Vickers will receive $500, a certificate and will be honored at a meeting of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration on March 1 in Salt Lake City. He also will be recognized in the society’s monthly publication, Mining Engineering, and his paper, “The Osceola Fault Re-Examined,” will be considered for publication in the magazine.

“To me, it’s an extreme honor,” said Vickers, who got his geology degree here and a degree in wildlife biology from Texas A&M University. “For a student at the graduate level, it’s the highest award you can get from this particular society. It’s a high honor for an economic geologist, and a student in particular. I’m pretty humbled about it, to tell you the truth.”

In his paper, Vickers studies a fault line in the Osceola mining district in eastern Nevada in the Snake Mountain Range. This area is part of the Great Basin, a region that includes western Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Arizona.

The paper is an off-shoot of his thesis, which studies the rocks in that area, cataloging the order of deposition, naming the rock units and describing the minerals they contain. Vickers hopes to have his thesis completed by August.

Vickers investigated the rock formations in the area and determined that Osceola was a major strike-slip fault, a fault that moves side-to-side instead of vertically.

This research on the fault will aid the Osceola mining industry, said Roger Bowers, president of TerraCon, Inc., a consulting firm in the mining industry.

“Western Utah and eastern Nevada have never thoroughly been understood,” Bowers said. “This has a major role in defining the structure so we can better interpret how the basin and range was formed. This is something that has been under debate for 50 to 100 years.

“Anything that we can do to advance the understanding of the structure helps understand the formation of the Great Basin, and that plays a significant role in finding industrial minerals or precious minerals.”

The society consists of about 16,000 professionals in the minerals industry in nearly 100 countries. 

Geology Department Chair John Wickham said the acclaim will help the university.

“Anytime a UTA student receives an award or recognition for their research from a national organization, it’s one of those things that gives UTA and the department some visibility,” Dr. Wickham said.

Entries to this contest were judged by the student subcommittee of the society’s Council of Education and Accreditation. Entries had to be well written in the student’s own words with their own research. 
  
 

John Smithis a journalism junior. He  can be reached by e-mail atopinion-editor.shorthorn@uta.edu  
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