Geography - Geology News

Starting with Volume 10 (1980-1981) and continuing off and on in more than a dozen volumes thereafter, Glacial Deposits has published letters from Linda (Lopeman) Matsui to Dr. E. Joan Miller. Linda graduated from Illinois State with a Geography degree in 1980 and moved almost immediately to Japan to teach English. It has been several years since we published a letter from Linda, so her Christmas 2009 letter seemed like a good way to help catch up with her life as an American wife of a Japanese man. In her letter, Linda refers to an August 2009 quake but notes that it was not the long-predicted super quake they were expecting. Larry Haigh prepared a map to go along with her letter, marking many of the places that Linda mentions. Then came the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami of March 11, 2011. Larry added to the map the large city of Sendai, which is just west of the oceanic epicenter of the quake, and the devastated nuclear power plant that has caused so much grief. Professor Robert Nelson provided the graph array and text about how a quake so distant registered on an instrument not far from our campus.

(To see the print version, read more of Volume 39, or view other issues of Glacial Deposits, click here.)

Letter from Japan

Dear Dr. Miller,                                                                              Christmas 2009

In February, the 40th anniversary of the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese convention was held just outside of Tokyo, in Chiba. The convention is always a highlight of my year and I was happy to make the event again this year. It is when I see other women like myself living in all corners of Japan and some even come from overseas to attend. I have been a member of the group for 25 years now.

Katsumi will be retiring at the end of March 2010, after 44 years with his company. He has had some 40 days paid vacation to use before then so this year we made various jaunts within Japan. In February, we ate a fabulous meal looking out over Mt. Fuji, framed by the bright blue Pacific Ocean and Izu Peninsula, at a little hideaway restaurant we discovered by chance. In April, we had a great day seeing ―the tunnel of cherry blossoms‖ in Fujieda, not far from where Katsumi works. In May, we spent a couple of nights at a lodge deep in Japan‘s Southern Alps. We went there several times when the kids were small so that trip was very nostalgic for us. In June, we spent the day viewing Japanese iris at a historical iris farm in Kakegawa, a place we first visited while dating and have returned to many times over the years. In July, we flew up to Sapporo, Hokkaido, from the new Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Airport that opened in June only 15 minutes from our home. We spent the week in Hokkaido driving up to the most northern point in Japan, next to Sakhalin, Russia, and taking ferries to the islands of Rishiri and Rebun, and finally drove back to Sapporo via the magnificent lavender fields in the Furano area. Food from Hokkaido is considered the best in the country and we ate our fill of crab, sea urchin, scallops, and melon. Hokkaido is very different from the rest of Japan in terms of scenery and climate. I‘ll be headed there again in late January for the next foreign wives convention and am looking forward to seeing all the deep snow just a week before the famous Snow Festival. We, also, enjoyed a day in late November enjoying the colorful Japanese maple trees in Mori-machi.

In April, I started a new job as part-time instructor of English at the Shizuoka Professional Training College of International Communication, Air, and Resort – “S-Air” for short. The students are studying to be flight attendants, airport ground staff, travel agents, resort hotel staff, and interpreters. They study English, Korean, and Chinese as part of their curriculum. This is only the second year of the school, as it was opened in connection to the new airport. Besides Japanese students, we have been able to attract students from Indonesia and China and next year may also have students from Myanmar. This has been a new challenge for me and this job is more time consuming than any work I‘ve ever had in Japan. I now find myself on rush hour trains making a commute of nearly 2 hours on the days I teach.

On August 11, we were in the epicenter of an M 6.5 earthquake which struck at 5:07 a.m. The tail-end of a typhoon was also passing through at the time so it was pitch dark and raining when the quake struck. This was the strongest quake that either Katsumi or I have been in as the last big quake to strike this area was before Katsumi was born. Thirty years of earthquake training paid off and I knew exactly how to respond and remained calm. I started to fill the bathtub with water shortly after the shaking stopped but our water soon stopped, only to resume about an hour later. However, it was too rusty and murky for drinking. We drank bottled water for the next week. During all of my time in Japan, I had never seen earthquake damage with my own eyes so it was somewhat shocking to leave my house that morning and see nearly half of all houses in my neighborhood with tile roofs damaged. To this day there are still many houses in my community awaiting roof repairs. Over 1,000 houses in just my town suffered damage. Fortunately, there was only one death in the earthquake. Sadly, this was not the long predicted “Tokai Earthquake” that is expected to have a magnitude of 8 so we may still experience something much, much worse in the future.

