L&S News  Tag: Geoscience

Charles R. Bentley, who in the 1950s led a team of scientists that measured the West Antarctic Ice Sheet for the first time, and who later explained the mechanics of the fast-moving ice streams that drain the sheet, died on Aug. 19 at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 87.

Wisconsin Sea Grant is launching a new project to cut erosion and protect Lake Michigan shoreline homes, beaches and harbors.The effort is funded through an award from the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coastal Resilience Grants Program and builds on prior Sea Grant work in Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee and Ozaukee counties.

On May 16th, when many faculty and students are putting the semester behind them and looking toward summer, a community of dedicated faculty, staff, and administrators joined together to honor 18 Assistant Professors graduating from the Madison Teaching and Learning Excellence (MTLE) program.

Continental drift and plate tectonics — the notion that large chunks of Earth’s crust slowly but inexorably shift positions — was proposed in 1912 but not accepted until the 1960s. Scientists began to speculate about how these alterations would affect the formation and extinction of species and thus, what we call biodiversity.

Using radioactive elements trapped in crystallized, cream-colored “veins” in New Mexican rock, geologists have peered back in time more than 400,000 years to illuminate a record of earthquakes along the Loma Blanca fault in the Rio Grande rift. The work was led by postdoctoral researcher Randy Williams and his advisor, Laurel Goodwin, a professor in the geoscience department.

Three UW-Madison students have been named winners of the prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship, for their undergraduate work in the sciences. Cory Cotter, Emily Jewell and Lucas Oxtoby were winners of the scholarship, while Elizabeth Penn was selected as an honorable mention.

This year’s recipients of the Hilldale Award, an honor bestowed annually by the Secretary of the Faculty, are Henry Drewal, Kenneth Raffa, John Valley and David Weimer. Winners are recognized for their distinguished contributions to teaching, research and service.

Ten members of the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty have been appointed to Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) named professorships in 2017. Seven of those faculty members are L&S professors.

Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Northwestern University has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in their orbits around the sun.

The discovery promises not only a better understanding of the mechanics of the solar system, but also a more precise measuring stick for geologic time.