Colloquia

September 23, 2022 – Professor Matt Carter (Biology)
1:00pm in Wachenheim Room 102

“Strategies for Designing and Delivering a Scientific Presentation”
A hands-on workshop for GEOS thesis students or anyone that will be presenting at conference(s).  A copy of Prof. Carter’s book “Designing Science Presentations: A Visual Guide to Figures, Papers, Slides, Posters, and More” is available in the GEOS student lounge.

September 30, 2022 – Dr. JoanMarie Del Veccio, Dartmouth College
4:00pm in Wachenheim Room 113

“Small satellites, big data, and the fate of permafrost landscapes”
Amplified warming at high latitudes threatens permafrost landscapes and their stored carbon, but we understand very little about the climate, vegetation and geologic conditions that promote disturbance in permafrost landscapes. We need innovative and cross-disciplinary approaches to quantify high-latitude carbon fluxes, one of the biggest “known unknowns” of future climate projections. Geoscientists, previously limited to low-resolution and infrequent data, can now investigate the Arctic at unprecedented resolution in time and space thanks to better computers, better algorithms and better data. I leverage these tools to learn about permafrost landscapes at levels of detail that had been limited to well-studied landscapes in lower latitudes, where most geomorphic laws have been formulated and tested…until now. I ask: are landscapes underlain by permafrost different enough from their temperate counterparts to warrant their own rules and models? If so, we’re going to have to rethink how we predict Arctic carbon fluxes.

October 28, 2022 – Joint Seminar with Dr. Robin McDowell, University of Washington, St. Louis, Dr. Priscilla McCutcheon, University of Kentucky and Dr. Brittany Meché, Williams College and Dr. Allison Guess, Williams College
3:00pm in Griffin Room 6

“The panel discussion, titled “Witnessing Lands, Witnessing Possession,” will include the four scholars listed.  The panelists will not offer prepared remarks, but will engage in conversation on a range of topics, including colonialism, militarism, food sovereignty, and environmental justice movements.”

November 18, 2022 – Dr. Alejandra Geiger-Ortiz, Colby College
4:00pm in Wachenheim Room 113

“Atoll Resiliency: Understanding the processes driving tropical island evolution with remote sensing, AI, and computer modeling”
Within our lifetime, climate change has the potential to drastically alter coastal resiliency. Atoll island nations are particularly vulnerable to climate change: from increasing ocean temperatures (causing coral die-off), to ocean acidification (decreasing coral resiliency), to increasing SLR. We must understand what will happen to the atoll islands because they are the inhabited portion of these systems. However, we lack a comprehensive understanding about the primary processes driving atoll island evolution under rising sea levels and varying wave climate. This uncertainty in predictions hinders local communities’ preparation for the future; we must understand how atoll islands respond and evolve with changing environmental forcings on a global scale. To predict the response of these islands to changing climate, we must understand the feedbacks between physical and ecological processes at different temporal and spatial scales. In addition, we must account for the actions and processes taken by humans driving landscape change on these islands. My lab has focused on investigating the feedbacks inherent in these landscapes using numerical modeling and remote sensing. Recent work using AI, a global atoll database of Landsat Imagery, and a case study of Glover’s Reef Atoll off the coast of Belize will be presented.

February 24, 2023 – Dr Sasha Wagner, RPI
4:00pm in Wachenheim Room TBD

March 3, 2023 – Dr. Elizabeth Ultee, Middlebury College
4:00pm in Wachenheim Room TBD

April 7, 2023 – Dr. Sarah Mazza, Smith College
4:00pm in Wacheheim Room TBD