Severe flooding followed heavy rains in Cranford, New Jersey.

Widespread climate change from global warming has devastating and lasting effects on human health, infrastructure and food production. As temperatures rise, certain areas are dealing with intense droughts and water scarcity, while other regions are experiencing catastrophic rainfall and flooding. The eastern United States is one area that has seen a marked rise in torrential storms in recent years. A byproduct of this was the East Kentucky flood of 2022, which occurred when a storm swept through, dropping four inches of rain per hour, resulting in the tragic loss of 44 lives and the declaration of 13 counties as federal disaster areas.

As the eastern U.S. comes to grips with the changing climate, local and state governments depend on accurate rainfall predictions to help save lives and minimize property damage. But human-caused climate change makes it difficult to isolate processes in the atmosphere and ocean responsible for long-term trends in rainfall. This makes it especially challenging to predict rainfall changes on a local scale. A team of researchers from the University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) has been awarded a $547,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate ancient climate data to help improve the accuracy of climate modeling and future rainfall predictions.

Tripti Bhattacharya (left) and David Fastovich

The project is led by principal investigator (PI) , Thonis Family Professor in EES, and co-PI , a postdoctoral researcher in Bhattacharya’s Paleoclimate Dynamics Lab. Bhattacharya is a leading expert in organic geochemistry and climatology, which involves studying how atmospheric conditions have changed over time. Fastovich, who joined Bhattacharya’s lab at ���ϲ����� in 2022, has particular interest in using the geologic record to better understand future global change.

“This project really brings together David’s and my expertise to tackle a climate question of strong relevance to the northeast U.S., including the Central New York region,” says Bhattacharya.

According to Fastovich, extreme rainfall in the eastern and central U.S. results from a “perfect storm” of conditions in the atmosphere, Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean.

“When oceanic and atmospheric conditions are just right, air laden with moisture from the Gulf of Mexico is directed towards the central and eastern U.S. This air is then quickly lifted by atmospheric processes creating pockets of intense rainfall,” he explains. “We hypothesize that the relative importance of oceanic and atmospheric processes needed to create extreme rainfall are poorly approximated in climate models that are used to make predictions of the future.”

Answers Embedded in Leaf Wax

The team will take measurements of leaf waxes from lake sediments preserved in the last ice age and compare those results to climate models to identify why predictions of rainfall in the central and eastern U.S. are uncertain.

Their research will focus on the period from the Last Glacial Maximum (~20,000 years ago) to the Holocene (last ~12,000 years of Earth’s history). During this time, there was an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide which led to ice sheet retreat and ocean heat transport variability—which refers to the fluctuations in the movement of heat within the ocean.

The leaf waxes that the team will study originate from five lakes across Ohio, Missouri and Florida. Bhattacharya and Fastovich will be applying lab methods that extract, identify and measure leaf waxes stored within the sediments.

Bhattacharya works with a gas chromatograph, a key piece of lab equipment that allows her to quantify the concentrations of leaf waxes in ancient sediments.

“My lab measures leaf waxes, but David’s unique expertise is helping us apply this technique in a new setting,” says Bhattacharya. “This grant is a great example of how postdoctoral scholars enrich the depth and breadth of research expertise here at ���ϲ�����.”

According to Fastovich, being able to engage in this type of hands-on research with field-leading instrumentation was one of the reasons he chose ���ϲ�����.

“I was really drawn to the expertise and analytical capabilities here in Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences,” he says. “Through this project, we’re using sophisticated equipment to study leaf waxes, which make up the shiny layer that can be seen on plants that prevent them from drying out. They are very robust compounds that are stored in lake sediments and hold a wealth of information about climate.”

Improving Climate Models

The team will measure the different proportions of hydrogen atoms in the compounds from these sediment cores to better understand how rainfall in the central and eastern U.S. changed over the last 18,000 years. With the data collected from the leaf wax biomarkers, the team will develop a network of hydroclimate reconstructions to reveal physical processes like atmospheric circulation, evaporation and condensation. These enable researchers to understand changes in atmospheric circulation and hydroclimate.

“Climate models struggle to capture the historic hydroclimate in the eastern United States, as they overestimate precipitation along the Atlantic coast and underestimate precipitation in the Great Plains,” Bhattacharya says. “With precipitation amount and intensity predicted to robustly increase throughout these regions in the coming century, accurate climate models will be an essential tool for policymakers to make informed decisions about adaption strategies and infrastructure planning.”

Fastovich notes that it will be difficult to alter the rainfall trajectory short of stopping carbon dioxide emissions altogether. It is therefore critical to engage in research efforts that improve climate modeling accuracy to prepare for the future.

“The less carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere, the less rainfall will differ from historical trends to which we are accustomed,” he says. “But it’s important to note that the eastern U.S. is locked in for some rainfall changes because of today’s high carbon dioxide levels, and as extreme rainfall becomes more common, preparing infrastructure for this new normal is imperative.”

The Importance of Postdocs

According to , vice president for research, Fastovich’s contribution to this project exemplifies the significance of postdoctoral scholars to the research mission at ���ϲ�����. In fall 2023, the University established an to provide centralized resources and dedicated staff to serve the interests and well-being of postdoctoral scholars.

“Professor Bhattacharya and Dr. Fastovich’s award demonstrates the important role that postdoctoral scholars play in pursuing funding, as well as working on research and creative projects,” says Brown.

To help more postdocs win research funding, the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs will be running a series of research development sessions targeted at postdocs starting next academic year.

Tripti Bhattacharya

Thonis Family Professor in ���ϲ�����’s�� focuses her research on understanding the sensitivity of regional rainfall to global climate change. In 2022 published , she led a team that used ancient climate data to predict how the summer monsoon may change in the North American southwest.

Bhattacharya says:

“This summer has seen a number of high impact weather events that highlight the impact of extremes on infrastructure.

“Tropical Storm Hilary represents an unprecedented event in the historical record. Few storms tend to propagate north over Baja into California, typically because ocean temperatures off the coast of southern California are relatively cool. These cool temperatures lower the amount of fuel available for tropical storms, causing them to dissipate rapidly if they do travel north. However, this year we are seeing record warmth over much of the global ocean, including the northeast Pacific. An El Nino event in the equatorial Pacific likely plays some role in this record warmth, but further work is needed to disentangle the potential role of climate change vs. other factors.

“Because this type of event is unprecedented in the historical record, it is hard to study a one-off event. But we know from climate models and theoretical predictions that rainfall is likely to increase in intensity in a warmer world. And we can study past warm climate states, when ocean temperatures off California were much warmer than during the pre-industrial interval, to understand how the statistics of rainfall and tropical storms might change in the future. As a paleoclimatologist, I use molecules in ancient rocks as well as climate models to understand these past warm climate states.”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Media Relations
M��315.380.0206
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���ϲ�����

Please contact Ellen James Mbuqe at ��or Vanessa Marquette at to schedule an interview with either professor.

��is a professor of practice at ���ϲ�����’s Maxwell School and deputy director of the Institute for Security Policy and Law. He writes:��“The latest incident with the missing submersible near the Titanic datum reminds us of the significant hazards attendant to operating in dangerous environments.��In spite of advances in technology, extreme ocean depths, and for that matter outer space, are hazardous and unforgiving places.��We certainly hold out hope for a rescue of the personnel aboard the Titan submersible, and at the same time, need to acknowledge the dangers that are part of highly adventurous “recreational” missions.”

Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences��at ���ϲ�����, researches volcanoes and tectonics, and is the co-author of the book “.” He has conducted numerous trips to the ocean floor in submersibles.

Karson said there are multiple issues with the location and rescue of the submersible. “This is a needle in a haystack situation. Even if they know it is around the wreckage of the Titanic, the debris down there is spread out over a kilometer and with debris as big as the submarine. So to the sonar, the sub is another lump down there.”

He points out that the sound, believed to be from the submersible, is a good sign, but now it is a case of triangulating the sound and pinpointing where it is. But he cautions that there are a lot of sounds in the ocean, such as whale songs, large shipping vessels or even other submarines, and sound can travel very far.

Karson offers insight one how the sub can be rescued. He points out that submersibles dive to extreme depths with weights attached to them. When the vessel is ready to surface, the weights are discharged, and it naturally rises to the surface. “Rescuers can use a remotely operated, sophisticated robot on a fiber optic cable. The robot can assist with freeing the submersible,” he said.

He also cautions that the vessel is too deep for human divers to get to it. The conditions of deep ocean will be challenging. “I am sure it is horrible down there. The temperature is just above freezing. It is like being in a snow cave and hypothermia is a real danger.”

Lu’s passion for cooking started while he was a graduate student at the University of Rochester. Like many college students, Lu says being on a tight budget often forced him to dine in, so he would use that opportunity to infuse creativity into his cooking. He’s honed his culinary skills over the years by watching YouTube videos, and his talents have evolved to the point where he now themes his dishes after his areas of scientific expertise.

Earth and environmental sciences professor Zunli Lu (left) presents a seafood dish to Life Trustee Mike ’72 (center) and Susan Thonis.

Since joining the University in 2011, Lu’s research has sought to improve people’s understanding of how catastrophic environmental changes drove mass extinctions in the ancient past, so that people today can try to anticipate the consequences of current climate change.

In recognition of his research and teaching excellence, earlier this year Lu became the third��Thonis Family Professor, made possible by the generosity of Life Trustee Mike ’72 and Susan Thonis. When they came to ���ϲ����� for Lu’s investiture, Lu cooked up a fusion dinner in which each course alluded to pivotal transitions in Earth’s history.

Explore how Lu connects food and science in the image gallery below from his dinner with the Thonises.

Lu prepares a seafood dish featuring salmon and seabass. In the center of the dish is a vial containing an otolith – a small bone from the inner ear of fish that grows rings, similar to trees. By measuring trace elements in otoliths, Lu can learn more about the life cycle of a fish, revealing information such as hypoxia (low oxygen) in modern oceans.

Thonis and his wife, Susan, recently gifted $1.34 million to establish the Thonis Family Professorship III of Earth Science. As part of the , the University contributes an additional $666,000 to the gift amount to fund the professorship. This is their third endowed professorship supporting the geosciences, though each recipient is distinctive in their research and teaching. This latest gift supports the work of , professor of Earth and environmental sciences, who joined ���ϲ����� in 2011.

“I think any problem that geochemistry can solve, Zunli can take it on,” says Thonis. He speaks with similar enthusiasm about the work being done by the other endowed professors in the Earth and environmental sciences department. The first Thonis Family endowed professorship currently supports research into “what’s going on way down deep in the Earth” and the second endowed professorship currently “uses geochemistry to understand rainfall, past and future.”

Lu’s work covers a wide range of topics intersecting geology, energy, environment and climate. “I like to use my science as a vehicle for exploring complex interactions among rock, water and life, to the maximum extent across space and time,” says Lu. , Lu and a team of interdisciplinary scientists were awarded a $2 million grant from the Frontier Research in Earth Sciences program of the National Science Foundation to study the causes of mass extinctions and how animals millions of years ago responded to environmental changes. Specifically, Lu looks at the stressors placed on marine animals by changing ocean conditions, such as elevated temperatures and reduced oxygen availability.��The research could help predict the impact of climate change on the entire ecosystem that supports animal and human life.

Thonis believes these gifts to advance research and scholarship help boost the overall reputation of the University. His focus on the geosciences may be personal, but his philanthropic goal is broad: “I know there are others out there who are passionate about math or philosophy or creative writing. I hope to propel someone to make a gift in the field of their choice.”

“This series of endowed professorships from Mike’s generosity has driven strong positive feedback in the growth of our faculty and in the reputation of our department,” says Lu.

“The Thonis family’s commitment to academic excellence, demonstrated by their generous support of our faculty, is deeply appreciated,” says College of Arts and Sciences Interim Dean Lois Agnew. “It’s inspiring to see someone parlay their own positive experience as an undergraduate into advancing the careers of countless students and researchers who are making a real difference in the field.”

“Through their continued philanthropic commitment to ���ϲ�����, Mike and Susie are helping us attract and retain top scholars who drive discovery,” says Chancellor Kent Syverud. “In the field of geology, discovery involves looking back millions of years to help us shape the future for years to come. Similarly, endowments are long-term investments in the future of scholarship that impacts generations to come.”

“The time I’ve spent with Mike and Susie Thonis drives home the value of the student experience within the department and the student-professor relationship in instilling a lifelong passion for both the department and institution,” says Gregory Hoke, chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “As we enter our 150th year as a department, their generosity does so much to cement our future as one of the University’s oldest academic units.”

In addition to his philanthropy, Thonis has generously donated his time and talent. He serves on the Advancement and External Affairs Committee and Finance Committee as a life trustee, and is a tri-chair of the National Campaign Council Executive Committee. He served as a voting trustee from 2008-2021, and was a member of the Boston Regional Council and College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Advisory Board. In 2015, he received the Dritz Trustee of the Year Award, and in 2022, he received the Dritz Life Trustee of the Year Award for outstanding Board service.

After Thonis graduated from ���ϲ�����, he earned an M.S. in geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then changed his career trajectory with an MBA from Harvard Business School. He launched a career in endowment management and co-founded Charlesbank Capital Partners, where he remains a senior advisor. With a career devoted to helping others understand what it means to invest in the future, Thonis sees his own philanthropy as a gift to the University and to himself.

“When you give gifts, you begin to feel more like your career matters,” says Thonis, who has gifted more than $5 million to support scholarships and academic excellence in research and teaching at ���ϲ�����. He says he was inspired by the teachings of Arthur Brooks, Ph.D., a former professor in The Maxwell School, and now Harvard Kennedy School and professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School. Brooks writes about the link between charitable giving and increased happiness and prosperity.

“When people give more money away, they tend to prosper,” Brooks . In other words, it’s good for the giver and for society because there’s an economic multiplier effect to philanthropic investments. Applying the same principles, Thonis continues to be a fervent supporter of ���ϲ�����.

“When you retire in business, it doesn’t mean you’re done contributing,” says Thonis. “If you want to be happy, you need to take what you’ve done in your career and convert it into something new and different. For me, it has meant returning to my geology and Earth science roots and becoming even more fervent in my support of the University.”

