August 2024: Hosting undergraduates in the Chipman Lab
Following up on our field season in Greenland, I hosted two outstanding young scientists in my lab for two weeks of core scanning and statistical analyses. Nina Botvin from Colorado School of Mines and Camilla Van der Waal from Texas A&M did a wonderful job analyzing our newly acquired lake sediment cores and working in the lab. Both students have submitted AGU abstracts based on their findings. I look forward to seeing them both in Washington DC this summer where they will present their research!
July 2024: Undergraduate REU in Greenland
This summer, I had the distinct pleasure of mentoring outstanding undergraduate students in field research in Greenland. Our team included eight undergraduate students and five mentors. We explored sites in western Greenland near Kangerlussuaq, Sisimiut, and Sarfanguit. Students learned geologic mapping, lake-sediment coring, water chemistry sampling, and acquisition of hyperspectral drone imagery while camping in some of the most beautiful areas of the Arctic. It was truly a privilege to work with such a talented and motivated group of young geoscientists! Below are some pictures of our trip.
May 2024: Lee Defends!
Lee Frank-Depue successfully defended his master’s research entitled “Fire reconstructions in the Far North: Late Holocene ecological responses to fire in northern Alaska”. Lee’s presentation to the department was fantastic, pulling together two years of laboratory works and analyses aimed at producing high-resolution fire reconstructions from sites on the Alaskan North Slope. Well done Lee!
April 2024: Publication in QSR
Big shoutout to graduate student Briana Edgerton for publishing her new paper entitled “Evaluating middle to late Holocene climate variability from δ18O of aquatic invertebrate remains in Southwestern Greenland” in Quaternary Science Reviews. Briana’s work at Arrowhead Lake (ARW) filled in the gap in our understanding of how temperature and precipitation changed along areas west of the Greenland Ice sheet following deglaciation. Great work Briana! The link to her paper is HERE.
January 2024: Hosting USure Undergraduates
OCC undergraduate students Nico Hayes and Taylor Westerlund joined the Chipman Lab for a 2-week research experience as part of the uSure undergraduate research program. We worked on the Alaskan cores from this past summer, and had a blast examining and interpreting core stratigraphy. The students presented research posters at the USure Symposium at OCC [Link]. They did a fantastic job!
November 2023: Welcoming Indigenous Scholars to SU
I was honored to co-host the Ray Smith Symposium in the Humanities with Professor Chie Sakakibara in Maxwell. The theme of this 2-day symposium was Indigenous Resilience, Climate Change, and the Environmental Humanities. This event was open to the public and included undergraduate students from the Integrated Learning Program in Environment, Science and Policy. Together we learned about Indigenous approaches to and perspectives on climate and environmental change. We invited Indigenous scholars from the Onondaga, Oneida, Cherokee, Mechoopda, Inupiaq, and Alutiq/Supiaq Tribes and Nations to speak at this event, and organized a panel discussion, SU undergraduate poster session, museum visit, Haudenosaunee dance performances, and traditional Haudenosaunee food.
July 2023: Field Season in Noatak, Alaska
We just returned from a fantastic field season in the Noatak River Watershed of Alaska. Once again, Dr. Mark Lara and graduate student Emma Hall from the University of Illinois joined me in the field to core some lakes, sample some soils, and examine linkages between climate, permafrost, and vegetation structure. We were also joined by Dr. Christian Andersen from the University of Wisconsin Madison, who collected data regarding methane can carbon dioxide fluxes from thaw slump features. It was an exciting field season with plenty of beautiful sites to explore and, of course, lots of resultant mud filling our coldroom! Here are some field photos of our grand adventure.
May 2023: Outreach at Clark Reservation
This was the second year of the Chipman Lab hosting an outreach event for 6th grade students from Pinegrove Middle School. Along with the indomitable Sue Sobon and several SU and ESF graduate students, we worked together to create a 3-day event that hosted 200+ students and their teachers. Our science stations included fossil, tree, and insect identification as well as explored how scientists reconstruct past environments. What a wonderful outing!
August 2022: Welcoming some new faces!
