President's Letter

With this spring newsletter the society hopes to revive a couple of long-dormant traditions. First is the newsletter itself. The late summer-early fall communication now seems to serve primarily as a vehicle for letting members know the details of the annual field trip, and for getting registration materials into their hands. There is not much space (or time, for those of us who still perceive time and space as separate things) left over for news unrelated to the upcoming and the previous trips. We think it is unfortunate that news of the departments and their faculties and students is not spread around more readily. We intend to address this need in an additional spring letter; each 'issue' will have news from several departments. We'll be soliciting information for it directly from the departments, but anyone who wants us to consider a submission should send it to one of the society's officers.

Georgia Academy

As in days of yore (Paleozoic times?) the Georgia Geological Society plans to revive the tradition of meeting in conjunction with the Georgia Academy of Science during the Spring. This year's meeting will be held in Albany on April 26-27. The Geology Section will convene between 8.00-12.00 on Sat, April 27. Prereegistration (by 4/15) is $40 for members of the Academy, $60 for nonmembers and $20 for students. With the exception of strudents there is a $10 fee for on site registration ( See the attached form). Motel accommodations are available at Holiday Inn Express (912) 883-1650 ( $48) and Days Inn (912) 888-2632, ($39 single, $44 double). For more details members should contact Jeffrey Tepper at Dept. of Physics, Astronomy & Geology, Valdosta State University, Valdosta, GA 31698-0055.

Field Trip 1995

Thanks to Burt Carter and Phil Manker, of Georgia Southwestern College, for organizing another excellent field trip. Eighty-five participants examined and discussed the "Paleocene carbonate facies and paleogeography of the Dougherty plain". Drew Hyatt and Peter Jacobs from Valdosta State were on hand to describe recent sinkhole development following tropical storm Alberto and Paul Huddleston (Georgia Geologic Survey) summarized the lithostratigraphy for the guidebook. With the exception of Burt's explanations of the typeface "Arial", ( written in a sand bar?) the guidebook is first class! Copies are still available from the treasurer for $10.

Outcrops

If you want to increase your "exposure" around the state, send your news to the editor for Outcrops. I plan to circulate two newsletters a year, so if you didn't hear from me this time around, be ready when I call in the summer.

GEORGIA SOUTHWESTERN COLLEGE

At Southwestern we are in something of a transition phase. The college president has recently retired and an acting president has been appointed while the search is in progress. We in geology are anxious to see what the attitude of the new president toward the sciences will be. There is also lively debate in our departmental meetings about the effect of semester conversion and the accompanying change in core curriculum requirements. Assuming a continued reasonable level of administrative support, the geology and physics department is probably in good shape. Our introductory classes are filled, usually, and our major classes have enrollments we haven't seen in years. It's a far cry from the quarter we had one geology major! Still, we have always been a small department, and 'restructuring' has always looked like an iffy process to us. We, like everyone else, I suppose, are trying to expand into the environmental niche without cutting loose from the historical geology niche, so we've all developed new courses, or assumed responsibility for dormant ones, with a surface- process/environmental theme.

Dan Arden, professor emeritus, is now living in Tallahassee. As you know, he missed the field trip in October because of a quickly scheduled heart operation. He reports feeling pretty good these days and he's getting a lot of exercise. Dan is toying with taking one of GSA's trips to the western US this year.

Bud Cofer, also professor emeritus, still lives in Americus, and still appears regularly at work. Bud is actively and energetically involved with the ongoing process of monitoring water quality, and the health in general, of Lake Blackshear.

Frank Jones slipped away from the department to run the Computer and Applied Sciences division for several years, and he retired last year. He has taken an administrative post at South Georgia Tech, and stays busy at it. We see him once in a while and he seems to be just as he ever was.

Phil Manker is still department chair, possibly in large part because the rest of us scramble for hiding places when we see him coming with that 'why don't you do it for a while' look in his eye. Phil still finds time to do research, mostly on remote sensing these days. He has, through a recent NASA-JOVE grant, set up an impressive computer lab with a satellite link. He uses this in his new course on remote sensing, and we all know on a pretty timely schedule exactly where nasty weather is coming from. Phil has been interested recently on the effects of Alberto's flooding of the Flint, Chattahoochee, Appalachicola Basin, particularly Appalachicola Bay. He has also been using aerial photographs of St. Josephs Peninsula to document changes resulting from this summer's hurricane pounding. He'll have three students presenting papers at the GAS meeting in April. Phil also helped put together a GGS field trip in the fall, you'll recall. Phil is partly responsible for x-ray and SEM work done in the department as a consulting service for clay and bauxite mining companies near Andersonville.

