Faculty News

Gary Allen

Last summer I had a chance to spend two weeks in Hawaii and visit four of the islands. The big island of Hawaii was tremendous. The helicopter flight over Kilauea and Mauna Loa was fascinating. I got some great videos and pictures of the flank eruption to show in my National Parks course. I even brought back a couple of orchid plants to see if my thumb was green enough to make them grow in New Orleans.

I continue in my second term as president of the Association of Louisiana Faculty Senates and chair of the Board of Regents Faculty Advisory Council. With the interest of the Governor in using higher education as the centerpiece for his economic development plans, we should be seeing an increase in the public/private initiatives that U.N.O. has pioneered in the state. Hopefully this will result in some major increases in funding for the universities.

On the home front my family has seen a lot of changes. My wife and I bought a new house across the lake in Mandeville and have joined the Stoessells and Tottens in the ``country life''. My daughter left to work with a bank in North Carolina after Bank One bought out First NBC and eliminated her department. My son continues to figure out ways to enhance the flow of oil in old fields and is currently renovating an old home on Audubon Boulevard. After renovating three other places with him, I declined his offer to let me help with this one. I hope that everyone has a great year in 98-99.

Bill Busch

It was another year that went by in a hurry. Two and a half students finishing up (Heidi Pelkey, Doug Dillon, and Dave Cole for the half) and helping develop the new undergraduate curriculum kept me busy. During the Spring Semester I taught the new Surficial Processes course and was introduced to New Mexico geology when I tagged along with the Field Geology I trip in May. I was impressed with the variety and accessibility (little vegetation) of the rocks of the Rio Grande Rift. The low humidity was also nice. The May introduction sparked my interest enough that I headed back to Taos in October to learn more and to make plans for the May `99 trip. Former faculty member Ralph Kugler led me around for four days, passing on his insights of the area and helping me sample the local cuisine.

I have continued to maintain an interest in paleoceanography/paleoclimatology problems. I am wrapping up work on El Nino influences on the Mississippi River, an extension of research started by former student Xuan Li. I gave a talk about the project at the AGU meeting in San Francisco in December. Another land-based paleoclimate project that has sparked my curiosity focuses on the loess of the lower Mississippi valley. With Frank Hall joining the faculty, and his expertise in environmental rock magnetism, I plan to start work on the loess in the coming year.

Barb and I finished up the year with a week of R&R on the Oregon coast. We had 15 minutes of sunshine and two storms with gale-force winds. It was ideal weather.

Bill Craig

My spring semester was spent on sabbatical, during which time I visited with conodont colleagues at Texas Tech and University of Arkansas---Little Rock. The rest was spent organizing the many samples I've collected over the past twenty years from Ordovician and Silurian strata of the Arkansas Ozarks. I hope to organize all these data into publishable form before I retire in a couple of years.

I took a group of New Orleans school teachers on a field trip to eastern Utah and western Colorado in early August. We saw and walked some in Dinosaur National Monument, and Arches, Canyonlands, and Mesa Verde National Parks. Also took the narrow gauge railroad from Durango to Silverton and back.

Laura Serpa and I, with an assist from new faculty member Denise Reed, developed and offered a course this past fall 1998 on the geology of New Orleans. We organized course material one day and presented it the next. (So, what else is new). The course had many shortcomings in its organization and presentation, but the concept was popular, and we will be revising it this Spring to present next Fall.

I continue to be active, along with other faculty, in science education for preservice elementary school teachers. These efforts are sponsored by grants from the Louisiana Board of Regents (LaCEPT---Louisiana Collaboration for the Excellence in the Preparation of Teachers).


Bill Craig and students on the 1998 Teachers' Field Trip to Western Colorado.

Dale Easley

No doubt the biggest events of the year have been my daughter Ananda's learning to walk and say a few phrases. Other than multiple fire-ant bites, she has had no problems and is a very happy kid. Jamie is staying home with her, teaching her arts and sciences, such as Archimedes Principle as applied to floating my alarm clock in the dog-watering bowl.

Growth in the environmental field in Louisiana tapered off rapidly after Buddy Roemer left office, but there have continued to be a steady, if smaller, number of students interested in water-related issues. Gordon Yamazaki has nearly completed a project with Ron Stoessell and me funded by the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation dealing with reducing nutrients from home septic-tank systems. Chad Vaughn is working with one of our alumni, Dawn Lavoie, at the Naval Research Laboratory in Stennis, Mississippi, on research on the effect of bioturbation upon permeability of bottom sediments. Alyssa Dausman is pursuing a career in improving water resources in poor countries---she spent three months last year in Haiti---and for her thesis is modelling freshwater/saltwater interface movement in the Yucatan, Mexico.

