Earth and Environmental Sciences News and Events

Renovation of new teaching laboratories is complete!

Steven Goodbred has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, effective Fall 2007.

Steve Goodbred and grad students Kimberly Rogers and Russell Pate spent 3 weeks in March 2007 conducting a research cruise off the coast of Bangladesh. The group is working to understand marine sediment pathways that connect the Ganges-Brahmaputra river mouth with offshore deltaic and canyon deposits.

John Ayers and PhD student Tim Peters spent two weeks collecting eclogite samples in central China during August 2007.  They plan to return to China in November 2008 to analyze their samples in the lab of John's colleague Shan Gao.

In July 2007 EES undergraduate Mike Ramirez spent two weeks on an archaeological dig on the north coast of Peru, working with Steve Goodbred and Anthropology chair Tom Dillehay to understand the relationship of climate change, physical geohazards, and development of a complex 6000-8000 year-old pre-ceramic culture.

Numerous EES students and faculty attended the Southeastern Geological Society of America Meeting in Knoxville (March 23-24).  Undergraduates in attendance: Emily Baunach, Ashley Bromley, Emilie Carroll, Stephanie Pappas, and Tonya Richardson.  Graduate students in attendance: Chris Fisher (link to abstract), Susan Howell, Jennifer Lovinggood, Maria Ruiz, and Brooke Traynham (link to abstract).  Faculty members attending: Brendan Bream, Calvin Miller, and Molly Miller (link to abstract).  Additionally, Molly Miller ran a field trip for the meeting on Saturday to Tennessee's northern Cumberland Plateau and Brendan Bream ran a structural geology field trip around Knoxville for the undergraduates.

In April 2007 Ph.D. student Beth Weinman conducted field work in Nepal with collaborators from Columbia University and University of Grenoble, continuing her reseasrch on the relationship between groundwater arsenic and floodplain geomorphology.  Beth will also return to the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India, where she will continue her internship with Dr. Ashok Singhvi, world-expert on luminescence dating techniques.
 
Molly Miller also gave a talk at the Gondwana Symposium in Mendoza, Argentina and is presently pursuing her ongoing field research on high-latitude paleoecology in Antarctica!

Calvin Miller has given talks at the GSA meeting in Utah, at the University of Alaska, and at retirement celebrations for Fred Anderson (Univ. of Chicago) and Ian Carmichael (UC-Berkeley - at Jackson, Wyoming). He also attended a GSA field conference in the Sierra Nevada, field trips and Gondwana Conference in Argentina, and a field trip to the active volcanic zone of New Zealand.

Kaye Savage gave an invited seminar talk on arsenic transport in surficial environments at the University of Florida Geology Department.

Speaker Schedule

Please see our Photo Album Page for images of recent departmental events.

Read the most recent department newsletter, VU GeoNews 2006.