Geology Department N e w s l e t t e r Western Illinois University Department News 2009-2010 Happy 2010! The Department of Geology is once again happy to have the chance to share some of the happenings of the past year with our alumni and friends. As you’ll notice when reading this newsletter, we have had another busy, successful year here in Macomb. Luckily, all of the budget problems in the state of Illinois haven’t caused us to change our activities yet. Speaking of budgets, we are proud to announce that you, our alumni, donate at a higher dollar amount per capita than any of the departments in the College of Arts and Sciences! Our small but active department rarely beats those departments with hundreds of majors (e.g. Biological Sciences, English and Journalism, Psy- chology) at anything so Dr. Calengas was suitably proud of our alumni when these figures were shared at a College meeting. We do have a couple new faces in the Geology Department this year. To offset the loss in enroll- ment caused by offering a small-enrollment Freshman section of our Introduction to the Earth course (Geol 110), the College agreed to hire an instructor to teach an additional section of Geol 110 each semester. The instructor we hired, Sara Bennett, was already quite familiar with the de- partment since she came to Macomb with me in 1994. Our other new member of the Department is our secretary Diane Edwards. Diane joined us mid-year and has immediately fit right in. She is not unfamiliar with Tillman Hall as, in years past, she worked for the Department of Geography. We haven’t asked her if we are better than Geography, but we know the answer anyway (and she is smart enough not to answer such a silly question). To facilitate the interaction of the Department with our alumni we have created a WIU Geology Department Facebook page. To view it and become a fan you can search for it on Facebook or go to the Geology Department web site (www.wiu.edu/geology/) and click the Facebook link on the left side of the page. This page will make it much easier to share photos of our recent field trips and other Departmental events with our students and ―extended family‖ off campus. We’re thinking about making a WIU Geology Department Twitter account but we want to wait and see how this Facebook thing works out first. Steve Bennett ([email protected]) Alumni Newsletter Editor The Geology picnic was held at Horn Field Campus last spring, which offered plenty of room for volleyball. Some attendees even made use of the climbing tower after the pic- Geology faculty and students at our annual Bonding nic. (Photo by Amy Brock) Night held at Aurelio‟s Pizza P a g e 2 Geology Department Newsletter Leslie Melim You'd think that without Field Camp, I'd spend more of the summer at home...not! I put over 10,000 miles on my little Subaru with two trips to Texas (research at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX and a meeting) and a separate trip to New Mexico for field work. You can bet I heard about it from my cats (all three of them...in chorus!). All that travel and hard work paid off with two papers, several talks and lots of good data. Three students worked with me during the year: Dan Gustafson finished up his project on the statistics of cave pools and presented at the Annual GSA Meeting in Portland, OR even though he graduated in May. His graduate school even helped pick up the tab (since WIU will only help current stu- dents). We had quite a crowd at GSA this year with myself and Dr. Amy Brock, two students presenting (Dan, '09 and Matt Mayerle, senior), and two alumni just checking it out (Randi Leischiedt, '09, Jonathan Love, '09). A good time was had by all (and it didn't even rain every day, a plus for Portland!). Derek Clark and John Chawula spent 2 weeks in the Carlsbad area describing yet more pools in Carlsbad Caverns and spending a couple of days in Cottonwood Cave. John had fun being "scale" (see photo--yep, it is right-side up. You should of seen it from the other side as he hung over an edge ;-). Both then completed re- search projects in the fall. Derek did his project on "Classification of Pool Fingers from Carlsbad Cavern" and then graduated. John finished his on "Classifying Cave Pools in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico" and has one more semester John Chawula in Cottonwood Cave with to graduate. spectacular pool fingers and u-loops (all the Per usual, there was a big home remodel project—this time during the semester drippy