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Newsletter
Fall 2005
by Roger Renteria and Susan Delap

Click here for previous news items.

TECHtonics Alumni Newsletter

Current Issue

EES Christmas Party 2005

December 11, 2005 -- EES members reveled at Pat Mills' house. Pictures.

Hydrology Research Featured

November 26, 2005 -- Hydrology graduate student Craig Altare and hydrology professor Rob Bowman are researching ways to clean up water used in the petroleum extraction process. NMT article. El Defensor Chieftain article.

MESA Students Visit NMT and Learn about Hydrology

November 22, 2005 -- A group of juniors and seniors from Cobre High School in Bayard, NM, visited New Mexico Tech today as part of the MESA (Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement) program to learn more about hydrology and nanotechnology.

Rob Bowman hosted the hydrology portion of the program and discussed groundwater pollution and the means to detect and prevent it. Jan Hendrickx and Enrique Vivoni talked about evaporation, water and energy balances, and remote-sensing algorithms used to estimate actual evapotranspiration rates over the state of New Mexico.

EPSCoR provided funding for the visit as part of its outreach program for K-12 students. -- S.D.

Small Earthquake Felt in Socorro

October 29, 2005 -- A few minutes before 9 on Saturday night, a small (magnitude 2.4) earthquake was felt by numerous Socorroans. The quake's epicenter was about 3.4 miles west of the city, and the depth was a little under 5 miles. Details.

I was in my house watching a movie when I thought I heard someone bound across my roof in 2 or 3 heavy strides. After running outside to check my roof and finding no one, I called my neighbor, Noel Barstow, who happens to be a seismologist at IRIS PASSCAL. We hooked up to the Internet, looked at the near-real-time seismicity plots from the NMT Geophysics Program, and determined that it was a fairly close earthquake--not a burglar! -- S.D. (NMT article)

GSA 2005

October 26, 2005 -- Fourteen EES faculty and students gave presentations at the annual Geological Society of America meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, on October 16-19, 2005. (NMT article)

Also at the GSA meeting, Professor of Hydrology Fred Phillips received the Kirk Bryan Award for Excellence for 2005, and alumna Michelle Walvoord (MS Hydrology '99, PhD Hydrology '02), pictured at left, received the GSA-Subaru Outstanding Woman in Science Award for 2005. (Related articles: EES, El Defensor Chieftain, NMT).
--R.R., S.D.

M-Mountain Run 2005

October 23, 2006 -- Roger Renteria documented the M-Mountain Run this year. EES members again had a strong showing. Story and pictures are here.

Field Study in Antarctica

October 18, 2005 -- Geophysics undergraduate Kyle Jones will be heading to Antarctica in late November to assist in an NSF-sponsored geologic field study. He will be joining geochemistry professors Philip Kyle and Bill McIntosh to study Mount Erebus in Antarctica. Jones was featured in a recent NMT article about his trip to Antarctica.
--R.R., S.D.

Tobin in Ocean Drilling Documentary

September 30, 2005 -- Associate Professor of Geophysics Harold Tobin spent the day being filmed by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) for an upcoming documentary about the NanTroSEIZE Expedition. The filming took place at the trench on the Socorro Canyon Fault, just off US 60 west of Socorro (pictured above), as well as on the NMT campus.

The picture above was taken while Tobin (middle) was expounding on plans to drill into an underwater earthquake fault. On the left is Nancy Light, Director of Communications at IODP, and Film Director Rich Field of Richfield Productions is on the right.

Tobin is the co-Chief Project Scientist of the NanTroSEIZE Expedition which will be conducted by IODP. The expedition will drill in waters off Japan to learn more about how earthquakes and tsunamis occur. Drilling will begin in the summer of 2007 and will continue for several years. Photo by Clay Wright, Desert Gem Productions. -- S.D.

Best Poster Award

September 28, 2005 -- Congratulations to Marty Frisbee, PhD student in hydrology. He won the best poster award among the PhD/Postdoc hillslope students at the 1st SLICE (SLope InterComparison Experiment) Workshop held at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in Blue River, Oregon, from September 26-28, 2005. The poster was titled "Hillslope Hydrology and Wetland Response of a Small Zero-order Boreal Catchment on the Precambrian Shield," by M.D. Frisbee, C.J. Allan, M.J. Thomasson, and R. Mackereth. (NMT article)

Chevron-Texaco Scholarship Awards

September 19, 2005 -- The E&ES awards committee has selected six students for a scholarship award from Chevron-Texaco. Shannon Archer, Shari Houston, and Ariel Dickens, each have been awarded a $1,000 scholarship. Jayme Margolin, Michael Iacoboni, and Melissa Dimeo, each have been awarded a $500 scholarship. Congratulations!

Large Earthquakes and Tsunamis

September 12, 2005 -- Sue Bilek was invited to give a talk at the American Museum of Natural History on October 6, 2005. The talk, titled "Large Earthquakes and Tsunamis," focused on the December 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami.

Last Updated: March 18, 2008. Email comments to Webmaster.
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