EARTH AND CLIMATE SCIENCES
at Middlebury College ISSUE 1, FALL 2024
What’s Inside . . .
Letter from Chair
Will Amidon
ECSC Faculty
Pete Ryan
Cam de Wet
Allison Jacobel
Sean Peters
Dave West
Jeff Munroe
Will Amidon
ECSC T-Shirt Designs
LETTER FROM CHAIR WILL AMIDON
Hello Alumni!
After nearly 15 years teaching at Middlebury College, the greatest part of this job is the family of former students who have now become contacts, colleagues, and friends spread across the world. We are so proud of what you all are accomplishing and we are eager to stay in touch and strengthen the Middlebury network. To that end, we are reviving our annual(?) newsletter to keep you all up to date on departmental happenings. We would also love to hear from you! If you would like to share your current happenings and contact information, please fill out this 2-minute contact form. Our goal is to reconnect with alumni, strengthen the network, and help foster connections between current students and alumni. Regardless, please read on for updates and photos from each of our current faculty members.
The last five years have seen a lot of changes in the department. Ray Coish retired in 2016 followed by Pat and Tom Manley in 2020. They still stop through occasionally to say hi. The department has since added two new tenuretrack faculty members, Allison Jacobel and Lizz Ultee. Allison is a paleo-oceanographer focusing on carbon storage in the deep ocean. Lizz is a glacier modeler focusing on ice sheet projections and water resources. Lizz departed this fall for the NASA sea-level team and we wish her well. We have also been blessed by two fantastic visiting assistant professors. Sean Peters is a planetary volcanologist who has been teaching a volcanology class and hosting exciting speakers from the planetary science realm.
Cameron de Wet is a paleoclimatologist focused on using speleothems to test climate model simulations, and has been teaching a new course called Hydroclimate and Wildfire.
Our department is also growing, more than doubling in size from ~10 up to ~23 majors per year!! This has kept us on our toes as we navigate overenrolled classes and high demand for student research experiences. We attribute this growth in part to our recent name change from ‘Geology’ to ‘Earth and Climate Sciences,’ which better captures the breadth of what we offer and attracts majors who are interested in a broader area of environment-related topics. Some growth has also come from a new joint major with biology. Finally, we have been having a lot of FUN! For example, we now offer a semiannual off-campus J-term course, which has visited Costa Rica and Mammoth Caves. We are incredibly grateful for the alumni support that makes this trip possible! We have also been hosting an annual t-shirt contest, check out the recent designs below.
In closing, we are grateful to all of you and miss you dearly. We would love to get an update from you via this 2-minute Contact Form, so that we can stay in better touch and strengthen ties across the generations of Middlebury Geology and ECSC alums.
Wishing you all the best, Will
RECENT ECSC T-SHIRT DESIGNS
PETE RYAN
Highlights of the past couple of years emerging from the pandemic include field experiences with students, alums and colleagues in Costa Rica and Puerto Rico and the opportunity to teach the first iteration of ECSC 0705 (Collaborative Capstone Research Seminar). I also was a Posse mentor for four years, one of the truly deep and meaningful experiences of my time in academia. As restrictions began to diminish in the summer of 2022, two students and I joined a USGS colleague for a week of fieldwork sampling landslide-prone soils in Puerto Rico. That trip was supported by the Malcolm E. McCallum ’56 Fund for Geology Field Work and Research, and it led to a lab group of six sophomore and junior majors that collected and analyzed mineralogical, chemical, and geophysical data—and made figures and wrote sections—for a manuscript that was just published by Geoderma. ECSC 0705 in spring 2024 featured two groups of six students working on groundwater quality, one PFAS in Vermont and the other arsenic in Costa Rica. Both are now awaiting peer reviews of manuscripts submitted to Environmental Science and Technology (PFAS) and Applied Geochemistry (arsenic). The potential of applying powdered basalt to farm fields as a carbon dioxide reduction strategy has grabbed my attention, so over the past couple of years students and I have carried out a series of experimental weathering trials designed to determine weathering rates of basalts of different composition/tectonic origin in tropical environments; results to date have been published in two articles (Science of the Total Environment, Applied Geochemistry). A major highlight was the J-term 2024 field course “Geohazards of Central America” (ECSC 1055), which featured a 12-day trip to Costa Rica. The course featured a superb group of 17 Earth and Climate Sciences majors, was co-taught by UC Davis PhD student Kira Waldman (Midd ’20), was augmented by the knowledge and buenas ondas of Guillermo Alvarado, and was possible by alumni generosity.
