GEOLOGICAL RECORD BYU Geological Sciences Magazine 2017
Alumni Field Trip p. 1 Alumni Spotlights p. 3, 5, 7 Alumni Events p. 9, 14 Student Profiles p. 15, 17 Faculty & Student Research p. 19 Faculty Spotlight p. 21 Field Trip p. 23 Quey Hebrew Lecture p. 25
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MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR
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Dear BYU Geological Sciences Alumni and Friends, The last year has provided some challenges and opportunities to the Department of Geological Sciences. The downturn in the petroleum industry and the decline in our undergraduate student enrollment have started a conversation in our department about the possible need to expand and diversify our program in order to meet the needs of our students, most of whom will seek employment as geologists or earth science educators. Several of our recent BS and MS graduates have started (or are now close to completing) PhD programs in geology or geophysics, including at such great institutions as Indiana University, Lehigh University, Stanford University, University of Aberdeen, University of Kansas, University of Oklahoma, University of Washington, and many others. From among these future PhD students, we expect to recruit future faculty. Our current faculty continue to distinguish themselves in many ways. In 2016, Professor Jani Radebaugh received the BYU Sponsored Research Recognition Award, which “recognizes BYU faculty members who demonstrate outstanding achievement in scholarly activities funded by external sponsors or who give significant service in support of
sponsored research and creative programs.” Research by faculty and their students has recently attracted the attention of the news media. For example, Professor Greg Carling and his students have repeatedly been featured on major news outlets for their work on environmental geology, including the recent toxic algal bloom in Utah Lake. Earlier this year, Professor Brooks Britt and Dr. Rod Scheetz completed a project with BYU students in documenting a new dinosaur species, Moabosaurus utahensis, a 125 million-year-old dinosaur whose skeleton was assembled using bones extracted from the Dalton Wells Quarry, near Arches National Park. For a paleontologist, this is a near equivalent to a chemist discovering a new element! In the field of petroleum geology, students continue to garner recognition, as evidenced by Scott Meek and Trevor Tuttle winning the SEG regional Student Challenge Bowl last year in Denver. They beat eight other teams from the University of Colorado, Colorado School of Mines, and Montana Tech. Of course, this would not have been possible without the tutoring and sponsorship of professors Bill Keach and Sam Hudson. In the fall of 2016, the department hired
Mr. Eric Tingey as our full-time Department Technology and Computer Specialist to replace Ms. Kim Sullivan, following her many years of faithful service. Mr. Tingey has already proved himself an outstanding asset by demonstrating great skill in solving a broad range of technology problems and helping faculty to adjust to new and emerging technologies. We are proud to recognize Randy M. Skinner as the department’s newest full professor. An amazing teacher, Professor Skinner also enthusiastically evangelizes on behalf of our geology major. At our most recent Department Awards Banquet, we recognized Professor Steve Nelson as the 2017 recipient of the J. Keith Rigby Research Award; Associate Dean Bart Kowallis as the 2017 recipient of the Myron G. Best Teaching Award; and Ms. Kim R. Sullivan, recently retired from the department, as the 2017 recipient of the BYU Geoscience Alumni Achievement Award.
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John McBride Professor and Chair Geological Sciences, BYU
2017 ALUMNI FIELD TRIP Saturday, October 7 Major sites visited: BYU Museum of Paleontology Observe dozens of skeletons from the Saints and Sinners Quarry before heading into the field. Saints and Sinners Quarry Located in the Nugget Formation of northeastern Utah, this site has yielded 15,000 bones of over 70 individuals, including articulated skeletons. The fauna contains nine vertebrate genera— many new—including a coelophysoid theropod dinosaur, crocodylomorphs, drepanosaurs, and a pterosaur. All were preserved on the shoreline of a Late Triassic oasis in the middle of a dune field. See evidences of an interdunal environment, the oasis, a drought, bones of the dead buried during haboobs, and tracks and burrows of survivors. Dinosaur National Monument Tour the famed “Wall of Bones” with Monument paleontologist Dr. Daniel Chure and learn fascinating facts about the quarry’s dinosaurs and geology. Discover how BYU graduate student Rebecca Esplin is working with the Monument to put all the bones and skeletons from the site into one spectacular GIS map and database. Field trip leaders: Drs. Brooks B. Britt and Daniel Chure. 1
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Gray cliffs o Shale Mem Mancos Sh shoreline d Sandstone, east-centra
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PRODUCTION Managing Editor: Jessica Olsen Assistant Editor: Alyssa Nielsen Graphic Designer: Sarah Thulin Writer: James Collard Writer: Jessica Parcell Writer: Maureen Elinzano Writer: CreelaBelle Howard
MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI CHAIR
CONTACT US Have a comment or question? Would you like to nominate someone to spotlight in our next issue? Contact the Alumni Relations Committee:
Thomas H. Morris 801-422-3761 tom_morris@byu.edu Brooks B. Britt 801-422-7316 brooks_britt@byu.edu Sam Hudson 801-422-4657 sam.hudson@byu.edu
ON THE COVER Gray cliffs of the marine Blue Gate Shale Member of the Late Cretaceous Mancos Shale is capped by sandstone shoreline deposits of the Muley Canyon Sandstone, Henry Mountains Basin, east-central Utah.
Last year Bill Keach and I took over for Gerry Morton as co-chairs of the BYU Geology Alumni Board. This past spring, the alumni board and department co-sponsored two outstanding events for the geology alumni in the Salt Lake City and Houston areas— dinner lectures by Dr. Wm. Revell Phillips on his experiences teaching in Pakistan during the 1960s and by Dr. Scott M. Ritter on his recent work in the Bahamas and San Salvador (see articles about these events later in this newsletter). These gatherings of alumni allowed those fortunate enough to attend to renew old friendships, recall cherished memories of our geologic roots, and reexperience the comradery we all had in our youth as geology students at BYU. We hope future events will do the same. The Geology Alumni Board is all about the students and helping the department help the students. The board and all geology alumni can help by providing financial support, mentoring students, or assisting with job searches. As many of us are painfully aware, the job market for geologists—particularly in the oil industry—remains poor, and many alumni may be looking for work along with the newly graduated students. All of us need to help in any way we can by passing along job opportunities to those out of work and to the department for the students to see. For the students, the dreams of making big bucks with an oil company may be on hold for the time being whereas some may prefer to pursue a different field of geology. There may
be entry-level jobs available that don’t meet the needs of the more experienced geologist or other options besides oil companies. I have been fortunate to be a geologist at the Utah Geological Survey (UGS) for almost twenty-eight years. It has been a great career, and I owe it all to my education at BYU. Many of us at the UGS are approaching retirement, myself included, and the UGS will be looking to hire the next generation of geologists. The Survey is part of the Utah Department of Natural Resource; and as an employee, I receive announcements of job openings with the state. Recently, there was an opening for a park ranger at Dead Horse State Park, which required a degree in any area of natural resources. I passed the announcement on to the BYU Department of Geological Sciences for the students to consider. The job may not pay like an oil company but what a place to work and explain the geology to the public! The Geology Alumni Board encourages all alumni to be vigilant in helping the students (as well as other alumni) in looking for work— in any area of geology—and supporting the department. If you have ideas or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact Bill or me.
