New Undergraduate Degree Option in Environmental Geoscience

The Department of Earth Sciences is pleased to announce that we will be offering a new degree option for our undergraduate students in Environmental Geosciences. Students may choose to pursue a Bachelors of Science (B.S.) or a Bachelors of Arts (B.A.) in Environmental Geosciences. We hope that this new degree option will open various opportunities for our students in a growing career field, preparing them to work in various areas including environmental consulting firms, as well as, federal, state, and nonprofit agencies.

For more information, please contact Dr. Joshua Feinberg at: feinberg@umn.edu.

Also, check out this great spotlight by CSE: Environmental Geosciences.

QMA 2019, Quantitative Microanalysis 2019

The Department of Earth Sciences and the Microanalysis Society are pleased to announce the topical conference QMA 2019, Quantitative Microanalysis 2019. QMA 2019 will be held June 24-27, 2019. Topics covered include, but are not limited to, quantitative analysis by SEM/EDS and EPMA, compositional mapping, sample preparation, microanalysis education, and reference materials.

Visit the QMA 2019 website for more information!

This Week's Department Seminar

Seminar will be held on Monday February 18th at 4 pm in room 101 Tate Hall.

Dr. Xingchen (Tony) Wang, Califorina Institute of Technology, Simons Foundation

Coral as a new archive of the marine N cycle: From the ice age to the Anthropocene

Bio: Xingchen (Tony) Wang is a Simons Foundation postdoctoral fellow (SCOL) in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. He received a B.S. in Geochemistry (2010) from Nanjing University, China and a Ph.D. in Geosciences (2016) from Princeton University. His research interests include ocean biogeochemistry, paleoceanography and paleoclimatology, historical geobiology, and isotope geochemistry.

Abstract: Nitrogen (N) is a key element of life and limits primary productivity in much of the ocean. The status of biologically available (or fixed) N in the ocean has implications for such properties as the amounts of CO2 and O2 in the atmosphere. Natural variation in the ratio of the two stable N isotopes (15N and 14N) is a power tracer of the marine N cycle, both today and in the past. In this talk, I will introduce a novel tool for studying the ocean’s N cycle: N isotopes of organic matter bound within the annually banded carbonate skeletons of corals. This measurement has been applied to address two questions in marine biogeochemistry. In the first application, the N isotopes of Southern Ocean deep-sea fossil corals indicate the entire Southern Ocean, both Antarctic and Subantarctic Zones, was nutrient-depleted during the last ice age relative to modern conditions, supporting the hypothesis that Southern Ocean changes contributed to the lower atmospheric CO2 concentration of the ice ages. In the second application, N isotope records from offshore Bermuda and South China Sea were used to assess the impact of anthropogenic N deposition on the open Ocean in the Anthropocene. While the measurements showed that the west Pacific has already been clearly affected by anthropogenic N deposition, the North Atlantic shows no signs of anthropogenic influence as yet, instead apparently recording the decadal signal of the North Atlantic Oscillation. These data indicate a weaker influence of anthropogenic N on the open ocean than had been suggested by models.

Interested in Working with the Department of Earth Sciences?

If you are interested in applying for any positions available here in the Department of Earth Sciences, check out the current positions available for more information.