESS Club) organized a number of popular activities at this year’s TGMS, teaching students about seismology, a make-your-own-tsunami activity, a paleontology table (organized by our volunteer emeritus Derek Hoffman!), dinosaur dig, mineral ID table, and a new activity by the Tree-Ring Lab on how data are collected and what they tell us about past climate and environment. TGMS continues to be one of our most popular events and we look forward to continuing to build upon Gloria’s great work!
Bachelor of Science student Laurel Karten piques interest in the geosciences at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. Photo by Gloria Jimenez
• Tucson Festival of Books (Shelby Rader and Carson Richardson, coordinators) was a huge hit, with hundreds of students and their parents exposed to the wide spectrum of geosciences, from geoarchaeology to dinosaurs to mining mineral resources to how we measure earthquakes. The liquid nitrogen volcano demonstration continues to be the most popular activity, teaching everyone about the energy released during phase changes in earth materials.
• Devon Orme, Matthew Wetzel, Allie Macho, Jenny Dabbs, and Marc Sbar gave presentations to numerous elementary school classes.
• Devon Orme, Marie de los Santos, and others served as judges at several middle school science fairs.
• Dakota Isaacs coordinated bringing ~50 middle school students to the GeoDaze poster session to learn about the exciting, wide-reaching research going on in the Department. (See photo on page 12.)
Page 14 • Geosciences Newsletter

• Shelby Rader continues to be involved in the Arizona Superfund Program developing applied modules on mining and environmental issues and how they affect local communities, and delivering them to Tohono O’odham community colleges.
• Sean O’Neal volunteers with the Red Rocks and Catalina State
Park Service Family Campout program, teaching students about geologic/scientific concepts and the fundamentals of camping.
• J.D. Mizer and Simone Runyon gave talks to the Society of
Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration’s Tucson section.
• Carson Richardson gave a talk on Arizona’s geohistory to the
Old Pueblo Lapidary Club.
• Marc Sbar represented Geosciences at the Earth Science
Outreach in Arizona meeting in late March.
This Tucson Festival of Books activity, led by PhD student Shelby
Rader, shows how difficult it is to mine metals. The children must extract minerals from tubs of birdseed using only pipe cleaners, coffee stirrers, chop sticks, and paintbrushes.
Bachelor of Sciences student John Carroll helps children at the
Tucson Festival of Books with a “Dino Dig,” where they use real geology tools to excavate plastic dinosaurs.
S teve Marshak completed his MS at the University of Arizona in 1979, under the supervision of Peter Coney. Since completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1983, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Geology at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. After serving as department head in Geology, he became the Director of the School of Earth, Society & Environment, where he oversees three departments—Geology, Geography & GIS, and Atmospheric Sciences—as well as the interdisciplinary environmental studies major.
Steve’s research focuses on structural geology and tectonics. He has worked on continental-interior structure, fold-thrust belt evolution, and Precambrian geology, and was Chair of the Division of Structural Geology and Tectonics of GSA. Steve greatly enjoys teaching and has offered courses in introductory geology, structural geology, geotectonics, Earth resources, and field geology. Recently, he developed an introductory geology MOOC that was distributed by Coursera. Steve is a Fellow of GSA, has won distinguished undergraduate teaching awards at both the college and the campus levels, received the Amoco Foundation Award for Innovation in Instruction, and was recognized by the 2012 Neil Miner Award of NAGT “for exceptional contributions to the stimulation of interest in Earth Science.” As a hobby, Steve writes college textbooks, and has authored or co-authored Earth: Portrait of a Planet; Essentials of Geology; Earth Structure; Basic Methods of Structural Geology; and Laboratory Manual for Introductory Geology.
Continued on page 19
2015 Geosciences Distinguished Alumnus
Steve Marshak in Utah.
