Headquarters: Holiday Inn Airport, Jacksonville, Florida

Organized by Fredrick Rich, Georgia Southern University and Jim Renner, Golder Associates, Atlanta.

This year's annual meeting and fieldtrip will begin in Jacksonville, Florida, at the Airport Holiday Inn. The Inn will serve as our lodging and base of operations for two separate trips. The excursions will lead us, first, to the Florida Plant, E.I. DuPont de Nemours and Company's heavy mineral sand mine near Starke, Florida. The second day will be spent in and near the Okefenokee Swamp.

Our initial destination will be the Airport Holiday Inn. It is conveniently located at the junction of Airport Road and Interstate 95. It is very hard to miss if you arrive on I-95. Should you be flying to JAX, complimentary shuttle service is provided from the airport, which is just 3 minutes away. Friday night at 8:00 the society will host a Smoker for getting acquainted. At 9:00 there will be a brief orientation talk to acquaint everyone with the forthcoming tours and the geologic history of the area.

On Saturday we will leave the Inn at 8:00 AM via motor coach and university vans. We will go directly to the Trail Ridge plant where we will be the guests of DuPont. Geologists and engineers will take us on tours of the dredge pit, and the wet and dry mills. You will be able to see first-hand how heavy mineral sands are mined and beneficiated. Lunch will be provided by DuPont. Saturday evening you will be on your own.

Sunday morning we leave by coach/van at 7:00 SHARP and will drive to Camp Cornelia, the headquarters of the Okefenokee Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, near Folkston, Georgia. We will board john boats (with lunches, if you elect to purchase one) and motor out along the Suwannee Canal. We will visit Chesser Prairie and proceed as far as Coffee Bay Shelter.

While in the swamp you will become acquainted with its natural history as well as the status of the proposed heavy mineral sand mine that DuPont wants to site on Trail Ridge, just east of Camp Cornelia. We anticipate being out of the swamp by 2:00 so that people will have time to drive back to the Atlanta area before it gets too late (estimated travel time 5-6 hours from Folkston via 95 and 16).

ACCOMMODATIONS

We have reserved a block of 25 rooms for the nights of October 9 and 10. The rooms will accommodate 1-4 persons, they are all non-smoking, and are available for $65.00 + 12.5% tax. You are responsible for making your own reservations, and you should refer to the Georgia Geological Society when booking your room. Motel reservations may be made by calling 1-800-HOLIDAY. You will need a credit card for making the reservations, and must be willing to make a one-night deposit if you arrive after 6:00 PM. The rooms will be held until September 25; after that they will be provided on a space available basis.

RESERVATIONS

Reservations for the trip should be made using the form printed in this notice. The registration fee includes transportation, guidebook, membership dues of $5.00, and the Friday night Smoker. The fee is $50.00 for professionals and $25.00 for students. Students are encouraged to attend. You must check whether or not you want the Sunday box lunch, as this is an additional cost of $5.50; the boat concessionaire at Camp Cornelia will prepare it. Friday and Saturday night meals are your responsibility, but the Inn has a full service dining room.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

For further information, members may call Tim Chowns at (770) 836-4368, or Fred Rich at (912) 681-5361.

President: Mike Higgins, Applied Mapping Systems Inc.

President Elect: Mack Duncan, J.M. Huber Corp

Secretary: Burt Carter, Georgia Southwestern

Treasurer: Tim Chowns, West Georgia

In an earlier column I mused about fossilization. Of all fossils the most likely to succeed in generating student interest and a surefire conversation stopper, after dinner or at a cocktail party, is the coprolite. It never ceases to amaze me that such delicate material is so common in the fossil record. My colleagues will tell you I am going potty, or still stuck in the anal phase, perhaps the result of spending too much time gazing at fecal pellet limestone. Regardless, as any rockhound will tell you, the most amazingly fresh coprolites come from the Salmon Creek locality, near Toledo in Washington State. I have a beautiful specimen, specially wrapped in tissue, of course, and guaranteed to stop you dead in your tracks. It is perfectly shaped, crumpled and slightly desiccated; almost too good to be true. In fact, this perfection has always troubled me, especially because these specimens are said to have been generously donated by freshwater turtles.

