CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
CU prof gets $875,000 fellowship
Oct 14th
CU-BOULDER PHYSICS PROFESSOR
AWARDED PACKARD FELLOWSHIP
AWARDED PACKARD FELLOWSHIP
Cindy Regal, a University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor of physics and associate fellow of JILA, has been awarded a prestigious David and Lucile Pack
ard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation established the fellowship “to allow the nation’s most promising professors to pursue science and engineering research early in their careers with few funding restrictions and limited paperwork requirements.” This year, 16 fellows were selected from 100 applicants at 50 leading universities.
The five-year, $875,000 fellowship will fund Regal’s work in experimental atomic physics. She is interested in developing techniques to control single neutral atoms with lasers and create small quantum gases that can be manipulated at the single-atom level, for applications in quantum information science and in modeling physics of complex materials.
CU names McPhee for Stegner award
Oct 12th
AUTHOR JOHN MCPHEE TO RECEIVE STEGNER AWARD
FROM CU’S CENTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST ON OCT. 27
FROM CU’S CENTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST ON OCT. 27
John McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Encounters With the Archdruid” and “Coming Into the Country,” will receive the Wallace Stegner Award from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center of the American West on Oct. 27.
The center’s highest award will be presented at a 7 p.m. event in the Old Main Chapel on the CU-Boulder campus. The evening will feature a discussion with Mc
arch typical Druid
Phee conducted by Patty Limerick, professor of history and chair and faculty director of the Center of the American West, and Charles Wilkinson, d
The event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited and people are encouraged to arrive early.istinguished professor and Moses Lasky Professor of Law at CU-Boulder.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of McPhee’s “Encounters With the Archdruid,” a book Limerick has long heralded as the Center of the American West’s “founding text” because of its inspiring demonstration of civil dialogue on contentious issues. McPhee also is the author of “Basin and Range” (1981), “In Suspect Terrain” (1983), “Rising from the Plains” (1986), “The Control of Nature” (1989) and “Assembling California” (1993).
“Each time I have assigned to a class, I take great pleasure in reading it again,” said Limerick. “Since I assign it in nearly every course I teach, that means I may be coming up on my 50th reading of it. If there is anyone who cares about the West but who has not read this book, it’s time to take action.”
Each year, the Center of the American West presents the Wallace Stegner Award to an individual who has made a sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the West through literature, art, history, or lore of the West. Past recipients include Tom McGuane, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ivan Doig, John Echohawk, Billy Frank, Terry Tempest Williams, John Nichols, Vine Deloria Jr., Ted Turner and many more. This year’s award was made possible by Alan and Carol Ann Olson.
CU-Boulder’s Center of the American West addresses a variety of regional issues, including water management, relationships between federal agencies and communities and economies, land planning, Native American identity, recent art and literature, and the balance of power between tradition and innovation in Western life. The center takes as its mission the creation of forums for the respectful exchange of ideas in pursuit of solutions to the region’s difficulties.
For more information visit the Center of the American West’s website at http://www.centerwest.org or call 303-492-4879.
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CU study: Lowly worms survive asteroid wipeout
Oct 10th
A new study of sediments laid down shortly after an asteroid plowed into the Gulf of Mexico 65.5 million years ago, an event that is linked to widespread global extinctions including the demise of big dinosaurs, suggests that lowly worms may have been the first fauna to show themselves following the global catastrophe.While the focus on the so-called K-T boundary extinction is often on the survival and proliferation of mammals, paleo-botanical studies show some of the earliest terrestrial ecosystems to emerge were dominated by low-diversity and opportunistic aquatic plants, said University of Colorado Boulder geological sciences Associate Professor Karen Chin. And while sediments laid down immediately following the impact event generally have relatively few animal fossils, new evidence from North Dakota shows networks of crisscrossing burrows less than three inches above the K-T boundary layer.
“Fossil burrows provide direct evidence of animal activity that occurred right at that spot, and these burrows are quite extensive,” said Chin, who said their characteristics suggest they were probably produced by worms. “To my knowledge, such burrows haven’t been documented in terrestrial environments this close to the K-T boundary. This is a glimpse of a world we don’t know very much about yet.”
While Chin and her colleagues are still working to understand the timing of the fossil burrows as they relate to the K-T extinction boundary, Chin said she believes that they likely were made within a few thousand years after the extinction event. Future studies should help narrow that window, said Chin, who also is curator of paleontology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
Chin gave a presentation on the new findings at the 2011 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America being held this week in Minneapolis. Co-authors on the study were A.A. Ekdale of the University of Utah and Dean Pearson of the Pioneer Trails Regional Museum in Bowman, N.D.
The three-dimensional burrows were found at the interface of a layer of coal and a layer of siltstone in southwestern North Dakota by Pearson, who has spent many years studying K-T boundary sites in the state. The decomposing organic matter in the ancient environment would have provided a food source for the worms. A few of the burrows were topped by a thin layer of coal, suggesting that the underlying coal may contain additional, earlier worm burrows that are not readily apparent, Chin said.
The clay boundary layer laid down at the end of the Cretaceous Period is associated with high levels of iridium, an element rare in Earth’s crust but abundant in asteroids. The Manhattan-sized asteroid plowed into Earth at 150 times the speed of a jet airliner and is thought to have released about a billion times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb, triggering tremendous dust and ash storms, wildfires, tsunamis, mega-earthquakes and dark, cold “nuclear winter” conditions for a time.
The North Dakota fossil worm burrows indicate the creatures probably were about the diameter of an average earthworm. The burrows indicate horizontal rather than vertical movement through the substrate, likely reflecting feeding activity, Chin said.
The study indicates the burrows were made in a peat-producing, bog-like environment that eventually was buried by sediment. Chin said the worms must have been capable of withstanding the challenging environmental stresses of flooded habitats, including prolonged inundation, low oxygen and acidic conditions.
Since the ancient burrows were filled by sediment, they actually are “positive casts” of the trails made by the worms. The burrows are examples of “trace fossils,” which also include tracks and fossilized feces, or coprolites. “When we reconstruct past environments, soft-bodied animals like worms get short-shrift since they don’t stand out in the fossil record like animals with mineralized skeletons,” said Chin. Ekdale, an expert on trace fossils, was key in analyzing the worm burrows, Chin said.
Chin said extensive work on plant fossils both before and after the K-T boundary event by Denver Museum of Nature and Science Chief Curator Kirk Johnson and his colleagues helped Chin and her research team to characterize the environment inhabited by the burrowers. Johnson’s research helped establish that terrestrial plants suffered heavy losses during the K-T extinction event, as did non-avian dinosaurs and many other terrestrial and marine organisms.
The K-T boundary commonly refers to the dividing line between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. Geologists now refer to it as the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg boundary event. While a number of vertebrates survived the event — including birds, snakes, lizards, turtles, fish and small mammals — fossil burrows provide direct evidence of animal activity that skeletal fossils cannot show, said Chin. “The fact that the burrows are so close to the K-T boundary is one reason they are so exciting.”
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