Tags: Earth


Museum of Natural History adds to its collection

The Georgia Museum of Natural History is a unit of the Franklin College that links collections, research, public service, and education through programs designed for a diverse audience. Many Franklin faculty also serve as museum personnel and board members. Faculty, staff, and students from across campus have built significant collections in natural history through their research that, together, represent the most comprehensive in Georgia.…

three students in front of NASA sign
Summer NASA experience for Franklin students

This is an update on a story we reported back in January. The Franklin College is especially pleased that it is written by the newest member of our communications team, Jessica Luton. Be sure to watch the great videos for each research project.   To Infinity and Beyond From Observation to Application: Franklin students inform policy using NASA data By Jessica Luton When NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is mentioned…


NOAA supercomputers: 200 trillion calculations per second

As we enter the height of hurricane season, forcasters have a new model to improve their work. Newly upgraded supercomputers of NOAA’s National Weather Service are now more than twice as fast in processing sophisticated computer models to provide more accurate forecasts. The scientific data and insights that these newly upgraded supercomputers will provide are essential to help government officials, communities, and businesses better understand…


Robinson named UGA Foundation Professor

2012-13 has been a banner year for chemistry professor Gregory Robinson, and now a new professorship has been offically added to his list of recent accolades: Gregory H. Robinson, Franklin Professor and Distinguished Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia, has been appointed the UGA Foundation Distinguished Professor in Chemistry. The special appointment was approved by the Board of Regents at its May 2013 meeting and will…


Shepherd named Inaugural Athletic Assoc. Professor in the Social Sciences

It's easy to find news stories and analyses that feature the conflicts between athletics and academics on campus. Especially at big state universities where sports fuel a level of revenue and enthusiasm otherwise unknown on the quad, academics can be perceived as a second class pursuit even when they are our very reason to be. The UGA Athletic Association has taken steps over the years to re-enforce the teaching and research missions of the…


Georgia Museum of Natural History gets major addition of specimens

With large scale coordination of people, machines, the United Parcel Service and the Smithsonian Institute, the Georgia Museum of Naural History received a rather significant expansion to what was already one of the largest university-based collections in the country: As officials with United Parcel Service, which coordinated the move, looked on, they unloaded literally tons of bones and animal skins. Freeman and other museum workers talked most…


Shepherd on the 'Face the Nation'

With all the usual caveats about the difficulty for complex issues to break through the media preferences for fragmentation and drama, extreme weather and climate conditions are forcing their way into the national discussion. On the CBS Sunday morning show 'Face the Nation' this week, UGA's Marshall Shepherd was among the panelists. WFOR's Chief Meteorologist David Bernard, Climate Central's Chief Climatologist Heidi Cullen, TIME Magazine's…


Weather and climate experts

The devastating tornado that hit the Oklahoma City suburbs on Monday has rightly taken up a lot of media oxygen over the last few days. The attention means faculty members in geography John Knox and especially current president of the American Meteorological Society J. Marshall Shepherd have been on call, non-stop. A sampling for Shepherd alone, just in the past two days: Huffpost Live, XM Sirius B. Smith Show NPR Science Friday on Friday.…


CO2 levels hit new peak

The big news starting on Saturday grew out of reports that scientists measured an average concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide of 400 parts per million for the first time, which equals one very busy UGA geography professor: "Most experts that really study CO2 amounts estimate that we haven't seen that amount of CO2 in our atmosphere in about 3 million years," said J. Marshall Shepherd, climate change expert and professor at the University…

researcher with glider
UGA to launch robotic submersible, 'Salty Dawg'

Great news from the department of marine sciences: UGA physical oceanographer Renato Castelao and colleague Ruoying He of North Carolina State University will launch two autonomous underwater vehicles called gliders in fall 2013. UGA's Salty Dawg and NCSU's Salacia, named for the Roman goddess of salt water, will remotely collect data on the exchange of water between the coastal ocean off Georgia and the Gulf Stream. "The oceans are chronically…

star, sun illustration with telescope
'UGA-1785'

NASA and a Franklin alumnus have made a very magnanimous gesture toward the College and UGA: The University of Georgia and its Franklin College of Arts and Sciences received the honor after the Kepler mission, NASA's first mission capable of finding earth-size planets, confirmed in 2012 the existence of three new planets in the system known as Kepler-37. This year, NASA authorized the nickname designation of this planetary system as UGA-1785.…


