Eugene Perry
Melissa Lenczewski
by Tom Parisi
Nearly 500 geoscientists will gather this week for the 42nd Annual Meeting of the North Central Section of the Geological Society of America, hosted this year by the NIU Department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences.
The April 2-3 meeting will take place at the NIU-Rockford Conference Center.
Conference presenters are primarily from a nine-state region and will include a substantial NIU contingent of four undergraduates, 27 graduate students and seven faculty members. Professors Gene Perry and Melissa Lenczewski are serving as the event’s lead organizers.
The keynote lecture, “Paleoclimate: Hadean to Holocene,” by John Valley of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, presents an example of what can be learned by applying a broad array of techniques and disciplinary approaches to the singularly important topic of climate.
The presentation will take place from 5 to 6 p.m. Thursday, April 2, in the conference center’s main auditorium. (An introduction to Valley’s talk, including photos, is online.)
Seven symposia will highlight cutting-edge scientific research on such topics as water use and availability in the Great Lakes Basin, carbon sequestration and modern techniques for addressing research questions in planetary geology.
In accordance with the Obama administration’s priority to increase science literacy, and in recognition of the need to prepare a new generation of geoscientists, several sessions at the meeting will focus on Earth science education.
Other themed technical sessions will feature presentations ranging from polar climate change and glacial deposits, to paleontology and sedimentary event histories in North American Phanerozoic Basins. In all, more than 300 presentations will be made by academic and industry scientists, undergraduates and graduate students.
On Saturday, April 4, geologic field trips will explore Chicago’s landscape, the lead-zinc mining district of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Silurian rocks in Northeastern Illinois.
Registration and more meeting information is available online.