Four Wooster undergraduate students traveled to the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver for three days of presentations, networking and learning. They reported on preliminary results of their Independent Study thesis work.
Cheyenne gears up for some lively conversation – she has taken on the task of comparing Northern and Southern Hemisphere coastal tree-ring records aiming to better understand the role of the ocean-atmosphere system in the Pacific that is symmetric across the tropics.
Adam is looking at the signal in old growth (>250 years old) forests across Ohio that “witnessed” European Settlement in the early 1800s. This is a timely study coinciding with 250 Anniversary of the Nation.
Anika is reporting on a discovery that Western Red Cedar have a winter signal in their ring-widths – explaining this is a big part of her work. She is the first to report on the first red cedar chronologies developed from Alaska. Another first for the Wooster Tree Ring Lab.
Anna has taken on a study of lake cores and the interval in time that coincides with Settlement and changes in diatom communities over the past few hundred years in two lakes in the Sierra Nevada, CA.
Anna shares an inside diatom perspective with an interested fellow scientist.
Anika explains that the last several decades in Southeast Alaska were the warmest winters over this several hundred year record.
Adam explains the signal in witness trees of multiple tree-ring records from different species in NW Ohio.
The Patagonia/ Gulf of Alaska comparison has not been done for over 15 years (originally done by Ricardo Villalba and others in 2011). We know more about the dynamics of mid-high latitude climate variability and the tropics now, and the results are revealing.
Alumni and students at the get together. Alumni who stopped by included former professors in Wooster Geology, Dori Farthing (SUNY-Geneseo; second from left), Jade Star Lackey (Pomona; and his son Finn) and Stephanie Sparks (Northern VA Community College); alums included Katherine Nicholson Marenco (Bryn Mawr; left above), Mary Palmieri (middle above), Abe Springer, Nicolas Young, Jack Whitehouse (who is a new graduate student of Abe Springer’s, both at Northern Arizona Univ.) and George Davis.
Yay Cheyenne, Adam, Anika and Anna! Great to see the College represented so well with top-notch science presented at a national meeting. The Earth Sciences are flourishing at Wooster. Great to also see alumni. I very much wish I could have been there!