I teach Sedimentology and stratigraphy, Structural geology, Earth and life through time, and Geologic Hazards. My research is focussed on low-temperature thermochronology, flood hazards, and the sediment record of environmental change, and I am interested the systematics of zircon and fission track dating.
I drive a hybrid, garden organically, heat with wood, recycle, light with fluorescent bulbs, buy locally, and conserve resources. I still think I’m not doing enough. I’m not a fanatic, just worried about the future. Here is what we are doing at Union.
The fission track lab at Union College is one of the leading labs in the analysis of fission track in zircon, or at least we think so. We do traditional fission track studies to undersatand orogenic development, and thermal studies related to fluids and ore forming events, and low-temperature studies in the analysis of basin maturation. A significnat fraction of our work involves understanding radiation damage in zircon. More...
For a number of years we have been looking into flooding on the Mohawk River in upstate New York (USA). In doing so, we've been primarily focussed on understanding the conditions that surround historic floods so that we can better understand future hazards for the city of Schenectady and nearby communities. We've compiled a relatively long record of historical floods through a variety of archives, and we've studied ice jams and the dynamics of these ice jams. More...
I find teaching fascinating and I enjoy getting students excited about science. I teach a number of field-intensive courses where students make observations, collect data, and then interpret those data in a meaningful way. Most course information is posted internally (Blackboard), except for Carbonate Sedimentology, and Living on the Edge and other FIELD Programs.
Living on the Edge is a Union College Miniterm aimed at exposing students to geologic hazards and the way society mitigates them. In 2007, the trip went to Alaska and on that trip we wrote a BLOG (2007) that chronicled the trip. A summary of the trip is here. We will run this trip again in the summer of 2008, and 2009. THE CURRENT BLOG (2008) is here.
A PDF of a Union College Magazine article about this experience is here (3.1 Mb).
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