Category: Departmental News

Cameron Davidson, Professor of Geology, Laura Cleaveland Peterson ’01, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Luther College, and Alessandro Montanari, Director of the Geological Observatory of Coldigioco, Italy, were awarded a Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) Grant by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) to support a faculty workshop to be held at Geological Observatory of Coldigioco (OGC) in Italy during the summer of 2010. The ultimate goal of this collaborative research project is to bring together ACM faculty from a variety of science disciplines to explore the possibility of a field-based Earth and Environmental Science off-campus studies program based at the OGC.

Mary Savina ’72, Charles L. Denison Professor of Geology, Steve Holland, Assistant Professor of Economics at Luther College, Jon Jensen, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Luther College, Ruth Kath, Professor of German at Luther College, Suzanne Savanick Hansen, Sustainability Manager at Macalester College, and James Farrell, Professor of History and Environmental Studies at St. Olaf, were awarded a Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) Grant by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) to work on Integrating Sustainability into the Undergraduate Curriculum. This project will assist ACM schools in efforts to integrate sustainability into their curricula through the development and dissemination of discipline specific and interdisciplinary resources on sustainability and through the sharing of best practices.

It is with heavy hearts that we in the Geology Department report that Professor Emeritus Eiler Henrickson ’43  passed away this morning.  Several of his children and family members were by his side.

Eiler’s funeral service was held Friday morning, Dec. 18, 2009, at the First United Church of Christ (UCC) in Northfield.  The schedule for the service includes visitation from 9 to 11 a.m. at the church, the service at 11:00 a.m., and then a light luncheon following the service.

We will be making up a picture board or slide show of pictures of Eiler doing the geology and wrestling that he loved.  If you have a classic Eiler picture we might be able to use, please mail it or email it to Tim Vick or Ellen Haboroth.  Email to me can be done with a reply to this email; my email is tvick@carleton.edu and Ellen’s email is ehaberot@carleton.edu.  Our mail address is Carleton Geology Dept., 1 N. College St., Northfield, MN  55057.

Also, we will hold a special memorial service on campus to celebrate Eiler in conjunction with alumni reunion in June.  That is tentatively scheduled for 10:00 a.m. on Friday, June 18, 2010.  We hope to join many of you there.

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Eiler Henrickson, age 89 of Northfield, passed away Thursday, December 10, 2009 under the wonderful care and support of the staff of Three Links CareCenter. Funeral Services will be 11am Friday, December 18th at the First United Church of Christ in Northfield with burial at the Oaklawn Cemetery. Visitation will be Friday from 9 am until the time of Services at the Church.

Professor Mary Savina ’72 and another alum, Suzanne Savanick Hansen ’89, were among those who recently received Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) grants from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) to support collaborative faculty workshops with their proposal entitled “Integrating Sustainability into the Undergraduate Curriculum.”

The goal of this cross-disciplinary and cross-college collaboration is to develop, assess, and then disseminate well thought-out pedagogical strategies and practical, meaningful, usable activities for introductory courses across the disciplines at our institutions and beyond. Teaching and learning resources that will be developed over the course of the project will be disseminated online.

We are most pleased to welcome Kevin Uno ’01 back to the Carleton Geology Department for fall term – Kevin will be teaching Introductory Geology.

Kevin’s Carleton comps project was entitled “Upper Cretaceous Paleomagnetism from Umbria, Italy: ‘Anchored’ poles set proposed True Polar Wander event adrift.”  From that platform he launched himself into the graduate school of the University of Utah where he completed a masters degree in 2008.  His masters research was on the use of geochemical tracers in ice to identify subglacial processes at Storglaciären, Sweden.  For his dissertation, Kevin is using stable isotopes to study past and present climates.  This includes paleoenvironmental reconstructions in East Africa using carbon and oxygen isotopes in fossil tooth enamel, and using isotopes from modern elephant  tusks as a proxy for climate and life history.

One of Kevin’s recent papers is Uno, K.T., Cerling, T.E., Nakaya, H., Nakatsukasa, M., Kunimatsu, Y., (2008), Stable carbon and oxygen isotope ratios of fossil tooth enamel from the Nakali and Namurungule Formations, Kenya: Capturing the C3-C4 transition in East African equid diet at ~9.6 Ma, J. of Vert. Paleontology, 28, 3: 155A.

