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 Hi. Sorry we haven't been better correspondents, but we haven't been standing still. So read on and see what has changed and yet what remains the same. As always we'd love to hear from you. Visit our web page at http://www.tarleton.edu/~physci/Geology/. In the alumni section you can fill out your contact information and find other alums email and see what they are up to. And we always appreciate donations to the Henningsen Scholarship Fund. Donations can be sent to the Department office with checks payable to Tarleton State University.

The New Building
We're THRILLED, after several decades, to have a new science building on the Tarleton campus. The building was dedicated in April of 2001, and the first classes were held in the building shortly thereafter. Geology occupies half of the first floor of this 100,000 square foot building, so we've significantly increased our acreage. Faculty members have both an office and a research lab. We have three large storage rooms for rocks and equipment, rock saw and polishing/thin section rooms, a microscope storage room, and a darkroom. The Environmental Science graduate students have offices, and the undergraduate students have a "lounge," complete with computers, a light table, refrigerator, and microwave. We also have five teaching labs. One of these labs is the new home of the chalk dinosaur mural (created in 1961) that was such a landmark in the old Mineralogy room. We couldn't imagine leaving it behind. Dr. Murry and some students pried it off the wall, and the Tarleton construction guys built a beautiful frame for it. One of our current students, Mr. Phillip Davis, touched it up after the move and it looks as good as new.

Much of the remaining space on the first floor is general use classrooms. The smallest of these rooms holds 24 students, and the largest is the two-story auditorium, built to hold 225 students. The office of the Dean of the College of Science and Technology (split last year from the College of Arts and Sciences) resides on the first floor, as does the departmental office for Chemistry and Geosciences. Another prominent feature is found on the northeast corner of the building. There you will find the copper dome of a 65-foot planetarium.

The building is beautiful, and we feel very fortunate to have it. You know what the old building was like. Next time you're in the neighborhood, stop by and let us give you a tour of our new digs. Here are a few pictures of the building. More can be found on the departmental web pages.

New Degree Programs
A few years ago, a committee was formed on campus to evaluate small programs. Unfortunately, at that time all three of our degree programs (Geology, Earth Science, and Earth Science for Teacher Certification) fell in this category. The recommendation of the committee was to combine all of these programs into a single degree, with separate tracks (called "support areas"). The faculty took this opportunity to re-evaluate our curriculum and make some substantive changes. We believe these changes have strengthened our program, and we have seen an increase in the number of students entering our programs.

Tarleton no longer has separate degrees in Geology and Earth Science. We have instead a single degree in Geoscience, with "support areas" in Geology, Earth Science, Composite Science for Teacher Certification, Environmental Science, and Hydrogeology. Our newest track is in hydrogeology. This is a demanding track requiring a lot of math, however, employment opportunities in this field continue to grow. Students in this track should be able to pass the Texas licensing test for Professional Geologist. The Environmental Science support area is a rigorous program, designed to expose students to the issues they will confront in their careers in the environmental industry. They take extra chemistry and biology courses, soils courses, a course in Geographic Information Systems, and environmental law and policy courses in addition to hydrology, hydrogeology, geochemistry, and other vital geology classes.

The Geology support area has experienced few changes from its original format. The biggest change is the addition of a course in Geographic Information Systems. The old Earth Science degree is also largely unchanged. The Earth Science teaching degree has been eliminated because of changing requirements from the state. Teachers, if they intend to teach a science, must be certified to teach all sciences. Therefore, our new teacher certification degree is in the Composite Sciences.

Dr. Rueben Walter, Dean of the College of Science and Technology
Dr. Walter will be stepping down as Dean in the summer of 2007 and returning to full-time teaching. The search is currently on for a new Dean for the College of Science and Technology.

Carol Thompson
Well in fall of 04, I became department head. Many days that seems like a significant lack of judgment, but we all seem to be surviving. Lately I seem to spend my days learning and implementing assessment methodology (those of you in teaching will recognize the activity)! The environmental science program is still here so I have a lot of courses to teach and I continually fiddle with those to improve and update them.

Right now I am trying to write up a number of research projects that have more or less finished. I worked with TIAER on a project to look at the interaction of surface water and groundwater with an emphasis on phosphorus dynamics in a small stream north of town. One undergraduate, Margaret Neill, helped on this project as well and when she presented her part at our annual student research symposium she won first prize. Teresa Sykes an ENVS grad student, myself, and a colleague from the USGS are trying to write up a paleolimnology study we did on three reservoirs in the area. I also hope to write up some of my work on fens at Gus Engeling in East Texas. I still have lots more I want to do on wetlands there, but it's hard to find time for fieldwork. I also am helping on another project at Gus Engeling. They are restoring savanna habitat at a big chunk of property there and we are going to monitor spring flows to see how they are affected.

