Donald Rusk Currey: 20th century scholar
Donald Rusk Currey (24 January 1934 - 6 June 2004) was an influential scholar, academic administrator, and educator, with primary focus on physical geography, and specifically the history and dynamics of arid region lake basins. His most widely known research was on the timing, geomorphic processes, and isostatic rebound associated with late Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, which at its maximum extent covered 50,000 km2 of western Utah, southern Idaho, and eastern Nevada.
Don was born in the city of Orange, California, to parents who emphasized education for their children, including Don and his younger brother Stan (7 February 1936 - 16 June 2012). Their father was a medical doctor (MD) and dental surgeon (DDS), and their mother (Ruth Rusk Currey) was a high school teacher, and eventually a member of the board of education of the city of Santa Ana, CA. When Don went off to college, he tried several different courses of study, and several different universities. He matriculated first, as an undergraduate, at Stanford. He obtained BS and MA degrees (in 1957 and 1959) from the University of Wyoming, both in geology, and a Ph.D. in geography, from the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, KS, in 1969.
One of Don’s most notable aspects was his ability to assess, and surmount, difficulties. He exhibited this in many different ways, over the course of his life. He solved many problems in mountain climbing, research in physical geography, university administration, and other arenas, using a keen intellect, curiosity, and a good understanding of physics and history.
Don was a skilled mountain climber, and established several first ascents in the Grand Tetons, of Wyoming, and in Yosemite valley, in California. During his Stanford days, he influenced John Harlin (30 June 1935 to 22 March 1966) to start climbing. Harlin later became famous as a climber, and died climbing the Eiger, in the Swiss Alps.
One of Don’s notable characteristics, either in person or in his voluminous writings, was his large, and precisely used, vocabulary. He said what he meant, and meant what he said. He wrote a scientific paper on the topic of “hemi-arid lake basins” and he meant “hemi-arid” (some parts are arid, others not) rather than “semi-arid” (somewhat arid). He preferred to use few, carefully chosen, words to convey his thoughts and feelings.
During his time as a student, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Don studied what would now be called “climate change” in the western U.S. During this time, an incident occurred which has, in some people’s minds, defined Don, as an eco-villain. Don was interested in establishing the times when glaciers had receded from their former margins enough for trees to take root on formerly glaciated terrain. He was collecting cores from old trees in the Utah-Nevada border land, with emphasis on bristlecone pines (Pinus Longaeva), in hopes of seeing climate signals recorded in tree ring width variations.
In one of the trees, on Wheeler Peak, in eastern-most Nevada, his increment borer got stuck. He went to the local Forest Service field office and asked for help. Donald E. Cox, a district Forest Service ranger, provided a saw, and helped Don cut down the tree. When the tree-rings were counted, it emerged that the tree, denoted as WPN-114 in Don’s notes (indicating White Pine county, Nevada, tree number 114), was 4844 years old. That made it, at the time, the oldest known tree in existence. Don carried the burden of that act, throughout his life. He had intended to do good science, and certainly did not mean to kill the oldest living thing on Earth.
Several people, who had been trying for years to get a “Great Basin National Park” established in the area, seized upon this incident as a key public relations bonanza. They gave a name (“Prometheus”) to the tree, and vilified Currey as a cold-blooded murderer. Despite that insult, Don helped lobby for establishment of the national park, and was certainly no enemy of old trees. Since then, it has emerged that another tree, informally named “Methusaleh”, sampled by non-destructive coring by Edmund Schulman and Tom Harlan (in 1957) was then 4789 years old, and is currently (in 2013) 4845 years old. That tree has now surpassed “Prometheus”, and it seems an appropriate time for the Great Basin “tree huggers” to forgive Don Currey.
There are, of course, much older trees, or families of related trees. In particular, clonal colony organisms, such as the quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) send up shoots from their extended root system, and though the individual shoots (or trees) only live a few hundred years, the organism itself can live very much longer. In contrast to trees sprouted from seeds, these are all genetically identical. The synchronized changes in color of leaves in autumn, of all the trees in an Aspen grove, are the most obvious manifestation of this fact. In particular, one such grove, informally named “Pando”, in Fish Lake National Forest in central Utah, is estimated to be at least 80,000 years old, but could be much older.
One of the notable things that Don Currey accomplished in his later years, as professor of geography at the University of Utah, was establishment of a program for preservation of “geo-antiquities”. He believed that such things as 15,000 year old shorelines of late Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, should be preserved, in much the same way as Egyptian pyramids, or old bristlecone pine trees.
