Spring 2006 Colorado School of Mines
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geophysics Colorado School of Mines Spring 2006 From the Department Head geophysics n spite of the fact that our enrollment is perennially strong and growing, we are Spring 2006 having trouble supplying the high Colorado School of Mines I recruitment demand for our students. It’s a great time to be graduating with a degree in 3 Hot Topics geophysics! In this newsletter, as always, we introduce the activities of our Department by focusing 10 Collaborations on its people – students, faculty, staff, visi- Terry Young tors. What a pleasure to welcome new faculty members Paul Sava and Feng (Suzie) Su this 14 Crossing Borders year, and to have Martin Landrø spend his sabbatical year with us. We have enjoyed watching our students thrive in their internships, study-abroad experiences, summer field 18 Study Abroad camp, research activities, and extracurricular pursuits. A bonus this year was the field venture in Hawaii, organ- 19 Faculty Spotlight ized by our junior class to do geophysical measurements over active lava flow fields. Our international connections are as strong as ever, with both faculty and students cir- 22 Alumni Focus cling the globe, and international students joining us from all over the world. I hope you have as much fun reading the articles about current hot topics, student life, research col- 24 Internships laborations, and much more, as we have had in writing them for you! 26 Visiting Committee 27 Honors & Awards 28 Campus Life 30 Jobs: The Road Less Traveled On Our Cover 31 Graduation 32 Faculty Retreat GP students Dustin Lanci and Kristen Schmidt pose during 2005 Field Camp in Chaffee County, Colorado. The story and more pictures are on page 3. 2 THE PROBLEM WITH WATER The Field Camp students performed a deep seismic survey to accurately map the structure of the valley floor, the fault Field Camp zones and the depth of the sediments filling the basin. This To provide students with field is the first such survey of the valley and the information will experience and to reinforce be vital to the county and municipalities as they plan for the future. important concepts and The second working site for Field Camp was on the High practices learned in class. Trails Ranch at The Nature Place, just south of Florissant, GOAL The 2005 Field Camp session, though located on a differ- Colorado. This area has suffered the effects of recent drought ent site from past years, dealt with a familiar issue – water. and wildfire activity. A recreational lake disappeared during This was a two-in-one experience for students as they divid- the drought, and questions of groundwater movement and ed their time on problems in two separate areas. One of the area wells arose. The CSM students performed surveys to areas was near Salida, in Chaffee County Colorado in the Up- characterize and quantify the regional subsurface and aquifer per Arkansas Valley. Water availability is a critical issue in geometry. this area which relies on groundwater and whose population is expected to increase by 70% in the next 30 years. H O T T O P I C S 3 Plate Tectonics Out of this World – Warren Hamilton The Distinguished Senior Scientist largest of Warren Hamilton, Distinguished Se- from the base of the planet's mantle, these basins nior Scientist, came to Mines after re- and that the magmatic products of has an inner-rim tiring from the these plumes have wholly resurfaced diameter of 2000 km, and is one of the USGS 10 years Venus within the last billion or half- youngest of the structures that is older ago, and contin- billion years. These plumes are as- than the unmodified young craters. ues active re- signed behaviors and products quite Analogy with the Moon, whereon search in geody- unlike those of hypothetical terrestrial the last giant impact is well dated at namics through plumes, which Warren regards as 3.91 billion years, indicates the Venu- time. He works imaginary; and the overwhelmingly sian structures to be that old and older. with data across circular structures assumed to be prod- Venus is almost as dead as the Moon the spectrum of ucts of the Venusian plumes are unlike and Mars, and much of its surface Warren Hamilton geology, geo- anything known on Earth, or other ob- dates from end-stage main planetary physics, and geochemistry, and regards jects in the Solar System, except for accretion. impact craters and basins. popular hypotheses of geodynamics as Warren’s past contributions to geo- controverted by much empirical infor- Only a thousand small, unmodified science have been honored with the mation. craters and basins on Venus are widely Penrose Medal of the Geological Soci- Where most see plate tectonics as accepted as of impact origin. (Most in- ety of America, and with membership driven by whole-mantle