Geosciences Newsletter • Page 15

Mariah Armenta , BS student, is the recipient of the Geosciences Department
Excellence in Undergraduate Research
Award. Last summer, Mariah was selected for the 2014-2015 Keck Geology
Consortium’s Montana Project,
Exploring the Proterozoic Big
Sky orogeny in SW Montana:
Metasupracrustal rocks of the
Ruby Range. She spent the summer conducting field work in southwest
Montana and has been contributing to the overall project by working on her own research project in Geosciences while using the facilities at the Arizona
LaserChron Center. Professor George
Gehrels was her supervisor for this project. In April, Mariah presented her research at the annual Symposium of the Keck Geology Consortium at Union
College in New York. She will pursue a
Master’s degree at Purdue University in the fall.
Mariah Armenta (l) and Tekla Harms (PhD
‘86) do field work in the Ruby Range in SW
Montana.
Elizabeth Balgord, PhD student, received a Fulbright Scholarship to go to Argentina. Elizabeth also won the Scholarship Award at the College of Science graduate student awards ceremony.
Jordon Bright , PhD student, received the Kerry Kelts Award of the Geological
Society of America Limnogeology
Division.
John Carroll, BS ‘15, received the
Geosciences Outstanding Senior Award in the graduating class of May, 2015.
Rachel Cajigas , PhD student, won the
Geological Society of America’s 2015
Claude Albritton Jr. Scholarship. This prestigious student award is offered
Page 16 • Geosciences Newsletter by the GSA’s Archaeological Geology
Division and will be presented at the
GSA fall meeting in Baltimore.
Christy Caudill , PSM student, has received a CREATE (Collaborative
Research and Training Experience)
Fellowship, funded by NSERC (Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research
Council), for her future work starting on her Ph.D. at Western Ontario
University. Christy also received a research and project grant from the
UA Graduate and Professional Student
Council.
Jay Chapman , PhD student, won the Teaching Award at the College of Science graduate student awards ceremony. Jay also received a $5,000 grant from the Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research, supported through the American
Philosophical Society.
PSM students Hayley De Witt and
Alexandra Macho , and MS student
Daniel Favorito received Fellowships from the Society of Economic
Geologists.
PhD students Ursula Ginster and
Melissa Harrington received 2015 NSF
Graduate Research Fellowships.
Nathanial Hendler , BS student, was awarded $13,000 through the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory’s
“Student Observing Support” Program for work he’s doing in the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
Phillip McFarland , PhD student, was named an ARCS Scholar by the ARCS
Foundation.
Jason D. Mizer , PhD student, received the Courtright Scholarship from the
Arizona Geological Society.
Shaunna Morrison , PhD student, received the Philanthropic Educational
Association (P.E.O.) Scholar Award and the NASA Astrobiology Institute
(NAI) Astrobiology Field Trip Award.
She has been featured in the media numerous times for her work with the
Mars Curiosity project, geosciences outreach, and mineralogy. Shaunna lists seven meeting abstracts for this year, three journal publications, and three public talks, in addition to outreach with elementary and middle school children. Shaunna and other members of her team also have two new minerals approved:
Hexiong Yang, Robert T. Downs,
Stanley H. Evans, Shaunna M.
Morrison, Benjamin N. Schumer
- Lefontite, Fe
2
Al
2
Be(PO
4
)
2
(OH)
6
;
Shaunna M. Morrison, Kenneth J.
Domanik, Hexiong Yang and Robert
T. Downs (2014) Petersite-(Ce),
Cu 2+
6
Ce(PO
4
)
3
(OH)
6
·3H
2
O, a ceriumdominate phosphate of the mixite structure-type from Yavapai County,
Arizona, U.S.A.
Devon Orme , PhD student, won the
Service Award at the College of Science graduate student awards ceremony.
Devon received a GPSC Research and Project Grant for $2,000 and an
American Association for Petroleum
Geologists (AAPG) Student Research
Grant for $ 3,000. Devon will become a post-doctoral research fellow at
Stanford University in August.
Shelby Rader , PhD student, received a Research Grant from the Society of
Economic Geologists.
