Geol 100 and 101 occupied my teaching time both during the year and the summer session. I ran the main Baraboo field trip three times during the year; each semester I took a van load of beginning students to map in Ableman's Gorge.
Alumnus Charlie Schweger visited in January, giving a very interesting talk to the Quats about the various interglacials in Alaska and the Yukon. Dr. Kamal Hussein, a professor from the University of Damascus, spent seven months at the pollen lab working on Quaternary materials from Syria. He showed me the definite advantage of using heavy-liquid separation to extract pollen from the very calcareous evaporites in the dry interior. Ewan Wolff, a senior from Bates College, Maine, spent four months here learning some palynology. We took a core from Hayton Marsh (near Valders) in May; rain, mosquitoes, a cranky landowner, dragging a heavy coring frame through knee-deep mud, and difficulty in obtaining and extracting cores, made it the worst coring day of my career. After that, winning the OOPPS Award for "winning the OOPPS Award every seventh year" was a distinct relief!
I have been working on a number of pollen sites in the Colorado Front Range with alumnus Jim Benedict. This year we looked at data from four sites and discovered a pattern of change in which the spruce/pine pollen ratios decrease in a regular manner forward through the Holocene. Combining this information with influx data from Redrock Lake, suggests that pine migrated into the higher-elevation sub-alpine forests during the Holocene, doubling the rain of pine pollen grains every 4000 years. This has to be taken into consideration when interpreting the vegetation and climate changes in the area. I gave a talk on the subject at the Denver GSA Meetings in October. And a couple of weeks later I got to attend a meeting of the Global Pollen Database in Boulder. On its Sunday field trip, we visited Redrock Lake where I distributed reprints of my 1972 paper along with several additional sheets showing how the changing spruce/pine ratios would alter my original interpretation.
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