Research

Externally funded projects within the department span a wide range of research areas. These projects include substantial amounts of field, lab, and computational work. Many of the research projects are collaborative both within and outside the department, with notable ties to Argonne National Labs, Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), the Field Museum, and the Chicago Botanic Gardens, to name just a few.

From a geographic standpoint, we currently have active projects in Namibia, Greenland, China, the large icebergs of the Ross Sea off Antarctica, the mountains of the Andes, various ODP sites, the Wyodak-Anderson coal bed aquifer in Wyoming, sites ectending from Texas to Alberta and Utah to Kansas, northern Italy, southern France, the Northern Slope of Alaska, Arctic Canada, Northern Minnesota, and the New Madrid Seismic zone in Southern Missouri, as well as the planetary surfaces of Mars, Venus and Mercury.

Graduate students carry out a significant portion of the Department's research under the guidance of experienced faculty and staff. Undergraduate students also participate in ongoing research. 

This is an exciting time for the department as we have recently occupied a gleaming, state-of-the-art analytic lab facility called the Integrated Labs for Earth and Planetary Sciences (ILEPS). Please visit the links shown left for more information about the department's research.