News
Fall 2004 Vol. 10 No. 1
From the Chair & Donors 2
Tumamoc Hill Reunion 3
Recruiting Efforts 3
Diversity in Radiogenic Isotopes 4
New Geosciences Faculty 6
TGMS Scholarship Recipients 7
Memorials 7
Geoarcheaology Tradition 8
Spring Degrees & Awards 10
Alumni News 11
Geosciences Advisory Board
Regina M. Capuano, University of Houston
•
Carlotta B. Chernoff, ConocoPhillips
M. Stephen Enders, Newmont Mine
•
Charles F. Kluth, Consultant
•
David J. Lofquist, ExxonMobil
•
Stephen J. Naruk, Shell
•
David K. Rea, University of Michigan
•
Jeffrey G. Seekatz, ExxonMobil
•
William H. Wilkinson, Phelps-Dodge
The UA Geosciences Newsletter is published twice a year by:
The Department of Geosciences
The University of Arizona
PO Box 210077
Tucson, AZ 85721-0077
•
Lesa Langan DuBerry, Editor
520-626-8204 lesa@geo.arizona.edu
• www.geo.arizona.edu
Graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in Sedimentary Basin Analysis
(GEOS 417/517) flew to Salt Lake City in late September for a five-day fieldtrip across the Sevier fold-thrust belt and foreland basin system in Utah and
Wyoming. The
17 participants represented six countries: China,
Italy, Turkey,
Argentina, the
United Kingdom, and the US. The trip was led by
Professor Peter
DeCelles with assistance from classic examples of both fold-thrust belt and foreland basin features, including six major thin-skinned thrust systems, a huge basement-involved duplex, examples of growth structures in wedge-top foreland basin deposits, and a wide variety of alluvial, fluvial, and marine facies. Moreover, extensive hydrocarbon exploration and production
Dr. Gian Paolo
Cavinato from the University of
Rome. Generous support from
ExxonMobil covered part of the costs involved.
The purpose of in foreland basins.
The fieldtrip area
Participants in the 2004 Sedimentary Basin
Analysis fieldtrip, with Fremont Lake and the
Wind River Range in the background. (Left to right) back: Amanda Reynolds, Facundo
Fuentes, Ross Waldrip, Brian Wallin, Gian
Paolo Cavinato, Erin Brenneman, John
Volkmer, Jana Van Alstine, Chuck Park,
Frank Guerrero, Majie Fan, Peter DeCelles; front: Lynn Peyton, Shundong He, Patrick
Mooney, Carl Anderson, and Serkan Arca.
the trip was to familiarize students with regional-scale structure of fold-thrust belts and the relationships between structure and sediment accumulation for many
Amanda Reynolds points out key features in an outcrop of synorogenic conglomerate in northeastern Utah.
decades provides a nearly unrivalled understanding of subsurface structure.
is an outstanding natural laboratory for such studies, as it contains
Even in a field area that is as scientifically mature as the
Jana Van Alstine (left) and John Volkmer
(right) ponder structural relations along the Crawford thrust in northern Utah.
Wyoming-Utah thrust belt and foreland basin, the students found much to
Erin Brenneman obscures an upward coarsening parasequence in Late Cretaceous fan delta deposits in western Wyoming.
debate and question.
For more information about this fieldtrip, contact Peter
DeCelles at decelles@geo.arizona.edu.

The fall semester has gone well. We have a new group of 17 graduate students that joined us this fall. The graduate students are already gearing up for GeoDaze (April 7-9, 2005) and the new chairs are Andy Frassetto and Toby Ault. Please mark your calendars, and plan to attend!
I just returned from the annual GSA meeting in Denver and was reminded once again of how truly outstanding our alumni are.
We had a great alumni reception, and I wanted to thank all of you that came by. I saw many old faces, and I also met many of you for the first time. We will definitely have this event go until 10 pm next year, so that we can all visit longer.
Our new faculty member in Geophysics, Dr. Richard Bennett, arrived this fall. Rick has been busy with proposal writing and fieldwork in Italy. We are glad to have him on board to bring a GPS and Geodesy component to our program.
We are currently searching for two new faculty in Biogeochemistry and Geomagnetism/
Paleomagnetism. We hope to interview in the spring and have the new faculty start sometime during the 2005/2006 academic year. Overall, the University and the
Department are moving forward, but we did have yet another budget cut for the
2004/2005 year due to increased costs in health care and benefits. This unexpected cut has been difficult.
Early last summer, Provost George Davis and I traveled to Houston to attend the 2 nd annual Houston Alumni Happy Hour. A huge storm prevented many people from attending the Happy Hour, but George and I were able to visit the ExxonMobil
Exploration office and meet with former alumni who work there. I stayed another day and visited both ConocoPhillips and Shell research offfices as well.
We had another good year of recruiting from many of the major petroleum companies and one mining company. ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Newmont
Mining all came to recruit graduate students from our Department this fall. We appreciate the support that we have received from all of these companies.
Robert Fromm-Rihm, one our PhD students from Chile, was killed in a scuba diving accident last August. Robert was working in seismology and was starting his fourth year. It was a blow to all of us, especially the geophysics group. Robert was a generous person who touched all of our lives.
I want to thank all of our Geosciences alumni and friends for their continued support of the Department. We have been able to offer more field experiences for both our undergraduate and graduate students due to your generous contributions.
The Department of Geosciences wishes to express its gratitude to alumni and friends who support programs and scholarships through their generous contributions.
Terence Britt
Jonathan Browne
Carlotta Chernoff
Jean Cline
Omar DeWald
Donna Eberhart-Phillips
Susan Gawarecki
Harry Goode
Kerry Inman
Gary & Joni Jones
Robert & Shirley Krantz
Joseph Lysonski Jr.
