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SPRING 2012 | ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE 19
It all started with St. Lawrence Professor Ken
West and a gold mini-grid and chlorophyll
solution Ewing employed to try to produce
solar energy for a research project. He learned
electrochemistry from a cassette tape narrated
by one of the electrochemistry greats and took
a hands-on electronics course during a Janu-
ary interterm.
“It was useful because I went on to work in in-
strumental analysis and have designed instru-
ments and built them,” he says. “Most impor-
tant, it gave me the background to understand
the measurements we are making.”
GEOSCIENCE TRAILBLAZER
Most people use Google Earth for fun.
Barbara Jarvis Tewksbury ’73
uses it for
research.
“Google Earth has enormous potential for
studying bedrock geology in remote and
inhospitable regions of the world where the
exposure is fantastic but access is difficult,”
she says.
Three years ago, Tewksbury, the Upson Chair
and professor of geosciences at Hamilton
College in Clinton, N.Y., stumbled on structural
patterns in Egypt after new high-resolution
satellite imagery appeared in Google Earth.
Since then, she has scoured hundreds of
thousands of square kilometers of Egypt
online and discovered sets of fold and fault
structures no one knew existed.
“The structures are small enough to be es-
sentially invisible in lower-resolution satellite
imagery, but big enough to be nearly impos-
sible to discern from the ground in the rare
places where roads traverse them,” she says.
“It’s like discovering a new planet.”
Hamilton Professor of Geosciences Barbara Tewksbury ’73 has
worked with colleagues from Egypt and the U.S. on her work
using Google Earth to map structural patterns and confirm their
findings in the field.