Congrats to our graduating seniors! We will miss lab members Dan Johnson, Beth Hoagland, Chris Thom, and Emily Wills.

Congrats to Dan Johnson & Beth Hoagland, who were both just awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships to attend graduate school. In the fall, Dan will be heading to Caltech and Beth will be going to Penn State. Both pictured below, enjoying their spring break in the Apennines.

Congrats!

New graduate students Jocelyn Richardson & Roger Bryant, both from St. Andrews, UK, will be joining us in Fall 2014. Looking forward to having them in lab!

Fike granted tenure!

Fike and Dr. Catherine Rose attended the ICDP-sponsored workshop on Drilling the Neoproterozoic, held at the British Geological Society in Keyworth. A lively discussion of Neoproterozoic strata, leading to possible plans to set up drilling programs in China, Brazil, and the White Sea in the coming years.

Safely returned from the Osservatorio Geologico di Coldigioco for a spring break trip to the Apennines, as part of our class (EPSc 400: Geology of Italy) with Dr. Catherine Rose and Prof. Phil Skemer.

Our new 7f/geo met its installation specs without a hitch and we are off and running. Looking ahead, we are planning to examine spatial variability in isotopic proxies on spatial scales from microns to centimeters, using that data to reinterpret many of our bulk-rock based records of biogeochemical cycling throughout Earth history.

Postdoc Catherine Rose and Grad student Tor O’Brien just returned to the frigid cold from 3 weeks of field work in the balmy environments around San Juan, Argentina, examining a series of Ordovician-aged carbonate strata to understand the impact of depositional environment on geochemical proxies, including carbon and sulfur isotopes.

Our new SIMS instrument, a Cameca 7f/geo, arrived on campus on December 4, 2013. After a slightly rocky start, we got it offloaded and transferred to its new home in the basement of Rudolph Hall (Rm 74).

We are looking forward to exploring all the new research avenues this instrument will open up. Click here to see a video of the installation.

Prof. Fike and Research Scientist Clive Jones travelled to the Cameca factory in Paris last week to perform the factory acceptance tests for the new ins 7f/geo SIMS instrument. The instrument passed with flying colors and we are very excited to have it come to campus. Target installation date is mid November!