Q. What’s your research?
A. I work on the Mesozoic and
Cenozoic terrestrial paleoclimatology of stacks of paleosols in the clastic
deposits filling continental sedimentary basins. I do this using petrographic
and stable isotope techniques to investigate the diagenesis and paleohydrology
of terrestrial carbonates. A lot of effort in recent years has been devoted to
improvements in chronostratigraphic resolution using carbon isotope
chemostratigraphy and collaborative efforts with U-Pb geochronologists.
Q. Where is your favorite field area
(and why?)?
A. I keep going back over and over again
to the San Rafael desert in eastern Utah to investigate the paleopedology,
paleoclimatology, and chronostratigraphy of the Early Cretaceous Cedar Mountain
Formation. This work has been carried out in concert with a group of
colleagues and students who are similarly drawn to this awesome landscape and
set of allied scientific questions.
Q. What do you enjoy about serving
as JSR AE?
A. Just from having been around long
enough, I can quickly think of appropriate peer reviewers to tap in case the
author’s suggested reviewers don’t work out. In those instances, that helps me
accelerate the peer review process for the journal. My term has been long
enough to get a good sense of the wide range in the quality of submitted
manuscripts, and that has helped me to quicken the pace of making recommendations
to the Editors. I have really enjoyed having the chance to monitor new
developments in the field of sedimentary geology through AE service to JSR.
Q. What was your favorite JSR paper
from “back in the day” (or a recent year)?
A. I think back to my early years as
a Ph.D student, and the impact that Robert Berner’s 1981 paper “A New
Geochemical Classification of Sedimentary Environments” (JSP, v. 51, no. 2, p.
359-365) had on me at the time. It was a simple, elegant paper that pulled
together a framework on how to interpret the presence of redox-sensitive
authigenic minerals, and what they indicated about depositional
environments. I read that paper at just the right time to begin collating
my own field experiences and develop a world view on how redox processes are
encoded in the sedimentary rock record.
Q. What are your hobbies?
A. I plant trees. I live on a rural
acreage with a lot of space, meaning that my long-standing impulse toward
therapeutic silviculture is not very well constrained. I am tending to an
embarrassingly large number of sapling trees, and I enjoy making daily to weekly
visits to see how they are doing. They live in slow-motion time scales
relative to our daily human experiences, but if you look closely, they offer
lots of clues.
Q. What’s on your favorite Pandora
station?
A. I let my involvement with Pandora
lapse some time ago. I am drawn to American Roots and folk music, and my
exposure to new material in this genre comes from listening to local NPR
affiliates on FM radio. Pretty old school, I know.
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