SJC GeoBuzz
News and Such from the Geology Department
No. 1  -  May 2001
Did somebody say field trips?  Just can't have a very good Geology program without field trips.  We took three this year.  In November we took a day trip down south to the Indiana Limestone district near Bedford to hunt for geodes.  The picture above was taken on this trip.  Left to right, that's Sarah Martin, Charles Martin, Shay McGuire, and Kris Krouse.
In February I dragged everyone out of bed at 2:30 am on a Saturday (I'm so cruel) to drive down to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.  But the sleep deprivation was well worth it;  we had a great time.  On Saturday we took a five hour cave tour (but not the "Wild Cave" tour, where you spend eight hours crawling through passages that would give squirrels claustrophobia - we'll do that next time!).  On Sunday (the day we weren't underground!) it was sunny and almost 80 degrees - a perfect day to tour the karst plain south of the park.  And of course, we had to stop for lunch at the Porky Pig Diner in Pig, Kentucky.  If you go, be sure to say "Hi" to Calvin for us.

Finally, in April we went "fossil hunt'n'" in the Upper Ordovician rocks just north of Cincinnati.  Dr. Bob Brodman from the Biology Department accompanied us on this trip, and he was absolutely blown away by the concentration of fossils in the rocks.  Hey, if you've been there, you know why it's the best Ordovician fossil locality in the world.  Personally, I was more impressed with the slab covered with Ordovician raindrop imprints (which is now part of the department's collection - thanks Shay!).

More pictures from our field adventures can be seen here.

And even though it wasn't really a field trip...Shay McGuire, Sarah Martin, Kris Krouse, and I attended the Geological Society of America - North-Central Section Meeting at Illinois State University this spring (Shay and another student, Jeannette Jaskula '99, and I also attended the North-Central Meeting in Indianapolis last year).  I also attended the GSA National Meeting in Reno, Nevada, last fall - there are definite perks to being a professor!
In April, Dr. William K. Hart of Miami University (Ohio) presented an open lecture entitled "Geology and its Role in Human Evolution Research:  Perspectives from the Middle Awash Valley, Ethiopia."  Dr. Hart is one member of an international research team which searches for fossils of human ancestors and evidence of human evolution in the Ethiopian part of the East African Rift System.

In 1994, this research group announced the discovery of one of the oldest known human ancestors, Australopithecus ramidus (later renamed Ardipithecus ramidus), a 4.4 million year old primitive hominid more resembling a chimpanzee than a modern human.  In 1999, the group again made news with two important discoveries.  One was the identification of a previously unknown, 2.5 million year old hominid, Australopithecus garhi, with long legs and a human-like gait but apelike arms, a small brain and a large jaw.  The other find, from the same geologic horizon, is evidence of hominids using stone tools to butcher antelope carcasses – the oldest direct evidence of meat- and marrow-eating by human ancestors.
 

Dr. Hart's main role in the research group is tephrostratigrapher - basically he's the person who finds and collects the layers of volcanic ash which bracket the fossil-bearing sedimentary layers.  Chemical analyses of the ash can be used to determine if widely separated deposits are from the same volcanic eruption, and therefore of identical age.  Feldspar grains from an ash deposit can then be analyzed to obtain absolute ages for the ash layers and constrain the age of the hominids.

It was a very interesting and entertaining lecture.  Not only was it good for our Geology students, but it was also an excellent tie-in with the material that we covered in Core Science this spring.


 

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