Department of Geography (DoG) News and Events Where it's at!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Satellite imagery of the Amery Ice Shelf in East Antarctica. The blue lines represent the movement of the ice as it flows from the continent to the edge of the ice shelf, where it calves, or breaks off into the ocean. Satellite data can now help researchers determine where these calving events will occur. Image: Shujie Wang

GOOD NEWS

The Palmer Museum of Art is holding a virtual exhibition of created works from graduate and undergraduate students of all fields. Submission deadline is March 15 via http://tinyurl.com/546e9xrb

Summer Internship opportunities with National Geographic Society. Application deadline is March 19.

Tuesday, March 30, 2:30 – 4 p.m. EDT, The Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units (CESU) Program at Penn State will hold a workshop. Researchers interested in applying their expertise in the biological, physical, social, cultural and engineering disciplines to address natural and cultural resource management issues can learn about partnering opportunities with federal agencies at lower overhead rates. For more information contact Erica Smithwick (eus17@psu.edu) or Lara Fowler (lbf10@psu.edu). To register for the workshop, which will be held via Zoom, visit https://bit.ly/CESU-2021.

Thursday, April 1, 7 p.m., EDT, Robert Bullard will present the virtual keynote talk at Penn State’s 2021 Colloquium on the Environment, “The Quest for Environmental and Climate Justice in the U.S.” Use this link to register.

Brandi Gaertner and Marcela Suárez have both enthusiastically agreed to join the department as new Assistant Teaching Professors in geography’s Online Geospatial Education (OGE) programs. Their appointments begin July 1, 2021.

Alumnus Sid Pandey was recently selected by Geospatial Media as one of their 50 Rising Stars in Geospatial for 2021. 

Jamie Peeler was named a NatureNet Science Fellow with The Nature Conservancy. She will develop spatial action maps for mitigating carbon loss to fire during a postdoc with The Nature Conservancy and University of Montana.

COFFEE HOUR

No Coffee Hour this week, but there are three more talks scheduled for the semester.

• March 19 Tatiana Gumucio, “Assessing triggers of weather-induced disasters to inform weather risk management design in Somalia”
• April 9 The Miller Lecture with Larry Smith (special time 11:30 a.m.)
• April 23 Undergraduate Research Opportunities Connection (UROC) Showcase

If you missed any talks, you can view the recordings at our Coffee Hour channel.

NEWS

NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite reveals shape, depth of Antarctic ice shelf fractures

When a block of ice the size of Houston, Texas, broke off from East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf in 2019, scientists had anticipated the calving event, but not exactly where it would happen. Now, satellite data can help scientists measure the depth and shape of ice shelf fractures to better predict when and where calving events will occur, according to researchers.

Ice shelves make up nearly 75% of Antarctica’s coastline and buttress — or hold back — the larger glaciers on land, said Shujie Wang, assistant professor of geography at Penn State. If the ice shelves were to collapse and Antarctica’s glaciers fell or melted into the ocean, sea levels would rise by up to 200 feet.

Published in Remote Sensing of Environment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2021 at 10:52 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.