ECSC 0705, Summit of Irazú Volcano, J-term 2024
2023 winner designed by Elise Chan and Molly Arndt,
2024 runner-up designed by Lucy pollitt,
2024 winner designed by Theo McDonough
CAM DE WET
I am a new visiting assistant professor in the department for academic years 2024–25 and 2025–26. Before coming to Middlebury, I did my PhD at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tnnessee, in 2023 and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Davis. Prior to graduate school, I studied earth and oceanographic science at Bowdoin College in Maine, so it is great to be back in the northeast.
I am a climate scientist and geochemist. I use both geochemical proxy data from cave carbonates (e.g. stalagmites) and output from climate model simulations to better understand past climate variability, with an eye toward how the climate system will continue to change in the future. To do this, I spend a lot of time crawling around in caves looking for samples and collecting data. Specifically, I am interested in how rainfall and temperature patterns in water-sensitive regions like California have varied over recent millennia. Recently, I have become fascinated in wildfire patterns and how they have changed through time in response to climate shifts. Here at Middlebury, I am working with students from the Computer Science and Earth and Climate Science departments to investigate wildfire patterns in North American over the last ~20,000 years. We are aggregating published lake sediment records of wildfire occurrence and comparing them with output from climate models that simulate how the climate system has evolved since the Last Glacial Maximum. Our goal is to provide some longer-term paleoclimate context for the intense and widespread wildfires of recent decades.
As for teaching, this semester I am offering a brand-new course called Hydroclimate and Wildfire. In this class, my students and I are exploring the large changes in rainfall patterns that have occurred across North America in response to the growth and shrinking of ice sheets, and what these changes have meant for the role of fire on the landscape. We are reading a wide variety of resources, including scientific papers, long-form journalism, and indigenous accounts of wildfire patterns, and are working with real paleoclimate proxy data to explore these topics. We’ll spend the latter half of the semester discussing droughts and wildfires of the western US today in the context of past variability. In the spring I am excited to have ECS majors work with data from climate model simulations in Python in Climate Dynamics (ECSC 0202) and to introduce first year students to Earth system science in How to Build a Habitable Planet (ECSC 0120).
The Pisa Room in Titan Cave, Woming (left), and a crawl in White Moon Cave, California (right). I am working on developing new records of past climate changes using stalagmites from both of these caves.
ALLISON JACOBEL
I arrived at Middlebury in 2020, by way of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory where I earned my PhD, and Brown University where I was a Voss Postdoctoral Fellow. I’m a paleoclimatologist and isotope geochemist who uses marine sediments to reveal the history of climate change and study its driving mechanisms. In the last few years, I’ve been setting up a sediment processing and trace metal clean research lab at Midd. We call the space the Facility for Oceanographic Research @ Middlebury (the FOR@M) after the tiny microfossils we use in our work and we invite you to read more about the students who are working in the lab, our facility, and our projects. Since arriving at Middlebury, I’ve also designed and developed five new courses including Earth’s Oceans and Coastlines, How to Build a Habitable Planet, Earth’s Climate History, Sedimentary Processes and Environments, and the Senior Research Seminar.
The FOR@M’s research is currently focused on two important ocean regions with implications for the global distribution of heat and carbon, and our collective climate future. In the equatorial Pacific Ocean we are studying the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and changes in deep ocean carbon storage. This work is currently supported by two Middlebury-lead NSF grants, and we recently published some of our results in the journal Nature. Our second region of focus is the high latitude North Atlantic where we are working on the history of abrupt climate change and what it can tell us about the consequences of modern ice melt. In summer of 2023, Ashely Rodriguez ’25 and I spent a month on the RV Celtic Explorer retrieving sediment cores from around the Greenland margin to study past and present changes in ocean circulation. For more about our time at sea please check out our blog , or the highlight in the most recent Middlebury alumni magazine. During the ’24–25 academic year I’m on sabbatical at CU Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.