Robert Metz
Rob Risley
Robert Roe
Helen & John Schaefer
Michael Scott
David Steadman
John Sweet
Yukimitsu Tomida
Arthur Trevena
Tucson Gem & Mineral Society
Phelps-Dodge Foundation
BP Corporation
ChevronTexaco
ConocoPhillips
ExxonMobil
The Lowell Program in Economic Geology at the UA is offering its first short course. A 10-day module on
Porphyry Deposits will be held in Tucson December
7-16, 2004. The short course includes lectures, labs, field exercises, and fieldtrips. For more information, go to http://econ.geo.arizona.edu/calendar/.
GeoDaze 2005 will take place April 7-9 in the Student
Union on the UA campus. Plan to be there!
page 2
Geosciences News • Fall 2004
SESS (the Society of Earth Science Students) is sponsoring a new activity this year, an undergraduate newsletter called
“THE CONGLOMERATE.” The newsletter will reach out to UA alumni and friends to build support for the undergraduate program. The newsletter will include articles on undergraduate research, travel, hobbies, awards, and scholarships.
In addition, a classified section will highlight job opportunities in the community that are geared toward undergraduate students. The first issue of “THE CONGLOMERATE” will be posted on the Geosciences web site in December. Hard copies can be requested.

It took 32 years to get the old gang together again, but an open house was a great excuse, especially when none of us are getting any younger. The invitation came from two professors who had sculpted us into their images on Tumamoc Hill. Dr.
Paul Martin had said “Here is the land and everything on its surface; study these and you will be able to interpret the past environments.” Dr. Ev Lindsay had said “Here are the vertebrate fossils; study these and you will be able to tell the story of animals on the land.” These two professors had poured their knowledge into our empty heads, and they had loved us unconditionally.
Invitations to come to Tumamoc Hill for a 1970s reunion during the first week of April were sent all over the US. The invitation list included about 25 people who lived in the western part of the US, and about half of whom were able to come. The list of invitees included some really big names in desert ecology, geology, paleoecology, and paleontology. The following individuals were able to attend:
Martha Ames Burgess (MS ‘73, geology/tree ring, watercolor artist)
Dr. Larry Flynn (PhD ‘81, Peabody Museum, Harvard
University)
Dr. Jessica Harrison (BA ‘70, MS ’72 paleontology, MD ’90 psychiatry)
Dr. Gerald Kelso (PhD ‘76, Natural Resources
Conservation Service, AZ State Archaeologist)
Dr. James King (PhD ‘72, Director of Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Director of Cleveland Museum of Natural History-retired, DSc-honorary ‘02, Alma
College)
Dr. Alex McCord (BS ‘72, MS ‘84, PhD ‘90, Arizona
Division of Emergency Management)
Dr. Mary Kay O’Rourke (MS ‘76, PhD ‘86, UA Associate
Professor for Environmental and Community Health, the Mel and Enid Zuckerman Arizona College of
Public Health)
Dr. Jim Mead (PhD ‘83, NAU Professor of Geology,
Director Quaternary Sciences Program)
Dr. Brian Robbins (PhD ‘75, National Museum of Natural
History-retired)
Dr. Norrie Robbins (MS ‘72, US Geological Survey-retired)
Dr. Dave Steadman (PhD ‘82, Curator and Chair, Florida
Museum of Natural History)
Dr. Lou Taylor (MS ‘77, PhD ‘84, Standard Geological
Services)
Dr. Thomas R. Van Devender (PhD ‘73, Arizona-Sonora
Desert Museum)
Dr. Jamie L. Webb (PhD ‘78, CSU-Dominguez Hills,
Professor of Earth Science-retired).
We mourned the loss of Dr. Fran Bartos King (MS ‘72)
The activities were planned with this group of scientists in mind.
The weekend started with a cookout lunch near the Old Tucson/
Desert Museum area. People brought their children and grandchildren, so the next generation could see, without prodding, how much fun scientists can have.
The group then drove to Tumamoc Hill. Everyone sat around the impressive old table and told stories, not about what people had accomplished since leaving the UA, but stories that revealed character. The group roared with glee at the memories. Some of the stories reached back to the early 1900s, because Tumamoc
Hill has been a center of scientific excellence for many years.
After this, the group toured the garden. It was shocking for some to see how much the plants had grown in 30 years.
Paul Martin handed out copies of a new book about Ike Russell, the famous aviator who had flown many of us on scientific expeditions, often crossing the border into the mountains of
Sonora and Chihuahua.
The day ended with a feast prepared by Mary Kay O’Rourke and her sister Karen, who is a caterer. The Mexican food was delicious and unique. Other people from the 1970s came and joined in, including Betty Fink who was a secretary and a fabulous “mom.” You know, “mom” stands for “move them out, make sure they leave happy.” The festivities ended with a pancake breakfast the following morning before everyone started their long drives home.
Tucson has changed, as we all have. But Tumamoc Hill was the same, with the same job ahead of it, nurturing the best and brightest to tell stories of the geologic past. This is needed now more than ever, because the climate is changing and our society needs to know what lies ahead. The only way to make predictions about the future is by looking at the past, so taught our brilliant professors.
This fall, BP Corporation, ChevronTexaco, Conoco-
Phillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell each sent recruiters to visit the Department, interview students for internships and permanent positions, and talk with faculty. The recruiting teams from BP and ConocoPhillips both included one UA Geosciences alumni as a recruiter.
