Olivia DrakeStudents who are enrolled in the E&ES 397/398 Senior Seminar and Senior Field Research Project Capstone spent eight days conducting research in Hawaii. Pictured, the students gather on a lava tree field.
Frederic Wills '19Johan "Joop" Varekamp, the Howard T. Stearns Professor in Earth Science, led an invited talk at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, Dec. 2015. The earth and space science community participated in discussions of emerging trends and the latest research. The session, which was co-authored by former Wesleyan E&ES graduate student Lauren Camfield, focused on the 2012 eruption of the Copahue volcano in Argentina. Due to the success of the invited talk on Volcanic Hydrothermal Systems, Varekamp will be a co-editor for a special issue of a journal based on that session. As part of his role as…
Andrew Logan ’18Bill Herbst, the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, and James Greenwood, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, co-authored an article published in the planetary science journal Icarus. Their article, “A New Mechanism for Chondrule Formation: Radiative Heating by Hot Planetesimals” grew out of research seminars from the recently introduced Planetary Science graduate concentration and minor at Wesleyan. Their work focused on chondrules, or tiny spheres of molten rock that permeate primitive meteorites and date to very close to the beginning of the solar system. For decades, the existence of chondrules has puzzled astrophysicists and cosmochemists as no…
Hannah Norman '16Students from Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Timothy Ku’s Environmental Geochemistry class presented their findings regarding the geochemical makeup of Lake Hayward in East Haddam, Conn., to almost two dozen members of the Lake Hayward and Wesleyan communities on Dec. 2 in a presentation at the Russell House. The class is part of Wesleyan’s Service Learning Program spearheaded by Rob Rosenthal, director of Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology. “Working in science, it's always fulfilling when you have people who care about the information you’re looking at,” said Zachary Kaufman ‘16.…
Lauren RubensteinFour Wesleyan undergraduates and a faculty member received awards in the latest call for proposals from NASA's Connecticut Space Grant Consortium. Astronomy major Rachel Aronow '17 was awarded an Undergraduate Research Fellowship in the amount of $5,000 for her project, "Planet Formation and Stellar Characteristics in Tatooine-like Systems." She is working with Bill Herbst, the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, studying Tatooine-like systems (named after the fabled home system of Luke Skywalker), which are planet-forming disks that surround a close pair of stars that are in orbit around each other. Aronow conducted research with Herbst last summer, and these funds will support further…
Suzanne O'Connell, professor of earth and environmental sciences, faculty director of the McNair program, is the author of a new op-ed appearing on Inside Sources and The Hartford Courant, in which she urges aggressive action to counteract climate change. O'Connell acknowledges the difficulty in communicating the urgency of climate change, and writes that one way she's found to express this to her students is to liken climate change to cancer. That is, it is the rapid rate at which we are introducing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—much like the accelerated rate of cell growth in cancer—that is so harmful. She writes: Cancer progresses at different rates in different…
Laurie Kenney Wesleyan Earth and Environmental Sciences students and faculty attended and contributed to this year’s Geological Society of America (GSA) Annual Meeting, held Nov. 1–4 in Baltimore, Md. (more…)
Jelle Zelinga de Boer, Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science, emeritus, was selected by the Geological Society of Connecticut (GSC) as the recipient of its 2015 Joe Webb Peoples Award, in recognition of de Boer's many contributions to the understanding of the geology of Connecticut. (more…)
Suzanne O'Connell, professor of earth and environmental sciences, received the Exchange Award from the Association for Women Geoscientists at its annual awards breakfast on Nov. 2. The Exchange Award recognizes the contribution of those who exchange technical, education, and professional information in the field. The award ceremony took place at the Baltimore Convention Center in Maryland in conjunction with the Geological Society of America's annual meeting. O'Connell is also faculty director of the McNair Program. According to Blair Schneider, president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, O'Connell won the organization's Outstanding Educator Award in 2000. Since then, she has been an active…
Joop Varekamp, the Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science, professor of earth and environmental sciences, and Marty Gilmore, the George I. Seney Professor of Geology, professor and chair of professor of earth and environmental sciences, are the co-authors of two book chapters published in Copahue Volcano (Springer Publishers, September 2015) Copahue Volcano is part of Springer Publishers' "Active Volcanos of the World" series. Varekamp is the lead author on a chapter with Jim Zareski MA‘14 and Lauren Camfield MA’15. Gilmore and Tristan Kading MA’11 are co-authors with Varekamp on another chapter dealing with terrestrial environments as analogs for Mars. A third chapter,…
Marine scientist and author Ellen Prager '84 came to the Exley Science Center on Oct. 8 to talk about her recent research and writing. Discussing her book Sex Drugs and Sea Slime: The Ocean's Oddest Creatures and Why They Matter, she entertained a crowd of Wesleyan students and faculty with stories from her work in the Galapagos and as researcher at the Aquarius undersea laboratory off Key Largo, Fla. Lately, Prager has ventured into the realm of children's fiction in order to spread awareness about the ocean's most pressing issues. Her most recent children's book, The Shark Whisperer, was published in May…