A very volcanic tour of New Zealand’s North Island

Mount Ngauruhoe on the North Island of New Zealand.

Our most distant Wooster Geologist this year, Andrew Collins, is now home from his semester abroad in New Zealand. He had many geological adventures, including that massive earthquake in Christchurch with its hundreds of aftershocks. Please visit his blog for the stories.

Andrew’s last trip in New Zealand was to Tongariro National Park (a UNESCO World Heritage site) on the North Island. He had, as he wrote, “a spectacular trek” of 20 kilometers between two volcanoes: Mt Tongariro and Mt Ngauruhoe, with a third volcano, Mt Ruapehu, always in view. Mt Ngauruhoe was, as you might have guessed, used as “Mount Doom” in a certain movie series the New Zealanders make a fuss about.

Please enjoy Andrew’s beautiful photographs in this post, and then go to his blog to see them and many others in full size. We are very proud of this Wooster Geology odyssey, and we are also happy to have Andrew safely home!

You can just barely see Andrew as he climbs to the summit of Mt Tongariro.

Note the bright red layers of volcanic cinders.

Beautiful, mineral-filled emerald lakes.

Mineralization along a stream flowing through this active volcanic region.

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Trays of trilobites, buckets of belemnites ….

WOOSTER, OHIO — Last weekend we picked up another load of rocks, minerals and fossils donated by the family of one of our loyal alumni. We will be sorting through them for months getting them ready for displays and our teaching collections. Among the treasures are large numbers of particular items, especially fossils. I want to highlight two of many such sets. The trilobites are Phacops bufo from the Silica Shale (Devonian) of northeastern Ohio; the belemnites below are from the Jurassic of Wyoming. (Belemnites from the Upper Cretaceous of Germany and the Jurassic of Israel have been featured in this blog, as have beautiful trilobites from the Middle Cambrian of British Columbia, Canada.) Numerous nearly-identical fossils such as these play an important role in our teaching. We can, for example, have a fossil in front of each student during lectures for immediate reference (and quizzing!). It is also possible to have biometric measuring exercises in our labs with these fossil “populations” of particular species. Gifts again put to work in education!

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An Afternoon of Rocks and Minerals at Cornerstone Elementary

Tuesday we had the pleasure to work with Mrs. Gaut’s and Ms Long’s (standing) third grade classes. Wooster Geology seniors Stephanie Jarvis and LaShawna Weeks taught 32 well-prepared students mineral and rock identification.

LaShawna shows the group the fine art of using the streak plate in mineral identification.

Steph explains the characteristics of metamorphism. The fellow in the lower left is eager to share his view of the processes associated with metamorphic rocks.

LaShawna discusses the formation of sandstone and quizzes the group on the depositional environment.

Steph explains the nuances of the rates of mineral crystallization.

It was clear that the group was ready to take their new knowledge of 14 minerals and 10 rocks to the next level.

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GeoJeopardy!

WOOSTER, OHIO — Dr. Meagen Pollock had a great idea: a geology Jeopardy game to liven up a Geology Club meeting … and to encourage the retention of all that knowledge we’re serving up daily. She used a software package from the Communication Studies Department and question sets from all the geology faculty. The contest was much fun, especially as we watched a team of sophomores and first-years dominate their older peers. I’m sure in the rematch next semester the upper class students will be highly motivated!

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Putting donated fossils to work

WOOSTER, OHIO — Last month we began integrating a large collection of rocks, minerals and fossils into our teaching program in the Department of Geology. These specimens were donated by an Ohio family who lovingly gathered them over decades. They displayed these natural wonders to friends, neighbors and children for their beauty and their educational value. Now we have started to use some of the specimens in our classes.

Invertebrate Paleontology students Sarah Appleton, Megan Innis (the TA), Melissa Torma and Michaela Caventer examine donated bivalve fossils. We are especially impressed with the large articulated Eocene oyster Michaela is holding.

Andrew Retzler holding two vertebrae of the Jurassic dinosaur Camarasaurus. We used these in the History of Life course.

Side view of the Camarasaurus vertebrae. These bones were reconstructed from dozens of fragments.

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It is not just fossils in a paleontology lab

WOOSTER, OHIO — To understand ancient life a paleontology student must also know a considerable amount about modern life. In our Invertebrate Paleontology course this means that students study, for example, modern clams to provide a context for the fossil clams they are interpreting. In the above image the class today is dissecting modern infaunal clams (Mercenaria mercenaria) and mussels (Mytilus edulis). I buy them at the local grocery store so that they are fresh and with no preservatives. That means there are always challenges opening them — and always a mushy mess afterwards! It is worth it, though, to sort out the anatomy of these bivalves and match their soft parts to the hard parts we find in the fossil record. It is also a reminder that the stony fossil we study today once had its gooey living moment!

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Another GSA presentation from a Wooster Geologist: Long-term tree ring records from Glacier Bay National Park

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!

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International Research Experiences for Undergraduates (Posters Part II)

Dr. Meagen Pollock discusses the challenges and rewards of leading international expeditions for undergraduates. She contributed her insights during a special poster session on International Research Experiences for Undergraduates sponsored by the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) and the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. Dr. Pollock is a Geoscience Councilor for CUR. Her contribution was coauthored with Dr. Mark Wilson. Wooster students and faculty presented results of international research from Iceland and Israel during this GSA Annual Meeting.

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A Contribution to Understanding Tree Growth and North Pacific Climate

Stephanie Jarvis contributes to a special session on Pacific Climate. Her talk was title Non-Stationarity in Mountain Hemlock Growth Along the Gulf of Alaska . She summarized a portion of her undergraduate thesis work and its relevance to understanding tree-ring proxy records along the Gulf of Alaska.

Steph is a veteran of undergraduate research and of contributing at GSA. Last year she presented a poster at the National Meeting in Portland Oregon on a REU project she participated in during the summer of 2009.

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Wooster Geology Alumni Gather at the 2010 Geological Society of America Annual 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.

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