During their visits, the oil company representatives gave a general introductory session followed by individual interviews. Twenty-seven individuals, primarily MS and
PhD students, participated in the interviews. Students at all stages in their degree programs were involved. The recruiters also met with various faculty members to talk about current issues in the oil industry as well as research trends in the Department.
BP Corporation and ChevronTexaco each made a financial contribution to the Department while they were here. During these times of economic hardship, their generosity is greatly appreciated by faculty and students alike.
We also had a recruiting visit from Newmont Mining
Corporation, one of the world’s largest gold producers.
Our thanks go to each company and their visiting representatives for their interest in our students and their continued support of the University of Arizona’s
Department of Geosciences.
Geosciences News • Fall 2004 page 3

Within the UA Geosciences department, around one half of the faculty members are directly or indirectly involved in research using geochronology and radiogenic isotopes.
Research that directly involves radiogenic isotopes or geochronology accounts for a significant fraction of the
Department’s research funding. The Department, when considered together with the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry
Facility shared with Physics, practices over 90% of all available methods in geochronology and radiogenic isotopic studies.
Worldwide, no other Earth Science institution has anything like the breadth of isotopic techniques that we perform here at the UA.
At the time of my hire in 1984, strontium (Sr) isotopes had been applied to igneous rocks and limestones, but very few
Sr studies of hydrologic systems had been performed.
Neodymium (Nd) isotopes had been applied to oceanic basalts since 1976, but studies of old continental rocks had been started only in 1980, and work on sedimentary systems using Nd was only just beginning. Hafnium (Hf) isotopes had only been in use since 1980 (Patchett and Tatsumoto, 1980), and all published work was just exploratory. By 2004, these fields have all grown tremendously, and the Department now has several faculty members whose research depends mainly upon radiogenic isotopes. My own research has expanded into several areas, reflecting the growth and diversification of the field. A key aspect of my research has been close collaboration with other faculty in the Department.
Fig. 2 Strontium isotopic results from the Colorado River (solid squares) and its tributaries (solid circles), compared to results for Late Miocene and Pliocene sedimentary formations along the course of the river. Diagram is from Patchett and Spencer
(2003) in the book Colorado River: Origin and Evolution, edited by R.A. Young and E.E. Spamer. “Marine Sr” corresponds to the
Pliocene Imperial Formation that represents the former delta of the Colorado. The Bouse Formation appears to have been laid down in a lake system fed by the river, rather than in an arm of the sea, because its Sr isotopic ratios are not marine. The ~6
Ma Hualapai limestone could not have been deposited by
Colorado River-fed waters, and predates the arrival of the river in the area of Lake Mead.
continents can probably only be produced by sinking the melting residues of granitoids back into the mantle.
From historical interests in Precambrian crustal evolution
(Patchett and Arndt, 1986; Patchett and Chase, 2002), research in crustal evolution at Arizona evolved into somewhat intensive studies of the Canadian Cordillera, in collaboration with Dr.
George Gehrels (e.g., Patchett and Gehrels, 1998), as well as
Sr is a powerful tracer of cations in weathering, in solution in natural waters, and in soils because Sr follows the major element
Calcium (Ca) through these systems, and the ratio 87 Sr/ 86 Sr can record the crustal provenance of both the Sr and the Ca.
Research using Sr for these purposes has been done in our laboratories by Dr. Jay
Quade and by myself. One continued application of Hf isotopes to crust-mantle differentiation over
Earth history (e.g., Patchett et al.,
2004a). Our current work in crustal evolution is mostly driven by an very interesting project was done in collaboration with
Dr. Jon Spencer of the
Arizona Geological Survey, and involved the history of exciting new grant from NSF’s
Continental Dynamics program, entitled “Batholiths 3D,” and spearheaded by Dr. Mihai Ducea.
We are investigating the geothe Colorado River. The
Colorado is a peculiar river because its course crosses several very different types of terrain, and includes the chemistry and geophysics of a large region of the Coast Plutonic
Complex in British Columbia (Fig.
1). This batholith is one of the world’s largest, and we believe that
Grand Canyon cut down through the Colorado
Plateau. Our work (Fig. 2, top right) shows that certain sedimentary we will be able to discover not only the origin of the granitoid rocks, but more importantly, what has been the fate of the lower crustal residues produced during the
Fig. 1 Fiord outcrop in the Coast Plutonic Complex of British
Columbia shows two generations of granitoid intrusion.
melting. This would have big implications for crustal growth and differentiation, because the worldwide composition of formations of Miocene and
Pliocene age are probably related to the ancient
Colorado River, but that some are not (Spencer and Patchett, 1997; Patchett and
Spencer, 2003). In particular, we concluded that the Pliocene page 4
Geosciences News • Fall 2004

Bouse Formation (Fig. 2) could not be an estuarine deposit, as had formerly been assumed, because its 87 Sr/ 86 Sr values did not match those of seawater or marine deposits closer to the Gulf of
California. This interpretation allows the conclusion that the
Colorado entered its present lower course only around 5 Ma, that the basins through which it flows existed prior to that time, and that the Bouse does not constrain uplift of the Colorado
Plateau to be post-5 Ma, as had been supposed based on the estuarine interpretation for the formation.
Nd isotopes are very powerful tracers of fine sediment provenance, because the Nd isotopic composition varies regularly with the average crustal residence time of the source rocks. In collaboration with others, principally Drs. Bill Dickinson of the UA and Gerry Ross and Ashton Embry, both of the
Geological Survey of Canada, we have been investigating provenance of clastic sediments all over North America from 600
Ma to present. The Nd isotopic work on sediment movements is complemented by the extensive efforts led by Dr. George
Gehrels, which use the U-Pb ages of detrital zircons to trace sediment movements.
