Alexandria, Va. — Global Positioning System (GPS) technology was conceived in the 1960s to provide precise time and location data to the U.S. military, but it was soon embraced by geodesists and earth scientists. The first major test of GPS as a seismic tool occurred on Oct. 17, 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck San Francisco just as the third game of the World Series was about to begin at Candlestick Park. [Read More]

Princeton PhD candidate, Joseph Majkut, has been selected as the 2014-2015 William L. Fisher Congressional Geoscience Fellow. He will spend a year in Washington, DC, working as a staff member in the office of a member of Congress or with a congressional committee. Majkut is completing a PhD in Atmospheric and Oceanic Studies at Princeton University. He is studying the ocean carbon cycle and how CO2 emissions and the associated warming affect the ability of the natural carbon sinks to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere. [Read More]

On a muggy day in mid-July 2009, a lone seven-story condominium complex northwest of Kobe, Japan, was violently shaken by an earthquake. The 23-unit, wood-frame tower swayed and bounced while, inside the building, furniture toppled and plates clattered to the floor. No one was hurt during the highly localized event and there was only minimal damage, in part because the building’s wooden skeleton had been augmented to better resist earthquake shaking, but also because the whole event — from the seismicity to the partially furnished building — was just a test. [Read More]

Alexandria, Va. - The American Geosciences Institute (AGI) is proud to announce the adoption of a new domain name: www.americangeosciences.org. This change reflects both AGI’s heritage and recent developments in the geosciences. Over 250,000 scientists with skills acquired through geoscience degree programs contribute to various aspects of U.S. energy production, resource development, environmental management, hazard mitigation, and education within the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The new domain name is a part of AGI’s efforts to represent all geosciences, which began with changing its name from the American Geological Institute to the American Geosciences Institute in 2012 and launching the “I’m a Geoscientist” campaign in 2013. [Read More]

Answering a Community-Wide Call, AGI Releases Report on Academic Geoscience Program Accreditation Answering a community-wide call from geoscience societies and employers, an American Geoscience Institute inter-society ad hoc committee examined the issue of academic geosciences program accreditation. The committee has concluded its two years of study, and released a report that details three observations regarding the classification of college and university geoscience programs. The committee’s three major observations are about distinctive approaches: program accreditation by a board or community, classification of programs, and student competency-based badging/portfolios. [Read More]

##EARTH Magazine: The Trouble With Turtles Alexandria, Va. - Turtles are the last major living vertebrate group to be placed firmly on the tree of life, and the arguments are getting messy. Three fields in particular — paleontology, developmental biology and microbiology/genomics — disagree about how, and from what, turtles may have evolved. In the latest EARTH Magazine feature story, contributing writer Naomi Lubick investigates how these creatures confound scientists on many levels — from their morphology in the paleontological record and in modern day turtles, to the analysis of their genome. [Read More]

Alexandria, Va - Robert D. Hatcher Jr., Distinguished Scientist and Professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and former President of the American Geosciences Institute (AGI), has been unanimously approved by the AGI Executive Committee to receive the 2014 Marcus Milling Legendary Geoscientist Medal. This award honors a lifetime contributor of high quality scientific achievements and service to the Earth sciences, and the Selection Committee’s nomination report highlighted his achieving legendary status for his lifetime of commitment to field mapping-based research, combining the latest geophysical, geochemical, isotopic and modeling techniques. [Read More]

Alexandria, VA — The American Geosciences Institute (AGI) congratulates the latest recipients of the Wallace Scholarship for women in geoscience. The newest awardee is Penn State doctoral candidate Elizabeth Denis and 2013 awardee, University of Florida doctoral candidate Kelly Deuerling, has received a second year of funding in a re-compete application. Denis’ research integrates geochemistry and sedimentology to investigate fire and aridity relationships during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) a past hot, CO2-rich climate. [Read More]

Alexandria, Va. — Join EARTH Magazine and guest writer Irina Overeem on an expedition that pitted a team of scientists against rapid erosion in the Arctic. Overeem transports readers to the edge of the North Slope of Alaska where her team explored the effects of rapidly thawing permafrost on cliff erosion — a process that’s resulted in an annual average of 15 meters of shoreline recession in recent years. The researchers expect that, with continued warming, the processes responsible for erosion will only accelerate. [Read More]

Alexandria, VA — The American Geosciences Institute has sought out the most exciting and relevant news from around the geosciences and brought it all together in the latest GeoSpectrum. With stories, awards, and meeting information from nearly 30 of AGI Societies — GeoSpectrum has it all! This issue covers a range of topics, including: The economics of soil Unconventional uses for coal, from rare elements to cancer treatments How the removal of a dam was celebrated as the best environmental and engineering geology project of 2013 A book review on sex in the paleontological record Much more This issue also features a special insert from EARTH Magazine, their interview with U. [Read More]