After more than a century of fossil fuel use, new techniques have generated additional interest in exploration and extraction of hydrocarbon resources and their environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions. The local Appalachian Basin region is the site of unconventional resources such as the Marcellus and Utica Shales.
Research
Environmental Geochemistry and Biogeochemistry
Research in this area focuses on geochemical processes at the interface of Earth and life, including everything from microbial and human activities to ecosystems. Biogeochemical processes in natural Earth systems, and anthropogenic impacts on them, are investigated through geochemical and isotopic tracers for a variety of chemical constituents, including potential contaminants, combined with modeling of transport processes through soil, plant, and hydrologic systems.
Hydrologic Processes
Earth systems are dominated by water, from the broad controls on global climate by the oceans to the atomic scale water-rock interactions driving chemical weathering and therefore rock cycling. Department faculty examine these hydrological processes across a wide range of time scales, both re-constructing the paleo-processes from imprints left in soils and lake sediments and deploying extensive modern sensing networks in cities and across across urban and natural landscapes.
Paleoclimate and Environmental Change
Human activities are increasingly influencing climate and other environmental systems on Earth, yet in order to put current and future anthropogenic impacts into perspective, we must better understand natural variability in the Earth’s climate system, including the response of ecosystems to climatic and anthropogenic change. Department faculty are engaged in interdisciplinary research on paleoclimate and environmental change attributed to both natural phenomena and human activity at local to global scales, and on time scales ranging from reaction kinetics to geological.
Planetary Science and Astrobiology
Research in this area has been a long-standing strength in the Department, and has included a diverse range of topics from the founding of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) Program to theoretical development of light-matter interaction to studies of planetary surfaces using remote sensing and geologic mapping.
Tectonic, Volcanic and Surface Processes
Our research encompasses a broad range of active tectonic and surface processes that span monitoring volcanic activity using remote sensing and field-based data and modeling the thermal and surface evolution before, during and after eruptions, to examining the interplay between rates of faulting and erosion in actively deforming mountain ranges.