Geology

GEO-VETS initiative funds military veteran’s research project

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 14:40:53 +0000

GEO-VETS initiative funds military veteran’s research project Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/11/2022 - 07:40

Desean Connors

Undergraduate awarded funds as a part of an effort to encourage research for student military veterans

Randall Duncan has always taken an interest in how water affects the environment. But it was not until later in his life that he became aware of the fraught issue of water in the West.

Duncan is an undergraduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder who is also a U.S. Army veteran. He is pursuing dual degrees in geology and geography and once pursued a bachelor’s degree in international studies at the University of Wyoming before enlisting.

But Duncan found a renewed interest in hydrology (the scientific study of water resources, management and movement) and hydrogeology (the study of the distribution and movement of groundwater in rocks and soil) upon returning home.

At the top of the page: Beaver dams on Trout Creek (Jeff Mitton/Flickr). Above: Randall Duncan conducting field work on the influence of beaver on rivers and floodplains near Crested Butte, CO (photo courtesy of Katherine Lininger).

After returning from the Army, Duncan committed himself to a couple geology and geography research projects.

Last summer, Duncan assisted a master’s student’s research investigating the role of beaver dams in controlling sedimentation rates and organic carbon storage in rivers.

“I’ve basically been helping out anyone in the lab that needs help,” says Duncan. “I just wanted to be a part of it and would work with whomever and wherever I was needed.”

Now, Duncan has been given the opportunity to start his own undergraduate research.

Duncan’s research will continue to analyze how beavers affect rivers and floodplains in the Manitou Experimental Forest and the Coal Creek Watershed, which supplies water to the town of Crested Butte, Colorado. He notes, “I have become much more interested in these unique creatures and more importantly how their actions change the environment around them.”

Duncan will focus on a geospatial analysis of historic beaver activity over time using aerial imagery, linking the density of beaver ponds with the physical characteristics of the river corridor (channel and floodplain).

The research will study if the ponds remain in certain areas and, Duncan says, “how different interactions with (beavers’) habitat, like from livestock and humans, have an effect on their development.”

Duncan’s undergraduate research project is a part of the Dynamic Water Cluster project, which itself is attached to the Critical Zone Thematic Cluster —a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded program. The project studies “how water stored in the subsurface drives environmental processes from supporting forest growth to groundwater and surface water quality,” says Holly Barnard, the lead principal investigator of the Critical Zone Thematic Cluster.

Duncan’s project will be assisted by his mentor, Katherine Lininger, an assistant professor of geography and co-principal investigator. Lininger says there is a variety of choice from the critical zone program. She says Duncan “could have chosen to do anything related to critical zone work.”

Duncan’s project will be funded by the NSF’s GEO-VETS (Geosciences-Veterans Education and Training) initiative. The initiative grants the “opportunity to support U.S. veterans’ participation and experience in research and fieldwork related to active NSF geoscience grants,” says Barnard.

The initiative recognizes that veterans are an underutilized workforce and believes that the military training obtained by many student veterans is useful in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, specifically geosciences. “It’s a great place for those skills that don’t ever get used,” says Duncan.

The initiative is a great way to support the involvement of veterans in research activities.

GEO-VETS funding is offered to U.S. veterans who are students, two-year college faculty, or K–12 teachers. The funds provide veterans an opportunity to work with approved principal investigators to conduct NSF research and fieldwork.

“The GEO-VETS funding opportunity has created a formal mechanism to broaden participation in undergraduate research for student veterans and increase their experiential learning opportunities,” says Barnard.

Lininger agrees. “The initiative is a great way to support the involvement of veterans in research activities.”

The fund to �� Boulder’s critical zone project totals to $21,495 from GEO-VETS. It will support veterans’ attendance at a scientific conference of their choosing in addition to research experience.

“It really helps. … Given that most vets are coming in as non-traditional students, so they don’t quite mesh as well as your standard undergrads,” says Duncan, adding:

“It has been a great opportunity!”

More information and eligibility requirements for veterans interested in research can be found on the National Science Foundation’s website.