I've not been traveling too much, but I did get to Australia in the summer of 06 for a month. The annual SWS meeting was there so I presented a paper on my East Texas wetlands research and then, of course, went birding for a few weeks.

Phil Murry
Our teaching collections and facilities have improved considerably. When we moved into the new science building we were able to obtain better microscopes and other equipment (including an electron microscope), and funds were allocated to improve the paleontology collections. Also within the past several years, I have been exchanging common invertebrate and plant fossils found around the Stephenville area for fossils from other institutions and individuals around the World. This allows us to build our collections, with only a postage expense involved. We now have a paleontology teaching collection that rivals that of any undergraduate institution, and we are improving it each semester. All specimens used in paleontology and vertebrate paleontology have been catalogued and incorporated into the Historical Geology, Paleontology and Vertebrate Paleontology lab manuals.

For those of you who were my field assistants in the Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous, you may be interested to know that I have been narrowing my research focus. I figured out that I wasn't going to be able to do it all. I am now largely concentrating on Triassic-age vertebrates. I recently described a new freshwater shark from the Chinle Formation of New Mexico and Arizona, which should be published within the next month or so by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History. Most of my research time has been spent writing a book with my longtime associate from Berkeley, Rob Long. When we first began this project, we thought we would write a general work on the terrestrial Triassic. After completing more than a thousand manuscript pages of text, we figured out that all that stuff was not going to fit in one volume. We have now narrowed our focus to include only Triassic reptiles (for now). We have written over six hundred pages of text on reptiles, and I suspect that we are approaching the halfway mark on that project (I hope). After that, we will plug away at the other aspects of the Triassic (which should keep us busy for the rest of our lives

Beth Rinard
I hope this finds you and your family healthy and happy. It's hard to believe, but this is the end of my 6th year at Tarleton. Time flies when you're having fun, right?

Over the last few years, I've been working on my PhD in geophysics (with an emphasis in earthquake seismology) at SMU. I completed my coursework in the spring of 2001, and passed my qualifying exam last fall. Once I finish and defend my dissertation I'll officially be Dr. Beth. I'm hoping that will happen by December of 2003.

My dissertation is tentatively titled "Relocation of Earthquakes on Kilauea's Southwest Rift Zone and Western South Flank." I'm looking at about 10,000 earthquakes that occurred on the above-mentioned region of Kilauea Volcano between 1981 and 2001. Most of these earthquakes were located using automated algorithms, and contain as much as 1km of error in any given direction. I'm using some new methods to calculate better locations for these events, significantly reducing the location errors. My initial work is very promising. The events are collapsing beautifully onto linear features (faults), just like we tell you they should in Physical Geology. If the project works as well as I think it will, I'll have the best map ever created of subsurface structures on that part of Kilauea. It's exciting. I'm working on this project with the lead seismologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, Dr. Paul Okubo. I've spent significant portions of the last three summers at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory gathering data and doing preliminary earthquake relocations. The experience has been tremendous, but I'm definitely ready to get this dissertation finished and get on with life. A slightly more in-depth description of my project can be found on my website (http://www.tarleton.edu/~brinard).

Thanks to the dissertation, I've been able to attend some great meetings and give some talks lately. Last September I went to a conference in Iceland, a Symposium on the Icelandic Plume and Crust. I attended a 2-day field trip following the meeting and was treated to spectacular volcanic landscapes, and real, live glaciers! I also attended the crazy American Geophysical Union national meeting in San Francisco last December, and gave a talk at the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington in April.

Lately, I've been teaching some the biggest sections of Physical Geology that Tarleton has ever seen. I guess word has gotten out that rocks are more fun than dead frogs or chemicals. I'm also still running field trips to Hawaii each summer. I've taken a different faculty member each trip. The most recent trip was in May of this year, and my faculty 'helper' was Dr. Philip Sudman from Biology. He's posted a number of pictures from this year's trip on his website (http://www.tarleton.edu/~sudman).

So there you have it… I'm teaching a ton of students and trying to find time for my dissertation. Hopefully next year at this time I'll be able to give you some good news about my graduation date.

E.R. Henningsen
Greetings to All Geology Alumni -
I'm slowly catching up with the geologic age of our local rocks. I visited rocks much younger than myself last year when I accompanied Beth on her Hawaii field trip. I neglected my geology this year, as I didn't make any field trips. I did reminisce of my earlier flying years… I just returned from the Commemorative Air Force Show in Midland. Still busy at the candy/sports card/book shop (Sammye's Candy and The Bookworm). Stop by when you're in town!