Our family dynamics changed this year with the greeting of our first grandchild—a girl. Mari Takekawa was born September 19 to our daughter, Mikiko, and her husband, Gen. They live more than 5 hours from us but I was able to visit Mikiko over the summer to help her get ready for the baby. In November, Mikiko and Mari spent a week with us. My son-in-law, Gen, is hoping to make Christmas at our house an annual family event so I‘ll try my hardest to show him a Christmas that doesn‘t consist of Kentucky Fried Chicken, sushi, and sponge cake decorated with whipped cream and strawberries. Instead, my favorite fruitcake recipe is already mellowing for the holidays and an imported turkey has just arrived by parcel post.

Naoki returned home from San Francisco, where he has been working the past 5 years, on September 20, to join us on a whirlwind trip to Nishinomiya to see baby Mari 2 days after she was born. Then Naoki stayed on for a visit with us for another 2½ weeks and saw friends and Japanese relatives, fished with his dad, helped care for the family graveyard, and ate a lot of mom‘s home cooking. He seems to be settling in to life in America with a long-term girlfriend there and the purchase of his first car. We miss him a lot, though.

I spent my final Christmas in America in 1979 with my extended family and set off on my big Japan adventure a few days later with only one suitcase. My Grandpa Beamer and Grandma Mary were still alive, as was my mother. At the time I had one niece, Leslie, who was 4 years old and one nephew, Christopher, who was a 5 month old baby. So many changes have happened in my family since then! On December 31, I will be marking a full 30 years in Japan. Hitting big milestones such as this tend to make me nostalgic, so indulge me a bit on reminiscing about how things were back then. At the time I arrived in Japan, foreign people were few and far apart and almost no street or rail signs used roman letters as everything was written in Japanese. Finding books in English or imported American foods were rare and extravagant luxuries; actually they still are but not quite at the same level as before. Jimmy Carter was still president and Mother Teresa had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Prince Charles had not yet gone out on his first date with Diana Spencer. Jesse Jackson was still about 4 years away from trying to become the first black American president. Michael Jackson was trying to make a comeback from his childhood days of popular ballads, like “I‘ll Be There,” by releasing “Don‘t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” and had broken his nose resulting in the first of his numerous plastic surgeries. The Sony Walkman had just gone on sale in Japan. Like America, almost no one in Japan had a video cassette recorder or microwave oven yet. The idea of owning a personal notebook computer, digital camera or TV, I-pod, or talking by cell phone was the stuff of science fiction. I certainly never could have imagined that 30 years on I‘d be turning on my own computer each morning and watching YouTube video updates of my granddaughter in utero, cooing, or doing other cute baby things or seeing the latest digital photos of her taken moments before, let alone learning about important world news or Facebook updates almost instantaneously! But for all the changes in the world, the traditions like hoping for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year live on as do prayers for peace on Earth and goodwill to all!                                                                                        Linda (Lopeman) Matsui

Tohoku Earthquake (or Great East Japan Earthquake)

At 2:46 in the afternoon of Friday, March 11, 2011, a major earthquake shook Japan. Eleven minutes and 54 seconds later, the first waves traveling through Earth reached the seismic station HDIL located 20 miles west of the Illinois State campus. The first arriving wave at 05:58:17 (GMT), or 23:58:17 (CST) on 10 March in central Illinois, was a compressional wave (P). Nine minutes and 25 seconds later the shear wave (S) arrived. Note that the east-west motion (top graph) was stronger than the north-south motion (middle), which was stronger than the vertical motion (bottom). Nine minutes and 3 seconds later the first of the surface waves arrived. The seismometer continued to record vibrations as Earth rang like a bell for three hours. This magnitude 9.0 earthquake was the fifth largest earthquake recorded by standardized seismometers since 1900. Portions of northern Japan were jolted to the east and southeast by as much as 4 meters and dropped about 0.6 meters by the quake and aftershocks. This displacement shifted Earth‘s axis 16.5 centimeters.                                                                 Robert S. Nelson

By Joseph J. Fluder III

Just north of Albuquerque, in central New Mexico, the Pueblo of Sandia is implementing the Pueblo of Sandia Riverine Habitat Restoration Project in portions of the Sandia Subreach of the Middle Rio Grande. The project goal is to provide benefit for the federally listed Rio Grande silvery minnow, the southwestern willow flycatcher, and the Rio Grande ecosystem as a whole. When implemented, the project will contribute to the Middle Rio Grande Endangered Species Collaborative Program’s meeting the habitat restoration requirements as stated in Element S of the Reasonable and Prudent Alternatives in the March 2003 Biological Opinion, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

(To see the print version, read more of Volume 39, or view other issues of Glacial Deposits, click here.)