Another legacy of Don Currey’s infectious enthusiasm for solving problems is the large number of geography students he supervised. It is estimated that he mentored 400 graduate students in geography, during his Utah days. He was chairman of the Geography Department, at the University of Utah, from XXX to XXX, and was on the faculty there from 1970 till his death in 2004. A “Donald R. Currey Research Scholarship” was established by the Geography Department shortly after Don’s death, and has supported 3-4 students per year since then. As far as is known to this writer, none of them has cut down an old tree.
Don inspired many people to look more closely at the landscapes around them, and rejoice in their complexity and beauty.
Research publications
Currey, D.R. (1965),
The Keystone gold-copper prospect area, Albany County, Wyoming, Report Geol. Soc. Wyoming, 20 pp.
Currey, D.R. (1965),
An ancient bristlecone pine stand in Eastern Nevada, Ecology, 46, 464-566.
Currey, D.R. (1974),
Continentality of extra-tropical climate, Ann. Assoc. Amer. Geographers, 64, 268-280.
Curre, D.R. (1974),
Probable pre-Neoglacial age of the type Temple Lake moraine, Wyoming, Arctic & Alpine Res., 6, 293-300.
Madsen, D.B. & D.R. Currey (1979),
Late Quaternary glacial and vegetation changes, Little Cottonwood Canyon area, Utah, Quat. Res., 12, 254-270.
Currey, D.R. (1983),
Lake Bonneville: Selected features of relevance to neotectonic analysis, USGS Open File Report 82-1070
Merola, J.A., D.R. Currey, M.K. Ridd (1989),
Thematic mapper laser profile resolution of the Holocene lake limit, Great Salt Lake desert, Utah, Remote Sens. Environ., 28, 233-244.
Currey, D.R. (1990),
Quaternary paleolakes in the evolution of semi-desert basins, Paleogeo. Paleoclim. Paleoclim., 76, 189-214.
Oviatt, C.G., D.R. Currey, D.M. Miller (1990),
Age and paleoclimatic significance of the Stansbury shoreline of Lake Bonneville, Quat. Res., 33, 291-305.
Benson, L.V., Currey, D.R. et al. (1990),
Chronology of expansion and contraction of 4 Great Basin lake systems during the past 35,000 year, Paleogeo. Paleoclim. Paleoclim., 78, 241-286.
Oviatt, C.G., D.R. Currey, D. Sack (1992),
Radiocarbon chronology of Lake Bonneville, Paleogeo. Paleoclim. Paleoclim., 99, 225-241.
Bills, B.G., S.L. deSilva, D.R. Currey et al. (1994),
Hydro-isostatic deflection and tectonic tilting in the Central Andes, Geophys. Res., Lett., 21, 293-296.
Bills, B.G.,D.R. Currey, G.A. Marshall (1994),
Viscosity estimates from patterns of lacustrine shoreline
deformation in the Eastern Great Basin,
J. Geophys. Res., 99, 22,059-22,086.
Wilkins, D.E., D.R. Currey (1997),
Timing and extent of late Quaternary paleolakes in the Trans-Pecos Closed Basin, Quat. Res., 47, 306-315.
Tackman, G.E., D.R. Currey, B.G. Bills, T.S. James (1998),
Paleoshoreline evidence for postglacial tilting in Southern Manitoba, J. Paleolimnology, 19, 343-363.
Wilkins, D.E., D.R. Currey (1999,
Radiocarbon chronology of late-Holocene aeolian environments, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas, Holocene, 9, 363-371.
Tackman, G.E., B.G. Bills, T.S. James, D.R. Currey (1999),
Lake-gauge evidence for regional postglacial tilting in southern Manitoba, Geol. Soc. Amer. Bull., 111, 1684-1699.
Parker, T.J., D.R. Currey (2001),
Extraterrestrial coastal geomorphology, Geomorph. 37, 303-328.
Chan, M.A., D.R. Currey, et al. (2003),
Geology for the record, Geotimes, 48, 14-17.
Godsey, H.S., D.R. Currey, M.A. Chan (2005),
New evidence for an extended occupation of the Provo shoreline, Quat. Res., 63, 212-223.
Nishzawa, S., D.R. Currey, et al. (2012),
Bonneville basin shoreline records of a large lake during Marine Isotope Stage 16, Quat. Sci. Rev., 58, 1-6.