All the best, Tom Chidsey With Bill Keach Geology Alumni Board Co-Chairs Geological Sciences, BYU
Photo taken by Kinsey Spiel
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EARLY-CAREER ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
WHEN OPPORTUNITY DOESN’T COME KNOCKING By James Collard
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t’s not always easy finding a job after graduation. When BYU geology alum JD Shumway finished up his master’s thesis at the end of 2016, there appeared to be no job prospects in sight. “I started to become worried as I neared the end of my thesis. If I didn’t get a geology job, I was going to apply at Target or something because unemployment wasn’t an option,” Shumway said. As a child growing up in Texas, Shumway had always planned on working in the petroleum industry. It was a career path that seemed incredibly promising, especially as a BYU undergraduate. “When I finished my bachelor’s, the price of oil was at $110 per barrel, which is great. Companies were hiring geologists left and right, but I knew I wanted to get a master’s degree,” Shumway said. “The month I started graduate school, oil dropped to about $50 per barrel. And by the time I finished my first year, it had plummeted to about $30 per barrel.” Shumway’s original plan of obtaining
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a petroleum job right after finishing his master’s degree wasn’t panning out. He had interned for an oil and gas company the summer before graduation, and he expected to snag a full-time job at the same company after his internship. “When the market was doing well, it was typical for this company to extend full-time offers to most of their interns as long as they didn’t catch the building on fire,” Shumway said. But the market was different this time. “The intern pool consisted of about fourteen people—maybe the company thought oil would recover and there would be more positions open at the end of the summer,” Shumway said. “It didn’t recover, and they only extended two fulltime offers.” Because he wasn’t offered a position, Shumway started applying to jobs while working simultaneously on his thesis. He was living in Houston—one of the top oil and gas cities in the world—but finding a geology job right of school still wasn’t easy.
“I started sending out my résumé, interviewing at every place I could,” Shumway said. “I got a job at a pipeline company—not a geology job, but a data analyst job.” Shumway felt lucky to find a job, but it wasn’t particularly what he wanted to do. He continued to look. “While I was there, I started interviewing with an oil and gas consulting company for a full-time geology position,” Shumway said. “I made it to the final rounds of the interview process, and everything looked promising. The day after the final interview, I received an email and subsequent phone call stating that they liked me, but I wasn’t qualified for the job.” He was understandably upset. Shumway had come so close to getting the dream job he had searched for and then was seemingly shut down at the last moment. The company wanted Shumway to gain some more MATLAB (computer programming) experience. “So I asked them if they’d be willing to hire me as an intern, let me gain experience on the job, and consider me for the position again in a couple of months,’” Shumway said. “That’s how I got to where I am now.” Shumway is currently the youngest geologist at the organization. And although he is still an intern, Shumway said the company will be hiring new geologists shortly, and he hopes he’ll be hired to work full time. “As an undergraduate, I felt that things would fall into my lap once I had my degree. As a graduate student, I realized if I want something, I have to make it happen,” Shumway said. “Opportunities don’t come knocking on your front door waiting to be let in. You have to go out and make your own.”
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MID-CAREER ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
TECHNOLOGY UNLOCKS PETROLEUM POTENTIAL
By CreelaBelle Howard
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YU alum Chris Bexfield has worked ten years for one of the United States’ top hydrocarbon producers— combining business, technology, and geology. Chevron employed Bexfield in 2007 after he had worked three years for Anadarko Petroleum. His geological knowledge has influenced Chevron’s business outcomes across the globe, including in Brazil, Southeast Asia, Greenland, and the North West Shelf of Australia. “I didn’t want to work in a lab,” Bexfield said. “I wanted to be making large business decisions, and geology is a field where you’re able to direct business decisions.” But a career in geology was not Bexfield’s original plan. Bexfield was studying microbiology at BYU but discovered the subject was not for him. To fulfill a core requirement, he took Geology 101 from Dr. R. Paul Nixon, who had previously worked for Mobil. Intrigued, Bexfield asked Dr. Nixon about opportunities in the oil industry. Dr. Nixon advised Bexfield to take more geology
classes to see if it was right for him. Bexfield took Dr. Nixon’s advice and graduated in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in geology. “He put me on the path to go into geology, and I haven’t looked back,” Bexfield said. Bexfield continued his graduate education at BYU. During that time, the petroleum company Anadarko was recruiting at BYU’s campus and offered Bexfield a three-month-long internship, his entry into the industry. Bexfield graduated with his master’s degree in geology in 2004 and began his internship that same summer. Because of his effort, Anadarko offered Bexfield a full-time position as a petroleum geologist developing a domestic resource in northern Louisiana. Bexfield’s goal was to work with highimpact international projects, and while Anadarko could provide that opportunity, he searched for a company with a larger international portfolio. He interviewed with several companies, got multiple offers, and decided to work for Chevron.
Even though Bexfield made a career move with the ambition of working an international assignment, Chevron hired Bexfield to work with domestic assets at first, assigning him to the Permian and Delaware basins as part of a reservoir management team. “It was a good experience because it helped me to develop more of my abilities and expanded my understanding of corporate strategy,” Bexfield said. “The approaches I would build on for the rest of my career actually started with the work I did in the Permian and Delaware basins.” He worked on that assignment for three years then finally got the opportunity he had been waiting for: Chevron moved him to the technology company (Energy Technology Company). From his workstation in Houston, his projects have delved into basins in Brazil, Southeast Asia, Greenland, and the North West Shelf of Australia. For three years, Bexfield lived with his family in Perth, Australia, doing basin
Photo credit: Tony Webster
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L analysis and prospect maturation for basins in Australia and Indonesia. Chevron then brought him back to Houston and put him on the Global Exploration and New Ventures team, which oversees and introduces exploration strategies within the company. Bexfield currently works with this team to evaluate whether Chevron should enter new countries, basins, or lease acquisitions based on geologic technical success and positive business drivers. Bexfield said he and his team members constantly stay up to date on the latest technology to maximize resource potential. Progression in technology, he said, has allowed oil companies to harvest more from basins in which production was once declining. “You take the Permian Basin for instance; it was a ‘brownfield’ by definition where the production had declined,” Bexfield said. “Many companies had left the Permian Basin altogether. Now you see such a resurgence out in West Texas and New Mexico where you have companies now trying to get back into those basins.” Bexfield said BYU’s Department of Geological Sciences gave him a great foundation for his career as an exploration
geologist. BYU geology students have the opportunity to see the science up close; the geology is in BYU’s “own backyard.” This sets BYU apart from other college programs, according to Bexfield. He has encountered other BYU alumni who also attribute their success to BYU’s geology curriculum and its top-notch educators. “I would not have changed my educational choice of going to BYU if I had to,” Bexfield said. “I am glad that I had that experience and worked with the professors that are in the Geology Department.”
