This week (February 20) Don Mikulic, retired from the Illinois State Geological Survey at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, will help us explore the over-arching impacts of the Niagara Escarpment that starts near its namesake falls and curves over through Ontario and Lake Huron and skirts along the southern U.P. and then through the Door Peninsula and into eastern Wisconsin.

Here’s how he describes his talk, entitled “Wisconsin’s Niagara Escarpment: The Continuing Impact of 430 Million-Year-Old Silurian Rocks on the State’s Development, Economy, and Scientific Heritage”:

"Geology has a strong influence where and how our society develops. Few people, however, are aware of the importance of this connection. In eastern Wisconsin, the Niagara Escarpment provides a noteworthy example of this cause and effect. From defining the shape of the Great Lakes to making a home for the Green Bay Packers, the escarpment has been instrumental in the direction of eastern Wisconsin’s historical and economic development and more recently its geotourism.

"The Silurian rocks of this region of which the escarpment is a part, continue to play a role in this development in addition to having been the basis of important scientific discoveries. First in the 19th Century documentation of ancient reefs by former state geologists and a UW President, on to more recent studies on the geologic record of glacially driven extinction events, these Silurian rocks have had an important role in studying the geologic past."

About the Speaker

Donald Mikulic is specialist on the geology and paleontology of Silurian rocks especially in the Milwaukee-Chicago area and on Wisconsin mining history. He has conducted research projects in North America and Europe and has worked as a curator at the Greene Museum at UW-Milwaukee, as a consultant for the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District and for the Wisconsin Department of Justice. He is a steering committee member of the Niagara Escarpment Resource Network.

Mikulic grew up in Muskego, earned his bachelor’s in geology at UW-Milwaukee and his PhD in geology at Oregon State University. He retired as senior paleontologist from the Illinois State Geological Survey at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is affiliated with the Weis Earth Science Museum, at the Fox Valley Campus of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

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