Rachel Graham '98 used the College's Martin Luther King Jr. observance on Monday to announce a new initiative for Hamilton Hill children and to solicit members of the Union community to get involved.
C.O.C.O.A. House (Children of Our Community with Opportunities to Achieve) will be in
the basement of the Grace Temple Church of God and Christ at 30 Steuben Street,
Schenectady.
The after-school mentoring program, which was to begin on Wednesday, is intended to
provide children with a place to go after school and meet with mentors to work on
homework, play games or just talk. For information, call ext. 6832.
“It takes a whole village to raise a child,” Graham said at the College's
Martin Luther King commemoration. “On Hamilton Hill, we have a role as a College to
help them along the way and to show them that life is much broader than what they
see.”
Graham, whose father, Marvin, serves as pastor at Grace Temple, also urged members of
the Union community to get involved with other community volunteer efforts such as Big
Brothers/Big Sisters, YMCA and YWCA.
Also speaking at the College's MLK commemoration on Monday were Dan West, vice
president of college relations; Kathleen Buckley, Protestant chaplain; Tom Frieberg,
Catholic chaplain; and Les Carter, deputy director of program services for the state
Martin Luther King Jr. Commission for Non-Violence.
Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone, a national bestseller about the deadly Ebola virus, will speak Tuesday, Jan. 30, at 8 p.m. in the Reamer Campus Center Auditorium.
Preston's chilling account makes the deadly virus seem like something out of science fiction. But it is not. In describing his subject, Preston will detail the hair-raising and heroic efforts of an elite team of scientists and soldiers who struggle to contain an
outbreak of Ebola, which kills its victims in a matter of days. From the Biosafety Level 4 military lab where scientists work in space suits to a remote jungle cave filled with
deadly and unknown organisms, Preston tells the breathtaking story which inspired the film Outbreak.
His talk is co-sponsored by the Speakers Forum and the Minerva Committee.
Faculty, staff and students met with campus planners throughout the day on Tuesday to mull a draft of a facilities and space master plan for the 21st century.
The plan, described as a 20-year physical development agenda, is “very much a work in progress,” according to Richard Dober, principal of Dober, Lidsky, Craig
Associates, the Boston firm hired by the College. Dober described the framework of the plan and solicited comments from members of the Union community.
The draft plan called for “qualitative” changes, not “quantitative” ones, Dober said, explaining that it assumes no significant changes in the size, mission
or organization of the College.
The draft is to be presented to the Board of Trustees at its February meeting, Dober said.
The draft contained 25 proposals for physical development of buildings and sites. The items, which include improvements to academic, residential, athletic and administrative
spaces, have not been ordered by priority, Dober said.
Meanwhile, at a faculty meeting on Jan. 11, William Shafer, capital projects and construction manager, presented architects' drafts for the renovation and expansion of Schaffer Library. Plans call for the removal of the 1972 addition, and a total increase in size from the current 70,000 square feet to about 90,000 square feet. The two-phase project could begin as early as the end of this year, with completion by the end of 1998, he said.
Shafer showed renderings of a three-story building with an open atrium area. The first-floor entry area would contain reference services. The second-floor learning center would contain an electronic classroom, group study area and language lab. The building also would contain a welcoming periodicals reading room with computer facilities. Special Collections would have a classroom space and areas for public lectures and exhibits. The west facade of the building would remain largely unchanged, with most of the expansion to
take place at the building's east end, Shafer said.
President Roger Hull announced that about $9.5 million has been raised for the library. Total cost is estimated at around $17 million — $12 million for construction, $2 million for a maintenance endowment, and $3 million for a technology endowment, he said.
Also at the faculty meeting, Louisa Matthew was elected to a replacement position on the Academic Affairs Council. Julius Barbanel and Frank Wicks were elected to replacement
positions on the Student Affairs Committee.
Wes LeMasurier '59 (left> with his field party at McMurdo Sound
Wes LeMasurier '59 has his name on hundreds of square miles of waterfront property.
The only problem? The site's a little hard to get to, and Antarctica isn't really the best place to take a vacation.
That doesn't bother LeMasurier. When the U.S. Board of Geographical Names informed him in the
early 1970s that a volcanic mountain on the Pacific coast of Antarctica would bear his name, LeMasurier was more than satisfied.
“It's not a giant mountain, but I'll take it,” says LeMasurier, a professor of geology at the University of Colorado. “It looks real good from the water. But it isn't exactly going to be something like Pike's Peak, where thousands of people go every year. Perhaps one or two people every ten years will see it.”
LeMasurier's mountain is in a remote area of Antarctica that he was one of the first to explore, back in 1968. It's among a group of volcanoes that
forms the southern portion of what geologists refer to as the Pacific Rim of Fire-a circle of volcanoes stretching for thousands of miles around the Pacific Ocean.
According to LeMasurier, the Antarctic section of the rim has a different origin. Elsewhere, volcanoes arise when the edges of two plates come
together one plate tucks under another and pushes up the higher plate.
In Antarctica, the volcanoes seem to be the result of a plate that is being stretched. No one knows why, but LeMasurier's best guess is that the phenomenon is caused by hot material rising from the earth's mantle. The material pushes up through the plate, causing it to crack and form volcanoes on the surface and underneath the ice and glaciers that cover the southernmost continent.