Undergraduate awarded funds as a part of an effort to encourage research for student military veterans.

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Alum goes hard core in new Nat Geo expedition

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 18:45:00 +0000

Alum goes hard core in new Nat Geo expedition Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/01/2020 - 12:45

Clay Bonnyman Evans

�� Boulder alum heads team in Himalayas for National Geographic climate-research mission

When she went to Nepal in 2019 to co-lead a geology team for the ambitious, multi-disciplinary National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition, Mary Hubbard was going back to the past in more ways than one.

At the top of the page: Himalayas, Nepal Above: Mary Hubbard

Time machine, take one: Hubbard (Geol’81), a professor of Earth Sciences at Montana State University who received her BS from the University of Colorado Boulder, had done field work in the Himalayas in the mid-1980s while pursuing her 1988 PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“That work centered on how mountains form, the geologic crustal processes in the earth that make mountains,” she says.

During planning for the expedition, a colleague suggested she’d make a great part of the team, which was going to study the impacts of climate change on different environments.

“He said, ‘You haven’t been back? What’s wrong with you? You’ve got to go back,’” recalls Hubbard. “When I did get back, after 28 years, I just couldn’t believe the mountains. I remember hiking up the trail, huffing and puffing a bit more than when I was 26.”

Time machine, take two: Hubbard’s team climbed deep into the Gokyo Valley, spending a few weeks in the shadow of Mount Everest to take sediment cores from two alpine lakes at more than 15,000 feet of elevation, hoping to look into the region’s climatic past.

“The lakes contain layers of sediment that have accumulated on the bottom,” Hubbard says in a short National Geographic video, History is in the Mud. The cores, she says, serve as a kind of “tape recorder,” that reveal the history of environmental conditions, zoology, and more, layer by sedimentary layer, year after year, across centuries.

The expedition of which her team was a part included more than 30 international researchers in geology, biology, glaciology, meteorology and mapping—as well as world-famous mountaineer Pete Athens, who served as climbing lead.

Mary Hubbard standing in the shadow of Mt. Everest.

National Geographic, which described the mission as “the most comprehensive single scientific expedition to the mountain in history,” is scheduled to release an hour-long special on all aspects of the expedition June 30. The research in Nepal is part of a world-wide project to examine the impacts of climate change on the planet’s vital life-support systems, studying the world’s highest mountains as well as the Earth’s rainforests and ocean.

“They started with the highest place on earth,” Hubbard says of the expedition in Nepal. “The Himalayas are kind of like a water tower for 20% of the world’s population. If you tweak the temperature a little, you get a big result.”

Hubbard’s co-leader was Ananta Gajurel, a geologist from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu. Their geology team also included her Nepali PhD student, Bibek Giri, and six Nepali MS students from the Tri Chandra Multiple Campus in Kathmandu. The lakes in Gokyo Valley were partially frozen when they arrived, but eventually they took to the water in a boat built out of two rubber rafts and a PVC-frame. They then dropped a cylinder to the bottom to collect sediment.

“The coring device is a plexiglass tube about a meter long, which you drop to the bottom,” she says. “Then you use a weighted cylinder … to hammer the tube into the mud and pull the whole thing up.”

Hubbard’s team eventually sent samples from two cores from two lakes to a lab at the University of California, Irvine, for Carbon-14 dating.

“It goes back about 1,800 years,” she says. “The next thing is to look at that record and see how it changes over 1,800 years, as a proxy for environmental change.”

Gajurel’s team in Nepal is now piecing together that record through the lens of diatoms (a group of algae) found, while Hubbard’s team is examining pollen. While the cores don’t have the resolution in the youngest time interval to reveal much about the current era of human-induced climate change, they will provide an important baseline for climate researchers.

Hubbard was impressed by the breadth and depth of the mission.

“The fact that Nat Geo was able to pull together so many scientific disciplines, who came together in one place to look at one problem, is one of the coolest things about this expedition,” she says.