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LATE-CAREER ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN ACADEMIA AND INDUSTRY By CreelaBelle Howard
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fter thirty-nine years in the oil industry, he’s back to teach BYU students how to apply their understanding of geology to working in industry. Robert F. Lindsay studied geology at Weber State College earning his bachelor’s degree in 1974, and he graduated from BYU in 1976 with his master’s degree. He later went to the University of Aberdeen in Scotland to earn a doctorate degree in geology in 2014. He worked for Gulf Oil from 1976 to 1985, Chevron from 1985 to 2002, and finished his career at Saudi Aramco, from 2002 to 2015. His career included working in production geology, enhanced oil recovery, applied research, exploration geology, laboratory supervision, and unconventional exploration. He also taught in-house courses, led field trips, and taught at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM). After he retired, he set out to achieve one of his three “bucket list” goals—to teach students at BYU what he learned in the oil industry. As an affiliated faculty member, he helped design an advanced geology course— Geology 621: Petrophysics and Reservoir Characterization—which he taught during Winter Semester 2017. Lindsay’s motive for creating the class was to bridge the gap between academia and industry. “It was my gift back to BYU,” Lindsay
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said. “They were nice enough to let me go to graduate school there. And so what I wanted to do was pay it forward to the next generation of students and give them a class that would help them as they go into industry after they graduate.” Lindsay divided the Geology 621 curriculum into five parts: four taught at BYU and the last one taught in the field in the Guadalupe Mountains of New Mexico and west Texas. Instead of a textbook, he gave the students real data from Permian Basin oil fields. First, the students described a core from a Permian Basin reservoir. Second, they learned how to build a sequence stratigraphic model that connects genetically-related strata within a reservoir. “If you understand the reservoir architecture, then you can drain the reservoir more efficiently and produce more oil, making a bigger profit for the company and hopefully not run out of oil,” Lindsay said. Third, his students learned how to identify a stratigraphic trap where oil is trapped in porous strata next to nonporous strata. Fourth, the students each assessed the reservoir potential of the core they described in part one and put together a five to ten-minute presentation. The presentation had to cover their core description, their sequence stratigraphic
Photo credit: CSIRO
Photo credit: Chad Teer
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model, the stratigraphic trap, and their assessment of reservoir potential. Lindsay kept track of how many times a student said “uh” or “um” during their presentation. The goal was to teach his students to present clearly and professionally. “When you’re standing in front of corporate management, you want to speak professionally,” Lindsay said. The class then went to the Guadalupe Mountains for part five of the course, and in seven days, built a sequence stratigraphic model across the entire mountain range. “The whole idea was to see how laterally and vertically all the different types of rocks fit together,” Lindsay said. Lindsay said the students performed well and responded positively to the class, despite the hard work. They are now more prepared to enter geology careers. “By doing these exercises, they got hands-on experience doing what industry does,” Lindsay said. He said the Department of Geological Sciences while he was at BYU was “marvelous” and prepared him well for his career in the oil industry. What he did not learn, however, was how to apply his understanding of geology to his occupation. Thus, he returned to BYU to teach the next generation of geologists those concepts.
Photo credit: Jawadqada
“This is something that’s hardly ever taught in any department,” Lindsay said. “Some of the things I taught the students hadn’t been invented yet when I graduated, and I had to learn them on the fly in industry.” The next decision is how often to teach the class. “As long as I can be an active instructor, that’s how long I’d like to teach,” Lindsay said.
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ALUMNI EVENTS
SALT LAKE CITY ALUMNI GATHERING At the Salt Lake City alumni gathering, Dr. Wm. Revell Phillips, Professor Emeritus for BYU’s Department of Geological Sciences, shared his experiences and insight from a year-long teaching sabbatical he went on in 1963. He shared his experience on March 8, 2017 in the Lion House on Temple Square, SLC. Below is the essence of the talk he gave to a gathering of more than fifty BYU geology alumni.
The Lord Will Provide A Way By Dr. Wm. Revell Phillips Photos courtesy of author
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came to BYU as an assistant professor in the fall of 1957. I was twenty-eight years old and younger than many of my students. Bill Berge, Max Pitcher, Gary Crosby, and others distinguished themselves in the world of geology and became life-long friends. They are all dead now. After six years, I was entitled to sabbatical leave, and I chose the fullyear leave at half salary. LaRue and I wanted to see the world, and I applied for a Fulbright grant to Norway. I was assigned by the State Department as “alternate” and was not notified until early August that all primary applicants
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had accepted their grants, and I would not be going to Norway. I had accepted half salary, rented my house, and burned other bridges in anticipation. In desperation, I called the State Department in Washington, D.C. to ask if there was nothing for me. The only unclaimed Fulbright grant was to a nothing university in the Sindh Desert of Pakistan. It had been available for several years, as no one wanted it. Being desperate, I said I would take it although Pakistan was my last choice to spend a year with my family. The world of the early ’60s was a different world from today. The American dollar was “sound as a dollar,” the silver dollar was
actually made of silver (people didn’t like them; they were too heavy), and Americans were honored and respected everywhere. It was a good time to be an American. I contacted the Church to learn if there were any groups or Church organization in Pakistan and was informed that the Church was not aware of any members anywhere in Pakistan. That presented a problem. I was to be paid in Pakistani rupees, which by law could not be converted to dollars or taken outside of the country. The official exchange rate was nine rupees to the dollar, but you could get one hundred to one on any street corner,
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and r outsid LaR but if accept Our b truly w provid Presid exactly We and fl the sun in Kar stoppe to pu The p the ru left sta At the light, w termin up ou Much light a to pick We a tiny There I was movin Many or fru goat o prepar We which was th ate all a tall P each o Eve at the with a were a things There assigne of Jam the In
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n’t like mericans here. It
f there ization hat the embers
rupees, rted to ountry. s nine uld get corner,
and rupees were completely worthless outside of Pakistan. LaRue and I had always paid full tithing, but if there was no Church in Pakistan to accept it, how would we pay our tithing? Our bishop said, “Don’t worry. If you truly want to pay your tithing, the Lord will provide a way.” The stake president and the Presiding Bishop’s office in Salt Lake said exactly the same thing in the same words. We left Salt Lake on September 1, 1963, and flew west over the Pacific, following the sun in days that never ended. We landed in Karachi in the middle of the night and stopped on the runway just long enough to put off my family and our baggage. The plane continued down the runway, the runway lights went out, and we were left standing in the dark with our luggage. At the end of the runway was a single light, which I assumed was some sort of terminal closed for the night. We picked up our bags and walked toward the light. Much to our relief, a man stepped into the light and announced that he had been sent to pick up Dr. Phillips and his family. We loaded six of us and baggage into a tiny French car and headed for Karachi. There were no lights along the road, but I was aware of a great mass of humanity moving with us on both sides of the road. Many were carrying baskets of vegetables or fruits, and some were herding a single goat or a couple of sheep. Karachi was preparing for another day. We were taken to the old Palace Hotel, which was built by the British when India was the “Jewel in the British crown.” We ate all alone in a large dining hall where a tall Punjabi with a turban stood behind each one of us during every meal. Every day I attended orientation meetings at the office of the Fulbright Commission with about thirty-five other grantees. All were assigned to major cities where most things were available if you could find them. There were two “hardship” posts. We were assigned to the tiny university community of Jamshoro about twenty miles across the Indus River from the medium city of
Hyderabad (not Hyderabad, India) at the mouth of the Indus. The other “hardship” post went to a young Mennonite couple— Jim and Maddi Lowery. It was in the high Himalayas where summer never comes. We came to love the Lowerys and encountered them again in Austria several years later. Because ours was a “hardship” post, we were given an old Volkswagen van, which I would need to drive to the Sindh campus every day; and we would be allowed to spend forty dollars’ worth of rupees at the U.S. commissary in Karachi each month— if we could get to Karachi. Meetings finished, we claimed our VW and drove to the U.S. commissary to carefully select our forty dollars’ worth of food items, which we did not expect to find in the Hyderabad bazaar. Standing in the checkout line, LaRue nudged me and said, “That woman at the head of the line
is wearing temple garments. Go ask her!” After a brief discussion about who should ask the lady about her underwear, we were introduced to Maxine Omps from Bicknell, Wayne County, Utah. Her husband Jim was teaching at Karachi University under an AID program, and they had been in Karachi for several years and had never encountered another Mormon. She was as excited to see us as we were to see her, and we agreed that on the first weekend of every month we would drive to Karachi, spend Saturday night at the Ompses’ home, hold a joint sacrament meeting Sunday morning and return to Jamshoro Sunday afternoon. We had been standing in the wrong checkout line. We paid with rupees, and there was a separate register for that; and Maxine said she never wore that sheer blouse because it was offensive to the Muslim population, but she wore it that day.
Extended families in the pass live in a literal fortress.
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Sind University, Science Building – Spring 1964 Mine is the only car in the parking lot on a school day.