The direct beneficiary of his latest gift shares Thonis’ appreciation for the broad impact of a focused investment. “I think there may be a surprising number of parallels between understanding the Earth system and navigating the finance world,” says Lu. “You need to pay attention to micro-scale details while tracking the big picture on a global scale. You constantly struggle with too much information and not enough information. The amazing thing about Mike is his success in having substantial influence and long-lasting impacts in both worlds.”

About ���ϲ�����

���ϲ����� is a private research university that advances knowledge across disciplines to drive breakthrough discoveries and breakout leadership. Our collection of 13 schools and colleges with over 200 customizable majors closes the gap between education and action, so students can take on the world. In and beyond the classroom, we connect people, perspectives and practices to solve interconnected challenges with interdisciplinary approaches. Together, we’re a powerful community that moves ideas, individuals and impact beyond what’s possible.

About Forever Orange: The Campaign for ���ϲ�����

Orange isn’t just our color. It’s our promise to leave the world better than we found it. Forever Orange: The Campaign for ���ϲ����� is poised to do just that. Fueled by more than 150 years of fearless firsts, together we can enhance academic excellence, transform the student experience and expand unique opportunities for learning and growth. Forever Orange endeavors to raise $1.5 billion in philanthropic support, inspire 125,000 individual donors to participate in the campaign, and actively engage one in five alumni in the life of the University. Now is the time to show the world what Orange can do. Visit to learn more.

Aerial view of the study region in the Argentine Andes (Photo courtesy of J.R. Slosson)

When secondary cosmic rays penetrate the upper meters of Earth’s surface, they turn elements in minerals, like oxygen, into rare radioisotopes (or “cosmogenic radionuclides”) including beryllium-10 (Be-10) and carbon-14 (C-14). Scientists can then study the variations in concentrations of these cosmogenic nuclides to estimate how long rocks have been exposed at the Earth’s surface. This in turn allows researchers to gain a better understanding of planetary processes, such as rates of erosion—from nothing more than a kilogram of river sand.

, the Jessie Page Heroy Professor and department chair of Earth and environmental sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, J.R. Slosson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who received a Ph.D. from ���ϲ�����, and , associate professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at Purdue University, recently co-authored a study published in analyzing cosmogenic radionuclides in samples from the Argentine Andes.

The goal of the project was to document the amount of time material resides on the hillslopes in the Andes Mountains relative to the overall erosion rate of the river basin. This information is critical to helping scientists identify landslide risks and understand how climate change will impact the dynamics of material transport on hillslopes as regions get wetter or drier.

History Written in the Sand

To determine erosion rates, the team obtained samples of river sand collected at the foot of the eastern flank of the Andes Mountains in the Mendoza and San Juan provinces, located in west-central Argentina. The river sand is to be a representative, well-mixed sample of the entire catchment (or runoff area) upstream of where the sample was collected.

In Hoke’s lab at ���ϲ�����, the sand was treated to isolate pure quartz from the other minerals present in the sample. The researchers use pure quartz because it is an optimal source for Be-10 and C-14. Splits of pure quartz were sent to the University at Buffalo and Lifton’s lab where beryllium and carbon were extracted, respectively. Subsequent measurements of C-14 were performed at Purdue University’s and Be-10 was analyzed at Lawrence Livermore National laboratory to figure out concentrations of each radionuclide.

A Tale of Talus

The highest non-volcanic peaks in the Andes are located between Santiago, Chile, and Mendoza, Argentina. The river basins that drain the high Andes span 5,000 meters (16,500 feet) in elevation and their hillslopes are lined with accumulations of rocky debris known as talus and scree.

Because Be-10 and C-14 are produced proportionally but decay at vastly different rates, the cosmogenic radionuclide concentrations within a sample reveal the rate at which sediment is produced from bare rock surfaces (Be-10) and the time it takes to travel down hillslopes through landslides (C-14). As sediment is mobilized and buried through landsliding, the rate of production of both isotopes diminishes, but because C-14 decays 1,000 times faster than Be-10, their proportionality changes rapidly. This change in proportion allowed the authors to apply a statistical model to determine the average duration of time it takes material to travel down talus slopes.

EES Professor Gregory Hoke co-authored a study investigating how long material resides on hillslopes in the Andes Mountains.

According to Hoke, this is one of the first studies to use the combination of Be-10 and C-14 to show the long-term average rate of sediment generation and the time and process it takes to move down to and through the rivers, giving a broader picture of the factors involved.

“Previously, we’ve relied nearly exclusively on Be-10 and sediment concentration measurements made at river gauge stations to estimate average erosion rates,” says Hoke. “What attracted us to study these catchments with C-14 was the agreement of gauge and Be-10 data. We expected to see the two isotopes and gauge data yield the same rates and demonstrate that mountain erosion was occurring at a steady state.”

While the concentration of Be-10 came back as anticipated over the long timescale, they found that C-14 was much lower than anticipated, meaning that sediments eroded from the high mountain watersheds were shielded from cosmic rays for at least 7,000 to 15,000 years. The authors explain that temporary storage in talus slopes best explains the lower concentration of C-14 relative to Be-10.

“This study shows that it is possible to fill an important gap in the observational timescale using the C-14/Be-10 pair that brings to life what really happens on the hillslopes,” says Hoke.

With the risk that landslides pose to humans and infrastructure, J.R. Slosson says their results indicate that C-14 can be significant in unraveling sediment transport dynamics going forward, and potentially help predict where future landslides might occur. He says, “utilizing C-14 along with Be-10 provides a new window into the complexity of sediment transport in mountain settings and can provide a backdrop for evaluating contemporary changes in earth surface processes.”

This project was funded by: National Science Foundation, Grant Numbers DGE-1449617, EAR-1463709; Geological Society of America; ���ϲ����� Education Model Program on Water-Energy Research; and the ���ϲ����� Research Excellence Doctoral Funding program.

Ice from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet flows through the Transantarctic Mountains. (Photo by Paul Fitzgerald, taken from the summit of Mt. Borcik in the Scott Glacier region of the Transantarctic Mountains at 86°S)

A trove of ancient rocks collected from glacial moraines has literally revealed the deep story of one of the most underexplored environments on the planet—the rocks and mountain belts hidden beneath the East Antarctica Ice Sheet. Before this study, scientists had only the vaguest idea of when, how and why the mountains and landscapes now buried under the world’s largest ice sheet had formed.

“These mountains and landscapes have been buried under miles of ice for the past 14 million years,” says , professor of Earth and environmental sciences at the College of Arts and Sciences. “They are much more remote than Mount Everest or the deepest part of the ocean.”

Now, some of that inaccessible region’s tectonic mysteries have been solved. In a study recently published in Nature Communications, first author Fitzgerald and second author John Goodge, a professor emeritus of geological sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth, used innovative rock sampling and radiometric dating on those rocks to reveal the history of central East Antarctica over the past half-billion years.

Mysterious Mountains

The researchers selected granite boulders ranging in age from 1 to 2 billion years old, knowing that rocks of this age do not occur anywhere else in Antarctica and must therefore come from well under the ice sheet, perhaps from the large and mysterious Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains. This is because as mountains erode, glaciers—slow-moving rivers of ice—transport the boulders to fields of deposited rock and sediment, called glacial moraines, near the edge of the continent.

Scientists have long puzzled over the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains purely because they are completely buried under the ice, and no one knows what rock types make up the range. Recent sub-ice images of the range suggest a non-volcanic origin, but if not volcanism, then what tectonic forces were responsible for its formation? Knowing when the mountains formed means researchers can start to solve this puzzle.

Researchers collect boulders from Milan Ridge. (Photo courtesy of John Goodge)

But how do you determine when a mountain belt formed, let alone one that is completely buried under the ice? By determining the low-temperature cooling history of the rocks. And that’s where complementary expertise comes into play.

Fitzgerald, a New Zealand native, and Goodge, an American, have been good friends since meeting as graduate students in the Transantarctic Mountains in 1986. But they had never worked together. Now they had a chance to do just that. Goodge had collected the boulders and Fitzgerald had the expertise with thermochronology. Both have been working on Antarctic geology for decades.

When mountains are formed, they are uplifted and form high topography. Due to erosion, rocks are then exhumed toward the surface. As rocks are exhumed, they cool. Determining when and how fast rocks cool helps narrow down when in geologic time the mountains formed. Geologists use thermochronology—analyzing the time-temperature history of rocks through radiometric dating­—to understand the cooling history. The relatively large size of the boulders allowed researchers to analyze the boulders using a variety of radiometric methods.

The Findings

The results showed that the interior of East Antarctica had experienced three major periods of rapid cooling which are due to major tectonic events. First, the supercontinent Gondwana formed due to continent-continent collision about 500 million years ago. Second, the Gondwana supercontinent started to break up about 180 million years ago. Finally, a high-elevation plateau started to collapse about 100 million years ago, associated with formation of a rift-system between East and West Antarctica. All in all, these conclusions make good geologic sense.

These are still very early days in understanding the geologic puzzles that are concealed by the vast mass of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. What stands out for Fitzgerald, though, is the excitement of discovery. “We were sampling a place that we knew very little about. For us, this was like having rocks to study from the moon or Mars,” he says.

Tripti Bhattacharya, Thonis Family Professor and a member of the Earth and environmental sciences faculty, and Alison Patteson, assistant professor of physics, have been presented with the prestigious honor.

The fellowships recognize “extraordinary U.S. and Canadian researchers whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders,” according to the . More than 1,000 researchers are nominated each year for 126 Sloan Fellowship slots. Winners receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship to help advance their research.

’s research focuses on and how cells navigate and respond to the physical features of their environment. Through a five-year from the National Institutes of Health, Patteson and her team are currently investigating how the structural protein vimentin affects cell migration. They are also exploring the properties that control the growth of biofilms, which are slimy clusters of microorganisms, including bacteria and fungi, that can adhere to wet surfaces.

uses evidence from the geological past to understand how rainfall will change in the future as a result of global warming. The Sloan Fellowship will support her work using past instances of climate change as natural experiments to explore the fundamental dynamics that shape the response of rainfall to climate change. Using isotopic analyses of plant biomarkers and climate model experiments, her research team seeks to understand how ocean warming patterns are likely to shape rainfall changes in the future.

“I congratulate Professors Patteson and Bhattacharya on being named Sloan Fellows,” says Arts and Sciences Interim Dean Lois Agnew. “In the five years since they joined the College of Arts and Sciences, they have done incredible work in advancing our understanding of the fields of cellular behavior and paleoclimate dynamics. This distinction is a rightful recognition of their innovation and vision in research and teaching.”

Tripti Bhattacharya uses a gas chromatograph, equipment that quantifies concentrations of leaf waxes in ancient sediments.

Rainfall Studies

The Sloan Fellowship comes at a crucial time for her research team, says Bhattacharya. “We are currently working in settings as diverse as western North America, southern Africa and the tropical Andes, and are hopeful that the results of our studies will provide valuable insights that are directly relevant to understanding changes in extreme drought and extreme flooding in the future.”

Since joining ���ϲ����� in 2018, Bhattacharya has been awarded over $2 million in research funding. Among many distinctions, she was recognized with the University’s Meredith Teaching Recognition Award in 2021 and has been an invited presenter at the American Geophysical Union Annual meeting in 2019, 2020 and 2022. She also served as one of eight leading climate scholars at a workshop organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Cell Migration, Biofilms

“From identifying and developing therapeutic treatments for cancers and infectious diseases to developing a framework to understand what promotes or hinders the growth of biofilm, this fellowship will help our group be at the forefront of these emerging fields,” says Patteson. The Sloan Fellowship will support Patteson’s research in all these areas, creating new knowledge that will lead to new societal impacts.

The fellowship comes on the heels of a 2023 Cottrell Scholar award for Patteson, which was presented by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. She also has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response Research grant to study cellular uptake of SARS2; an NSF EAGER (Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research) award to examine emergent collective behavior of bacteria; and an NSF Collaborative Research grant for her work with biofilms. She has been a faculty member in the Department of Physics since 2018.

Alison Patteson prepares a petri dish as part of her study of biofilms and biophysics. (Photo by Marilyn Hesler)

Leaders of Great Promise

According to the Sloan Foundation, “the fellowships are one of the most prestigious awards available to young researchers, in part because so many past fellows have gone on to become towering figures in science.”

Past recipients include numerous Nobel prize winners and other renowned researchers and scientists. Candidates are nominated by fellow scientists. The winners are selected by independent panels of senior scholars on the basis of research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field. The fellowships are open to scholars in the fields of chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics.

“Professors Bhattacharya and Patteson are stars in their fields and superb leaders and mentors to their students. Their work in climate science and biophysics is highly regarded and well-recognized,” says University Vice President for Research . “These Sloan fellowships confirm the impact that their research has on the world and shows outstanding promise for future careers. The University and its students are very fortunate that ���ϲ����� is their research and teaching home.”

is an assistant professor of seismology in ���ϲ�����’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. He provides comments below that can be quoted directly and is available for interview.

Russell says:

“The magnitude 7.8 earthquake and subsequent earthquake sequence that occurred near Gaziantep, Turkey was indeed tragic. Turkey is a tectonically active region located on the Anatolian plate, which is being squeezed westward about 2 cm/yr. by the northward collision of the Arabian plate with the Eurasian plate — like pinching a watermelon seed between your fingers. Although earthquakes are quite common in this region of the East Anatolian Fault Zone, one of this magnitude is rare. To give a sense, only three earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater have occurred within 150 miles of this earthquake within the last 50 years. As of this writing, there have already been five such earthquakes within the last 24 hours. A magnitude 7.5 earthquake occurred 9 hours after the 7.8 on a different fault strand to the north.

“More work is needed to understand the potential relationship between these two powerful earthquakes, but it is plausible that the larger magnitude 7.8 earthquake changed the stress state on the neighboring fault segment, which pushed it to rupture in the magnitude 7.5 earthquake. Aftershocks (smaller earthquakes following the main shock) will continue to occur over the next several weeks to months.”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Associate Director of Media Relations
Division of Communications

M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |
news.syr.edu |

���ϲ�����

Continuing its trajectory of robust faculty hiring in , the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) announces the following new professors in the humanities and the sciences, whose appointments began in January 2023.

