Wooster Geologists

A happy Greg Wiles on the shore of Glacier Bay, Alaska.

(by Stephanie Jarvis, ’11)

Professor Greg Wiles, the Ross K. Shoolroy Chair of Natural Resources at Wooster, finished off the series of Wooster presentations at this year’s Geological Society of America Annual Meeting with his talk: “Multi-millenial-scale tree ring records from Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve: Paleoenvironmental reconstruction and placing ongoing cryosphere-ecosphere changes into a long-term context”. He presented this work in a session on research in National Parks this morning.  Highlighting this study with Dan Lawson and Wooster students in the park and surrounding area (see the Alaska tag for this blog), Greg described the timing of glacial advances and retreats as determined by dendrochronology, and the applications of these results to understanding the history of the native Tlingit people.  As the National Parks belong to everybody, and our projects are often funded by government agencies (i.e., taxpayers), the communication of this research in a coherent and understandable manner is one of the many duties of scientists and a great way to close out the 2010 Annual GSA Meeting!

DENVER, COLORADO — It has been a tradition for decades that Wooster Geology alumni, faculty and students meet one evening during the annual GSA conference. This year we had forty people come by; a good number of them are pictured above. There were many other Wooster alumni who were running their own events at the same time and could not attend. What a joyous gathering it was … and an excellent opportunity for our current students to meet a diverse group of successful geologists who shares their academic heritage.

DENVER, COLORADO — George H. Davis, structural geologist extraordinaire and a 1964 geology graduate from Wooster, will receive the Structural Geology and Tectonics Career Contribution Award from the Geological Society of America at this annual meeting. This honor is given “to an individual who throughout his/her career has made numerous distinguished contributions that have clearly advanced the science of structural geology or tectonics.” George has certainly done that. He is now Regents Professor (Emeritus) and Provost Emeritus at the University of Arizona. Here is the award citation and George’s response as a pdf from GSA.

George Davis ('64) in his element. (From his website.)