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The Department of Geosciences was present at the Geological Society of America's Annual Meeting on October 18th to the 21st in Portland Oregon. As usual, a number of students and faculty presented an array of talks and posters throughout the meeting. The department hosted an alumni reception on Monday evening during the conference which many alumni and friends attended, and we had an information table in the Graduate Forum all day Sunday and Monday.

• Geology folks in campus news: click to read about the recent activities of Beth Caissie and David Boutt.

• Dr. M. Lee Allison (UMass PhD’86) presented a talk entitled “Intelligent Design and the Assault on Science and Religion” on October 2. Dr. Allison, currently State Geologist of Arizona, spoke about his involvement in the state of Kansas, during a six year battle against imposing intelligent design and other religious beliefs into science classes in the elementary and secondary schools of the state. After the talk Dr. Allison received the Department of Geosciences Distinguished Alumni Award.

• UMass Geosciences was well represented at this year's NEGSA meeting. Organizeed by UMass alum (PhD '80) Art Goldstein (shown here with Mike Williams), over 1100 scientists attended the three day conference in Portland, ME. More

•Don Wise, Mike Williams and about 30 faculty, undergraduate and graduate students from UMass Amherst, Smith College, Amherst College and Hampshire College attended the 2009 Five College geology field trip to Pennsylvania in May. More

• UMass Geology grad student Carrie Petrik has received a Climate Fellowship from the non-profit Clean Air-Cool Planet. Climate Fellowships pair outstanding students with challenging projects aimed at moving the US toward a low-carbon future. Carrie will work with Sustainable Nantucket's Volunteer Green Council, and various town agencies and departments to draft a Climate Protection Action Plan for Nantucket.

• Congratulations to Jason Kaiser, he was awarded a $25,000.00 scholarship from the Icelandic Leifur Eiriksson Foundation in February, 2009. The Leifur Eiriksson Foundation was established to provide recognition and financial assistance to further scholarly study and research through graduate student exchanges between Iceland and the United States.  Jason is working on his MS with Sheila Seaman and will be using the scholarship to conduct field work in north-central Iceland in the summer of 2009.  He will be mapping and sampling a mafic and silicic layered intrusion, with the goal of adding data to the debate as to the origin of silicic rocks in Iceland.

• Professor Lynn Margulis, along with twelve other distinguished scientists, was honored by Linnean Society of London with the 2008 Darwin-Wallace Medal. Read more here.

• Climatogist Doug Hardy comments in a story about why tropical glaciers are important and why there is great concern that they are melting rapidly. More.

• Since participating on the Svalbard REU, Luke Trusel (Geology senior class of 2006) has been to Antarctica and is currently working on a multibeam bathymetry project in NE Alaska for the National Park Service via a Masters program at NIU. Read more here.

•Stan Stevens (Geography) spent the first half of October in Barcelona, Spain for meetings of IUCN's Commission on Economic, Environmental and Social Policy and IUCN's World Conservation Congress (WCC).  See the story here.

• In late August 2008, Professor Emeritus Peter Robinson and two colleagues led a ten-day excursion across the Scandinavian Caledonides following the International Geological Congress in Oslo. Read more here.

• A team of scientists headed by Robert DeConto, Geosciences, says the ice sheets in the Arctic may have formed 22 million years earlier than had been previously thought. His paper entitled Thresholds for Cenozoic bipolar glaciation was recently published in the journal Nature and can be read here.