News

In a county where 42% of the residents rely on drinking water from unregulated sources, primarily private wells, educating residents on protecting their drinking water sources is a big job. Such is the case in Gaston County, North Carolina, where arsenic, manganese, and E. coli and total coliform bacteria threaten to contaminate wells, compromising the […]

Two years ago, we set off on a journey to refamiliarize ourselves with the greater Charlotte region. With funding from The Duke Endowment, the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute sought to understand how a cohesive region whose shared identity was once synonymous with the ethos of New South prosperity had splintered in recent decades. A thriving […]

The Department of Geography and Earth Sciences hosted more than 150 geographers at this year’s Applied Geography Conference on October 23-25 in Uptown Charlotte. Thanks to faculty, staff and graduate students, the conference was a true team effort. Student turnout was outstanding — 27 of our graduate students discussed their research, presented posters, organized panels, […]

Elizabeth Delmelle spoke on NPR’s morning edition as part of WFAE’s Finding Home series documenting affordable housing issues in the Charlotte Metropolitan Area. She discussed findings from her collaborative research project with Drs. Isabelle Nilsson and Claire Schuch on the impact of rail transit on neighborhoods, gentrification, and displacement. https://www.wfae.org/post/finding-home-does-light-rail-development-push-out-affordable-housing#stream/0

Terry Shirley, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences, is one of three finalists for the UNC Charlotte Teaching Excellence Award.

Recently, GES’ staff cartographer, Patrick Jones, completed maps for use in Dr. Christine Haynes’ (UNC Charlotte Department of History) book, Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France after Napoleon available at Harvard University Press. The book has been very well received and peer reviewed by academics from other universities. One such review, by Thomas […]

Professor Heather Smith and Environmental Sciences major Sierra Matteson recently returned from Jerusalem where they were team members of the 2019 UNC Charlotte Mount Zion Archeological Dig. Each year, UNC Charlotte students have the opportunity to join the dig through summer study abroad. This year, Dr. Smith was a member of the faculty team and […]

Three GES students were selected as Student Assistants for this year’s 2019 ESRI User Conference held in San Diego California: Vani Singh, Zoey Zhang, Sam Holden. All three are new or continuing in the geography MA program. The students gained valuable networking opportunities and furthered their appreciation of the numerous applications of GIS. Vani reported […]

“Part of understanding Antarctic geomorphology, is understanding how rocks actually crack,” said Martha-Cary (Missy) Eppes, a geologist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. “Understanding the factors that influence rock fracture on Earth’s surface generally is something that we haven’t quantified.” Click here for the full article. https://antarcticsun.usap.gov/science/contentHandler.cfm?id=4401

Continuing its longstanding tradition in the world of applied geographic research, this year the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences will host the Applied Geography Conference in Charlotte, October 23-25, 2019. Students, faculty, policy makers and other researchers from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors will converge on uptown for three days of sharing insights […]

Doctors Diemer and Eppes are representing UNC Charlotte, presenting their research – on the history of geology and mechanical weathering respectively- at this year’s European Geosciences Union conference held in Vienna, Austria. https://www.egu2019.eu/

Our student Meteorology club STORM is running the 5th Annual UNC Charlotte WeatherFest on Friday March 15 from 10am to 4pm at the Hauser Alumni Pavilion on campus. Like previous years, the celebration of weather has been completely organized and led by our undergraduate majors. This year, they even raised money for the event via […]

Antarctica’s unique climate enticed UNC Charlotte earth sciences researcher Martha Cary Eppes and her research colleagues to spend weeks camping in a tent in sub-zero temperatures, in order to literally monitor and listen to rocks as they fracture. They are studying how rocks alter and erode in one of the most extreme environments on the […]

In early January, students and faculty from Geography and Earth Sciences will be representing UNC Charlotte at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting https://annual.ametsoc.org/index.cfm/2019/ in Phoenix, Arizona. The conference hosts over 4,000 attendees with applied and theoretical research related to atmospheric sciences, and includes both a Student Conference and the Full Conference. 20 students […]

Several GES students and faculty attending this year’s AGU Fall Meeting in DC. See below for links to their research: Nicholas Golden (Earth Sciences MS) and Jacob Scheff, “Do CMIP5 climate models agree on warming of the atmosphere with latitude and height?” https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm18/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/452580 Xiaoyu Bai (INES PhD) and Jacob Scheff, “Energy Budget Analysis of TRACMIP […]

Jean-Claude Thill received a special Service Award from the Regional Science Association International for services rendered to the association in 2017 and 2018. A plaque was handed out at the 2018 North American Meetings of RSAI in San Antonio TX in November 2018. Dr. Thill has a long-term involvement with the RSAI in various leadership […]

Doctoral student Paul H. Jung received the first prize in the Graduate Student-led Paper Competition at the 2018 Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) in San Antonio, TX. The award was for a paper co-authored with Drs Jean-Claude Thill and Michele Issel on “Heteroscedasticity Consistent Empirical Bayes Estimator: Areal Prevalence […]

Current INES Ph.D. student Matt Gropp was recently selected as the winner of the 2019 Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award. His M.S. thesis, titled “Assessing the Impact of the Nocturnal Transition on the Lifetime and Evolution of Supercell Thunderstorms in the Great Plains,” was completed in 2017 under the direction of Dr. Casey Davenport. The thesis […]