Emma Reed , MS student, received the $5,000 Harriet Evelyn Wallace
Scholarship grant from the American
Geosciences Institute. Emma was also accepted into the NSF East Asian
Pacific Science Institute. She will spend eight weeks in Australia, mostly at the
Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, working on coral reefs and climate change.
PhD students Carson Richardson and
Simone Runyon received Research
Grants from the Geological Society of
America.
Jessica Faith Rudd , BS ’14, received both the Geosciences Outstanding
Senior Award and the College of Science
Outstanding Senior award in the graduating class of December 2014.
Adjunct Professor Lee Allison was elected Chair of the Geoinformatics
Division of the Geological Society of
America and chosen as Chair of the
National Data Repositories consortium, a 30-nation group of mostly petroleum regulatory agencies and national oil companies. He writes, “We spun off

a new non-profit company, USGIN
Foundation, Inc. to commercialize the
US Geoscience Information Network, data integration platform. I am CEO of the company, which is focusing on national and international projects.
“The National Geothermal Data
System was formally launched by US
Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, at the White House Energy Datapalooza, in May 2014. I served as the Principal
Investigator on the four-year, $22 million project to build and deploy the national federated data network.
NGDS was turned over to the USGIN
Foundation, Inc, to commercialize and deploy for other uses.
“I was appointed by the World Bank to the Working Group for the African
Minerals Geoscience Initiative, to be launched by the African Union in April
2015.
“I continue to co-chair the Belmont
Forum e-Infrastructure and Data
Management Steering Committee and
Secretariat, developing an international strategy to support global change research for a group of 15 national science funding agencies around the world plus the European Commission and the International Council for
Science.  A final report is due in June
2015
“ As PI on the NSF EarthCube Test
Enterprise Governance project, we launched a community-based organization that is being tested as a model for a long-term body to facilitate agreement on a cyberinfrastructure architecture for the geosciences.”
Richard Bennett won the Richard
Ruiz Outstanding Faculty Fellow in a
Specialized Center award from Student
Affairs and Enrollment Management,
Academic Initiatives and Student
Success.
Susan Beck and Jibamitra Ganguly were named AGU fellows by the
American Geophysical Union. Susan
Beck was also the 2014 Gutenberg
Lecturer at the Fall AGU meeting.
Barbara Carrapa was awarded a grant from the National Geographic Society to work on the uplift history of Cerro
Aconcagua (6962 m) in Argentina and its implications for Andean mountain building. Carrapa, PhD student
Elizabeth Balgord, and colleagues did field work in the Aconcagua region in early 2015. Barbara also won the 2015
Outstanding Faculty Award from the
Geosciences Advisory Board.
Andrew Cohen received the Israel C.
Russell Award from the Limnogeology
Division of GSA. The award is given annually for major research, teaching, and service achievements in limnogeology. In addition, “A
Human Climate,” an NSF-funded movie about Andy and team’s work on connections between past climate and human evolution in Africa’s Rift
Valley, is now on YouTube and will be distributed to museums in the US and internationally.
Led by Peter DeCelles , Geosciences professors Barbara Carrapa , Peter
DeCelles , Mihai Ducea and Paul Kapp published a GSA Special Memoir on the Andes. The publication stems from a six-year project on the Andes, in collaboration with ExxonMobil.
The project involved several faculty members and students and represents a significant contribution to Andean geology and Tectonics.
GSA Special Memoir on the Andes.
Professor Emeritus William Dickinson received the Rip Rapp Archaeological
Geology Award from the Geological
Society of America.
Discover Magazine named the Colorado
River pulse flow #14 of the top 100 stories of 2014 in their January/February
2015 issue. Karl Flessa and a team of scientists from the US and Mexico released a pulse flow of water into the Colorado River in March 2014 and continue to monitor its effects.
Professor Emeritus William Dickinson celebrates with his former student Lynn
Soreghan (PhD ‘92) after receiving the Rip
Rapp Award at the GSA fall meeting.
Joellen Russell has a $2.36 million grant over six years as part of a larger effort called the Southern Ocean
Carbon and Climate Observations and
Modeling program (SOCCOM) that will study the Southern Ocean’s role in climate regulation and ocean health.
