Geology professor gets $30,000 grant

Rhawn Denniston, associate professor of geology at Cornell College, has been awarded a $30,000 grant to study stalagmites for evidence of long-term climate change.

The seed grant will help Denniston to develop a 3,000-year-long record of the North Atlantic Oscillation, a climate phenomenon linked to extreme weather events like droughts and heat waves in North America and Europe. The work is based on years of work already performed by Denniston and his students and will involve high-resolution analysis of stalagmites collected from caves in Portugal. This analysis will be performed at laboratories at Iowa State University and the University of New Mexico as part of Cornell College geology major student theses. The granting agency is the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research.

In 2011 Denniston won a $98,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to construct a 4,000-year-long record of extreme rainfall and flooding events using stalagmites in tropical Australia.