The Chipman Lab group welcomes two new members: Ilexxis Morales and Lee Depue. Ilexxis is joining us after completing her M.S. at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she worked on reconstructing past storm surge events using paleotempestological methods. She will be applying her excellent training in lead-210 dating and other techniques to tackle a whole new set of questions in the Arctic. Working on lake sediments cores from the Alaskan North Slope, Lexxi will investigate the timing, frequency, and impacts of past permafrost disturbances, as well as linkages to climate change. Lee Depue joins us from William and Mary, where he completed an undergraduate research project examining paleofire records from eastern Virginia that resulted in a publication that just came out this month (check it out here). Lee will use his experience in examining macroscopic charcoal particles to create new fire history reconstructions from the Alaskan tundra and examine the linkages between fire and nutrient cycling in the boreal forest. We are so excited to welcome you both to the lab, and look forward to doing some amazing research in the coming years! 🙂
May 2022: Outreach at Three Falls Preserve
The Chipman Lab and several graduate students from SU and ESF coordinated and hosted a 3-day science field trip for 6th grade students from Pine Grove Middle School. Partnering with teacher-extraordinaire Sue Sobon, we developed five unique field-based activities for ~220 students in Three Falls Preserve in Manlius. Students learned about grain-size and chemical weathering, fossils, insect identification and ecology, reconstructing past vegetation from pollen records, and observing nature as scientists. This was a wonderful event that got students outside to perform hands-on activities with science experts.
This event would not have been possible without the hard work of several graduate students: Jesse Czekanski Moir (ESF), Valeria Perez (SU Biology), Tyler Logie (SU-ESS), Heather Gunn (SU-ESS), Madison Woodley (SU-ESS), Julia Zeh (SU-Biology), Peter Brannon (SU-ESS), Jessica Garrison (SU-ESS), Claire Rubbelke (SU-ESS), and Briana Edgerton (SU-ESS). Thank you all so much for helping to brainstorm such engaging activities and for keeping such positive attitudes in the bugs, rain, and mud.
Also many thanks to Sue Sobon for coordinating this terrific event, the other fantastic teachers who participated, and of course, the awesome 6th-graders from Pine Grove! 🙂
April – May 2022: EES Awards Ceremony and CYNESS
A shout out to Briana Edgerton for winning the Daniel F. Merriam Endowed Scholarship. Briana received her award at the EES graduate ceremony in Heroy. This award recognizes Briana’s many contributions to the department over this past year, including her work in coordinating the annual Central New York Earth Sciences Student Symposium in April. Congrats Briana on this much-deserved recognition!
Also a shout-out to graduate student Jessica Garrison for her presentation at CYNESS, entitled Geochemical and sedimentological characterization of retrogressive thaw slump deposits in lake sediment archives from northern Alaska. Jessica gave a great talk about her M.S. research. Well done!
April 2022: Briana passed her quals!
Shout out to graduate student Briana Edgerton for successfully passing her qualifying exam! 🙂 Briana has made excellent progress on her PhD dissertation so far, and it is great that she has passed this important milestone. Well done Briana!
Her proposal is entitled: Holocene Reconstructions from Greenland and Alaska: Spatiotemporal Variability and Drivers.
Thanks also to her committee members Chris Scholz, Tripti Bhattacharya, Chris Junium, and Yarrow Axford (Northwestern University).
January 2022: Welcoming LSAMP students to the lab
This month, the Chipman lab hosted two students from Onondaga Community College as part of the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program, coordinated my Melissa Hicks at OCC. Undergraduate students Jadrien Jones and Keirstin Lorraine learned how to process sediment cores by splitting, describing, and subsampling sediments. They worked on brand new cores from Alaska, and were a tremendous help in getting these samples processed. Thanks so much Jadrien and Kierstin for all of your hard work!
December 2021: AGU presentations in New Orleans
Graduate Student Briana Edgerton presented a fantastic talk at AGU this month, highlighting her research in Greenland. All slides from her talk are available here.
Slide from Briana’s AGU talk
Well done Briana!
August 2021: Eric Deutsch’s Master’s Defense
Eric Deutsch successfully defended his Master’s project on August 24th – Observations of post-wildfire landcover trends in boreal Alaska using a suite of remote sensing approaches. His presentation and thesis were excellent and received high praise from his committee members. It was truly a pleasure to mentor Eric over the past two years, and I am sure he will be successful in whatever lies ahead.
If you are interested in Eric’s research, I will post a link to his thesis here as soon as it is available online!
Slide from Eric’s defense presentation
Congratulations Eric! 🙂
July 2021: Alaskan Field season
Our field season to the Alaskan North Slope was a success! Graduate student Briana Edgerton and I teamed up the Dr. Mark Lara and graduate student Emma Hall from the University of Illinois to collect lake sediment cores, drone imagery, vegetation surveys, and soil samples from five sites near Toolik Field Station. After a month in the field, we are happy to be back at SU! Now the real work begins!
