Graduate Students in Volcanology and Petrology

University of Idaho

  • Mark (Navon) Jellinek, M.S., 1994

    •     Navon's thesis is entitled "A window intoa caldera-filling ignimbrite: Twin Peaks caldera, Idaho".  The thesisinvolved a lot of field work in a spectacular area west of Challis, Idaho,followed by geochemical and petrologic studies.  The caldera-fillingignimbrite and outflow sheets are part of the youngest phase of Challisvolcanism, about 45 Ma.  The work was funded by the a State Boardof Education grant.
        Navon went on to get his Ph.D. at Australian National University, working on the fluid dynamics of petrologic and geodynamic processes. He was a Miller post-doc at Berkeley then a prof of Geophysics at the University of Toronto and is now a prof at the University of British Columbia.
     

  • Bob (Bungalow) Reynolds, Ph.D., 1994


    • Bob and I in a sleazy airport bar.

        BungalowBob's dissertation was "The geology and petrology of Sierra Negra volcano,Galápagos archipelago".  Bob spent several months in the fielddoing mapping; this was especially tough work, because Sierra Negra isthe most voluminous and aerially extensive volcano in the Galapagos. He then followed up the field work with detailed geochemical study of thelavas he collected and consideration of the stress regime around a Galapagosshield.  The work was funded by a pair of grants from NSF. His dissertationresulted in two excellent papers:
        Reynolds, R, Geist, D, and Kurz, M, Physical volcanologyand structural development of Sierra Negra volcano, Galápagos Archipelago,Geological Society of America Bulletin  107, 1398-1410, 1995.
        Reynolds, R and Geist, D, Petrology of basalts fromSierra Negra volcano, Galápagos Archipelago, Journal of GeophysicalResearch  100, 24,537-24,553, 1995.
        Bob is now an associate professorof geology at Central Oregon Community College in Bend, Oregon.
     
     

  • Roberto (Boto) Barragan, M.S., 1994


    • Roberto relaxing as our broken down jeep (loaned
    by the infamous "My Best Friend Jorge") gets fixed
    in the Amazon rainforest.
        Boto's thesis was "A petrologic transectof the Ecuadorian Andes", a nifty study of three volcanoes that lay perpendicularto the trench in the northern Andes.  He did field work (see photo)that mostly involved sampling volcanoes that had been previously mappedby Pete Hall and his colleagues.  The work was supported by a seedgrant to me from the University of Idaho. His thesis resulted in the article:
        Barragan, R, Geist, D, Hall,ML, Larson, PB, and Kurz, M, Subductioncontrols on the compositions of lavas from the Ecuadorian Andes, Earthand Planetary Science Letters 154, 153-166, 1998.
        Boto went on to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Toulouse, where he worked on the back-arc geology of the eastern Andes. He is now a petroleum geologist for a big oil company.
     
  • Lisa Morrow, M.S., 1996
    •     Lisa worked on a truly-cool volcano inthe Snake River Plain that started off life under Lake Idaho and builtitself out into the air.  Not only that, but dikes that fed the volcanomelted and mobilized  tuffaceous sediments in the subsurface. Herthesis is called "Volcanic evolution of Guffey Butte volcano, Snake RiverPlain, Idaho".
        Lisa is now working as a marine geologist, doing seafloor geology for a company that lays communications cables.
     

  • Jeff Standish, M.S., 1996


    • Jeff on the summit of Alcedo volcano                  Jeff enduring the glamorous field conditions at
                                                     the summit of Wolf volcano.
        Jeff's thesis was on Roca Redonda volcano,the emergent tip of a mostly-submarine shield volcano in the northern Galapagos.The work involved scuba diving and rock climbing in the field and a lotof careful probe work on the picrites back at home. The work was supportedby a National Geographic Society grant and resulted in the article:
        Standish, J, Geist, D, Harpp,K, and Kurz, M, Theemergence of a Galapagos shield volcano: Roca Redonda, Contributionsto Mineralogy and Petrology 133, 136-148, 1998.
        After working for several years inthe environmental industry, Jeff enrolled in the Ph.D. program at WoodsHole/MIT.  He is now a postdoc at Harvard ("the University of Idaho of New England").
     