The fact that Nat Geo was able to pull together so many scientific disciplines, who came together in one place to look at one problem, is one of the coolest things about this expedition"

Hubbard spent her early years in Chicago and became enamored of the American West during family vacations. The family moved to Aspen when she was in high school. Graduating from Aspen High School in 1976, she wasn’t inclined to “go where everyone else was going,” and decided to start her undergraduate career at Middlebury College in Vermont.

But when many of her fellow juniors headed off for a year abroad, she opted instead to travel to the distant land of Colorado and try out �� Boulder.

“I wanted to try a large school in the mountain West,” she says. “I wasn’t on campus more than two weeks when I said, ‘This is good; I’m staying.’ … It was such a great pleasure walking that sidewalk, seeing old people and young people, dark-skinned and light-skinned. You’d look people in the eye and they’d smile. I thought, ‘Oh, this is a happy place.’”

At �� Boulder, she was inspired by the late Geology Professor Bill Braddock and got her first taste of field work in the foothills and mountains west of Boulder.

“We’d have two or three lab periods a week and we’d be out crawling around the Front Range a 15-minute drive north of town,” she says. “That was a real strength of ��.”

She worked in Wyoming oilfields for a year while boning up for the GRE, then went to MIT, where her research took her not only to Nepal, but also Pakistan. After earning her PhD, she accepted a postdoctoral position at ETH Zurich (known as the “MIT of Switzerland”) doing fieldwork in the French Alps. She later joined the faculty at the University of Maine, and in 2015 accepted her position in Bozeman.

Hubbard is now poised to return to the Himalayas, pending relaxation on travel restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic: She has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct further coring research in 2021 and 2022 with teams from Montana State and Maine.

“We were only just scraping the surface of what could be done to really understand the retreat of glaciers,” she says.

�� Boulder alum heads team in Himalayas for National Geographic climate-research mission.

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Geologists work to piece together Earth's missing memories

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 15:05:17 +0000

Geologists work to piece together Earth's missing memories Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/28/2020 - 09:05

Daniel Strain

A team of geologists led by �� Boulder is digging into what may be Earth’s most famous case of geologic amnesia.

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Raton Basin earthquakes linked to oil and gas fluid injections

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 15:04:58 +0000

Raton Basin earthquakes linked to oil and gas fluid injections Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/26/2017 - 09:04

A rash of earthquakes in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico recorded between 2008 and 2010 was likely due to fluids pumped deep underground during oil and gas wastewater disposal, says a new �� Boulder study.

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Digging in the Arctic mud for answers to climate change

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 22:28:24 +0000

Digging in the Arctic mud for answers to climate change Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/18/2017 - 16:28

Paleoclimatologist Sarah Crump, a PhD student and INSTARR researcher, studies the effects of climate variability in the Canadian Arctic by analyzing ancient DNA from lake sediment.

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Benson Earth Sciences building turns 20

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 21:57:32 +0000

Benson Earth Sciences building turns 20 Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/11/2017 - 15:57

Cay Leytham-Powell

The Benson Earth Sciences building, near Folsom Field, is celebrating its 20th anniversary by looking at where it was, and where it will go.

The Benson Earth Sciences building is turning 20 this year, and the Department of Geological Sciences is celebrating.

The expansive building, located adjacent to Folsom Field, allowed the department the space to not only grow, but thrive, ushering in a period of transformation to a then-modestly sized department. This success, shared with the University of Colorado Boulder, has enabled one of the oldest departments on campus to rise to international acclaim, ranking in the top five programs globally.

One of the most striking features of the Benson Earth Sciences building is the three-story atrium at its entrance. Photograph by Cay Leytham-Powell.

"The building itself makes you feel good about the program," said Gifford H. Miller, the associate director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), a professor of geological sciences, and the presiding department chair when the Benson Earth Sciences building was built in 1997.

"I think that’s where architecture can actually play an active role in the educational program and the enterprise of the university. It can set the tone and influence how people feel about the unit."

While funding for construction was first secured at the end of 1993, anticipation for such a project started much earlier, often navigating an array of complications and set-backs, which seemed to reflect, all too appropriately, the department's challenging history with space on campus.