Check out some field photos below.
February 2021: Bugs, Mud, and Draining Lakes
February has been a month of snow, snow, and more snow. But it is no reason to be down, since there is always good science to talk about. I presented my research virtually for the TACNY Junior Cafe Scientifique, and had a wonderful time interacting with folks from the Syracuse community! Thanks to Sue Sobon and Howie Hollander for organizing the event, and to the curious students that attended to hear all about mud and bugs! 🙂 LINK
Also, we had a new paper published this month in a special issue of Remote Sensing. Dr. Mark Lara and I used remote sensing data to characterize northern Alaska lake morphologies and vulnerability to drainage. Be sure to check it out! LINK
December 2020: On fire at AGU
M.S. Candidate Eric Deutsch presented his research at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting this month. Great job Eric! LINK
I also gave a virtual poster presentation, which you can view here. LINK
August 2020: Welcome new students!
After a summer full of unforeseen hurtles and new challenges, I am happy to welcome Jessica Garrison and Zachary LePage to my lab group. Jessica got a B.S. in Geology from Western Kentucky University and will be working towards and M.S. degree, with a project focused on constraining geochemical signals of past permafrost thaw from Alaskan lake sediments. Zack got a B.S. in Ecology and Environmental Science at the University of Maine, and will work towards his Ph.D. with a project seeking to understand interacting fire and thermoerisonal disturbance on millennial timescales in Alaskan and Greenland tundra ecosystems.
Welcome to SU Zach and Jessica!
March 2020: Visit from Dr. Estella Atekwana
Our Nelson seminar speaker on March 5th was Dr. Estella Atekwana, Dean of the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment at the University of Delaware. It was a very great pleasure to host Dr. Atekwana, who generously gave her time to come and meet with faculty and students in the Earth Sciences Department. She not only taught us all about biogephysics in the Nelson Seminar [LINK], but also presented her work on tectonics and rifting to students and faculty in a special lecture for the SESSion. Thank you Estella for sharing your amazing science with us!
Dr. Atekwana with EAR WiSE students and post-docs.
January 2020: Paper published in TREE and Syracuse events
Check out our new Forum paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, where Joe Napier, Guillaume de LaFontaine, and I discuss how new paleoecological technologies coupled with ancient DNA may be able to teach us about plant adaptation over the Quaternary. LINK
This month kicked off with an excellent discussion at the Museum of Science and Technology in Syracuse. Thanks so much to the organizers and everyone who attended thee Cafe Jr. Scientifique this month, especially to all those who asked such great questions! Briana Edgerton and I enjoyed discussing research and showing some of our sediment cores and samples to attendees, and we hope you enjoyed the presentation.
Also, a big thank you to Sue Sobon and the entire 6th grade class at Pine Grove Middle School for inviting me to talk about fire and permafrost thaw. What a fantastic group of young minds!
December 2019: American Geophysical Union Meeting
This week (Dec 9-13) was AGU in San Fransisco. I presented a poster in a fantastic session — A Warming Arctic: What Records of the Past Tell Us About the Future — organized By Jamie McFarlin (Northwestern U), Greogry de Wet (UC Boulder), and William Longo (Woodshole). Enjoyed insightful (and non-stop—whew) discussions about my research into Holocene climate in South Greenland.
The best part? I was one of three female professors standing side-by-side at our posters presenting brand-new Arctic research (shout out to Yarrow Axford, Northwestern and Elizabeth Thomas, Buffalo). It was by far the best AGU I ever attended—-it was also the AGU centennial, so maybe every 100 years the magic just happens? We need more data…
It was inspiring to be in such great company and to discuss my work with so many passionate Arctic scientists. Have a look at my poster if you are interested!
This month started off with a fantastic visit to the University of Maine at the end of October to give two invited talks. For the first, I presented new research to the faculty and students in the Climate Change Institute about Holocene climate change in South Greenland. For the second, I spoke at the School of Biology and Ecology about my research examining Alaskan disturbance regimes on millennial timescales.
Thanks to Jacquelyn Gill for extending the invitation to visit and share my research (as well as for organizing so many fantastic meetings with the folks in both departments). What a visit! Lots of amazing scientists studying the Arctic and beyond in both groups. Great meetings and great discussions!