Russell is leading a team of scientists that will improve how the Southern
Ocean is represented in the computer models used to understand climate change and to make projections about future global warming.
At a recent meeting of the Arizona
Geological Society, Spencer Titley met with the speaker—former astronaut and former Senator from New Mexico
Harrison Schmitt. Schmitt is the only geologist to have been on the moon.
Spence helped train astronauts in geology before they went into space.
David Steinke , Staff Engineer, won an award of Excellence from the College of
Science Staff Advisory Council.
C ongratulations to these Geosciences faculty and staff members, honored on April 16 by the University President’s
Office for their employment service at
Jibamitra Ganguly – 40 year award
George Gehrels – 30 year award
Mark Barton – 25 year award
Susan Beck – 25 year award
Mihai Ducea – 15 year award
Heather Alvarez – 10 year award
Kiriaki Xiluri-Lauria – 10 year award
Xioyu Zhang – 10 year award
Geosciences Newsletter • Page 17

Jennifer Dabbs, MS Student
Spencer R. Titley Scholarship
$4,170
Marie De los Santos, PhD
Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,601
Daniel Favorito, MS Student
Spencer R. Titley Scholarship
$4,170
Victor Garcia, MS Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,170
Ursula Ginster, PhD Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,601
Dominik Kardell, MS Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,170
Andrew Laskowski, PhD
Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,601
Ryan Leary, PhD Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,727
Jason D. Mizer, PhD Student
Keith L. Katzer Scholarship
$1,230
Daniel Portner, PhD Student
Bert S. Butler Scholarship
$4,601
Lucia Profeta, PhD Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,727
Emma Reed, MS Student
Paul S. Martin Scholarship
$4,170
Kevin M. Ward, PhD Student
BP Geophysics Scholarship
$4,727
Shana Wolff, PhD Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,601
Jonathan Delph, PhD Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,727
Susana Henriquez Gonzalez,
PhD Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,601
Adam Hudson, PhD Student
Geosciences Graduate
Scholarship $5,587
Jhon Jimenez, MS Student
Geosciences Graduate
Scholarship $4,170
Ryan Leary, PhD Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,727
Cheryl Peyser, PhD Student
Geosciences Graduate
Scholarship $4,601
Anne Billingsley, MS Student
Geosciences Graduate
Scholarship $4,601
Kathleen Compton, PhD
Student
ConocoPhillips Fellowship
$4,727
Page 18 • Geosciences Newsletter
Mariah Armenta, BS Student
A. W. Voorhees Scholarship
$2,200
Rebecca Beadling, PhD Student
Wilson Thompson Scholarship
$500
Anne Billingsley, MS Student
Bert S. Butler Scholarship
$1,314
Brandon Bishop, PhD Student
Chevron Summer Support $909
Alejandro Blanco-Ocampo, PhD
Student
Spencer R. Titley Scholarship
$1,500
Jordon Bright, PhD Student
Maxwell N. Short Scholarship
$1,500
Nicollette Buckle, MS Student
Wilson Thompson Scholarship
$500
John Carroll, BS Student
Mr. and Mrs. Lee H. Davis
Family Scholarship $2,200
James Chapman, PhD Student
Chernoff Family Field
Experiences Scholarship $500
Marie De los Santos, PhD
Student
Sulzer Scholarship $1,000
Kim Fendrich, PhD Student
Bert S. Butler Scholarship
$1,314
Erik Fleming, BS Student
A. W. Voorhees Scholarship
$2,200
Cheryl Peyser, PhD Student
Wilson Thompson Scholarship
$500
Eduardo Garcia, BS Student
Mr. and Mrs. Lee H. Davis
Family Scholarship $2,200
Kojo Plange, BS Student
David L. Moore Scholarship
$2,200
Victor Garcia, MS Student
Spencer R. Titley Scholarship
$1,500
Lucia Profeta, PhD Student
Chevron Summer Support $909
Paul Goddard, PhD Student
Wilson Thompson Scholarship
$500
Emma Reed, MS Student
Wilson Thompson Scholarship
$500
Melissa Harrington, PhD
Student
Maxwell N. Short Scholarship
$1,500