convection, coming bolides are destroyed in the at- in the National Academy of Sciences. Warren sees it as enabled by internal mosphere, which is almost 100 times Time will tell whether he has more heat, but as driven by top-down cool- denser than Earth's.) winning concepts. ing: the density inversion caused by The postulated products of Venusian chilling of asthenosphere to oceanic plumes are the lithosphere is righted by subduction, several thousand which provides the primary drive for circular structures both subducting and overriding plates, that saturate much and the 3-D circulation is limited to the of the planetary upper mantle. surface. (See fig- Where most assume plate tectonics ure.) Warren’s to have operated throughout geologi- evaluation of cal time, Warren sees products of plate- these old circular like processes (and those significantly structures is that different from modern ones) only in they are variably terrains younger than 2.1 billion years, eroded and sedi- earlier tectonics having been con- ment-buried im- trolled by quite different heat-loss pact craters and Synthetic-aperture radar image of Venusian surface saturated mechanisms. basins; they com- with circular structures conventionally attributed to young monly have rims plume magmatism but interpreted by Warren Hamilton to be H Warren has expanded his studies to ancient impact craters and basins. Venus is shrouded in mist, steepest on the in- O Venus, which is almost as large as and its surface is seen with satellite radar imagery. Area T Earth and which, all agree, lacks plate side, broad outer shown extends from 40 to 47 degrees North Latitude, and is tectonics. Conventional explanations ejecta blankets, centered on 222 degrees East Longitude. Mosaic provided by T assume that Venus must lose as much and central peak U.S. Geological Survey O and peak-ring up- P heat as does Earth, and postulate that I this hypothetical heat loss occurs as lifts, and many are multiring. C plumes, columns of hot material, rise S 4 Learning about Volcanoes MonitoringMonitoring Mt.Mt. St.St. HelensHelens– Roel Snieder, Professor n 2004 Mount Saint Professor Roel Snieder is IHelens in Washington studying these seismic was active again. This vol- events in a collaborative cano erupted violently in project with Stephanie Pre- 1980 when part of the jean of the Alaska Volcano mountain was blown away. Observatory of the US Ge- ological Sur- vey. The figure here shows seismic events record- ed on Mount Saint Helens Mt. St. Helen’s erupting over a period Coda wave interferome- of 24 hours. It try, developed by Snieder, is day. is striking a technique to analyze how repeat- minute changes in seismic The waves recorded on Mount Saint Helens able these waveforms. Snieder and that are generated by small earthquakes. seismic Prejean showed that the These waveforms are shown at hourly inter- events are. A changes in the waveforms vals, indicated on the vertical axis. closer analy- can be explained by a The activity in 2004 was ac- sis reveals that these wave- movement of the source of companied by seismic forms slowly change over these seismic events over a events in the volcano. time. distance of about 100 m per SeniorSenior DesignDesign ProjectProject ExaminesExamines KilaueaKilauea – Rich Krahenbuhl, Postdoctoral Fellow & Alicia Hotovec, GP Junior In March 2006, a group designed and implemented report/proposal, and as a projects and study on Ki- of undergraduates and fac- the geophysical surveys, formal presentation at Col- lauea. The first group tack- ulty traveled to Hawaii Vol- and processed and interpret- orado School of Mines. led the problem of identify- canoes National Park to per- ing subsurface structure as- form geophysical investiga- sociated with lava-tubes, tions on the world’s most caves, and old lava ponds active volcano, Kilauea. beneath the current caldera The surveys were part of a floor. The second group Senior Design course re- helped to map active lava quired for all undergraduate tubes throughout the active students in the GP Depart- flow field to identify the ment. hidden route(s) of lava As part of the course re- transport from the active quirements, a few select vent Pu`u `O`o to the Pacif- students took a leading role ic Ocean. H in identifying geophysical The students will use O Littoral Cone on Kilauea in 1998 – photo R. Krahenbuhl problems of interest to the their geophysical data to T ed their data. The final National Park and USGS The students, while work- calculate lava-flux through T Hawaiian Volcano Observa- product was presented to ing as one large group for tubes, thus predicting the O tory (HVO), chose appro- the faculty and members of part of the study, also divid- amount of growth to the big P priate geophysical methods the USGS Hawaiian Vol- ed into two sub-groups for island of Hawaii.