- There will be no EPS Colloquium this week (Wednesday, Nov. 25th) due to Thanksgiving Holiday break.

- Next EPS Colloquium (Wednesday, Dec. 2, 12:00 noon, Wright Labs Auditorium), is by Dr.Gray Beboutof Lehigh University, who will present "Metamorphism, melting, magmatism, marl, microbes, and (maybe) Mars - a Nitrogen isotope perspective". Host: Linda Godfrey.. All are welcome.

- Congrats to George McGhee, who has just been awarded a 3-month summer visiting fellowship for 2010 from the Board of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (Austria), to work on “Predictability and the Evolutionary Process”.

- William Berggren is to receive the first Outstanding Geoscience Alumnus Award at this year's Society of Exploration Geophysicists Exposition and Meeting at the University of Houston, Natural Science Museum. The award is part of a special Gala to be held on October 24, 2009, to help “preserve the field experience” for geology and geophysics students across the U.S. 

- Just out in Science, check out Cermeño, P., and Falkowski, P.G. Controls on Diatom Biogeography in the Ocean. (see Science),...who suggest that "biodiversity and macroevolutionary patterns at the microbial level fundamentally differ from those of macroscopic animals and plants" . There is also a nice write-up in Science Perspectives by David Patterson Seeing the Big Picture on Microbe Distribution (see Science Perspectives).

- In Nature, 27 August, 2009, check out Oppo, D.W., Rosenthal, Y. and Linsley, B.K. "2,000-year-long temperature and hydrology reconstructions from the Indo-Pacific warm pool." (see Nature).

- Check out Peter Rona featured in this week's Science Times "Diving Deep for a Living Fossil", NY Times, Tuesday, August 25, 2009)..a nice article on Peter's deep sea research, go to Diving Deep... , and great slide show at Slides...

- Congrats to Dennis Kent, who has been selected recipient of the 2009 Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism Section's William Gilbert Award. The President of the Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism Section of AGU writes that this award "... acknowledges your [Dennis Kent's] many contributions to the GP community and to our science. As a section, we owe you a great deal for elevating and promoting our discipline within geosciences, and we are pleased to honor you as a celebrated and active member of the GP community". The award will be presented at the GP reception and business meeting of the Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco.

- Ika Sulistyanigrum presented and successfully defended her MS thesis "Seismic Sequence Stratigraphy during the Cretaceous through the Early Paleogene in the northern Scotian Basin (Laurentian Subbasin), offshore, Nova Scotia" (Monday, October 5th, 10:00 AM).

- Richard Fairbanks, Jim Wright and Richard Mortlock were awarded an NSF grant for $497,513 to study the Barbados Sea Level and Radiocarbon Calibration Records.

- Dr. Dave Olgaard and Dr. Spyros Lazaratos from ExxonMobil (Houston, Texas) were recruiting here in EPS Monday, September 14th, 2009, and gave a noontime talk "ExxonMobil Geosciences Overview".

- Alissa Henza presented and successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation "Influence of pre-existing fault fabrics on normal-fauilt development: An experimental study", Tuesday, August 25th. Alissa will be heading off to Houston next week, to start work with BHP Billiton.

- Michael Durcanin presented and successfully defended his M.S. thesis "Influence of synrift salt on rift basin development: Applications to the Orpheus basin, offshore Eastern Canada", Wednesday, August 26th. Mike is off to Dallas, where he has accepted a position with Nexen Petroleum.

- We missed this one...Yair Rosenthal was named by editors of the AGU journal Paleoceanography, as one of the 2008 "Editors' Citations for Excellance in Refereeing" (see EOS, July 14, 2009, vol. 90 , no, 28, p.243).

- The ExxonMobil Workshop on Integrated Bio-, Chemo-, and Sequence Stratigraphy was held August 18 to 21 (2009), at Rutgers University Inn. The workshop was hosted by EPS faculty Ken Miller, Marie-Piere Aubry, William Berggren, Richard Olsson, Jim Wright, Jim Browning, EPS graduate students Ashley Harris and David Bord. Others included Pete McLaughlin (Delaware State Survey) and Mimi Katz (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). About 25 ExxonMobil scientists in addition to EPS faculty and graduate students attended. A welcome reception was held in the Geology Museum and banquet dinner at the Frog and the Peach.