  • Pedro Najar, M.S., 1998


    • Pedro at the summit of Mt. St. Helens
        Pedro worked on a series of plutonic rocksin one of the most remote places in the lower 48, the middle of the FrankChurch wilderness.  Just to get to his area, he had to fly a bushplane into a wilderness airstrip, then backpack up and out of a major canyon. His thesis is called "Geology and geochemistry of the Papoose Peak quadranglein the Salmon and Payette National Forest, Idaho and Valley Counties, Idaho".
        Pedro has worked in both petroleum exploration and the environmental industry.
     

  • Terry (Terrible) Naumann, Ph.D., 1998

    • Terrible (pronounce terr-ee-blay) worked on Cerro Azul volcanoin the Galapagos for his dissertation, called "Geology and petrology ofCerro Azul volcano, Isabela island, Galapagos archipelago". His work wassupported by a pair of NSF grants.  Cerro Azul is one of the remotestplaces on earth, and Terry made the most of it, hunting down wild catsand surviving without water for weeks on end. Along the way, he managedto participate in three oceanographic cruises and a lot of other stuff.
        Terry's work resulted in several papers:
        Geist, D, Naumann, T, and Larson,PB, Evolution of Galapagos magmas: mantle and crustal level fractionationwithout assimilation, Journal of Petrology 39, 953-971, 1998.
        Naumann, T and Geist, D, Generation of alkali-olivinebasalts by fractionation of tholeiitic magma, Geology 27, 423-426, 1999.
        Naumann, T and Geist, D, Physical volcanology andstructural development of Cerro Azul volcano, Isabela island, Galapagos:Implications for the development of Galapagos-type shield volcanoes, Bulletinof Volcanology 61, 497-514, 2000.
        Terryis now an assistant professor of geology at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
     

  • Shelley Bishop, M.S., 1999

    •     Shelley followed on the heals of Pedroand flew into the Salmon River wilderness. But she worked on a stack ofvolcanic rocks exposed west of the Taylor Ranch, resulting in a thesiscalled "Volcanism on the northern margin of the Thunder Mountain calderacomplex, Idaho."
        Shelley has just finished a year ofteaching high school in the DC area and rumors have her moving up to Maine(her home) to do more teaching.
     

  • Elisa Sims, M.S., 2000

    •     Elisa worked on a quickly-erupted sequence of 1 Ma basalts from the Snake River Plain.  The basalts happen tocontain a contaminant plume of TCE, so she had a terrific opportunity fora complete 3-dimensional sampling because of all the drilling that hadbeen done.  The work was supported by a DOE grant. Her thesis is "Origin and evolution of Snake River Plain basalts: a geochemically constrained model", and it resulted in important contributions to a couple articles:
        Geist, D, Ellisor, R, Sims,E, and Hughes, S, Subsurface volcanology at TAN and controls on groundwaterflow, GSA Special Paper, in press, 2000.
        Geist, D, Sims, E, and Hughes, S, Open-system evolutionof a single cycle of Snake River Plain magmatism, GSA Special Paper, inpress, 2000.
        Elisa worked for a year teaching junior high then a resident scientist at a guest ranch. She now works for the state of New Mexico on water resource issues.
     

  • Rachel Ellisor Teasdale, Ph.D., 2001


    • At left, Rachel is with our friend Wendy Bohrson. It appears that Rachelwore #40 for a
    basketball team. At right (on Krakatau, Indonesia), she watches ourfriend Mike Garcia demonstrate the
    emplacement of pyroclastic flows with violent arm motions.
        Rachel's interest is in the emplacement and cooling history of basaltic lava flows. She is focussing on the 1998 eruption of Cerro Azul (Galapagos), which she had the opportunity to witnessfor a month. She has also completed field work in Hawaii and the Snake River Plain. Her work has been supported by NSF, DOE, GSA, NASA and a hostof others.  Rachel did a postdoc at Bristol, England and Arizona State and now is a professor at Chico State.
     

  • Jennifer Gustafson, M.S., 2003


    •     I co-advised Jennifer (with ScottWood) on a project that assessed the sources of selenium in mine waste drainage from the Red Dog mine in Alaska.  My role is helping her with petrography and microprobe work to determine the mineralogic hosts for selenium in unweathered bedrock, and Scott is directing some experimental simulations. The work was supported by Cominco.  She works in the environmental industry in Denver.
     