“We are pleased and proud that these new professors are joining our A&S community of top-tier faculty and high-achieving students,” says Interim Dean Lois Agnew. “With their unparalleled subject matter expertise and dedication to teaching, they will be instrumental in helping students gain the flexibility and knowledge needed for success, wherever the future takes them.”

Read more about their research and teaching interests in the profiles below.

Mohammed’s research focuses on the hydrology and hydrogeology of environments undergoing rapid changes due to climate change and increased development. He is interested in the movement of water, energy and chemicals through landscapes, and their interacting effects on hydrologic processes such as permafrost thaw, groundwater recharge, seawater intrusion and contaminant transport.

Mohammed (left) and Russell

His research aims to improve understanding of, and ability to predict, hydrological processes in a changing climate and develop management strategies to enhance the resiliency of water and ecosystem resources.

, assistant professor

Russell specializes in seismology. His research uses measurements of ground vibrations from seismic waves to create images of Earth’s interior and illuminate its structure, composition and dynamics. This involves collecting new datasets from unexplored reaches of the globe as well as developing leading-edge computational and analytical tools. He teaches courses in Earth science, earthquake seismology and geophysical imaging and is a member of ���ϲ�����’s Energy and Environment Research Cluster.

“Central to my teaching philosophy is a lowering of the divide between teaching and research in order to bring the excitement of research and scientific discovery into the classroom. Development of data-driven lectures are a key component of this effort. By infusing openly available datasets directly into lectures via interactive elements, students can explore complex phenomena and ideas in an approachable way.”

Pettolina

Forensics

, assistant professor

Singerman is a linguist specializing in the Indigenous languages of the Amazon Basin. Since 2013, he has conducted field research into Tuparí, a Brazilian language spoken by approximately 350-400 people. His research seeks to contextualize Tuparí grammar in the broader landscape of linguistic typology and to investigate areas of Tuparí grammar of interest to linguistic theory. His research synthesizes various strands of linguistic inquiry, including historical linguistics.

Singerman (left) and Surovi

“My goal as a teacher of linguistics is to present material in a way that builds upon my students’ innate knowledge as speakers/signers of natural languages, while also challenging them to recognize the value—cultural, historical, intellectual—of minoritized languages, including Indigenous languages. I provide my students with plenty of opportunities to work directly with data; by doing so, I aim to show them the major empirical phenomena that have motivated the development of linguistic theory.”

, assistant teaching professor and Italian language program coordinator

Surovi specializes in Italian Renaissance literature and culture and has taught both undergraduate and adult learners. She also has extensive experience with college in prison initiatives. Surovi is an active member of several professional associations in Italian and Renaissance studies and has also published a number of book reviews in journals such as Italica, Forum Italicum��and��Quaderni d’italianistica.

“My teaching promotes a communicative, multiliteracy approach in the classroom and encourages a welcoming and positive environment that motivates students to move beyond their comfort zone to discover new perspectives through the study of Italian language, literature and culture.”

, assistant professor

Mansell’s research background is in optics, lasers and instrumentation for interferometric ground-based gravitational-wave detectors. Her Ph.D. research was on squeezed states of light for gravitational-wave detectors and her postdoctoral work was on commissioning the advanced LIGO (laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory) detectors. She will be building an inclusive research group at ���ϲ����� and setting up a new lab space focused on testing technologies for future gravitational-wave detectors.

Mansell (left) and Nitz

“I hope to share my knowledge and excitement around experimental physics with students. I plan to maintain close ties to the LIGO observatories and hope to send students to the sites to work on gravitational-wave detector hardware. Some of the technical skills integral to gravitational-wave detection include classical and quantum optics, electronics, controls and mechanical design. I also strongly believe in the importance of diverse collaboration.”

, associate professor

Nitz’s research focuses on understanding the Universe with gravitational-wave astronomy and the astrophysics of compact objects. He has contributed to the detection of the first observed binary black hole merger (GW150914) and neutron star merger (GW170817). His interests include the study of neutron stars, black holes and dark matter in addition to high-performance data analysis techniques and the development of next-generation gravitational-wave observatories.

“My hope is to share the excitement of scientific discovery and the wonder present in the Universe around us. Students should see how cutting-edge science is conducted while getting opportunities inside and outside the classroom to explore and work with publicly available astronomy datasets. My goal is for students to cultivate their curiosity in addition to their critical thinking capabilities.”

Before the emergence of forests, primitive shrub-like vascular plants covered the Earth and played an important role in lowering CO2 levels, a new study has found. (Illustration by Jeffrey Benca, University of California-Berkeley)

It’s hard to imagine our planet without trees. From providing wildlife habitat to reducing erosion and absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, trees play an important role in maintaining a livable environment. But trees haven’t been around forever. Over 400 million years ago, the continents were covered by primitive shrub-like plants. It was during the Devonian period, around 385 million years ago, when shrubs evolved into small trees and forests emerged. So before trees, you might think CO2 levels were higher, right?

Contrary to previous estimates, a team of researchers including��, associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, have found geochemical evidence suggesting that CO2 levels may have been much lower millions of years before the emergence of large forests, according to .

Junium and his collaborators, including the study’s lead author Tais W. Dahl, associate professor from the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen, found that the earliest vascular plants substantially reduced CO2 levels long before the evolution of forests. This early CO2 decline may have led to significant global cooling and glaciation during this period.

Researchers tested ancient CO2 concentrations by studying 410- to 380-million-year-old fossilized plant material embedded in rocks. (Photo by M.A.R. Harding)

The team analyzed modern descendants of club mosses, plant fossils and geochemical data and found that 410–380 million years ago, CO2 levels were only modestly elevated compared to the present day—about 1.5 times greater than current levels, compared to up to 10 times greater, as previously estimated. Using paleoclimate and Earth systems modeling, they found that CO2 decline and simultaneous oxygen (O2) increase, even by the earliest land plants, was enough to have led to significant climatic cooling and partial glaciation, consistent with geological evidence.

Analyzing Ancient Plants

Junium’s work on the project involved analyzing Early Devonian Period fossil plant materials for their carbon stable isotope composition. By comparing ratios of carbon, researchers can determine how plants incorporated carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into their tissues during photosynthesis.

“The specific values (of carbon isotopes) can help us determine the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” says Junium, who conducted the research in his lab at ���ϲ����� using an isotope-ratio mass spectrometer, which has been custom modified to allow for analysis of extremely precise nanomolar quantities of fossil carbon. “The 410- to 380-million-year-old plant materials we analyzed were some of the oldest fossil vascular plants that colonized land before the rise of large forests. The analyses revealed that the ancient plant materials had carbon isotope compositions that were surprisingly similar to modern plants and suggested that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Early Devonian was not as high as we had thought.”

The new analyses served as a starting point for a deep reexamination of the evidence for high carbon dioxide concentrations prior to the expansion of large forests.

“A new method has enabled us to calculate the CO2 level in the atmosphere in the past based on plant fossils,” writes lead author Tais Dahl. “We initially applied the method to the time before forests emerged—a time which researchers agreed was characterised by high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. We used to think that the emergence of forests reduced the amount of atmospheric CO2 on Earth. But instead of 4,000 parts per million (ppm), which is the amount researchers assumed was found on the planet back then, we have shown that the figure is close to 600 ppm, which is not far from the level we are approaching today.”

How Studying the Past Impacts the Future

Christopher Junium

The team ultimately found that the emergence of large forests later in the Devonian may not have played as important of a role in decreasing carbon dioxide as previously thought, despite the fact that evidence suggests that the climate cooled considerably from the Early to the Late Devonian.

“The growth of smaller plants like those we analyzed appear to have induced changes in the terrestrial biosphere sufficient to decrease carbon dioxide and increase oxygen through the growth of soils and weathering of nutrient-rich rocks,” says Junium.

In terms of the study’s impact for the future of climate change, it underscores the growing consensus that Earth’s climate is highly sensitive to CO2 levels and that efforts to limit further CO2 increase can only improve the future outlook.

“Just because our results suggest that expansion of forests in the Devonian did not cause a dramatic decrease in carbon dioxide does not mean that afforestation—planting new forests on land without trees—is something we should not do,” says Junium. “Rather, climate mitigation practices need to involve decreasing emissions and multiple means for removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Planting trees and evaluating ways to increase weathering will be important tools for long-term carbon dioxide reduction and stabilization.”

Dahl adds, “To understand how this works on a global scale, and what the consequences are, it is a good idea to look at what happened in the past when the Earth saw major changes and these mechanisms changed. And that is what this study does.”

**

Tripti Bhattacharya

is the Thonis Family Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences in ���ϲ�����’s College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on understanding the sensitivity of regional rainfall to global climate change. Her work focuses on a paleoclimatic perspective, whereby past instances of climate change can be used as “natural experiments” to understand the response of the atmosphere-ocean system to external forcing.

Bhattacharya would be able to answer your questions and discuss the following points:

• California’s highly variable climate, put into context by its paleoclimatic record
• Predictions that individual storms will become stronger due to warmer atmosphere
• Impact of extra snowpack and higher spring temperatures
• Compounding risks to people living in impacted areas – extreme rain, wildfires, and increased mudslides

**

Sam Tuttle

is an Earth and Environmental Sciences assistant professor in ���ϲ�����’s College of Arts and Sciences. As a hydroclimatologist, he studies the distribution of the three phases of water at the Earth’s surface and in the atmo­sphere, and how it affects hydrological, atmospheric, and land surface processes. This includes moisture and energy exchanges, floods and droughts, and their different physical and biological causes and effects. Professor Tuttle is primarily interested in terrestrial water availability, and how it will change across time and space with climate change and land use.

Tuttle would be able to answer your questions and discuss the following points:

• Extreme rain that follows severe drought
• Weather’s impact on groundwater resources
• Below normal reservoir levels
• Spring snowmelt

To request interviews with either professor or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Associate Director of Media Relations
Division of Communications

M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |

���ϲ�����

EES Professor Christopher Scholz is the recipient of the Geological Society of America’s Israel C. Russell Award.

, professor in the�� (EES), is the recipient of the����from the Geological Society of America’s (GSA’s) Limnogeology Division. Presented to only one researcher each year, the award recognizes outstanding research, teaching and service in the field of limnogeology, which involves the study of modern and ancient lake basins around the world.

A professor at the University since 1998, Scholz is a leading expert in lake systems and paleolimnology—reconstructing the past environments of inland waters. His studies explore seismic and sediment core data from lakes around the world to answer fundamental questions about lake system evolution.

His award citation notes that among his seminal contributions to the field are his work on the Great Lakes of East Africa. Scholz has led several high-profile scientific drilling projects at Lake Malawi, an African Great Lake located between Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania. During one of those studies, his team drilled a 378 meter long Malawi core, extending back 1.3 million years, offering a continuous record of past climate change affecting the African continent. In addition to working on most of the Great Lakes of Africa, he has also conducted research on Lake Baikal, Siberia—the world’s deepest and oldest lake—as well as on many lake basins in North America.

A view of the Malawi coast in Eastern Africa. (Photo by Christopher Scholz)

Among his other research achievements, Scholz has authored or co-authored over 100 journal articles and served as principal investigator (PI) or Co-PI on nearly 60 grants. Through a recent collaboration with the��, Scholz is leading a team of researchers to study environmental changes over the last 300+ years in two of the Finger Lakes in New York state. The project aims to help understand environmental conditions that lead to harmful algal blooms.

In another study funded by the��, Scholz is working to determine the best areas in East Africa’s Lake Victoria to drill as part of a future planned proposal to capture lake sediment and recover long and continuous sedimentary records. As the largest lake in Africa, Lake Victoria is home to hundreds of native organisms and the largest lake fishery on Earth. Past records show that during its 400,000-year history, the lake has dried up and refilled multiple times. A future drilling program would support research to explore how past climate can be linked to lake drying events and how current levels of climate change might affect the lake and the surrounding environment in the future.

Scholz currently holds professional affiliations with the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America. Among his other awards and honors, Scholz received the ���ϲ����� Chancellor’s Citation for Faculty Excellence and Distinction in 2017 and served as director of undergraduate studies for the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences from 2007 to 2011. During his time at ���ϲ�����, he has also advised 24 graduate students and nine post-doctoral scholars.

Jeffrey Karson

is Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences at ���ϲ����� and extensively researches lava flow and interaction with various materials. Professor Karson is one of the directors of the , which allows geologists to create and experiment with 2200°F lab-created lava in a massive outdoor furnace. Karson has spoken with dozens of news outlets about volcanic eruptions and lava flow including , and .

He provides detailed information and commentary below about the Mauna Loa volcano and the latest eruption, which you are welcome to quote.

Karson says:

“Mauna Loa is by far the biggest volcanic mountain on Earth. It is 4,000 m above sea level but there is an additional 6,000 m below sea level, in this deep part of the Pacific Ocean, but also in part because it is so heavy that it has depressed the underlying seafloor, like placing a bowling ball on a mattress. But regardless of its size, it is not the most dangerous volcano. Eruptions that form shield volcanoes are generally small flows of basalt, the most common volcanic rock on Earth (and in the solar system). This is the same type of lava that we experiment with in the . There can be some fire fountaining (lava sprayed upward on the order of 100m) but it will most likely be just lava flows as seen in the 2018 Kilauea eruption or last summer’s Iceland eruption.

“Small eruptions like these incrementally build up giant volcanic masses like the big island of Hawaii or Iceland or other ocean islands. Far more dangerous are the large explosive volcanoes of the Pacific rim (Ring of Fire) that occur above subduction zones where ocean lithosphere is shoved back down into the Earth’s interior, or continental calderas, like Yellowstone. The good news is that basaltic eruptions in places like Hawaii are frequent and not very explosive. The bad news is that larger, more explosive volcanoes erupt less frequently so that we tend to forget about how dangerous they can be.