Geological sciences at �� Boulder was established around the turn of the century, when the field itself was still rather young. In 1911, the young department moved into the building that would house it for the next 86 years. As technology progressed, and much of what would come to define it developed, it quickly became apparent that the department did not have the space or the facilities for the growing program.

In the late 1960s, the department began its three-decade long push for a new building to both create research space and to collect all of the faculty under one roof. Despite the Colorado Commission on Higher Education’s declaration in 1969 that the building was functionally obsolete, the department confronted a myriad of financial roadblocks throughout the 1970's, hindering construction.

Things finally began to turn around in the 1980's when the �� Foundation helped raise money from the private sector to "seed" a building fund, which was soon amplified by a major contribution from an important alumnus — Bruce D. Benson, now president of the �� system.

Benson graduated from �� Boulder in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in geology, and for four decades, while building his multi-million-dollar company from scratch, served as a tirelessly volunteered and advocated for both the Department of Geological Sciences and the university.

With Benson's help and a sizable donation from fellow-alumnus Eric Crail Johnson, development for the new earth sciences building was fast-tracked and completed in 1997.

Benson Earth Sciences served many goals besides just providing a bigger, newer space to bring everyone together, but one of the most important ended up being its ability to recruit students and faculty.

And attract students and faculty, it did.

The Benson Earth Sciences building gets its name from an important alumnus who made the building possible — Bruce D. Benson, now president of the �� system. Photography by Cay Leytham-Powell.

At the time of construction, roughly 40-80 students graduated with a geology major annually. Now, in 2016 alone, 50 new undergraduate students entered the program, raising the total head count in the department to 345 students, doubling its size over the previous decade.

"The building has given us that extra push to recruit the very best students, and those students then go into postdocs and eventually into faculty roles, federal and regional agencies, or the private sector," Miller said.

The department has also grown in other ways, such as its ranking among other geoscience programs.

At the time of the building's construction, the department landed consistently between 30th and 40th place nationally. Now, geosciences at �� Boulder (which spans beyond just geology, though geology is the largest component) is ranked number two in the world, according to the most recent US News and World Report rankings.

"You can't say it's only because of the building, but the building undoubtedly has played a significant role," Miller said.

"It serves as a major recruiting tool, and has made a big difference for all of us."

The Benson Earth Sciences building currently houses 10 state-of-the-art analytical laboratories, as well as the Earth Sciences Library, which demonstrates not only what the program is capable of, but also the program's importance to the university.

While the department’s faculty are not all in the same building — a consequence of its ongoing growth and success — it is continuing the momentum, bringing ��’s success to international attention.

"The department is more than the building," Miller remarked, "but the building as our physical core and academic home helps."

The Department of Geological Sciences will hold a reception celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Benson Earth Sciences building on Friday, Sept. 15, at 5:30 p.m. Walk-ins are welcome.

The Benson Earth Sciences building at �� Boulder is turning 20 this year, and the Department of Geological Sciences is celebrating both past accomplishments and a bright future.

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Underrepresented students excel through SMART

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 21:26:04 +0000

Underrepresented students excel through SMART Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/09/2017 - 15:26

Cay Leytham-Powell

�� Boulder’s SMART program helps underserved and underrepresented students in the STEM fields gain valuable research experience for graduate school.

What do parasites, broadband-internet cables, hydrogels and ultra-fast lasers have in common?

Rather than forming the basis of a crazy science experiment, these are all research topics showcased at this year's SMART (Summer Multicultural Access to Research Training) program symposium, which is scheduled for Thursday.

SMART is a summer-long initiative that provides students the opportunity to gain research experience across the science, technology, engineering and math (also called STEM) disciplines.

SMART students attend weekly Friday workshops where they learn various skills, including how to make a poster for their findings. Photo by Cay Leytham-Powell.

Over the years, the program has helped roughly 700 underserved and underrepresented college students finish their undergraduate education and continue onto graduate school. Some of these students are now faculty sending their own students across the country to engage with the University of Colorado Boulder’s world-class labs.

And the program, which is finishing its 28th year at �� Boulder, is only just getting started.