For our journey across the Sindh Desert, the Fulbright Commission had assigned a young Pakistani student to guide us to our new home in Jamshoro. As the sun was setting, he made violent motions that the van must stop. He got out, walked a hundred yards toward the setting sun, spread his turban on the sand, and paid homage to Allah. We were met at the door of our new home by two servants whom the Commission had engaged to care for us. Omar Din had served guest faculty in that house before, but Fareed was new. They had dinner ready for us, and the beds were made up. The following morning a small group of students appeared at the door. They wanted to see the new visiting professor and to show him the Sindh campus. The campus was about a mile away, and I had to drive as they had no transportation. There were two academic buildings, which were long, narrow, one-story structures with a broad hallway running the length of one side, open to the outside through lattice work and vines. Four classrooms on the other side opened into the hallway. One office at the end was for
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department chairmen, but there were no offices for faculty, so I taught my class and went home every day. One building was for science and one for engineering. A third building had been started but had collapsed and was a pile of rubble. A rather extensive dormitory complex for student housing completed the Sindh University campus. Across the valley was the Liaquat Medical College, which was a single building with a classroom on one end and a “hospital” on the other. The hospital hallway was crowded with patients—all male, mostly nude, and covered only by a dirty sheet and flies. People here chewed betel nut, which makes their mouths and teeth a brilliant red. They spat it like one might spit chewing tobacco, and the unpainted, cement floor and walls were brilliant red. Returning home, I told LaRue that we must not get sick as there were no reasonable medical facilities here. LaRue actually became the medical consultant for our housing compound, dispensing medicine from our limited supply, bandaging wounds, and giving advice. She failed when a worker wanted her to pull his infected tooth.
“I would get up in the night and chase rats out of the bedroom.”
Our faculty housing compound consisted of ten houses in two rows of five facing one another with a strip of raw desert between, about a hundred yards wide. There was no attempt at landscaping either here or on the campus. There was only desert on all sides with one road leading out to the campus about a mile away and another to Hyderabad. Every morning a small bus stopped at the corner of the compound to pick up one servant from each household and others who needed a ride to Hyderabad. It returned in the afternoon. One day the bus failed to arrive, and I volunteered to drive. Twenty-four people got out of my VW van in Hyderabad. All shopping was in the Shahi Bazaar, which ran for nearly a mile through the heart of Hyderabad. It was a narrow asphalt walkway just wide enough for a small delivery truck. Open face shops on each side offered a variety of food, and open ditches on each side carried the sewage of one-half million people. The smell was awful, especially on warm days with no wind. Beggars and lepers without feet or hands begged for the hundredth part of a rupee.
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Ser as ther Our faculty Jamsh River, miles village We al for tw cool it The house toilet i We like m with a water butane We tempe the fo summ rose to for a fans c twice the ce escape out. W for an out fo which The and a enter. get up the be mongo lights comin but we I ta men, officia was en matter thinkin I spen integri were i unders (boy-g hard t ethics I an see if On th showe
Servants bought food for only one day as there was no refrigeration in the houses. Our house was reserved for visiting faculty and had the only refrigerator in Jamshoro. All water came from the Indus River, which flowed for over a thousand miles through India, with every city and village dumping its sewage into the river. We all boiled drinking water vigorously for twenty minutes, but only we could cool it in a refrigerator. There were no bathrooms in the houses, and we had the only sit-down toilet in Jamshoro. We bathed in a large, round laundry tub like my grandmother used to wash cloths with a scrub board, and Omar Din heated water for us in a teakettle on the twin butane burners in the kitchen. We had no heat in the winter, and temperatures sometimes descended into the forties. No air conditioning in the summer where temperatures commonly rose to 110°F and may have stayed there for a week or more. Slow moving ceiling fans circulated the air, and ceilings were twice the normal height, with windows at the ceiling level to allow hot air to rise and escape. There were no windows to look out. We expected the electricity to go off for an hour or more every day, and it was out for a week or more when it rained, which it did three times during our stay. There were no locks or any doors, and anyone or anything could freely enter. About once each week, I would get up in the night and chase rats out of the bedroom, and one night there was a mongoose on the bedroom floor when the lights went on. In the spring, snakes were coming into the houses for the summer, but we never saw any. I taught one class of about forty young men, mostly the sons of government officials or other wealthy folks. The course was entitled “Mineralogy,” but the subject matter was whatever the students were thinking about that day. I told LaRue that I spent more time talking about ethics and integrity than about minerals. The students were interested and listened intently. They understood honesty (don’t lie) and morality (boy-girl rules were strict), but they had a hard time seeing the subtle differences of ethics and integrity. I announced a quiz one day. I wanted to see if the students were learning anything. On the appointed day, only one student showed up for class. The education system
in Pakistan is a joke. The teacher who teaches the class gives no tests and assigns no grades. A government official appears at the end of the year and administers the same test given last year. He assigns a grade, which depends more on who your father is than on the results of the test. These are the young men that the Taliban train as leaders for terrorism. The students liked me and were always courteous and respectful to me; but the year after I left, a group of students went to the apartment of the department chairman, took all his furniture, clothing, and other belongings, piled them in the courtyard, and burned them. He moved to Canada where he lives today. He sent his sorrow and sympathy when LaRue died. I don’t know how he knew. Every two weeks a man set up a small table in the hallway of our building, and the faculty stepped forward to be paid. I was paid under the table as I got twice what anyone else got. I was paid in pads of a hundred rupee notes about one-fourth inch thick. LaRue and I carefully took out 10 percent and put it in a tiny drawer in an upright wardrobe in the corner of our bedroom. It had the only key in the house. Most days were rather dull. I taught my class in the morning and came home. For the first month, Lee and Lyle went to school in Hyderabad smashed among the sweaty bodies on the morning bus. The Saint Bonaventure’s School was operated by two Franciscan Dutch monks, who looked the part dressed in heavy robes with a rope around the middle and a hood. They were called on a mission and served for a lifetime. We had to withdraw the boys after a few weeks as they were always followed by a crowd of boys who just wanted to touch them. In the spring, we took the train north to Peshawar for a conference of Fulbright survivors. The Northwest Territories (now known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas) are the domain of the Pashtuns, who gave the British fits and have never been subject to a central government. They live as an extended family in a literal walled fortress and never leave it without a rifle on their back. They make guns in Kohat Pass south of the Khyber, all by hand without any form of power tools. We drove up the Khyber Pass, but the Afghans wouldn’t let us in, and we were warned to stay on the road, which was controlled by the Khyber Rifles.
Off the road the Petans could shoot us if they wanted. Only two years earlier, a man from Sindh in the south came to Peshawar and told the Petans about the graves of saints on the Sindh Desert. When a saint died, he was buried on the desert where travelers could stop to rest and meditate and add another rock to the grave mound. He was so convincing that the Petans killed him and buried him on a street corner where passersby could stop to rest and meditate. With a guide, LaRue and I drove north into the high Himalayas over some pretty unlikely roads. We spent a few days in the independent kingdom of Swat, where the surrounding mountains are all over twenty thousand feet, and we visited with Jim and Matti Lowery at their hardship post. Most months we made the drive to Karachi to overnight with the Ompses. We left Jamshoro about 8:00 a.m. and arrived at the Ompses’ in the early afternoon. After a fine dinner, we watched a 16 mm movie lying on the lawn at the American compound. LaRue and I slept in the kids’
LaRue wearing her green corduroy skirt and standing outside our front door in Jamshoro
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beds while all the kids slept on the living room floor. After breakfast, we held a joint sacrament meeting, and after an early Sunday dinner, we had to return to Hyderabad to get back before dark. Trucks on the road ran without lights. Drivers thought that saved the battery. The journey from Karachi to Hyderabad was only about 150 miles, but it took six hours on a one-lane road surfaced most of the way. It carried the north-south traffic for a nation of two hundred million, and most of the vehicles on the road were one-ton trucks that were greatly overloaded. When a truck approached, I got off the road and let it pass. If a truck got off on the shoulder, it frequently overturned and often burned, and we came to expect one or two new burned trucks every time we made the trip. In late April, we made our final trip to Karachi. Without conferring, both LaRue and I knew that we must take the tithing money. We had no idea why. We had never taken the money before, but this time we must take it. We packed the money pads into the large pockets in LaRue’s green corduroy skirt and left for Karachi. During the movie that evening, I developed a severe pain in my right side, which continued throughout the night.