“Mauna Loa is just one volcanic center that formed about a ‘hot spot’ of rising, hot, solid mantle material that protrudes upward the Earth’s surface. As the Pacific plate moves northwest over this hot spot and the volcanic centers it produces, a line of individual seafloor volcanoes (seamounts) to form the Hawaii-Emperor seamount chain that can be traced from the big island to the Aleutians. Each volcano erupted in turn for about 1 million years before becoming inactive and sinking below sea level and being carried along on top of the Pacific plate. Continuing movement will shift the big island to the northwest and a new volcano will emerge to its southeast. We already see a small volcano – Loihi – forming there.

“For now, the main hazards are the lava near the summit and tephra (volcanic ash) that falls like heavy, hot rain sometimes many miles downwind from the eruptive center. Hot poisonous gases, like sulfur dioxide can also pose a significant hazard. The eruption is in a remote, mostly uninhabited area, so that risk to infrastructure and lives is low. However, lava can flow rapidly (few km per hour) and long distances (10s of kilometers) along new or re-activated rift zones and reach population centers, as we saw in 2018.

“We have been experimenting with the way lava flows over different materials at ���ϲ����� – clay, sand, wet sand, ice, and snow – so it will be interesting to see how the lava behaves in this eruption where lava may encounter any of these materials.

“Every eruption is an opportunity to learn about how volcanoes work and how to prepare for the next eruption. Afterall, it is just a question of��when, not��if��the next eruption will occur.”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
Associate Director of Media Relations
Division of Communications

M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |
news.syr.edu |

���ϲ�����

Summer storm developing over desert regions of Great Basin in summer 2022. New research suggests that these types of storms were intensified in the Pliocene, driving wetter conditions across much of the desert southwest.

The North American southwest has been suffering through weather extremes in recent years ranging from searing heatwaves and scorching wildfires to monsoon rainfalls that cause flash floods and mudslides. As temperatures around the world continue to rise because of global warming, a team of researchers from ���ϲ�����, the University of Connecticut, the University of Arizona, George Mason University and Harvard University are looking for environmental clues from millions of years in the past to predict what the southwestern climate may look like in the future. By analyzing ancient climate data, the scientists suspect that higher temperatures could cause stronger and more widespread summer rainfall across the southwest United States.

Subtropical regions like southwestern North America are becoming drier in response to global warming, as higher temperatures cause more aridity overall. However, rising temperatures can also lead to instances of excess precipitation during the summer months. The mechanism driving this is a strengthening monsoon. Just this past summer, southern California felt the effects of the monsoon, with historic flooding extending to places like Death Valley and other areas known for their lack of rainfall.

In a study led by��, Thonis Family Professor in the , researchers explored another time in Earth’s history with a strong North American summer monsoon. During the middle Pliocene epoch, an interval approximately three million years ago, despite carbon dioxide levels similar to today, the North American southwest was surprisingly full of lakes and plant and animal species needing a moister environment. The team’s new paper, published in the journal , suggests that a stronger monsoon in the middle Pliocene can explain past wetter conditions, with implications for the future.

Finding Answers in Ancient Leaf Waxes

To understand how the monsoon changed in the middle Pliocene, Bhattacharya and graduate student Claire Rubbelke, a Ph.D. candidate in Earth and environmental sciences, analyzed Pliocene-era leaf waxes preserved in ocean sediment cores from Baja California and southern California. The hydrogen isotopic composition of these waxes reveals past changes in the monsoon. Since rain is the source of the hydrogen used to produce leaf waxes, measuring the concentration of hydrogen reveals precipitation totals from a particular moment in the past. Researchers extract the leaf waxes by running solvents through sediments at high temperature and pressure and make isotopic measurements using a device called a gas chromatograph-isotope ratio mass spectrometer, which separates out waxes by their molecular mass.

Tripti Bhattacharya (right) samples sediment from a dry lakebed in Nevada, which is used to provide further evidence of monsoon changes during the Pliocene.

“With information encoded in leaf waxes we found that the Pliocene featured a stronger summer monsoon in western Mexico stretching all the way to where southern California now is, contrasting with previous work which stated that Pliocene hydroclimate changes were only the result of winter, not summer, rainfall,” says Bhattacharya. “Our paper presents the first direct evidence that monsoon changes caused wet conditions in the middle Pliocene.”

Driven by Temperature Changes

Climate modeling expert��, professor in the University of Connecticut’s Department of Geosciences and second author on the study, carried out simulations to determine how sea surface temperatures may have factored into the stronger North American Monsoon during the mid-Pliocene. Her team found that ocean temperatures in the Pacific were arranged in a way to transport more moisture from the tropics to the subtropics. Specifically, there was a reduced subtropical-tropical temperature gradient that drives the strengthening of the North American monsoon.

Temperatures are one of the driving factors behind monsoon intensity. Warmer conditions in the eastern equatorial Pacific cause descending motion over many monsoon regions of the southwestern North America, reducing the favorability of the atmosphere to rainfall. But when the California margin is warmer than the eastern equatorial Pacific—as can happen today during marine heat wave events—greater amounts of tropical moisture enter into the subtropics, bringing enhanced North American monsoon precipitation.

“By studying the mid-Pliocene climate, we can determine how our planet operates under warm conditions,” says Feng. “The mechanism we identified here is already at play during present-day marine heat wave events and we anticipate that it will become more prevalent in the future with a warmer climate and perhaps more frequent marine heat wave events.”

Their results offer confirmation that higher temperatures on the California margin help increase the favorability of the atmosphere for monsoon rainfall—essentially providing more energy to fuel monsoon storms.

“Summer rainfall and flooding will likely increase in the future in southwestern North America,” says Bhattacharya. “We believe our work is a nice illustration of how the past can be used to predict future climate hazards.”

Tripti Bhattacharya performs maintenance on her gas chromatograph, a key piece of lab equipment that allows her to quantify the concentrations of leaf waxes in ancient sediments.

, professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the study, notes that these potential intervals of ‘Pliocene-like’ rainfall, co-existing with intensifying megadrought in southwestern North America, will have implications for ecosystems, human infrastructure and water resources.

“A stronger monsoon means more rain for the southwest U.S., which is a good thing for a region facing chronic drought,” Tierney says. “Unfortunately, a lot of the rain that falls in monsoon storms falls very quickly, runs off the landscape, and can cause catastrophic flooding, posing a hazard to communities.”

While exact projections about future North American monsoons remains uncertain, their study offers proof that a warmer climate with similar conditions to the middle Pliocene brings with it potential for an expanded and more intense monsoon. With current trends of global warming and human-caused climate change, extreme summer monsoon conditions may soon become more widespread across the North American southwest.

Read the team’s full paper in��.

Additional authors on the study include Claire Rubbelke, Ph.D. candidate in Earth and environmental sciences, ���ϲ�����; Natalie Burls, associate professor, and Scott Knapp, Ph.D. candidate, George Mason University’s atmospheric, oceanic and Earth sciences department; and Minmin Fu, Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University.

Bhattacharya’s work was supported by three National Science Foundation grants:��,����and��.

No researcher is an island.

While scientists and academics certainly find themselves toiling alone in laboratories and behind computers at times, it is collaboration—consulting, borrowing from and building upon the research of others—that really drives discovery.

And in the field of low-temperature geochemistry—which studies geochemical processes that occur just at or beneath the Earth’s land surface and examines time-sensitive questions related to climate change—the process of gathering available data can be frustratingly slow.

This is due to the fact that datasets from different sub-disciplines are deposited in multiple databases and can vary significantly from each other in format. The datasets must be brought into alignment with each other so that “apples to apples” analyses can happen. What’s more, these datasets are not always published in searchable or discoverable form. And widely used search engines aren’t useful in these scenarios because of the highly specialized nature of the research.

EES Professor Tao Wen is part of an NSF-funded project to create efficient scientific search engines.

This is the problem��, assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’��, and colleagues are working to address with the Democratized Cyberinfrastructure for Open Discovery to Enable Research (DeCODER) project—a joint effort of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, ���ϲ�����, Virginia Tech, Texas A&M and the University of California, Berkeley.

The combined team of software cyberinfrastructure scientists and geoscientists began their four-year project on Oct. 1 and will endeavor to standardize and unify the descriptions of data and tools, facilitating the creation of efficient scientific search engines.

Wen was awarded a for his part in the project. He will lead the low-temperature geochemistry team, working in tandem with Professor Shuang Zhang of Texas A&M and graduate and undergraduate students from both schools.

Wen’s team studies low-temperature geochemistry – chemical processes that occur in the Earth’s surface environments. The above diagram depicts how carbon atoms ‘flow’ between various ‘reservoirs’ in the Earth system. (Courtesy: UCAR)

The initial work of the project will be expanding on the already successful����framework, enabling the geoscience community to adopt science-on-schema—an established, agreed-upon vocabulary for scientific datasets—to share data and codes.

“Ultimately, we are further developing and deploying DeCODER in three additional Earth and environmental science disciplines: ecological modeling, low-temperature geochemistry and deep-sea observation,” Wen says. “These three scientific disciplines very well cover the scientific questions related to climate change and global warming.”

After the data set and search engines are in place, Wen’s team will move into a “test-run” phase, applying the tool to specific low-temperature geochemistry questions, and reaching out to the scientific community for feedback.

“This grant will put ���ϲ����� on the frontier of both low-temperature geochemistry and cyberinfrastructure development,” Wen predicts. “���ϲ����� students will be able to work on not only the DeCODER development in low-temperature (geochemistry) but also the subsequent application of DeCODER in low-temperature geochemistry-related scientific questions. DeCODER will facilitate and push forward the study of scientific questions in the future for earth scientists and beyond.”

Story by Laura Wallis

Jeffrey Karson during a research expedition to Iceland.

, professor emeritus of Earth and environmental sciences (EES) in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), an honor bestowed to fewer than 0.1% of members each year. AGU is a nonprofit organization that supports 130,000 members worldwide in Earth and space sciences. Karson is among 53 other individuals in the 2022 Class of Fellows and is the second ���ϲ����� professor to receive the honor, joining EES Professor Emeritus Donald Siegel, who was named a Fellow in 2013.

Karson was selected in recognition of his outstanding achievements and contributions to the field of Earth sciences. A press release distributed by AGU states, “Karson embodies the organization’s vision of a thriving, sustainable and equitable future powered by discovery, innovation and action. Equally important is that he has conducted himself with integrity, respect and collaboration while creating deep engagement in education, diversity and outreach.”

Karson joined the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in 2006 and was recognized with emeritus status in 2022. During his time at the University, he served as EES department chair and was the Jessie Page Heroy Professor from 2007 to 2013, and again from 2019 to 2021. He is also a co-founder of the ���ϲ����� Lava Project, a fusion of science and art that creates experimental lava flows for scientific, educational and artistic projects.

Christopher Scholz

HABs occur when colonies of cyanobacteria grow out of control. “They can be very toxic,” says Christopher Scholz, professor of Earth and environmental sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. “If there’s a HAB in a freshwater lake, you certainly don’t want to be drinking that water and you don’t want to be bathing in it or have your dog swimming in it.”

Scholz’s research focuses on paleolimnology—reconstructing the past environments of inland waters through their geologic record—and he has studied climate change using sedimentary analysis of lake basins ranging from Lakes Malawi and Taganyika in the East African Rift Valley to Lake Baikal in Siberia to freshwater lakes in Upstate New York. He’s now using similar techniques to study environmental changes in Skaneateles Lake and nearby Oneida Lake over the last 350 years, a starting point for research that may eventually provide a historical record of environmental conditions leading to HABs on the lakes.

Scholz has received $34,000 from the , a program based out of Cornell University, to collect sediment cores from the two lakes to determine spatial patterns of sedimentation and take measurements of nutrients including phosphorus, carbon and nitrogen to see how those have varied over time.

Researchers from the Departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering collect sediment cores from Skaneateles Lake in October 2021.

“The layers of sediment at the bottom of a lake basin are essentially a tape recorder of environmental change over time,” Scholz says. “Within this relatively small project, we’re trying to get a sense of how the loading of nutrients into the lakes have changed just over the last 300-350 years, from precolonial times to the present.”

Skaneateles Lake is an oligotrophic lake, meaning it contains low nutrient content leading to clear water due to limited algae growth. Scholz says the recent HABs are unusual. “We know essentially nothing about past, ancient occurrences of HABs in the lake,” he says.

Oneida Lake, by contrast, is a eutrophic lake. “Parts of it turn green every summer on account of high biological productivity, and there’s a longer history of HABs occurring,” he says.

Comparing sediment cores from the two lakes may provide answers to environmental conditions that lead to HABs.

Scholz is collaborating on the project with ���ϲ����� colleagues Charles T. Driscoll, University Professor of Environmental Systems and Distinguished Professor of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, and Melissa Chipman, assistant professor of arctic paleoecology and paleoclimate in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Staff technician Jacqueline Corbett and graduate student Laura Streib examine a sediment core from Oneida Lake.

In partnership with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the Skaneateles Lake Association and the Oneida Lake Association, the team is collecting core samples from both lakes to quantitatively measure how the sediment in each lake changed in accumulation and composition over time, as well as to establish patterns of sediment accumulation in different locations in the lakes.

“Sediment doesn’t accumulate evenly all around the bottom of a lake,” Scholz says. “So, identifying the key sites to evaluate these kinds of changes is very important and will inform future studies.”

Ultimately, understanding past history of environmental change leading to HABs may help scientists protect water quality in the future. “We can’t take these remarkable natural resources for granted,” Scholz says. “We live in a changing world and water conditions are definitely evolving.”

Donald I. Siegel

Siegel is acclaimed for his decades of pioneering work on wetland geochemistry and hydrogeology, his education and mentoring of students and early-career scientists, and his leadership in multiple geoscience professional societies.

His wetland research evolved to examine the ways that groundwater flow and water quality influence greenhouse gas emissions in the vast peat lands of northern Canada, Siberia and northern Minnesota. This research has been recognized as showing potential significance for building understanding of global climate change.

Siegel has provided society leadership in numerous capacities, including as past president of the Geological Society of America (GSA) and has received many honors in the field of hydrogeology, including the O.E. Meinzer Award, the Birdsall Distinguished Lectureship, and GSA’s Distinguished Service Award. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and GSA.

