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CSU Bakersfield Department of Geology Newsletter

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CSU Bakersfield Department of Geology Newsletter CCSSUU BBaakkeerrssffiieelldd DDeeppaarrttmmeenntt ooff GGeeoollooggyy NNeewwsslleetttteerr http://www.csub.edu/Geology Fall 2007 A MESSAGE FROM THE NEW CHAIR: DIRK BARON Greetings and welcome to our first-ever department newsletter! This is something we have been wanting to do for a long time but it has been one of these things we just never got around to actually doing. You can thank Eugene Edward Miller who received his BS in Earth Science from CSUB in 1978 (!) for finally motivating us to make it happen. He emailed us with an update about his fascinating career (see Alumni News). He also told us that he wants to hear from his classmates. I am sure he is not the only one. The goals of this newsletter are to help you reconnect with old friends, to update you on what is happening in the department, and to encourage you to take a more active role in our old department. We are hoping to hear from many of you in the coming year and that this will be the first of many annual newsletters. DEPARTMENT NEWS these numbers with K-12 outreach and recruitment initiatives. We are proud to report that our programs continue to attract some of the best students on Dirk Baron just started a 3-year term as our campus. They receive an outstanding department chair, taking over from Jan Gillespie education with exceptional opportunities for who did a fine job steering us through these student research. In recent years, our students interesting times. have been honored as CSUB Outstanding Graduating Seniors, have won statewide student Inside this newsletter: research competitions, have presented their research at national and international Department News professional meetings, traveling as far as Italy, Germany and even Turkey. Perhaps most Faculty and Staff News impressively, several have had their research Student News published in premier professional journals such as Geology, Geochimica Cosmochimica Acta, New Laboratory and Field Equipment AAPG Bulletin, and Quaternary International. Alumni News We currently have 25 undergraduate and 12 Mitchell Fossil Collection graduate students working towards their geology Donations degrees. We are continually working to increase DEPARTMENT NEWS CONTINUED FACULTY AND STAFF NEWS Last year, we welcomed a new faculty member, Dirk Baron The fall of 2007 marked three Dr. Staci Loewy. She received her Ph.D. from interesting milestones for me: First, I have now the University of Texas in Austin. Her areas of been at CSUB for 10 productive years. I was expertise are radiogenic isotope geochemistry, lucky to find some very supportive and capable U/Pb geochronology, and structural geology. colleagues. With support from two major Our students and we are fortunate that Staci’s instrumentation grants from the US Department husband, Dr. Patrick Mickler, has also been of Defense, Bob and I were able to bring two teaching for us for the last year. He also holds a state-of-the-art analytical laboratories to CSUB. doctorate from UT in Austin. Read more about We established a laboratory for ICP/MS trace- Staci and Pat in the Faculty News section. element analysis and - just this spring - a brand new electron microscopy lab. Both labs are now Long-time geology professor Bob Horton, who used for many student research projects and also many of you will know, has accepted an attract outside collaborators including from UC appointment as the interim head of CSUB’s Davis, UC Berkeley, USGS, and the China Grants and Contracts office. Although by all Lakes Naval Research Center. I was also lucky accounts he is doing a great job in his new to be able to collaborate with Rob, Jan, and Bob capacity, we are hoping that he will return to the in several grants funding research on the aquifer department next year. Our students and we are used by the Kern Water Bank, and with Rob in a fortunate that despite the demands of his new National Science Foundation grant for a summer position, he continues to supervise several senior research participation program for K-12 teachers undergraduate and MS theses and volunteers to and high school students. teach a graduate class in winter 2008. The second milestone was the 20th Anniversary Many of you know Steve Mitchell, the longest- of my arrival in the US. Who would have serving member of our department. Steve fully thought that I would be in Bakersfield today retired this spring. Steve left behind an when in 1987 I arrived as a fresh-faced exchange irreplaceable fossil collection that needs more student from Germany in Oregon for what was exposure to the general scientific community supposed to be a one-year exchange