Geosciences Emeriti Faculty

The following professors from the Department of Geosciences have retired from Oberlin College, although they remain valued members of our geosciences community.

• Dennis Hubbard
  Biography

  I am a broadly-trained geologist who works in both modern and ancient depositional environments. Before retirement, I taught Sedimentology & Stratigraphy, Evolution of the Earth, Environmental Geology, Beaches & Coasts and Coral Reefs and led several Winter Term trips to the Caribbean. Since the late 1970s, my research focused on the geologic development of Caribbean coral reefs based on deep cores that span the last 125,000 years. My work on modern reefs has focused on their declining ability to keep up with accelerating sea-level rise in the face of increasing human stressors. Grant-funded projects have quantified the declining carbonate production and increased degradation on Caribbean reefs over the past 40 years. Since retirement, NSF has continued to fund my research as an Emeritus Professor. This work has documented a significant increase in the rate of reef-sediment export as a result of rising sea-surface temperatures and the increasing storminess that has resulted. A collaborative project with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will hopefully use isotopic measurements derived from our fossil-coral archive to create the first quantitatively rigorous record of sea-surface paleo-temperature over the last 10,000 years. These projects are well-suited to involving undergraduates as researchers.

• Bruce Simonson 
• Karla Parsons Hubbard
• Steven Wojtal