Francis Macdonald, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University, will give the talk "Geological context for long-term climate change."
Daniella Rempe, assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Texas, will give the talk "Direct measurements of water storage dynamics in Earth's Critical Zone: the implications of rock moisture on geochemical and ecological processes."
Allen McNamara, Endowed Professor of Geological Sciences at Michigan State University, will give the talk "Multiscale compositional heterogeneity in Earth's mantle and its implications for hotspot volcanism and chemistry."
Mark Clementz, professor of paleobiology at the University of Wyoming, will give a talk TBD.
Douglas Bird, associate professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Human Ecology, will give the talk "Livelihoods, fire regimes, and novel ecosystems in Indigenous Australia."
In a weekend, imagine walking the earth before the time of dinosaurs, then during the period in which they roamed, and finishing your walk long after their demise. For students in a geobiology (Geosc 204) course that culminates with a field trip to the Denver Basin, that’s the story that’s told in the exposed rocks of Dinosaur Ridge, Green Mountain, Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument and backstage visits to a nearby museum.
The 2017 Institutes for Energy and the Environment (IEE) seed grants have been awarded to a pool of interdisciplinary researchers at Penn State. Thirteen grants totaling more than $312,000 have been awarded to 42 researchers that addressed four of IEE's five research themes: Climate and Ecosystem Change, Future Energy Supply, Smart Energy Systems, and Water and Biogeochemical Cycles.
While most climate scientists, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, implicitly define "pre-industrial" to be in the late 1800's, a true non-industrially influenced baseline is probably further in the past, according to an international team of researchers who are concerned because it affects the available carbon budget for meeting the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit agreed to in the Paris Conference of 2015.
Large, robust, lens-shaped microfossils from the approximately 3.4 billion-year-old Kromberg Formation of the Kaapvaal craton in eastern South Africa are not only among the oldest elaborate microorganisms known, but are also related to other intricate microfossils of the same age found in the Pilbara Craton of Australia, according to an international team of scientists.
