all over the world. He has visited and studied volcanoes in Indonesia, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, and Washington State. Varekamp has been able to take some lucky Wesleyan students with him on these international excursions. Most of them have prospered in their careers after Varekampís tutelage.

Johan Varekamp began his work on geochemistry at the University of Utrecht, Holland where he got his B.A and MA. He then received a Ph. D. for thesis work he did in Italy. There, he worked on fairly young volcanoes, brothers and sisters of Mount Vesuvius. He then studied geochemistry as a faculty research associate at the University of Arizona for 3 years, before coming to Wesleyan. This semester (Spring '00) he teaches Environmental Geochemistry and has started a class called CO2. Aside from teaching, he serves on the Graduate Council and is the director of the Environmental Studies Certificate Program.

Johan explains that the direction of his career towards volcanology was guided by serendipity. The reason his path crossed with volcanoes was because of two lucky breaks. When he came to the United States in 1979, he studied geothermal energy with the Geological Survey in the Northwest. When Mount Saint Helens erupted, he was right there at the scene. Fortunately he was funded by the Geological Survey, which enabled him to fly into the crater by helicopter and get hands on experience in an erupting volcano.

 Studying volcanoes has taken Professor Varekamp to some very special, extraordinary and often remote areas. He studied on a 70-person crew boat in Indonesia for many years. There, he traveled to some islands where the natives had not seen white people for decades. He later led an exploration for three months back to Indonesia to work on a volcanic arc. "It was the biggest thing I had ever done and I will probably never do anything quite as big as that again." In Indonesia, he first got interested in acidic lakes that sometimes accompany volcanoes. These lakes had a pH level of about 0, the same as battery acid. Accompanied by several Wesleyan students, Varekamp returned to Indonesia to further study these acidic lakes. He discovered that by monitoring the local river system,you could understand the volcano in terms of its lake water. 

Varekamp has recently traveled to the Andes to study another almost boiling acidic lake. He understands that doing research on these lakes may provide more reliable data on the gases of a Volcano than actually sampling the gases. "In the old days, I would take a sample with a vacuum bottle of volcanic gas, but it was a 10 second sample of something that is streaming all the time. You always wonder how representative that one sample was. However, crater lakes collect and integrate the same elements over 50 years, which then start over after further eruptions. In crater lakes, there is a much larger time signal. That is a better way of looking at volcanic gases."

The Rio Agrio on the Copahue Volcano has a pH ~ 0.5.

Although his studies in Argentina will probably end in 2 years, Varekamp plans on returning. "I will probably keep working in the Andes because Argentina is a great country to work in; I like it a lot. There are still many unexplored areas and topics, so next time I go there, I will explore a little more in the Patagonia region to see what I can find. I see myself working in the Andes for some time to come."

Although Varekamp was experienced in volcanology, he teaches a wide variety of courses in the E&ES Department. "When I got hired, they said, "So, this volcanic stuff is nice, but you also got to do something environmental because the Earth and Environmental Science program has got to come off the ground." Johan then began to work on heavy metal pollution in the wetlands and coastal marshes around Middletown. After conducting detailed experiments on a wide array of variables, he realized that his team could do more by studying sea level rise. Relative sea level rise can be indicated by sampling sediments and may provide clues to the climate at the time they were deposited. Johan commented, "Holland is flat, virtually at sea level. So, basically sea level research would have been a lot more appropriate than volcanology (in Holland), but I never studied sea level rise until I came to the US." 

Professor Varekamp at the Copahue crater lake. The fog is actually HCl fumes emanating from the lake.

Currently, Johan Varekamp is working with his wife, Ellen Thomas, another Wesleyan professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, on mercury pollution in the Long Island Sound. Their work is part of a larger joint study with colleague Kristina Beuning on the environmental and ecological state of the Long Island Sound. They have found that there still is significant pollution entering the Sound, even though it appeared to be lessening. Comparing their current samples with those taken in 1960, they found that although the sediment quality of the sound has improved, the water quality has gotten progressively worse. They found the source of this pollution to be sewage waste pipes, where they found abundant levels of metal in the sediment. More details of the research on the Long Island Sound can be found at http://www.wesleyan.edu/ees/johan2res2.html.

This semester, Professor Varekamp started a new class for freshman entitled CO2. The students have been studying the global warming gas and collecting CO2 data from the area. Fortunately, the class was awarded a CO2 analyzer, a $10,000 machine, by the school for innovation in teaching. Johan has encouraged the students to get hands on experience with this equipment as well as with a CO2 monitoring facility he has built especially for the class. "The students are having a great time. They are building a greenhouse now and growing plants to see how much CO2 the plants draw down out of the greenhouse per time unit per weight of plant. We are playing with those variables and scaling them up to compare their results with the total mass of the biosphere." 

Professor Varekamp has just been awarded funding for his work in the Long Island sound for two years and he has just written another proposal to the EPA for two more years. "Ultimately, we will try to get a big ship out here to drill some long cores and do very detailed records." Fortunately, his work in the Long Island Sound will keep him at Wesleyan. Without that, he is a hard man to pin down in one place.