I've been running between several projects. The field trip preparations and editing the guidebook kept me thoroughly occupied during the fall. Since then I've been combing through my echinoid collections from the southeast preparing for something like a taxonomic revision of the Paleogene species. There are a number of new taxa and some taxonomic/stratigraphic errors to be corrected in the current literature. Jon Bryan, who helped with one paper in the GGS guidebook, asked me to produce a manuscript on the echinoids of the Salt Mountain Limestone in southwest Alabama, so I've been on that project, too. And I have a manuscript on comparative diversity of echinoids and molluscs waiting for a last presubmission revision. I've assumed a geomorphology/surface processes course as my environmental contribution.

Tom Weiland has been spending most of his time in developing new courses and administrative functions. Tom has set up an excellent GIS station in the department and has done some consulting work with it and developed new courses to teach GIS. He'll have one student presenting a paper at GAS in April. He has also been spending summers developing Earth science and Environmental courses for science teachers. Tom has found himself on some of the busiest standing and ad hoc committees on campus over the last couple of years. He's now cycling out of some of these, and is looking forward to picking up his research on Caribbean Arc volcanism again. Tom also does some of the analyses for local mining outfits.

Dan Askren has developed our class in late summer when we are flirting with 100 F, he has gone to Canada to teach a field course sponsored by the Keck Foundation and operated by Beloit College. He has supervised GSW student research projects on materials he collects during these jaunts, and set up a XRF spectrometer in the department, donated by an alumnus, to do the analytical work for this research. He had a student present a paper at a Keck Foundation conference at Pomona College this fall, and will have another presenting a paper at GAS in the spring. Dan's primary research interests have been in the igneous rocks of the western U.S., and he environmental geology. For the past couple of years, in the has been gathering alkaline rocks from New Hampshire to study as well. He catches a fair share of the clay mineral consulting the department does.

Jim Littlefield is a GSW graduate who studied hydrology at South Florida. He operates a geo/hydro consulting firm in Americus and teaches a hydrology course for us.

Even our two physicists have geological connections. Michael Pangia teaches introductory and science-major physics courses and oversees our engineering connections to Tech. His research is in magnetospheric physics. Michael spent last summer in Boston on a research grant from the Air Force, studying a curious interaction of the ionosphere and electrons emitted by the space shuttle.

Bill Anderson mostly teaches physics service courses, but also teaches geophysics. His undergraduate and early graduate work were geological, and he has a mean fossil collection to prove it. The geophysics course Bill is now teaching has a near-surface (environmental) sensing slant, without sacrificing the overall planetary physics scope it was designed for. Bill came from Cal Tech, where he was thoroughly entangled with NASA planetary exploration. He is continuing that work and has new proposals in at NASA to sample an asteroid. He has just been awarded another NASA grant to design an x-ray diffractometer for a Mars lander (as co-investigator with Manker and Askren).

Burt Carter

VALDOSTA STATE UNIVERSITY

The geosciences are now included in a combined department of Physics, Astronomy, and Geology. There is still no geology major degree offered (only a minor), but there is a proposal in review at the board of regents for a degree program in environmental geography. As support for this program, the department has recently added several geographers, including a couple of physical geographers/geomorphologists. The core curriculum courses have healthy enrollments, with 300-400 students per year in each of the geography and geology lab sequences. The major level courses currently offered tend to have enrollments of fewer than 10. Overall, enrollment is high enough, and steady enough, that the department is healthy. Major geology courses actively offered include geochemistry, soil science, hydrology, geomorphology, and physiography of North America. If the degree is approved, courses in GIS, planning, and physical geography will probably be added, with an additional faculty position possible.

Ed Chatelain has recently been researching dinosaur gastroliths from the western United States and searching for correlations between western glacial advances/retreats and global climatic patterns.

Drew Hyatt is a geomorphologist with primary interest in permafrost in the Canadian Arctic and ways of living with it. He is still translating his dissertation material on the topic into manuscripts. His local interests involve sinkhole development and morphology in the Dougherty Plain of southwestern Georgia, particularly those resulting from flooding of the Flint Basin by hurricane Alberto in 1994. He and Peter Jacobs supplied a paper and field trip stop for the October trip. Drew is also involved with Jeff Tepper in coring ephemeral lakes near Providence Canyon.

Peter Jacobs is also a geomorphologist, with primary research interest in soils and paleosols. His recent work has concentrated on buried interglacial soils in the American midcontinent, and the effects of fluctuating groundwater tables on soil formation. He, along with Drew Hyatt, has studied the very recent development of sinkholes near Albany.

Jeff Tepper is an igneous petrologist who has been working on the evolution of granitic magmatism in the west, particularly the Cascades. He is also interested in sedimentation in Recent lakes, and is actively working on coring and interpreting sediment from the lakes developed downstream of Providence Canyons on the small stream which cut them. He is hoping to relate the evolution of these lakes to the development of the canyons.

