Bob Compton Award

New model may improve Bay Area seismic hazard maps

Bob Compton Field Geology Research Fund

The Bob Compton Field Geology Research Fund was established to honor Professor Compton’s remarkable contributions to field-based teaching, research, and mentoring at Stanford. The fund supports fieldwork and associated costs for individual graduate students engaged in geologic mapping and field-intensive studies as part of their PhD and MS thesis work.

About Robert R. Compton

Bob Compton was born on July 21, 1922, in the Los Angeles area. He earned his A.B. from Stanford in 1943 and, after serving in the military and joining the faculty of the Geology Department, completed his Ph.D. in 1949. He was promoted to Professor in 1962 and retired in 1981 to pursue his passion for painting.
Bob was a legendary teacher, leading the Stanford Geological Survey to unmapped regions across California, Nevada, Utah, and Idaho. He was an exceptional instructor in petrology and inspired hundreds of undergraduates in his Introduction to Geology classes, dedicating time both in and out of the classroom to his students’ learning. His lasting legacy is the textbook Geology in the Field, the definitive “how-to” manual for field studies. Since its publication, it has been the primary reference text for Stanford field courses, featuring all hand-drawn illustrations by Bob himself.

Bob Compton Awardees

Starla Toto

M.S. student with Marty Grove

I am a second-year master’s student working with Marty Grove, interested in various areas useful to studying my primary focus (tectonics), including geochronology, geochemistry, metamorphic petrology and thermochronology. My master’s thesis further characterizes the mafic forearc basement of the North American Mesozoic convergent margin, particularly in southern California, where Neogene rifting and subsidence has obscured basement relationships. Remnants have been observed on Santa Cruz Island (SCI), Catalina Island and in boreholes throughout the borderland, noting altered mineral assemblages, but the questions of when/how the rocks were altered are yet to be answered. Otherwise, mafic cobbles dispersed within the San Onofre Breccia, the syn-tectonic unit that accreted during rifting (~18-12 Ma) will provide a statistically significant interpretation of the formerly cohesive forearc basement. One of the breccia’s depositional domains encompasses SCI, and the Bob Compton Field Award funded 9 days of solo field work there. I’m grateful to have made this trip a second time since I had previously gone for 3 weeks of mapping (half of UCSB’s summer field). This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! This time, I made observations and collected samples from relatively inaccessible outcrops. A significant amount of data (zircon U-Pb ages and trace element concentrations) came from this trip’s samples. In fact, these were the first fruitful samples that led us toward a solid interpretation for the cause/timing of alteration of the mafic forearc basement, which I presented at GSA and AGU.