2025-12-15
- Geology can take many forms, from the study of rocks and minerals to the living records preserved in trees. At Homer Lake Forest Preserve, graduate students from the Department of Earth Science & Environmental Change spent a November morning extracting tree-...
2025-12-12 - Eight staff members and academic professionals are being honored by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences for outstanding professional contributions. As a facility operations coordinator for the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics and the School of Earth, Society...
2025-12-09 - After more than a decade of collaborative work, a significant new book advancing the science of water and society has been published with the involvement of Murugesu Sivapalan, professor of geography and geographic information systems. Sivapalan served on—and co-chaired—the editorial advisory board for...
2025-11-14 - Twelve scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have been named to the 2025 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list. The list recognizes researchers and social scientists who have demonstrated exceptional influence, as reflected through their publication of...
2025-11-04 - The voyage of the HMS Challenger in the 1870s was a sprawling 3-1/2-year expedition to explore the world’s oceans. The scientists aboard the vessel collected 100,000 specimens of sea creatures, discovered 5,000 new species, mapped the ocean floors and took hundreds of measurements of sea temperature and chemistry that formed the basis of the discipline of oceanography. The data collected by the...
2025-10-30 - The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is expanding its online offerings with two innovative programs, designed to meet the growing demand for advanced skills in environmental and engineering geology.Launching in spring 2026, the graduate certificate programs in ...
2025-10-29 - In a discipline devoted to spaces, one of the most significant transformations came recently in Davenport Hall where a little-used room was converted to a new, state-of-the art geospatial laboratory thanks in large part to a generous donation from Candace Penn (BS, ’72, geography; MPA, ’94, Auburn University Graduate Air War College, Maxwell AFB,...
2025-10-17 - Winds across Illinois are beginning to still. A new study led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers has found that average wind speeds across the state have declined over the past three decades—and that the prevailing wind direction is slowly shifting southward. The findings, published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, have significant implications for...
2025-09-26 - While rivers are popular magnets for fishing, boating, and kayaking, they are also potential powerhouses in the fight against climate change. Rivers and streams carry inorganic carbon from land to oceans in a process called lateral carbon flux. In recent years, environmental engineers have proposed to utilize this movement in a class of carbon sequestration strategies known as “enhanced...
2025-09-17 - Sarah Austin didn’t set out to become a geologist. In fact, she jokes that she “messed up” when she first enrolled at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, mistakenly thinking the College of Education and Human Development was the right path to medical school. But one introductory geology course changed everything.“I sat in the second row and was so enthralled the whole class, and then was...
2025-09-15 - The world of weather and climate science is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and set against a challenging federal funding environment. In this story, we’ll talk about the changing landscape and how weather and climate data are aggregated, shared, and used.Dr. Gan Zhang is not only an expert on weather extremes and their impacts,...
2025-09-10 - Gyudae “GD” Kim never planned on becoming a geographer. Nearly 20 years ago, he was serving his mandatory military service in South Korea when a sudden injury left him paralyzed. At the time, he wasn’t considering graduate school, let alone an academic career. He was just trying to figure out how to move forward.That turning point...
2025-08-08 - Illinois Public Media premieres a new weekly radio program and podcast, a partnership with the Department of Climate, Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences in the School of Earth, Society & Environment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Weather Realness brings the best weather and climate scientists in Illinois to help the public understand weather and climate by providing...
2025-08-04 - CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — On Tuesday, President Trump’s administration proposed revoking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” a 2009 scientific finding that underpins U.S. policy on greenhouse gas emissions. By identifying the gases as a threat to public health and welfare, the finding provides the basis for many emissions regulations....
2025-07-29 - As Larry Di Girolamo stood at Vandenberg Air Force Base in December 1999, he was a relatively new professor in what would become the Department of Climate, Meteorology, & Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois. He had come to witness ...