After breakfast in the morning, we were preparing for our sacrament meeting when the phone rang. On the line was a young air force pilot Captain Guy Wilhelm. I don’t really know his complete story for that Sunday morning, but as I understood it, he was stationed in Vietnam and was flying over Karachi when he received an undeniable command to attend sacrament meeting. He landed, left his plane, and went in search of a sacrament meeting. He was inspired to contact the Japanese Embassy, which is normally closed on Sunday, but the ambassador was working that Sunday to catch up on some work, and he answered the phone. The ambassador just happened to be the nextdoor neighbor to Jim Omps and probably the only person in Pakistan that knew that Jim was a Mormon. Captain Wilhelm got the number and called. While Jim finished preparing the sacrament, I drove to the American compound and picked up Captain Wilhelm. That Sunday we had three priesthood bearers to bless and pass the sacrament. After dinner, it was time for us to return to Jamshoro, but the pain in my side was quite painful by now, and a short
A saint’s grave on the Sind Desert – 1963 Hyderabad in the background
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conference decided that I should not leave Karachi. In Jamshoro, I would be without medical help and six hours from Karachi. Jim knew of two American doctors associated with the Seventh-day Adventist hospital in Karachi. They were called on three-year service missions. Jim called the hospital. One doctor was out of the country, but the other was there that Sunday and would see me if Jim would drive me to the hospital. The doctor poked my side, took a blood test, and announced that I had a highly infected appendix, which must be removed immediately. He seemed quite serious when he said the appendix was ready to burst, and if it did, my life would be in serious danger. He was quite insistent to operate NOW. There was a problem. Pakistan law requires that a noncitizen must pay the full medical bill before he could receive treatment. The doctor was reluctant to violate the law as he could lose his license to practice in Pakistan and be sent home. The doctor manipulated a few figures and announced a very substantial payment of several thousand dollars. Jim said he could get the money but not before the banks opened on Monday morning. I of course knew where the money was. It was in the pockets on that green corduroy skirt, and the figure the doctor gave was within ten dollars of the amount in those pockets. While the doctor prepared me for an operation, Jim drove back across the city and returned with the tithing money, a vial of consecrated oil, and Captain Guy Wilhelm. For only a few hours during our entire stay in Pakistan were there two elders available to give a priesthood blessing. I never saw Captain Wilhelm again after he lifted his hands from my head. He appeared out of nowhere and disappeared the same way. The doctor wheeled me into the operating room, lifted me onto the operation table, had me curl up into a fetal position, and injected something into my spinal column. Above the table was a large round light with a central mirror about a foot and a half in diameter where I could see what was happening. I remember clearly that it had been broken and repaired with scotch tape. There was no nurse present or any help for the doctor, and although I was quite groggy, I handed instruments to the doctor as he asked for them. He couldn’t find the appendix, and
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I watc lay the the hi off, an had sa I sp Adven don’t e cassero some r Wh panic kidnap
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Photo c
“We packed the money pads into the large pockets in LaRue’s green corduroy skirt and left for Karachi.” I watched him remove my intestines and lay them out on my stomach. He found the highly infected appendix, snipped it off, and held it proudly for me to see. He had saved a life. I spent the next week in the Seventh-day Adventist hospital in Karachi. Those folks don’t eat meat, and I got very tired of spinach casserole. LaRue and Maxine smuggled in some real food, and I did quite well. When we didn’t return, there was panic in Jamshoro. Surely we had been kidnapped by the flourishing sex trade.
A beautiful blue-eyed blonde and three fair-haired children would bring top price. Omar Din got on a train and came to Karachi. He found me and returned to announce that classes would resume next week. Apparently the Fulbright Commission was notified when I registered at the hospital, and it sent a representative to visit with me and confirm that I was all right. He told me that the commission carried insurance on grantees, and I would be reimbursed for what I had spent. It
would be returned to me in American dollars at the official exchange rate of nine to one and deposited in the bank I designated in America. LaRue and I paid our tithing that year in full, in Provo and in our home ward as we always did. The Lord had provided a way, and I have often marveled at how much effort the Lord expended to get a few dollars of tithing money. Like the generic Mormon missionary, I can say it was the richest year of my life, but I wouldn’t want to do it again. We will always remember a sheer blouse, goat roast on Sunday, and a phantom fighter pilot. We learned to love the Muslim students, Mennonite missionaries, Franciscan monks that serve for a lifetime, Mormon friends, and a Seventh-day Adventist missionary—a whole spectrum of religious faiths that made up our story. I bear witness that there is God in heaven who knows me and loves me. Although I may hide in the furthest corner of the earth, he knows where I am and what I need. And for what I need, the Lord will provide a way.
AAPG Convention 2017 By Scott Ritter
Photo courtesy of Scott Ritter
The Annual Convention of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in Houston, Texas, (April 2–5) afforded the department an opportunity to present current research and to connect with geology alumni. Five students (Kaitlyn Smith, Chanse Rinderknecht, Evan Gunnell, Geoff Ritter, and Scott Meek) presented posters on their thesis work in the Illinois Basin, Paradox Basin, and southern Wyoming at various sessions, accompanied by faculty advisors Sam Hudson, Bill Keach, and Scott Ritter. The Alumni Board, led by Tom Chidsey, Bill Keach, and Parker Velora, hosted an alumni dinner at Pico’s Restaurant on Monday, April 3. Forty-seven former students and partners (representing graduating classes between 1976 and 2016) came out to meet old classmates, make new acquaintances, and share memories of their student exploits. Bill Keach and Scott Ritter informed the group of ongoing and upcoming activities within the Department of Geological Sciences. We sincerely appreciate the work of the Alumni Board in organizing this and other alumni gatherings. Please provide the department with current contact information and stay tuned for future alumni events.
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UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT PROFILE
GEOLOGY UNDERFOOT AND UNDER ROVER By Jessica Olsen
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annah Bonner’s research is both down to earth and out of this world—literally. Bonner, an undergraduate student, co-authored Landscapes of Utah’s Geologic Past (published May 2016) with her mentor, Dr. Tom Morris. Morris was searching for someone who had Photoshop and design experience to help with the project, and Bonner had worked as a graphic designer before. “I was there when he was talking to his graduates students about it, and I was like, ‘Wait, I can do that!’” Bonner said. “I worked on it over the weekend and showed him, and he hired me that next day.” Aided by her background in graphic design, Bonner helped him reconstruct the paleogeography of Utah with nine maps showing the topography of Utah over the last 310 million years. “These maps are so important because they simply and powerfully communicate complex geologic information in a format understandable and appreciable to even a non-scientific audience,” Bonner said. “Not only does our work educate but it also builds disciplinary communication tools.” She presented a poster on her paleogeographic reconstructions at the 2016 Geological Society of America Conference in Denver, Colorado. This opportunity gave her the chance to share her research and maps of Utah’s ancient landscapes with geologists from across the United States. She said the experience was “humbling and enabling.” Bonner was also selected as one of only four undergraduates in the United States for an internship in China studying landslides. The project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the University of Houston, is focused on assessing landslides near the Yangtze River and Three Gorges Dam. “There’s a lot of destabilization of soil in the Three Gorges area. Our work focuses on the nearby Huangtupo landslide site.
