2016 Earth & Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz
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EPS Newsletter 2016 Earth & Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz Fall 2016 http: //eps.ucsc.edu www.facebook.com/UcscEPS 1 EPS Newsletter 2016 2 Chair’s Welcome Dear Alumni and Friends, It’s been a VERY active year in the EPS Department, and the coming year looks to be even more vibrant. Our proposed new environmental sciences undergraduate major (spearheaded by Patrick Chuang and Ocean Sciences’ Raphe Kudela) is percolating through the approval system (UC grinds slowly, but it grinds exceedingly fine…) and, as part of this environmental initiative, we are hiring two new faculty this year: in Biogeochemistry and a broad-ranging search for a faculty member who works on the continental side of water’s importance in geologic processes (we call it Fresh Water). And, in April, we will have our roughly every 7 year Departmental External Review. So, we’ve been spending a lot of time preparing our Departmental Self-Study. Table of Contents On the brighter side, at the forthcoming AGU meeting, our own Susan p.4 Department News Schwartz and Rob Coe are being honored: Susan’s been elected an AGU p.5 Slugs in the Field Fellow (0.1% of the membership is elected each year) for her outstanding seismologic research, and particularly her work on p.8 Slugs around campus subduction zones. Rob has won the prestigious John Adam Fleming p.9 Slug science news Medal, which was awarded for his career research and leadership in p.10 GEODES geomagnetism (during Fleming’s career, one of his job titles was “Chief p.12 Undergrad & Grad Magnetician,” which is certainly how we think of Rob!). The Geological degrees Society of America also showed our faculty some love this year, with p.16 Richard Gordon Andy Fisher winning the GSA’s O.E. Meinzer Award (the father of modern groundwater hydrology) for distinguished contributions to p.19 Sami Chen hydrogeology, and especially marine hydrogeology. As part of the award, p.22 Terry Blackburn Andy gets to keep a large silver bowl with his name (and those of past p.25 Allison Pfeiffer recipients) etched on it for a year—it is truly the Stanley Cup of p.28 Alumni Notes Hydrology! Congratulations to all… p.34 Development Update p.37 Donor As a vibrant Department, the cycle of regretted departures and exciting new arrivals continued this last year---on the latter front, we are happy Acknowledgements to welcome Nicole Feldl, our new climate dynamicist, who arrived from her post-doc at Caltech. During her time there and in her Ph.D. at U. Washington, she’s looked at a broad suite of climatic/atmospheric issues, including the origins and likelihood of extreme rainfall events, and climate sensitivity to, and feedbacks from, regional effects like changes in cloud cover, surface ice cover, and atmospheric water content. Overarching themes of her research are the interplay between regional and global climatic phenomena, and short-term (weather) and long-term (climate) observations. And, we were pleased to recruit Myriam Telus to our faculty in the past year. She’s a cosmochemist/meteoriticist whose research focuses on evolutionary and accretionary processes in the first few tens of millions of years of our 2 EPS Newsletter 2016 3 Chair’s Welcome (con’td) solar system: a time period in which meteorites are the only witnesses to the dynamic processes occurring as the solar system formed—she utilizes geochemical probes to illuminate this most enigmatic period of solar system history. She is finishing her post-doc at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institute following her Ph.D. at U. Hawaii, and will join us next academic year. On the departure front, Eli Silver retired this past year—his long-standing presence and standing as a premiere tectonicist in our Department will be much missed (although the plus side is that, as with many of our emeriti, he’s still at work from early to late every day, and advises graduate students). And, his mid-career research evolution to being a remote sensing aficionado also represents a major loss for our Department (though we can still fortunately access his expertise). He’ll be missed---Thank goodness he’s still around! And, we recently lost our long-term Department Manager Judy Van Leuven to a higher-level position in our Arts Division, where she’s their new Operations Manager. We’re dismayed by the loss, but we wish her well, and really appreciate her many years of service to the EPS Department! And, since one of our strengths is that our Managers tend to stay in our Department for double-digit years, we’re working hard to ensure that we have a great replacement. Editors: Now, many of you will (we hope!) recall the lab, field and class experiences Eli Silver & Francis that you had while you were with us at UCSC. To