Department News

Jökulhlaup is Icelandic for a glacial outburst flood. Join the in the fun as the Geology Department bursts out and floods into the Webers Rock Garden for a BBQ!  Food, fun, hammer throws, and more!

Guest Speaker: Nick Swanson-Hysell, Associate Professor, Dept of Environmental Sciences and Associate Director, Institute for Rock Magnetism at the University of Minnesota.

Nick’s presentation will explore recent advances in reconstructing Earth’s cooling climate during the Ordovician period when the rocks under Macalester College were deposited. He will then broaden the scope to discuss his research group’s efforts to understand the links between changing paleogeography and climate from the Cryogenian Snowball Earth, 717 million years ago, to the onset of Northern Hemisphere glaciation 2.5 million years ago.

Friday, April 12, 4:00-7:00 p.m.

Olin-Rice Science Center 100

Come support your 2024 graduating seniors as they present their research.

Stay as long as you can. Schedule is posted in the department so you know who is presenting when.  

Congratulations, seniors!

Speaker:  Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater

Claire Wahmanholm will read from her latest collection, Meltwater (Milkweed Editions, 2023) and discuss what poetry can offer us during the age of climate collapse, ecocide, species loss, and extractive capitalism. The talk will end with a Q&A and selection of writing prompts.

Claire received her BA from UW-Madison, her MFA from the Johns Hopkins University, and her PhD from the University of Utah. Her debut full-length collection, Wilder (Milkweed Editions), won the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award. Her second collection, Redmouth, was published with Tinderbox Editions in 2019. Her third collection, Meltwater (Milkweed Editions 2023) is a finalist for the 2024 Minnesota Book Awards and the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She was a 2020-2021 McKnight Writing Fellow, and her poem, “Glacier,” won the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Her work has most recently appeared in Sierra, The Hopkins Review, The Anarchist Review of Books, TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, and Blackbird, and has been featured by the Academy of American Poets.

Refreshments provided.

This event is co-sponsored by the Environmental Studies, English and Geology Departments.

Jansen Smith, Mac ‘12, Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Minnesota, Duluth, will speak on "Putting the dead to work: Conservation Paleobiology from Local to Global Scale."

Claire Zurkowski, Mineralogical Society of America Distinguished Lecturer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will speak on "Mysteries beyond our solar system: characterizing the mineralogical building blocks of multi-Earth mass exoplanets."

Benoit Welsch, Macalester Visiting Scholar, will speak about Olivine.

"Olivine is a ubiquitous rock-forming mineral that can record a wide variety of dynamic processes during its lifetime. However, the details of its crystallization from a silicate melt are complex, specifically regarding crystal habits and growth kinetics.

"Olivine can develop a wide variety of crystal shapes depending on its crystallization environment, at growth rates spanning 10 orders of magnitude, from 10-16 m/s to 10-6 m/s and more. In this talk, I will present results of dynamic crystallization experiments using a heating stage microscope to investigate in situ the early stages of olivine crystal growth inside a plagioclase-hosted melt inclusion. I will also touch upon how large discrepancies between datasets can arise from a variety of methodological inconsistencies, limitations, and outright errors, as well as broad uncertainties regarding the timing and manner of crystal growth."