This year's class of 19 students represent schools ranging from California to Puerto Rico, and New Hampshire to New Mexico. They span the country—each arriving with big dreams and returning home with something even bigger: an educational focus and a mentor-relationship that helps propel their careers.

"In the sciences, in order to get into graduate school, having authentic research experience is critical," said Kristin Lopez, a SMART program administrator. "Part of what this program is trying to do is level the playing field and allow those research opportunities for students who may not have been able to get them for financial and other reasons."

"It opens a lot of doors," echoed Juan Pablo Gevaudan, a PhD student in civil, environmental and architectural engineering and one of the lead graduate advisors for the SMART program, "especially if a lot of doors were not originally open for you in the beginning."

Providing pathways to higher education is a fundamental value of SMART, which is part of both the Colorado Diversity Initiative and the broader Leadership Alliance, a consortium of 35 leading teaching and research institutions including many Ivy League and minority-serving colleges and universities, which mentor, train and introduce those with diverse backgrounds to the world of higher education.

"We view ourselves as part of a national effort," commented Barbara Kraus, an administrator of the SMART program. "It's not just about, 'We're going to get the students here,' 'We're going to recruit them to graduate school here.' It’s all part of the national effort."

Barbara Kraus is one of the SMART administrators, and ensures that student's experience is a great one. Photo by Cay Leytham-Powell.

Initially, SMART appears like any other undergraduate-research program in that qualified students are paired with faculty mentors, so that students then spend their summer conducting their own self-directed experiments and presenting their results when the program is over.

But that's where similarities end.

Over the course of 10 weeks, SMART takes in roughly 20 STEM students from around the country, places them in prominent �� Boulder laboratories, and provides them the necessary training, skills and experience to pursue graduate study.

They attend weekly workshops on everything from communicating their findings to taking the GRE, as well as designing, implementing and analyzing an experiment under the careful guidance of graduate students, lab postdocs and �� Boulder professors.

At the conclusion of the program, students present their findings orally at the Leadership Alliance National Symposium, and with a poster presentation at the annual SMART symposium.

"It's a powerful experience for them," said Kraus. "We've gotten to know faculty or program directors at other institutions, and they're always sending us students because they know that we'll take care of them."

In addition to providing that national conference experience, SMART is unique in a variety of fundamental ways, with one of the most important being the role of the graduate student mentors who spend their summer with the students, providing them guidance with everything they might need along the way.

One of the factors that sets SMART apart from other similar programs is the role that mentors play in the SMART student's experience. Photo by Cay Leytham-Powell.

This all results in something that brings students back year after year: community.

"I like that there's a sense of community. There's mentors. There's people you can go to apart from just the people you do research with. In that sense, it makes this program unique and I’ve enjoyed that aspect," said Daniel Olivares, a 2017 SMART program participant and junior studying biology at Cal State University Monterey Bay.

Another aspect that sets this program apart is that it encourages students to not just work—it wants them to enjoy their time and truly learn what graduate student life is like.

"They really do a good job of balancing academia and training you, and challenging you, along with having fun and enjoying Colorado," commented Jonathan Nesper, a junior in physics from the University of Central Florida and one of this year's participants. "This is a fun place to come. I think it's one of those things where how much you put into it is how much you get out. I've had a great experience."

This sentiment is echoed among this year's participants, with most feeling prepared to go back to their home institutions and apply what they've learned this summer to their future endeavors.

"My experience has been extraordinary. I feel like I’ve gotten to stretch my skills better and I’ve gotten to know myself as a scientist better—where my weaknesses are and where I can improve and definitely improve my chances of getting into graduate school, improve my chances as a candidate," said Gloire Rubambiza, a 2017 SMART participant and senior in computer science from Grand Valley University. "It's been amazing just being a part of the program."

SMART's 2017 Student Symposium is Thursday, Aug. 10, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. in JILA X325 and X317, 440 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309.

�� Boulder program helps underserved and underrepresented students in the STEM fields gain valuable research experience for graduate school.