October 2019: Visiting students from Winsor School, Boston MA
Dr. Linda Ivany organized a visit with high school students from Winsor School this month. Linda took them on a fossil-collecting trip and the students processed samples on the SEM. Dr. Christa Kelleher talked with them about urban water and they all built drones together (the room was literally a-buzz with activity!). I introduced them to remote fieldwork methods and we discussed environmental change in the Arctic. We also processed some lake sediments and picked macrofossils under the microscope (see pics below). I think we may have some paleoecologists in the making! Thanks so much to these fantastic students and their excellent teachers (Mr. Schopf and Ms. Uhre-Balk).
September 2019: Lab Renovations complete!
I am happy to announce that the lab renovations are complete, and the space is ready to go! Now to fill with science-making tools and curious students! 🙂
August 2019: New students have a arrived, paper published in Biology Letters
Briana Edgerton and Eric Deutsch (see Lab Group) arrived on campus this month and have already started diving into their respective projects! Here’s hoping for a productive semester from the lab group. Also, check out my new publication in Biology Letters, which examines the response/resilience of lake biogeochemistry to boreal burning during the Holocene.
July 2019: Funding for a new project to study fires and permafrost thaw in the Arctic
It’s been an exciting week for my lab group! I just found out that the NSF Environmental Engineering program will be funding my new project! This is a collaborative 3-year research project with Dr. Mark Lara at the University of Illinois. Our project is titled “Navigating Disturbance Regimes In The New Arctic”. More info on this exciting new project, and potential student opportunities, will be updated on my research page.
June 2019: Welcome to the MUSCLE Lab
The Geotek MSCL is now up and running. We have fondly named Heroy 012 the MUSCLE Lab (MUlti-Sensor Core Logging Enterprise). We are starting to collect data on cores from the Scholz Lab Group, with Jacqueline Corbett leading the charge to get samples processed. So much lovely data to ponder. So many lakes left to core…
May 2019: Some large boxes have arrived!
Our new Geotek multi sensor core logger has arrived at last! Now to find some tools to open these boxes…
March 2019: The MSCL is a go!
Great news! Our NSF EAR/IF proposal “Acquisition of a Multi-Sensor Core Logger for Syracuse University” was funded. This is a collaborative proposal with Co-PI’s Tripti Bhattacharya, Chris Scholz, Chris Junium, and Zunli Lu. This grant will allow us to set up a new core scanning lab in the Department of Earth Sciences. The MSCL includes several sensors for non-destructive core analyses, including a digital line-scan camera, magnetic susceptibility meter, visible spectrometer, p-wave sound velocity sensor, gamma density system, and an integrated hand-held XRF for elemental composition. This is an exciting set-up for our recently expanded Ancient Climate Group at SU. Well done everyone!
January 2019: The adventure begins!
I arrived this month in Syracuse to begin my new position as Assistant Professor in Earth Sciences at SU. Syracuse is lovely in the winter, and everyone in the department has been very welcoming. Now to get my new paleoecology lab set up and ready for students…and hopefully get some new projects off the ground. Fingers crossed for a great year!
Following up on our field season in Greenland, I hosted two outstanding young scientists in my lab for two weeks of core scanning and statistical analyses. Nina Botvin from Colorado School of Mines and Camilla Van der Waal from Texas A&M did a wonderful job analyzing our newly acquired lake sediment cores and working in the lab. Both students have submitted AGU abstracts based on their findings. I look forward to seeing them both in Washington DC this summer where they will present their research!
Lee Frank-Depue successfully defended his master’s research entitled “Fire reconstructions in the Far North: Late Holocene ecological responses to fire in northern Alaska”. Lee’s presentation to the department was fantastic, pulling together two years of laboratory works and analyses aimed at producing high-resolution fire reconstructions from sites on the Alaskan North Slope. Well done Lee!
Big shoutout to graduate student Briana Edgerton for publishing her new paper entitled “Evaluating middle to late Holocene climate variability from δ18O of aquatic invertebrate remains in Southwestern Greenland” in Quaternary Science Reviews. Briana’s work at Arrowhead Lake (ARW) filled in the gap in our understanding of how temperature and precipitation changed along areas west of the Greenland Ice sheet following deglaciation. Great work Briana! The link to her paper is HERE.
OCC undergraduate students Nico Hayes and Taylor Westerlund joined the Chipman Lab for a 2-week research experience as part of the uSure undergraduate research program. We worked on the Alaskan cores from this past summer, and had a blast examining and interpreting core stratigraphy. The students presented research posters at the USure Symposium at OCC [Link]. They did a fantastic job!
