It's a little creepy if you allow yourself to dwell on it--the cavernous, high-ceilinged hallways with peeling paint just the other side of the door blocked by a tall cabinet in Dorothy Sack's new laboratory. One can almost hear voices of the earlier residents echoing from the gloomy, unused portions of Building Seven at the Ridges, the former state-operated Athens Mental Health Center.
But inside the lab, Dr. Sack, associate professor of geography, and two geography graduate students, Jon Van de Grift and Mark Fonstad, seem unperturbed by ghosts of the past as they immerse themselves in work made much easier by creation of the new facility. In fact, the several rooms carved from a portion of the building are light and airy, and, according to Dr. Sack, very pleasant to work in. The laboratory is just what Dr. Sack needed for her research--which involves lots of dirt. She said:
In Clippinger Hall, the Department of Geography had no space for a laboratory where I could perform physical and chemical analyses of field-collected sediments and prepare samples for radiometric dating. There was really no need for this kind of research lab until I joined the department as a physical geographer in the fall of 1994. Meteorologist Ronald Isaac (assistant professor of geography) mostly usescomputers and meteorological instruments. He uses "clean" space. But I am a geomorphologist--a person who studies land forms--and I needed a research lab for "dirt." Although this isn't a classroom lab, graduate students conducting physical or chemical analyses for their thesis research will work here, too.
Dr. Sack's research involves the landforms and sediments of ancient Lake Bonneville, which existed during the last Ice Age in western Utah. Great Salt Lake and the Bonneville Salt Flats are remnants of the paleolake, which was once as large as modern Lake Michigan. Dr. Sack maps surficial deposits and studies the layers of sediment in order to reconstruct the chronology of the lake. From that research she contributes to an understanding of the regional paleoclimate. Such knowledge of past climates may help other scientists model and predict future climates.
Dr. Sack displayed a number of plastic bags containing samples from Lake Bonneville. "This one is mud, a deep water sediment from the middle of the lake where things were pretty still and sediment settled very slowly," she said. "Sediment in this other bag is poorly sorted, with a variety of grain sizes--everything from clay (small) to gravel (large)."
Another aspect of her research is showing changes happening over a much shorter period of time than millennia--that of damage to Utah desert sand dunes by off-road vehicles. "Sand ranges in size from 0.0625 to 2.0 millimeters," Dr. Sack said, her voice rising as she switched on a noisy brass sieve shaker that sorts sand grains by size.
By comparing sand sediment from an area of the dune field where off-road vehicles have been ridden for the past several years to an area where they have never been ridden, I have shown that the dunes are being compacted by the vehicle usage. The areas have the same climate and sand source--an old Lake Bonneville delta. Everything matches, except that vehicles are used in one area and not in another.Using a penotrometer--an instrument that measures how much force it takes to ram a rod into the sand-- I conducted field tests and found greater compaction in the area where vehicles are ridden. Because the penotrometer values vary with grain size and water content I had to collect samples of the sediment, determine grain size and moisture characteristics, and see if they had an impact on the penotrometer readings.
Dr. Sack presented a paper on this aspect of her research in April at the
Association of American Geographers annual meeting. She teaches Geography
101, "Introductory Physical Geography"; Geography 271, "Introduction to
Statistics"; and Geography 315, "Landforms and Landscapes."
Jim Dyer, assistant professor of geography, who joined the staff in the fall of 1995, will also use the lab facilities to analyze plant and soil samples for his research efforts. A biogeographer, Dr. Dyer's research concentrates on an old-growth northern floodplain forest of the Allegheny Wilderness Islands in Pennsylvania and on examining the encroachment of tree line into a high-elevation meadow at Buck Mountain, near Ruidoso, New Mexico.
The new laboratory was made possible in part by a generous gift from alum Carl Ross and is named the Carl Ross Physical Geography Laboratory. Mr. Ross received a B.S. in elementary education with a geography major in 1936 and a B.S. Ed. in geography in 1937 from Ohio University. He is presently retired after a long career of teaching geography and civil service as a geographer for the U.S. government. Following military service at the end of World War II, Mr. Ross worked as a geographer for the U.S. Department of Commerce and for the U.S. Army for twenty years and later held a six-year teaching position with Southern Connecticut State University.
Finding suitable space, remodeling it, and furnishing the lab was accomplished through the cooperative efforts of several units on campus. The Dean's office of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Geography, and Facilities Management figured prominently in this effort.
Three separate work areas were shaped from one initial room--roughly 1,500 square feet--which was formerly used for a dining hall for patients. "I was given a floor plan and was asked to put down on paper what I wanted for a lab," Dr. Sack said. "I tried a couple of different ways--it was a challenge because I had to work around two structural poles. We added walls to create three separate areas. The analyses involve noisy equipment and generate substantial dirt and dust, so it's great to have the main lab separate from smaller, quieter work areas."
The renovation included erecting divider walls and lowering ceilings from their original lofty height. All the walls were freshly painted in a light-enhancing color, and floors were stripped and waxed. From the hallway the first area one enters has storage space for sediment samples--dozens of boxes fill cabinet shelves. "This was all stored in my garage before. My husband was very glad to have them moved," laughed Dr. Sack. Field equipment fills another tall cabinet. In the middle of the room is a table for sorting, bagging, and labeling sediments.
The main laboratory area features two walls of counters with drawers for storage, a double sink and a single sink, and attractive glass-fronted hanging cabinets. An oven, fume hood, microscope, sample splitter, sieve shaker, and other research instruments line the counter tops. The spacious area has room for work tables as well. Yet another room is equipped with drafting tables, filing cabinets, map cases, and a desk for graduate students. A small, oval-shaped room was remodeled for Dr. Sack's office.