- Congrats to David Bord, who has been offered and is accepting an NSF K-12 Fellowship for 2009-10. David is now the 3rd EPS graduate student over the past 3 years, following Ian Saginor and Lauren Neitzke, who have been awarded this fellowship with Kathy Scott's education group.

- Check out the Editorial in Science (7, August 2009, Vol. 325. no. 5941, p. 655) on Future Energy Institutes by Rutgers' Paul Falkowski and Robert Goodman.

-  Rutgers Media highlights Yair Rosenthal and Sindia Sosdian on their 17 July, 2009 article in Science "Deep-Sea Temperature and Ice Volume Changes Across the Pliocene-Pleistocene Climate Transitions"(see Research Papers below).

- George McGhee gave an invited presentation (August, 2009), "Beyond Darwin: Analyzing both Existent and Nonexistent Biological Form in Evolution" at a conference at Oxford University, England, on Darwin and Evolution in this 150th year since the publication of On the Origin of Species.

- Congratulations to Paul G. Falkowski, Nathan Yee, Vikas Nanda who have just been awarded an NSF (Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences) grant for $300k to study "The Prebiotic Evolution of Redox Chemistry on Earth".

- Congratulations to Esteban Gazel, who Wednesday (15 July, 2009) presented and successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation "Interaction of the Galapagos plume with the southern Central American Volcanic Front.  (Advisor, Mike Carr). Job well done!

- Gail Ashley has been selected as one of the traveling 2009-2010 North American AAPG Distinguished Lecturers. (see  http://www.aapg.org/education/dist_lect/domestic.cfm).  Her presentations will include The Paleoclimatic Framework of Human Evolution and The Sedimentary Record of Human Evolution

- Greg Mountain and Ken Miller report today (July 14, 2009) that Site 29 was successfully cored to 755 m below sea floor, completing a successful coring campaign aboard the L/B Kayd off the New Jersey Shore. For news story and video in the Philly go to Digging for Answers, and video on Slate TV Drilling for Clues About Global Warming

- Congratulations Kelsey Bitting, GSA 2009 Outstanding Mention for "a grant proposal of exceptionally high merit in conception and presentation", Optically-stimulated luminescence dating of a widespread Holocene unconformity within Delaware River Valley alluvial deposits, reported in GSA Today, July vol., 19(7), p.18.

- Congratulations to Fara Lindsay, who on Monday, June 22, 2009, presented and successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation, on "Geochemistry of lavas from southeastern Nicaragua and of mantle xenoliths from Cerro Mercedes, Costa Rica".

- Professor George McGhee is featured in "The Geometry of Evolution" . View Video (6/19/09)

 

- Aubry, M.-P. 2009. Thinking of Deep Time. Stratigraphy, vol. 6, no. 2, p. 93-99.

- Aubry, M.-P., Van Couvering, J.A., Christie-Blick, N., Landing, E., Pratt, B.R., Owen, D.E., and Ferrusquía-Villafranca, I. 2009. Terminology of geological time: Establishment of a community standard. Stratigraphy, vol. 6, no. 2, p. 100-105.

-Spiro, B., Ashkenazi, S., Mienis, H.K., Melamed, Y., Feibel, C., Delgado , A., and Starinsky, A. 2009. Climate variability in the Upper Jordan Valley around 0.78 Ma, inferences from time-series stable isotopes of Viviparidae, supported by mollusc and plant palaeoecology. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, vol. 282, p. 32-44.

- Cermeño, P., and Falkowski, P.G., 2009. Controls on Diatom Biogeography in the Ocean. Science vol. 325, p. 1539-1541. DOI: 10.1126/science.1174159.

- Muttoni, G., Scardia, G., Kent, D.V., Swisher, C.C., and Manzi, G. 2009. Pleistocene magnetochronology of early hominin sites at Ceprano and Fontana Ranuccio, Italy. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, vol. 286, p. 255-268.

