This past summer, newly minted Full-Professor Arlo Weil, along with his colleague Adolph Yonkee from Weber State University in Utah, took two students (Fern Beetle-Moorcroft and Andriy Mshanetskyy) deep into the Rocky Mountain foreland to study the kinematics and mechanics of Laramide deformation.  This was the final summer of a three year National Science Foundation project investigating the link between plate-scale dynamics and foreland deformation in the North American Cordillera. We collected nearly 100 sites worth of data, and only had one rattle snake bite to show for it.

In July, new Assistant Professor Selby Cull took six Bryn Mawr Geology students (Christina Lee, Alice Clark, Mary Schultz, Hannah Gatz-Miller, Simona Clausnitzer, and Danyelle Phillips) to Houston to fly in NASA’s parabolic airplane that simulates zero gravity, testing the properties of Martian soil.  Follow their story on their blog!

Read news coverage and an interview with team member Danyelle Phillips in the Nelson County Times and with team member Christina Lee in the Courier Post!

Bryn Mawr Research Associate Katherine Marenco conducted field work in western Utah this summer, for an ongoing project exploring the relationship between seafloor conditions and the evolution of marine communities during the Ordovician radiation. Also participating in the Utah expedition were Assistant Professor Pedro Marenco and Geology majors Alliya Akhtar and Danyelle Phillips, who focused their efforts on measuring and sampling Ordovician and Triassic stratigraphic sections for geochemical analysis. The group encountered plenty of wildlife – including four rattlesnakes – but came away unscathed.

This summer, Associate Professor Don Barber led a student team to investigate sea level changes in coastal North Carolina. Geology students Anna Lee Woodson and Storrs Kegel led a team of researchers back to Woodson’s senior thesis site in search of a longer Holocene sea level record.  The team obtained the deepest Holocene marsh peats ever found in southern Pamlico Sound.  After the work in southern Pamlico Sound, Kegel and Woodson joined the international group for additional fieldwork in northern Pamlico Sound, near Nags Head on the Outer Banks. A second field campaign by Barber and Kegel recovered cores from a new southern NC site.  Geology students will begin analyses of the new core materials in the new geochemistry lab suite this fall.

Department Chair Arlo Weil poses for the cover of GSA Today and a cover story on his research.  Read the full story here.

The Bryn Mawr Microgravity Research Team – a group of seven Geology Majors – has been selected by NASA to fly on the “Vomit Comet“, an astronaut training aircraft that simulates zero gravity. The team wrote the NASA grant themselves, mentored by Geology Assistant Professor Selby Cull, and will be simulating the effect of Mars gravity on Martian soil porosity.  Read their blog here!

Two Bryn Mawr students will join Geology Lecturer Lynne Elkins on a trip to the waters north of Iceland next summer as Elkins and her fellow researchers try to better understand volcanic activity in the area. The researchers plan to explore the mechanisms driving the production of new ocean crust occurring at volcanic mid-ocean ridges like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the Arctic Ocean, and also to help explain anomalous volcanic activity occurring in the region. The trip is funded by a National Science Foundation grant that Elkins and colleagues from the University of Wyoming received this summer to explore volcanic activity in a segment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge known as the Eggvin Bank.  Read more…

New Assistant Professor of Geology Selby Cull is among the researchers making headlines for a just-released article in the journal Science on the possibility of water on Mars. The news has been reported by most major media outlets world-wide.