looking mineral). He had to hang timed so I could work on it over Spring Break. It was a big one—completing redo- upside-down over the edge for nearly 10 ing the kitchen. I took it down to the studs and started over. Well, my contractor minutes while our cave photographer got the did. It was too much for me alone. The result is spectacular. That finishes my right shot. Photo by Kenneth Ingham. house, I have remodeled it completely, inside and out. Now I'll just have to make the furniture to furnish it! Papers and Talks (undergrad co-authors underlined): Boston, P.J., Spilde, M.N., Northup, D.E., Curry, M.C., Melim, L.A., and Rosales-Lagarde, L. 2009. Microorganisms as speleo- genetic agents: Geochemical diversity but geomicrobial unity, in Klimchouk, A.B. and Ford, D.C. eds., Hypogene Speleo- genesis and Karst Hydrology of Artesian Basins. Special Paper 1: 51-58. Ukrainian Inst. Speleology & Karstology, Simfer- opol, Ukraine. 280 pp. Gustafson, D. Melim, L A., Kooser, Ara, Northup, D.E., Study of Cave Pools in Carlsbad Cavern, New Mexico: Controls on Bio- them Distribution, Annual Meeting Geological Society of America, Portland, Or., Presented October 20, 2009; Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, Vol. 41, No. 7, p. 399 Kooser, A., Crossey, L. Northup, D., Spilde, M. and Melim, L., 2009, Geomicrobiology and hydrology of pool precipitates in the Guadalupe Mountains, New Mexico, USA. Proceedings 15th International Congress of Speleology, v. 3, p. 1562-1567. Melim, L.A. and Spilde, M.N., 2009, Astounding Rates of Precipitation and Recrystallization Iin Experimental Cave Pearls in an Underground Limestone Mine, Annual Meeting Geological Society of America, Portland, Or., Presented October 20, 2009.; 9; Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, Vol. 41, No. 7, p. 399 Melim, L.A., Gustafson, D., Kooser, A, Northup, D.E., and Spilde, M.N., 2009, The geology of cave pools: Clues for the microbi- ology, 15th International Congress of Speleology, Kerrville, TX, Proceedings, p. 397-398. Melim, L.A., Liescheidt, R.L., Northup, D.E., Spilde, M.N., Boston, P.J. and Queen, J.M., 2009, A biosignature suite from cave pool precipitates, Cottonwood Cave, New Mexico, Astrobiology, v. 9, pp. 907-917. Geology Department Newsletter P a g e 3 A my B r o c k Happy 2010! 2009 was a fun and busy year for me. In the spring I taught Glacial Geology (Geol 421) and team-taught Natural Disasters (Geog 430). The Glacial Geology class had a fun trip to Wisconsin and Kettle Moraine State Park that involved a hunt for the elusive Elephant Rock. I also visited a number of area schools and spoke with students about Ge- ology and Geology Careers. Over the summer, Geology major Matt Mayerle and I took a trip to Nevada to start a map- ping project funded by the USGS EdMap program. We spent a couple of weeks mapping Neogene and younger sediments and surfaces north of Las Vegas. It was hot but we cov- ered a lot of ground and will be going out in this winter break to do some final field check- ing. Matt was able to travel to Portland, Oregon to the GSA Annual Meeting and present his preliminary map as a poster. We received a lot of excellent feedback and are looking forward to submitting our final map at the end of the spring semester. This summer I also traveled with my mom to the Big Island of Hawaii where we stayed several nights in Vol- cano next to Kilauea. It was awesome! Fall involved a trip to Portland to present my research at the GSA meeting. I was able to get out to see Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens. I’ve been plugging away on a paper that I hope to get submitted soon that reports a new way to view the internal features of highly indurated soil materials. My co-authors and I have a publication coming out in GSA Bulle- Amy on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. tin that we worked hard on. It’s nice to have that finally finished up, submitted, and ac- cepted. The Geology Club had a great trip to the Field Museum that included a behind the scenes tour that included the storage of large specimens in the basement and meteorites. On the home front, I adopted two kittens (Hutton and Indi) who keep me thoroughly entertained and are always in trouble. I’m looking forward to a great 2010 and hope everyone has a great year! Make sure to keep in touch with us! Kyle Mayborn It has been another good year here at WIU. I have been steadily transfer- ring the lectures for my upper divisions classes into PowerPoint.