Our graduate students resumed organizing our traditional Winter Party, our annual event that brings all of us together in an evening of celebration and fun. While the 2022 winter party was moved to Spring as the pandemic restrictions slowly continued to ease, in 2023, we held it again in February, together with our traditional Rock Trot. However, we must wait another year to bring back our Groundhog Day BBQ and other alumni day festivities.

In 2022 we welcomed a new faculty member, Nicholas DiFrancesco, clinical assistant professor. The department will continue to grow through new hires in hydrology, geo- and climate hazards, and geophysics for building strength to help society at the intersection of Earth and its population on a warming and more crowded planet. We are hiring, but we also saw a long-term faculty member, Howard Lasker, retire in the past year. Howie and Mary-Alice Coffroth (Mac) had a most successful research program in marine ecology. We hope they will continue enriching the department for many years as they complete their research projects and guide their students through graduation. 

We are proud to announce a new MS degree program in Computational Earth Science, led by Dr. Sophie Nowicki, addressing the growing need for professionals skilled in Geology and data science/modeling. After Dr. Valentine stepped down, Dr. Nowicki became the new director of the Center for Geological and Climate Hazards (former Center for Geohazard Studies). 

Our faculty continued to be recognized for their outstanding teaching and research. In 2022 we congratulated Dr. Elizabeth Thomas for her promotion to Associate Professor. Dr. Thomas also received a prestigious Fulbright fellowship for conducting research in Norway during her sabbatical. Dr. Greg Valentine received the recognition of UB Distinguished Professor in honor of his outstanding research in physical volcanology and volcanic risk assessment. Please read more about the research and recognition of our outstanding students and faculty in this newsletter or visit our Geology in the News page. 

In closing this message, I would like to recognize and thank two long-term Department of Geology staff members, Barbara Catalano and Robyn Wagner, for their many years of hard work and service in our department.  We wish them well as they start their new assignments within the College of Arts and Sciences.

Finally, I thank everyone who has generously contributed to departmental activities, events, scholarships, and awards. Your contributions make a difference!

Travis Nelson (Logistics Coordinator) and Sue Bratcher (Head Chef, last time we were out West in 2019) arrived in Denver early to inspect and clean the supplies in the storage unit. First-time Field Camp Cooks Tyler Krul and Rachel Ferry flew in from Canada to help, and within a couple of days, the entire staff for the first map site was pitching in. Ms. Kiersten Hottendorf (MS candidate) served as Sous-Chef. TAs Meredith Cole (PhD candidate), Kurt Lindberg (PhD candidate) and Travis Parsons (MS candidate) were invaluable both in the field and in camp. Professors Tracy Gregg and Stephan Kolzenberg taught the first map site. Drs. Chuck Mitchel (Emeritus) and Margarete Jadamec led the second map site. And Drs. Jason Briner and James Boyle wrapped everything up nicely at the third map site.

The heat at the second map site was brutal, with triple-digit temperatures most days. The thirty students had a brief but welcome relief one evening while enjoying the Ufford Ranch water slide! We remain grateful that the Uffords generously continue to let us on their property to instruct the next generation of geologists.

In the future, we plan to alternate a local field training course with our traditional Western course. Our goal is to increase accessibility to our field training and to allow more undergraduates to obtain a BS in geological sciences. Therefore, the 2023 camp will be held locally, building on our successes from 2021. We hope to be back West in 2024 for another great adventure.

The UB Paleoclimate Dynamics team, led by Dr. Elizabeth Thomas, has had a great year! We started fieldwork on a project in Western New York, collaborating with Dr. Jason Briner’s Glacier History Group. We core lakes and take limnological measurements at a couple of sites south of Buffalo on a monthly basis. It’s been fun for us all to be able to get into the field. If you’re in the area and want to join us for a day in the field, let us know! Check out the latest about our research.

Our research on the hydrological cycle response to past warm periods is expanding with new tools and new team members. Dr. Michaela Fendrock (PhD ’22 from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program) joined us as a postdoc starting this summer. Michaela received an NSF Office of Polar Programs Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to study the response of the climate system to freshwater forcing in the ocean using a combination of isotope-enabled climate model simulations and paleoclimate proxy data. PhD student Katelyn Eaman (CU Boulder) and MS student Rebecca Topness (College of William and Mary) also joined our team this summer. We celebrated undergrad Katie Lovell’s graduation last winter and welcomed four new undergrads onto our team: Haben Berhe (Environmental Engineering 23), Dephil Jones (Environmental Geosciences ’23), Katie Patchett (Geology ’23), and Abby Stressinger (Environmental Geosciences and Biology, ’23).

And finally, here are some updates and milestones from our continuing team members:

• JM Aguilar (PhD student), co-advised by Dr. Diana Aga in UB Chemistry, is analyzing lipids preserved in some really rare samples collected from beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet in the 1960s by a team that included former department chair, Dr. Chet Langway!
• Owen Cowling (Lab Meownager) is the glue that binds all of us and our aging instruments together!
• Harleena Franklin (PhD student) is preparing for her qualifying exam this spring. For her research, she will be studying how plant communities interact with the climate in the Arctic.
• Devon Gorbey (PhD student) received several science policy fellowships, has started a Science and Health Policy Club at UB, and plans to pursue science policy as a career path after graduation in spring 2023.
• Hannah Holtzman (MS student) received the Arthur D. Howard Award for Outstanding Master’s Student Research Proposal from the Geological Society of America Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology Division (previous recipients include Dr. Jason Briner!), and will be defending her MS in spring 2023.
• Sofia Kjellman (PhD student at the University of Tromsø, Norway, co-advised by Elizabeth) will defend her dissertation in September 2022.
• Kurt Lindberg (PhD student) passed his qualifying exam in the spring.
• Elizabeth was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure in fall of 2022 and is on sabbatical with her family in Bergen, Norway, this academic year.