We have also applied U-series dating in the much more competitive field of South American Quaternary to Holocene climate change. PhD student Christa Placzek has been investigating the shoreline deposits of megalakes on the Bolivian
Altiplano, in a project under the leadership of Dr. Jay Quade
(Placzek et al., 2003). Fig. 4 (page 6) shows Christa standing in front of lakeshore carbonate tufas, representing a long-lived megalake on the Altiplano, that we have dated at ~100 Ka, much older than has been supposed. Christa will present her story to the critics at a special session during the annual 2004
GSA meeting in Denver!
The results mentioned here owe their existence and impact to past postdoctoral scientists, graduate, and undergraduate students who have worked on our projects. I regret that it has been possible to name only current students and collaborators in the article. Some additional names of contributors to my/our work appear in the reference list.
The large expansion of applications for radiogenic isotope geochemistry offers exciting opportunities for collaboration on projects within the Department at the UA and beyond.
Our most far-reaching conclusion based on Nd has been that the continent was deluged with sediment from the Caledonian-
Appalachian mountains after about
450 Ma, and that this material dominated the sedimentary system for more than 300 million years
(Patchett et al., 1999). Fig. 3 shows the results of a recent study of the Carboniferous to Cretaceous sedimentary sequence in the
Canadian Arctic (Patchett et al.,
2004b). The results appear to show that the “Cover Nd” signature (Fig.
3), and hence the clastic material that had been delivered to the
North American craton following the Caledonian-Appalachian orogeny, dominated provenance in the northern half of our continent until 100 Ma. Not surprisingly, our paper suggests that much of the
Canadian Shield was actually covered during 450-100 Ma, a very differentlooking continent than exists today.
Fig. 3 Neodymium isotopic results for shales from the sedimentary sequence in the
Sverdrup Basin of Arctic Canada (Patchett et al., 2004b, from Journal of Geology). The results show the provenance of sediment in the northern part of North America from
Carboniferous through Cretaceous time. The sediment appears not to have been derived from the old rocks of the Canadian Shield, but instead from a sedimentary cover that had been deposited after the Caledonian-Appalachian Orogeny at ~450 Ma. Much of the Canadian Shield may have been covered by sediment from 450 to 100 Ma.
To our existing arsenal of techniques, we added U-Th (or U-series) dating in 1999. This method is powerful for dating carbonates and other aqueous deposits up to 400,000 years in age. PhD student Jennifer
Wagner has applied the method to dating of cave calcite samples in southern Arizona, in collaboration with myself and
The expansion also poses a challenge to specialists who build and maintain geochemical techniques, because an increasing number of scientists would like access to, or analytical support from, all the methods that are available in the Department. We expect these trends to continue, such that our facilities and the time of a scientist such as myself might become overloaded.
Drs. Julia Cole (project leader) and Warren Beck of the UA. To date, paleoclimatic records from the southwestern US and northern Mexico are sparse, and this effort is generating some of the first results. We are developing constraints on issues like the transition from cooler and potentially wetter conditions during the glacial periods to the present overall dry, but monsoonal climate (Wagner et al., 2003).
In this context, the Department is very excited about the prospect of building the Earth Surface Processes Research
Institute (ESPRI) in collaboration with the US Geological Survey, to be housed in a new building located on the ...cont’d page 6
Geosciences News • Fall 2004 page 5

Rick Bennett joined the
Department in August as an Assistant Professor in Tectonic
Geodesy. He obtained his BS degree in Geophysics at UC
Riverside in 1990, and a PhD degree in Geophysics at MIT in
1996. After this, he went to the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where he conducted research as a
Geodesist for eight years.
Rick’s primary research focus is the application of space geodetic techniques, such as the Global Positioning
System (GPS), to problems in active and neo-tectonics.
Space geodesy provides new quantitative constraints on the spatial and temporal patterns of crustal motion from kilometers to thousands of kilometers, and seconds to tens of years, with implications for the geodynamics of the lithosphere and the mechanics of earthquakes, faulting, and magma transport. He is very interested in comparing geodetic measurements of presentday deformation rates with geological inferences, which constrain deformation rates across significantly longer intervals of time.
Rick’s current projects include investigations of geodynamic models for syn-convergent extension in the northern
Apennines in northern Italy, the tectonic history and geodynamic setting of the San Bernardino Mountains in southern California, the pattern and rates of crustal spreading within the Gulf of California in Mexico, and the development of new techniques for determination of transient crustal motions using the new NSF Plate Boundary
Observatory (PBO) continuous GPS (CGPS) network. He hopes to develop an investigation of accretionary flux and elastic strain accumulation associated with the Cascadia subduction zone in the Olympic Peninsula in northwestern
Washington, the geodynamic setting of the Laguna Salada normal fault zone in northern Baja California, Mexico, and the kinematics of arc/arc collision at the junction of the
Aleutian and Kamchatka subduction zones.
Patchett, P.J. and Spencer, J.E. Application of Sr isotopes to hydrology of Colorado system waters and potentially related Neogene sedimentary formations. In Colorado
River: Origin and Evolution , Young, R.A. and Spamer, E.E.
(eds.), 167-171, 2003.
Patchett, P.J. and Tatsumoto, M. A routine high-precision method for Lu-Hf isotope geochemistry and chronology.
Contribs. Mineral. Petrol. 75, 263-267, 1980.
Patchett, P.J., Ross, G.M. and Gleason, J.D. Continental drainage and mountain sources during the Phanerozoic evolution of North America: Evidence from Nd isotopes.
Science 283, 671-673, 1999.