LeMasurier, who has been studying volcanoes since the 1960s, when he earned a Ph.D. in volcanology from Stanford University, says that his research “is the sort of thing where you have to gather samples at the surface in the area and imagine what's going on beneath the ice sheet and deep within the earth's interior. For example, samples composed of chips of basalt glass probably were erupted
in contact with glacial ice, and these can help determine the history of the ice sheet.”
He has gathered his materials on seven trips to Antarctica during the past twenty-five years. The trips, which have varied from two weeks to two and a half months, aren't your average journeys to Antarctica-if there is
such a thing. After the six to eight-hour flight from New Zealand, LeMasurier has to board a U.S. Navy j transport plane for a 1,000-mile flight east to one of the most remote areas in the world. From there, he boards a snowmobile for further exploration.
How does it feel to be the first human being to explore a part of the earth? “It adds a great deal of excitement to the work,” he says. “If you're the first one, you have very little idea what to expect, except that there will be a lot of surprises.”
Since he has often been the first person to study these volcanoes, LeMasurier says he doesn't enter the region with any specific scientific objectives.
“The idea is to discover what's there first, then piece together the geologic history that's recorded in volcanic rocks,” he says. He tries to collect plenty of samples, which will provide clues to how the volcanoes evolved, and takes a lot of pictures, because he knows he may never get back. It took him eighteen years to get back to one especially interesting volcano.
LeMasurier takes his samples and photos to his lab in Colorado to study them for several years. In addition to many articles in professional journals, he has written one book, Volcanoes Of the Antarctic Plate and Southern Ocean.
One trip always seems to bring on another, since “it's tough to get it all right the first time you're there.” An eighth journey isn't outside the realm of possibilities, he says, but for now, “I still need to publish some of the data I found the last time.”
Karen St. Germain '87 says she always wanted a career that would be filled with adventures.
Yet, even she probably could not have predicted that a Ph.D. in microwave remote sensing would send her into the eyes of numerous hurricanes, on a snowmobile traverse of Greenland, and across the Weddell Sea on an ice breaker.
St. Germain, who teaches electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, says the adventures allow her to combine her interest in the environment with her love of science.
°I rarely work with other engineers,” she says. “One of the great bonuses of my job is that I'm constantly interacting with a whole variety of meteorologists, physicists, and climatologists.”
During her senior year at Union, the electrical engineering and physics major went for what she thought would be an interview for a job in the optical communications division at Raytheon, the defense contractor.
This was still the age of the Cold War, though, and when St. Germain arrived at Raytheon she was told that the position that was available was in the missile systems division.
“I wouldn't argue that making missiles did not eventually help lead us on the path to disarmament, but it wasn't really what I was interested in,” St. Germain says.
So, instead of entering the military industrial complex, St. Germain headed to graduate school in microwave engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. There, as St. Germain explains it, she would try to figure out how to “observe a target without actually coming into contact with the target.” As the end of summer approached, so did hurricane season, which meant that her first research project was about to begin.
Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAH) in Florida were searching for a way to measure the speed of the wind as it rolls across the surface of the ocean's waters during a hurricane. St. Germain and her research team had an idea. When wind rushes across the sea, it creates
rough waters and foam, which produce increased radiation. Using a radiometer to measure the amount of radiation, scientists could then accurately estimate the wind speed from an aircraft flying at a safe altitude.
Taking those measurements wasn't the only hard part. “I'd get a call at 2 p.m. telling me there was another hurricane, and at 3 p.m. I'd board a plane to Miami. By 6 a.m., I'd be on a NOAA plane out in the Atlantic so we could start flying through the hurricane.”
Although the Orion P-3 aircraft she was in was built to withstand turbulence, St. Germain remembers being “knocked around a bit. I didn't feel like I was in a great deal of danger, but I didn't exactly feel like eating while we were flying.”
Further research has taken St. Germain into the neighborhoods of both the North and South Poles to figure out how to measure the thickness of ice. Since the Navy sometimes likes to hide its submarines under the Arctic ice sheets, its submarine captains need to know if the ice will be thin enough to break through when they decide to bring their vessels to the surface. Since the amount of radiation ice gives off is related to its thickness, measuring that radiation using remote sensing systems can enable satellites to map out the thickness of the sea ice throughout the entire Arctic and Antarctic regions.
In the fall of 1989, St. Germain found herself in Antarctica's Weddell Sea aboard a German ice breaker. In one of the lesser known celebrations of the end of the Cold War, the German ice breaker was able to rendezvous with a Russian ice breaker for a cold but memorable party as the Berlin Wall fell.
The ice-measuring technology isn't used just for military purposes. Sea ice also acts as an insulating layer between the relatively warm ocean and the very cold polar atmosphere, making it a critical component of the global climate. In the summer of
1994, when climatologists were interested in the potential thinning of Greenland's ice sheet, St. Germain and a research team headed north with their cold-weather gear for a four-week snowmobile ride across perhaps the iciest country on the globe.
This year, most of her research has been conducted indoors. After receiving a fellowship from NASA this past summer, St. Germain conducted her most recent research at the Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt, Md. There, she and a colleague attempted to use satellite observations to map the temperature of ice across the Arctic oceans.
St. Germain says that these days teaching is her toughest challenge. “It's not as easy as it looks,” she reports.
And the future? “You just have to keep yourself open to different opportunities,” she says. “NASA exposed me to a lot of new funding sponsors and research programs. As long as there are environmental needs for microwave remote sensing technology, I hope I'll be there to meet them.”
