2019-08-13 -   Professor Bruce Fouke and researcher Joseph Cross suggest that societal pressures drive a wedge between student's academic activities and athletics in a new paper in the journal 'Frontiers in Sports and Active Living'.  See the full interview here.  

2019-07-20 -   Graduate student Julia Cisneros was chosen to be featured in the July, 2019 AGU Young Researcher Spotlight.  Julia works in Prof. Best's group and her interests include sedimentology, surface processes, and bedform morphodynamics.  Julia is also very active as a leader of the Geology grad students and organizes outreach activities to broaden participation in the ...

2019-06-30 -   Recent assessments of employment prospects for college graduates have ranked Geoscience very highly.  An analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey by the web site 24/7 Wall St. identified college majors with the lowest unemployment rates. ...

2019-06-20 - Ph.D. student Naomi Wasserman has been awarded a Fulbright grant to support her research work in New Zealand!  Naomi's research focuses on developing novel isotopic methods to address water quality issues and tackle a range of other geochemical problems.  The New Zealand project aims to develop measurements of the antimony (Sb) stable isotopes (123 and 121) to improve understanding of...

2019-05-19 -   If you will be at the AAPG Annual Meeting in San Antonio, please join us for a U of I Geology reception: Monday, May 20th, 2019 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Yard House 849 E. Commerce St. Suite #409  Walk one block north of convention center, on the riverwalk.  As you reach the Marriott on the right, you should see the Shops at Riverwalk sign above.  Yard House is on the second...

2019-04-21 -   Jon will be joining Jenny Druhan’s lab for his PhD in Fall 2019, and his successful proposal centers on the use of mid-mass stable isotope ratios to parse between weathering and vegetation influences on solutes in the Critical Zone. He will primarily use the unique instrumentation available at the Eel River Critical Zone Observatory and related catchments now part of the French Critical...

2019-04-10 - This was the first year that the School of Earth, Society and Environment co-ordinated EoH contributions across Geology, GGIS and Atmospheric Sciences, and was led by a school committee of Becky Vandewalle (GGIS), Marley Majetic (Atmospheric Sciences) and chaired by our own Nooreen Meghani. This co-ordination provided a tremendous advantage and enabled us to highlight much research and teaching...

2019-04-10 - In the first year of her PhD in 2016, Julia Cisneros attended the 5th International Conference on Marine and River Dune Dynamics (MARID) in Caernarfon, North Wales, to listen, gain ideas and meet new researchers. Three years later, as a fourth year graduate student, she attended MARID VI, that was held in Bremen, Germany, April 1-3. Julia presented a talk entitled ‘Dune morphology and hysteresis...

2019-04-07 - Willy Guenthner has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER grant to investigate the origin and erosion of the Great Unconformity throughout North America. The highly-competitive grant, designated for early-career faculty members, provides Willy with five years of funding to pursue the project Refining zircon (U-Th)/He deep-time thermochronology for constraining Neoproterozoic thermal...

2019-04-07 - Jess Conroy has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER award for her proposal Ocean-atmosphere interactions through the lens of stable water isotopologues. This research will use new measurements of stable isotope ratios of O and H in seawater, precipitation, and water vapour, to advance understanding of the hydrologic cycle in the tropical Pacific, and how it is archived in key...

2019-03-28 - This 3-year NASA funding will provide support for Trish, and co-I Zhong Lu (Southern Methodist University), to build a data assimilation framework for six high-risk volcanoes in Alaska. Although remote, these volcanoes pose a hazard to the ~50,000 airline passengers that fly overhead every day along circumpolar flight paths. Satellite InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) data and GPS...

2019-03-27 - Jeremy Bellucci (B.S. ’06) and colleagues recently determined that a felsite clast in a sample of Lunar regolith (Apollo sample 14321), collected by Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard on February 6, 1971, may be derived from Earth’s Archean crust. Jeremy and team’s fascinating results were published in a recent issue of Earth and Planetary Sciences Letters (vol. 510, pp. 173-175, 2019) and...

2019-03-26 -   Dr. Fang Huang, who earned his Ph.D. in 2007, working on igneous petrology and isotope geochemistry with Prof. Lundstrom, has been highlighted in the Geochemical Society's monthly newsletter.   Fang is a professor at the famed University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and has a large, productive research group with excellent lab facilities....

2019-03-19 -   The Department, along with the Illinois State Geological Survey, is fortunate to have been granted access to software donated by Petroleum Experts to use in research and education of students. The software, known as Move, is a premier structural geology modeling...

2019-02-14 -     The world’s great rivers have been home to the growth of human civilization, form unique and vital ecosystems, and comprise regions that sustain the livelihoods of billions of humans. Yet today the world’s big rivers face a wide array of anthropogenic stressors that are challenging and threatening their functioning as never before. Jim’s review provides a state of-the-art...