Faculty News |
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Stan Stevens (Geography Program) was a plenary speaker at a November 8, 2008 symposium, "Conservation as if People Mattered: Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas Around the Globe and Here at Home," at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. This was the annual symposium of Bowdoin College's Environmental Studies Program and was funded by the Nature Conservancy and the Mellon Foundation. Stevens was the last of four plenary speakers, following Ashish Kothari (IUCN TILCEPA co-chair and Kalpavriksh environmental action group founder), Randall Curtis, senior policy advisor for The Nature Conservancy for International Government Relations and formerly Director of Multilateral and Bilateral Institutions for TNC, and Xavier Basurto, Assistant Professor of Sustainability Science at Duke University. Stan spoke on "Community Conserved Areas and National Parks in the Nepal Himalaya: Opportunities and Challenges." |
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In late August 2008 Professor Emeritus Peter Robinson and two colleagues led a ten-day excursion across the Scandinavian Caledonides following the International Geological Congress in Oslo. The trip was entitled "A tectono-stratigraphic transect across the central Scandinavian Caledonides" and was attended by 30 participants from 12 different countries with a wide range of interests involving the tectonic development of mountain belts. The major continental collision in this region took place 415-390 million years ago, the same time as the major "Acadian" continental collision in New England right around Amherst, and along the same trend, now separated by the modern Atlantic. Peter Robinson and students and former students have been conducting research on the Scandinavian side only since 1990. The trip began near Ostersund, Sweden, where rocks contain beautifully preserved Cambro-Ordovician fossils, and penetrated deep into the roots of the mountain belt, near Aalesund, Norway, where some rocks now on the surface had been to depths in excess of 100 km, suitable for the genesis of microdiamonds. The excursion was blessed to have the participation of three former U. Mass. Ph. D. students, Kurt Hollocher, Ph. D., 1985; Peter Thompson, Ph. D., 1985, and Virginia Peterson, Ph. D. 1992. In addition, major contributions to the comprehensive Guidebook were made by Kurt Hollocher and Michael P. Terry, Ph. D. 2000, who could not attend for health reasons.
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Several members of the Climate System Research Center were contributors to reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in recent years. The reports earned the panel the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Al Gore, a leading environmentalist and former U.S. vice president. Raymond Bradley, Mathias Vuille and Douglas Hardy were all contributing authors to the IPCC reports. In addition, former Climate Center members Caspar Amman (now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research) and Michael Mann (now at Pennsylvania State University) also contributed to the reports.
Read More
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Rob DeConto will use recently recovered sediments from below the Ross Ice Shelf to improve and validate his Antarctic Ice Sheet Model which was built as part of the international ANDRILL project. The goal is to better understand how ice sheets respond to changing temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations.
More information:
http://www.andrill.org/
Read the coverage in the news:
UMass Amherst Press Release
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Drill Rig on the Ross Ice Shelf (Image by Diane Winter, thanks to National Science Foundation) |
In the 20 Dec 2006 edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters, Prof. Emeritus Steve Haggerty (now at Florida International University) proposes that black or carbonado diamonds formed in stellar supernovae explosions and were deposited on Earth by asteroid impacts.
Read more at New Scientist Space
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A black diamond
(Steve Haggerty image) |
Michele Cooke and her PhD student, Scott Marshall have published a new model for active fault movement in the Los Angeles area (Geophysical Research Letters, 21 Nov 2006). Their research suggests that several of these faults are moving faster than expected.
Read their Coverage in the News:
Read the paper in Geophysical Research Letters
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Fault surfaces in the Los Angeles basin. (red=shallow) |
Rutherford H. Platt, Professor of Geography and Director of the Ecological Cities Project, gave an illustrated book talk on Nov. 8, 2006 at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, MA.
The talk introduced Dr. Platt's new book: "The Humane Metropolis: People and Nature in the 21st-Century City" which has been jointly released by the University of Massachusetts Press and the Lincoln Institute this month. The book includes essays by 27 experts in various aspects making urban communities at all scales greener, healthier, safer, more efficient, more equitable, and more fun -- in short, more "humane." Read more about it here.
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Professor Julie Brigham-Grette and collegues have been funded by the National Science Foundation, to drill through the sediment at Lake El'gygytgyn, a 3.6 million year old meteorite impact crater in northeastern Siberia to study climate change. Drilling is currently planned for winter 2008.
Read more about the scientifc implications of this project.
Read the UMass Amherst press release.
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Lake El'gygytgyn
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Distinguished Prof, Lynn Margulis with Dorion Sagan (UMass Amherst alum) will codirect Sciencewriters Books a new imprint of Chelsea Green Publishing. Sciencewriters Books will develop outstanding works of science aimed at the general public. It is a partnership between Sciencewriters, an educational partnership devoted to advancing science through enchantment in the form of books, videos, and other media. Watch for it this fall as you peruse your local bookshop shelves.
