Funneling water-monitoring well data into a geodatabase. Researching formations suitable for CO2 sequestration. Creating a digital storytelling exhibit about fossils. Analyzing coal ash samples for rare earth elements. Four Indiana earth science students have been able to explore more research and career options than they’d known existed before their Potter Internships began in May.

The students, Elena Cruz, Rachel Culver, Melissa Humbarger, and Trent Stegink, are the IGWS’s second class of Potter Interns, chosen for 4- to 10-week paid internships funded by the Paul Edwin Potter Trust.

Potter, a geologist and professor in the Midwest and South America, worked at Indiana University from 1963 to 1970. His estate granted $1 million each to the geological surveys of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Kentucky to establish “summer internships for worthy and deserving geology students and other persons involved in high school, college, or post-graduate master’s education … in the field of geology.” The IGWS is receiving a percentage of the endowment each year to hire Potter interns to work on “geologic problems linked to Indiana.”

This summer’s interns were chosen from a highly competitive pool of 48 applicants. Each was asked to pick from a list of six possible projects.

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An incident 10 years ago this month prompted geological researchers to expose a hazard that nearly claimed the life of a 6-year-old boy.

On July 12, 2013, the boy, from Illinois, was racing his father and two other people up Mount Baldy at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore (now a national park). The boy disappeared into the sand, and his friend yelled to their dads for help. They could hear him but couldn’t reach him through the 1-ft-diameter hole, and the sand they dug kept rushing back into the void.

Three-and-a-half hours later, the rescuers—dozens of people with probes, shovels, and excavators—pulled the boy out. He was still alive: a “miracle on Mount Baldy” which his parents attributed to a higher power.

Geologist Erin Argyilan, who’d been on that dune that day measuring wind speeds, wanted to learn why it happened. Two years later, she and several other researchers published a study in Aeolian Research about dune decomposition chimneys, which form when “migrating dunes encroach on a forest and buried trees subsequently decay, leaving a temporary stable open hole,” the abstract explains. When the stoss, or windward, side of the dune intersects the void, a hazard develops.

Mount Baldy was known to be a migrating and complex parabolic dune; it moves inland about 4 m per year, reforming as the shoreline lakeward of the dune erodes and sediment is redeposited westward. It’s expected to migrate so much that it will overtake a bathroom building and parking area at its base in the next five to 10 years.

What wasn’t apparent until the accident and subsequent dune closure was that Mount Baldy had overtaken and buried an oak forest—and that more holes existed. (“Four holes were discovered when people stepped into them during surveys,” Argyilan reported in the paper.)

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Limestone pieces that were considered inferior for architect use will soon be put on display at two Indiana museums precisely because of their “flaws.”

IGWS Volunteer Affiliate Dr. Brian Keith (at right) has spent several hours polishing out the saw marks from four of the nine slabs. They contain a large columnal stromatolite, a sedimentary feature created by cyanobacteria.

Stromatolites have the distinction of being the “world’s oldest fossil,” explained Keith, who co-wrote a guidebook entry about them in 2018 with IGWS Director Dr. Todd Thompson.

An even lesser-known fact is that stromatolites are responsible for enabling a key part of life as we now know it: “They basically changed the chemistry of the atmosphere to produce enough oxygen” for more complex life forms to develop, Keith said. They appeared on Earth up to 4 billion years ago, “back when bacteria were the only thing on Earth, for the first half of Earth’s history.”

Though they’re sometimes called blue-green algae, cyanobacteria aren’t technically algae, but they’re not clearly bacteria either, because cyanobacteria are photosynthetic—they convert carbon dioxide into oxygen—and bacteria generally aren’t.

"(Stromatolites) were, in the Precambrian, totally dominant for a billion-and-a-half years, until at least the first animals appeared," Keith said. That's when cyanobacteria retreated to environments unsuitable for the animals who sought to feast on them. These included tidal flats with elevated salinity and periodic exposure, freshwater lakes, and marine tidal channels. Stromatolites that grew in the channels are composed of sand-sized sediment, not mud as are most stromatolites.

The Salem Limestone at Crown Quarry, where Keith and Thompson have found more and larger stromatolites than anywhere else, shows evidence of a narrow tidal channel running through that area. The quarry was where Keith and Thompson first reported the occurrence of stromatolites in the Salem back in 1994. These stromatolites in the Salem are rarely found in the fossil record, Keith said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in the literature elsewhere in the world, other ones from the Miocene of Spain.”

Modern-day stromatolites have been documented in the Bahamas. And while it may be strange to think of Indiana and the Bahamas having anything in common, about 340 million years ago when Salem Limestone was being formed, the area now known as Indiana was near where the Bahamas are now, immersed in a warm, shallow sea.

Bybee Stone Company in Bloomington donated the slabs to the IGWS back in the ‘90s, as fossils are generally undesirable in building stone.

Keith has buffed four of the slabs to 1,000 grit with a countertop polisher and is debating whether he wants to go finer. One of the first slabs Keith finished, Thompson took on fieldtrips to the now-inactive quarry so visitors could see up close what is not easy to see in the quarry wall anymore. Peggy Fisherkeller attended one of those fieldtrips last year, heard there were more slabs, and requested one for the Indiana State Museum, which is what’s been keeping Keith busy. At least one more slab will go into the IGWS Learning Lab’s Education Collection.

