Environmental Geology

Kirsten Menking is an environmental Earth scientist in the Department of Earth Science and Geography at Vassar College. Her research interests include using lake sediments to unravel Earth's history of climatic change, linking this history to atmospheric and hydrologic processes through a combination of numerical modeling experiments and collection of weather and stream discharge data, analyzing the evolution of landforms in response to climatic and tectonic processes, and studying the impacts of urbanization on streams. She has published journal articles documenting glacial-interglacial cycles in the Sierra Nevada mountains and adjacent Owens Valley of California, determined the climatic conditions necessary to produce a Pleistocene lake in the now-dry Estancia Basin of New Mexico, and un-covered a centuries-long mid-Holocene drought in New York's Hudson River valley. Her current research involves quantifying the amount of road salt entering the groundwater system,a topic of concern both for people dependent on well water and for aquatic ecosystems. Andrew de Wet is a classically trained geologist specializing in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing and their application to environmental problems on Earth and geological processes on Mars. He holds an honors degree in geology from the University of Natal (now the University of Kwazulu-Natal), South Africa, and a doctorate from Cambridge University, England. He has done field work in South Africa, Greece, the United Kingdom, Mongolia, Chile, Antarctica, and the United States. He teaches environmental geology, GIS and Natural Resources, and an interdisciplinary course on comparative planetology with a focus on Mars. He served as director of the Keck Geology Consortium for three years and has led Keck Geology research projects numerous times. Professor de Wet's capacity for visualizing complex systems has clarified concepts and inspired students to better understand the interconnectedness of natural systems. Through his travels across seven continents he has acquired a deep knowledge of geological and environmental conditions, which he transcribes into dynamic graphics portraying natural and anthropomorphic processes. He has published articles on geological pedagogy in the Journal of Geological Education and on shared faculty positions in the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering and Geotimes. He is a member of the Geological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union. He is involved in a long-standing collaboration with researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and publishes on environmental issues and planetary geology.