SEAN PETERS
I arrived at Middlebury in spring 2023. I am a volcanologist and planetary geologist, focused on how volcanoes form, evolve, and shape the surface evolution of planets. I earned a BS in psychology and geosciences from Mississippi State University, and an MS and PhD from Arizona State University. Prior to Middlebury, I served as postdoctoral fellow at the University of Idaho and an assistant language teacher in Himeji, Hyogo, Japan. Highlights from the past year include teaching Natural Hazards (ECSC 111) and developing and teaching Physical Volcanology (ECSC 375), establishing the Planetary Research Group, and performing lava analog experiments with a student research assistant. ECSC 375 covers a variety of topics related to volcano formation, evolution, and the contribution of volcanoes to society and climate. The students complete quantitative exercises that illustrate volcanic processes from the interior to the surface and craft miniresearch projects which they present as either proposals or preliminary work. In fall 2023, I established the Planetary Research Group which is tasked with investigating physical processes that modify the surfaces of planets, which at present, has been primarily through the lens of volcanism. I traveled with a student (Kijani Derenoncourt) to Syracuse University to perform lava analog experiments. Together with a team from the University of Idaho and the California Institute of Technology, we produced lab-made basalt. We poured the mixture into blobs and measured the cooling rate via thermal IR cameras and inserted thermistors. That trip was supported by the Malcolm E. McCallum ’56 Fund for Geology Field Work and Research.
In spring 2024, a team of collaborators and myself were awarded a three-year grant via NASA’s Mars Data Analysis Program, which will determine the relative contribution of explosive volcanic deposits to the Martian geologic record with significant implications for Martian paleoclimate. This award includes two summers of funding for an undergraduate student. In summer 2024, I hired three summer research assistants on planetary volcanology projects. Two of those students intend to present novel research at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in December 2024 and the Lunar Planetary Science Conference in March 2025. Currently, I am developing Geology of Rocky Planets—a course that will expose students to a variety of geologic and atmospheric processes affecting the surfaces of the terrestrial planets.
DAVE WEST
I continue to devote much of my research energy towards unraveling the ancient tectonic evolution of the northern Appalachians, with a particular emphasis on the record preserved in Maine. This exploration continues to be rooted in field-based studies and this summer marked my 23rd straight year of 1:24,000 scale bedrock mapping for the Maine Geological Survey. Recent student thesis projects associated with this work have focused on meta-volcanic rocks in Casco Bay (Sophie Johnson ’22), meta-plutonic rocks (Max Hanscom ’23), Cretaceous alkalic magmatism (Erin Hansbrough ’24), and bedrock mapping in Muscongus Bay (Eliza Tod ’25). I remain heavily involved with the Geological Society of America and this has included a 12-year run as secretary-treasurer of the Northeastern Section, the co-organization of the Structural Geology and Tectonics Forum at Bowdoin College with colleague Emily Peterman (Midd Geo ’04) in 2022, and the organization of the 2024 NEGSA meeting in Manchester, N.H.
In the fall of 2022, I began teaching the Bedrock Geology of Vermont course (a.k.a. “Bedrock”)—a class that has a rich 50-year history in the department. While the basic elements of the class have been retained (field-based, technical writing), the content has been expanded to include aspects of the more recent glacial history and the course has been renamed the Geologic Evolution of Vermont (a.k.a. “Geo Evo”). We still visit many of the classic field sites you all know and love (e.g., Redstone Quarry, West Castleton syncline, Brandon Gap, Champlain thrust at Lone Rock Point), but new stops that illustrate glacial erosion and deposition have been added. The rising number of department majors has increased demand for the class such that two lab sections are now offered. Current enrollment this fall stands at 31, and over the past three years a total of 78 students have taken the class. Rest assured, whether you took the class from Brew Baldwin, Ray Coish, Pat Manley, or Kristina Walowski, today’s students are learning the same skills, and having just as much fun!
