Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences

09/03/2026

Join Penn State postdoctoral scholar Rebecca Bussard for “Mitigating Atmospheric Noise in InSAR Time-series Over Volcanic Targets Using a Convolutional Neural Network” at 2 p.m. Friday, Sept. 4, in 117 Earth and Engineering Sciences Building or via Zoom.

Bussard will discuss how machine learning can help reduce atmospheric noise in satellite data, making it easier to detect changes linked to volcanic activity and improve volcano monitoring.

The talk is free and open to the public.

https://buff.ly/wmmMGEL

Rebecca Bussard, postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State, will give the talk “Mitigating Atmospheric Noise in InSAR Time-series Over Volcanic Targets Using a Convolutional Neural Network,” at 2 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 4, in 117 Earth and Engineering Sciences Building on...

09/02/2026

What a great honor for Dr. Joel N. Myers, the founder and executive chair of AccuWeather, to be honored for his pioneering career. The weather forecasting icon will be inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame this month.

Considered the father of modern commercial meteorology, Myers will be honored at a gala ceremony on Sept. 29 in New York alongside figures such as Bravo’s Andy Cohen, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Food Network’s Bobby Flay and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith.

Myers founded AccuWeather as a Penn State meteorology graduate student in 1962 and served as its CEO for more than 60 years, building the company into a global leader in weather data, forecasting and warnings.

Myers continues to mentor our meteorology and atmospheric science students who frequent the Joel N. Myers Weather Center on the University Park campus. Congrats on this honor.

Joel Myers, the founder and executive chair of State College-based AccuWeather, will be honored for his pioneering career when he is inducted into the

09/02/2026

Liz Hajek, professor of geosciences and associate head for diversity, equity, and inclusion, is among the Penn State faculty members to receive the Fulbright Scholarship Award.

Hajek uses sedimentary geology to reconstruct ancient landscape conditions, understand the sensitivity and resilience of Earth’s surface environments, and analyze how to best manage buried water, energy, and mineral resources.

This award will allow her to collaborate with colleagues at University College Cork to reconstruct and compare Paleozoic landscapes in the Eastern United States and Ireland to assess historical and future approaches to energy and mineral resource development in both regions.

Congrats!

09/01/2026

This new Penn State Research out of our Department of Geosciences shows you can use fiber optic cables already in place below ground, and signals from a thunderstorm above, to identify and track geohazards.

Traditional tools for understanding the ground beneath us requires expensive instruments and strong signals from above. Yet Tieyuan Zhu and his team of researchers show there's a better way.

The results are a near constant mesh of data from below the Earth's surface as 458 thunderclaps created an image of the ground 330 feet deep.

The work has just been published in Science Advances and is featured in Earth.com

www.earth.com/earth-science/thunderquakes-seismic-imaging-underground

Thunder can act like a natural seismic source, helping scientists map underground rock and potentially identify sinkhole hazards.

08/31/2026

Check out Penn State's wide variety of museums during the fall “Night at the Museums,” planned for 4 to 8 p.m. on Sept. 3.

Organized by the Penn State Museum Consortium, the event will once again include the Penn State trolley, which will provide transportation among the various sites at University Park, courtesy of Penn State Outreach.

And, of course, don't miss our Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum & Art Gallery. There are some old favorites, such as the "Blue" and "White" gemstone collection and industrial artwork from the Steidle Collection.

Visitors can discover something new, too. The current exhibition, “Through Different Eyes: Industrial Worlds by Women Artists,” and the newest exhibition, “Casting an Icon: Making the Liberty Bell,” are both curated by Penn State student interns. Visitors also can say hello to Snowball the mule, who, along with Old Coaly, lived and worked on campus at the turn of the 20th century.

https://lnkd.in/eH_jycxs

08/28/2026

Rob Lydick chats with Interim John Leone Dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Dr. John Mauro. Mauro began overseeing departments, including meteorology and atmospheric science at Penn State, in the summer of 2026.

08/26/2026

To create seismic imaging of what's happening below ground, you can use specialized instruments that capture single data points.

Or you can do what Penn State University researchers use: Existing fiberoptic cables below ground and the free waves produced during thunderstorms, to create a mesh of data regarding the ground below.

Penn State geoscientist Tieyuan Zhu and his former graduate student Nolan Roth, just published their approach in the journal Science Advances. The work shows how simple signals such as thunderquakes can provide useful data in mapping the ground - and potential hazards below - using a distributed acoustic sensing the team has spent years developing and refining.

“We demonstrated the first successful seismic imaging using thunderquakes," Zhu said. "Not only does this research serve as a proof of concept for using thunderquakes as seismic sources for tomography, but DAS provided a new way to observe the interaction between the atmosphere and the solid Earth.”

Seismic waves produced by thunderstorms, called thunderquakes, can be used as a novel source for seismic imaging, according to a new study led by researchers at Penn State.

08/24/2026