Author: ltriplet

If you’ve been on campus lately, you’ve seen the mighty new wing of Nobel Hall rising up!  That expansion will open in June, then all of the current Nobel will be emptied and renovated.  Biology and Chemistry will cozy up in the new wing for 2019-20, while the rest of us scatter to temporary locations…

(Alison was a Chemistry and Environmental Studies major with a Geology minor.) In the summer of 2015 I sailed in the Western Arctic Ocean to study mercury chemistry and cycling in the ocean. Spending 64 days at sea on a Coast Guard icebreaker is both exhilarating and exhausting, as the unique Arctic scenery and charismatic wildlife…

Ben DeSutter (Environmental Studies – Physical Science track, ’19) recently returned from a semester in New Zealand!  Here’s what he had say near the end of his trip: “My time in New Zealand has been an incredible experience so far. Classes have been really insightful towards New Zealand environments and geology as a whole. However,…

The Nobel Conference 2018 “Living Soil: A Universe Underfoot” was a tremendous success!  We had 3350 attendees including nearly 1000 high school students, and another 4000+ live-streaming the talks.  The speakers were AMAZING, and really enjoyed spending time with our students and faculty. Soil was also celebrated through the fine arts, performing arts, music and…

I hope you’re all paying attention to the phenomenal footage from Hawaii!  From the first cracks in driveways to the sputtering lava fountains to the mighty rivers of lava flowing to the sea…  How awesome is our planet!  Laura was there on vacation in January, and there was no indication that a major eruption was…

The 2018 Nobel Conference is titled “Living Soil: The Universe Underfoot”, with geology center stage!  Laura is co-chairing the conference with Jim Dontje, the director of the Johnson Center for Environmental Innovation, and Julie and several GEO students are deeply involved in planning and hosting.  We have a crazy-talented set of speakers who will address…

The Gustavus Geology Department welcomes Rory McFadden as our new tenure-track professor!  Rory will teach the solid earth parts of geology, including the courses Earth Materials (previously known as Mineralogy), Petrology, Structural Geology, in addition to our intro courses and research seminars. Rory taught at Gustavus this past year as a one-year visiting professor, including…

Archaeology: some people think it’s an exciting glamorous discovering-Pompeii kind of life, while others think all we do is dig around in the dirt. As I learned on my dig this summer, the reality is somewhere in between. All I knew about the site upon arrival was that it was a Roman Villa, first built…

Hi there! I’m Sarah Bruihler and I’m a senior in the Geology Department. Last summer I worked with Julie Bartley on stromatolite research; for my senior thesis I will be doing a comparison of modern and ancient stromatolites, identifying similarities and differences between them. In June, Julie and I traveled for a week to the…