Besides my work at UNO, one of my most rewarding activities has been teaching in an adult literacy program twice a week. I admire the students for the adversity they've overcome, and it gives me a better perspective on the day-to-day annoyances that go with any job, but can seem significant when one becomes too insulated in the university community. One example student is a young single mother who while in the GED program was working 35 hours per week. Her take-home pay was approximately $520 per month with no benefits. In addition, she received $175 in food stamps, a total of less than $700 monthly to support her and her child. She has now completed her GED and begun Delgado Community College. But to top it off, when she got money back from her income tax, she donated $100 to the GED program because she wanted to give something back to the those who'd helped her. When I think of her, office politics just doesn't seem so important.

Frank Hall

In addition to coming to UNO, 1998 has shown to be a year of many changes. In particular, I was recently married to the former Ms.~Carol Cooper. Carol is from Bucks County, PA, and is a clerk in the court system there. She will be joining me in LA come December of this year 1998. My scientific research focuses on the field of ``Environmental Magnetism''. In this field, we examine the magnetic mineralogy of sediments and attempt to decipher environmental change. Geographically, I work primarily in the Candadian Arctic, along the margin, from Nova Scotia to Baffin Bay.

My interest in education is a long standing one. Both my parents are (retired) educators: my mother a junior high school teacher, my father a college professor. I have spent the past four years working with colleagues in science education, learning the methods, styles, and jargon of the field. It has been very interesting and very rewarding. I am looking forward to a fruitful career at UNO and having the chance to meet many of our alumni.

Kathleen Johnson

A year of tying up loose ends and opening new doors, capped off by a whorl-wind summer of travel and research. I attended the International Volcanological Congress in Capetown South Africa, and found that the controversy over the genesis of tonalites in island arc environments is alive and well! As a part of this conference I attended a volcanology workshop on Reunion Island, where Piton de la Fournaise continued its active eruptive phase. I also took a side trip to Zimbabwe to see Victoria Falls!

I am tying up the loose ends of the Panama project, and moving ahead with our research in the central Oregon Cascades. Judy Wilson has completed her Keck Project in the Tertiary western Cascades terrane, and will be starting her M.S. degree working on a magma chamber model for South Sister Volcano. In addition, Wendell Thompson has joined the research group; collecting magnetics data during our Summer 1998 field season. Wendell will be evaluating those data for his senior thesis project. Both of their projects will be utilized to develop an overall volcanic hazard model for the Bend Oregon Region, adjacent to the South Sister Volcano. We will return to the field in the summer of 1999, focusing our efforts on sub-glacially erupted Pleistocene lava flows.

The Field Geology I course ended up in the Taos region of New Mexico, rather than the Appalachians, and seems as though it will continue to study the geology of that region in future years. Our Silicic Volcanism Graduate Seminar this Fall has benefited greatly from the participation of two students from Tulane, as well as our cross disciplinary interests which include: obsidian domes, sedimentary reworking of ash flows, and geophysical studies. As a continuation of this class we will offer a Field Volcanology course this coming summer, focusing on the Rio Grande Rift.

Terry Pavlis and Laura Serpa

Dale has been nagging me for weeks to get this note for the newsletter, so here it is:

Lots of big events with us this year. First off, we are now Mississippi rather than LA residents. We decided to imitate Joe Snowden and Al Weidie and move to Mississippi, but we opted for the redneck riviera--Bay St.~Louis. We have a great spot overlooking the bay, and we're really glad for the change of setting. Helps relieve the job stress to have a nice place to come back to---not that we've had much time to enjoy it yet. It was a big decision to move out of the city, and commuting 50 miles is a pain, but it is worth it to live in a really nice setting.

