Brownfield Action: Dissemination of a SENCER Model Curriculum and the Creation of a Collaborative STEM Education Network

Brownfield Action (BA) is a web-based environmental site assessment (ESA) simulation in which students form geotechnical consulting companies and work together to solve problems in environmental forensics. Developed at Barnard College with the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, BA has been disseminated to ten colleges, universities, and high schools, resulting in a collaborative network of educators. The experiences of current users are presented describing how they have incorporated the BA curriculum into their courses, as well as how BA affected teaching and learning. The experiences demonstrate that BA can be used in whole or in part, is applicable to a wide range of student capabilities and has been successfully adapted to a variety of learning goals, from introducing non-science-literate students to basic concepts of environmental science and civic issues of environmental contamination to providing advanced training in ESA and modeling groundwater contamination to future environmental professionals

Age of the Mono Lake excursion and associated tephra

The Mono Lake excursion (MLE) is an important time marker that has been found in lake and marine sediments across much of the Northern Hemisphere. Dating of this event at its type locality, the Mono Basin of California, has yielded controversial results with the most recent effort concluding that the MLE may actually be the Laschamp excursion (Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 197 (2002) 151). We show that a volcanic tephra (Ash #15) that occurs near the midpoint of the MLE has a date (not corrected for reservoir effect) of 28,620 ± 300 14C yr BP (~32,400 GISP2 yr BP) in the Pyramid Lake Basin of Nevada. Given the location of Ash #15 and the duration of the MLE in the Mono Basin, the event occurred between 31,500 and 33,300 GISP2 yr BP, an age range consistent with the position and age of the uppermost of two paleointensity minima in the NAPIS-75 stack that has been associated with the MLE (Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London Ser. A 358 (2000) 1009). The lower paleointensity minimum in the NAPIS-75 stackis considered to be the Laschamp excursion (Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London Ser. A 358 (2000) 1009)

On the reliability of the Matuyama–Brunhes record in the Sulmona Basin—Comment to ‘A reappraisal of the proposed rapid Matuyama–Brunhes geomagnetic reversal in the Sulmona Basin, Italy’ by Evans and Muxworthy (2018)

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Extremely rapid directional change during Matuyama-Brunhes geomagnetic polarity reversal

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How fast was the Matuyama–Brunhes geomagnetic reversal? A new subcentennial record from the Sulmona Basin, central Italy

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