Richard Peter Nickelsen ’47

Richard Peter Nickelsen ’47, Ph.D., died on November 23, 2014, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He started college in the summer of 1943, served in the Army from 1943 to 1946, returned and graduated in 1949. He majored in geology, was active in Cabin & Trail, elected president of the Outing Club, sang in the Glee Club and was a member of Casque & Gauntlet. In the summer of 1949 he and a friend sailed on an ice-breaker out of Boston to Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic to dismantle a watch tower. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in geology from Johns Hopkins. As part of a four-man team, he spent two summers in Alaska mapping the northern wilderness near the Kuskowim River. He joined the faculty at Penn State department of mineral industries in 1953. In 1960 he accepted an invitation to move to Bucknell University, with a mandate from the dean to build a geology department, which he did with the addition of courses and faculty. He served as chairman of the department of geology and geography for several years. His research projects in the Appalachians led to a NATO fellowship in Norway with his family for 15 months in 1965-66. In the 1991 the Northeast and Southeast sections of the American Geological Society honored him with a symposium on thrust-belt structure and tectonics. He served on the class executive committee from 1997 to 2014. He is survived by his wife of 64 years and three children, two of whom are Dartmouth alumni.