So, I should not have been surprised by a recent paper by Patrick Spencer (1997) in the Journal of Geoscience Education (v.5, no. 2, p. 123-128) uncovering these beauties as pseudofossils. Apparently, there is no internal evidence of digested material and their occurrence within cavities in carbonized wood does not fit the turtle hypothesis. Spencer suggests that ash-laden marsh muds were intruded through holes into rotten wood during early compaction and subsequently replaced by siderite. This still sounds like a stretch, but perhaps less so than for a sphincter origin. What should I do with the specimen I put in the showcase? Bury it? Flush it away? Relabel it as a pseudofossil? Or, perhaps, follow Mother's advice given years ago, and just leave it alone.

Tim Chowns

Remember the 1999 meeting of the Southeast Section of the Geological Society of America will be held in Athens on March 26 and 27, a Thursday and Friday. The meeting is being hosted by the Department of Geology at the University of Georgia. The site of the meeting is the new Classic Center on the edge of both downtown Athens and UGA.

For the latest information, check the meeting website at: http://www.gly.uga.edu

Ever since first arriving in North America I have wanted to visit the world famous Permian Reef in the Guadalupe Mountains of west Texas. Although, petroleum geologist Wallace Pratt donated land for a park back in 1961, it was not until 1970 that Guadalupe National Park opened to the public and not until the early 1980s that a trail was constructed through the reef. Now there is a wonderful geological trail and an excellent guidebook to accompany it. I got my first chance to hike the trail this summer on a month long western fieldtrip with students from West Georgia. Beginning at the mouth of McKittrick Canyon the trail climbs about 2000' up to the top of the Guadalupe escarpment with a great view over the Delaware Basin to the east. Translating ones self back some 250 million years it is easy to imagine snorkeling at the edge of the Permian shelf and gazing over the reef into deep water in the basin. The trail begins at the toe of the Permian slope and rises steeply through the old talus slopes deposited seaward of the reef. Much of this part of the trail follows one stratigraphic horizon so that the slope approximates that of the original reef talus. Above lie the massive unbedded carbonates of the Capitan Limestone. Although, partly obscured by dolomitization, reef- building sponges, bryozoa and algae are common, as well as spectacular cavities infilled with marine cements and sparry calcite. At the top of the escarpment well-bedded pisolitic limestones and dolostones with teepees signal that one has reached shallow water.

This is a spectacular hike, which I recommend for all geologists, not just carbonate petrologists. My visit was greatly enhanced by the " Guide to the Permian Reef geology trail, McKittrick Canyon, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, West Texas" edited by Don Bebout and Charles Kerans and published in 1993 by the Bureau of Economic Geology of the University of Texas at Austin.

It contains excellent stop descriptions, and numerous colored illustrations including panoramic views, stratigraphic diagrams, and photographs of outcrops and thin sections; the distillation of years of work on this classic locality.

Tim Chowns

The geology department at Georgia State has been a very busy place in 1998. An important new face this fall is Professor Pamela Burnley, who joined our faculty in January from a research post at the University of Colorado. Pamela's PhD is from UC-Davis, and her research interests are in high T and P mineral transformations. She's also into quality science education, and is forming ACRES, the Atlanta Consortium for Research in Earth Sciences, to bring together faculty, students, and K-12 teachers in a number of beneficial ways. Her first project is a National Science Foundation REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) proposal that will involve faculty from GSU, Perimeter College, Fort Valley State, Clark Atlanta, and Columbus State, undergraduate students, and local schoolteachers.

Recently, the department was pleased to announce the endowment of the David Ogren Memorial Scholarship, in honor of Dave Ogren, a paleontology professor that many still remember fondly. The Ogren scholarship has been awarded annually since 1987, and with the endowment this scholarship is perpetual.