Fig. 4 PhD student Christa Placzek standing alongside carbonate tufa heads that were produced by a large lake on the Bolivian Altiplano around 100,000 years ago.
integration between Geosciences and ESPRI, such that both science initiatives and laboratory facilities will be shared or collaborative. With the infusion of laboratory space, instruments and personnel, ESPRI should ensure availability of state-of-the-art geochemical methods for the foreseeable future.
cont’d...
Patchett, P.J. and Arndt, N.T. Nd isotopes and tectonics of 1.9-1.7
Ga crustal genesis. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 78, 329-338, 1986.
Patchett, P.J and Chase, C.G. Role of transform continental margins in major crustal growth episodes. Geology 30, 39-42, 2002.
Patchett, P.J. and Gehrels, G.E. Continental influence on Canadian
Cordilleran terranes from Nd isotopic study, and significance for crustal growth processes. J. Geol. 106, 269-280, 1998.
Patchett, P.J., Embry, A.F., Ross, G.M., Beauchamp, B.,
Harrison, J.C., Mayr, U., Isachsen, C.E., Rosenberg, E.J. and
Spence, G.O. Sedimentary cover of the Canadian Shield through Mesozoic time reflected by Nd isotopic and geochemical results for the Sverdrup basin, Arctic Canada.
J. Geol. 112, 39-57, 2004b.
Patchett, P.J., Vervoort, J.D., Söderlund, U. and Salters, V.J.M.
Lu-Hf and Sm-Nd isotope systematics in chondrites and their constraints on the Lu-Hf properties of the Earth. Earth
Planet. Sci. Lett. 222, 29-41, 2004a.
Placzek, C., Patchett, J., Quade, J. and Betancourt, J. Chronology and sedimentology of major lake-level fluctuations on the southern Bolivian Altiplano. 3rd Intl. Limnogeol. Congr. Abstr.,
216, 2003.
Spencer, J.E. and Patchett, P.J. Sr isotope evidence for a lacustrine origin for the upper Miocene to Pliocene Bouse Formation, lower
Colorado River trough, and implications for timing of Colorado
Plateau uplift. Geol. Soc. Am. Bull. 109, 767-778, 1997.
Wagner, J.D.M., Cole, J.E., Beck, J.W., Patchett, P.J. and Peachey,
W.D. Speleothem records reveal abrupt climate variations in the arid southwest United States over the last glacial cycle. XVI
INQUA Congress Progr. W. Abstr., 140, 2003.
page 6
Geosciences News • Fall 2004

Jerome Guynn and Kimberly Tait each received a Tucson Gem and Mineral Society Scholarship for the fall 2004 semester. These scholarships are awarded to students for excellence in pursuing a Geosciences career, with special consideration given to students with an interest in minerals. The purpose of these scholarships is to allow students to focus on their research and studies. In the paragraphs that follow, each scholarship recipient has summarized his/her research activities.
Jerome Guynn
My advisor, Paul Kapp, and Craig
Manning (UCLA) are exploring a new geobarometer for metabasites, which are common in convergent margin metamorphic belts but often lack garnet for traditional geobarometric methods. The new method uses an equilibrium reaction between sphene, epidote, anorthite, rutile, and quartz, and it is called
TZARS (for titanite, zoisite, anorthite, rutile, and silica). An additional strength of TZARS is that it can be integrated with U-Pb dating of sphene to provide the age of metamorphism. Unfortunately, while results from this method for metabasites from central Tibet appear to be correct, no independent means are available to assess their validity and the sphene is uranium poor.
Jerome Guynn in
Tibet
Samples of intermediate orthogneisses from my PhD field area in eastern Tibet contain the TZARS mineral assemblage, and, in addition, I was able to collect garnet-bearing amphibolites from within the gneiss as well as a garnet-kyanite schist that was associated with the gneisses. The garnet-bearing rocks will allow us to use established geobarometric methods as an independent means to verify the TZARS results. The sphene also has a high uranium concentration. Some preliminary results give an equilibrium pressure of about 12 kbar, consistent with the presence of the garnet-kyanite schist, and a 179 ± 2 Ma age for the sphene.
Kimberly Tait
Gas hydrates (clathrates) are elevated-pressure and lowtemperature solid phases in which gas molecule guests are physically incorporated into hydrogen-bonded, cage-like ice host frameworks. Natural clathrates have been found worldwide in permafrost and in ocean floor sediments, as well as in the outer solar system (the Moon, comets, Mars, satellites of the gas giant planets). Clathrates in oceanic deposits have a great potential as an energy resource for the future; some have estimated that the global reserve of methane in hydrate form contains more than twice the energy of all natural gas, petroleum, and coal deposits combined.
Kimberly Tait at the Los Alamos Neutron
Scattering Center
I am interested in methaneethane and methane-propane clathrates, since they are the most geologically relevant.
I will study lab-synthesized and natural samples with
X-ray and neutron diffraction at ambient and high pressure,
SEM, Raman, and NMR to study the stability and variations of crystal structure of the clathrates. I am a PhD student in the geosciences Department at the University of Arizona, but I spend a significant amount of time at the Los Alamos Neutron
Scattering Center (LANSCE) in Los Alamos, New Mexico as a
Graduate Research Assistant to do the neutron diffraction experiments.
Robert Fromm-Rihm , a doctoral student from Chile, drowned in a scuba diving accident near San
Carlos, Mexico this past August.
Robert was a gentle and caring individual; he was an energetic, outgoing adventurer; and he was a brilliant scholar. As part of the department’s seismology group that analyzes information from earthquakes to study the Earth’s structure, Robert was working on ways to estimate the thickness of the Earth’s crust in Chile and Argentina, along the Andes range. News of his death came as a shock, and he is missed by everyone in the Department, especially his fellow students.