  • Charlotte Goddard, M.S., 2003

    •     Charlotte worked with me and Howard Snell (biologist at the Darwin Station and UNM) in a totally new direction,the geologic controls of biodiversity in the Galapagos Islands.  Our idea is that the biodiversity (the number of species present) is partly controlled by the age of an island, the distance to a neighboring island, and its area (both at present and during the Pleistocene).  Her thesis involved a great deal of age dating (40Ar/39Ar in Bob Duncan's lab and 3He in Mark Kurz's lab).  The work was supported by the National Geographic Society. Charlotte is now a PhD student at OSU.
     

  • Susan Wilson, M.S., in progress


    •     Susan is working on the Beaver Creek pluton, an Eocene body in north-central Idaho.  This pluton containsa lithologic smorgasbord, ranging from olivine gabbro through normal biotite-hornblendegranite to cordierite granite.  Her work is supported by a USGS Edmap grant.
     

  • Ellen Hedfield, M.S., 2003

    •    Ellen worked on melt inclusions in olivine and plagioclase from both submarine and subaerial lavas at Fernandina volcano in the Galapagos.  Allan and Simkin had shown that Fernandina has erupted a remarkably monotonous suite of basalts.  This raises the question: does the mantle make the same damn thing all the time, or does everything get homogenized in a giant Cuisinart blender beneath the volcano?  Ellen built the gas mixing furnace pictured here in the Institute for Petrology and Volcanology.  Her work was supported by an NSF grant. She thinks that the mantle makes lots of different magmas that get homogenized in a giant Waring blender under the volcano.  Ellen is now a consulting geologist in Redding, CA.
     

  • Peter Oswald, M.S. 2006, Ph.D. in progress

    •    Peter is an Alaskan and an excellent skiier, which in addition to liking dogs, is an important part of the graduate program. For his masters, he worked on Tertiary volcanic rocks from the Talkeetna Range in his home state.  They are cool rocks, and much to our chagrin, this "arc" appears to run perpendicular to where the trench was. Peter's Ph.D. is working on tephra and lavas from Hekla volcano in Iceland, exploring the petrologic relationships between explosive and effusive rocks from the historical record. The work is supported by an NSF grant.
     

  • Matt Hoffer, M.S., 2004

    •    Matt is not the first petrologist to be befuddled by the inch scale layering at the Stillwater Complex, even if he is from Pennsylvania.  Matt worked on a series of Cretaceous plutons in the Priest River Complex, supported by the USGS Edmap program.  In addition to mapping, he did petrologic studies and worked with the Donelicks on fission track dating, to constrain uplift in this part of Idaho.
     

  • John Lyons, M.S., 2004

    •   John hails from Missouri (not pictured here).  He is worked on dunite and wehrlite xenoliths from Floreana Island, in the Galapagos Islands (not pictured here but soon to be published in Geology). His work was supported by an NSF grant. John is now a Ph.D. candidate in the Natural Hazards program at Michigan Tech. As part of that program, he is serving a 2-year term with the Peace Corps in Guatamala, mostly working around Fuego volcano.

  • Bridget Diefenbach, M.S., 2005

    • Bridget worked on the amazing submarine terraces that form the southern margin of the Galapagos platform. She did a bunch of her work at Woods Hole, working with the amazing Dan Fornari on image processing and Mark Kurz on isotopic analyses. She had the opportunity to go on a cruise to the mid-Atlantic Ridge with Maurice Tivey and Henry Dick while in grad school, then went to the Aleutians with Gene Yogi and Peter Kelemen as a post-grad. Her work was supported by an NSF grant. She now works in the environmental industry in Seattle and still hasn't sent me a picture of herself while she was a student.

    Lisa Mayhew, M.S., 2006

    Lisa is from the Colgate mafia and was co-advised by me and Susan Childers. She worked on the microbial diversity in and around fumaroles in the calderas of Alcedo and Sierra Negra volcanoes in the Galapagos. Her work was supported by National Geographic. She is now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado, working on a geomicrobiology project.

    Jason Felsman, M.S., in progress

    Jason is working on potassic alteration associated with gold deposits in Wyoming. His work is supported by Newmont.

    Andres Gorki Ruiz, M.S., in progress

    Gorki is working on using GPS to monitor deformation of Sierra Negra volcano in the Galapagos. His work is supported by an NSF grant.

    Melissa Sabga, M.S., in progress

    Melissa is just starting her masters program. She hails from San Diego State.

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