“Don Siegel’s groundbreaking work as a scientist, his teaching and mentoring of students entering the discipline, and his leadership in professional societies and publications, taken together, represent a tremendous service to the geoscience community,” says AGI President Paul Weimer. “He has not only shaped the field of hydrogeology but provided a model of professional excellence for future geoscientists.”

“Don Siegel has been the instigator of great progress in the science of groundwater hydrology and its effects on surface ecology,” says Jeffrey Chanton, professor at the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University, in nominating Siegel for the award. “He has been instrumental to the advancement of science through his many research publications, his education of students, and the support of his colleagues.”

“I am flattered to receive the 2022 Marcus Milling Legendary Geoscientist Medal from AGI and thank those who graciously nominated me,” Siegel says. “Throughout my career I did my best to teach and mentor students with compassion and understanding, do research with rigor and a sufficiently open mind to accept when others proved me wrong, and finally, as an administrator, listen and understand opposing views and not just ‘hear’ them. I thank AGI and feel honored receiving this award.”

Siegel has been invited to accept the medal during the awards ceremony of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists/Society of Exploration Geophysicists annual meeting in Houston, Texas, Aug. 28-Sept. 2.

The Marcus Milling Legendary Geoscientist Medal is a lifetime achievement award given in recognition of an individual’s high-quality basic and applied science achievements in the Earth sciences. The award, established in 1999, was named in late 2006. Marcus Milling was an ardent and tireless champion of geoscience education, policy and information services who served as AGI’s executive director from 1992 until July of 2006, when he transitioned to a senior advisor role.

AGI directly, or in cooperation with its Member Societies, bestows a number of awards each year to recognize particular excellence in the geosciences. In addition, AGI works with its Member Societies to foster nominations of deserving geoscientists for consideration in a number of National Science Awards.

Two ���ϲ����� professors provide insight below that you are welcome to quote. Both are also available for interviews.

Linda Ivany

, professor and associate chair of Earth and Environmental Sciences at ���ϲ�����’s College of Arts and Sciences. Professor Ivany’s research lies at the intersection of paleoecology and paleoclimatology.

Ivany says:

“This is a short-sighted and seemingly politically motivated decision.��The mission of the EPA is to ‘protect human health and the environment’, and they accomplish this in part by ensuring that ‘national efforts to reduce environmental risks are based on the best available scientific information’.

“The scientific consensus here is overwhelmingly clear on what is happening and why.��I don’t understand the logic behind Chief Justice Roberts’ claim that the EPA, a regulatory agency, does not have the authority to regulate emissions in such a way that will indeed protect human health and the environment in myriad substantial and universal ways.”

Charles Driscoll

Charles Driscoll is University Professor of Environmental Systems in ���ϲ�����’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. He has extensively researched air pollution, climate change and the health implications of power plant emissions.

Driscoll says:

“This ruling is disappointing but not unexpected.��Prior courts had deferred to the administration in complex technical matters because the agencies have the technical expertise to address these issues.�� Often legislation in is not written in specific terms or circumstances change or evolve and the administration needs to adapt to address these changes.

“This will have huge implications for the ability of agencies to address complex technical challenges.��Climate change is the issue for this specific case, but the ruling also has implications for other matters such a public health and safety. The administration had limited tools to address climate change, but this ruling really puts them in a box.��What would be required going forward would be a legislative approach but that seems unlikely.

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
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Division of Communications

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In 1948, Professor James Hope Birnie became , teaching here until 1951. He was also one of its first biology faculty members to be supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). During his career in academia and industry, he remained committed to creating opportunity for underrepresented students in science.

Today, departments such as and (EES) are carrying on the important legacy of A&S pioneers like Birnie, seeking innovative ways to ensure their classrooms and fields are welcoming to all. Over the past 18 months, biology and EES faculty, graduate students and undergraduates have introduced new approaches to encourage diversity and equity and promote engagement with the community’s budding scientists.

The SEEDS SPUR Fellowship

Earth and environmental sciences graduate student Eliza Hurst presenting a hydrology demonstration to North Side Learning Center students in ���ϲ�����.

The (SEEDS) program was established by the Ecological Society of America (ESA) nearly three decades ago with the goal of working to increase minority representation by introducing students to ecologists with diverse backgrounds and giving them hands-on experience with the field and its real-world applications. The program’s is its highest honor—and matches selected undergraduate students with institutions doing work that fits their research interests and goals. It’s an opportunity that’s open to all undergraduates, but underrepresented minority, low-income, first-generation college and veteran students are especially encouraged to apply.

Biology professor Katie Becklin had been involved with SEEDS as a mentor in the past, and in early 2021 worked with fellow biology professor Jason Fridley to get ���ϲ����� listed as a SPUR partner institution. Last summer, the first undergraduate came to work at ���ϲ����� as a SPUR intern.

“We’ve committed to funding a SEEDS fellowship every summer,” says Becklin. The fellowship (which is paid and offers fully funded travel and research expenses) is nationally advertised and open to current ���ϲ����� students as well; applications are posted in late fall each year, and due in early March. Since the program is supported by the biology department as a whole, the selected fellow will be paired with one of several biology labs that best suits their interests. “It’s a little different from typical summer research,” Becklin says, “[in that SEEDS] also offers professional development and networking opportunities throughout the year.”

Katie Becklin, assistant professor of biology

Currently, the department is reviewing about 15 applications for this year’s fellowship. “I am very excited about the level of interest in this program from students across the country,” says Becklin, who hopes that more fellowship positions will be offered at ���ϲ����� in the future. “Not only is this program a tool to increase diversity within ecology, but it’s also a way to show students from other areas how great ���ϲ����� is. [Our first intern] was fantastic in the lab—I hope they will come here for grad school in the future.”

Natural Science Explorers Program

This spring, eight biology and EES graduate students launched the Natural Science Explorers Program—a weekly outreach program for elementary-age students at the North Side Learning Center (NSLC). Eliza Hurst of the Earth and environmental sciences department spearheaded the program with the support of Becklin, whose class, , inspired the initiative.

Graduate student Alex Ebert led the effort on the biology side and worked with Hurst, who was the first graduate student member of the DEI committee for her department, among others, to bring in speakers. “Our two main goals were to amplify the diverse voices in our field and provide a platform for their research ideas,” says Ebert, “and also to include at least some discussion [of] the intersection of race and the environmental sciences such as historical underrepresentation and ways to begin to address these disparities.”

Biology graduate student Alex Ebert

In addition to showcasing the latest research and work of the scientists, each event also offers opportunities for interacting and networking, via “virtual lunches” for students and speakers. “There have been so many wonderful conversations during [that informal time] about what has led these scientists to their current places in their various careers,” says Ebert. “But I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at how many took time during their seminars to discuss their journeys, and to talk about the importance of mentors and role models. And [now] these speakers are getting to become the very same mentors and role models to many students who may have never really ‘seen’ themselves in the fields in which they’re most interested.”

The events are open to anyone, but “we promote them especially to the undergraduate classes—to show them the full range of scientists behind the work they are learning about,” says Hurst. Some of those students, including those in Becklin’s Ecology and Evolution class, can earn credit by attending the seminars and writing summaries of what they’ve learned.

The series will be continuing into next year, and a new group of grad students—notably Thomas Johnson and Julia Zeh in ecology and evolutionary biology, and Claire Rubbelke in Earth and environmental sciences—will be taking charge. A schedule is not yet out, but those looking for more information can contact Johnson or Rubbelke directly.

Story by Laura Wallis

Sam Tuttle

This month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations released a new report detailing the biggest climate concerns for countries all over the world. Some of the report’s main conclusions centered around steadily rising emissions and continued global warming, which will have a catastrophic impact on our climate if levels continue to increase.��

���ϲ����� assistant professor and hydrology expert provides six takeaways from the report that he views as the most important elements ahead of Earth Day (April 22). He is available for future interviews and questions. ��

Professor Tuttle says:��

1. We know what needs to be done – we just have to do it.�� The technology is available to reduce global carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change.
   
2. We have to move very fast if we are to avoid major climate-related impacts. The report says that we must massively cut down on fossil fuel use by 2030 in order to keep warming below the commonly accepted 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial temperature, which will allow us to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.�� Global carbon emissions have not slowed in the past 10 years. We no longer have the luxury of trying to make incremental changes. We need transformational change, and we need it as soon as possible.
3. Climate change is impacting everyone.��Wealthy countries are responsible for a majority of carbons emissions, but developing countries will suffer the most from future climate change.
   
4. Change must come from all levels, including the top. Individual actions are not enough to make the necessary change at this point.�� We also need changes to infrastructure, which needs to come from government policies and initiatives, as well as businesses.�� It will not be cheap nor easy to change our energy infrastructure, but we need governments to act, and boldly!
5. However, there does not seem to be a political will nor urgency to do what is needed to reduce carbon emissions.�� Current climate commitments made by countries generally fall well short of what is needed, and it seems like most countries are not meeting even their modest goals.
   
6. Every little bit counts!�� The sooner we reduce emissions, the better for our future.�� Even if we miss the 1.5 degrees C target, our safest future is with as little global warming as possible. There is no future date where it’s no longer worth it to reduce carbon emissions. We need to do as much as we can, as soon as we can!��

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For more information:��

Daryl Lovell
Associate Director of Media Relations��

University Communications��

M 315.380.0206������
dalovell@syr.edu | ��

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As temperatures and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels on Earth continue to increase in response to rising , researchers are looking to a mystery millions of years in the past to answer questions about what our climate may look like in the future. Their findings show how changes in the Arctic driven by climate change can have an impact as far away as the tropics.

A team of international researchers, including first author��, professor in the University of Connecticut’s Department of Geosciences, and second-author , Thonis Family Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) at ���ϲ�����, has been exploring an over 3-million-year paradox from the Pliocene Epoch to help determine the long-term effects of global warming.

Aerial view of a retreating glacier near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. According to NASA, five trillion tons of ice have melted in Greenland over approximately the past 15 years, enough to increase global sea level by nearly an inch. (Photo by Vadim Nefedoff)

The team zeroed in on the climate during the Pliocene, which was the last time Earth has seen CO2 concentrations above 400 parts per million. While researchers would usually expect higher atmospheric CO2 to result in higher global temperatures, and in turn, drier subtropical regions, this surprisingly wasn’t the case. Geologic evidence suggested that this interval featured wetter and greener conditions in today’s dry areas like the Sahel region of Africa and Northern China.

The research team wanted to know the root cause of this apparent discrepancy and determine if there are processes that can account for wetter Pliocene subtropics. The results of their study were recently published in��.

The team used proxy data, which are measurements from natural recorders of past climate variability gathered from sources like sediment, ice cores and tree rings, as well as a suite of model simulations of the Pliocene to identify the factors responsible for subtropical rainfall changes.

Tripti Bhattacharya

“Our study focused on Eurasia and North Africa, and we looked at whether the latest, state-of-the-art climate models could actually capture a pattern of hydroclimate that was consistent with available geologic evidence of wet conditions,” says Bhattacharya. To their surprise, the researchers found that current generation models perform well at simulating wet conditions on Pliocene subtropical continents, but only when interactions between ice sheets, vegetation and the atmosphere were included in models.

The team concluded that the key reason for wetter conditions over those regions was vegetation and ice sheet changes in the Pliocene, which created high latitude (Arctic) warming and a circulation pattern that allowed much more moisture to converge over the continents, intensifying the summer monsoon circulation. “The main takeaway is that including the interaction of ice, vegetation and the atmosphere is key to accurately simulating Pliocene hydroclimate,” Bhattacharya says.

These long-term adjustments of ice (the cryosphere) and the biosphere to higher greenhouse gases are key components of what climate scientists call Earth system feedbacks. Previous work has shown that these Earth system feedbacks can amplify warming in response to CO2 over long time scales, and Bhattacharya says this study demonstrates that these feedbacks also have an important impact on the hydrological cycle.

Bhattacharya notes that the results are an important indicator that what happens at high latitudes does not stay there. “There are consequences of Arctic climate change as far away as monsoon regions in the tropics and subtropics,” she says. “If we continue to warm the planet, raising greenhouse gases, over the long-term we are likely to see unanticipated changes as far away as the tropics.”

Feng explains that this work is providing a new perspective: when studying hydrological cycle responses to CO2 changes, it is important to consider long-term changes in terrestrial conditions like the shifting range of ice sheets and biomes (areas with distinct assemblies of plants and animals such as tropical forests, grasslands and boreal forests).

“Continental greening and ice sheet retreat have profound impacts on the surface temperature through lowering the surface albedo—the ability of the Earth’s surface to reflect sunlight back to space—and a profound effect on the hydrological cycle allowing for greater evaporation and altering paths of moisture transport. In the long run, there’s a much bigger change in the hydrological cycle, compared to what we are anticipating today,” says Feng.

The researchers say this is a cause for concern because changes in the hydrological cycle will mean places that are already receiving excessive amounts of summer rainfall such as Southeastern Asia, Northern India and West Africa, are going to see even more summer rainfall as continental greening increases and the ice sheets continue to recede.

“For us as a species, we need to have long-term plans, beyond the next several decades,” says Feng. “By looking back to past climates and learning what the world was like, we can better prepare for the future of our society.”

This work was funded by the��.

With steep walls and deep valleys, the Grand Canyon in the western United States or the massive gorges that saw through the margins of the Tibetan Plateau are some of the most awesome and spectacular landforms on the planet. But have you ever wondered how they are formed?

The spectacular Cauca River Canyon in the Northern Andes of Colombia. The Cauca River has incised up to 2-3 km into the bedrock of the mountains during the past 6-7 Ma. Canyon walls are steep, and landslides are common.

Some studies have proposed that canyons form when a mountain range grows in height and a river running through it cuts into the rock formation like a knife, ultimately forming gorges. Other studies have associated canyon incision with past changes in climate. For example, in the Miocene (about 15 million years ago), an increase in precipitation rates is believed to be the cause behind rapid incision of the Mekong River in China.

But what about canyons in hot and humid tropical latitudes? Researchers from the College of Arts and Sciences’ (A&S) (EES) recently embarked on a research expedition to the Tropical Andes of Colombia to study the massive Cauca River canyon.

