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The flooding caused by Hurricane Ida across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions provides a glimpse at the disasters threatening coastal communities as the climate warms. These disasters often disproportionately affect communities of color and other historically underserved neighborhoods. A $19.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Coastlines and People Program (CoPe) will help to bring researchers and stakeholders together to equitably support coastal communities to better manage coastal climate risks.

Bradford Foley and Kimberly Lau, both assistant geosciences professors in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, are part of the eight multidisciplinary teams of researchers selected to receive funding in the inaugural year of "Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe," a new research initiative designed to bring the world closer to answering basic questions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

Investigation of subsurface environments and subsurface processes is becoming more and more important in our understanding of planetary evolution, habitability and the search for life. Barbara Sherwood Lollar, University Professor in Earth Sciences and Dr. Norman Keevil Chair in Ore Deposits Geology at the University of Toronto, will discuss her research on this topic in the talk, "Imaging Habitable Worlds – Lessons from the Deep Biosphere and Hydrogeosphere."

By Davitia James, Temblor Earthquake News Extern (@davitiaa)

Citation: James, D., 2021, Fluids and tiny minerals play a big role in subduction zones, Temblor, http://doi.org/10.32858/temblor.213

The Earth’s surface is constantly moving as tectonic plates slide past, rip away from, and bump into each other. All this commotion commonly creates earthquakes at plate boundaries, but these seismic events are not evenly spaced, geographically speaking. Why do earthquakes happen more often along some parts of a plate boundary? And why do some places seem to escape large seismic events?

Melissa Lee will give the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ 2021 Lattman Visiting Scholar of Science and Society Lecture. Her talk, “Training the Next Generation Workforce for a Sustainable Future,” will be held at 5 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 18, in 26 Hosler Building on the University Park campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Traffic levels in North America plummeted in March 2020 as governments implemented stay-at-home measures to prevent the transmission of COVID-19. A two-year, $400,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office will allow a Penn State-led research team to measure the rapid changes in greenhouse gas emissions that resulted from lower traffic levels and efforts to curb transmission of the virus.

Previous fires may hold the key to predicting and reducing the severity of future wildfires in the western United States as fire activity continues to increase, according to researchers from Penn State and the U.S. Forest Service.

Andrew Smye, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State, will use a $640,000 Faculty Early Career Development Program grant from the National Science Foundation to shed light on a geological mystery while advancing educational opportunities for underrepresented students.

Kimberly Lau, assistant professor of geosciences and an associate in Penn State’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, received the Pre-tenure Excellence Award from the Geobiology and Geomicrobiology Division of the Geological Society of America. The award recognizes Lau’s accomplishments in the fields of research, mentoring, service and leadership in the geobiology and geomicrobiology community.

Fires in semi-arid forests in the western United States tended to burn periodically and at low severity until the policy of fire suppression put an end to these low-intensity events and created the conditions for the destructive fires seen today. Understanding the benefits of these periodic fires and the forest structure that they maintained may help land managers and communities avert megafires in the future, according to researchers.