7 the process of acquiring 6 broadband seismic stations. Please come over and visit. I would love to hear from you regarding research ideas and how my lab and expertise can be of use to you. On the family front, my wife Mahasin and our 4 children have adjusted nicely to life in Stillwater. Dr. Eliot Atekwana Greetings to all alumni and friends! I report to you a successful 2013. I served as the Interim Head of the School until June 2013. During my tenure, I enjoyed serving the students and the faculty and working closely with the Alumni Advisory Board to advance the agenda of the School. In all, I believe the School made important advances in 2013 (see the report from the Head). I continue to teach, maintain an active research program and supervise students. This year, I taught Geology Colloquium in the spring and Geochemistry and Research Methods and Techniques in Geosciences in the fall. I also supervised MS thesis and Doctoral Dissertation in the spring and fall semesters. This year, our hands-on laboratory/field component to the Geochemistry course involved investigating the quality of bottled vs. tap water. The students were attempting to answer the simple question: “Should I drink bottle or tap water?” Tap water was collected from Stillwater, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Kansas City, Denver and Huston. Bottled water included distilled, reverse osmosis water, spring water and carbonate water from various companies which were purchased within the State of Oklahoma. The data collected this year was combined with data collected in 2007 in the same course. The students who were divided into groups measured the pH, nitrate, chloride, alkalinity, calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium concentrations in our geochemistry laboratory in the HBRC. The students compared their results with the drinking water standards and found that all the tap water samples were of high quality and comparable to the bottled water except for one bottled water sample with high nitrate. This exercise culminated into insightful reports about the project findings; the conclusion was that there was no advantage to drinking bottled water over tap water and based on the cost and environmental degradation (energy use, plastic material needed, plastic to be disposed, etc.) tap water was better for the environment. The report was designed to fulfill the writing component of the course. Eliot Atekwana helping Kyle Obenberger to get out of mud at a hot spring sampling location in Kasane, Botswana. In international research, I worked with graduate student Mary Niles and undergraduate Kyle Obenberger on investigating the chemistry and stable isotopic composition of hot springs, cold springs and streams in Zambia, Malawi and Botswana. This is part of our National Science Foundation funded research “Collaborative Research: Integrated studies of early stages of continental extension: From incipient (Okavango) to young (Malawi) rifts”. In all, the field campaign was very successful (see spotlight on international research). This year, I was one of two members of the Joint Technical Program Committee of the Hydrologic Division of the Geological Society of America. We helped put together the hydrology program for the GSA's 125th Anniversary Annual Meeting & Exposition in October 2013 in the Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO. The entire meeting including the sessions sponsored by the Hydrology Division was very successful; the meeting as a whole was a blast. I published a paper with my PhD student Pride Abongwa in the Journal of Hydrology and with my MS student Eric Akoko in the journal Biogeochemistry. My students, collaborators and I presented six abstracts at the GSA annual meeting. My students Pride Abongwa, Scott Meier and Morgan Ostroski presented their research at the Oklahoma State 24th Annual Research Symposium on February 20-22, 2013. Dr. Estella Atekwana and I along with our students and collaborators continue to work on our projects funded by Chevron Energy Technology Company and the National Science Foundation. I continue to work with and mentor my students Pride Abongwa (PhD), Eric Seeger, Rawlings Akondi, Christopher Geyer, Stephanie Wisler, Mary Niles (MS) and Wes Rutelonis (undergraduate). I served on several MS and PhD thesis committees throughout the year and I graduated MS degree student Morgan Ostroski. Please drop by to say hello when next in Stillwater or send me email if I can be of assistance to you. Dr. Estella Atekwana Greetings to all alumni and friends! I hope this newsletter meets you all in good health. I keep saying that this is the year that I slow down. However, this never seems to happen especially now that I have added on the responsibilities of the School Head. 2013 continued to be an extremely busy year for me as usual with lots of travelling to distant parts of the world. It was also a very exciting and productive year for me. We shut down our activities related to the BP Deep Horizon Oil spill project after Hurricane Isaac demolished our geophysical monitoring system. We finished processing the data and submitted a paper for publication which is currently under review in the journal Geophysics. Work continues on our Chevron grant and we have some very important discoveries that have resulted in the publication of two papers and three best paper awards. In August we presented the results of Year 2 activity to the remediation group at Chevron in Houston Texas. Chevron continues be very impressed with the work we are doing and this year our grant was renewed for another $300,000 for the third year. This is also the last year of the project. However, we hope that Chevron will continue the funding after year 3. This project has given us the opportunity to critically examine biogeophysical signatures at organic rich contaminated sites. We now have some ideas on how to extend this work to examining microbial induced
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