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During the Summer of 1999, the class of 2000 was beginning work on their Senior I.S. Evan Berliner spent part of the Summer working with Nigel Brush and Nick Kardulias (Archaeology) at an old fort site near Clinton, Ohio, examining the stone structures and their relation to the French and Indian War. He used a proton precision magnetometer and a soil susceptibility magnetometer with his work. Evan also researched burial sites and wooden tombs in St. Genevieve Churchyard near Calmontier, Ohio. This site is one where LaSalle may have traveled through during the French and Indian War. Amanda Cook spent the Summer of 1999 at the Florissant Fossil Beds, a national monument near Florissant, Colorado, which was established by the National Park Service in 1969. These beds preserve the Late Eocene plant and insect fossils. Amanda observed both fossil butterflies and host plants while there. She plans to compose a list of host plants for the butterflies in the Florissant Formation belonging to the Family Nymphalidae, which is the best represented of the families. Because so much study has been done in the classification of insects, she is able to assign a recent counterpart to each fossil genus. She hopes to draw some phylogenetic relationships between fossil and recent genera of the nymphalids so that she can get a clearer picture as to what significant evolutionary changes occurred. By doing this work, Amanda hopes to avoid the problem of assuming that recent nymphalids live the same way in their environment as they did 34 million years ago. Her research this summer was made possible by an internship at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. Her field supervisor was Dr. Herb Meyer, a paleo-botanist with the National Park Service. To read more about Amanda's I.S., check her website: http://www.wooster.edu/geology/Amanda.html. Allison Cornett's Summer research was funded by The College of Wooster's Copeland Fund, along with a Council on Undergraduate Research Fellowship she received. Allison conducted geological field research at an interglacial site on San Salvador Island, The Bahamas. She used paleontology to help unravel past climate change. By looking at how organisms living within the reefs surrounding San Salvador responded to a cooling event that happened 125,000 years ago, she will be able to better describe the event itself. It is fairly controversial, and it may change the way we look at climate modeling. Allison's website is http://www.wooster.edu/geology/Allison.html. Mike Gluck is using paleomagnetism to assess the relative timing of tilting of cross-cutting sheeted dikes collected in Cyprus. These data will document progressive magmatic and structural events at the Troodos spreading center. Ryan Hanson is working on Pleistocene glacial deposits in the Cincinnati, Ohio, region. Together with Greg Wiles and Dr. Tom Lowell of the Department of Geology at the University of Cincinnati, Ryan is interested in the possibility of using tree ring analysis as a stratigraphic correlation tool for forest beds buried by glaciers during the last phases of the Ice Age (20,000 years ago). Megan Hooker is studying the fluctuating paleoenvironments of the Simsima Formation (Late Cretaceous, Maastrichtian, Oman Mountains), which have not been studied in detail. The Simsima Formation is a fossiliferous carbonate unit deposited in the tropical Tethys on the southeastern Arabian Peninsula in present-day Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Studying the Simsima Formation is useful because it will further the knowledge about ancient tropical marine communities, particularly those living just before the Cretaceous mass extinction. It will also show how tectonic events correlate with sea level changes in the region. During the Spring semester of 1999, Megan studied the literature on the geologic setting and stratigraphy of the Oman Mountains; this year she is reconstructing the paleoenvironments of the Simsima Formation through sedimentary petrology and invertebrate paleontology. Her work has been supported by a grant from the Abu Dhabi Oil Corporation, United Arab Emirates. To read more about Megan's Senior I.S. Research, log on to http://www.wooster.edu/geology/Megan.html. Miranda Loflin participated in the Keck Colorado project during the Summer of 1999. Miranda's project was entitled "Petrologic and Structural Evolution of the Northern Rio Grande Rift, Central Colorado." She is characterizing the sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen isotopes systematics of alunite from the altered zone in order to determine the origin of the alteration. Her analytical work will be done at the USGS isotope geochemistry lab in Denver with Dr. Bob Rye. Two other students are characterizing the trace element geochemical variations Ryan McAllister's trip to Alaska this past Summer was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF-REU) program. Ryan spent three weeks working at six field sites within the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. The sites included five glacier forefields and the subject of his Independent Study, one of the Tana Dunes. He is studying this dune and its advance rate, migrating through a forest killing the trees as it advances. Ryan's independent study will investigate the mechanism(s) responsible for reactivating this dune. The dead white spruce trees within the dune will be used to help reconstruct the story of dune migration. He will be using tree-ring analysis to extract geomorphological information from cores and discs to date the dead trees. He also will crossdate the dead trees and create a several hundred year chronology of dune activity. More information regarding Ryan's research can be found at http://www.wooster.edu/geology/RyanM.html. Ryan Oates is using sulfur isotope analyses of the Troodos Ophiolite to learn more about the hydrothermal alteration processes responsible for ore deposition in the complex. Aaron Shear ('01) participated in a Sophomore Keck
Project during 1999. "Delineation of a Jamaican Slave Village
Using Field Geophysics" was the title of Aaron's project,
which was directed by Rob Sternberg of Franklin and Marshall
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