In the warmer seasons in Central New York, rainstorms can be sudden, violent and torrential, soaking students to the skin as they walk across campus. But for Cassidy Jay ’11, rain this summer means more than damp jeans: it means changes in the chemistry of water samples she collects from the Oriskany Basin. She and Associate Professor of Geosciences Todd Rayne are comparing the chemical composition of stream water before and after a rainstorm in the Oriskany Basin. More ...

Eugene Domack, the Joel W. Johnson Family Professor of Geosciences, presented “A Continuous GPS Network for Measuring Crustal Response to Changes in Ice Mass, a Sub-project of LARISSA (Larsen Ice Shelf System, Antarctica) and Polenet” at the XXXI SCAR and Open Science Conference held July 30 through Aug. 11 in Buenos Aires. More ...

This is Nora Grenfell's '12 third report from a field study in Iceland.

Our backcountry camping tour of Iceland began our second week. Prior to that, we had been staying in hostels around the capital area, but come Sunday we piled our packs in a bus and prepared for a week on the road. Our bus was nicely equipped with a cooking trailer, and we were accompanied by Sola, our cook (and her daughter Sofia, whose English put us all to shame) our driver, Franz, and our guide, Jon, who has known Professor Tewksbury for more than 30 years! More ...

Nora Grenfell '12 is providing updates from Iceland, where Upson Chair for Public Discourse and Professor of Geosciences Barbara Tewksbury is leading eight Hamilton students and nine students from SUNY Oneonta in a 15-day field study.

Our trip began with a 9 p.m. flight from Boston’s Logan international airport, and ended with us arriving four time zones ahead of New York in Iceland at 6:30 a.m. We hit the ground running, driving from Keflavik airport to Reykjavik across the Reykjanes ridge. As we drove, we observed the oldest rocks in Iceland. Since the island has been built up by magma rising from the mid-Atlantic ridge, the oldest rocks are at the edges of Iceland while the youngest land lies in the center on the volcanically active zone. So far we have been able to observe both the older zones in Iceland and areas where there has been volcanic activity as recently as 30 years ago. More ...

Five Hamilton students will be joined by 12 additional students from seven colleges and five countries (Belgium, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom and United States) for a two-week course on the marine geology of Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf. This National Science Foundation-sponsored program, related to the International Polar Year (IPY) and the LARISSA project (Larsen Ice Shelf System, Antarctica), will take an interdisciplinary approach in examining the reason for the ice shelf's dramatic breakup in 2002. More ...

In June, Madeleine (Maddy) Gunter ’11, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale, Associate Professor of Geosciences David Bailey and Science Center Administrator Alissa Nauman conducted archaeological and geological field research on Inishark, an island off the west central coast of Ireland. More ...

For a country with a population smaller than that of Wyoming, Iceland drew a lot of attention this spring when a more typically dormant volcano erupted and brought European air travel to a stop. Over the next two weeks, several Hamilton students will be able to observe for themselves this spectacular country and its many unique geologic features. More ...

Every morning, Hanna Kahrmann-Zadak ’12 rides her bike from outside Clinton up the Hill to get to the lab. But before reaching her destination, she makes three pit stops to pick up her samples from two wells and nearby Oriskany Creek. She and Associate Professor of Geosciences Todd Rayne are embarking on a project that could prove extremely significant, especially to the community of Clinton: plotting the changes in the components of groundwater and of Oriskany Creek as they correlate to precipitation events. More ...

WRVO’s The Campbell Conversations – Conversations in the Public Interest will feature an interview with Eugene Domack, the J.W. Johnson Family Professor of Environmental Studies, at noon on Friday, June 4. Domack will speak about Antarctica and climate change, the recent earthquake in Chile, the Deep Water oil well blow out and the local natural gas exploration effort in the Marcellus shale via hydraulic fracturing or hydrofracking. More ...

Katharine Cashman became an expert on Mount St. Helens largely by accident. She isn’t a great geologist, she said during her presentation on April 13 in the Science Center, because she likes studying geologic processes that unfold on a time scale that she can watch. Volcanic activity is one such process, and Cashman, the head of the geosciences department at the University of Oregon, has devoted much of her life to studying the science behind the eruptions of Mount St. Helens. More ...