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Our research will use GPS and LiDAR technologies to map the landslide and then study correlation between landslide movement and the Three Gorges Reservoir water levels,” Bonner said. “Ultimately, we hope to develop an early warning system to be used to protect local communities.” But while Bonner diligently studies the earth beneath her, her focus is also skyward, with sights specifically set on the red planet. Bonner is the science team lead for BYU’s Mars rover project. She oversees the rover’s science cache activity. The team is designing a rover that can collect and store samples for later retrieval.
Photos courtesy of Hanna Bonner
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“Our research focuses on designing a rover able to navigate the surface of Mars, take detailed pictures, collect soil samples, run a series of tests, and thoroughly assess its environment for evidence of past or current life,” Bonner said. The team is building a physical prototype of the rover, and the team will take the rover to the University Rover Challenge in Hanksville, Utah, in June 2017. Universities from seven different countries will bring their rovers to the competition. The rovers will be ranked for their ability to perform a series of tests. Hanksville is the competition’s 2017 location because of its Martian-like terrain and Mars Desert Research Station. The BYU team recently took their rover out there to test its performance. Data from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, which is currently on the red planet, has
largely impacted the BYU team’s research. This data has helped determine the history of liquid water on the planet and the potential for microbial life. “We know that Mars had all the elements required to evolve life,” Bonner said. “Early in the planet’s history, it had a stronger atmosphere, moderated surface temperatures, and liquid water. Our rover’s mission is to determine if these conditions led to the evolution of microbial life. We’re searching for definitive evidence that life was present.” Bonner said BYU has done really well in this competition in the past. Thanks to a strong team of engineers and valuable mentoring from Dr. Eric Christiansen and Dr. Jani Radenbaugh of the Geology Department, Bonner is hopeful that her team will place well this year too.
Hanna Bonner GEOLOGICAL RECORD
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GRADUATE STUDENT PROFILE
GEOLOGICAL HISTORY: IT’S WRITTEN IN STONE MUDSTONE By Jessica Olsen
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ome people stop playing in the mud by age ten—not Alex Washburn. In August 2016, the geology graduate student found himself across the world steeped in mud, collecting samples. Of course, the specific mud Washburn works with is now stone, having hardened after millions of years; and finding the right samples takes diligently hammering into geochemically undisturbed rocks in the right interval of terrain. “It’s a dirty science,” Washburn said about geology. “Since we study things that are only in nature, and nature—by nature—is really complicated, dirty, and doesn’t behave the way you want it to.” For Washburn, it’s all about finding the right sample—a sample that he and his faculty advisor Sam Hudson hope will tell a snapshot of Azerbaijan’s geological history. Specifically, Washburn hopes to discover at what point millions of years ago the Paratethys Sea lost its connection to the ocean, resulting in the isolation of the South Caspian and Kura basins. “That’s a topic that is really highly debated about this area: when that closure happened,” Washburn said. Washburn hopes to resolve some of the debate about the age of the basins using emerging geochemical techniques on the samples. “It’s called rhenium-osmium geochronology,” Washburn said. “It’s a technique recently developed for organicrich mudstones, but it has never been done on mudstones as young or organically diverse as mine.” The technique looks at the amount of rhenium and osmium in the rock. The isotope rhenium-187 decays into osmium-187. Rhenium and osmium, which occur naturally in water, bind to organic matter. The team knows when, in a broad geologic timescale, the basins were isolated because of the appearance of thin, discreet intervals of organic-rich
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mudstone, which are related to basin closure. Performing rhenium-osmium geochronology on those organic-rich intervals of mudstone will reveal with much greater accuracy when the basins were isolated, according to Washburn. “When we see high total organic carbon in the mudstone, that means the basin was restricted. In rock that we don’t have as much organic carbon, that means it was open,” Washburn said. Water column stratification, a process that can result when a basin is closed off from seaways, determines how organically rich the mudstone is. Water column stratification occurs when differences in water density stop the water on the top from mixing with the water at the bottom of the sea. Because of this separation, the water at the top is allowed to replenish its dissolved oxygen, but the water on the bottom is not. Eventually, all dissolved oxygen at the bottom of the water column is consumed. When organisms living in the oxygenated
zone die and fall to the bottom of the sea, their organic matter is preserved because microorganisms at the bottom lack the oxygen needed to break down the organic matter to produce chemical energy. The organic matter, and the subsequent abundances of rhenium and osmium that bind to it, is buried and lithified, allowing Washburn and Hudson to dig it up and analyze it millions of years later. “We take the rock [sample] and crush it into powder. We dissolve it in this really powerful acid, and then we put that into an analyzer that can analyze rhenium and osmium up to parts per trillion, which are insanely small abundances,” Washburn said. The team also looks at the trace metals in the samples. The team took samples from several different locations and performed chemostratigraphic analysis, taking the abundances of redox-sensitive metals and providing data for future geologists. “Nature isn’t just like a beautiful layer cake,” Washburn said. “It’s got all kinds of crazy stuff going on, and so the more
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data y out w sampl Was both s the reg “Th forma indust genera The better the ba like th by the Wh analyz and si learnin “Sh kind o his da Lik rocks. them
data you have the better you can figure out what’s going on in between [each sample layer].” Washburn said the data he collects can both satiate many scientists’ curiosity about the region and help the petroleum industry. “The better we understand [the formation of the basin], the better the industry will be able to model hydrocarbon generation and migration,” Washburn said. The research also helps geologists better understand the events that lead to the basin closure and a variety of things— like the paleoclimate—that were affected by the closure. When Washburn isn’t off collecting and analyzing samples, he’s home with his wife and six-year-old stepdaughter, who’s just learning to ride a bike. “She loves learning about science, any kind of science,” Washburn said about his daughter. Like Washburn, she’ll collect her own rocks. Washburn will cut and polish them for her.
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FACULTY & STUDENT RESEARCH
POINT OF THE MOUNTAIN: UNSTABLE GROUND? By Maureen “Mo” Elinzano
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raverse Mountain, also known as Point of the Mountain, marks the border between the Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley. Many buildings and houses stand on this well-known piece of Utah geology. But what if Traverse Mountain was actually a giant terrestrial landslide block— not an ordinary mountain? That’s the question Dr. Jeff Keith, who teaches in the Department of Geological Sciences at BYU, and his graduate student Collin Jensen want to answer. If Keith and Jensen prove this theory to be correct, Keith thinks
the Point of the Mountain might be one of the larger terrestrial landslides in the world. “It’s most significant in terms of the amount of very expensive real estate built on it,” Keith said. “People typically don’t want to build on unstable ground.” Jensen became involved with this project after taking it over from his friend who had graduated from BYU. Jensen realized that that there was some good evidence supporting the giant landslide theory, and that convinced him to join the project. Part of the project is incorporated into Jensen’s thesis.
“It started out as just a few observations— for one, it just looks like a landslide if you look at an overhead map or a satellite photo of the area,” Jensen said. “The biggest thing that we’re looking at are these things called pebble dikes. They seem to be sourced from some long distance away, and we’re like, ‘How could that rock have gotten all of the way over here from its source seventeen kilometers away?’” The pebble dikes have chunks of igneous rock in them (Figure 1), and Keith and Jensen think the igneous rock was originally part of Little Cottonwood
Figure 1: Mineralized clasts of Little Cottonwood stock in a pebble dike in the Traverse Mountains.
Figure 2: Former BYU geology student Cameron Harrison stands on a 70 cm wide pebble dike present near the top of the Snowbird tram up Little Cottonwood Canyon (see the rounded pebbles and cobbles beneath his feet). The molybdenite (Mo)-mineralized White Pine Intrusion is on the near-skyline between Cameron’s legs. The theory suggests that after the molybdenum mineralization occurred and the pebble dike intruded to the surface, the entire lid to the intrusion slid catastrophically 17 km downhill to form the Traverse Mountains.
