Civil rights activist and two-time presidential candidate Jesse Jackson is
to speak on Monday, Feb. 1, at 6:30 p.m. in Memorial Chapel.
Members of the Union community may pick up a ticket with college ID for this
campus-only event.
Faculty and staff may get tickets from Central Scheduling. Students may get tickets at
Reamer Campus Center Atrium.
1. The minutes of January 4, 1999, concerning the calendar were modified to
read, “Following the Board's discussion, the AAC will distribute the report to
the community.”
2. A letter was distributed from the Chair of Sociology concerning the external review
of the department.
3. The document prepared by Dean Cool on the calendar was discussed and amended.
Read MorePresident Roger Hull has appointed a committee to lead the search for a new vice
president for College Relations.
Chaired by Dan Lundquist, vice president for admissions and financial aid, other
members are John Garver, geology; Louisa Matthew, art history; George Butterstein,
biology; Elisabeth Bischoff-Ormsbee, annual giving; alumni trustee Karen Huggins '77;
and senior student trustee Jon Zandman.
Dan West, former vice president for College Relations, has accepted a similar position
at Swarthmore College.
“Dan West helped to make this great college greater and we all appreciate the
contributions he and his wife, Sidney, made to the place over the past six years,”
Hull said. “The search for his successor will be critical to the success of the
College in number of ways, and I welcome advice, nominations, and applications from all
alumni and friends.”
Schenectady, N.Y. (Jan. 22, 1999) – At the start of this century, before even the telephone, people sent postcards like we send e-mail today. “I'll see you on Saturday,” was a typical message.
Many of those messages were scrawled on postcards that featured buildings and scenes of the Union campus.
Lance Spallholz, instructor of computer science, has been finding these little pieces of Union history tucked away in antique stores as far away as Crisfield, Md.
Now, he's sharing his hobby over the Internet. His homepage — http://tardis.union.edu/~spallhol/postcards — features the decade-old collection of Union postcards.
His site gives a glimpse of the postcards he has found: South College, the Nott Memorial (then called Memorial Hall), the old Washburn Hall. The cards date from about 1906 to 1920. Many were printed or hand-colored in Germany
A postcard of the Nott Memorial carries the message, “Here is one of the great buildings where many great men have received their learning.”
On a 1908 postcard of South College the sender wrote, “X marks Harry's room where we are having a fun time, but most too strenuous for me.”
Some of the messages are poignant, like this one on the back of a postcard of South College: “If your father had a good memory, he could tell you what a good time he had here.”
On another: “Hard luck, Milton. Rain, nothing but rain up here – with love, Mother.”
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Schenectady, N.Y. (Jan. 18, 1999) – Some mud stashed away in the back of a refrigerator at Union College may begin to answer to a number of questions scientists are asking about El Niño.
Donald T. Rodbell, assistant professor of geology at Union, reports in the Jan. 22 issue of Science on a 30-foot-long column of sediment he and a fellow researcher obtained in 1993 from a high-elevation lake in the southern Ecuadoran Andes.
Noting that more work needs to be done to duplicate the findings, Rodbell writes that this sample suggests that during the past 5,000 years, El Niño occurred every two to eight years, the same frequency we see in modern times. The sample also suggests that El Niño was weak or non-existent between 5,000 and 12,000 years ago.
Rodbell and his student, Jeremy Newman, in 1996 began to take a serious look at the sample that had been sitting in their lab cooler for several years. What they found in the core is a data-rich natural archive, the first continuous record of El Niño events dating back more than 5,000 years.
“We didn't know exactly what we had,” says Rodbell. “When we took this core, we thought the light-colored striations from landscape and flood events were very pronounced and unusual. We called them 'zebra stripes.' At the time, we were more interested in climate change associated with the last ice age, but in the back of my mind I wondered if these patterns were somehow connected to El Niño.
Rodbell is lead author of the Science article. His co-authors are Newman; Geoffrey Seltzer of Syracuse University; David Anderson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Mark Abbott of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and David Enfield of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.
Their study, while preliminary, has generated excitement among scientists worldwide who are trying to unlock the mysteries of El Niño. “Based on this work, we realized that this one lake, while interesting because it may have provided the longest El Niño record ever found, is only one sample,” Rodbell says. “We want to go in and compare it with samples from other lakes in the area.”
Rodbell was recently awarded a two-year grant of $90,000 from the National Science Foundation to investigate the climatic record preserved in sediment cores from other high-elevation lakes in southern Ecuador. The initial core suggests that lakes in this area may provide a natural archive of El Niño events covering the last 15,000 years, the longest continuous record of El Niño activity ever discovered.
Rodbell and Seltzer obtained the sediment core sample from Lake Pallcacocha in southern Ecuador. After initial analysis, the core went back to the refrigerator, where it stayed for three years until the scientists pulled it out for a closer look. Newman and Rodbell adapted medical imaging software to quantify shifts in the patterns of layers.
The core sample contains hundreds of layers of sediment deposited over a period of about 15,000 years. About midway through the 30-foot core (representing a period of time beginning about 5,000 years ago) there are a series of light-colored sediment bands that occur approximately every 10 years or less. The bands contain the type of debris — mostly inorganic material washed from the slopes of nearby mountains — which would flow into the lake only during periods of heavy rainfall and flooding — conditions likely triggered by ancient El Niño events, Rodbell says.
Characterized by warm ocean currents that begin off of the western South American coast, El Niño can affect weather systems across both North and South America — from tumultuous rainfall in northern Peru and southern Ecuador to unusually warm and dry conditions in the northeastern United States and western tropical Pacific. Until now, scientists did not have a clear understanding of when these events first began. Written records and anecdotal observations of El Niño events go back only several centuries.
“The question many scientists are asking is, 'What will happen to El Niño as the global climate gets warmer,'” Rodbell says. “The computer models are good, but they are limited by our understanding of how El Niño works. El Niño may be driven by a number of factors other than global climate.”
Contact information:
Donald T. Rodbell, Department of Geology, Union College
(518) 388-6034
rodbelld@union.edu
Charlie Casey, director of the news bureau, Union College
(518) 388-6090
caseyc@alice.union.edu
Union College was ranked 14th of U.S. colleges in
the number of students who studied abroad during 1996-97, according to a survey by the
Institute for International Education (IIE), published Dec. 11 in The Chronicle of
Higher Education.
Union last year was ranked 8th, 11th the year before.
Union had 249 students – more than 12 percent of the enrollment — study
abroad during the 1996-97 academic year, the period of the study by the IIE.
St. Olaf's College topped the list with 599 students, Colgate University was
second with 427, and College of St. Benedict/St. John third with 417. The IIE survey
ranked institutions that grant bachelor degrees.
An accompanying article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that
nearly 100,000 U.S. students who studied abroad in 1996-97 represented an 11.4 percent
increase over the previous year. The statistics are from the organization's annual
report on international education exchange; the most recent edition “Open Doors
1997-98,” was just released.
Highlights of the report can be found on the IIE Web site: www.iie.org/opendoors/.
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