Student interest in geology is holding strong, with our graduates recently numbering about 20 B.S. degrees and 6 M.S. degrees annually. Practically all seem to be landing decent jobs. As always, instruction of these students is taken very seriously in the department. Recently, Crawford Elliott earned the 1998 Outstanding Junior Faculty Award for excellence in research and instruction from the College of Arts and Sciences.

Individual faculty reports can be viewed at the department's web site at http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwgeo/ (look for the Annual Report). Some highlights: recent research grants have been awarded to Pamela Burnley (NSF, numerical modeling of the olivine-spinel transition), Crawford Elliott (Petroleum Research Fund, illite and the Alleghanian orogeny), and Ann McCartney (American Geological Institute, workshop to pilot AGI's EarthComm high school curriculum). In 1998, faculty and/or students have conducted research or field work in Iran, Montana, Kentucky, France, and Cyprus, as well as Georgia.

David A. Vanko

The "fall" semester started in Athens with temperatures in the 90's and the calendar reading August. It does not seem like "fall". The students are in Athens and many have found their way into geology courses. The experiment of making the introductory geology sequence (GEOL 1121-1122) stand-alone courses with optional labs seems to be working and attracting students. Over 1,000 students are taking introductory geology this fall and about 600 of those are taking the optional lab. The drop in geology enrollment predicted by some in response to the changes in the core curriculum has not shown up and that is good news.

Plans are well under way for hosting the SE Section meeting of the Geological Society of America in Athens next spring on March 24-26. The meeting will be held in the Classic Center in downtown Athens and the Holiday Inn will be the meeting hotel. More information on the meeting can be found on the Department web site at http://www.gly.uga.edu/ give it a try! Hope to see all of you in Athens!

The annual field trip for new graduate students found cloudy skies, but managed to dodge the rain. A van full of students visited gold mines in Dahlonega and tried their hand at panning gold. A visit to Tallulah Falls featured discussions of hydrology, water quality, and energy issues in Georgia. Woodall Shoals showed students the complexity of the geology of the Blue Ridge. Dinner at the Dillard House resulted in a very quiet van trip back to Athens. A good time was had by all.

This year will see some major changes in the geology facilities. A major renovation project will result in the relocation of the stable isotope lab to the basement of the geography-geology building. Several other labs and classrooms will also be renovated in the process. With the renovations, changes to semester, and the GSA meeting it is going to be a busy year in Athens.

Sam Swanson

Overall, the department has been somewhat overwhelmed by the demands of serving the Environmental Science graduate program (e.g. hydrology, land use and environmental geology courses), and by converting to semesters. We are experiencing considerable pressure to make changes in our curriculum and courses in the geology major. Some of us Luddites believe real rocks and fossils are still better teaching tools than are virtual specimens!

Bill Frazier recently underwent major surgery to replace both hips (two operations separated by six weeks). Obviously, he is not hopping around in the field at the moment, but reports that he is recovering quickly and is very happy about the semester system.

Tom Hanley is finishing his portion of SE MAPS an NSF funded project that packages geology, geomorphology, geography and history in map, air photo and remote sensing oriented activities for pre-College students. Tom's area is Pine Mountain and deals with the structure and differential erosion of the Hollis Quartzite, the FDR legacy, Depression Era farms east of Hamilton, GA, and the transition to silvaculture. In January, Tom traveled to eastern Panama with others from the CSU College of Science, to scout out an area for possible Environmental Science work. He stayed in the Mamoni River Valley, an area that has been mapped as part of an ophiolite sequence.

Tom and his students continue to work in the Piedmont, analyzing rock samples (Thanks Tim Latour & Scott Robertson) and running a magnetometer survey (Thanks Tim Long). Together with Mark Steltenpohl of Auburn he ran a field trip through mylonites in western Georgia for the Atlanta Geological Society. He is also working with Dr. Glenn Stracher of East Georgia College on calcsilicate rocks.