Carson Richardson, PhD
Student
H. Wesley Peirce Scholarship
$6,300
Susana Henriquez Gonzalez,
PhD Student
Chevron Summer Support $909
Hunter Tek, BS Student
David L. Moore Scholarship
$2,200
Dakota Isaacs, MS Student
Chevron Summer Support $909
Kaitlynn Walker, BS Student
Mr. and Mrs. Lee H. Davis
Family Scholarship $2,200
Kristen Joyse, BS Student
Mr. and Mrs. Lee H. Davis
Family Scholarship $2,200
Zachary Williams, PhD Student
Chevron Summer Support $909
Dominik Kardell, MS Student
Chevron Summer Support $909
Shana Wolff, PhD Student
Chernoff Family Field
Experiences Scholarship $500
Saba Keynejad, PhD Student
Chevron Summer Support $909
Hector Zamora, PhD Student
Wilson Thompson Scholarship
$500 Jennifer Kielhofer, PhD Student
Chernoff Family Field
Experiences Scholarship $500
The following students received
$1,000 scholarships from donors to the College of Science Galileo
Circle .
Matthew King, PhD Student
Chernoff Family Field
Experiences Scholarship $500
Clinton Koch, MS Student
Chevron Summer Support $909
Barbara Lafuente, PhD Student
Chevron Summer Support $909
Andrew Laskowski, PhD
Student
Chevron Summer Support $909
Jason D. Mizer, PhD
Student
Bert S. Butler Scholarship
$1,314
Connor Nolan, PhD Student
Wilson Thompson Scholarship
$500
Jared Olyphant, PhD Student
Chevron Summer Support $909
Kevin Ortiz, BS Student
Evans B. Mayo Scholarship
$1,992
Winslow Scholarship $208
Jordan Abell, BS student
Mariah Armenta, BS student
Elizabeth Balgord, PhD student
Rachel Cajigas, PhD student
Susan G. Earl Galileo Circle
Scholarship
John Carroll, BS student
James Chapman, PhD student
Dakota Isaacs, MS student
Gloria Jimenez, PhD student
Barbara Lafuente, PhD student
Daniel Portner, PhD student
Andrea Stevens, PhD student
Shana Wolff, PhD student
Chad Yost, PhD student
A total of $162,548 was awarded

To see this listing with research topics, please see www.geo.arizona.edu/Grads1415.
Over the years, Steve has participated in various advisory boards. For the National Science Foundation he served on the continental dynamics panel, the structure and tectonics panel, and the advisory board for the Spatial Intelligence and Learning
Center. At the University of Illinois he has worked with the Institute for Sustainable Energy & Environment, the CyberGIS
Center, the Council on General Education, the Council on Undergraduate Education, the Global Studies Program, and the
Liberal Arts & Sciences Strategic Advisory Committee. He has been an external reviewer of academic programs for a number of universities.
Steve and his wife Kathy, who was the editor for the UA Department of Geosciences in 1977-78 and works with Steve on textbooks, have two children and a daughter-in-law, all of whom live on the east coast. The family still enjoy vacationing together, despite frequent stops to check out outcrops and take geophotos.
Geosciences Newsletter • Page 19

G eophysics Professor George Zandt officially retired in January of this year and is now an Emeritus faculty member in the department. George has been at UA since 1995, having come from
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. George is continuing to pursue his passion for seismology and tectonics and working with graduate students, but he now has more time to
“think.”
George continues to make major strides in seismic imaging of the lithosphere and in understanding processes such as lithospheric removal, subduction, and mountain building. George has worked on projects in North America, South America, Asia and the Middle
East. George was honored as an American Geophysical Union
Fellow in 2011, an award given to 0.1% of the AGU membership for exceptional contributions to Earth and space sciences. George has worked with many graduate students over the years and they are scattered across the globe in academic and industry jobs. We hope to see George in the Department for many years to come.