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Top in state, No. 2 in geosciences in global rankings

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 22:57:25 +0000

Top in state, No. 2 in geosciences in global rankings Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/25/2016 - 16:57

For the third year in a row, the University of Colorado Boulder has been ranked No. 2 in geosciences among the world’s universities, according to U.S. News & World Report, which today released its third annual global standings for 2017.

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Geologist's work spans globe, philanthropy helps students

Anonymous — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 20:41:28 +0000

Geologist's work spans globe, philanthropy helps students Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 09/11/2016 - 14:41

Clint Talbott

Dale Grant, who has ‘always been a Buff,’ has moved to establish a major scholarship for geological sciences students

At the University of Colorado Boulder in the 1970s, Grant became energized by the great outdoors, and his career “seemingly fell in front of me.” Now, the man who says he’s “always been a Buff” has moved to establish a significant scholarship for geological sciences students with his estate.

Dale Grant at the USGS National Earthquake Information Center in Golden. Photos courtesy of Dale Grant.

Grant’s career, both in college and beyond, has been far-flung and meaningful. He hopes his scholarship fund helps enable future students to find similarly rewarding careers.

Like many students, Grant did not arrive at �� Boulder planning to become a geologist. He began as an engineering student, but later changed course. A dorm buddy got Grant interested in both rugby and geology.

Grant was working up to 30 hours a week as a dishwasher and food-server in the dorms, and he found that he was “struggling” with his classes. Meanwhile, he discovered the joy of skiing, which “began to dominate my winter life.” In summers, he’d work as a whitewater-raft guide.

Academically, a presentation by geology Professor Emeritus Theodore Walker seized Grant’s attention. “It so interested me that I changed majors.”

But he took a break from college in 1974, in his junior year, to move to Crested Butte, work as a lift operator and join skiing’s “freestyle craze,” along with some high-school friends. He spent a couple years skiing, rafting and rough-necking on oil rigs.

In July 1976, Grant was guiding whitewater-rafting trips in Idaho just before the devastating Big Thompson Flood, which killed 144 people and remains Colorado’s deadliest flood. The state highway department needed people with math and science backgrounds to work on a survey crew to find the center-line of the decimated highway.

“I learned how to be a surveyor, which I didn’t think anything of at the time.”

He returned to ��-Boulder in 1978 and got his geology degree with a geophysics option in 1979. Within two weeks of graduation, he saw an ad for geothermal exploration that required a background in surveying. He got the job, which took him around the western United States.

Dale Grant, at right, heliskiing in New Zealand.

He then took a job with Geophysical Services Inc., which deployed him to western Oman. Grant spent two years there, working seven weeks on, three weeks off. In his off time, he went to Greece, Austria and Nepal, where he did the Annapurna base-camp trek.

Later, GSI sent Grant and others to western China, where the team used seismic sensors to search for oil and gas. He saw the Great Wall of China before it was rebuilt and saw the terra cotta soldiers in Xian just as their excavation was beginning.

Grant worked in Saudi Arabia, where he did computer processing and interpretation of data. The work was stimulating, but the working conditions were constrained. Grant recalls disembarking from a jetliner to walk past a phalanx of automatic weapons and then being required to surrender his passport. He and his colleagues were driven to a luxurious compound that was surrounded by barbed wire. He describes it as a “gilded cage.”

A bus ferried them to and from the work site. In his off time, he went on safari in Kenya, completed two treks in Nepal, traversed 14 countries in Europe, heli-skied in New Zealand and explored much of Asia.

He’d seen pretty much everything he wanted to see in the world, and after a few years, he chose to return to Colorado, where he earned a teaching certificate at Western State College in Gunnison, a locale convenient for skiing at Crested Butte.

After teaching awhile, he took a job at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Yucca Mountain Program. Then he moved to the USGS National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, where he’s served as a geophysicist for a decade and a half.

Grant is on a team that determines where, when and how big significant quakes are. The USGS NEIC has monitors that flag potential earthquakes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “Our job is to take a look at (the data) and determine, ‘Is it real? Is it an earthquake, or is it noise: an explosion or some other event?’”

