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This is a guest blog by senior Geology major Todd Kremmin as part of GEG-345 Remote Sensing of Environment. Back in March of 2002, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), which is a twin satellite project that takes detailed measurements of Earth’s gravity field. After 10…

Don’t forget to look for the “super moon” Saturday night: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/05/us-usa-moon-idUSBRE84409Y20120505.

The Celebration of Creative Inquiry will take place today, Friday, May 4 from 5-7 PM in the Jackson Campus Center banquet rooms. There will be over 120 posters representing students from many departments and programs in all divisions of the campus. This is a wonderful opportunity to honor the work that our students are doing.…

Congratulations to sophomore Geography and Environmental Studies major Meg Wika for winning a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD)/German Academic Exchange Service scholarship! Meg will be studying in Freiberg, Germany, during Fall 2012. For more information, see this Gustavus (front-page!) news story.

Gustavus Geography had a great showing at this year’s Midwest Undergraduate Geography Symposium (MUGS) on Saturday, April 28. Gustavus students Jory Birkeland, Emery Ellingson, and Peter Westby presented papers from their original research: Jory presented on the future of public transportation in the American West, Emery on the relationship between growth in corn ethanol and…

Dr. Thomas Sigler took his Sustainable Cities class on a field trip to Minneapolis last week.  Two educated and informative speakers — Paul Burns from the Metropolitan Council and Ben Penner from Open Arms — met with the class to explain the mechanics of transit-oriented development and urban farming, respectively.

This sign on a city street in North Vancouver, British Columbia is evidence of the coexistence of humans and bears in the suburbs of Vancouver. Vancouver has set an ambitious goal of being the greenest city in the world by 2020. One of its main strategies is a strict urban containment boundary with large areas…

Students in GEG105 Physical Geography: Earth System Science took a field trip west of campus this week to study human impact on the natural environment in Nicollet County, MN. At one time Nicollet County and surrounding areas were covered in lakes and wetlands–some seasonal and some permanent. At the turn of the 20th century, farmers…

Here’s a gorgeous and informative real-time animation of surface winds across the USA: http://hint.fm/wind/.  

This is a guest blog by Geology major Andi Eglinton as part of the course GEG345 Remote Sensing of Environment. The Australian Antarctic Program is using remote sensing to look at near-coastal Antarctic sea ice and its impacts on ice shelves and ecosystems. They are using RADARSAT satellite ScanSAR images as well as MODIS images…