2018-03-26 - The Department's Spring Oil and Gas Industry Short Course, sponsored by Royal Dutch Shell, was held on March 10th and 11th. Titled,"Controls on and Prediction of Sandstone Porosity and Permeability," the course was taught by Drs. Linda Bonnell and Rob Lander of Geocosm, LLC. The course covered advanced concepts, and recent research, that enable greatly improved prediction of sandstone porosity...

2018-02-21 -   The department's Eryops Skeleton replica is being repaired in preparation for its return to NHB.  Christa Deacy-Quinn from the Spurlock museum is generously helping this effort, supplying essential expertise in plaster preservation and repair.  Click here for blog posts as the project proceeds.

2018-02-20 - A paper just published in Nature Geoscience, and led by Illinois Geology team Jiashun Hu, Lijun Liu, Quan Zhou, Craig Lundstrom, and Stephen Marshak, in collaboration with Manuele Faccenda of the University of Padova and Karen Fischer of Brown University, highlights that geology activity within stable portions of Earth's uppermost layer may have occurred more recently than...

2018-02-16 - Leah Matchett, a Geology alumna from the class of 2016, is one of 49 students selected in the first year of the Knight-Hennessy Scholar program for postgraduate study at Stanford University. Matchett is currently pursuing a master’s in international relations at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. At Stanford, she will pursue a Ph.D. in political science.  See the Illinois News...

2018-02-06 - Graduate student Mike DeLucia, and advisors Willy Guenthner and Steve Marshak, have constrained the timing and magnitude of erosion that produced the Great Unconformity surface (the global erosion surface separating Precambrian and Paleozoic rocks) in the St. Francois Mountains of Missouri. These constraints come from a new method of “deep-time thermochronology” and lead to fascinating insights...

2018-01-25 - The department's 3-D model of parts of the Colorado Plateau, including the Grand Canyon and southern Utah, found its new home in the Natural History Building, after about 4 years in storage.  In this photo, Profs. Willy Guenthner and Lijun Liu marvel at the features shown in the plaster model.  We are not sure when this piece was created, but it could be more than a hundred years old....

2018-01-24 - The Department of Geology continues to bring its historical treasures back into the Natural History Building.  Several detailed replicas of fossils that were part of the early natural history museum displays in NHB have been brought out of storage and are being mounted in the hallways for all to see.  The photo shows a U of I carpenter fastening a large fossil fish display to a wall in...

2018-01-15 - The Univ. of Illinois is hosting the 55th Annual Meeting of the Clay Minerals Society (CMS) on June 10 - 14, 2018. Prof. Stephen Altaner, who is on the Organizing Committee, will lead a field trip to the Starved Rock State Park area, a field trip to the type locality of illite, and a thematic session on Teaching and History of Clay Sciences. The U of I also hosted the CMS meeting in 2013 when it...

2018-01-15 - In a paper “Western US volcanism due to intruding oceanic mantle driven by ancient Farallon slabs” published in Nature Geoscience, Lijun Liu and graduate students Quan Zhou and Jiashun Hu have employed seismic tomography to reveal new insights into the origin of Yellowstone volcanism and challenge existing views on deep mantle plumes. Click here to see details on this...

2017-12-11 - Julia Cisneros was invited as the sole student representative of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign to speak about her research and fieldwork in the Amazon and Yellow Rivers and showcase the importance of applied fieldwork and student research opportunities to the Chancellor, President, and Board of Trustees. Click ...

2017-12-07 - Graduate student Yan Zhan, advised by Trish Gregg, had a paper accepted in Frontiers in Earth Science. This work demonstrates how modeling the eruption potential of a restless volcano can be improved by incorporating volcano monitoring data by “hindcasting” a 2009 explosive eruption of Kerinci volcano, Indonesia. Click this link to view the paper:...

2017-12-07 - Graduate student Robert Goldman won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in fall 2017 based on his proposal "Developing a Comprehensive 3D Finite Element Model of Magma Plumbing Systems to Improve Forecasts of Eruption Timing, Location, and Destructive Potential." Robbie’s comments on winning this award: "As a life-long scientist and science-enthusiast, I am extremely humbled and honored to have...

2017-12-07 - Professor Emeritus Susan Kieffer is a leader in the emerging field of Geoethics. This year she received the Marcus Milling Legendary Geoscientist Medal of the American Geoscience Institute https://www.americangeosciences.org/news/professor-susan-werner-...

2017-12-07 - Graduate student Julia Cisneros won a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship this fall for a project titled “Dune morphology and dynamics in fluvial channels."  Julia works with Professor Jim Best and her comment on winning this award is "I am very excited and proud to be awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Receiving the NSF GRFP has been a goal I have had since I began...

2017-12-07 - Assistant Professor Wendy Yang’s recent paper “Evaluating the Classical Versus and Emerging Conceptual Model of Peatland Methane Dynamics” published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles provides an improved tool for predicting methane emissions and understanding how they feedback into global climate change. Click here...