After adjusting to the extremes of reverse culture shock upon my return to the U.S. following six years in Geneva, Switzerland (when I left the U.S. in 1993 the economy had just headed deep south!) I set out to build a new rare gas laboratory in Madison. With generous support from the Graduate School, Weeks Foundation and the NSF, I am happy to report that after 13 months of work (with considerable help from staff members Lee Powell, Bill Unger, and John Randall), the lab is nearing completion with the recent arrival of the mass spectrometer. I managed to arrive just in time to find a talented graduate student, Monica Relle, who joined me in working on a project to determine the duration and fine-scale temporal structure of the last reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field using the 40Ar/39Ar method to data lavas. This NSF and Weeks supported research took Monica, myself and colleagues from the USA, France, and Spain to the islands of Tahiti in the south Pacific and La Palma in the Canary Islands in search of lava flows erupted in rapid succession during the Matuyama-Brunhes reversal. Monica has worked hard to prepare what will become the first samples measured in the new lab. News on the results next year!
I have also begun an exciting collaboration with Alan Carroll focused on generating a precise chronostratigraphy for the world-famous Eocene Green River Formation in Wyoming. Alan and I are co-advising Mike Smith’s MS thesis project in which we hope to obtain 40Ar/39Ar ages of several tuffs interbedded with sediments deposited from Lake Gosiute during the last period of global "hothouse" climate. This will be the first study of its kind to tie the paleoclimatic and tectonic records preserved in an ancient terrestrial lake basin to the better known global marine record. I can’t wait to get back to Wyoming (where I did my PhD and met my wife) to collect samples with Alan and Mike next summer.
On the home front, my daughter Zoe celebrated her 5th birthday and is now in kindergarden in Muncie, Indiana where my wife Teri Boundy is also an Assistant Professor of Geology. Zoe enjoyed all her many visits to "Badgerland", especially learning to rock climb at Devil’s Lake with Gordon Medaris and Nancy Korda.
Featured Faculty Research: IsoTopics - Brad Singer
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