Professor George Zandt retired in January, 2015.
George Zandt with former graduate student Lepolt Linkimer (PhD
‘11) deploying a seismic station high in the Andes in Argentina.
George Zandt and crew after installing a station in the Altiplano of Bolivia.
The rifting process, along with formation of oceanic fracture zones, created a very complex tectonic and structural environment in the Guinea margin with faulting and rapid sediment deposition punctuated by volcanic eruptions and intrusions.
The subsurface data show old, riftrelated and post-rift volcanoes buried by thick sedimentary rock sequences, large extensional faults, and numerous depositional fan sequences, fault blocks and other structures of interest to explorationists.
“Part of our focus is to identify and map now-buried volcanic and intrusive features to help determine their geometries and their timing of emplacement,” said Professor
Roy Johnson, who is leading the
Geosciences side of the project.
“This is complicated work, but it has been greatly facilitated using new seismic workstations and large datastorage capacity made possible by research funding from Hyperdynamics, which has also supported our IT staff and, primarily, the thesis and dissertation work of seven geophysics graduate students,” Johnson said.
Ray Leonard, Hyperdynamics
President and CEO also commented on the collaboration’s benefits. “The partnership between the Department
“The exceptional quality of the state-ofthe-art 3-D data from offshore Guinea makes interpreting geologic features quite exiting and always fascinating,” said Johnson.
Continued on page 21
Page 20 • Geosciences Newsletter of Geosciences and Hyperdynamics for the past four years has been mutually beneficial,” Leonard said. “The
Department has had access to a large state-of-the-art 3-D seismic survey for research and teaching purposes along with financial support, while
Hyperdynamics has had the benefit of excellent research studies on tectonics and identification of volcanic and carbonate features on the block.”

C hris Eastoe joined the Department of Geosciences in 1982 as an Assistant Professor in Economic Geology. Some of the research he and his students undertook required stable isotope measurements, and this led him into cooperation with Professor
Austin Long, a relationship that would continue for many years.
Austin Long’s group had recently succeeded in developing a highprecision method for measuring stable chlorine isotopes, and
Chris felt encouraged to combine that know-how with his own experience in fluid inclusions in ore deposits. Although he was denied promotion to Associate Professor, that decision came at a time when opportunities were about to lead him in unexpected directions. Employment as a laboratory coordinator for Austin
Long led to involvement in the research activities of Austin’s group: isotope hydrology and radiocarbon dating, cooperative exchanges with Chinese scientists, and the application of chlorine isotopes to geochemical problems.
From Austin, Chris inherited the tradition of running the laboratory as an observatory of natural phenomena such as
Since retiring, Chris Eastoe is spending two months as a visiting scholar at Nanjing University, China.
rainwater isotopes and atmospheric radiocarbon. Chris views the evolution of his career as a steady cooling of his fields of interest, beginning with porphyry copper deposits (400-600⁰C), passing through volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits (300-400⁰C) to Mississippi Valley-type deposits and basin brines (90-
150⁰C), and continuing down through evaporites and groundwater to Tucson rainwater (0-25⁰C). At the time of his retirement, early in 2015, he had still not tackled glaciology.
Looking back over an interesting, varied, and completely unforeseeable career, Chris considers the following to have been high points. He, along with Charles Tucek, ran the Arizona Radiocarbon Laboratory that had begun life in the 1950s, and finally closed because both needed to retire. With David Dettman, he coordinated the Environmental Isotope Laboratory, an operation that continues to thrive. During Chris’s time of involvement, both laboratories served clients from around the globe. As for research projects at the University of Arizona, some of Chris’s highlights are measurement of radiocarbon in 500 sequential tree rings from a sequoia (undertaken with Paul Damon), mapping and interpretation of isotopes in Tucson basin groundwater, and measurement of chlorine isotopes in Phanerozoic marine evaporites.