David Schwimmer is mid-way through a project on the paleobiology of the Late Cretaceous giant crocodile Deinosuchus rugosus, funded by National Geographic. It turns out this species ranged across the entire southern continental margin, across the interior sea, and therefore the scope of the study continues to expand. During this upcoming spring, David and students will return to Big Bend Park in Texas to continue searching for big crocodile feeding traces and spare body parts. On the same topic, David visited museum collections housed in Chicago, Raleigh and Philadelphia. One interesting upshot of the crocodile study will be a non-technical book under contract with Indiana University Press, to be colorfully illustrated with lurid, bloody paintings of giant crocodiles eating young dinosaurs.

During the past year, David presented papers at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Chicago (just a week before they brought the T-rex "Sue" to the Field Museum), on Late Cretaceous biogeography across the Western Interior Seaway. Also at the third Dinofest Symposium, in Philadelphia, on Deinosuchus, and in April at the Southeastern GSA meeting in Charleston on vertebrate bite traces in marine Late Cretaceous deposits. Two journal articles by David this past year cover taphonomy of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs in Eastern USA, and species of Xiphactinus (a big Cretaceous fish). In addition, David reviewed a book on Functional Morphology in Vertebrate Paleontology, for Palaios.

David Schwimmer

DeKalb College has seen a lot of changes over the past couple of years. The most obvious change is its new name, Georgia Perimeter College. GPC still has only three full-time faculty, spread over the five campuses: John Anderson (Dunwoody Campus, formerly North Campus), and Pamela Gore and Lynn Zeigler at Clarkston Campus (formerly Central Campus). The Lawrenceville Campus (formerly Gwinnett Campus) has been served by Pamela Gore through GSAMS distance learning going on three years now, and enrollment in Geology courses has steadily increased. In the next five years, the Lawrenceville Campus will move to a new facility to be built on Collins Hill Road, where it will offer 4-year degrees in partnership with the University of Georgia.

Besides getting a facelift after this past April's tornado, the Dunwoody Campus is going to be opening a new classroom building (January 1999), which will more than double classroom space on campus as well as expand the Science Department. All faculty on campus will be getting new offices and the Geology Laboratory classes will no longer have to share laboratory space with Physics and Astronomy. Geology will move into a lab vacated by biology. Things will remain in a state of flux for a while until this lab is remodeled. The Dunwoody Campus continues to have a strong enrollment in Geology with two part-time instructors besides Dr. Anderson. Carol Gelbaum, a longstanding part-timer and Trudy Briggs, a new addition to the Geology team. Trudy recently graduated with her Masters in Geology from Georgia State University. She has jumped in teaching and has been doing well taking the place of Tim Welling, a former part-timer who has moved to New York State.

Clarkston Campus has had a busy summer, culminating with a move from the old Science Building (D Building) to the newly-renovated Science Building (C Building). We are now in a state-of-the art Geology lab with a ceiling-mounted multimedia projector, an ELMO visual presenter, and of course, a networked computer. We are all enjoying the larger space and increased storage. The Clarkston Campus also has part-time adjunct faculty, namely Rob McDowell and Bill Turner.

At the Lawrenceville Campus, our part-time adjunct faculty are, Jim Smith and Alan Hughes.

Dr. John Anderson will be leading a field trip entitled Coastal Plain Paleocene - Eocene Stratigraphy and Paleontology of Southeastern and South-central Georgia for the Southeastern Section of SEPM at the Southeastern Section of GSA. The trip will look at some of the enigmatic Eocene units as well as some interesting sedimentological beds. Apart from preparing for this trip John spent part of the summer doing paleontological collecting in the Mississippian of Tennessee and various Eocene units of the Coastal Plain of Georgia. He also has been working with the Geology Department at Georgia State University on a REU grant from NSF.

Lynn Zeigler has started working on her Ph.D. in Science Education at Georgia State University. She is also up for tenure this year. Lynn attended the Rocky Mountain Section meeting of the GSA in Flagstaff, AZ this year, and visited the Grand Canyon (again). She is still the advisor for the campus Science Club, which is involved with the Georgia Adopt-A-Stream Program. They monitor a stream on the Clarkston Campus. Lynn is also working on developing an outdoor classroom setting on the campus, which will be available for use by all science disciplines.