Richard Beane (MS ‘68) died in November following an accident near his home in Oro Valley, Arizona. Most recently,
Dick was a Senior Principal Scientist in Geochemistry for BHP
Billiton Mining Company headquartered in Melbourne,
Australia. He had previously taught at several universities; including the University of Arizona. Dick’s joy and passion were in teaching his many students and colleagues in the field of geology and geochemistry, both in academia and the mining industry.
Richard Bideaux (BS ’60) died in October at his summer residence in Prescott, Arizona. He was a well-known, respected mineralogist, author, collector and mineral dealer.
He collected minerals throughout his life and was especially partial to ones from Arizona. He was an active long-time member of several mineral and geological societies, and he was very active in the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. He gave freely of his knowledge and time to various individuals and organizations associated with minerals.
Geosciences News • Fall 2004 page 7

wider array of dating research was under way with the establishment of the Geochronology Labs. Haynes was a part of this program and conducted research into dating a wide array of materials found in archaeological contexts.
The University of Arizona has one of the longest traditions of training and research in geoarchaeology of any university in the
US. Geoarchaeology is the application of the geosciences to answer archaeological questions. These questions might include
A very different kind of geoarchaeology was developed at about the same time by Bill Dickinson. Archaeologists working to understand the evolution and spread of pottery and people in the South Pacific tapped into Bill’s knowledge of the origins and rock types of most of the islands. Careful collaborative research over the decades has allowed the reconstruction of trade networks and population movement over a vast ocean area through time.
dating, stratigraphic correlation, landscape setting, or perhaps the source of raw materials for tool manufacture. Geologists and archaeologists have worked together since the 19 th century.
One long-standing area of overlapping interest is the timing and nature of the peopling of the
New World, and the archaeology
With Vance Haynes’ retirement, Vance
Holliday was hired to fill his position in 2002 and to direct the Argonaut
Archaeological Research of Paleoindians, the earliest occupants of the continent.
Fund. AARF is a privately endowed research program focused on understanding the earliest peopling of the greater
Here at the UA in the 1950s,
Ernst Antevs and John Lance, both from Geosciences, worked with Emil Haury in Anthropology on excavations at the Lehner site, a mammoth kill in a buried tributary of the Upper San Pedro
Southwest. Before arriving here, Holliday had spent over 20 years investigating the Paleoindian geoarchaeology and
Quaternary geology of the southern Great Plains.
Valley of southeastern Arizona.
This site was left by the oldest well-established archaeological tradition in the Western Hemisphere, referred to as Clovis. In the 1960s Vance Haynes entered the scene as a graduate student and eventually as a faculty member, pursuing interests in
The "Clovis" style projectile points (~11,000 radiocarbon years B.P.) recovered from the mammoth kill sites of the upper San Pedro Valley of southeastern Arizona (top two are from the Escapule site, second row from the Naco and Leikum sites, third row from the Lehner site, and the rest are from Murray Springs). Photo by Vance Haynes both Paleoindian archaeology and geology, particularly the
Clovis record. Additional mammoth sites turned up in a series of paleo-drainages along the San Pedro Valley as a result of Haynes’
A variety of similar research endeavors are now underway in the
Southwest. A prime study locality is back in the upper San Pedro Valley. It may be the only drainage system in North America with well documented
Paleoindian sites that cross the international border between the US and Mexico. In light of this unique characteristic, two graduate students in
Anthropology are surveying and mapping the area from research and that of his colleagues and students. The Murray
Springs site, near Sierra Vista, includes a mammoth kill, a rare
Clovis bison kill, and one of the only clovis campsites known
Fairbank, Arizona to the headwaters in Sonora, Mexico in search of additional buried early sites. Haynes’ work showed that the in North America. The upper San Pedro Valley now has the highest concentration of reported, buried Clovis sites in North
America. Moreover, this remarkable collection of sites is in a stratified, dated context. The sites were occupied ~11,000 radiocarbon years ago when the floors of ancient stream channels were damp, attracting animals and people alike.
The channel beds and archaeological sites were buried by an algal “black mat” shortly after the Clovis hunters passed through, providing an unusually high degree of preservation.
Vance Haynes’ research also included field work at early sites throughout much of the US, and the stratigraphy and geochronology of pre-Dynastic sites in Egypt. Another important component of Haynes’ work was applying the then relatively new radiocarbon method to dating the sites. The radiocarbon lab at the UA was one of the first established after the development of the method in 1950. By 1960, a
The quarry area of El Bajio, an extensive Clovis archaeological site in Sonora,
Mexico. This site is on the flanks of a basalt hill where early human populations, including Clovis hunters, quarried fragments of the volcanic rock for manufacturing their stone tools.
Large piles of discarded rock are the result of testing the raw materials during repeated visits by many tool makers over thousands of years. Photo by Guadalupe
Sanchez de Carpenter page 8
Geosciences News • Fall 2004

Paleoindian sites are in a repeatable and recognizable late Pleistocene and early Holocene stratigraphic context traceable over a large part of the drainage.
The current field work is thus focused on tracing the extensive arroyo exposures that dissect the area, using the stratigraphy and recovery of stone artifacts and remains of extinct fauna to guide that have produced most of the reported Paleoindian materials. The archaeology indicates that the Clovis and younger occupations field parties to potential archaeological sites.
took place after the lake receded from its highest
Farther south in Sonora, near
Hermosillo, we are conducting excavations at El Bajio, which has yielded several dozen Clovis artifacts over an area of several hectares. It is one of the largest
Clovis sites known in North
America based on areal extent.