In retirement, Chris is looking forward to writing a number of papers and being involved in some joint research projects. At the time of writing, he is spending two months as a visiting scholar at Nanjing University, where colleagues are interested in advancing chlorine isotope research.
The data cover an area of roughly 87,000 square kilometers on the Guinea margin, and include over 9,300 square kilometers of high-quality 3-D seismic data, which is sampled every 25 m in map view and every 5 m in depth to 10,000 m.
Portion of interpreted seismic profile from the
Guinea Plateau showing collapse features in a
Paleogene carbonate layer. The intra-Miocene paleo-seafloor horizon marks the approximate upper limit of “sagging” sedimentary rock units above the collapse features suggesting that dissolution of carbonate and consequent collapse occurred in the early
Miocene.
Geosciences Newsletter • Page 21

Jeffrey Bryant (BS ‘74, MS ‘78) writes, “After a 25-year career as a petroleum geologist and 11 years as an energy analyst for the
Department of Defense, I have managed to return to Tucson as an Intelligence Analyst for the U.S. Air Force at Davis-
Monthan Air Force Base.”
Arianna Gleason (BS ‘03) received the 2014 Mineral and
Rock Physics Early Career Award at the 2014 American
Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, held 15–19 December in
San Francisco. The award is for promising young scientists in recognition of outstanding contributions achieved during their PhD research.
Richard Norris (PhD ‘86) is with Scripps Institution of
Oceanography,University of California, San Diego where his research focuses on Paleobiology & Paleoceanography.
Richard was recently featured in the Geological Society of America’s STEPPE (Sedimentary Geology, Time,
Environment, Paleontology, Paleoclimate and Energy) newsletter. To read the full feature see steppe.org/featuredresearchers/richard-d-norris/.
Hector R. Hinojosa-Prieto (BS ‘03) writes, “Currently, I am pursuing a PhD in Germany at the University of Cologne
Institute for Geology and Mineralogy, and plan to graduate this summer. Before that, I spent ~3 years working in the geophysical instrument manufacturing sector. Before that,
I pursued an MS in Structural Geology followed by an MS in
Geophysics.”
Christine Smith Siddoway ( MS ‘87) writes, “ Monte Swan
(MS ‘76) contacted me after learning of a new discovery in the Colorado Front Range (Siddoway & Gehrels 2014; http:// news.sciencemag.org/earth/2014/09/strange-formationcolorado-rockies-sheds-light-earths-past)   ; we met for the first time and promptly set off to visit some nearby exposures of Tava sandstone in Colorado Springs. Dave
Freedman joined in, because Tava sandstone was the subject of his 2014 Bachelor’s degree thesis. Monte and I had not been acquainted with each other previously, and discovered a shared interest in sandstone injectites*!
Stephen Marshak (MS ‘79) received the 2015 Distinguished
Alumni Award from the Geosciences Advisory Board. Please see a brief biography of Steve on page 15.
Stephen Myers (MS ‘90, PhD ‘97) a seismologist at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, won the prestigious Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for his work advancing national security and nonproliferation by developing seismic monitoring technologies to locate nuclear explosions.
“Both Monte and I had George H. Davis as an MS advisor, but at different times, and we were unaware of each other here in Colorado. Also, George Gehrels (BS ‘78) became my MS advisor within a year of my arrival at UA because
George Davis departed for a term at University of Vermont!
It’s really rewarding to now, decades later, be able to make use of the UA Laserchron facility for some joint research.
The Tava sandstone injectites are such a big problem that
Professor Peter Reiners, recent postdoc Alexis Ault , and all the Laserchron facility staff have become involved!”
(* sedimentary intrusions)
Stephen Myers (right) receives the Ernest Orlando Lawrence award from US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz.
Page 22 • Geosciences Newsletter
Christine Smith Siddoway (MS ‘87), Monte Swan (MS ‘76), and Dave
Freedman, a student at Colorado College.

Joel Saylor (PhD ‘08) is now a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the
University of Houston ( http://easd.geosc.uh.edu/saylor ).