Kevin’s teaching experience is equally wide-ranging, with his student groups spanning the age range from elementary school to college. 

Welcome Kevin!

Mark Kanazawa is betting that today’s college students are more interested in studying the environment than ever.

Beginning this fall, Carleton College will offer an Environmental Studies major. While six students have already changed to the new major, environmental studies grads aren’t expected until spring 2011.

Kanazawa, the college’s director of environmental studies, has spent years planning and preparing for the program, which until now was offered as a concentration. But with the number of concentrators growing, the school agreed to consider a major. Final approval came in March.

Ordovicious, the Geology Department’s Intramural Frisbee team, suffered a close loss (12-13) to Bloodhue (4th Goodhue) on May 29 in an epic battle for the title of IM Champions in the soft core division spring term.

The sun shone on patchy grass and colorful freezy-pops dotted the field on game day when Ordovicious arrived to defend last year’s championship. 

We are delighted to announce that Cameron Davidson is being promoted to full professor – congratulations Cam!

Cam has taught geology at Carleton since 2002.  His courses have incuded Mineralogy, Petrology, Structural Geology, Environmental and Science Policy, Introductory Geology, and the off-campus program in Italy.

Cam earned his B.S. in Geology and Geophysics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and his Masters and Ph.D. at Princeton. Cam actually came to us from Beloit College in Wisconsin where he taught for seven years and was tenured. His fields of specialization are metamorphic petrology, structural geology and tectonics, and his current research interests include the metamorphic and structural evolution of the middle and deep crust during mountain building and the tectonic evolution of southern and southeastern Alaska and northern British Columbia.

The Carleton College Geology Department’s alumni communications are lurching into the digital age.  We’ve been using email sporadically for quite a few years now, but this year we broke into the world of electronic web-based forms with the roll-out of the electronic version of the traditional Newsletter postcard, so here’s an update on its success.

We have been using the paper postcard since the mid-1970s and it’s worked well for us.  This year we decided to try supplementing the postcard with an electronic form hosted on our web site.  This worked spectacularly well, especially after we sent out an email containing a link to the form.  Over 130 people have submitted news on the form!  Thank you all for taking the trouble, it’s a great treat to have all your news and be able to put it in the Newsletter.

We would like to express a special thanks to Joe Harten ’85, who was a history and political economy major, for the donation of a very nice set of rocks and minerals that had been collected by a great-uncle who happened to be an avide amateur geologist.  The collection included a number of very nice specimens which will be added to the Dana Mineral Set or used as classroom specimens.

The collection contained minerals such as apatite, barite, fluorite and staurolite as well as some geodes and fossils.

 Thanks Joe, we appreciate your gift very much!

Cam Davidson, Associate Professor of Geology, has been awarded one of eight undergraduate research program grants for the summer of 2009 from the Keck Geology Consortium for his proposal, “Exhumation of the Coast Mountains Batholith during the Greenhouse to Icehouse Transition in Southeast Alaska: A Multidisciplinary Study of the Paleogene Kootznahoo Formation.”

Cam will lead a party of nine students mapping an area of southeast Alaska during June and July, 2009.

The study will use a multi-disciplinary approach to unravel the depositional history of the Kootznahoo Formation in Southeast Alaska with a specific focus on the exhumation history of the Coast Mountains batholith (CMB), and how high latitudes (~57°N) recorded overall global cooling from the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) through the Eocene-Oligocene transition to the present icehouse state.

Later in the summer, Cam is directing the Carleton Summer Science Institute, a three-week program for high school juniors and seniors eager to try out the world of college-level science.

The students will spend their mornings attending week-long courses in scientific disciplines including animal behavior, geology and biology.  Afternoons will be devoted to research projects in which each participant will self-select into a research group of 10 to 12 students. Together with their research group, the students will take three courses by the end of the program, and will have the opportunity to participate in forums and informal discussions about emerging questions in science, ethics, public policy, science writing, and other topics of interest.