Stories Archive

Slippery Ice

The National Science Foundation has highlighted the work of UM Geosciences professor Joel Harper and his team of students and postdocs in their media gallery. In collaboration with the University of Wyoming, the team has discovered that the Greenland ice sheet slides more rapidly and...

Undergrad Max Hannah Spends Five Weeks on Greenland Ice Sheet Project

Max Hannah, a junior from Bellingham, Washington who is majoring in Geosciences, spent five weeks this summer participating in a field research project on the Greenland Ice Sheet. In these photos, Max melts snow to make water for a drill used to make boreholes into the ice sheet. His home for...

Afghanistan’s Blob Hunters: UM Researchers Find Blob of Continental Lithosphere

In 2015, Bendick, using a small amount of the prize money Molnar got when he won the Crafoord Prize, sent her then master’s student, field geologist Dylan Schmeelk, to Afghanistan to train Kakar and his team on how to set up field GPS stations. Bendick and Molnar, as part of their mission to...

Dr. Rebecca Bendick wins UM Distinguished Scholar Award

Dr. Rebecca Bendick, Professor of Tectonics in the Department of Geosciences, was awarded the 2019 Distinguished Scholar Award. Dr. Bendick leads UM BRIDGE's Numeracy Workshop.
The Distinguished Scholar Award recognizes faculty who have made outstanding contributions in the areas of research,...

Geosciences Commencement 2019

BBQ/Reception
Saturday May 4th, 12:00-1:30pm
CHCB lawn
Food will be provided. Please bring family.

Noah Clayton selected as Geosciences Outstanding Senior

The Department of Geosciences has selected Noah Clayton for the 2019 President’s Outstanding Senior Award, an honor conferred each year to exemplary graduating seniors across campus for their academic accomplishments. Noah was born in rural North Carolina and will be a first-generation college...

Nate La Fontaine wins poster award at AAPG 2018

Nathan La Fontaine (MS 2018) was awarded a top 10 poster presentation at the 2018 American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Convention. His poster was titled "Facies Architecture and Controls on Reservoir Behavior in the Turonian Wall Creek Member of the Frontier Formation in the...

MS Student Robin Welling's Research Featured in MWC Newsletter

Follow link to read Robin Welling's interview with the Montana Water Center (MWC)

Geosciences Alum Co-Author on paper in Geology

Tim Willey is a recent graduate of the International Field Geosciences program. As part of his studies he worked with researchers at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam. His work as an intern has been credited in a Geology article published late last year.
GeoScienceWorld:...

UM Scientist’s take reporter to Greenland ice sheet

Professor Joel Harper and students Rosie Leone, Aidan Stansberry and Ian MacDowell were joined by a reporter from PRI on a recent trip to the Greenland ice sheet. Their experience is documented in the linked article and podcast.

A Parent's Letter to President Bodnar

Hello President Bodnar,
My name is Tonya Robinson, and I briefly met you last year at the (UM Conference on Undergraduate Research) award ceremony. My daughter, Autumn Robinson, received an award for her poster presentation. The reason I am writing you is to acknowledge the incredible...

Sara Stotter Wins First Place in the Best Student Geologic Map Competition

Sara Stotter, a graduate student in the Department of Geosciences brought home one of the top honors presented during the Geological Society of America's annual meeting Nov. 4-7 in Indianapolis. Sara won first place in the Best Student Geologic Map Competition. As the top winner, she received a...

Robin Welling Receives Award at 2018 Montana Conference

Robin Welling was awarded first place Student Presentation at 2018 Montana American Water Resources Association (AWRA) conference. Robin Welling highlighted key findings from research she is conducting with advisor Andrew Wilcox as part of a NSF-supported project exploring the morphologic and...

Graduate Student Update from Laura Stevens: Are stromatolites always good biosignatures?

Biosignatures are anything left in the geologic record that could have only formed because life was present, and stromatolites---these dome-shaped, layered rock structures---are thought to form only in the presence of life. Graduate student Laura Stevens is working to build a computer model to...

Declining summer precipitation enhances heating and exacerbates wildfires, UM study says

Longer periods of hot and dry weather, less summer precipitation and warmer temperatures are not only leading to more intense fire seasons but also stress on agricultural systems. The hottest part of the summer is when crops need the most water, this means that rainfed crops are not getting the...

Luke Fisher spends summer interning with The Nature Conservancy in Colombia

With the support of UM BRIDGES, Geosciences Graduate Student Luke Fisher spends the summer working with The Nature Conservancy in Bogota, Colombia helping to integrate Geomorphic models into a decision support system framework for hydrologic issues in the Magdalena River Basin.

UM Geoscience Grads Succeed in a Changing Field

Majors in UM’s Department of Geosciences receive basic and applied science training relevant to a broad range of careers, and they are highly sought after by employers. This article in the Montanan describes some of the unique professional experiences and employment opportunities for Geosciences...

