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Professor of Geosciences Barbara Tewksbury and Geosciences Technician Dave Tewksbury gave several presentations at the 6th Quadrennial Conference of the International Geoscience Educators Organisation (IGEO) held Aug. 30 – Sept. 3, at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Professor of Geosciences Barbara Tewksbury was part of a science team that supported NASA’s 2010 Desert RATS (Research and Technology Studies) project in September in Flagstaff, Az. One of the aims of the mission was to conduct two weeks of geologic field work simulating lunar operations in order to test various data collection and communications scenarios.

 Hamilton Professor of Geosciences Barbara Tewksbury spent several days in August near Los Alamos, N.M., teaching NASA's latest group of astronaut candidates how to do geologic field work and mapping.

Most people use the program Google Earth to zoom in on their houses, fly through the Grand Canyon, or maybe to see if their neighbors have pools. But from the geosciences lab of Barbara Tewksbury, Tucker Keren ’13 and Steve Kemp ‘11 are using the program to analyze some fascinating linear features in the southwest corner of the Egyptian desert several hundred kilometers west of Aswan.

This is Nora Grenfell's '12 third report from a field study in Iceland.Our backcountry camping tour of Iceland began our second week. Prior to that, we had been staying in hostels around the capital area, but come Sunday we piled our packs in a bus and prepared for a week on the road. Our bus was nicely equipped with a cooking trailer, and we were accompanied by Sola, our cook (and her daughter Sofia, whose English put us all to shame) our driver, Franz, and our guide, Jon, who has known Professor Tewksbury for more than 30 years!

For a country with a population smaller than that of Wyoming, Iceland drew a lot of attention this spring when a more typically dormant volcano erupted and brought European air travel to a stop. Over the next two weeks, several Hamilton students will be able to observe for themselves this spectacular country and its many unique geologic features.

Anoop Pandey '10 is responsible for distributing the famed "golden bikes" for free student use on campus, but the part of the globe he's studying certainly isn't accessible by bike. This summer, Pandey is using remote sensing to study unusual fold structures along faults in the Western Desert of Egypt. He is working with Upson Chair for Public Discourse and Professor of Geosciences Barbara Tewksbury. 

During the last Ice Age, the whole country of Iceland was covered in a thick sheet of ice. From an aerial view, most of the island would have appeared to be in a state of frigid serenity. But under the ice, chaos ensued – massive volcanoes entombed in the ice erupted often, causing the overlying ice to melt. As the hot lava erupted into cold water, explosions occurred, depositing fragmented rock and glass with few lava flows.

Professor of Geosciences Barbara Tewksbury delivered the commencement address at Virginia Tech's Department of Geosciences graduation ceremony on May 10. The title of her address was "Insights from Apollo for Teaching and Learning Geoscience in the 21st Century."