2018-05-30
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Professor Tom Johnson has been elected as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America at its Spring 2018 council. GSA Fellowship is an honor bestowed on the best in our profession in recognition of their distinguished contributions to the geosciences through publications, applied research, teaching, and administration of geological programs. Tom was recognized for his fundamental...
2018-05-11 - George Klein was born in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1933. The Klein family moved to Australia in 1939 and then to the United States in 1947, where George subsequently earned three degrees in geology, his bachelor’s at Wesleyan University, a master’s from the University of Kansas, and his doctorate at Yale, in 1960. George’s academic career began with a faculty position at the University of...
2018-05-02 - PhD candidate Haley Cabaniss, Prof. Trish Gregg and collaborator Prof. Eric Grosfils publish a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that lifts the lid on the precursors to supervolcano eruptions. In a new geodynamic modeling investigation entitled ‘The Role of Tectonic Stress in Triggering Large Silicic Caldera Eruptions’ (see online here), Geology PhD candidate Haley Cabaniss finds that large...
2018-04-25 - The class spent three days at the Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado, examining the geomorphology and sedimentology of a range of environments, from hillslopes and debris flows to shallow braided rivers to eolian dunes and playa lakes, and the sedimentary structures present in each. The group were lucky to gain an overview of the park from Park geologist, Dr Andrew Valdez, and then have the...
2018-04-23 - Professor Trish Gregg was one of eight National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Faculty Fellowship awardees for 2017-18. Faculty fellows work with NCSA to help solve some of the grand challenges facing society. Each one works closely with experts at NCSA on a project that aligns with NCSA's six thematic research areas and/or major projects (i.e., the Blue...
2018-04-10 - Prof. Jim Best was awarded the 2018 Jean Baptiste Lamarck Medal by the European Geosciences Union at the EGU annual meeting in Vienna, April 9th, 2018. The Lamarck Medal was established by the EGU Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Paleontology Division, in recognition of the scientific achievement of Jean Baptiste Lamarck. It is awarded to scientists for their...
2018-04-03 - Second year geophysics Ph.D. student, John “Jack" Albright, has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Prior to joining Professor Trish Gregg’s group at the University of Illinois, Jack completed a B.A. in Geology at Pomona College, and a Frontiers Abroad program at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Jack's doctoral research focuses on combining volcano-monitoring data sets...
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...