Dr. Pamela Gore received the Regents Teaching Excellence Award this year, for her work with technology in the classroom and the web site, Georgia Geoscience Online (http://www.dc.peachnet.edu/~pgore/gore.htm), which she developed with Regents Connecting Teachers and Technology Grants. The course techniques (using GSAMS and the web) or the web course materials are available for adoption if your institution is interested. See the web site or contact Pamela Gore for more information. She will be glad to present a GSAMS seminar to your department to demonstrate the many features of her web site. She developed an online Historical Geology Lab Manual during summer 1998, which can be used by any institution in the System. Just let her know what you find useful. (Incidentally, Schlumberger used some of her images in its CD-ROM and web-based training modules.)

Over the past year Pam has been busy with presentations galore on her use of technology in the classroom. October 1997 saw presentations at the Rock Eagle University System Annual Computing Conference, the League for Innovation in Community Colleges Information Technology Conference, and participation in a panel discussion with participants from the Second International Geoscience Education Conference (GeoSciEdII) in Salt Lake City. In April, she gave an invited presentation at the Georgia Conference on College and University Teaching at Kennesaw State University. In June, she helped Tim Long (Georgia Institute of Technology) teach his Earthquake Hazards and Recording Workshop for Middle School teachers. She has also become involved in working on the Atlanta area maps for the SE Maps project (spearheaded by John Wagner at Clemson with an NSF grant), and spent a week at Clemson in July. In August, she was invited to present at a conference on "Web-based Learning and Assessment" at the Colorado School of Mines, attended by about two dozen geologists from industry and academia. Participants were invited on the basis of their past activities in web-based learning (look for an upcoming article on the conference in Geotimes). Her web site has been recognized by "The Virtual Geosciences Professor's GeoScience Education Site of the Fortnight (http://www.uh.edu/~jbutler/anon/site/siteNEXT.html) for September 14, 1998, and she has an upcoming paper in Computers and Geosciences. She will also be presenting a paper on her Historical Geology Online Laboratory Manual at the GSA meeting in Toronto. To top it all off, Dr. Gore has just been named "Coordinator for Online Instruction" at Georgia Perimeter College.

Once again I, Fred Rich, am pleased to offer an update on the state of affairs in the Department of Geology and Geography at Georgia Southern University. Last year at this time I reported on our pending renovations in the undergraduate research and teaching facilities (the hard rock and soft rock labs). Since that time, the building has been swarming with contractors who, working steadily through winter, spring and summer, brought the project almost to completion. Chemistry and we did not have much trouble spending the $1.38 million that came from NSF and the State, and our new labs are truly wonderful. We had a surprising windfall come to us from the University Administration in the form of improvements to our large lecture hall, Sam Couch's office, and one of the undergraduate teaching labs, so they have been similarly redesigned. All together, something over $1.5 million was spent this year on physical facilities.

We intend to have an open house to show off our new rooms on October 17, so, alumni, be looking for further news.

The other big news is that we successfully completed two searches last year. One was for a new Department Chair. I had been in the saddle for ten years, and the ride was getting kind of bumpy, so I decided to get off and walk. The new Chair is Dr. Dallas D. Rhodes, who comes here from Whittier College. Dallas was affiliated with Whittier since 1977, having been the Chair there over three different intervals of time. Dallas is a geomorphologist by training, and earned his degrees from the University of Missouri (BS, 1969), and Syracuse University (MA, 1973; PhD, 1973). His recent work involves research into tectonic geomorphology of active strike-slip faults in California.

Our second search was for a structural geologist. Dr. Chuck Trupe, III, comes to us from a one-term appointment at Appalachian State University. Chuck was schooled at George Mason University (BS, 1985), and the University of North Carolina (MS, 1989; PhD, 1997). Chuck's main research interest is in the structural evolution of the Blue Ridge.

Other faculty news follows:

Pranoti Asher is in her second year with us. She has taught courses for majors and non-majors. Last year she organized a meeting and fieldtrip for the Board of the Association for Women Geoscientists (a group with which she has very close ties), and she was able to acquaint quite a few woman geoscientists with our programs and our area. This summer she participated in a W. M. Keck Foundation- sponsored student-faculty geology research program at Smith College.