In two years at UH, Joel has built a group of eight graduate and undergraduate researchers working on basin analysis projects incorporating sedimentology, stable isotopes, and detrital thermochronology. Field study areas range from the
Cordilleran foreland basin and Ancestral Rocky Mountains of western North America, to the Andes of Peru and Colombia, to the high plateau of the Himalayan-Tibetan orogenic system.  Joel is particularly excited about the growing capabilities in UH laboratories for U-Pb geochronology, (U-
Th)/He thermochronology, stable isotope geochemistry, and paleomagnetic studies.
Attending the annual Exploration Roundup conference in Vancouver in January were the following 20 Wildcat alumni:
Front row, left to right:  John-Mark Staude (PhD ‘95), Scott McBride
(MS ‘08), Jennifer Roskowski (MS ‘07), Tom McCandless (PhD ‘94),
Moira Smith (PhD ‘90), Joey Wilkins (BS ‘85), George Sanders.
Back row, left to right:  Brooke Clements (MS 91), Christian Rathkopf
(Current PSM student), Hayley DeWitt (Current PSM student), Doug
Kreiner (PhD ‘11), David Maher (PhD ‘08), Eugene Schmidt (MS ‘73),
David Johnson (PhD ‘00), Brigette Martini (BS ‘97), Kent Turner (MS
‘83), Peter Megaw (PhD ‘90), Clancy Wendt (MS ‘78), Kit Marrs (BS
’74, MS ‘79), Louis Lepry Jr. (MS ‘81)
Several generations of UA Geosciences alumni participated in a
March 2015 field trip to the Andes of Argentina, across the provinces of Mendoza and San Juan. The trip was led by Brian Horton (PhD ‘98) for his basin analysis course at the University of Texas at Austin. Left to right: Brian Horton, Lily Jackson (BS ‘14, now Brian Horton’s PhD student at UT Austin), Kurt Constenius (PhD ‘98), and Facundo
Fuentes (PhD ‘10).
Professor George Davis and Chuck Kiven (MS ‘76) met up during the Geosciences reception at the Geological Society of
America meeting in Vancouver in October.
Jackie Dickinson , wife of Professor Emeritus William R.
Dickinson, passed away May 7, 2015. She had many friends in the Department and will be missed by the entire
Geosciences community.
Gary M. Edson (MS ‘77) passed away October 2, 2013 after a long battle with cancer.
Elliott Lax (MS ‘91) passed away in February 2015.
His obituary in the Arizona Daily Star provided this tribute: “Elliott loved traveling and getting to know new people, cultures, and landscapes as he created enduring friendships all over the world. His passion in life was to help and mentor others: from the students he taught or advised, to refugee families who he helped thrive, to his family and his many, many friends. He had a gift for building community whether on an archeological dig, in the classroom, or working for social justice. The world has lost a tireless advocate for peace.” Elliott was the husband of former Geosciences staff member Eneida Lima.
Purnendu K. “Rana” Medhi (MS ‘64) passed away in
November, 2014. Rana was a former chairman of the
Board of Governors of the Arizona Department of Mines and Mineral Resources. He retired in 1994 after 28 years at
Cyprus Amax Minerals Company and later worked as an independent consultant.
Jean Straub Russell , long-time Geosciences friend, passed away on December 5, 2014. Jean established the Ike
Russell Endowment, in memory of her late husband, to fund student work on Tumamoc Hill.
Geosciences Newsletter • Page 23

NONPrOFiT OrG
Us POsTAGe PAiD
TUcsON AZ
PerMiT NO. 190
The University of Arizona
The Department of
Geosciences
PO Box 210077
Tucson, AZ 85721-0077
ADDress service reqUesTeD
Name:
(Please check one of the boxes below to indicate which address you prefer as your mailing address.)
Home Address:
Phone:
email: company:
Department:
Business Address:
Phone:
email:
New job? Kids? Back in school? retired? Attend a national meeting? Take a trip? see a classmate? Please send us your news and a photo by mail or e-mail (alicias@email.arizona.edu).