October 04, 2016
William Rainey Harper Professor Susan Kidwell has won the Raymond C. Moore Medal for Paleontology from the Society for Sedimentary Geology. The award is given for outstanding contributions in paleontology, especially those that "promote the science of stratigraphy through research in paleontology and evolution, and the use of fossils for interpretations of paleoecology." Congratulations Sue!
September 19, 2016
Graduate student Miquela Ingalls, Assistant Professor Albert Colman, and Professor David Rowley have published a paper in Nature Geoscience titled, "Large-scale subduction of continental crust implied by India-Asia mass-balance calculation." Based on consideration of the mass balance of the subduction of the India-Tibet system, they were able to infer that lower crustal eclogite has been subducted into the mantle, affecting the evolution of mantle geochemistry. Congratulations guys!
September 17, 2016
Former postdoc Christoph Burkhardt and Lous Block Professor Nicolas Dauphas have published a new paper in Nature titled, "A nucleosynthetic origin of the Earth’s anomalous 142Nd composition." In it they consider the issue of whether meteorites are representative of Earth's building blocks. Isotope measurements of Nd made 10 years ago had cast some doubts on this view. Their newer and higher precision measurements show that the Earth may indeed be like meteorites to which a small amount of extraneous stellar dust was added.