Drew Hyatt

EMORY UNIVERSITY

The college administration is still ruminating over the proposal to join geology and ecology into an environmental studies program. At this point, students interested in pursuing such studies are advised to transfer rather than wait and see what will happen, but Bill thinks that the emergence of this entity is imminent. Enrollments in the department's introductory classes, both environmental and more strictly geological, are steadily high.

WEST GEORGIA COLLEGE

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

In recent years a number of new faces have joined the faculty at UGA. Douglas E. Crowe, Assistant Professor of Economic Geology joined the UGA faculty in the fall of 1991. His research involves the application of stable isotopes and laser microprobe to the study of hydrothermal ore systems. He is a pioneer in the application of microanalysis of stable isotopes. Current areas of study include hydrothermal gold deposits in the Southeast and California, borosilicate skarns in Russia, and massive sulfide deposits in Cuba and Alaska.

Ervan G. Garrison, Associate Professor of Archaeogeology joined the faculty at UGA in the fall of 1992. From 1979-1990 he served on the faculty of Texas A&M University, first with the Department of Anthropology (79-81) and for the rest of his appointment with the Environmental Engineering Division of the College of Engineering. From 1990-1992, Erv served as Chief, Marine Archaeology & Maritime History Unit, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). At NOAA, he carried out high resolution marine geological mapping and sea level studies in both Atlantic and Pacific ocean sites. He has logged over 2,000 underwater hours in research dives - Scuba and submersible. He served on the Agency's advisory committee for the Global Change Program (NOAA).

At UGA, Erv has been hard at work carrying on UGA's growing program in Archaeological Geology so ably founded by Norm Herz. His present research includes a 10 year+ study of Lake Neuchusing on its hydrology, sedimentary history and relationship to prehistoric cultures of that portion of Europe. He has built an archaeogeophysical research and instructional program. Summer, 1995, was the second year for UGA's shallow geophysics field camp. Robert W. Hawman, Assistant Professor of Geophysics came to UGA in the spring of 1990. His speciality is seismic reflection and refraction studies. Rob has conducted wide-angle reflection profiling of the Precambrian shield in Minnesota to look at deep crustal structure. More recently he has been involved with a series of experiments to look at deep crust and mantle structures in the central and southern Appalachians. Rob has pioneered the use of shallow seismic reflection profiling to study the structure of fault zones.

Steven M. Holland, Assistant Professor of Stratigraphy joined the faculty at UGA in the spring of 1991. Steve's research is concentrated in two areas. Field research is centered on establishing chronostratigraphic frameworks for paleoecological studies in paleontologically important regions. Projects include high-resolution (10 kyr) correlation in the Ordovician of the Cincinnati Arch and the sequence stratigraphic analysis of the Ordovician of the Nashville Dome. The Nashville Dome chronostratigraphy is being used to test the causes of a major provincial extinction in the Middle Ordovician of eastern North America. In addition, this work in Nashville has raised questions about detecting subaerial exposure in pre-mid-Paleozoic rocks. Steve's second research area is numerical modeling of the stratigraphic distribution of fossils, based on a sequence of the stratigraphic record.

Valentine A. Nzengung, Assistant Professor of Hydrogeochemistry joined the faculty at UGA in the fall of 1995. His research concerns organic materials in water. Specific research goals include: 1) study of the kinetics and equilibrium sorption of neutral and ionizable organic chemicals in aqueous and mixed solvents by organo-modified sorbents. 2) Basic and applied research on the enhanced degradation of chlorinated organics by zero valent metals and redox manipulated sediments. 3) The use of plants in the degradation of organic contaminants (phyto-remediation).

Alberto Patino Douce, Associate Professor of Experimental Petrology joined the faculty at UGA in the winter of 1991. His research is aimed at understanding the evolution of the continental crust by means of experiments at high pressures and temperatures. Current research focuses on the complementary topics: the origin of felsic magmas, the origin of deep-seated granulites, and thermodynamic properties of micas (as a tool for calculating intensive variables during high metamorphism and anatexis). Recent exciting developments include: the experimental demonstration that strongly peraluminous high-SiO2 magmas can have a hybrid (mantle-crust) origin even in the absence highly aluminous crustal source rocks, a model for the formation of deep-seated mafic to ultramafic granulites with highly evolved isotopic compositions, and the experimental determination of incongruent subsolidus dehydration reactions of micas, which may explain depletion of LIL elements from granulites in the absence of melting.

