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Date: March 29, 2001
Who/Where: Lewis Clark State College – Natural Sciences Division
What: Presentation at National Geologic Society of America Meeting
Contact: Dr. William Heins, 208-792-2342

LCSC Faculty/Student Project to be Presented at Annual National Meeting

Work by LCSC Natural Sciences Division faculty and a student will be presented at the joint annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain and South-Central Sections of the Geological Society of America, and the Rocky Mountain Section of the Geological Society of America.

The project, titled “Implementation of a Web-Accessible Database of Hells Canyon Petrographic and Geochemical Data” is a result of work by Tamara Stutzman, a Junior Geology major; Dr. William Heins, Associate Professor; Dr. Tracy Vallier, marine geologist, retired, USGS, LCSC Adjunct Faculty; all from the Division of Natural Sciences. Stutzman will present the project at the joint meeting in Albuquerque, April 30 through May 2.

Dr. Vallier is considered the world’s foremost expert on Hells Canyon geology; he has worked in the Canyon for nearly forty years as a graduate student, professor, and USGS geologist. Ms. Stutzman was responsible for constructing the database—the computer infrastructure — for the project. Dr. Heins served as project advisor.

The project involved compiling a geo-referenced database of hand samples, petrographic and geochemical data collected from Hells Canyon by Vallier over the last 40 years. The database currently contains information about 600 samples, including information about location and composition. Users can query the database using any combination of attributes. Chemical data will be added in the future and a Geographic Information System (GIS) database will be developed, affording users the capability to query data from a map interface. This project makes Lewis-Clark State College the principal repository in the world for primary geologic data about Hells Canyon.