Having made that determination, the team will issue an initial report on the location and magnitude of the quake. This generally happens in 10 to 12 minutes for events in the United States and within 20 minutes for quakes elsewhere in the world. The NEIC issues refined reports as more data are verified.

Dale Grant snapped this photo in western China, where his team used seismic sensors to search for oil and gas.

The work is important. “It’s critical when an earthquake happens to know exactly where it was and how big it was in order to determine the possibilities of damage and casualties,” Grant says. The NEIC makes this information available to the first responders.

On average worldwide, there are about 1,000 quakes of magnitude 4 or greater per month.

His degree from �� Boulder became the “means to my career,” Grant notes, adding that there was never any question about where he would study. �� has always been “my school,” he adds. “That’s where I always wanted to go. There was never anywhere else.”

Born in Casper, Wyo., Grant grew up in Denver. Attending �� Boulder seemed a foregone conclusion. “On Saturdays, we’d get around the radio and listen to the Buffs games back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.”

That deep connection is one reason he plans to endow a scholarship fund in geological sciences. “That’s where I’d like to see people study, because it’s something in my heart, something I always enjoyed. And also think it’s the future, because the environment is so trashed right now that if we don’t have people who are knowledgeable and concerned about it, I don’t see any way out of it.”

Dale Grant’s career and travel have spanned the world—and included jobs in eastern China and Saudi Arabia—and now his geology training helps quickly alert the world where, how big and how damaging severe earthquakes are. Now, the man who says he’s “always been a Buff” has moved to establish a significant scholarship for geological sciences students with his estate.

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Water-expert alumnus swims into current affairs

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 18:59:34 +0000

Water-expert alumnus swims into current affairs Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/27/2016 - 12:59

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Bob Crifasi’s new book dives deep into Colorado water history

He was hired as an environmental planner for Denver Water, the 800-pound trout of Front Range water agencies, to explore alternatives to the controversial proposed 615-foot-high Two Forks Dam on the South Platte River, which was vetoed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1991 under pressure from anglers and environmentalists.

Bob Crifasi

Crifasi, who earned bachelor’s degrees in geology and chemistry and master’s degrees in geology and environmental science from the University of Colorado Boulder in the 1980s and ‘90s, has served on the boards of—and often, pitchforked weeds, trash and the occasional dead skunk for—11 Boulder County ditch companies, including the historic Anderson Ditch, which runs through the ��-Boulder campus.

And he spent 16 years as the “water wizard” — aka water resources administrator — for the City of Boulder’s Open Space and Mountain Parks Department, managing all of the city’s water-distribution ditches.

Every drop of that experience watered what he calls his “labor of love,” the highly accessible, deeply researched new book, A Land Made From Water: Appropriation and the Evolution of Colorado’s Landscape, Ditches, and Water Institutions (University Press of Colorado). The book focuses on Boulder but explores much larger questions about the past, and future, of water resources in the West.

“Personally, I find histories that only deal with the very local are missing something,” says Crifasi. “With this book, I wanted to really situate what was going on in Denver, on the South Platte, and how these things were nested.”

Personally, I find histories that only deal with the very local are missing something,” says Crifasi. “With this book, I wanted to really situate what was going on in Denver, on the South Platte, and how these things were nested.”

The book (whose title echoes a line by Colorado poet Thomas Ferril Hornsby: “Here is a land where life is written in water.”) begins with a concise history of water development in the West, noting that the Ancestral Pueblo people, who inhabited the area around Mesa Verde National Park in the Four Corners region, were building ditches and reservoirs for irrigation as early as 900 BCE.

The Spanish took some of those ideas and blended them with a cultural and political system of “acequias,” a word adapted from the Arabic “al saqiya,” meaning “water conduit.”

Crifasi then explores the development of Boulder County’s earliest ditches. The area was dry indeed before pioneers began digging the first ditches 1859, using shovels and horse-drawn “Fresno scraper” plows.

“I think we can safely state that east of the foothills, from approximately Coal Creek on the south to St. Vrain on the north, there were virtually no lakes present prior to active settlement,” Crifasi writes.