The project consists of the application of several restoration/rehabilitation techniques designed to improve aquatic habitat in the Sandia Subreach. In particular, the project seeks to enhance the availability and condition of spawning and egg retention, larval rearing, young-of-year, and over-wintering habitat for the silvery minnow by providing slackwater habitat and facilitating lateral migration of the river across bars, islands, and riverbanks during various mid-level and high-flow stages. Project construction began in fall 2010 and ended in January 2011. Specific restoration treatments will be evaluated to allow for adaptive management and the planning of potential future phases. Monitoring began in May 2011. Future potential maintenance activities are not part of this biological assessment, however.

Empirical evidence derived from habitat remediation work conducted in the Albuquerque Reach of the Middle Rio Grande suggests that silvery minnow habitat goals can be met by 25 days of inundation based on conservative estimates for egg and larval maturation. Accomplishing these goals required 1) the creation of backwaters and embayments to create slackwater areas; 2) the reduction in height of banklines, bank-attached bars, and islands; and 3) the creation of ephemeral high-flow channels to carry water into hydrologically disconnected overbank areas and bank-attached bars and islands. These actions will result in redistribution of river sediments into geomorphic units (mesohabitats) that are in balance with the existing sediment supply and hydrology at the site. Further, jetty jack lines (fabricated streambank stabilization devices) have contributed to the disconnection of overbank areas from the active channel. Natural levees have built up around jetty jack lines as the river drops sediment during the receding limb of the hydrograph. Natural levees are caused by overbank flood sedimentation and develop where there is an abrupt reduction in flow velocity, such as around jetty jacks, resulting in immediate deposition of coarser sand and silt. These natural levees reduce the connectivity between the river channel and the floodplain. The deposition of nutrient-rich sediments around the jetty jacks, as well as the accretion of similar sediments on the river banks adjacent to the jetty jacks provide ideal conditions for the colonization of these areas by non-native vegetation, particularly Russian olive. The colonization of these areas by dense vegetation causes additional decreases in flow velocities, further increasing the deposition of sediment along the channel margins. This positive loop relationship further decreases the connectivity between the channel and adjacent floodplain. Therefore, it is unlikely that flows alone would be able to remove vegetation and permit lateral reworking of the existing in-channel and channel-margin bars and islands. Mechanical interventions were required initially to form and maintain desirable silvery minnow spawning and refugia habitat.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Joseph Fluder earned his undergraduate degree in Geography at Illinois State in 1999 and subsequently took his master’s, also in Geography, at the University of New Mexico. Since then he has worked in Albuquerque for SWCA Environmental Consultants, where he now holds the position of Office Principal.

Stephen Van der Hoven

Hydrogeologist Stephen Van der Hoven will be the speaker for the John W. Foster Lecturer Series on Friday, April 27, at 3 p.m. in 133 Felmley Science Hall at Illinois State University. The lecture, sponsored by the Department of Geography-Geology, is free and open to the public.

Van der Hoven, a senior hydrogeologist at Genesis Engineering & Redevelopment in Sacramento, Calif., will give a talk titled “Clean Clothes and Dirty Water: The Environmental Legacy of Dry Cleaning Operations.”

Van der Hoven worked as a geologist for Dames and Moore while completing his doctorate at the University of Utah. He joined the faculty at Illinois State in 2000, where he taught courses in areas such as groundwater geology, field geochemistry, groundwater modeling and contaminant transport. Since 1990, he has developed and implemented a wide range of research projects to study the movement of water and geochemical processes in the vadose zone and groundwater. His work has resulted in more than a dozen peer reviewed publications, and scores of technical reports and conference presentations. Van der Hoven left academia to begin his career at Genesis in 2011.

For additional information, contact the Department of Geography-Geology at (309) 438-7649 or geo@IllinoisState.edu.

Maddie Mahon

Maddie Mahon, master’s student in hydrogeology, is the recipient of a $3,275 grant from the University of Michigan Biological Station Joel T. Heinen Student Research Fund. This award is given to outstanding students who are performing field research at the Biological Station, and Maddie will spend part of this summer working at this site in northern Michigan. Her research will investigate microbial activity on leaf litter and the role of leaf chemistry in mediating nutrient dynamics in streams. Her project will contribute to a larger experimental stream project being done at the field station, led in part by Catherine O’Reilly, assistant professor of geology.

“I’m really looking forward to the my field work this summer. This is a great opportunity to contribute to a larger research project that will help us understand the potential for natural management of stream ecosystems,” said Maddie.