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Enrolling in Geoscience 435 in fall 2021, fourth-year Penn State student Alysha Ulrich did not expect to end the course with a literature review on-track to be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
In 2002, an area of ice about the size of Rhode Island dramatically broke away from Antarctica as the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed. A new study of the conditions that led to the collapse may reveal warning signs to watch for future Antarctic ice shelf retreat, according to a Penn State-led team of scientists.
Kimberly Lau, assistant professor in Penn State’s Department of Geosciences and an associate in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, was recently selected to receive a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship. Awarded since 1955 to the brightest young scientists across the United States and Canada, the two-year Sloan Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers.
Rocks, rain and carbon dioxide help control Earth’s climate over thousands of years — like a thermostat — through a process called weathering. A new study led by Penn State scientists may improve our understanding of how this thermostat responds as temperatures change.
The oldest known Earth stuff that remains on the surface of our planet is a mineral that's been called the "Time Lord" because it's so incredibly good at keeping geologic time.
Changes in Earth’s orbit that favored hotter conditions may have helped trigger a rapid global warming event 56 million years ago that is considered an analogue for modern climate change, according to an international team of scientists.
Three Penn State faculty — Kate Freeman, Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences, Christopher House, professor of geosciences, and Allison Baczynski, associate research professor of geosciences — have been selected to join the NASA Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission to analyze samples from the asteroid Bennu.
The geosciences fields are at a turning point, where the jobs of the next 50 years are likely to be quite different from the jobs of the last 50 years. As the world’s dependence on energy increases, it is becoming increasingly clear that the ways in which those energy needs must be met are changing.
In the late 1940s, a budding electrical engineer named Hu Barnes spent the summer working with General Radio Company. In a time before the widespread use of computers, he watched as doctoral students toiled over drafting tables.
A recently released set of topography maps provides new evidence for an ancient northern ocean on Mars. The maps offer the strongest case yet that the planet once experienced sea-level rise consistent with an extended warm and wet climate, not the harsh, frozen landscape that exists today.