Luke Fisher, UM Bridges Trainee, Earns Toelle-Bekken Award

From Luke Fisher, UM BRIDGES Trainee:
Analyzing the concentration of the cosmogenic nuclide, 10Be, in river sediments is a tool frequently used by geomorphologists to quantify basin wide erosion rates over thousand-year timescales. This is a technique that has not been widely applied to large...

Isabellah von Trapp Receives Outstanding Student Presentation Award

University of Montana graduate student Isabellah von Trapp recently received an Outstanding Student Presentation Award at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

NASA EPSCoR grant

Researchers in the Geosciences Department at the University of Montana received a $750,000 NASA EPSCoR grant to develop and apply remote sensing technologies and in order to provide insight into the resiliency of Montana’s agricultural system to drought, and to understand the impact of...

New Core Option

New Lower Division Core Option in Geosciences
We are happy to announce that undergraduate students now have two ways to complete the lower division core for the Geosciences B.S. Degree or Minor.
LOWER DIVISION CORE
OPTION 1
GEO 101N - Introduction to Physical Geology
Credits: 3. Offered autumn and...

Greenland Grant

A new $1.54 million grant from the National Science Foundation will fund University of Montana geoscientists as they study the deep layer of compacted snow covering most of Greenland’s ice sheet.  
Lead investigator Joel Harper and co-investigator Toby Meierbachtol, both from UM’s Department of...

Africa GPS Network

Graduate student Ellen Knappe spent January-March 2017 in Ethiopia and Kenya.  During her scientific expedition, she collected GPS data recording the tectonic deformation of the African Rift and Ethiopian Highlands.  She also oversaw the transfer of a geophysical geodesy instrument network from...

Griz Alumni

Two new faculty members in UM’s Department of Geosciences, Payton Gardner and Hilary Martens, started their career on campus as undergraduates. Both earned Ph.D. degrees at other universities...

IBA

This spring, the University of Montana Geosciences Department fielded a team of four to compete in AAPG’s annual Imperial Barrel Award Competition.  The eight-week program tested the geological backgrounds of Isabellah von Trapp, Sara Stotter, Megan Mave, and Nathan La Fontaine, in their efforts...

Coral research

Corals are particularly hard-hit by subtle changes in ocean temperature and acidity. About 200 million years ago at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, corals and reefs completely collapsed. During this particular extinction event, researchers have found no evidence of asteroid impact or other...

Drought Impact

More frequent and intense drought can have a devastating impact on forests, rendering them vulnerable to fire and disease. Caelan Simeone, a graduate student in the Geosciences Department from Bozeman, Montana, is using computer models to help scientists understand the complex relationship...

Geo-Radar

Graduate student Ben Hills, who is from Helena, Montana, operates a geo-radar system on the Greenland ice sheet. The radar system reveals the structure of the ice below the surface. Ben is searching for small crevasses that are a few meters deep, but do not intersect the surface. The crevasses...

Chemistry of Hot Springs class

In September, Nancy Hinman took her Chemistry of Hot Springs class to Yellowstone National Park. Dr. Hinman’s field of research primarily focuses on low temperature geochemistry as well as biotic and abiotic chemical processes, primarily in hydrothermal systems. She has conducted years of...

World-renowned Mesoproterozoic Belt Basin

The UM Geosciences program has continued important work in the world-renowned Mesoproterozoic Belt Basin of the Northern Rockies, with the upcoming publication of Special Paper 522 of the Geological Society of America. The book, "Belt Basin: Window to Mesoproterozoic Earth", edited by UM alum...

Dr. Payton Gardner and a team from Sandia National Laboratories received prestigious R&D100 awards for 2016 for an experiment conducted at Sandia on a water free electro-fracturing test system. Hydraulic fracturing requires millions of barrels of water for each fracking job, and a water free...

Dam Removal

Missoula and the Clark Fork River were home to one of the most significant dam removals that have occurred, when Milltown Dam was removed in 2008. But this only one of over 1200 dam removals that have occurred in the United States. Andrew Wilcox and his students have intensively studied both the...

Rocky Mountain GSA

UM Geosciences was well-represented at the recent Rocky Mountain GSA meeting in Moscow, ID. Professor Julie Baldwin led a field trip to the basement rocks in the Clearwater complex with colleagues Reed Lewis (Idaho Geological Survey) and Jeff Vervoort (Washington State University) to talk about...

Missoula Ready

Carson McPherson-Krutsky (M.S., defending May 2016) and Rebecca Bendick have teamed up to create an online natural hazard information tool for the Missoula area. It provides the most up-to-date information location-by-location (either map click, smartphone location, or address) about the most...