ScotBlogs

I was privileged today to visit Brown’s Lake Bog, a Nature Conservancy preserve, with Greg Wiles, Nick Wiesenberg, and Kim Carter (Chemistry ’16). Greg and Nick have been here many times with students and colleagues, including some epic sessions of … Continue reading →

Well, folks, this is it: my final blog post. I didn’t exactly keep up with this blog as much as I intended to this year…or at all…which is pretty par for the course, honestly. But I still thought I would … Continue reading →

The fossil above was found by Luke Kosowatz (’17) on our Sedimentology & Stratigraphy class field trip last month. We were measuring and sampling the Brassfield Formation (Early Silurian, Llandovery) near Fairborn, Ohio, and Luke pulled this beauty out of … Continue reading →

On Thursday evening, April 23, the Alumni Board convened its spring meeting with an informal reception, welcome, and brief review of the schedule. Following dinner, Mary Neagoy ’83, chair of the Presidential Search Committee and Tom Courtice, search consultant from … Continue reading →

Last week, SpaceX conducted a successful pad abort test of its innovative Crew Dragon spacecraft. The hypergolic (= ignite on contact) MMH + NTO Super Draco engines accelerated Dragon from 0 to 100 mph in 1.2 seconds — that’s faster than … Continue reading →

This week’s fossil is again in honor of Annette Hilton (’17), now retired as my Sophomore Research Assistant this year. She has been assessing with great skill a large and diverse collection of scleractinian corals from the Matmor Formation in … Continue reading →

As a kid, I poured over diagrams in Popular Science magazine describing possible Grand Tours of the outer solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto) made possible by a rare alignment of the planets. Unfortunately, budget cuts reduced the Grand … Continue reading →

My retiring Sophomore Research student, Annette Hilton (’17), is excellent at making acetate peels. These peels, like the one above she made from a mysterious Callovian (Middle Jurassic) coral, show fine internal details of calcareous fossils and rocks. This is … Continue reading →

Another exquisite little coral this week from the collection of Matmor Formation (Middle Jurassic, southern Israel) corals Annette Hilton (’17) and I are working through. We believe this is Epistreptophyllum Milaschewitsch, 1876. It is a solitary (although more on that … Continue reading →

Our introductory courses don’t have labs, but that doesn’t stop our students from having hands-on experiences. Today, students in the Geology of Natural Hazards investigated the relationship between impact craters and projectile properties (size, mass, velocity) by experimenting with a tray of … Continue reading →