That is the exciting news for the year. Otherwise we've been into the same old things. Last spring I (Pavlis) promised myself I would do less running around and spend more time writing papers--I didn't keep my promise; both Laurie and I need to learn a two letter word that starts with n. Both of us kind of ran in circles all spring, for reasons I'm not sure. I spent about a month in the field working in Death Valley---managed to juggle my schedule to make that work---so that was part of it, but time seemed to slip away. I did rack up lots of frequent flier miles and should have gotten frequent horse miles---used pack horses last spring to put camps into the boondocks. Lot of fun last spring---the desert was incredibly in bloom from El Nino rains. The summer was pretty awesome this year---even more travel. Laura and I led the Summer in the Rockies field trip again this year and we went to Yellowstone. This group was a super bunch of kids but they weren't too thrilled about the temperatures. We traveled through Wyoming and South Dakota during an incredible cold snap; we got snowed on in the Black Hills in early June! Real excitement for me though was the summer in Alaska. Did things I've never done before. Summer started with some fairly typical field work for me (usual hiking and scrambling around rough terrain mapping rocks), but the summer ended with a three-week stint on the Seward Glacier-Bagley Icefield in the St. Elias Range. We flew in with a ski plane, set up camps on the ice, and then skied to various spots where we could see the rocks without falling into a bergschund. Had incredible weather and so now I have all these great pictures of Mt. St. Elias and Mt. Logan. I hadn't skied in years, so that made it tough---I was the weak guy on the crew, which was a first for me; one of the team was a mountaineer who had actually soloed Everest, so I shouldn't feel too inadequate. Anyway, an awesome experience and something I'd always wanted to do. It will be hard to ever repeat any experience comparable to that.

Laurie has also been busy---too busy actually---she needs to learn to say no even worse than I. She came up with me to Alaska this year for a couple weeks R&R before we went off to our field adventures but didn't do as much traveling as I---she took a couple trips out west and went to a meeting, but not as much running around. She has been working with Bill Craig and Frank Hall on the teacher education things as well as working on the minority program; you'll probably see elsewhere in the newsletter that her work paid off well when she got large grants from both Texaco and Exxon. Given the price of oil, lets hope that support continues because we have a lot of student scholarships riding on it! She also worked hard last year trying to get the ultimate geophysicist's dream---a bigger computer lab with some other geophysical toys to go with it. Just a couple of weeks ago we found out the project was funded, so we are about to have lots of new toys--we even went to Commander's Palace to celebrate and she got flowers from the Chancellor!

Denise Reed

I arrived here in the department in August and still haven't managed tp unpack all the boxes. As this is my first semester I've been introduced gently to teaching by giving a few lectures on the Mississippi River and coastal wetlands in the new Geology of New Orleans course. This allowed some interesting discussions with students about our local environment - from new locks to why we should eat more nutria!

Most of the semester has been spent trying to get used to the new system here and I thank all my colleagues for their assistance with a string of bizarre questions. I've also been continuing many of the research and other programs started while at LUMCON. For the last 18 months I've been the only university scientist working on the team that has written the new state and federal plan for the Louisiana coast. I hope by the time you read this 'Coast 2050' is a well-known concept in Louisiana and maybe in other coastal areas of the country. My role has been to ensure that the plan is based on technically sound principles and I'm pleased to say it does a pretty good job.

On the research side Wendy Morrison, my research associate, and I have made several trips this semester to the Sacramento - San Joaquin delta where we are part of a larger team assessing restoration of tidal marsh habitat in the delta. Unlike the Mississippi delta, most of the marshes in that part of California have been drained and are used for agriculture. I find it very interesting to compare approaches to restoration between the two systems - we have a lot to learn from each other. My other project on the west coast, sediment dynamics in the Columbia River estuary, will take us on a two-week research cruise next summer and we have been making progress on a huge backlog of sample processing (we've been working there since 1990).

Being at UNO provides me with new opportunities for research partnerships and the challenge over the next year is to develop these, get some graduate students involved out in the marsh, integrate my research and teaching skills into new courses, and still work to ensure that policies directing coastal restoration efforts are based on the best available science.

Ron Stoessell

My low-temperature geochemistry program continues to support environmental projects and work closely with the geohydrology projects of Dale Easley. Keith Hall received his M.S. in August for completing his thesis on the Delatte lead pollution site southeast of Pontchatoula, Louisiana. Paul Sak didn't graduate but both Dale and I are hoping the day will come. Gordon Yamazaki's laboratory study on eliminating nutrients from the effluent of home septic tank systems was completed in the fall, and he will graduate with a M.S. in May, 1999. Gordon has been a great student. A field test of his project will be done this coming year. My own research continues to emphasize cation-exchange processes and predicting pollutant retardation. One paper was published in Clays and Clay Minerals that uses thermodynamics to support the use of the Gapon Convention in writing cation-exchange reactions. Another paper is In Press in Ground Water on the use of a simple mass-balance approach to predict the retardation of pollutants moving away from a constant source and undergoing nonlinear sorption on sediments. I'm working on another paper that expands the approach to eliminate the constraint of a constant source of the pollutant.