Paul A. Schroeder, Assistant Professor of Mineralogy came to the UGA faculty in the fall of 1991. His research program deals with the advancement of clay mineralogy as it applies to geologic study. Laboratory studies are focused on the use of non-traditional spectroscopic methods to characterize clay crystal-chemistry. Specifically, this includes the development of far-IR spectroscopic methods to constrain 2:1 phyllosilicate order-disorder phenomenon. Collaborative studies are also currently underway with Dr. Robert Pruett at English China Clay International. This work involves the use of 27Al and 29Si MAS NMR spectroscopy to characterize the nature of Fe and Al ordering in the kaolinite structure. Current field programs involve the potential application of stable carbon isotopes bound soil goethites as recorders of soil respiration and weathering rates in a variety of Georgia Piedmont modern residual soil profiles. Another field project centers on the Gulf of Mexico and nitrogen fixation in clays during later diagenesis. The purpose is to test models for the mechanism and illitization.

Samuel E. Swanson, Head and Professor of Igneous Petrology came to UGA in the fall of 1994. Prior to moving to UGA Sam taught for five years in North Carolina (Charlotte and Appalachian State in Boone). He started some field work in the Blue Ridge of western North Carolina on the petrogenesis of ultramafic rocks and the Spruce Pine pegmatites. In 1979 Sam moved to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, Alaska. Many of his friends who knew how much he enjoyed the warm weather thought he had lost his mind, but it was a great chance to be a geologist in a state that refers to itself as "The Last Frontier". In Alaska he worked on granites associated with ore deposits and on the petrology of volcanic rocks of the Aleutian arc. In recent years he worked with the Alaska Volcano Observatory on projects relating igneous petrology and volcanic hazards. Sam taught classes at all levels at Fairbanks, but concentrated on igneous petrology at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He was Head of the Geology Department at Fairbanks for 6 years. While at Alaska, Sam kept ties to the Southeast via sabbatical leaves in 1984-1985 at the Oak Ridge National Lab and to the Geology Department at the University of Tennessee in 1993-1994.

As a new department head at a new university, Sam spent much of his time dealing with matters of organization and program development. His teaching has been at the introductory level in physical geology and the environment. Some of his research projects in the Blue Ridge are being reactivated this summer. Field work is underway in the Spruce Pine, NC area and in the area between Clayton, GA and Franklin, NC.

Sally E. Walker, Assistant Professor of Paleobiology came to UGA in the fall of 1993. Her research follows three lines of inquiry which focus on paleoecology and its contribution to environmental change through time. First, she works with the biological factors (i.e., hermit crabs, birds, fish, algae and fungi) in the marine environment that breakdown and recycle calcium carbonate (mollusk shells) in modern seas as well as in ancient environments. This work also has another side to it, and that is how taphonomic factors affect our interpretation of evolution -- especially of the symbiotic or mutualistic organisms that use and abuse mollusk shells. Second, she is part of a research team (including mathematical modelers, chemists, and oceanographers) that is conducting deepsea research using submersibles in the Gulf of Mexico and the Bahamas to understand how fast deepsea environments recycle calcium carbonate and other organics. This research has repercussions for how carbon is recycled in the biosphere, and has not been done for the vast area of the ocean, which is the deepsea. Third, she works on terrestrial snails and how they might be an indicator, through isotopic studies, of past climate and paleoenvionmental change in the ancient landscapes of the Bahamas. Field research sites are Ecuador (including the Galapagos), Gulf of Mexico, and the Bahamas.

Sam Swanson

ATLANTA GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY

The Atlanta Geological Society, our sister organization, was formed in 1991. The objectives of the Society are to provide a forum for members of diverse interests to communicate the results of ongoing research or work on topics of interest, and to promote fellowship, cooperation and involvement among geologists in the public and private sectors, especially those in the Atlanta area. The Society meets monthly on the last Thursday of each month at the Fernbank Science Center in Decatur with a social hour at 6.30 and business meeting at 7.30 pm. Membership costs $20 annually ( $10 for students). Corporate memberships are also available. Apart from its regular meetings the Society runs occasional field trips and technical workshops, and publishes a monthly Newsletter. For more infomation contact:

Atlanta Geological Society
c/o Georgia Geologic Survey
19 M.L. King J r., Dr., SW., Rm 400
Atlanta, GA 30334.

Treasurer's Report

The Society's account currently shows a balance of $ 3827.89 compared to $ 3748.22 at this time last year. Last year's field trip incurred a small loss but there are still guidebooks on hand for sale. This total includes the repayment of a $750 loan, which was given in order to help found the Atlanta Geological Society. Postal expenses will rise with the publication of two newsletters and members are asked to check that their dues are current. The treasurer will be purging the membership rolls before the next newsletter. If an asterisk appears on your address label your dues are current, if not please send $5.00 if you wish to continue receiving the Newsletter.

Membership Update

If there have been any changes in your address please send the following information to