Figure 3: These students (left to right: Spencer Bur, Collin Jensen, Bret Young, and Ryan Chadburn) are standing in front of the mineralized outcrop in Little Cottonwood Canyon that most closely matches the pebble dike shown in the previous photo. They are also just a few hundred meters from a historic Mo-bearing adit, but 17 km away from where the pebble dikes occur in the Traverse Mountains.
Photos courtesy of Jeff Keith 19
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Stock, which is seventeen kilometers away from Traverse Mountain’s present location (Figure 2). But the theory is still under investigation. The process of gathering evidence includes a lot of fieldwork, including hiking around Traverse Mountain and gathering samples of rocks (Figure 3) from what is called the White Pine Intrusion in the Little Cottonwood Stock. Other collaborators include people from our department, from the Utah Geological Survey, and from private industries. After Keith and Jensen go out in the mountains and do fieldwork, the duo have
several undergraduates in the lab back at the Eyring Science Center analyze the pebble dikes. The undergraduates search for chunks of igneous rocks in the pebble dikes and use various lab techniques to separate the different minerals in the rocks. Given the implications of the giant landslide theory, Keith and Jensen expected to have their fair share of doubters and critics in the geology community. “You know how [President] Lincoln chose his cabinet to be his enemies?” Keith said. “We’ve chosen the members of the committee to be broad enough that we can get various aspects and
various disciplines represented by each of them. They’ve each seen the strength of the argument, and none of them are saying this is crazy—they’re saying this has potential.” If their theory is correct, they want to learn more about it so that they can serve the public by advising citizens where a similar landslide may happen again. “If this is a major geological hazard, we want to make sure that this does not become a destructive geological hazard and that we can reduce the impact of that hazard,” Jensen said. “We can help people; if there is this hazard, we can help people before the negative consequences come.”
Cut and polished sample of pebble dike reveals fragments of all the formations cut by the dike en route to the surface as well as the types of hydrothermal alteration experienced by the intrusion. In this sample, quartz-sericite-pyrite alteration is evident along two intersecting veins.
right: g, and of the nwood pebble ey are istoric from averse
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FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
PALEONTOLOGY: ‘IT’S LIKE CHRISTMAS EVERYDAY’ By James Collard
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ourteen-year-old Brooks Britt and his cousin—armed with paleontology books and canteens full of water— decided to mount their own expedition to dig for dinosaurs. “My aunt drove my cousin and I to Vernal, dropped us off with some relatives we didn’t know, and we rode our bikes out into the desert,” Dr. Britt said. “On the first day, we found dinosaurs.” Ever since his summers spent in eastern Utah digging for dinosaurs, Britt has been fascinated with our prehistoric friends. Now, as a paleontology professor at BYU, Britt works hard to share his love of the earth’s history with a new generation of scientists. However, Britt recognizes that geology isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. At the beginning of each semester in his Geology 100 course, he asks members of his class to raise their hands if they only took the course because they thought it would be easy. “They all raise their hands. They’re all honest with me. I go, ‘That’s fine. I know you hate science. I’m here to show you that science is fun and get you excited about it,’” Britt said. “Most everyone has had some interest somewhere in their life about dinosaurs.” The purpose of Britt’s class is to help explain the science behind dinosaurs—the
Photos by Jaren Wilkey/BYU
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scienc five-ye “Ba anima hundr Brit a plet career the lo the ar Accor discov “Y until y Un scienti are mo once there to be a “W demis How w on? W they b Brit these collea expos hidden “It’
Brooks Britt with his recently named sauropod dinosaur, Moabosaurus utahensis, at the BYU Museum of Paleontology.
science that has fueled the imaginations of five-year-olds across the world. “Basically, you’re doing genealogy with animals that have been gone for up to hundreds of millions of years,” Britt said. Britt has discovered and researched a plethora of dinosaurs throughout his career. He recently discovered and named the long-necked Moabosaurus utahensis after the area in Utah where it was discovered. According to Britt, the process of discovery is surprisingly simple at first. “You’re just digging blind in the rock until you start seeing patterns,” Britt said. Understanding these patterns helps scientists identify which rocks and areas are most likely to contain fossils. However, once the bones have been discovered, there are many more questions that need to be answered. “What caused their death? After their demise, what happened to their bones? How were they buried? Were they chewed on? Were they eaten by insects? Why are they broken?” Britt said. Britt loves digging into the heart of these questions with his students and colleagues. His students work in the lab to expose the fossils—usually small ones— hidden in rock. “It’s like Christmas every day. You walk
On the “ first day, we found dinosaurs.”
into the lab and students have got some new bones out of these big sandstone blocks,” Britt said. “And then you work on describing those with your colleagues and figure out the relationship to these animals to other animals that have been previously discovered. It’s just fun. It’s a blast.” According to Britt, it shouldn’t be hard to convince students to study geology. It should feel natural. “Some people pray about what they should major in. I always tell these guys... ‘If you’re worrying and fretting about it this much, maybe you shouldn’t be a geologist.’ Because to me, it’s just so selfevident,” Britt said. “That’s why we try to get them fired up in class. They start realize that ‘Wait, the earth has a history and life has a history. I can be a part of discovering earth’s and life’s history.’” And once their interest is piqued, there’s one sure way for Britt to truly help them develop a love for paleontology. For Britt and his students, it’s hands-on research that works the best. “The simplest thing you do is get students involved in a research project,” Britt said. “Once they get a little interested and they show you they’re interested, you bring them into the lab and turn them loose on a new project. It really gets them fired up.”
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FIELD TRIP
FROM MODERN TO ANCIENT By Sam Hudson
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uring the Fall of 2016, as part of the Petroleum Systems class (Geology 525), Dr. Hudson travelled with nine students to the Texas Gulf Coast to see for themselves the depositional environments they’d spent the semester studying in the classroom. From rivers to estuaries to shorelines and beyond, coastal settings are responsible for many of the conventional reservoirs from which we produce oil and gas. Seeing these environments first-hand gives students the opportunity to better grasp the scale and complexity of the architectural elements at the surface. While this was a “trip to the beach,” students worked for their knowledge by digging trenches everywhere they went. At each field stop students (and instructors) got to work digging trenches to see the sedimentary structures
being deposited and preserved in each environment. From sandy point bars to muddy bays, students worked to uncover what lay beneath the surface, breaking several shovels along the way. Important reservoir analogues studied included fluvial point bars, which by themselves are not large accumulations of sand but which often stack up in the subsurface to create bigger reservoirs. Geomorphology and spatial/temporal evolution of rivers was discussed as the class saw evidence of recent flooding, as well as cutoff channels and oxbow lakes. The size of the active floodplain was contrasted with the size of the active channel, and comparisons to other modern systems, such as the nearby Mississippi River, were made. Shoreface systems were a major focus of the trip, with multiple stops
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n each bars to ncover reaking
(and trenches) along the Texas Gulf Coast. At the bay head delta for the Trinity River, dry sandy trenches gave way to ankle-deep mud and discussions of invertebrate communities and their relationship to salinity variability. Distributary channels and mixing of water bodies as the delta evolves were shown to affect biological ecosystems, and the class discussed how the fossil record can show the evolution of the delta both spatially and through time. Nearly half of the trip was spent along the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico, looking at environments ranging from shoreface sands to backshore dunes to tidal channels and tidal deltas.
