Posted at 1:26 a.m., Thursday, May 31, 2007
WCC professor headed to Greece to research eruption
Advertiser Staff
A professor of geology and oceanography at Windward Community College has been awarded a Fulbright grant that will allow him to travel to Greece in June to research the largest volcanic eruption in human history."I am so honored to have this opportunity," Flloy McCoy stated in a UH news release.
From June 2007 to July 2008, McCoy will be involved in fieldwork to study the effects of the Late Bronze Age eruption of Thera (Santorini) in Greece. McCoy will attempt to merge the fields of archaeology and geology into a new discipline — geoarchaeology — to find out what destroyed a Cycladic culture and led to the demise of the Minoan culture on Crete.
He will also teach as a visiting research professor from September 2007 to May 2008 at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, mentoring students, and teaching graduate seminars in natural hazards and geology.
McCoy has studied the geological evidence for this eruption and its impacts over the last 20 years with the assistance of small groups of interested scientists and non-scientists, the UH news release said, and his work has been featured in numerous programs on NBC, BBC, the National Geographic, Learning and Discovery Channels.
As a Fulbright scholar grantee, McCoy will also be negotiating deep-water archaeology, mapping the ocean floor in search of ships and looking for evidence of ancient trade routes between Greece and Egypt. His role as a geologist will include developing new remote techniques for recording information in waters as deep as 12,000 feet.
