The University of New Mexico’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences announces the Seventh annual Stuart Northrop Distinguished Lecturer featuring Dr. Jerry X. Mitrovica on Friday, April 26 at 2 p.m. in Northrop Hall, Room 122. A reception will follow in the Natural History Science Center.
Mitrovica’s talk, “Advances in Modeling Ice Age Sea Level and Dynamics: Lessons for the Modern World,” will highlight major advances in the theory and modeling of ice age sea level changes and dynamics over the past 10 years. The advances include the development of methods that permit very high spatial resolution (< 1 km) within fully global models, the incorporation of complex, 3D viscoelastic Earth structure, improvements in coupling sea level and ice sheet models, and the formulation of adjoint equations that allow for efficient assessments of 3D model sensitivities.
Mitrovica will highlight these advances using case studies focused on problems in paleoclimate and archaeology. Each case will emphasize lessons for our modern, progressively warming world.
Mitrovica joined Harvard in 2009 as a professor of Geophysics. His work focuses on the Earth's response to external and internal forcing that have time scales ranging from seconds to billions of years. He has written extensively on topics ranging from the connection of mantle convective flow to the geological record, the rotational stability of the Earth and other terrestrial planets, ice age geodynamics, and the geodetic and geophysical signatures of ice sheet melting in our progressively warming world. Sea-level change has served as the major theme of these studies, with particular emphasis on critical events in ice age climate and on the sea-level fingerprints of modern polar ice sheet collapse.
Mitrovica is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University. He is a former director of the Earth Systems Evolution Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and J. Tuzo Wilson Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto, where he also received his Ph.D. degree.
He is the recipient of the Arthur L. Day Medal from the Geological Society of America, the W.S Jardetsky Medal from Columbia University, the A.E.H. Love Medal from the European Geosciences Union and the Rutherford Memorial Medal from the Royal Society of Canada. He is also a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union the Geological Society of America and the Macarthur Foundation, as well as a past Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Launched in 2016, the Northrop lecture was created in honor of former EPS professor and Chair Dr. Stuart ‘Stu’ Alvord Northrop by UNM Alumnus and former student of Northrop, Dr. Bill Lovejoy. The lecture series serves as a venue to showcase the type of research and enthusiasm for seeking knowledge that was emblematic of Northrop himself.
Northrop’s contributions to the UNM Department of Geology during his long tenure as Chairman (1921-1961) were profound including laying the foundation of the present department by creating the MS and Ph.D. programs and building the current department’s building.
Lovejoy is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Georgia Southern University, who influenced generations of students with his own with his teaching and research. Lovejoy was born in a small Ohio town coming from four generations of coal miners and became a first-generation college graduate. After serving in the Navy, he attended Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio where he majored in geology. A month later, he boarded a bus for Albuquerque and UNM where he earned a master’s degree in geology.
Northrop’s contributions to the UNM Department of Geology during his long tenure as Chairman (1921-1961) were profound including laying the foundation of the present department by creating the MS and Ph.D. programs and building the current department’s building.
Lovejoy is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Georgia Southern University, who influenced generations of students with his own with his teaching and research. Lovejoy was born in a small Ohio town coming from four generations of coal miners and became a first-generation college graduate. After serving in the Navy, he attended Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio where he majored in geology. A month later, he boarded a bus for Albuquerque and UNM where he earned a master’s degree in geology.
The lecture series serves as a venue to showcase the type of research and enthusiasm for seeking knowledge that was emblematic of Dr. Northrop himself.
Featured image: By National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - Global sea levels during the last Ice Age.