Every week is Earth Week

But in April we schedule events designed to highlight the importance of sustainable living: From April 22-27, the UGA Office of Sustainability, Students for Environmental Action and other campus and community organizations will host events highlighting opportunities ranging from alternative transportation and local food to water resource preservation and career insights from industry leaders. UGA Earth Week is held in conjunction with Athens-…


Public archeology dig

On Saturday March 16, Jennifer Birch, assistant professor in the department of anthropology, and students from the Student Association for Archaeological Sciences hosted a public archaeology day for the Greater Atlanta Archaeological Society. The dig took place at the Raccoon Ridge site, north of Madison, GA. This location was the site of two prehistoric village occupations, one dating to the Late Woodland period ca. AD 900-1150 AD and the other…


Discovery may create path to fuel from CO2


Origin of Life

The Origins Lecture Series continues next week with the Origin of Life by series founder and chair of the division of biological sciences, Mark Farmer: The origin of life remains one of the great unsolved mysteries in all of science.  Late in life Charles Darwin speculated that life may have begun in “a warm little pond” but today we think it more likely that the earliest life forms emerged in the dark depths of the early Earth’s oceans.…


Shepherd on the future of weather satellites

Easy access to precise weather information, the beauty and accuracy of real-time satellite imagery in particular, almost seems commonplace at this point. But that doesn't mean the system providing that data is secure in today's world of tight budgets. In National Georgraphic news, professor J. Marshall Shepherd speaks to the strains on an aging system and explains the problems with replacing it: a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (…


Schaefer receives Chemical Pioneer Award

An outstanding honor will be presented to Henry "Fritz" Schaefer from the American Institute of Chemists: Schaefer, Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, will receive the Chemical Pioneer Award at the AIC's annual meeting in April. The award recognizes researchers whose work has had a major influence on advances in chemistry. Past recipients include Nobel laureates Linus Pauling and Glenn T. Seaborg,…


Shepherd at Senate Climate Hearing today

Professor and director of the UGA Atmospheric Sciences Program in the department of geography Marshall Shepherd will testify before a U.S. Senate Committee this morning. Per the AMS blog: The Senate Committee on Environment and Infrastructure, chaired by Senator Barbara Boxer, has already lined up a session on the “Latest Climate Science” for this morning, at 10 a.m. EST. The blue-ribbon panel of invited experts providing testimony includes AMS…

yager, with ocean background.
Focus on the Faculty: Patricia Yager


Refining your research

Along with a couple of dozen colleagues from campus, I was involved in a day-long workshop back in the fall on the subject of communicating research: how to accurately condense descriptions of research for public consumption. It's not inevitable that we always can, but we do try. And now, Columns reports that workshops to assist faculty on this subject will soon be repeated:  A team of UGA faculty and staff is beginning a new program to…

priomordial soup
Public discussions on science

If anyone was wondering whether there would be any interest in public lectures on big scientific questions, and relatedly, what a packed Chapel for such a discussion would look like, here you are: The Origins Lecture Series continues on Wednesday Feb. 27,  when Claiborne Glover will discuss the origins of biomolecules. Again, arriving early is a good idea. Image: Clumsy author photo and Photoshop job, but you get the idea.

earth origins
Origin of the Earth

The Origins Lecture Series continues on Wednesday, Feb. 6 at 7 p.m. in the Chapel with Ray Freeman-Lynde from the department of geography: In the early 19th Century, geologists, using simple principles to determine the relative ages of rocks, came to understand the great age of the earth and to establish a relative geologic time scale. Following the discovery of radioactivity at the end of the 19th Century, geochronologists developed techniques…

Tan and Mohnen in the lab
New Plant structure may improve biofuel processing

Great new work from Debra Mohnen and Li Tan in the BioEnergy Science Center: When Li Tan approached his colleagues at the University of Georgia with some unusual data he had collected, they initially seemed convinced that his experiment had become contaminated; what he was seeing simply didn’t make any sense. Tan was examining some of the sugars, proteins and polymers that make up plant cell walls, which provide the structural support and…


Shepherd and Yager challenge 'Zombie theories' on climate change

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides public-access data confirming “average temperature in the United States for 2012 was ... 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average, and 1.0 degree above 1998, the previous warmest year” in the United States. It is also well-documented that over the last several decades, we have experienced far more record-high temperatures than record-low temperatures. Up to the early…


NASA DEVELOP at UGA

Students and faculty in the department of geography have pioneered a terrific new collaboration with NASA set to begin this summer: University of Georgia's department of geography will partner with NASA through DEVELOP, a national student internship program created to enhance training and development in Earth science. The UGA collaboration is only the second housed strictly at a university in the U.S. Initial UGA projects include analyzing the…
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