The team’s objective was to determine the age of formation of the Cauca River canyon and then compare that with known tectonic and climatic processes that happened in the region during the past 10 million years to figure out what caused its incision. The team concluded that erosion in the Cauca River canyon was driven by tectonic processes.

Their study, which expands the understanding of erosion hotspots in tropical landscapes and why they occur in certain areas, will be an important source of information for decision makers who must take erosion and landslides into account during infrastructure planning. Their results were presented in two papers that appeared in and .

Nicolas Pérez-Consuegra (left) and Gregory Hoke standing in front of a waterfall in the Caqueta Canyon in the tropical Andes during the summer of 2018.

The study was led by MIT postdoctoral fellow Nicolás Pérez-Consuegra G’21, Ph.D., who completed the research as a graduate student in EES with support from the Graduate School’s and an A&S doctoral fellowship. He collaborated on the project with his advisor Gregory Hoke, associate professor and chair of EES, Paul Fitzgerald, professor in EES, and international colleagues from the University of Potsdam, Germany; the German Centre for Geoscience Research, Germany; the University of Granada, Spain; and Ecopetrol Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The authors used a combination of techniques. They analyzed the landscape using data derived from satellite imagery; carried out fieldwork to collect rock samples along one of the steep walls of the canyon; and analyzed those rock samples using thermochronology. Thermochronology is a technique that allows the researchers to figure out when and how fast a canyon is carved into a mountain by recording when the rocks cooled to surface temperatures. Certain minerals, in this case apatite, become radioactive clocks as the rocks cool.

In their landscape analysis they observed a surprising feature—a massive plateau elevated ~2.5 km (~8,200 ft) surrounded by hundreds of waterfalls and very steep rivers draining the flanks of the plateau.

“Finding such a flat landform at high elevations in a tropical climate is unexpected and suggested that the topography could not be very old,” says Pérez-Consuegra. “If the topography had been old, the rivers would have probably already eroded the plateau.”

Apatite crystal under a microscope at Paul Fitzgerald’s laboratory at ���ϲ�����. It was extracted from a granitic rock at the Cauca River Canyon in Colombia. The linear features observed are fission tracks which track the cooling history of a rock through time. This apatite crystal has a length of ~150 micrometers.

What might have caused these elevated plateaus? Between the period of 50 to 10 million years ago, the research team believes erosion smoothed the landscape to low, rolling hills. About 10 million years ago tectonic forces began lifting that smoothed landscape, creating a plateau perched at its current elevation of ~2.5 km (~8,200 ft). This was likely caused by a change in the angle of the oceanic plate that subducts beneath northern South America through a process called slab flattening.

Their findings provide a plausible link between tectonic processes rooted deep in the Earth and erosion in the form of canyons being carved by rivers. Pérez-Consuegra says the team is now trying to determine catchment-scale erosion rates in the Central Cordillera of Colombia to discover how fast the rivers are incising and eroding into the plateau. They have collected sand from more than 20 rivers to calculate erosion rates through a technique which uses cosmogenic nuclides to estimate the length of time rock takes to traverse the upper 4 ft. (1.2 m) of the Earth’s surface as it is converted to sediment. Their results will pinpoint the areas where erosion is most active, and thus those same places where infrastructure and human populations will be most vulnerable.

Jeffrey Karson

, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at ���ϲ�����, researches volcanic activity. He also is one of the directors of the , which allows geologists to create and experiment with 2200°F lab-created lava in a massive outdoor furnace.

Karson says:

“The Tonga volcano is along the ‘Ring of Fire” of the Pacific Ocean. Volcanoes erupt frequently – almost all the time – in this region. And there can be very large earthquakes along this same belt. This has been going on for millions of years and will continue into the future indefinitely. So, we can expect more eruptions and more tsunamis. Predictions of eruptions improve all the time and are possible only if there are monitoring systems installed on a volcano. Most are not instrumented. So, we find out about eruptions when they occur or after from satellite images or remotely sensed atmospheric pressure waves and sound waves.

“It is a terrific contrast to the Iceland eruption of last spring and summer, and the kind of mini-eruptions that we do at the . In these, we see a range of volcanic behavior from violently explosive with global impact to rather calm flowing lava of mainly local and regional importance.

“Water plays a big role in a couple of ways. Water and other gases are dissolved in magma (molten rock) where it forms deep in the Earth. This is just like carbon dioxide gas that is dissolved in a soda, beer, or champaign. Pressure in the unopened liquid holds the gas in. When it is opened, the gas escapes. We all know how temperature and shaking can increase the release of the gas. The same goes for volcanoes. As the huge amount of gas is released, it expands tremendously and rapidly. It can tear apart a volcano and blow pieces into the stratosphere- where it enters the global climate system—affecting it with both particulate matter and chemically (greenhouse gases). The amount of gas (and potential for explosions) is very different for different types of magma. The Tonga kind has lots of water and gas in it; the Iceland or Hawaii kind has very little, hence, oozing lava instead of a volcanic blast.

“There is no telling how long the eruption will continue but there are hazards from the dense ash fall, poison gases, landslides, and tsunamis that can travel all the way across the Pacific Ocean. At this point, it is not entirely clear what caused the tsunami – a submarine mass slide or the shock wave of the volcanic explosion.”

To request interviews or get more information:

Daryl Lovell
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As a young girl, Linda Ivany ’88 was fascinated by the natural sciences. Flipping through the pages of National Geographic magazine, she would learn about the work of noted female scientists Eugenie Clark, known for her pioneering research with sharks and fish, and Jane Goodall, one of the world’s leading experts on chimpanzee behavior. While she drew inspiration from those trailblazing researchers, she often wondered why there weren’t more women making headlines in other branches of the sciences, such as geology.

Linda Ivany

“When it came to geology and deep-time paleontology, I don’t think I knew of any women working in the field at all until I met brand-new professor Cathryn Newton when I visited ���ϲ����� as a prospective undergrad,” says Ivany, now professor and associate chair in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). Ivany would go on to receive an undergraduate degree from ���ϲ�����, majoring in geology and minoring in zoology (now biology). Newton, now Dean Emerita of A&S, was both an advisor and mentor to Ivany as she cultivated her passion for paleontology at ���ϲ�����. Today, Ivany hopes to encourage a future generation of young female scientists, as she is a featured researcher in an exhibit at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, NY, titled “.”

The virtual and in-person exhibit looks back on the careers of 19 female paleontologists who paved the way for women in science today and profiles 41 women currently working in paleontology, reflecting on their challenges and triumphs.

Ivany, who received an M.S. in geology from the University of Florida-Gainesville and a Ph.D. in Earth and planetary sciences from Harvard University, has been a faculty member at ���ϲ����� since 2000. She specializes in paleoecology and paleoclimatology, studying the evolution of the Earth surface and how ecosystems evolve and respond to changes in the physical environment.

For decades, Ivany has collaborated with the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI), which is the parent organization of the Museum of the Earth. Their extensive collection of fossil mollusks from Antarctica and the U.S. Gulf Coast—two areas where Ivany works extensively—provided a great resource for her, and she has in turn contributed her own research materials to their collection. When PRI asked if she was interested in being featured in an exhibit highlighting women in paleontology, Ivany happily accepted.

“If sharing my experiences might help a young person realize that she has a place in this field if she wants it, it is my honor and privilege to help. As well, the conversations among women scholars that this exhibit helped to foster have been empowering and validating, connecting women who might otherwise be isolated in their home institutions with stories of shared challenges and triumphs,” says Ivany, who is also a member of PRI’s Board of Trustees.

Professor Linda Ivany’s work (center, in glass case) is on exhibit in a Daring to Dig display highlighting modern women paleontologists. (Photo by Jon Reis)

As true of other branches of science as well, Ivany points out that women have faced issues ranging from subtle marginalization to overt sexism. “The exhibit at the Museum of the Earth shines a light on this, recognizes the significant contributions of early pioneers in the field who worked in virtual anonymity and highlights the diversity of women currently engaged in research. The situation is steadily improving as more women enter the field and change the landscape for professional networking.”

In association with the exhibit, Ivany was one of four women who recently participated in a panel discussion livestreamed by��. Their talk touched on various aspects of being a woman in the geosciences and paleontology. The panel also featured ���ϲ����� alumna Christy Visaggi, who received a master’s degree in geology from A&S in 2004 and is now a senior lecturer and undergraduate program director of geosciences at Georgia State University.

The Daring to Dig in-person exhibit is on view through December. View��.

Tripti Bhattacharya, Thonis Family Professor�� of earth and environmental sciences, recently served as one of eight leading climate scholars on a panel to identify potential future paleoclimate research directions that will help advance understanding of current and future change in the Earth’s climate system. The results, recently featured in a distributed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), will help shape funding through the National Science Foundation and spark important discussions about the future of paleoclimate research.

Tripti Bhattacharya

Bhattacharya, who has taught at the University since 2018, was nominated to be on the panel by members of the international paleoclimate science community. The group’s discussions led to a report highlighting emerging scientific areas of interest to paleoclimatologists, including hydroclimate during past warm periods, connections between the biosphere, marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and the carbon cycle, which is the exchange of carbon between reservoirs stored in rocks, living matter, the ocean and the atmosphere. The burning of fossil fuels has accelerated the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere and is disrupting the carbon cycle’s balance. The panel emphasized the significance of focusing future research on human-relevant timescales and extreme events to make paleoclimate research more relevant to the nexus of science and decision-making.

Earth and Environmental Sciences faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students and alumni took part in a geological expedition to Iceland.

Jeffrey Karson, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, describes the process like this: “Two of the Earth’s lithosphere plates—large blocks of the outer part of the Earth—are being pulled apart. New crust is being produced to fill the resulting gap. This is happening all around the planet, and it is very obvious down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”

As the Earth pulls apart, it cracks, and the crack is filled with igneous material—magma, if underground, or lava, if erupting onto the surface. Iceland, explains Karson, is a particularly special place to view geological phenomena because it is a “hot spot”—a hyperactive volcanic center. “An unusual amount of heat beneath Iceland results in more magmatism than in other parts of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” says Karson. “The volcanoes we see in places like Iceland are helping to heal the fractures formed by the divergence of North American and Eurasian plates.”

The Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences had planned the trip to this iconic geological destination for the previous summer, but had to postpone due to the pandemic. “Our department has a very long and rich history of taking students and faculty together on field trips, including one to Iceland back in the ‘70s,” says Karson. The trips are supported by generous gifts from alumni, many of whom remember their own undergraduate field trips as pivotal in their careers and the highlight of their time at ���ϲ�����.

Earth and Environmental Sciences Professor Linda Ivany and students searching for fossils in sedimentary rocks.

Particularly after a year of virtual learning, “there was a lot of pent-up desire to get out into the world,” says Karson. “There’s nothing like seeing real geological relationships in the field. It’s like a walk through an Earth science textbook.” A key feature of the trip, he says, is the shared experience between students and faculty. “All of us are learners on this trip, together experiencing those things and sharing our perceptions and backgrounds. By bringing faculty members with different specialties, and graduate students working on PhDs, there is a lot of diverse expertise and a lot of eyes on complicated geological features.”

Interestingly, though the group got to witness an active volcano eruption, junior Derick Ramos remembers a visit to a��formerly��active volcano as the most moving. “Where it had been previously active was an open, wide, big field, filled with black lava,” he says. “Standing where there had been turbulent activity at one point, but now is very quiet and very open, you feel like you’re on another planet, but you’re on Earth.” A geology major, he credits the trip with firming up his commitment to the field. “It expanded my horizon,” Ramos says.

Mullins grew up in the Hudson Valley village of�� Ghent, New York, and developed his passion for science at the State University of New York-Oneonta, where he earned a B.S. in geology in 1973. He would go on to receive an M.S. at Duke University in 1975 and Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) in 1978.

In 1977, Mullins accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship in marine geology at the California State University system’s consortium Moss Landing Marine Laboratory on Monterey Bay. There, he diversified scientifically to work on low-oxygen marine environments, coral reefs, lagoons and estuarine systems in many different parts of the world.

Mullins joined ���ϲ�����’s geology department (now the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences) in 1983, with a goal to strengthen the research and graduate teaching profile of that department and A&S. He received extensive funding from the National Science Foundation and American Chemical Society/Petroleum Research Fund. As a graduate student mentor, Mullins’ colleagues say he demonstrated a distinctive blend of rigor and personal supportiveness. He was awarded the 1997 College of Arts and Sciences’ , recognizing a “distinguished scholar whose work is characterized by its originality and distinctive character.”

As editor-in-chief of the premier journal Geology (1990-1995), Mullins strongly influenced the publication of scientific discoveries—including publishing the paper by Alan Hillebrand et al. documenting the find of the Chicxulub Crater—the record of the Cretaceous-Paleogene impact that triggered rapid extinctions of dinosaurs and numerous other groups. For his editorial leadership to the geological sciences, the Geological Society of America honored Mullins with its 1995 Distinguished Service Award.

Mullins retired from the University in 2011, although he continued writing, publishing “Will Population + Technology = Armageddon?” that year, and two books in 2014 exploring earth-sciences themes for the general public: “The Simple Science of Global Climate Change” and “Knowledge for Non-Scientists��and��Is Gaia God: A Personal Journey.”

In memory of Hank Mullins, gifts can be made to the following:�� (mark checks “Hank Mullins Student Support-Earth Sciences”) or the��.

Read��.

Ever since Swedish naturalist and explorer Carolus Linnaeus developed the uniform system for defining and naming species of organisms, known as binomial nomenclature (e.g., Homo sapiens��for human beings), scientists have wondered if they will ever be able to predict the total number of species with whom we share the planet.

At current count, there are about 54,000 known vertebrate animals, which are those having a backbone or spinal column, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes. Professors in the College of Arts and Sciences explored whether or not the scientific community will ever be able to settle on a “total number” of species of living vertebrates, which could help with species preservation. By knowing what’s out there, researchers argue that they can prioritize places and groups on which to concentrate conservation efforts.

Earth and environmental sciences professors Linda Ivany (left) and Bruce Wilkinson.

Research professor Bruce Wilkinson and professor Linda Ivany, both from the��, recently co-authored a paper in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society where they determined that forecasting the total number of species may never be possible.