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Discussions focused on determining the evolution of the shoreline through recent time, with trenches illuminating important changes that have happened just in the recent history of the Gulf Coast. Relationships between bedforms and processes was a major focus of the trip, and groups took turns presenting what they had uncovered at different parts of the system to the group. Studying the recent geologic record preserved within the sediment of the Gulf Coast while being able to turn around and look at the analogous modern environment is invaluable to picturing the process that led to the weathering, transport, and deposition of the sediment around which the discussions centered. Aside from field learning, this was also a good introduction to applied research. The trip was modeled after a trip that Dr. Hudson used to help teach for new hires when he worked at ConocoPhillips and was co-led by Dr. Hudson’s former colleague who’s still working at this major energy company. Discussions not only focused on the processes at work in each environment but also focused on how the details of what they were seeing apply to oil and gas exploration. The way in which a reservoir performs deep in the subsurface is often affected dramatically by fine-scale details within the sedimentary rocks, and seeing these details in the modern coastal environment builds knowledge students and professionals can apply to similar systems deposited long ago.
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QUEY HEBREW LECTURE
FROM CHARIOT TO PRIUS:
SOCIETY’S DEVELOPING USE OF RESOURCES By James Collard
F
or a thousand years, Hittite chariots rolled through the Middle East, injecting the empire’s influence into what is now present-day Turkey and Syria. The Hittite Empire’s success can be largely attributed to one thing...metal resources. Dr. Adam Simon, a geology professor at the University of Michigan, shared the past and present importance of resources to attendees of BYU’s Quey Hebrew Memorial Lecture. “When the Hittites developed the ability to make bronze, they effectively ruled that part of the Middle East for the next thousand years,” Simon said. “It put the Hittite Empire on the map.” According to Simon, metals of antiquity didn’t just put the Hittite Empire on the map; they are the reason we have maps. “If you look at a map of the evolution of society and the x’s, or dots, on a map, what puts those dots on a map are resources,” Simon said. Bronze is combination of tin and copper, an alloy stronger than what the nearby armies of the Hittites possessed. But the abundance of copper and scarcity of tin in the Middle East, forced the Hittites to expand their trading routes so that they could keep up their supply of bronze. And as the Hittites and other civilizations increased their knowledge and application of metal elements, their view of the world expanded. “Currently, fifty thousand container ships traverse the world’s oceans. Products made in China that contain resources from South America, Africa, Asia, Utah, and Arizona all get put on ships and transported around the world,” Simon said. “It’s amazing what humans have done in a relatively short amount of time considering that two hundred years ago nobody flipped a switch.” The impact of resources cannot be underestimated. After showing the audience images of things he and his family regularly do—e.g., listen to classical
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music, heat and cool their home, travel on airplanes, check their smart phones— Simon asked a question. “But the connection is what?” Simon said. “Fundamentally, they are all resources. Embedded in those products is everything up here on this wall,” he said while pointing to a large periodic table. The amount of elements humans use today is almost unbelievable. Take copper, for example. “We have increased copper production over the last sixty years by more than 300 percent,” Simon said. “Why? Because, following the industrial revolution, we figured out that copper is this amazingly malleable metal that we can use to send electricity over hundreds of thousands of miles and power civilizations.” And copper is not the only useful metal. “We’ve figured out ways to use tin that the Hittites and Greeks could never have imagined. We [can] take tin and combine it with indium to make a tin indium alloy.” This alloy is embedded below the screens of smartphones to physically sense the electrical conduction of fingerprints, enabling the touch-screen function of the phone. “If you think about that—going from tin plus copper to make bronze, to tin plus indium to use a smartphone—it’s amazing,” Simon said. With the increased consumption of resources that humans use to make Priuses, drones, Nike shoes, and iPads, one would understandably worry whether we have enough resources to maintain our consumerist lifestyles. According to Simon, if the world, for some reason, decided to stop exploring copper right now, copper reserves would run out in thirty-five years. However, the mining community and geologists show no signs of stopping. “I want to let you know now that’s not the case,” Simon said. “Geologists . . . are really good at making sure those [reserve] values remain relatively consistent even
as we increase the amount of copper and other resources that we consume.” One hundred or even fifty years ago, many resources were mined close to the ground. But now geologists need to dig deeper and deeper to find new deposits. “Those deposits are like needles in a haystack,” Simon said. He and his colleagues have devoted much of their research to understanding how valuable metals and minerals become embedded in rock. “So in order to find new deposits, what do you do?” Simon asked. “You interrogate the deposits we know to try and decipher how those deposits formed.” Simon’s “interrogation” of deposits reveals important information about nature’s ability to produce large volumes of copper, gold, silver and other minerals. Producing these types of materials in areas like the Bingham Canyon Mine in Salt Lake County requires the entrapment of magma beneath the earth’s crust “In magmatic systems with porphyry ore deposits like Bingham, there is effectively a sweet spot with respect to the partial pressure of oxygen at controlling the ability for sulfur and copper and gold to be transferred from the melt into the gas phase,” Simon said. Although society’s consumption of resources continues to increase, the geologic community’s technology and knowledge of obtaining those resources increases with it. The process of discovery and gathering will continue.
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ROCK BOX GEOLOGY IN THE NEWS
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here is a new second branch of the rift in the Larsen C ice shelf in West Antarctica. The main rift is currently 180 kilometers long. The new rift, which is moving in the direction of the ice front, is 15 kilometers long. In the past couple months, the rift has remained static but was previously widening by up to 1 meter/day. Currently there are only 20 kilometers of ice holding the rifted portion of the shelf together. When it separates, it will become one of the largest icebergs ever recorded—approximately one quarter the size of Wales. The ice shelf is approximately 350 meters thick and holds back the flow of glaciers that feed it. Professor Adrian Luckman of Swansea University stated, “When it calves, the Larsen C Ice Shelf will lose more than 10 percent of its area to leave the ice front at its most retreated position ever recorded; this event will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula.” Source: sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170502095105.htm
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ind generators accounted for 8 percent of the operating electric generating capacity in the United States in 2016— more than any other renewable technology, including hydroelectricity. Wind turbines have contributed more than onethird of the nearly 200 gigawatts (GW) of utility-scale electricity generating capacity added since 2007. The increase in wind development in the United States over the past decade reflects a combination of improved wind turbine technology, increased access to transmission capacity, state-level renewable portfolio standards, and federal production tax credits and grants. More than half of U.S. wind capacity is located in five states: Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, California, and Kansas. In three states—Iowa,
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Kansas, and Oklahoma—wind makes up at least 25 percent of instate utility-scale generating capacity. Several states with the highest wind capacity are located in the Midwest, a region with favorable wind resources. As of December 2016, nine U.S. states had no operational utility-scale wind facilities: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia. This article is part of an ongoing series of Today in Energy articles examining the fleet of utility-scale power plants in the United States. Previous articles have examined hydroelectric, coal, natural gas, and nuclear generators. Principal contributor: Tosha Beckford
Giving to the Department of Geological Sciences
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Aerial view of the Larsen C ice rift in Antarctica Photo Credit: John Sonntag/NASA
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Brigham Young University Department of Geological Sciences S-389 Eyring Science Center Provo, UT 84602
UPCOMING EVENTS JUNE 10-20 2017 SEPT. 2 2017 OCT. 3-7 2017 MARCH 2018
Global Field Trip
Italy-Switzerland–Austria
BYU vs. LSU Football Game Houston, Texas Backyard BBQ
Homecoming
Alumni Field Trip Dinner
Quey Hebrew Lecture
For other Homecoming activities go to homecoming.byu.edu/schedule.cfm
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GEOLOGICAL RECORD
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The orange fence marks the Saints and Sinners Quarry in the Nugget Sandstone—the focus of this year’s alumni field trip, October 7, 2017. The truck is on the Highway to Hell, the shortest route to the quarry.
SPRING 2017
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