- Godfrey, L.V. and Falkowski, P.G. 2009. The cycling and redox state of nitrogen in the Archaean ocean. Nature Geoscience (13 September 2009) doi:10.1038/ngeo633.

- Rona, P., Seilacher, A., de Vargas, C., Gooday, A., Bernhard, J., Bowser, S., Vetriani, C., Wirsen, C., Mullineaux, L., Sherrell, R., Grassle, F., Low, S., Lutz, R., 2009, Paleodictyon nodosum: A living fossil on the deep-sea floor, Deep-Sea Research II, 56:1700-1712, Special Issue with Guest Editors R. Lutz and T. Shank, Marine Benthic Ecology and Biodiversity: A Compilation of Recent Advances in Honor of J. Frederick Grassle.

- Oppo1, D.W., Rosenthal, Y. and Linsley, B.K., 2009. 2,000-year-long temperature and hydrology reconstructions from the Indo-Pacific warm pool. Nature vol. 460, p. 1113-1116 (27 August 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08233.

- Henza, A.A., Withjack, M.O., Schlische, R.W., 2009. Normal-fault development during two phases of non-coaxial extension: An experimental study. Journal of Structural Geology, in press. (check it out at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsg.2009.07.007)

- Feibel, C. S., Lepre, C. J. and Quinn, R. L. 2009. Stratigraphy, Correlation, and Age Estimates for Fossils from Area 123, Koobi Fora. Journal of Human Evolution vol. 57, p.112-122.

- Sosdian, S. and Rosenthal, Y. 2009. Deep-Sea Temperature and Ice Volume Changes Across the Pliocene-Pleistocene Climate Transitions, Science, vol. 325. no. 5938, p. 306-310, DOI: 10.1126/science.1169938. ...a link to Rutgers news release http://news.rutgers.edu/medrel/news-releases/2009/07/deep-ocean-study-yie-20090721

- Muttoni, G., Gaetani, M., Kent, D.V., Sciunnach, D., Angiolini, L., Berra, F., Garzanti, E., Mattei, M., and Zanchi, A., 2009, Opening of the Neo-Tethys Ocean and the Pangea B to Pangea A transformation during the Permian: GeoArabia, vol. 14, p. 17-48.

- Nikulin, A., V. Levin, and J. Park (2009), Receiver function study of the Cascadia megathrust: Evidence for localized serpentinization, Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst., vol. 10, Q07004, doi:10.1029/2009GC002376.

- van de Schootbrugge, B., Quan,  T. M., Lindström, S., Püttmann, W., Heunisch,  C., Pross, J., Fiebig, J.,  Petschick, R., Röhling,  H.-G., Richoz,  S., Rosenthal,  Y.  and Falkowski, P.G., 2009. Floral changes across the Triassic/Jurassic boundary linked to flood basalt volcanism. Nature Geoscience, Advance Online, www.nature.com/naturegeoscience, 13 July, 2009.  | DOI: 10.1038/NGEO57...and a link to the Discovery Channel News release   http://dsc.discovery.com/news/news.html

- Aubry, M.-P., Berggren, W.A., Dupuis, C., Ghaly, H. Ward, D., King, C., Knox, R.W.O’B., Ouda, K., Youssef, M. and Galal, W.F., 2009, Pharaonic necrostratigraphy: a review of geological and archaeological studies in the Theban Necropolis, Luxor, West Bank, Egypt. Terra Nova, vol. 21, no. 4, p. 237–256, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-3121.2009.00872

- Miller, K.G., 2009, Broken greenhouse windows. Nature Geoscience, vol. 2, p. 465-466.

- Maguire, T.J., Volkert, R.A., Swisher III, C.C., Sheridan, R.E., 2009, Evidence for an Alleghanian (Early Carboniferous to Late Permian) tectonothermal event in the New Jersey Coastal Plain basement from 40Ar/39Ar biotite data, geochemistry and gravity modeling. Journal of Geodynamics, vol. 48, p. 23–36.

- Ashley, G.M., Tactikos, J.C., Owen, R.B., 2009, Hominin use of springs and wetlands: Paleoclimate and archaeological records from Olduvai Gorge (~1.79-1.74 Ma): Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, vol. 272, p. 1-16.