When asking the question, “how many species?” it is important to note that only a fraction of existing species have been named. In order to make a prediction on a total number, researchers project the curve of new species descriptions each year into the future until eventually reaching a point when all species should have been found.

Discovery curves representing new barrels of oil found per year (top) and new species named per year (bottom).

Wilkinson, a geologist, noticed parallels between the discovery curves of new species and the total reservoir size of nonrenewable resources like oil or mineral ores. Similar to the species curve, by extending the oil reservoir curve researchers thought they should be able to estimate the total global reservoir and how long it will take to get to it all. The theory of resource exploitation suggests that the number of discoveries over time follows a bell-shaped curve: The curve rises as production rate increases due to new discoveries and then decreases as production declines, despite all the effort continuing to go into finding the resource. The time of maximum discovery is known as Hubbert’s peak, after M. King Hubbert who predicted it. Following that time, the resource is being evermore depleted until it is used up.

“The problem with using that curve to predict how much is left is that you have to assume that the effort invested and the approach used to discover new oil, or species, is consistent and known,” says Wilkinson. “We used to think we’d gone over the peak for oil and gas around 1972, but then 15 or so years ago someone figured out how to do horizontal drilling and all of the sudden there was a new bump in the amount being discovered.”

Wilkinson and Ivany say that the discovery curve for new species of vertebrate animals shows a similar bump. Like the increase in the oil curve caused by horizontal drilling in the early 2000s, there was a surge in new species discovery beginning around 1950, when new funding was being dedicated to science after World War II, more scientists were going into biology, and new molecular techniques were leading to an increase in the ability to distinguish species from one another.

In both cases, unforeseen changes in the effort and method of discovering new oil or species altered the way the discovery curves were playing out.

If researchers had estimated the total number of species based on data prior to 1950, their estimates would be much different from any estimate made today, and both would likely be wrong because those new advents cannot be predicted.

In some ways, this is a reflection of the scientific method, in which hypotheses stand until new facts are discovered, which lead to changes in the hypothesis.

“As much as we’d like to know ‘the number,’ the total species richness of the planet will remain an elusive target,” says Ivany.

Read their full paper, “,” in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Crude oil production and natural gas withdrawals in the United States have lessened the country’s dependence on foreign oil and provided financial relief to U.S. consumers, but have also raised longstanding concerns about environmental damage, such as groundwater contamination. A researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences and a team of scientists from Penn State have developed a new machine learning technique to holistically assess water quality data in order to detect groundwater samples likely impacted by recent methane leakage during oil and gas production. Using that model, the team concluded that unconventional drilling methods like hydraulic fracturing—or hydrofracking—do not necessarily incur more environmental problems than conventional oil and gas drilling.

How the Drilling Process Works

Tao Wen

The two common ways to extract oil and gas in the U.S. are through conventional and unconventional methods. Conventional oil and gas are pumped from easily accessed sources using natural pressure. Conversely, unconventional oil and gas are acquired from hard-to-reach sources through a combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Hydrofracking extracts natural gas, petroleum and brine from bedrock formations by injecting a mixture of sand, chemicals and water. By drilling into the earth and directing the high-pressure mixture into rock, the gas inside releases and flows out to the head of a well.

Tao Wen, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, recently led a study comparing data from different states to see which method might result in greater contamination of groundwater. They specifically tested levels of methane, which is the primary component of natural gas.

In April 2017, a landslide in Mocoa, Colombia, ripped through a local town, killing more than 300 people. Nicolás Pérez-Consuegra grew up about 570 miles north in Santander, Colombia, and was shocked as he watched the devastation on television.

Nicolas Pérez-Consuegra, left, and Professor Gregory Hoke standing in front of a waterfall in the Caqueta Canyon.

At that time, he was an undergraduate intern at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. As a budding geologist raised hiking the tropical mountains of Colombia, he wondered, what causes greater erosion in some areas of the mountains than in others? And, is it tectonic forces–where Earth’s tectonic plates slide against one another leading to the formation of steep mountains–or high precipitation rates that play a more important role in causing erosion within that region?

To answer those questions would require a geological understanding of the evolution of the mountains in Colombia. During his undergraduate internship, Pérez-Consuegra studied the mountains near the towns of Sibundoy and Mocoa in the southern region of Colombia. There, he observed thick rainforests covering steep mountains and many landslide scars in the cliffs. There were also many landslides on the road, leading him to believe that the tension and release of pressure along tectonic faults was shaking the landscape and removing rocks from its surface and shedding it into the rivers.

Nicolas Pérez-Consuegra hammering into a rock outcrop to obtain a sample for thermochronology analyses from the mountains in the Putumayo region of Colombia.

To find out more about the forces at play that were shaping the steep terrain of that region, Pérez-Consuegra pursued a doctoral degree in the College of Arts and Sciences’ . He says the opportunity to develop his own research ideas was one of the key reasons he chose ���ϲ�����. Pérez-Consuegra led the study from start to finish, proposing the research questions, hypotheses and methodology, with help from his Ph.D. advisor Gregory Hoke, associate professor and associate chair of EES, and Paul Fitzgerald, professor and director of graduate studies in EES. He also obtained research grants and support from EES and a number of outside sources including a National Geographic Early Career Grant and more, which fully funded three field expeditions to Colombia and the analytical work on rock samples collected there.

Pérez-Consuegra’s study revealed that the highest erosion rates occur near the places that have the most tectonically active faults. While precipitation may act as a catalyst for erosion on the surface of the mountains, the main force at play are faults where rock is exhuming from deep below the Earth’s surface at faster rates.

Nicolas Pérez-Consuegra wading through water in the Caqueta Canyon, one of the locations where the team collected a rock sample.

“Tectonically active faults are causing uplift of the mountains surrounding Mocoa and are also making the landscape steeper,” Pérez-Consuegra says. “Steeper and taller mountains are more prone to have landslides. Rainfall, and specifically torrential rains, can trigger the landslides, but what sets the stage are the tectonic processes.”

Hoke says that while geomorphologists would like to think that rainfall rates can take over as the major influence on mountain formation, Pérez-Consuegra’s research proves that Earth’s internal deformation is the main factor.

“While prior work within a bullseye of high rainfall in Colombia’s Eastern Cordillera initially pointed towards a strong climate control on mountain growth, Nicolás’ work expanded the same types of observations to another precipitation hotspot over 250 miles away and found the rates at which rock is transported to the surface were dependent on fault activity, and not precipitation amount,” Hoke says.

Pérez-Consuegra, who will start a postdoctoral fellowship in environmental sciences at MIT in the fall, notes that geological knowledge is essential for predicting what areas in a tropical mountain range are more prone to have landslides, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and the catastrophic consequences that these events might have in the surrounding populations.

“It is important to invest in doing better geological mapping in tropical mountains, to better understand the spatial distribution and geometries of tectonically active faults,” Pérez-Consuegra says.

You can read more about Pérez-Consuegra’s research in the journal Tectonics: “.”

Lava pour at the Comstock Art Facility in early 2020.

Robert Wysocki arrived at ���ϲ����� in 2008, having made a name in the art world by capturing landscapes in three dimensions. Known for large sand sculptures showcased in galleries from Los Angeles to Florida, Wysocki’s inspiration began on a driving trip through Central Nevada, where he kept stopping the car to look at a large formation of sand dunes far in the distance, seemingly floating in a valley.

“I couldn’t capture them in photos. I wanted to be a landscape painter, but I’m not talented, so painting was out. My wife suggested that I make the landscape instead,” he says.

Newly arrived at ���ϲ�����, Wysocki felt like he had mastered sand as a medium for creating landscapes. As an artist and art professor focused on sculpture, he knew how to work with foundries and had experience with aluminum, bronze and iron. He started thinking once again about landscape formation and wondered how to make lava. Doing what any inquisitive person does when initially faced with a question, he turned to Google.

“All I found was instructions on how to make lava lamps. So I spent two weeks researching how mineral wool—the raw material for lava—is made. All of the materials engineering papers I found online were in Russian, Chinese or Hindi,” says Wysocki, director of the School of Art and the Doris E. Klein Endowed Professor of Art in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. “Google translate wasn’t what it is today, so it was a fair amount of filling in the blanks. I knew what size rock and what temperature, I didn’t know what type of rock would work best to produce lava. That’s when I turned to the Earth Sciences department. I called Jeff Karson because he had five minutes to talk to me. We ended up talking for an hour. He was laughing the whole time, but he eventually figured out that I was serious.”

“Bob came to me and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to make lava?’” says Karson, the Jesse Page Heroy Professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences.

“I was skeptical, but it turned out that Bob knew a lot about geology and had thought a lot about how to simulate lava flows, so we just took it from there.”

Ten years and more than 2000 “pours”—simulated lava flows using a furnace, a crucible and molten rock—later, the pair are two of four collaborating authors of a recent paper in one of the world’s premier peer-reviewed science journals that demonstrates how planets made primarily of metal might form.

Believing in the process from the beginning, Wysocki and Karson never expected it to take this long for their work to be recognized as a scientifically valid—and artistically relevant—way to investigate lava formations and draw conclusions that inform our understanding of our own planet and others that exist within our range of observation.

Essentially, the ���ϲ����� Lava Project bridges a gap in the traditional scales of observation for volcanologists and planetary scientists, notes Karson. “You can observe the properties of lava in a laboratory, but the scale is at a thimbleful at a time and you can’t observe some of the physical properties or interactions with surroundings. You can observe natural lava flows, but you are limited to working with the material nature provides in a dangerous setting,” he says.

“Thanks to this collaboration, we have created an experimental environment where we can control key variables like slope, temperature, viscosity and—at a moderate scale—how lava made up primarily of metal might behave.”

“Science is conservative,” says Wysocki. “Every volcanologist, physicist or planetary scientist who sees the project thinks it’s brilliant, but even though we can make the process consistent and reproducible, it was treated as a novelty.”

Karson adds, “We had this unique experimental program with an interesting niche—scientifically—between observing in a lab or during an active eruption. We eventually got grudging acceptance from the scientific community, but funding agencies really did not know what to do with us. The people in the lab didn’t see it as typical experimental work and the field volcanologists were skeptical that our findings could apply at a larger scale.”

Similarly, the art community isn’t really sure what to do with the project. “There’s an art to a lot of science,” says Wysocki, who has now observed lava for more hours than 90% of field volcanologists, based on the estimation of one geochemist involved with the project. “The impurities that float to the top, the lobes and petals that build up, crystal formations, these are all parts of the art of the lava pour that are relevant to the science.”

Now, with their latest paper and the help of a CUSE grant, this unlikely faculty duo and their collaborators have the data to submit a proposal to NASA for the planned mission to 16 Psyche, a 140-mile diameter giant metal asteroid in our solar system’s asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Earth sciences doctoral candidate Chris Sant working with lava.

Having observed the lava creation process thousands of times, the dynamic partnership between art and science means that both Karson and Wysocki are possibly the world’s leading experts on the practical dynamics of lava experimentation, Karson in terms of measurement protocols and reproducibility of experiments and Wysocki in understanding the alchemy of temperature, materials and experimental conditions that helps him predict—he says 99% of the time—how a lava pour will behave.

Each credits the other as the key to the project’s persistence and success.

“Our academic backgrounds are completely different,” says Karson, “But without Bob, we never could have done this. He’s very inventive and a terrific lateral thinker. While lava flows are one of the faster geological phenomena, this project is really eye-opening in that you see geological processes, such as the transformation of lava to rock and crystal formation, happen right before your eyes.”

Wysocki credits Karson, whose primary research interest is planetary architecture and specifically the phenomenon of sea floor spreading, for his insight, saying, “We’ve had MacArthur genius grant recipients, celebrated volcanologists and geologists—lots of intelligent and accomplished people around the project. Yet, in my mind, I have always found Jeff to be the smartest person in the room regardless of the scientific focus.”

After ten years, their unexpected partnership is finally getting the recognition it deserves.

In high school, Ellen Jorgensen was highly involved in the Green Club in her school and led initiatives that focused on waste reduction. She also developed education initiatives for her peers to give them a sense of responsibility regarding the environment.

“In high school, my passion for the environment developed out of concern for the planet and frustration with the lack of urgency around me. At that point, my love for science in the classroom and my dedication to environmental action seemed separate,” she says. “Today, the convergence of these passions forms the foundation of my academic and professional goals. … While I wasn’t aware of climate sciences as a career path back in high school, I now see it as a calling.”

Jorgensen, a sophomore double major in earth sciences and environment, sustainability and policy in the College of Arts and Sciences, a Coronat Scholar and a member of Renée Crown University Honors Program, is a recipient of a 2021 , which will help support her studies.

Named for Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina, the prestigious award provides tuition support ($9,500 per year) and paid summer internships with NOAA to recipients. The award is designed to support students working in areas related to NOAA’s programs and mission. ��Students apply as sophomores, do an internship in their junior year, and receive support and mentorship throughout their undergraduate career.

“Receiving NOAA’s Hollings scholarship is an honor and affirms my passion for climate and environmental science. I am very excited to participate in their internship program to explore applications of climate science in the field,” says Jorgensen. “While I have certainly worked hard to reach this achievement, it is much more a testament to the immense support I have received from CFSA; the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences; my faculty mentor, Dr. Bhattacharya; and above all, my family.”

Jorgensen is also pursuing a minor in physics and says her majors and minor allow her to balance her focus on scientific studies of the climate with a grounding in policy. She is currently engaged in research in the Paleoclimate Dynamics Lab of Tripti Bhattacharya, Thonis Family Professor: Paleoclimate Dynamics and assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences.

Jorgensen works with Bhattacharya constructing temperature proxies for the mid-Pliocene, a period that may serve as a predictor of the challenges ocean ecosystems will face in the coming century. Their research uses alkenones, biomarkers produced by haptophyte algae sourced from ocean sediment, to generate new records of ocean temperatures. In the fall of 2020, Jorgensen focused on samples from a site off of the coast of southern California, extracting alkenones from these samples. “Working in an active laboratory, I have gained a much greater understanding of mechanisms by which discoveries are made in the field of earth sciences,” she says.

