PhD student Shaina Sadai and Professor Mark Leckie are recipients of the University's 2021 Distinguished Teaching Awards. Since 1961, the University of Massachusetts has presented the Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA) to instructors who demonstrate exemplary teaching at the highest institutional level.
Recent research on soil loss in the Corn Belt by graduate student Evan Thaler and professors Isaac Larsen and Qian Yu has been highlighted by Smithsonian Magazine. Read the Smithsonian article here...
Several students and faculty will be participating in the 2021 (virtual) annual meeting of the American Assocation of Geographers. See below for a schedule of who is presenting when:
Lightning Talk: Using climate modeling and interdisciplinary theory to analyze climate justice impacts of the Paris Agreement
Shaina Sadai
1:40PM
In a new paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters PhD student Anna Ruth Halberstadt, Dr Rob DeConto, former postdocs Ed Glasson, Doug Kowalewski and colleagues, model ice-sheet dynamics during a past warm period (the mid-Miocene) that is often used as a future analog due to elevated CO2 and warm temperatures.
PhD student Laura Fattaruso recently published a piece on temblor about recent research that looks into why the southern San Andreas Fault has had a relative lack of recent earthquakes: a story that involves the famous Salton Sea, prehistoric Lake Cahuilla, and how those lakes can affect stress in the earth's crust along the Fault.
The hydrogeology research group has published a number of articles in the past few weeks on their research in the Salar De Atacama, Island of Tobago, and Massachusetts. This stellar cast of authors includes Professor David Boutt and graduate students Marsha Allen, Sarah McKnight,
![Linemen work to restore power in Texas during winter storm, February 2021. Photo by Jonathan Cutrer, via Flickr [CC BY-NC 2.0]](http://www.geo.umass.edu/sites/default/files/styles/thumb-square/public/field/image/news/texas-1-1068x580.jpg?itok=Mc3N8Okc)
Associate Professor Eve Vogel provides an analysis in ProMarket about the recent failure of the Texas Power Grid in the contexts of broader electricity markets, biophysical limitations, and different governance options. The piece features a map by MS Geography-GIST students
Recent alum Ian Hillenbrand, professors Mike Williams and Haiying Gao, along with PhD student Cong Li, have just published a paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters proposing that a
U-Mass Geosciences has a strong showing at the (virtual) annual meeting of the Northeastern Section of the Geological Society of America, March 14th and 15th 2021. If you're attending #NEGSA2021 this year don't miss out! Here is a schedule of who is presenting and when.
Graduate student Evan Thaler, with professors Isaac Larsen and Qian Yu, recently published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that documents complete carbon-rich topsoil loss in one-third of the Corn Belt in the Midwest – nearly 30 million acres. Read more...
The American Geosciences Institute just published their report of Geoscience graduate employment trends as of December 2020: "91% of geoscience graduates who earned their degree between 2014-2018 were employed, while 75% of graduates from 2019 and 80% of graduates from 2020 reported the same.
Dr's Brian Yellen, John Woodruff, and collaborators at WHOI recently published a paper in Estuaries and Coasts documenting their findings of much-lower-than-expected sediment levels behind dams in the Lower Hudson watershed in addition to creating a tool to quickly estimate the amount of sediment trapped behind dams. Read more here...
While most of our course offerings are remote this semester, we are offering several courses through U-Mass University Without Walls. These are asynchronous courses that are taught independently from your regular semester courseload, and can taken by anyone, whether enrolled at UMass or not. They are all listed in SPIRE.
Dr. David Boutt, along with colleagues at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, has been commissioned as part of a cooperative study to investigate how lithium extraction impacts the hydrologic environment in Latin America, especially with regards to lithium brine-fresh water aquifer systems. The goal of the study is to provide companies with better guidance on sustainable lithium extraction.
The Geosciences Department is pleased to announce the November 29, 2020 publication of The Chinese City (Routledge, 2021), by Professor Piper Gaubatz (Geography Program) and Professor Weiping Wu (Director, Columbia University Graduate Program in Urban Planning). This is a completely revised second edition of their 2012 book. The book engages with major recent changes in Chinese cities and urban life.
Recent alum Dr Jessica McBeck and professor Dr Michele Cooke are senior authors on a recent paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters studying how the mechanical energy budget in accretionary prisms, a fundamental geological structure at tectonic plate margins, scales from analog models in the lab to real-world examples and its implicat
Graduate Student Justin Mistikawy is senior author of a paper with collaborators (including Dr. Justin Richardson) recently published a paper in Environmental Geochemistry and Health
Recent alum Dr Benjamin Keisling and professor Dr Rob DeConto are senior authors on a new paper discussing the results of Benjamin's work at U-Mass, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Ice and Climate, on new mechanisms for how and when a network of canyons under the Greenland Ice Sheet formed, especially one that is so deep and long it’s ca
The Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is offering several online courses for the 2nd session of the Summer 2020 term. These courses begin July 6th and end August 14th.
If you are interested in these courses, please register by June 19th to guarantee that they will have enough students to be run.
On Friday, May 22, the Department (virtually) held its annual awards ceremony granting awards and scholarships to outstanding seniors and research scholarships to graduate students from our department alumni endowments and memorial funds. It's with much pride that we celebrate students and their accomplishments.
Outstanding Senior Awards:
Geology:
Earth Systems:
Geography:
Seniors, students, faculty, staff and alums: please join us in a digital celebration of the 2020 graduating class this upcoming month and until we are able to celebrate them in person!
The university’s Board of Trustees unanimously voted to name the UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center (FAC) for the late Dr Randolph W. “Bill” Bromery, in honor of the former chancellor, geoscientist, and Geosciences department head who played a transformative role in creating today’s vibrant and diverse public research university. Click here to read more.
Several graduate students submitted excellent proposals to the NSF Graduate Student Research Fellowship program this year. Current graduate student Kelly McKeon and incoming graduate student Sam McComb were awarded fellowships for their proposals.
The Geomechanics Group has recently published two new papers in Geosphere:
"Urban forests have long been forgotten by ecosystem scientists and biogeochemists..." Dr Justin Richardson and co-authors recently published a paper in Science of the Total Environment. The paper highlights research conducted by U-Mass undergraduates, graduate student Jonah Jordan, and himself on mercu
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