He tackles the famous Colorado Supreme Court decision, Coffin v. Left Hand Ditch Company, which ensconced the idea of “first in time, first in right” as the most basic principle in Western water management. The case established that owning land did not automatically convey rights to water passing through.

“Today, Colorado’s Prior Appropriation system has become a symbol for the preference of private property over common property, the privatization of public resources, and the rule of markets to distribute natural resources,” Crifasi writes.

Jess Alexander, ditch rider for the Dry Creek Davidson, pitching weeds during the spring water run in May 2004. Photograph by Bob Crifasi.

Ironically, he notes, prior appropriation was widely understood at the time as a blow against control of water by the wealthy who could afford to buy land — and the establishment of the Left Hand Ditch Company in 1863 grew out of the kind of cooperative that many would revile as “socialist” today.

Crifasi also relates the history of large-scale public water projects on the Front Range, from the Moffat Tunnel pipeline to Gross Dam and Reservoir and the Colorado-Big Thompson Project.

He ranged far afield chasing down sometimes-tiny details to enrich the text and delves into subjects that would not, at first glance, necessarily appear relevant to the topic. He went to a tiny town in New Mexico, for example, to learn more about Marcellus St. Vrain, who managed Fort St. Vrain on the South Platte.

Crifasi also plunged into one of Colorado’s most shameful historical incidents, the brutal massacre of between 150 and 500 Arapaho Indian women, children and elderly at Sand Creek in 1864. The military units that carried out the slaughter included many prominent Boulder County water pioneers—Jonas Anderson Jr. and Porter M. Hinman, who helped start Left Hand, Morse Coffin, and Capt. David H. Nichols, the co-founder of North Boulder Farmers Ditch, who helped lead the massacre.

The incident, described by witnesses in gory detail before a congressional committee, was driven by railroad politics and led to a “land grab.”

And “(b)ecause the Americans had won, the settlers could impose their legal systems governing water, land, minerals, and other resources in Colorado,” Crifasi writes.

Headgate of the Enterprise Ditch. Photograph by Bob Crifasi.

“Those Congressional reports make for devastating reading,” he says. “I’ve brought �� groups on tours of the Anderson Ditch, and it struck me, there I was giving this presentation to all these kids, and there was all this intense history. It’s affected me in a more than an academic way.”

The book is a history, but not entirely backward-looking. Crifasi explores conflicts between farmers and land managers. He once ran into a young biologist who had found leopard frogs, a federal species of concern, in a local ditch and ordered that it the area not be disturbed.

“I wholeheartedly shared his desire to protect the species. But the problem was that these frogs migrated into and now occupy habitat that was created by people,” Crifasi writes.

“Never mind that if someone like me didn’t get the laterals cleaned, there would be no point for the rancher to turn water into the laterals so he might irrigate his hay meadow. The laterals would simply dry out and cease providing tadpole habitat or a source of water for the hay meadow. … It felt like to me that he wanted … some kind of frog Valhalla. Our conversation made me feel like a callous frog killer for even suggesting it might be necessary to occasionally disturb the habitat … so that we might perpetuate it.”

But don’t think Crifasi is the sort of guy who might spend a weekend taking potshots at feds alongside the likes of the anti-government group that recently occupied the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon; he has absolutely no truck with ranchers who refuse to see the value of preservation.

“Those guys just want to take down the sign that says ‘welcome to your public lands’ and put up a ‘no trespassing’ sign, for free,” he says. “People who support them are forgetting that these lands once were private, first taken from the Indians, next privatized, then overgrazed until the owners were bailed out by the federal government.”

Clay Evans is a free-lance writer in Boulder.

Think of Robert R. “Bob” Crifasi as a kind of Zelig or Forrest Gump when it comes to water in Boulder, Denver and northern Colorado—he spent a quarter century getting his hands wet, both literally and figuratively, in countless ways. Crifasi, who earned bachelor’s degrees in geology and chemistry and master’s degrees in geology and environmental science from ��-Boulder, has served on the boards of—and often, pitchforked weeds, trash and the occasional dead skunk for—11 Boulder County ditch companies.

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