News Archive

7/26/21: Courtney Shafer, who will join the UB Department of Geology this fall as a PhD student, has been awarded a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Computational Science Graduate Fellowship.

6/22/2021: Thousands of years ago, at different points in time, clouds of ash, rock and hot gas rushed across the Mojave and Sonoran deserts as two volcanoes erupted. These destructive events are long over. But their history is written in the lonely landscapes they ravaged. Volcanic dunes and other deposits hold debris from the ancient eruptions, as do craters marking the sites of the blasts — Ubehebe in Death Valley in the Mojave Desert in the U.S., and El Elegante in the Gran Desierto de Altar in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico.

5/13/2021: A new UB study uses these deposits to learn about ancient climate in southern Greenland, focusing on summer temperature during periods of relative warmth on Earth, called interglacials, over the past 600,000 years.

6/17/2021: Dr. Elizabeth Thomas and five other UB researchers awarded 3.5 million in grants to further climate action research. Assistant Professor of Geology Dr. Thomas, will be analyzing the ancient climate history of Western New York by observing sediments, rain patterns and lake effect snowfall of the Great Lakes Region. She is also a co-instructor of the Carbon Reduction Challenge where students partner with local businesses to develop ways to reduce their climate impact

5/4/2021: New research from a large international community of scientists including Sophie Nowicki from UB, predicts that sea level rise from the melting of ice could be halved this century if the world meets the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That’s relative to projections based on countries’ current pledges to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases.

4/21/2021: Mattia de’ Michieli Vitturi, a geology faculty member and a mathematician, uses computational modeling to help officials in Iceland understand where lava may flow

3/25/2021: This movement of water through and under Helheim Glacier — called hydrology — is the topic of a $2.2 million project that brings together researchers from the University at Buffalo, Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and Dartmouth University. Funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation, the research has implications for predicting global sea level rise.

3/23/2021:The new study shows that not all ecosystems of the past were scoured into oblivion by ages of glaciers and ice sheets bulldozing overtop. Instead, the story of these living landscapes remains captured under the relatively young ice that formed on top of the ground, frozen in place, and holds them still.

1/5/2021: Jason Briner a UB climate scientist co-authored two major studies that underscore the urgent need for societies to curb carbon emissions.

12/2/2020: An international consortium of scientists has created the first-ever common framework for increasing comparability of research findings on coral bleaching.