For me, the first week of fall semester 2021 culminated with a UConn Today feature article by Elaina Hancock titled: “Rx for Humanity: Whole Earth Environmentalism.” The article’s subtitle “Whole Earth Environmentalism is mine. It popped out accidentally when I was trying to describe what Earth System Science was to an outsider who wasn’t getting […]
Author: Thorson Robert
Earth Blog #4 – Breakthrough to High Schools
Last year was a breakthrough year for the Department of Earth Sciences. Perhaps you noticed the stronger support by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the addition of two full professors active in paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental research; the dean’s appointment of a new department head (Tracy Frank); a near-doubling of our graduate student group; […]
Earth Blog #3 – The Anthropocene and the “Terrible-Day-Hypothesis”
Mass extinctions get portrayed as single events of death and destruction. Does this portrayal obscure the hallmarks of extinction that are kicking into overdrive during the Anthropocene? It has been over 30 years since the publication of Luis Alvarez’s groundbreaking paper in Science on the asteroid that impacted Earth 66 million years ago. Out of […]
Earth Blog #2 – What is Landscape?
What is landscape? Based on the original definition, it’s only the human modifications in the scene in the painting above, a detail from “Mantle of Winter,” 1921, Guy C. Wiggins, Oil on canvas, Louise Crombie Beach Collection, William Benton Museum of Art, UConn. Mark Twain once wrote. “The difference between the right word and almost […]
Earth Blog #1 – Painting the Blue Planet Blue
Note: This is the first of many posts for our new website designed to highlight the role of Earth Sciences within UConn Nation. The target audience consists of students, faculty, staff, and administrators interested in how the earth works, what its history has been, and why this matters. As our climates change, water is increasingly […]