Half of this year’s Geologic Evolution of Vermont class at the West Castleton syncline in the Taconic belt of southwestern Vermont. Note the beautiful graded beds and axial planar cleavage!
JEFF MUNROE
In the spring of 2020, in the midst of pandemic lockdown, I learned that NSF decided to fund an ambitious five-year project that I would lead focused on the role of mineral dust in functioning of the Critical Zone—the “thin skin” of the earth where geology, hydrology, ecology, and society intersect. The project, which became known as DUST^2 , had an initial roster of six principal investigators at 5 schools, a dozen senior scientists, and numerous post-docs and graduate students—now in its fifth year, the project has grown even larger. In addition to running DUST^2, I was also responsible for a major expansion of my long-running network of mountain dust samplers in the Rocky Mountains. To provide the space for me to accomplish all this, the grant included a fall semester teaching release, and salary support to cover my replacement each year. Running a project this large and complex has been a challenging and rewarding experience, and I and my students who have participated in DUST^2 have learned a huge amount from my colleagues and their research groups. Updates about the project are posted regularly on Mastodon, videos presenting the work of the larger Critical Zone Collaborative Network (of which DUST^2 is a part) are posted on YouTube. And just recently, I finished the multi-week loop to visit all the dust collectors (of which there are now 20 spanning Utah, Nevada, and southern Idaho) —videos presenting that work are also available on YouTube
My regular semester teaching over the past few years has included “Environmental Geology,” my first-year seminar “Mountains of the Northeast,” and a new upper-level seminar “Past, Present, and Future of the Mountain Critical Zone.” In 2020 and 2022, I was also joined by a visiting colleague from Austria to teach a fantastic new J-Term course on “Karst and Cave Geology” complete with a week-long trip to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. Huge thanks to the alumni whose generous donations have supported these trips.
I returned to Austria for my sabbatical during the 2023-24 academic year, my second time spending a year there. I had a guest professorship in the Institute for Geology at the University of Innsbruck where I was active with the Quaternary Research Group, co-advised students, analyzed cave samples collected as part of my work in Utah, was a co-organizer of the 2024 International Workshop on Ice Caves, and taught an upper level course on the “Geology of North America.” After two sabbatical years and numerous shorter visits, Innsbruck feels like a second home, and it was wonderful to be back with friends and colleagues there again.
2020 Mammoth Cave trip
Emptying a dust collector with Elsa Soderstrom ‘22 on a snowy October day in Utah
Visiting the Scărişoara Ice Cave in Romania
WILL AMIDON
It has been a fun couple of years of teaching and research! On the teaching front I have been offering Environmental Geology (0112), Active Tectonics and Earthquake Hazards (formerly known as plate tectonics), and Remote Sensing in Environmental Science. The students still love the Environmental Geology field Trips and a new(ish) lab that has us analyzing REE’s in mine tailings. In Remote Sensing we are just headed into final project ‘season and the students have come up with a lot of interesting and fun projects, including study of lake temperatures, sediment plumes, algal blooms, and snow cover/snowpack. My research has mostly been focused on U-Pb dating of calcite and dolomite. I received a PRF grant to explore the feasibility of U-Pb dating of dolostone, including development of a new reference material for U-Pb dating by LAICPMS. We have been testing this method by dating a sequence of Late Proterozoic sedimentary rocks in the Kingston Peak Range of southern California. These rocks are of particular interest because they contain glacial tills deposited during ancient ‘Snowball Earth’ events. We have recently revived the OSL lab and are working on dating sediments from the Clarksville Cave in New York, that likely record an ancient deglaciation of unknown age. Overall the students are enthusiastic, we are having fun,and making slow but steady progress!
The students and Pippa enjoying lunch in the California desert!
Calder collecting an OSL sample from Clarksville Cave