By Professor Tracy Gregg

The most recent example of this was in May 2022. The day after classes ended, six students flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I met them at the airport on a Saturday evening (I was already in the area for project work). The next day we drove five hours to a campground near the town of Quemado (meaning "burnt place," ironically) to set up our first headquarters amongst the piñons. That first night we had an outstanding, high-altitude view of the Blood Moon total Lunar eclipse.

Our first study site is a crater known as Zuni Salt Lake in far west-central New Mexico. This is a volcano type known as "maar" and is created when rising magma interacts just right with groundwater and produces violent explosions (by the way - we're not exactly sure what is "just right," but we're working on that!). These explosions excavated a crater that cuts into the landscape - a hole instead of a cone. Students had two days to make detailed stratigraphic columns of one sector of the ejecta ring. After that, we spent some time on the young McCartys basaltic lava field (about 3000 years old) and then visited a rhyolite lava dome.

Meantime, I was following the regional wildfire reports. Our main field area was planned to be around the Valles Caldera, a supervolcano in the north-central part of New Mexico. The problem was a major wildfire, which torched about 45,000 acres of ponderosa forest. That fire closed down the whole mountain range, including all access roads, campgrounds, and groovy outcrops of the classic Bandelier Tuff.

Ok, scratch that plan. But here I am, 2000 miles from home, with a group of students who have studied and worked hard for this field trip....what to do? They deserve good volcanic rocks! No choice but to dodge wildfires by heading to the barren desert.

I had recently been re-engaging with a deposit called Peach Spring Tuff in western Arizona, which I had studied millennia ago during graduate school. This deposit was from a super-eruption about 18.8 million years ago, which explosively discharged more than 1100 cubic kilometers (about 260 cubic miles) of magma over a period of several hours. You read those numbers right. We've estimated that magma discharged from the ground at a rate several thousand times the flow rate of water in the Mississippi River as it passes New Orleans. The resulting pyroclastic flows traveled at least 130 km to the east, and 170 km to the west, of the source volcano. Thanks to a combination of the arid Mojave Desert setting (no sugar maples there!) and just the right amount of faulting, the deposit of this flow is extremely well-preserved and exposed. Plenty to torture the students with...bwah ha ha haaaa! There's more driving than the original plan, but there's some great volcanic stuff to see across Arizona.

We camped at about 8000 feet altitude in a craggy desert range just outside Kingman, Arizona. It turned out that the area was even better than our original Valles Caldera plan. The Peach Spring Tuff's caldera is no longer a recognizable landform, but the tuff's exposure and the excellent late spring desert weather worked with us. We were able to document the tuff in a place where its parent pyroclastic flow(s) filled a deep valley and another location where it draped over an older scoria cone.

On the drive back to Albuquerque, we were able to pay a quick visit to the San Francisco volcanic field (which surrounds the town of Flagstaff) and then the super-interesting Hopi Buttes area. This is an eroded volcanic field, so we can see the dikes and diatremes that fed eruptions at the surface. The student group was great, and I believe they all learned a lot. And I think that if I offer this course in the future, we'll duplicate this trip instead of returning to the Valles Caldera. Thanks, wildfires...but really, those things are no joke and are ravaging the Western forests.

I can't imagine producing volcanology graduates without being able to actually touch volcanoes and volcanic rocks - not an easy task in Western New York. Thanks, Geology alumni, for supporting these types of hands-on field courses, which are so important for our student training!

But it was also a little exciting and gratifying because the epicenter was only 1.5 km away from a fault, one of hundreds I proposed back in 2002. This particular fault was poorly constrained back then because it was based only on Landsat lineaments, and so some might legitimately question if it even existed.

Until John Fountain, myself, and our students started working in Allegany County (southeast of Buffalo), earthquakes in large swaths of New York State were enigmas since no faults had been proposed in those regions, including in Buffalo and suburbs. In fact, there was a ~ 500 km E-W swath across central New York State between the Mohawk Valley in eastern NYS and the Clarendon-Linden Fault System in western NY (near Batavia) that had not a single generally-recognized fault.

In the 1990s we began working in Allegany County, employing 11 integrated geological and geophysical techniques to determine whether faults existed there. New York State had recently proposed disposing of radioactive waste on strike with the seismically active Clarendon-Linden Fault System. In 1996 we finished that work and reported that in Allegany County there were indeed hundreds of faults and fracture intensification domains (Figure 1). Fracture intensification domains generally indicate faults nearby, either horizontally or vertically, or both. One of those fault systems was the southerly extension of the Clarendon-Linden Fault System.

In 2002 I expanded the idea of faults and fracture intensifications in Allegany County to the remainder of the Appalachian Plateau in New York State, based on EarthSat’s (1997) lineaments integrated with some groundtruthed geology. That map implied that the entire Appalachian Plateau region in New York State is riddled with faults (Fig. 2). Since that time, we have worked across the state and found evidence that indicates many of the proposed faults do indeed exist, and most of the earthquake epicenters recorded in NYS fall on these faults (Fig. 2). However, none of us has worked on the geology around any of the proposed faults in the immediate Buffalo area.