School of Earth and Climate Sciences

Each year, the School of Earth and Climate Sciences awards a cash prize to the master’s and Ph.D. students who give the best presentations in the School’s spring Brown Bag seminar. This year, the award for the best presentation by a Ph.D. student goes to Sam Roy, and the award for the best presentation by […]

Along with his co-authors Philip Conkling, Richard Alley, and Wallace Broecker, George Denton has received this year’s Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science for The Fate of Greenland: Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change (The MIT Press, 2011). The book focuses on the role of Greenland in recording climate history and how changes to its […]

A new article highlights innovative teaching by Professor Karl Kreutz. The December newsletter for iseesystems, publisher of the popular STELLA systems modeling software, describes how Karl uses STELLA for teaching about the global carbon cycle. In the article, Karl says “I knew that if students could really get their hands on the carbon cycle, they […]

Geologists at the University of Silesia in Poland have discovered two minerals new to science and have named them edgrewite and hydroxyledgrewite in honor of University of Maine geologist Edward Grew. The new minerals were discovered by Evgeny Galuskin and Irina Galuskina in the Chegem caldera in the Northern Caucasus, near Mount Elbrus in the […]

In the most recent rankings of the US New and World Report (2010), the Department of Earth Sciences (now the School of Earth and Climate Sciences) was ranked higher against our national peers than any other ranked graduate program at the University of Maine. We ranked 69 in the nation among Earth Sciences programs. The […]

Over the weekend of October 12-14th, 2012, Chris Gerbi participated in the Chinese-American National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium, held in Irvine, California. He was also invited to be on the organizing committee for the next symposium, in 2014, to be held in China. Brenda Hall attended a similar Symposium in 2006. […]

Bess Koffman, a Ph.D. student in the School of Earth and Climate Sciences, has won an NSF postdoctoral fellowship award. Next June, pending completion of her degree, she will begin work at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and at Cornell University, investigating the role of New Zealand dust in global climate during the Last […]

Science Daily, the popular news website for breaking news in science, highlights a new paper in the July 2012 issue of American Mineralogist by Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution with co-authors including Ed Grew of the University of Maine. Science Daily reports that the paper “demonstrates that the creation of most minerals containing mercury […]

The new book “The Story of Earth” by Robert M. Hazen (Viking Press, April 26, 2012) highlights Ed Grew’s research on boron and beryllium minerals and the emerging field of mineral evolution. Hazen, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D.C., credits Ed with producing a “landmark graph” showing the increasing […]

The Geological Society of Maine announced that Patrick Ryan and Peter Strand won the Walter Anderson Award for the best undergraduate poster at the spring Geological Society of Maine meeting, held April 13 at UMaine – Presque Isle.  Pat and Peter had traveled with Professor Brenda Hall in January and February, 2012, to perform research […]

Today the University formally announced that Dr. Brenda Hall will be promoted to Professor and that Dr. Christopher Gerbi will be granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.  You can read more at the UMaine news site. Hall, whose main research focus is in glacial geology, joined the faculty as a Research Professor in 2001 […]

A Magnitude 7.4 Earthquake occurred on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 at 18:02:48 UTC time (2:02:48 Eastern Daylight time). The shaking was significant enough to be measured on the seismometer at the University of Maine. The quake occurred at a depth of 20 km (12.4 miles) at a depth of 20 km (12.4 miles). The epicenter […]

We send out our congratulations to Eliza Kane and Audra Norvaisa for scholarships we learned about recently! Eliza is using a $5000 Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, to support her studies in Brazil this semester. This is a nationally competitive award aimed at supporting travel abroad for Pell grant-funded students. More information is at their […]

On February 23, Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative and the Department of Earth Sciences are hosting a seminar with Dr. Robert Jacobson, a supervisory research hydrologist with the United States Geological Survey (http://www.cerc.usgs.gov/Staff.aspx?StaffId=268) . The event will include two presentations by Dr. Jacobson, both of which will take place in Wells Conference Center, Room 2.  For […]

Ed joined his wife Priscilla Grew and other volunteers in presenting “Sunday with a Scientist: Rocks and Minerals” at the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln on December 18. The Museum’s monthly “Sunday with a Scientist” outreach programs are designed to appeal to family audiences. Volunteers from the University and local groups present topics […]

Assistant Professor Amanda Olsen is partnering with colleagues at Penn State and St. Francis University to create a database of environmental reactions in order to more comprehensively investigate rates of weathering, carbon sequestration, and other chemical processes that occur at Earth’s surface. The work is funded by the National Science Foundation. Read more at the […]

The late Charles V. Guidotti, Professor in the U Maine Department of Earth Sciences from 1981 to his untimely death in 2005, was honored in 2010 with having a new mineral, guidottiite, named after him. Stephen Guggenheim recently sent us photograph of guidottiite taken by Ludi von Bezing. Guidottiite is the black, shiny columnar material […]

Paul Mayewski, Director of the Climate Change Institute and Professor of Earth Sciences, along with Michael Cope Morrison of Opsin Imaging, has released a beautiful new book entitled Journey Into Climate: Adventure, The Golden Age of Climate Research, and the Unmasking of Human Innocence.  They use stories and period photographs to follow a number of […]

Kaitlyn Anderson, an Anthropology major with minors in Earth Science and Spanish, is featured in the Center for Undergraduate Research (CUGR) website!  Anderson conducted research with the Climate Change Institute under Professor Karl Kreutz collecting bivalve shells from the ocean bottom off the coast of Maine.  She focuses on chondrophores, which are decay-resistant components of […]

Earth Science Professor George H. Denton is a coauthor of a recently published book “The Fate of Greenland”, which depicts the scientific escapades of a group of distinguished climate scientists sponsored by billionaire philanthropist Gary Comer.  Comer, the former head of Lands’ End Company, once sailed his yacht through the Northwest Passage and upon experiencing […]