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Rutherford H. Platt, Professor of Geography, was an invited keynote speaker at the recent Chicago Wilderness Tenth Anniversary Celebration on May 17, 2006. Chicago Wilderness is an alliance of over 190 public and private organizations working to restore, protect, and manage natural ecosystems in the greater Chicago region. For more information, download a copy of the program and his remarks.
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Piper Gaubatz, Associate Professor of Geography, has just completed a year
as a Yale faculty fellow in the interdisciplinary Program in Agrarian
Studies. An urban geographer, Gaubatz devoted the year to work on a new
urban political ecology/urban environmental history book that she is
writing with co-researcher Stan Stevens (Adjunct Associate Professor of
Geography) on the roles of urbanization and Manchu, Chinese, and Western “Treaty Port” colonialism in constructing the economies and ecologies of
the northern frontier of China over a four hundred year period.
Drawing on multiple rounds of fieldwork and analysis of historical Chinese, Mongol,
and Western materials, Gaubatz and Stevens examine how development of the
city of Hohhot, now capital of Inner Mongolia, incorporated a vast
hinterland into the Chinese and global economies in new ways and the
impacts this has had on grasslands, forests, rivers, and wildlife across much
of northern and northwestern China and Mongolia.
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Earth system students and teachers from
5 high schools for the deaf around the country were at UMass for 4 days of field trips and workshops. The
students had been running sandbox faulting experiments
in their classrooms and came to UMass to compare the deformation in
the sandboxes with deformed rocks around western
Massachusetts and Vermont.
This collaboration between high school
teachers at schools for the deaf and fault system evolution
researchers at UMass is supported by Michele
Cooke's NSF CAREER grant. One of the ideas behind
the collaboration is that deaf students who use a spatial
language (American Sign Language) may be more
adept than hearing students at understanding and talking
about three-dimensional structures such as faults. |
Deaf high school students learning about structural geology in Utah, 2005. |
New faculty member David Boutt received a 3 year grant from the Department
of Energy to study the effects of porous media compaction on fluid flow.
Read more about his project.
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Mark Leckie recently taught onboard the JOIDES Resolution for
the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP)'s School of Rock.
During a transit from Victoria, B.C., Canada, to Acapulco, Mexico,
Earth science teachers were mentored and taught by scientists
like Mark who are actively engaged in IODP research. Follow the
journey here.
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A new film on DVD--"The Humane Metropolis" --has been produced by the
department's Ecological Cities Project under the direction of Dr. Platt.
The film was created by Ted White, a maker of environmental films, who is
currently a graduate student in the Geography Program. The film celebrates
the work of the late urbanist writer, William H. Whyte, and samples a
variety of approaches to urban regreening in the U.S. today. Order a copy here.
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Jim Hafner recently returned from the Philippines, where he led a training session for biodiversity.
The
primary role of UMass is in support of computer-based modeling of the
distribution of endangered vertebrate species, delineation of species habitat, and assessing probabilities of threats to species and species habitats within the Eastern Mindanao Corridor, a major biodiversity hotspot in Southeast Asia. The overall project is known as the Eastern Mindanao Conservation Collaborative (EMCC). View the full report
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Senior geosciences student Luke Trusel spent three and a half weeks during the summer of 2005 conducting research in the Norwegian arctic with Professor Julie Brigham-Grette. View the full report on the UMass Amherst News Page
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Luke Trusel in Svalbard
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Michele Cooke and other UMass geologists recently lead 20 deaf high school students and their teachers from around the country on an exploration of ancient and active geologic faults in central Utah. The students received hands-on geologic education by becoming involved in geologic data collection, mapping and interpretation of geologic structures . Read the full press release on the UMass Amhest news page
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Week of January 24: Professor Piper Gaubatz was invited by the municipal government of Shanghai, China to address a meeting of high-level government officials, academics and members of the press designed to analyze prospects for shaping Shanghai's urban image and the course of Shanghai's urban development in preparation for the 2010 World Exposition. View the full press release on the UMass Amherst news page. |
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Professor Rutherford Platt will travel to Istanbul to discuss the importance of ecological cities. The workshop, held in collaboration with Istanbul Technical University (ITU), will take place from January 31 - February 1. The goal of the workshop is to begin developing a proposal to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Institution's (UNESCO) Man and Biosphere Program to establish an "urban biosphere reserve" in the vicinity of Istanbul. Platt will give a keynote talk, summarizing strategies for making cities more ecological and humane. View the full press release on the UMass Amherst news page.
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Week of October 11: Professor Julie Graham attended working conference (54 people) in Manila on "Strategies for Sustainable Development Involving Migrants." The invitation came from several NGOs that (1) organize international migrant workers into savings groups to save their wages for investing in alternative enterprises back home and (2) work with migrant savings groups to design and development alternative enterprises on the ground in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Julie and her collaborator Katherine Gibson (Australian National University) were invited to talk about the Community Economies project and strategies for alternative enterprise development.
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