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Earth & Environmental Science Department Newsletter

Welcome to the first newsletter of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at Wesleyan University!  

Congratulations to Dana Royer, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences on receiving the George I. Seney Professorship of Geology, established in 1880!

Dana Royer came to Wesleyan in 2005 after receiving his PhD from Yale University and completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Pennsylvania State University. He studies fossil plants as a window into their ecology and climate, publishing over 80 papers on these topics. His extensive reconstructions of temperature and atmospheric CO2 over the last 450 million years of Earth history have gained traction with groups such as 350.org and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He currently co-leads a community-wide project for standardizing and improving the deep-time paleo-CO2 record; this multi-institution project is funded by the National Science Foundation. He regularly teaches courses on soils and Earth history and rotates through multiple introductory courses and the department capstone senior seminar. He has served Wesleyan as department chair and as Board of Control member at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. 

Professor Dana Royer and members of his lab attended the Botany 2023 Conference in Boise over the summer, presenting on their research on fossil plants and climate.

They also spent a day collecting fossils at the renowned Clarkia deposit in northern Idaho (~16 Ma). The full crew included Xiaoqing Zhang (postdoc), Bryton Smith (MA ’24), Fletcher Levy (’23), Melanie Cham (’24), and Marcus Brown (’25) 

Fletcher Levy (’23)

Xiaoqing Zhang (postdoc)

Marcus Brown (’25)

Melanie Cham (’24)

Wynnie Avent II (MA ’24, left) Lisa White (U of CA Museum of Paleoentology, right) attended and presented a poster at the NABG conference “Geoscience United: Collaborating for a Sustainable and Equitable Future”.

Joop Varekamp and Ellen Thomas (both professor emeritus) attended the 11th IAVCEI workshop on volcanic lakes in the Azores (Portugal).

The weather was remarkably nice for the islands, and although Joop had told himself never to fill any bottles with lake water for research again, on the 4th day he was just doing that, and the first analyses are already in. Both Joop and Ellen gave talks and posters at the meeting – Joop gave a keynote address on “CO2 Bubble Transport from Magma to the Surface” and Ellen spoke about “Stable Isotopes in Ostracods in Paulina Lake, Newberry Volcano, OR’”. The field trips were great and the food and wine tasty, so it was a glorious example of talking about/doing volcanology on a remote island. Joop and Ellen both agree that the senior seminar students should be looking forward to their upcoming January trip over there!

Joop at Fogo lake on San Miguel, Azores

Collecting water samples on bubbling Lake Furnas, San Miguel

Dr. Scott W. Tinker, the Texas State Geologist and Director of the Texas Economic Bureau of Geology gave a well-attended presentation on Wednesday, September 20th, “Untangling Energy and Climate.”

His thought provoking talk challenged students to think more deeply about how to deal with most of the world’s the energy poverty and what renewable energy means. He showed images of solar panels in developing countries that allowed villages to have electricity at night and in their schools. On the other side he asked where the minerals needed for the batteries were going to be mined and what happens to old wind turbine blades? [They get chopped up and buried.] Parts of his talk are available in his TED Talk:

The Joe Webb Peoples Museum organized an Usdan exhibit “Crafting Sea Critters: a look at Oceanic Ecosystems”. (April 6-May 9 2023)

This exhibit celebrated the diversity of life in the oceans through a combination of museum specimens (including biological and archaeological specimens thanks to Ann Burke and Wendi Murray) and items crafted (mainly crocheted) by the Wesleyan community. The exhibit was conceived and organized by student curators led by Lily Rudofsky ('24) assisted by Lilly Hochhauser ('24) and Fletcher Levy ('23), and featuring art by Cole Goco ('23).

In time for commencement, we opened permanent display cabinets in the Exley lobby built by Jim Zareski and Joel LaBella, displaying giant clams and corals (curated by Lily Rudofsky ('24) to highlight the photography by Joshua Boger ('73), who made a generous donation for our museum work.

We opened our web-portal with the first set of data from collection digitization, soon to be updated.

Lily Rudofsky continued her curation of the sub-recent coral collection with important specimens from the United States Exploring Expedition (1832-1842) in the summer of 2023, receiving an honorable mention for her poster.

The Museum loaned a cast of the plesiosaur Thalassiodracon hawkinsi, usually exhibited on the 3d floor of Exley, to The Bruce Museum (Greenwich, CT), to be part of their exhibit 'Monsters and Mermaids: unraveling natural history's greatest hoaxes' (August 26, 2023-February 11, 2024), to explain the source of Nessy, the Loch Ness Monster.

We are planning a museum Open House during the upcoming Homecoming-Parent Weekend (October 28).

Professors Suzanne OConnell and Raquel Bryant recently spent time conducting research on the JOIDES Resolution off the coast of Iceland (Expedition 395) and Greenland (Expedition 400). Expedition 395 had cross-disciplinary objectives to elucidate Icelandic mantle plume activity associated with ocean floor spreading over the past 30 million years and the evolutionary process of mantle melting. Sediment cores were collected to examine paleoclimate on a millennial scale and temporal changes in ocean circulation, in particular the initiation of North Atlantic Circulation. Expedition 400 primary objective was to understand how the Northern Greenland Ice Sheet responds to extreme glacial warmth, test the hypothesis that the northern Greenland Ice Sheet underwent significant deglaciation at intervals that match the frequency of orbital eccentricity and to understand the relationship between glacial inception in northwest Greenland and long-term carbon dioxide trends/variations, temperature, global ice volume and regional/local tectonics.