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TWITTERAround the College: September
News from Geological Sciences
News of Faculty
Professor and Chair David Foster spent two weeks in the remote Turkana District of northern Kenya in August 2013. Foster and collaborators from Melbourne University, Australia, are studying the formation of the Turkana Basin as a key to understanding how continents rift apart and oceans form. This vast desert basin is a relatively low elevation area between the two classic segments of the East African Rift in Kenya and Ethiopia where eastern Africa is slowly pulling away from western Africa. The basin includes Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world, which stands in sharp contrast to the harsh landscape around it. The geology and climate of this region played a role in the dawn of mankind, and some of the earliest hominid fossils are found here. Anthropologist Richard Leaky, who has spent most of his life working in the area, has seen dramatic pressure on the local environment from climate change and overgrazing and warns that the region is a canary for human impacts on the global environmental system.
The next step will be using thermochronology to analyze the past temperature history of the rocks the group collected. Foster anticipates the study's results will form the basis for a larger research effort into the evolution of the Turkana Basin.
News from Chemistry
UF receives grant to join national metabolomics consortium
To help chart the course of biomedical discovery in the newest of the "-omics" frontiers, the University of Florida today launched the Southeast Center for Integrated Metabolomics with a five-year, $9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
An emerging field, metabolomics is the study of small molecules called metabolites, which result from the metabolic processes that fuel and sustain life. It offers a new lens through which scientists can assess and understand the state of nutrition, infection, health or disease in an organism, whether human, animal, plant or microbe. Read More
July
News from Geological Sciences
News of Faculty
Outgoing Chair and Professor Michael Perfit was selected in July by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as one of its 2013 class of Fellows. Established in 1962, the Fellows program is a special tribute for those scientists who have made exceptional scientific contributions and have attained acknowledged eminence in the fields of Earth and space science. Conferred on not more than 0.1 percent of all AGU members per year, Perfit is one of only 62 Fellows chosen this year and the only one from the state of Florida. He will be recognized during the Honors Tribute at the 2013 AGU Fall Meeting in December in San Francisco. Perfit joins two other Geological Sciences faculty members chosen as Fellows by AGU in previous years, Emeritus Professor Neil D. Opdyke (1976) and Distinguished Professor James E.T. Channell (1998).
Emeritus Professor Anthony Randazzo, now president of Gainesville-based Geohazards, Inc., is serving as a technical advisor to the BBC television network's science and philosophy documentary program "Horizon." Broadcast since 1964, "Horizon" covers a broad range of scientific topics during each 60 minute show. A sinkhole expert, Randazzo provides the show's producers with information on sinkholes, which are prevalent in Great Britain, and other geological events.
April
News from Anthropology
News of Faculty
Richard Stepp was elected president of the Society for Economic Botany. SEB serves as the world's largest professional society for individuals interested in exploring human use and interaction with plants, cultures and the environment. The society was established in 1959 and has over 1200 members in more than 64 countries around the world.
News from Geological Sciences
News of Faculty
Professor and Chair Michael Perfit spent a week in March 2013 in the northern section of the Sultanate of Oman doing field work to study a 90 million year old piece of the ocean floor that was thrust onto the continent during the tectonic collision of Africa and Asia. This exposed section of oceanic crust, known as an "ophiolite," is one of most well exposed on Earth. Perfit was invited there by Professors Adolphe Nicolas and Francoise Boudier from the Universite' Montpellier in France who have been mapping the terrain for over 30 years. During this trip, they documented and sampled rocks formed in the crust and upper mantle that are rarely exposed in modern oceans. This information will be used as part of continuing research on how magmas form and erupt at mid-ocean ridges.
February and March
News from Geological Sciences
News of Students
Ph.D. candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow Kelly M. Deuerling was selected in February as the first ever recipient of the American Geosciences Institute's Harriet Evelyn Wallace Scholarship for women in geoscience. The selection was based on her outstanding contributions to her field, her commitment to several extracurricular activities, and her strong participation in the geoscience community. Deuerling is a highly accomplished geoscientist with wide ranging field experiences, lab skills, grants, and awards to support her research and a publication in review. Her research focuses on the chemical weathering of the glacial foreland in western Greenland using tracers of subglacial hydrologic systems and oceanic fluxes of radiogenic isotopes.
The Harriet Evelyn Wallace Scholarship is awarded to a female student pursuing a thesis-based master's or doctoral degree in the earth sciences who most exemplifies the strong likelihood of successfully transitioning from graduate studies to the geoscience workforce. Deuerling will receive $5,000 for the first scholarship year and, on successful completion, will receive a second year $5,000 scholarship. AGI is a nonprofit federation of geoscientific and professional associations representing more than 250,000 geologists, geophysicists, and other earth scientists. Founded in 1948, AGI provides information services to geoscientists, serves as a voice of shared interests in the profession, plays a major role in strengthening geoscience education, and strives to increase public awareness of the vital role the geosciences play in society's use of resources, resiliency to natural hazards, and interaction with the environment.
News of Faculty
Professor and Chair Michael Perfit was featured as one of Gainesville's "Fascinating People" in the January 2013 issue of Gainesville Today magazine. The article describes his path to becoming a geologist and focuses on his research studying undersea volcanoes through trips in the submersible "Alvin" operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The article can be viewed here: http://www.gainesvilletoday.com/2013-january/2013/01/15/fascinating-people-dr-michael-perfit/.
An article by Ph.D. graduate Chandranath Basak (currently at the Max Planck Research Group for Marine Isotope Geochemistry, Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment at the University of Oldenburg in Germany) and Professor Ellen E. Martin was published in the February volume of Nature Geoscience. Entitled "Antarctic weathering and carbonate compensation at the Eocene-Oligocene transition," it discusses the results from a technique the researchers developed to try to understand changes in continental weathering in the past by studying lead isotopes of ancient rock fragments taken from deep sea sediment cores. The technique was used to evaluate at what happened 34 million years ago when Antarctica went from being a green continent to an ice covered continent over a very short time interval. The study results suggested high rates of weathering prior to the ice build up, which may have contributed to the drawdown of CO2 required to make the world cold enough for the ice sheet to grow. The researchers also saw evidence for weathering of carbonate rocks on Antarctica following the development of ice, which may have contributed to global changes in ocean chemistry. They described this as an ocean deacidification event in which more carbonate was deposited in the ocean, which is essentially the reverse of modern ocean acidification.