program! (see box about the Mitchell Fossil Collection) . Due to the CSU system’s budget constraints, we Third, with the arrival of Staci last year, I am not have not yet been able to replace Steve but we the “new faculty in Geology” anymore and have are optimistic that we can conduct a search next in fact just started a three-year term as year. department chair. Retired professors Dr. John Coash and Dr. Ed Undoubtedly the most rewarding thing during Laskowski continue to live in the Bakersfield my time at CSUB has been the work with our area. We last saw Dr. Coash at the retirement students including some of our best majors and reception for long-time staff member Marie graduate students. Recent highlights of this Covin last year. We were sorry to hear that Dr. work include Liz Golob’s thesis on the John Manning, an early faculty member, passed geochemical correlation of the Kern River Ash, away a couple of years ago. We continue to use Leslie Boockoff’s research on arsenic in parts of his fine textbook Applied Hydrologic groundwater in the southern San Joaquin Valley, Principles in several of our hydrology and and Anne Draucker’s work on the hydrogeology classes. characterization of obsidian from archaeological sources in Coso Range. This year, I am working with one of the CSUB Student Research Scholars, Jenn Kalkis, on the geochemical characterization of chert samples from archaeological sites in southern France. Jan Gillespie Whoa—have I really been here 17 rock climb. Yes! I climbed to the top of the years? Sun, fun, stay, play—just like the old Tower—several times now! Bakersfield billboard said! I have just come off Last summer I was at Grand Staircase-Escalante a 3-year stint as department chair and was glad to National Monument in southern Utah where I hand the reins to Dirk Baron. Hopefully, I will worked on a self-guided geology fieldtrip along have more time to spend getting back up to one of the rough dirt roads through this 2 million speed on all the new GIS technology but, with acre monument. Undergraduate student Dirk as chair, I’ll probably have to take over Rosemary Marble came out to Utah for a few more of the hydro duties. weeks and worked on a self-guided hiking tour Besides being department chair, I’ve been of the Box area in the Paria Wilderness. I hope spending most of my time on petroleum geology to get more students involved in the parks and and subsurface mapping studies. My two most monuments in the future. recent graduate students Ariel Auffant and Sophia Cobos recently completed subsurface mapping theses in the western Bakersfield Arch/Elk Hills area. Occidental played a major role and part of the study was funded by a Department of Energy grant as well. Ariel now works for Chevron in Houston and Sophia for Oxy International in Columbia. I’m also collaborating on papers with Ariel and with Dan Steward who is working for Noble Petroleum doing deepwater Gulf exploration and production. Next, I’d like to learn more about applying subsurface mapping to CO2 sequestration so that I can be more politically correct! Jan at “The Wave” in Grand Staircase and soon-to-be-alumna Rosemary after being rescued out of the quicksand in “The Box”. Bob Horton I’ve been involved in plenty of interesting and fruitful projects in recent years. Brian Taylor’s recently finished thesis on the Point of Rocks Formation, as well as Andy McCrea’s work on very deep core (>18,000 ft) in the Maricopa sub-basin and Kay Coodey’s study of lithologic influences on secondary oil production at Kern River field, have been very On top of Devil’s Tower interesting, as has my own work on porosity I’ve also started working on a long-time passion development elsewhere in the San Joaquin basin. which heretofore has had to take a backseat to It has been especially fun to work with our the more practical pursuits of oil, groundwater newly acquired scanning electron microscope, and GIS. I’ve spent the last three summers which is equipped with an energy-dispersive x- working as a ranger at a couple of the national ray spectrometer and a state-of-the-art real-time monuments--first at Devils Tower, Wyoming color cathode-luminescence detector (we were where I created a geology tour website for the one of the first, and still one of the only, National Park Service. I also learned how to California universities to have this equipment). extremely interesting and we are making progress at improving the entire grant process, from proposal writing to final report submission. In spite of these challenges, I have continued to work with both graduate and undergraduate students on research projects and I plan on teaching Advanced Sedimentary Petrology during winter quarter. So, I have quite a bit on my plate at present.
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