March 17, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.- Edward S. Belt, the S.A. Hitchcock Professor Emeritus of Mineralogy and Geology at Amherst College, will present his research on "The Paleontology of Marginal Marine Environments" at a joint meeting of the Northeastern and Southeastern Sections of the Geological Society of America. Almost 1100 geoscientists are expected to attend the event, which will take place in Tysons Corner, Va., March 25-27.
Belt's research focuses on 60-million-year-old sediments of North Dakota's Tongue River Member, which he has now proved contains marine layers in otherwise freshwater strata (and not an entirely freshwater body, as previously thought). Hypothesizing that a newly discovered marine shell bed, the Van Daele shell bed, would occur not only at the Van Daele ranch on the Little Missouri River, but elsewhere as well. Belt drove from Amherst to North Dakota in October and found the marine shell bed just where he expected: at the Hanson ranch, 10 kilometers east of the originally known location. This new correlation ties together strata dated at disparate localities over a wide area. It allowed Belt to argue that a gap of approximately one million years occurs in the stratigaphic record just below the Tongue River Member and above the Ludlow Member of the Paleocene Fort Union Formation.
Belt, who graduated from Williams College and received a master's degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Yale, taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Villanova University before coming to Amherst in 1966. He served as the director of the Pratt Museum of Natural History from 1987 to 2002.
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