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Foreign Professors Visit the USGS' Center for Coastal and Watershed Studies in St. Petersburg, FL
Two professors visited the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)'s Center for Coastal and Watershed Studies in St. Petersburg, FL, in spring 2003 to further their education and look for opportunities for continued collaboration with the USGS. Ivan Correa and Scott Nichol worked under the guidance of Bob Morton, looking at different aspects of coastal research that have piqued Bob's interest in the past. Ivan, whose formal name is Ivan D. Correa Arango, is a professor of coastal and marine geology at EAFIT University in Medellín, Colombia. He formerly worked at INGEOMINAS, the Colombian equivalent of the USGS. Ivan first met Bob in the mid-1990s, when Bob was lecturing in Bogotá. Ivan has published reports on both the Pacific and the Caribbean coasts of Colombia, which are quite different in terms of geologic setting and coastal environment. He received his doctorate in Bordeaux, France, and is fluent in Spanish, English, and French. Ivan visited the USGS on a 4-month sabbatical to learn about the USGS' coastal and marine research and the types of products we produce. He translated into Spanish a "Geoindicators" paper that Bob wrote about tropical coasts and prepared a summary of information about the Colombian coasts for a revised version of The World's Coastline (edited by Eric Bird and Maurice Schwartz in 1985) that is being prepared for electronic publication by Kluwer Academic Press early next year as "The World's Coasts: Online"a project organized by Eric Bird of the University of Melbourne, Australia. Ivan also took a field trip to Louisiana, where he worked with Juan Luis Gonzalez (University of Illinois, Chicago), who is collecting basal peat cores to help refine sea-level curves. Scott Nichol, who currently resides in New Zealand, visited the USGS for a month during his winter break. Scott took advantage of his trip to the Coastal Sediments '03 Conference, held in May in Clearwater, FL, to continue his research on the comparative sedimentology of storm and tsunami deposits. Scott is a senior lecturer in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Auckland. His research interests are coastal geomorphology and evolution, tsunamis in the geologic record, and sea-level change. Scott is a native of Australia, where he received his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney. Later, he held a postdoctoral position at Halifax, Nova Scotia, before accepting the teaching position in New Zealand. He has conducted research in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the U.S. Gulf Coast, Canada, and Antarctica. The Center for Coastal and Watershed Studies was fortunate to host two outstanding international researchers, and hopes they will continue their collaboration with the USGS.
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in this issue:
cover story: Gas Hydrate: Potential Drilling Hazard Foreign Professors Visit St. Pete |