Although areas of study across UW Oshkosh have struggled to replace equipment in recent years due to the university’s financial situation, the geology department has been able to keep its technology up to date behind donations from alumni and emeriti faculty.
Geology Professor Timothy Paulsen, who has taught at UWO since 1999 after obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that when the department’s proton magnetometer stopped working, he knew it was going to be tough to get a new one.
“It was an older piece of equipment, and the cost of buying a new one is roughly on the order of $10,000 or so,” Paulsen said. “Trying to replace that is really hard to do these days because of budget cuts.”
A proton magnetometer measures small variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, allowing for certain objects to be detected based on how they interact.
The machine uses the principle of Earth’s field nuclear magnetic resonance, which is a physical phenomenon where nuclei in a strong magnetic field is disturbed by a weak oscillating magnetic field, and produces an electromagnetic signal.
Paulsen said that it’s a tool that is commonly used when scientists are looking for buried gas drums.
“The Earth has this magnetic field, but when there are certain objects, made of certain materials, they’ll actually interact with the magnetic field,” he said. “So it’s one way of actually discovering whether or not you have a buried ore deposit, or, for example, maybe there are buried drums or pipes, or other types of things that you’re trying to locate. By looking at those variations, you can kind of, in a remote way, sense their presence.”
Paulsen said that the proton magnetometer is a necessity for geology students because the department uses the machine in its lab classes.
“A lot of our students get jobs in the environmental industry, looking for clean water resources, looking for hazardous materials and such,” he said. “This kind of gives them really good training for what they’re going to potentially be using when they actually work in the real world.”
After the proton magnetometer stopped working in the spring of 2022, in the midst of UWO’s budget deficit, Eric Hiatt, a former geology department chair, reached out to alumni and emeriti faculty to help fund a replacement. Carol Jones, the wife of former UWO geology professor Norris Jones, who died in 2020, answered the call and donated $12,000 in her husband’s name to the UWO Foundation to be used for replacing the proton magnetometer.
Paulsen said that Norris Jones, who earned his Ph.D. at Virginia Tech and authored a widely used geology lab manual, was a great instructor at the university that his students loved.
“People really liked his teaching style and taking his classes,” he said. “He was a good friend of the department. All of the old faculty were really good.”
Paulsen said that because of Carol Jones’ donation, students were able to use a new proton magnetometer in lab classes starting last spring.
“The students love it,” he said. “One thing that I found is that students, when they get to use equipment, they’re really excited to use it. It’s one thing to learn about science in the lecture, it’s a whole other thing to actually operate devices to actually learn about what you’re seeing in real time.”
Paulsen said that Carol Jones’ donation is an example of how other departments can still obtain new equipment without relying heavily on the university.
“There have been dwindling resources made available to the university over the past decade or so, and so, donations, like from alumni or other people, make a big difference,” he said. “We have a number of accounts in the foundation, and so some of those accounts are created to actually support field trips that we take … and that can get expensive. There are accounts in the foundation that are used to help subsidize some of that, so that the students can get out in the natural world and do that. When donors do that, it helps with lab equipment. It helps with the running of field courses like what we do every semester in the department.”
