Robert E. Garrison *65

Bob died Nov. 26, 2021, in Santa Cruz, Calif. 

He was born Oct. 25, 1932, in Texas and graduated from Stanford in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in geology. After serving in the Air Force, he earned a master’s degree from Stanford in 1958 and studied at the University of Innsbruck on a Fulbright scholarship. Bob worked for two years for Sunray DX Oil Co., developing an appreciation of the commercial applications of geology. He completed a Ph.D. in geology at Princeton in 1965.

After faculty positions at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, Bob came to UC Santa Cruz in 1968 and was a founder of the Earth Sciences Board there. He was among the first to apply transmission electron microscopy to obtain the high magnification needed to image the textures of very fine-grained sedimentary rocks from peel replicas of polished and etched samples. Bob studied the Monterey Formation, the source and sometimes the reservoir of almost all the petroleum found in California. He assisted in geologic field training of Apollo astronauts and studied two samples of lunar rocks collected during the Apollo 12 mission.

Bob’s wife Jan and son James survive him.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.