In May and June I taught two geology courses in UNO's summer program in Costa Rica which was a great experience. The Costa Rican volcanoes and the ophiolite sequences along the Pacific Coast are incredible. And this coming summer I will be returning to Costa Rica! I'm also reexamining the formation of karst topography in the Yucatan and Dale Easley and I will do field work there this coming May. I'm hoping to examine the effect of sulfide oxidation on limestone dissolution in the sinkholes and take some flow measurements with Dale in the fresh-water zone and in the underlying sea-water zone in these same sinkholes.

In case any of you are planning on getting married, my wife Londi continues to run Piffany Oaks, our Northshore reception hall. We're also beginning a commercial development in a wooded area between Piffany Oaks and Hwy 190 in Mandeville, hoping to build "ginger-bread" Victorian-style two and three story cottages that will be commercial on the bottom floor and residential above. My son David is in the Air Force as an F15 crew chief in North Carolina and is looking forward to going back to college when he gets out in March of 2000. He complains about the military (all the time) but always seems to have great weekends on the Atlantic beaches. What I would give to be his age again. On a personal note, it looks like Lake Pontchartrain will have good water quality this coming year, and I'm looking forward to some great sail boarding this spring. Hope to see you on the water!

Matt Totten

This last year has been very busy. Mark and I had a paper in a special publication on shale research, and another one in the GCAGS Transactions. We just submitted a paper to the GSA Bulletin and one to Clays and Clay Minerals. Michelle Abraham finished her thesis on remagnetization of limestones during diagenesis, and we are preparing her results for publication also. I also have several very good grad students working on sed pet theses, so the lab is always full (I like it that way!).

I taught Petroleum geology for the first time this semester. As we were reviewing the cycles throughout the history of the industry, prices dropped to mid 1980 levels. Then, as we were talking about the breakup of the Standard Trust, it started being put back together. We have no idea how it will effect us (Iris did go out and buy an Exxon coffee mug), but I still feel it is a positive time for young geologists to consider the field. In the long term there are still too many geologists my age that won't hang on forever.

The house project is still dragging on. We actually have half of the house almost ready for sheetrock, and plan to move in that portion while we complete the other side. All of the kids have been a big help, and might even be learning something. Cody and Wyatt know the names of all the power tools, and Home Depot is their favorite store. Matt Jr. is a pro installing hard wood floors. Nate comes home at least one weekend a month to help. Louise says she might even get to stay in the house a few weeks before time to report to Tulane. Becky has become an accomplished window painter.

Bill Ward

A highlight of 1998 was attending the groundbreaking for the Homer L. Hitt Alumni Center at UNO. On that very quick trip I had nice visits with Al and Ana Weidie and the Hitts in Mississippi and with Dale, Jamie, and Ananda in New Orleans. Also got a brief look at Kraig Derstler, who seems to be doing great things with dinosaur paleontology. In connection with the 40th anniversary of UNO there was a convocation at which the names of "Favorite Faculty" were presented. I was touched and honored to be included. To whomever nominated me I want to express my sincere thanks (they won't reveal your name(s) or else I would thank you personally).

Last visitors of 1997 were the Kent McDonalds. That boy is still running and participating in Ironman Triatholons. First visitors of 1998 were those wild and crazy girls Diane Hyatt and Emily Taylor. Great way to start the year. Joe Snowden and Lou Fernandez and Dale Easley and family also visited us this year. Bill Wilbert has decided the neighborhood has declined too much since we moved here; so he moved to New Braunfels.

Kathy is very busy in her job at Our Lady of the Lake University as a curriculum specialist for a NASA grant to train middle-school teachers in earth and space science.

I made my "last" trip to Mallorca this summer, and son Bruce joined us to help with the geology. Luis and I have a paper coming out in AAPG on Miocene of Mallorca. Also continue to help some of Ivan Gill's students on the Tertiary carbonates of northern Puerto Rico. Jim Wilson and I may help lead a field trip to northeastern Mexico for the upcoming AAPG meeting in San Antonio. Earlier this year I helped lead a Mobil field trip to Mexico, and one of the brightest participants on that trip is the husband of Cheney Snow Milholland (Cheney is back in Louisiana, living across the Lake). And among other things, I am getting more and more involved with the Cibolo Nature Center, helping initiate some geologic displays.

It was great to see so many alumni, as well as Ray Stephens and Bill Craig, at the GCAGS in Corpus. Ray was honored with Honorary Membership, and Bill Doyle and Frank Sheppard got awards for papers and posters.

Whenever you are in the Texas Hill Country, please stop by to visit us.