Sam Couch is also in his second year. Sam taught a variety of geography classes, and spent much of his time cultivating ties with the Irish Studies Program, as well as the U.S. Forest Service. USFS is the proprietor of a Warren, Idaho, archeological site that Sam has been involved with. Right now, it appears that the Irish connection is going to be developed very successfully, and Sam spent the last days of summer in the vicinity of Donegal. Both connections lead to establishment of summer field schools or 1999 - one in Wilderness Field Methods, and one in Irish culture geography.

Kelly Vance is entering his tenth year. Still slugging it out in the classroom, Kelly has also been heavily involved with our searches. Late this summer he took advantage of a course development grant to do fieldwork in New Mexico in anticipation of running a regional field geology class next semester that will focus on volcanic terranes.

Denise Battles continues in her role as Assistant Dean. Her primary activity in the department has been in coordinating two NSF grants - the ARI grant which lead to the building modifications, and a Course and Curriculum Development grant which centers about the new Environmental Science courses that all the science departments are offering this year.

Jim Darrell was President of the Georgia Academy of Science this last year. The tasks associated with that job, as well as advising, and teaching Environmental Geology and Teaching Science in the Middle Grades have kept him pretty busy.

Dan Good continues to keep the Geography program rolling. Now that we have a major, he and the other geographers have new courses to teach, and people to advise. Dan spent part of the summer doing volunteer work in Panama, and continues in his role of trying to forecast the behavior of hurricanes. Good luck, Dan!

Mark Welford is increasingly linked to teaching and research in biogeography. In addition to teaching introductory geography classes, this summer he spent seven weeks in Ecuador; four of the weeks were spent doing research and two weeks teaching a biogeography field class that combined his interests in ornithology and physical geography. Furthermore, in January he was appointed Associate Editor of the Journal of Geography. He is responsible for submissions pertaining to physical geography.

Gale Bishop is in his last year at GSU. He is one of the founding members of the department, and intends to retire in June of 1999. Gale is our leader in the development of innovative teaching techniques, particularly those involving Distance Learning and computer applications in the classroom. This year Gale, and his colleague Nancy Marsh, continued with the extremely successful St. Catherines Island Sea Turtle Internship program. They are the best allies the sea turtles have on the Georgia coast.

Jim Reichard is in his third year here. He has taught many introductory geology classes, and is now in charge of the installation of an observation well field. We secured an NSF-ILI grant last year, which will help us, install peizometer nests at an on-campus site. The well field is being established as a component of our developing Environmental Geology courses.

Richard Hulbert, Jr. remains in charge of the Georgia Southern Museum's paleontology collections, and has succeeded in putting the final touches on the Plant Vogtle whale. Georgiacetus is soon to be described in print, and an unveiling of a new whale display is scheduled for October. Aside from those activities, Richard teaches a lot of Historical Geology, and a successful new course, History of the Earth.

Jim Henry remains at his outpost on Skidaway Island. Jim is the Director of the Applied Coastal Research Laboratory, and continues to write successful grant proposals to continue his studies of the Georgia Coastal Zone. He is working very closely with Dr. Clark Alexander, an adjunct member of our faculty and research geologist with the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography.

I guess that leaves me, Fred Rich. I spend a lot of time smiling. When I'm not doing that, I teach introductory geology classes, count pollen grains, run fieldtrips in the Okefenokee Swamp, and measure the orientation of joint sets on the Coastal Plain. Don't laugh - this is not the passive, trailing continental margin that you thought it was. See you next month!

Fred Rich

The GGS Membership Directory is now available, to members only, as a floppy disk. The directory includes names, addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail stored as an EXCEL spreadsheet. The cost is $5.00. You may pick up a copy at the meeting in Jacksonville or contact Secretary Burt Carter for information on alternative formats.

Checks should be made payable to the Georgia Geological Society and mailed to:

Dr. Burt Carter
Dept of Geology & Physics
Georgia Southwestern State University
Americus, GA 31709