I had a good time working on the Ordovician this year. Norlene Emerson, PhD candidate with Toni Simo, is studying the brachiopod distribution in the Decorah-Galena interval, and relating it to the sequence stratigraphy and chemostratigraphy. I'm her shale and lithostratigraphy advisor. Two undergrad students, Rich Krause and Chris Ott, carried out senior theses on the stratigraphy of the Guttenberg Formation. I presented our work in an Ordovician symposium at the North-Central GSA meeting in Champaign. We see the carbonates of the formation shoaling eastward and being cut off by an unconformity; the Iowa Survey folks see them deepening eastward and covered by a submarine condensation surface. Pistols at dawn!
The department is in the process of revising its undergrad curriculum. As chair of the curriculum committee (a.k.a. Chief Cajoler), I spent a lot of time negotiating. Reform is a delicate task. We wanted to make the course sequence more uniform and integrate more chemistry and physics into the courses themselves, but deciding what to take out is the sticky point; all professors know what the most important subject in the curriculum is their own! In the end we decided to plunge all new majors into a field-based course on structure and geomorph, followed by a single semester of mineralogy/petrology. The new plan has been approved by the faculty and the divisional committee; the first course will run in the fall.
On the home front, we hit a major milestone–teenager-hood–when Wesley turned 13 this January. Now he's counting the days until he can drive. He thinks it will be in three years, but I'm thinking more in terms of the next magnetic reversal.
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