-An Interview With Bob Stern-

Q: Tell us a little about yourself.

A. Well, I was born on ground-Hog's Day in 1951 in Sacramento, California. I grew up in Oroville, a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada of northern California. I graduated from Oroville High School and entered UC Davis in 1968, staying in school to avoid the draft more than anything else. After the draft lottery was instituted and I got a high number (352), I had to re-evaluate what I was doing in college. I couldn't think of anything, so I dropped out for a year. When I came back, I was determined to find a major that interested me, and I was lucky to get interested in UC Davis Geology when some very exciting people were teaching. Summer field camp was spent in the Sierras west of Lake Tahoe, and that was where I decided that I wanted to study island arcs - after all, California is just one big fossil Mesozoic arc complex. I guess it was my senior year when I started thinking about what I was going to do after I graduated. Someone told me that if you wanted to go to graduate school in geology, they might even pay you to go! I couldn't imagine that could be so, but it turned out to be true. I applied to a number of schools and was pleasantly surprised when the Scripps Institution of Oceanography offered me a fellowship. I spent five wonderful years at that seaside resort - oops - research institute and it was Scripps that turned my attention to studying intra-oceanic arcs. I started working in the Precambrian of Egypt because Al Engel had a research project and was looking for graduate students. Tim Dixon and I signed on, and except for a run-in with a bad can of sardines, I've never regretted the decision. Melissa and I got married in 1977 and Ryan was born later that year. He's a sophomore at Trinity University in San Antonio now. He loves the Cowboys and Rangers. I got my Ph.D. in 1979; my dissertation was entitled "Late Precambrian Ensimatic Volcanism in the Central Eastern Desert of Egypt. From 1979 through 1981, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, where I continued my work on the Marianas and the Precambrian of Egypt. We lived in Wheaton, MD and Rebecca was born in Olney in April 1980 - she is a junior at Richardson High School. In January of 1982, I came to UTD and I've been here ever since. Alexis joined us in Texas - she is in the 7th grade at Westwood Junior High., and is on the Volleyball team Zyzzy Beloubah (dog) wagged her way into our lives in 1988.

Q: What do you like to study?

A: I'm most interested in how continental crust is formed and evolves. This leads naturally from my interest in island arcs like the Mariana Arc to places where the continental crust has formed completely (like the Arabian-Nubian Shield in Egypt, Sudan, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc.). It allows me to focus on isotope geochemistry, because this tool lets me look at what are the sources of modern arc lavas and also lets me determine the ages of ancient rocks and determine their source characteristics. A growing part of my research concerns remote sensing. I'm involved with NASA's Shuttle Imaging Radar experiment, and this imagery is 'seeing through' the sand of the Sahara Desert to reveal some very important Precambrian sutures -like the Keraf Suture - and related structures in Sudan. A developing interest is tied in with UTD Geosciences efforts to reorient to some degree with the growing opportunities in geology applied to environmental issues. One of the classes that I developed looks at the geology around the Dallas-Fort Worth area - it's called 'Geology of the Metroplex', and I've learned a lot getting ready for this course.

Q: Anything interesting happening in your research this year (1996)?

A: It has been a busy year. In May, I visited Kohistan in the Himalayas of Pakistan with Prof. Asif Khan of the Centre for Excellence in Geology, Peshawar University. In late July and early August, Makoto Arima (Yokohama National University, Japan) and I hosted a workshop on future US-Japan collaborative research in the Izu-Bonin-Mariana Arc system . In December, I had the pleasure of studying exposures of upper mantle peridotites exposed in the Central Graben of the Mariana Trough using the manned submerisble Shinkai 6500

Q: I'd like to know more about what you're up to without reading everything you've written. Can you recommend a few articles that would get me there?

A: Sure. Here are three articles that I'm particularly fond of:

Me and  Sherm   Bloomer, 1992. Subduction zone infancy: Examples from the       
        Eocene Izu-Bonin-Mariana and Jurassic California arcs.  Bull. Geol. Soc.
        America, v. 104, p. 1621-1636.

Just me, 1994. Arc Assembly and Continental Collision in the 
        Neoproterozoic East African Orogen: Implications for the 
        Consolidation of Gondwanaland.  Annual  Reviews of Earth and Planetary 
        Sciences, v. 22, p. 319-351.

Rob Gribble, Me, Sherm Bloomer, Doris Steuben, Tim O'Hearn, and Sally Newman,
        1996. MORB mantle and subduction components interact to generate basalts in the southern Mariana Trough back-arc basin.  Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, v.60, p. 2153-2166

Q: How can I contact you directly?

A: rjstern@utdallas.edu ought to do it.