continue to maintain this Nimmo caliber of educational experience, the Department would certainly appreciate any support you can give back: on p. 34, you’ll find descriptions of some of Phone: 831 459 our most active donor opportunities within our Department. These include 2266 the Weber-Holt Fund, which provides scholarships for students attending field camp and the Casey Moore Fund, for which the first awards were just made Emails: to seed graduate student research opportunities in our department. Other esiliver@ucsc.edu opportunities can be found at http://eps.ucsc.edu/support-us/ and in the final fnimmo@ucsc.edu pages of this newsletter. Also, if you haven’t already, do friend our Department’s Facebook page—it’s at https://www.facebook.com/UcscEPS , and will give you updates on what’s happening on the Departmental home front! Finally, we all look forward to reconnecting with many of you at our 16th (!) annual alumni/friends/current folks’ get-together at the Thirsty Bear (“San Francisco’s first and only organic brewery”) during AGU! As ever, it’s a great time to see old friends and make new ones (and, of course, have snacks with your possibly-hops-bearing beverage of choice). It’s Tuesday, December 13th, www.facebook.com/ 6 – 8.30 p.m., 661 Howard Street, San Francisco!! UcscEPS Quentin Williams, Chair EPS Newsletter 2016 4 Department News Rob Coe received the AGU Fleming medal Susan Schwartz was elected AGU Fellow Andy Fisher received the Meinzer Award from the GSA and became a GSA Fellow Rob Coe Adina Paytan Adina Paytan became a Fellow of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography Eli Silver retired from the Department Susan Schwartz Nicole Feldl arrive as a new faculty member in climate dynamics Myriam Telus was appointed as a new faculty member in Cosmochemistry Myriam Telus Judy Van Leuven became Operations Manager in the Arts Division Andy Fisher We hope to see you at the Thirsty Bear Brewing Company for our 16th Annual UCSC EPS Alumni Event at Fall AGU! When? Tuesday, December 13, 2016 from 6:00pm - 8:30pm Where? Thirsty Bear Brewing Company 661 Howard Street San Francisco, CA 94105 http://www.thirstybear.com/ Fiat Slug! EPS Newsletter 2016 5 Slugs in the Field Grad student Marci Beitch sampling glacial polish beneath a glacier in the Sierra Nevada. Grad student Dan Killam doing modern carbonate sedimentology in Eilat, Israel EPS graduate student Summer Thresher (left) and Physics undergraduate Jimmy Layne (right) onboard Grad student Alex Nereson and colleagues the CIRPAS Twin Otter aircraft during the FASE (Fog installing a continuous GPS station on a boulder and Stratocumulus Experiment), Monterey, CA. in the Diablo Range earthflow, northeast of San Jose EPS Newsletter 2016 6 Slugs in the Field Panoramic view, Invertebrate Paleontology field trip Department vans, Summer Field camp Grad student Dan Killam, Israel Jim Zachos coring a section of the Summer Field camp, measuring the Poleta Formation Paleocene-Eocean thermal maximum in Maryland EPS Newsletter 2016 7 Slugs in the Field UCSC alum Dr. Lisa White (Ph.D. 1990) stands in front of the cast of a gigantic Late Cretaceous ammonite, Pachydiscus seppenradensis, that grew to 8 feet across, recovered from southern Germany. This cast is displayed in Berkeley at the University of California Paleontology Museum, where Lisa serves as Director of Education and Research. (Photo courtesy of Cal Alumni Association, UC Berkeley). Gary Griggs, Coral Beach, Isle of Skye, Scotland EART102 (Marine Geology) King Tides class field trip, led by Ana Garcia Garcia EPS Newsletter 2016 8 Slugs Around Campus Jennifer and Judy doing their best Thelma & Louise impression on their way to the Thirsty Bear EPS presenters in the UCSC Grad Division Research Symposium Inaugural EPS Department Research Symposium Paul Koch at the Thirsty Bear with former grad students Kena Fox-Dobbs, Katie Snell and Patrick Wheatley. Edible geodes from the Department Picnic, courtesy Claire Masteller EPS Newsletter 2016 9 Slug Science News Diverse rupture Grooves on Martian moon Phobos processes in the 2015 Peru deep earthquake Graduate student Mikey Nayak proposed that the doublet enigmatic grooves on Phobos were caused by By: Ye, Lingling; Lay, debris from a meteorite impact being lofted Thorne; Kanamori, above the surface and then re-impacting to cause Hiroo; et al. the characteristic “string of pearls” appearance of SCIENCE ADVANCES the grooves. Volume: 2 Issue: 6 (Nayak and Asphaug, Nature Comm. 7, 12591, 2016) Magma body uplifting the Altiplano Graduate student Jon Perkins and Prof. Noah Finnegan used satellite images, topography and gravity to probe the subsurface structure of the Andean Altiplano, Earth's second highest continental plateau. They concluded that the uplift was driven by a large magma body, also responsible for the volcanic activity of the area.