The area is a bajada along the western foothills of the Sierra
Madre. The artifacts were
Geosciences graduate student James Mayer prepares to core late
Quaternary sediments on the floor of the White Lake Basin at the northeast end of the Plains of San Augustin, New Mexico.
Preliminary analysis of the core shows that the area was a marsh or shallow pond during Paleoindian occupation of the area. The coring locality is adjacent to the headquarters of the Very Large
Array radiotelescope. In the background is one of the radio antennas parked in a maintenance "garage." recovered from arroyos that dissect the area. The Clovis level (i.e., below 7050 ft).
The early sites apparently were along the margins of shallow ponds and marshes rather than the shores of the main body of water, perhaps because the lake was brackish.
In addition to the AARFbased work, Vance also has a geoarchaeological program underway along the Don River of Russia. There, in and near the occupation debris has yet to be found in place, but the next round of field work (late this fall) will focus on trenching the alluvium that must have produced the artifacts. Another noteworthy characteristic of the site is the availability of good quality raw material for making the stone artifacts. Within
1 km of the main find is Cerro La Vuelta, a volcanic hill producing basalt that was heavily quarried by the prehistoric occupants and is one of the largest Paleoindian quarries in the southwestern US and northwestern Mexico.
structural basin formed along the southeast flank of the Colorado Plateau. Our work, including mapping and coring, has focused on several shallow sub-basins village of Kostenki, archaeologists have investigated several dozen Upper Paleolithic occupation sites (~40,000-20,000 years old) since the 19 th century, drawn by repeated recovery of mammoth bones. In cooperation with archaeologists from St.
Petersburg, the project is focused on understanding the formation process that created a series of Upper Paleolithic sites with evidence of some of the oldest occupations by modern humans in Eastern Europe. The sites are turning up evidence of hitherto unrecognized sedimentation by seeps and springs, which would account for the intense occupation and the high number of mammoth bones and other remains of late Pleistocene fauna.
Paleoindian geoarchaeological research is also underway in and near the central Rio Grande Rift. Dozens of Clovis and post-
Clovis Paleoindian sites are known in the Albuquerque Basin.
Of particular interest is the West Mesa segment of the Llano de
Albuquerque, west of the Rio Grande and north of I-40 near the
Tres Volcanos and Petroglyph National Monument areas. The
West Mesa is underlain by late Pleistocene basalt and covered with eolian sheet sand and dune sand. Depressions on the surface of the basalt formed shallow playa basins. Many of the
Paleoindian sites are found around these basins. Our work, in cooperation with faculty in Anthropology and in Earth Science at UNM, is focused on understanding the landscape setting of the sites and the paleoenvironmental implications of landscape evolution. Trenching and coring has shown that the Paleoindian archaeology is sandwiched within soils formed in the sheet sand.
The adjacent playa basins contain palustrine mud, providing paleobotanical remains spanning the late Pleistocene and the
Holocene. The Paleoindians of the area must have lived on stable eolian landscapes around shallow basins with marshes and ponds. The artifacts and playa sediments were then covered by Holocene sand.
The other AARF project area in central New Mexico is the Plains of San Augustin, most popularly known as the site of the Very
Large Array. The basin contained one of many paleo-lakes scattered throughout the Southwest in late Pleistocene time.
As such, it was likely attractive to Paleoindian occupants, and, indeed, extensive collections of Paleoindian artifacts are known from the area. The Plains of San Augustin are on the floor of a
Russian archaeologists uncover mammoth tusks at one of the
Upper Paleolithic sites in the village of Kostenki, along the Don
River. This particular level is ~45,000 years old. A hint of the complex microstratigraphy of the site is apparent on the wall to the left behind the seated individual. Interbedded lenses of silt
(redeposited from upland loess), primary carbonate, and organicrich loams probably accumulated along the valley margins due to slopewash and spring/seep sedimentation.
Geosciences News • Fall 2004 page 9

Christina Butzer, MS
Neogene Tilting of Crustal Panels Near Wrangell,
Alaska, Robert Butler
Sergio Castro-Reino, PhD
Intrusion-Related Mineralization in The Central
Sector of The Sierra Madre Oriental, Mexico,
Mark Barton
Robinson Cecil, MS
Stratigraphic Analysis of Eocene River Systems:
Implications for the Cenozoic Uplift History of
The Sierra Nevada, Clement Chase
Andrew Hennes, MS
Structural Constraints on Gas-Hydrate Formation and Distribution in the Milne Point Unit, North
Slope of Alaska, Roy Johnson
Katherine Likos, MS
Factors that Influence a Teacher’s Ability to
Implement an Environmental Science K-12
Education Program: A Study of the GLOBE
Program, Michelle Hall-Wallace
John Porter, MS
Sulfur Evolution of The Ertsberg Intrusions and
Sulfur Isotopes of The Ertsberg Stock Work Zone,
Ertsberg Mining District, West Papua, Indonesia,
Spencer Titley
Todd Shipman, PhD
Links Between Sediment Accumulation Rates and the Development of Alluvial Architecture: Triassic
Ischigualasto Formation, Northwestern
Argentina, Peter DeCelles
Richard Thompson, PhD
Crystallographic Models of The Pyroxenes,
Robert Downs
Jana Van Alstine, MS
Water Density and Bottom Gradient Controls on
Lacustrine Delta Stratigraphy: A Case Study from the Shellenberger Canyon Formation, SE
Arizona, Andrew Cohen
Lynnette Kleinsasser, Graduate College fellowship
Ross Waldrip, Sulzer Scholarship
Becca Walker, Sulzer Scholarship
The Spring 04 edition of the Geosciences Newsletter neglected to acknowledge Murray Gardner as the individual responsible for the award for “Best Talk Based on Field Geology.” We regret the omission, and we appreciate Mr. Gardner’s continued generosity which supports departmental activities and helps stimulate interest in fieldwork.