“They’re a pretty special feature,” Keith said, “and with the rarity of them in the geologic record, it’s kind of exciting to have them here.”

• The IGWS Learning Lab attracted 3,493 visitors during its first year of operation. The one-year anniversary of its opening was June 3.

• An estimated 400 people attended the second annual Limestone Fest at the IGWS on June 17. (See photos at this link.) Visitors were invited to learn more about Indiana’s limestone heritage through games, crafts (at right), and historic photos; get info about trails and other recreational opportunities in the stone belt; look at core and the fossils that make up Indiana’s state stone; carve limestone pieces; enjoy an inflatable climbing course; and visit the IGWS’s Learning Lab. Mark your calendars for next year’s Limestone Fest on Saturday, June 15.

• Twelve Monroe County educators participated in a three-day Limestone Heritage Teacher’s Workshop in June, organized by IGWS Education and Outreach Coordinator Polly Sturgeon. Educators went on fieldtrips to two local quarries, a stone mill, a cemetery, a library, and a notable outcrop; tried their hands at carving at the Limestone Symposium; browsed the collections in the IGWS Learning Lab; and heard presentations from the Monroe County Historic Preservation Board of Review, the Indiana Limestone Institute of America, and IGWS staff members Dr. Todd Thompson, Jenna Lanman, and Kristen Wilkins. On a post-workshop survey, one participant wrote: “I have gained much knowledge, resources, and respect for this historically monumental place. It was one of the most amazing workshops I’ve ever attended.” The workshop was co-hosted by the IGWS and Monroe County Historic Preservation Board of Review.

• Thompson attended the 116th Annual Meeting of the Association of American State Geologists (AASG) in June. AASG membership consists of the leaders of geological surveys in each of the 50 states and Puerto Rico. The responsibilities of geological surveys differ from state to state; however, all function as the fundamental geologic scientific information source for the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of their state governments. Thompson is the president of the AASG Foundation and the chair of the 70-plus-member AASG Honorary Committee. He represented the IGWS during numerous breakout and plenary sessions and gave presentations on the foundation, honorary activities, and the IGWS STATEMAP Geological Framework Initiative.

• Research Scientist Ashley Douds was elected president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Energy Minerals Division (EMD). She’s currently president-elect, will be president in 2024-25 and then past president for 2025-26.

• Research Scientists Tracy Branam, Ginger Davis, and McKailey Sabaj attended the spring Indiana Water Resources Association meeting June 7-9 in West Lafayette on the Purdue University campus. Branam spoke about the Indiana Springs website, introducing its features and demonstrating some of the interpretive uses of the data. Sabaj presented a poster titled “Barium and Sulfur Isotope Exchange between Barite and 137Ba- and 32S- Enriched Solutions at Barite Solubility Equilibrium.” Davis is secretary and a past president of the IWRA.

• Branam also gave a presentation on how to navigate the Indiana Springs database website at the virtual Groundwater Focus Committee meeting of the Indiana Water Monitoring Council on June 15.

• IGWS Volunteer Affiliate Chris Kohler gave a presentation at the District 8 Emergency Planning and Preparation Coalition conference in French Lick in May. His talk was titled, "30 Years in HAZMAT: Projects, accidents, toxic tales, and urban legends."

• The fossilized tree trunks outside the IGWS/Geology Building were mentioned in the IU Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (DEAS) summer newsletter (page 22). (The E-Geo News did a piece on them in December.) DEAS Prof. David Polly and IGWS Director Thompson have been inquiring about relandscaping or moving the fossils to better preserve them. So far, IU Landscape Services has weeded and mulched the area to better highlight the fossils’ significance.

Dr. Allan F. Schneider, a research scientist at four geological surveys including Indiana’s, died June 9, 2023, in Wisconsin. He was 97.

Schneider worked for the Indiana Geological and Water Survey in the 1960s as part of a long research and teaching career in several states. A native of Chicago, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1948 from Beloit College, a master’s degree from Penn State University in 1951, and a PhD in 1957 from the University of Minnesota, all in geology. He taught at two of his alma maters (Penn State and UMN), Washington State University, Indiana University, and the University of Wisconsin Parkside, and worked for the geological surveys of Minnesota, Indiana, Wisconsin, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

At the IGWS, Schneider worked in the geology section, primarily as a glacial geologist. He was the lead author of two publications: "Geology of the Upper Fork Drainage Basin, Indiana" (1966) with Dr. Henry Gray, and Geologic Map of the 1° x 2° Chicago Quadrangle, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan Showing Bedrock and Unconsolidated Deposits (1970) with Stanley Keller. Schneider also received partial authorship credit for two IGWS guidebooks, one other geologic map, and one bulletin between 1965 and 1978.

One of his largest and longest-running projects was the codification of lithostratigraphic names for Quaternary sediments in Minnesota.

“Al made great contributions to our science and our profession, to help us all better understand how the global climate system works, and what we need to do to help protect drinking water,” wrote Harvey Thorleif of UMN and the Minnesota Geological Survey. “… His cheerful and thoughtful disposition meant a lot to us all.”

Read his obituary here.

The Indiana Geological and Water Survey, a longstanding institute of Indiana University, conducts research; surveys the state; collects and preserves geologic specimens and data; and disseminates information to contribute to the mitigation of geologic hazards and the wise stewardship of the energy, mineral, and water resources of Indiana.

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• To ask a question of IGWS staff or suggest an E-Geo News topic, email scliffo@iu.edu.