 | PI Retreat
February 1-3, 2007
Location to be determined
BRIC Workshop
April 11-14, 2007
St. Anthony Falls Laboratory
Minneapolis, MN
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|  | Paul Morin
received 2.8 million dollars from NSF Ecosystems for a collaborative research project. The goal of this project, entitled "An Interdisciplinary Investigation of Groundwater-Carbon Coupling in Large Peat Basins and its Relation to Climate Change," will be to develop a transient 3D numerical model to study the linkages between climate, groundwater, landscape, and peatland carbon fluxes.
Aurelia Eugenia-Glory DeNasha
was recognized at the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) annual national conference, held October 2006, for her outstanding performances at the 2005 and 2006 Intel International Science Fairs. Aurelia, a participant in NCED's American Indian Youth Science Immersion Program, has been researching muskrats and their effects on wild rice with NCED advisor Andrew Wold.
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| NCED Post-Doctoral Associate Investigating Climate and Land Use Change in Ethiopia | | NCED Post-Doctoral Associate Nikki Strong recently returned from Ethiopia where she is investigating the history of climate and land use in the Northern Highlands of Ethiopia together with undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers (biogeochemists, foresters, archeologists, geographers, hydrologists, and geologists) from the U.S. and Ethiopia. This international research team is using numerous climate and land use proxies and tools, including stable isotope and compound specific carbon and nitrogen analysis, paleomagnetic intensity measurements, paleohydraulic reconstructions based on exposed modern and ancient fluvial systems, and carbon 14 dating, to reconstruct the last 7,000 years of climate and land use change in Ethiopia. |  |  | | Soil erosion in the Northern Highlands (left photo) has been a major source of Nile Delta sediment for thousands of years, as well as a major factor contributing to recent famine. Ethiopian and NCED researchers collecting paleosol samples (right photo) for carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis. | |
| | 3D World Floor Map at Science Museum of Minnesota | | Using NCED mapping tools and techniques, a new 3D floor map of the world was recently installed in the lobby of the Science Museum of Minnesota. This map is 4.4 meters high by 8.8 meters wide and contains satellite data with a resolution of 500 meters. Visitors entering the museum, according to Paul Morin, NCED Visualization, can truly see the "biology of the world on the [map's] surface." To view pictures of the world floor map, click here. | | NCED at AGU Conference | | Last week NCED participated in the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in San Francisco, California. Jane Staiger and Doug Jerolmack, NCED Post-Doctoral Associates, were among the participants. Jane gave a presentation about a new methodology that would constrain the erosional effect of human land use by using beryllium 10, a terrestrial in situ cosmogenic isotope. By measuring the beryllium-10 concentration in sediment, you can determine the amount of erosion above that due to natural processes and the depth from which that sediment came. Doug hosted a session that involved several NCED researchers. This session, "Autogenic Dynamics in Landscape Evolution and the Geologic Record," provided background on the theory that large changes in landscape can be brought about by river processes and sediment transport alone - not necessarily major climate changes. In addition, Doug and other NCED researchers are working on numerical models for predicting these types of statistically rare events. For a complete list of NCED sessions and talks at AGU, click here. | | |
