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People & Offices
Andy Moore
Professor of Geology; 3-2 Engineering Program Liaison

I grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, where my dad worked for IBM and my mother was a librarian. Although I took geology in high school, I had absolutely no intention of becoming a geologist! I became one in college because of the field trips and the sense of knowing something different about the world. After grad school, I lived in Sendai, Japan, for three years as a researcher at the Disaster Control Research Center, looking at the deposits of ancient tsunamis. I left Japan to take a job at Kent State University, where I worked before coming to Earlham. My wife and I have a two-year-old daughter who appears to view sleep as something other people do.

Contact Info

Campus Mail
Drawer 132

Phone
765-983-1672

E-mail

Office
313 Dennis Hall

Programs/Departments

  • Geology
  • Environmental Science
  • Japanese Studies
  • East Asian Studies
  • Pre-Engineering

Degrees

  • Ph.D., University of Washington
  • M.S., University of Washington
  • B.A., Carleton College

Selected Courses:

I teach classes related to earth history, geologic hazards, and sediment transport. At Earlham, I regularly teach Oceanography, Geohazards, Physical Geology, Earth History, Earth Surface Processes, and Depositional Environments. Like all of the geology faculty I run off-campus programs in May, most recently to Yellowstone.

Most of my projects still involve tsunami deposits. I work in Hokkaido, Japan, on several ancient tsunamis, and in Okinawa on a tsunami from 1771. I've also worked on modern tsunamis quite a bit, including surveys of the 1996 Irian Jaya, 1999 Vanuatu, 2004 Indian Ocean, 2006 Java, 2007 Solomon Islands, and 2011 Tohoku tsunamis. I don't tend to work on these much any more because of the difficulty in bringing students to disaster areas on such short notice.

I belong to Sigma Xi.

I learned woodworking from my father, and try to make one or two pieces of furniture a year. I pretty much exclusively work in the Arts and Crafts style, though I've worked in Shaker occasionally. I learned to garden from the same source, and spend most summers annoying my wife with excess produce. I have an unfortunate knitting obsession. I took up knitting while living in Japan, and now knit two or three sweaters a year, alternating between Ganseys and Fair Isle. Because my mother was also a knitter, I have two generations worth of yarn stockpiled, and it's becoming a problem.

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