School of Earth and Climate Sciences

We congratulate several SECS students for recent awards: Nick Richmond, an M.S. student, received First Place in the graduate division of the AGU Spring 2018 Virtual Poster Showcase. The American Geophysical Union is one of the largest and most respected geoscience professional organizations. Read the UMaine story about the award. Ph.D. student Susan Elias won […]

Congratulations to Allie Balter, who was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for her project, “Quantifying summer temperature change during Heinrich Stadials in the American Southwest”. Allie graduated from Bates College in 2014 with a B.S. in Geology. After taking two years to explore careers in outdoor education and environmental consulting, Allie began […]

Ph.D. student Jesse Walters describes his work in the Himalaya for the Traveling Geologist, a website highlighting the successes, adventures, and everything in between of geoscientists working around the globe.

The Russian Mineralogical Society has elected Research Professor Edward S. Grew as an Foreign Honorary Member.  He joins Peter Wyllie (Cal Tech), Peter Burns (Notre Dame) and Robert Hazen (Carnegie Institution) as the 4th current Foreign Honorary Member in the United States.  The election was held at the 200th Anniversary meeting of the Society in St. […]

The New York Times has highlighted the ongoing work, led by Alice and Joe Kelley, along with M.S. student Jacque Miller, to investigate the middens along the Maine coast at risk of erosion, with their archaeological significance potentially washed away. Additionally, Alice has provided an update for the ongoing Maine Sea Grant project .  With […]

Alice and Joe Kelley, along with graduate student Jacque Miller, are featured in a new UMaine News article describing their efforts to assess and preserve archaeological sites threatened by erosion. The researchers work with the Maine Historic Preservation Commission on a Maine Sea Grant funded project to use ground-penetrating radar to characterize the size and […]

Sean Smith, Peter Koons, and several undergraduate students are featured in the video documenting the ERS200 trip down the Penobscot River in Fall 2016.

Andy Reeve’s ongoing collaboration with Kristin Wilson-Grimes (Ph.D. UMaine, 2013) and her students, as they study the salt marshes of St. Croix, Virgin Islands, is featured in the Virgin Islands EPSCoR publication this month.

A new paper by Aaron Putnam, co-authored with Wally Broeker of Columbia University, has garnered attention from several media outlets.  The paper explores how rainfall patterns will respond to changing climate, using past climate change as a guide. The paper at Science Advances (a top feature on their website): http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/5/e1600871 Related articles UMaine press release […]

Laura Hartman was awarded a prize for her presentation “Frozen Volcano: Quantitatively Sourcing Ice Core Tephra” at the 2017 UMaine Student Symposium. Laura is an M.S. student in the Climate Change Institute, working with Andrei Kurbatov and Alicia Cruz-Uribe of SECS. Laura’s project relates to tephrachronology, as she explains: “Paleoclimate reconstructions from ice cores rely […]

Ed Grew and co-authors Robert Hazen, Marcus Origlieri and Robert Downs have published a study cataloging 208 minerals tied to human activities and consider how minerals do and will appear in the stratigraphic record of this time period, one many now call the Anthropocene. The article is published in American Mineralogist. Over 60 news organizations […]

Kimberley Miner, Ph.D. student, is studying pollutants currently trapped in glaciers to develop a climate resilience policy. See the video from WABI TV here.

Kat Allen, new faculty at the School of Earth and Climate Sciences, studies fossils in ocean sediments to determine past ocean conditions with implications for past ocean-climate interactions. Read the full story at UMaine News.

Ph.D. student Andrew Newcomb is studying dams along the Penobscot River to inform decision making. Read the full story at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions here.

Gordon Bromley led the team that discovered a sample from East Antarctica that contains the highest concentration of helium-3 (a variety of helium formed from cosmogenic radiation) ever recorded in a terrestrial sample. Gordon’s full story is on the cosmognosis blog.

Recent B.S. graduate and incoming M.S. student Jillian Pelto is making waves in the world of using art to communicate science. Her recent recognition comes from her inspiring illustrations of climatic data in a new NOAA report. A full story is on the UMaine news page.

Kimberley Rain Miner, Ph.D. student in the UMaine School of Earth and Climate Sciences, was selected as a Switzer Environmental Fellow by the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation. Miner will add her Switzer fellowship to a remarkable list of awards and grants she has received for her research, including a Fulbright Award, a SMART grant […]

The history of the Mongol empire captures people’s attention. In recent years, paleoclimate research has shed more light on some of the military decisions of that time. Most notably, the changing climate of the 1200s may have resulted first in the spread of grasslands, allowing the consequent spread of the Mongol empire. Later, drying could […]

The 2016 awards from the School of Earth and Climate Sciences were announced on Friday May 6th. Congratulations to: Zachary Mason (Kupfer Field Camp Scholarship, Golden Field Camp Scholarship, George H. Stone Award, Outstanding Senior Award) Marissa Bovie (Golden Field Camp Scholarship, Edward Sturgis Grew Scholarship, Outstanding Senior Award) Adam Rogers (Golden Field Camp Award, […]