Paul Kapp received the College of Science “Early-Career
Teaching Award.” He also received the “Foreign Travel Grant
Award.”
Andrew Cohen was elected to the Science Planning Committee and Board of Directors of DOSECC (Drilling, Observation, and
Sampling of the Earth’s Continental Crust, Inc.).
Pete Kresan received an “Extraordinary Contributions to Honors
Award” from the Honors College.
Lee Davis from Denver, Colorado will receive a Geosciences
T-shirt for sending in his change of address. Congratulations!
Send in your updated contact information and have your name added to the drawing pool for the next Geosciences T-shirt.
page 10
Geosciences News • Fall 2004

Abdul Arif (MS Hydrology ‘65)
Abdul retired from his position as Chief
Engineer of Irrigation for the Government of Punjab, and he has been working as a project manager since May of 1992. He is presently in charge of feasibility studies to modernize three aging barrages used to divert river supplies for irrigation. He also worked as Chief Hydrologist for the Basha
Dam. He has one daughter, two sons, and four grandchildren. He took a trip to the US during 1997.
~ aceron@brain.netpk
Bernard (Barney) Pipkin (PhD ‘65)
Barney is an Emeritus Professor at the
University of Southern California. He just completed the 4 th edition of Geology and the Environment with Dee Trent (PhD, ‘73) and 3 rd author Rick Hazlett of Pomona
College. He went to the GSA meeting in
Seattle and saw Spence Titley. Barney says, “Best wishes to my classmates, also of the Mesozoic era.”
~bpipkin@aol.com
William Sauck (MS ‘69, PhD ‘72)
I appreciate receiving the newsletter. I’m still in academia, having oriented 31 MS theses
(9 in Portuguese) and a couple of PhD dissertations. I’m the only geophysicist in a department of 11-12, so I pull my share of
Geos 100 classes, as well as doing my own thing in geophysics. Geophysics has taken me to lots of interesting places (besides AZ);
5000 ft underground in Lead, SD; airborne geophysical surveys; underwater GPR in the
Great Lakes; archaeological geophysics in the Yucatan; mineral exploration in various parts of the Brazilian Amazon and central plateau; ground water exploration in the
Amazon delta and in the SW Sinai of Egypt; and a multitude of forgettable environmental sites in the Midwest.
My Brazilian wife (Elen) of 25 years and I have put three children through Universities.
The fourth is starting this fall. The last three have had all-tuition scholarships at the
University of Michigan. We spend at least six weeks a year in Brazil on the NE coast
(Sao Louis) where we hope to partially retire some day and still maintain a home in
Belém. Hi to all the 60’s grad students! See the WMU web page for more information.
~sauck@wmich.edu
Anne Simpson (MS ‘83)
We moved to Tucson in January 2003 when my husband Tom was transferred by
Asarco. I am working as a special education teaching assistant at Canyon del Oro High
School. Our oldest child is a junior in college, and our youngest is in middle school. It’s great to be back in Tucson!
~simpson@ecentral.com
Joe Acaba (MS ‘92)
Joe has been a 7th and 8th grade science and math teacher in Dunnellon, Florida.
After graduating from the UA, he worked as a hydrogeologist and then spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the
Dominican Republic teaching people about the environment.
Joe has been selected for astronaut training to become a Mission Specialist-
Educator. The new class of astronauts includes pilots, mission specialists, and three new mission specialist-educator astronauts, teachers who will help ensure that there will always be a next generation primed to explore.
Joe and ten other candidates reported to
NASA’s Johnson Space Center this past summer where they began their intensive training. Initially, they undergo land survival training,
T-38 jet ground and flight training,
Shuttle orbiter systems training,
Space Station systems training, science and engineering briefings, and orientation tours at all the NASA centers, including the Kennedy Space
Center and the Marshall Space Flight
Center. Joe said, “ My personal goal as an astronaut educator is to reach out to minority students.”
Joe Chmielowski (MS ‘99)
Joe (above left) works for BP and visited the Department this fall as a recruiter. He was a student of George Zandt. We were able to get a photo of them together.
~ chmielj@bp.com
Brian Horton (PhD ‘98)
Brian was the 2004 GSA Donath Medalist.
The award was established in 1988. It is given to a young scientist (35 or younger) for a major advance in the Earth Sciences.
The award consists of a gold medal called the Donath Medal and a cash prize of
$20,000.
~ horton@ess.ucla.edu
Jesse Moore (BS ‘96)
I left the swamp and the pull of the corporate dollar in Houston (ExxonMobil) to resettle in the Land of Enchantment, where
I had gotten my MS in 2000. I’m currently working as a hydrogeologist, enjoying the great outdoors, fixing up a 100-year-old house in downtown Albuquerque, and teaching yoga, not necessarily in that order.
~jmoore@shomaker.com
Nadine McQuarrie (PhD ‘00)
Nadine has taken a job as tenure-track
Assistant Professor at Princeton University.
~nmcq@princeton.edu
Heather Folsom Sherrington (MS ‘02)
Heather is currently a PhD student at the
University of Washington. At the UA, she was a student of George Zandt.
~hkfs@u.washington.edu
Rebekah Wright (BS ‘03)
My significant other, Brett, and I moved to Chandler, Arizona in January of 2004.
I spent my first few months here teaching colorguard at two local high schools. In
March, I accepted a job offer as a Staff
Scientist for the environmental consulting firm ATC Associates Inc. I am enjoying my job and things are going well.
~rebekahaw@yahoo.com
Geosciences News • Fall 2004 page 11

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