Jorgensen also received a grant last summer from the University’s Office of Undergraduate Research (SOURCE), which she used to review literature on alkenone temperature proxies and paleoclimate reconstruction. This summer, she will pursue new channels of paleoclimate research through a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program in a lab at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Jorgensen is also involved in several community sustainability efforts. During the summer of 2020, she worked on a farm in North Carolina through WWOOF, an organization that provides small organic farms with volunteer help, to support sustainable, small scale food production and sell organic produce to local communities. During the academic year, Jorgensen is a volunteer with the University’s Office of Sustainability Management and manages the compost pile used by members of the University’s housing community. Currently, she is involved with the Student Association’s sustainability committee, with whom she has helped develop waste-reduction campaigns such as the promotion of reusable menstrual products for Earth Day later this month.

In all the work she does, whether in the lab or in the community, Jorgensen knows the importance of good communication. “I know that communication skills are an integral tool for a scientist aiming to make change,” she says. She sharpened her skills as the editor in chief of her high school newspaper and in her role as a writer at the University’s Blackstone LaunchPad, where she wrote stories about entrepreneurial projects.

After graduating from ���ϲ�����, Jorgensen plans to pursue master’s and doctoral degrees in earth and environmental sciences. “I will center my career around my passion for innovative climate research while opening pathways for communication with communities who will benefit from the research,” she says. Ultimately, she plans to lead her own laboratory focused on predictive climate sciences.

Jorgensen worked with the�� to apply for the NOAA scholarship. CFSA offers candidates advising and assistance with applications and interview preparation for nationally competitive scholarships.

“Ellen’s clear focus on understanding and mitigating climate change—a focus that structures her academic, campus, and community work—made her a clear fit for the NOAA Hollings Scholarship,” says Jolynn Parker, director of CFSA. “She is poised to make the most of the extraordinary mentorship and support that NOAA provides to Hollings Scholars.”

The 2022 NOAA-Hollings Scholarship application will open on Sept. 1. Interested students should contact CFSA for more information: 315.443.2759; cfsa@syr.edu.

Earth Day will be celebrated on April 22. Sustainability Management is collaborating with the Student Association Sustainability and Community Engagement Committees; the Department of Earth and Environment Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences; the New York Coalition for Sustainability in Higher Education (NYCSHE); the SUNY Student Assembly; and Bard College to bring an assortment of events to the campus community.

Environmental Justice in ���ϲ����� Virtual Panel
Tuesday, April 6, 6 p.m. ET

The Student Association Sustainability Committee and Community Engagement Committee will host a discussion with local leaders about environmental injustices that occur in and around ���ϲ�����. The panel includes:

• Deka Dancil, president of the Urban Jobs Task Force;
• Neil Patterson, assistant director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment;
• Catherine Landis, associated faculty at the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment; and
• Thomas Perreault, professor and chair of the Department of Geography and the Environment in the Maxwell School.

Students, faculty and staff interested in the event may .

Solve Climate By 2030 Panel Discussion
Wednesday, April 7, 6 p.m. ET
Sponsored by Bard College, NYCSHE and the SUNY Student Assembly

Students, faculty and staff are invited to join a regional panel discussion about how an ambitious Green Recovery based in state and local action can put us on the way to solving climate change by 2030. A panel of thought leaders will provide their perspective on what a Green Recovery in New York would entail, the one most impactful action that can be taken and how students can advocate for change. or for more information contact gogreen@albany.edu.

Waste-Free Menstrual Cycle Education and Menstrual Cup Giveaway
April 8, 15 and 22

The Student Association Sustainability Committee will table in the Schine Student Center to sign up participants for their menstrual cup giveaway. The Committee will be giving away 20 menstrual cup goodie bags, which include a menstrual cup, compact sanitizer, washing solution and bag. The tabling event will also provide information about having a waste-free menstrual cycle.

Lunch and Learn: A Look Behind the Scenes of Campus Recycling
Wednesday, April 14, 12:30 p.m. ET

If you are interested in what happens to your recyclables on and off campus, join Sustainability Management for a virtual Lunch and Learn to learn what really can be recycled, why it can be recycled and how it gets recycled. This session will reinforce Sustainability Management’s goals for increasing recyclables on campus and reducing contamination before it is sent to the recycling center. These figures also determine the ranking of the University in the Campus Race to Zero Waste—an annual recycling and waste reduction competition where colleges and universities compete from across North America. Sign up for the Lunch and Learn on the .

‘Cooking for the Planet’ Plant-Based Cooking Class
Tuesday, April 20, 6 p.m. ET

Join Meg Lowe, sustainability coordinator, and Claudia Cavanaugh, sustainability student intern, for an interactive, virtual cooking class. Learn about how a plant-based diet will help save our planet while making a delicious coconut curry. The class is free, open to the campus community and limited to the first 20 people who . Registrants will receive an email with the link to join and can pick up their ingredients at the Carriage House, 161 Farm Acre Road, on the day of the event.

‘David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet’ Screening and Panel Discussion
Thursday, April 22, 4 p.m. ET

On Earth Day join Sustainability Management and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences for a free screening of the documentary “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet” on Zoom. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion at 5:30 p.m.; participants can join the entire event or watch the movie on their own time and tune in only for the panel discussion.��

“A Life on Our Planet” serves as Attenborough’s “witness statement” through which he shares concerns for the current state of the planet and hopes for the future. Many are familiar with Attenborough as a faceless narrator, but in this film, you will go on a journey with him as he traces his 60 plus years as a naturalist, showing you the planet’s past and present biodiversity and the degradation humans have caused over the years.

Join the post-film panel discussion with ���ϲ����� Earth and Environmental Sciences professors, including:

• Professor Suzanne Baldwin, a geologist who investigates the rock record to reveal how the Earth has evolved over geologic time;
• Professor Melissa Chipman, a paleoecologist who uses lake sediments to study interactions between past climate, wildfires and permafrost thaw in the Arctic; and
• Professor Sam Tuttle, a hydroclimatologist who studies the movement and storage of water throughout the Earth system.

Pollinator Kit Giveaway
Wednesday, April 28, 10 a.m.-1 p.m.

As a , Sustainability Management and the Bee Campus USA working group will be in the Schine Student Center on April 28 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. to hand out Pollinator Kits! Stop at the table to pick up a free kit and learn why planting pollinators is important. The Pollinator Kits include everything needed to plant herbs that help pollinators and can be transplanted to your garden or repotted to fit in your space. No registration is necessary.

For more information about sustainability at ���ϲ�����, visit the and follow @SustainableSU on , ��and .

On a beach on a remote island in eastern Papua New Guinea, a country located in the southwestern Pacific to the north of Australia, garnet sand reveals an important geologic discovery. Similar to messages in bottles that have traveled across the oceans, sediments derived from the erosion of rocks carry information from another time and place. In this case the grains of garnet sand reveal a story of traveling from the surface to deep into the Earth (~75 miles), and then returning to the surface before ending up on a beach as sand grains. Over the course of this geologic journey the rock type changed as some minerals were changed, and other materials were included (trapped) within the newly formed garnets. The story is preserved in garnet compositions, as well as in their trapped inclusions: solids (e.g., very rare minerals such as coesite – a high pressure form of quartz), liquids (e.g., water) and gases (e.g., CO2).

Suzanne Baldwin examines a gneiss, a type of metamorphic rock on a field expedition to Papua New Guinea. (Photo credit: Prof. Paul Fitzgerald)

Suzanne Baldwin, Thonis Family Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, has led many field expeditions to Papua New Guinea.��Her team’s latest results on this tectonically active region have just been published in the prestigious journal��.

By reading the rock record researchers revealed the recycling pathway from the surface to deep within the upper mantle and then back to the surface as a result of tectonic and sedimentary processes. The compositions of that sand also hold various key components that reveal how quickly this recycling happened. In this case, transit through the rock cycle happened in less than ~10 million years. This may seem like a long time, but for these geologic processes it is actually remarkably short.

The garnet sands are just the latest piece of the puzzle to understand the geologic evolution of this region. It is the only location on Earth where active exhumation of high- and ultrahigh- pressure metamorphic rocks is occurring during the same rock cycle that produced these metamorphic rocks. The international group of researchers, including Joseph Gonzalez ’19 Ph.D. from ���ϲ����� (now a European Research Council postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pavia, Italy), Ph.D. student Jan Schönig and Professor Hilmar von Eynatten from the University Göttingen in Germany, and Professor Hugh Davies (formerly from the University of Papua New Guinea, now at The Australian National University), revealed how the trapped inclusions in garnet sand can be used to determine rock recycling processes within active plate boundary zones.

Garnet sand beach on Goodenough Island. These garnets originate from rocks such as the gneiss (pictured above). (Photo credit: Professor Paul Fitzgerald)

At active plate boundaries, like the one the team studied in eastern Papua New Guinea, converging tectonic plates slide toward each other with one plate moving underneath the other to form a subduction zone. During this process, rocks are subducted deep into the Earth. Over time, forces on the plate boundaries may change and rocks can be exhumed to the surface through a process known as lithospheric deformation. The trapped inclusions preserve a record of crustal subduction and rapid exhumation linking upper mantle and surface processes on these short geologic timescales. By applying their approach to both modern sediments and sedimentary rocks, researchers can now reveal the tempo of rock recycling processes throughout Earth’s history.

This study was funded by the ���ϲ����� Thonis endowment, grants from NSF Division of Earth Sciences, NSF Major Research Instrumentation Grant and a German Research Foundation Grant.

Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences Thonis Family Assistant Professor Tripti Bhattacharya (left) and Professor Linda Ivany.

Tiny bubbles of ancient air trapped deep beneath the ice in Antarctica contain important information about our atmosphere. By drilling into the ice, scientists have analyzed these bubbles and determined that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels on Earth today are higher now than at any point in the last three million years. As human activity like the burning of fossil fuels increase concentrations of greenhouse gases, the sun’s heat is trapped within our atmosphere, causing it to warm. To determine how atmospheric heating will affect Earth’s future climate, scientists are retracing the planet’s past—back to a time when temperatures and levels of CO2 were even higher than they are today.

Two faculty members from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) recently contributed to the review paper “,” by lead author Jessica Tierney of the University of Arizona’s Department of Geosciences. The article, published in the leading journal Science, suggests that researchers using numerical models to predict future climate change should include simulations of geological data from the Earth’s distant past in their evaluations. Included on the international team of scientists contributing to paper were EES’ Thonis Family Assistant Professor Tripti Bhattacharya and Professor Linda Ivany.

Past carbon dioxide concentrations compared to possible future emissions scenarios. If emissions continue unabated, carbon dioxide levels by the year 2300 could meet or exceed past warm climates. (Graphic courtesy of Jessica Tierney/University of Arizona)

Climate scientists often evaluate their models with data from historical weather records that date back one or two centuries, such as sea surface temperatures, wind speeds and other parameters. The model’s algorithms are then adjusted and tuned until their predictions mesh with the observed climate records. If a computer simulation produces a historically accurate climate based on the observations made during that time, it is considered fit to predict future climate with reasonable accuracy.

“We find that many models perform very well with historic climates (climate fluctuations recorded over the last few millennia), but not so well with climates from the Earth’s more distant geological past,” Tierney says. “If your model can simulate past climates accurately, it likely will do a much better job at getting future scenarios right.”

Paleoclimate research explores a vastly broader range of climatic conditions dating back millions of years. These periods in Earth’s past span a large range of temperatures and precipitation patterns and consequently can inform climate models in ways recent historic data cannot.

Research by Bhattacharya and Ivany specifically deals with determining how temperatures and regional patterns of rainfall responded to global climate change millions of years ago.

According to Bhattacharya, current climate models predict very different trajectories of warming and rainfall change in particular regions. This is because regional climate changes often depend on complex variables, including the way clouds respond to climate change, or the way the land surface or vegetation responds to warming. By using geological data from past climate states as a guide, Bhattacharya says scientists can enhance their understanding of how regional rainfall and temperature will respond to global climate change.

“New techniques for looking at the geologic record offer additional variables to examine, or better precision on climate modeling estimates,” she says. By using sophisticated geochemistry to examine organic matter in fossil leaf wax dating back millions of years, Bhattacharya can closely pinpoint regional precipitation at that time.

Growth banding in fossil mollusk shells can reveal the mean and seasonal range of temperature in a region tens of millions of years ago.

Similarly, Ivany uses high-resolution studies of the chemistry of growth banding in fossil mollusk shells to reveal the mean and seasonal range of temperature in a region tens of millions of years ago. “Geoscientists have a number of approaches for estimating mean temperature in the distant past, but seasonality is especially difficult to constrain because of the need for weekly to monthly resolution records,” says Ivany. “Very few archives allow for that in the deep-time record.”

Amazingly, weather data teased out from fossil leaf wax and ancient mollusk shells can help determine which climate models most accurately reproduce the past, and hence are most likely to accurately capture the future.

Regional patterns in rainfall and temperature seasonality are predicted by climate models and expected to change significantly with global warming. However, different models can yield surprisingly different predictions in a warming world. Choosing a model that best reproduces the geologic data, such as those produced by Bhattacharya and Ivany, helps scientists get that much closer to understanding what to expect in our future.

While there is no debate in the climate science community about human fossil fuel consumption pushing the Earth toward a warmer state for which there is no historical precedent, different models generate varying predictions. Some forecast an increase as large as six degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Tierney says that while Earth’s atmosphere has experienced carbon dioxide concentrations much higher than today’s level of about 400 parts per million, there is no time in the geological record that matches the speed at which humans are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.

The authors discuss climate changes during the Cretaceous period, about 90 million years ago, when dinosaurs still ruled the Earth. That period shows that the climate can get even warmer, a scenario that Tierney described as “even scarier,” with carbon dioxide levels up to 2,000 parts per million and the oceans as warm as a bathtub.

“The key is CO2,” Tierney says. “Whenever we see evidence of warm climate in the geologic record, CO2 is high as well.”

To ensure future climate models provide accurate scenarios as policymakers, scientists and citizens at large plan for a warmer future, the authors urge the climate community to test models on paleoclimates early on, while the models are being developed, rather than afterward.

For a full list of authors and funding information, see the paper, “.”

Note: Excerpts of this story are adapted from a press release from the University of Arizona.