Author Archives: gwiles

It was a honor to welcome Dr. Nicolás Young (’05) back to the College to be our 44th Osgood Speaker. Dr. Young hails from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Cosmo Lab, where he is a Associate Research Scientist. Nicolás is a … Con… Continue reading →

Dr. Mark Abbott and his graduate students Cole and Adeel visited the Wooster Tree Ring Lab with portions of white oak beams from a historic cabin in Pittsburgh. The mission was to tree ring date the outer ring of the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Dr. Lyon’s class along with her TAs and in collaboration with the Wooster Art Museum significantly upgraded many of the fossil and mineral displays in Scovel Hall this past fall. The classes hard work was revealed in an “opening” on &… Continue reading →

Imagine a world with larch trees in the uplands and dawn redwoods in the flats, and bald cypress trees in the wetlands. This existed in the Eocene (~40 million years ago) when the world was warmer, the treeline was at … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Nigel Brush and colleagues have assembled a record of human history in the Walhonding Valley of Ohio (see map below). Along with Jeffrey Dilyard and others, Brush has worked in the region for decades  examining the history of human occupation … C… Continue reading →

The global tree-ring community is racking up the papers investigating the utility of the relatively new proxy using blue intensity of annually-dated tree rings. This latest effort is a blue intensity investigation followup of a recent study on ring wid… Continue reading →

HYDRO25 the class. On a beautiful fall day the class investigated the South Wellfield – the mission was to take water levels from 15 observation wells and sample the groundwater, surface water and water emanating from the airstrippers. Isotopic a… Continue reading →

At the alumni reception – a reunion. Elliot Miller (Wooster) presenting his IS work on geochemical analyses of palagonite and potential applications to Martian exploration. Mary Palmieri (Wooster) investigates the linkages of tree rings and cloud… Continue reading →

Guest bloggers: Ihaja Metz and Cooper Norwell: On  September 29th, 2025 Dr. Wiles’s Hydrology class (along with Dr. Ison’s Field Botany class) took a trip out to Fern Valley, a College of Wooster monitering station on Wilkin run, a stream … Conti… Continue reading →

Guest bloggers: Luke Woodfill and Francis Nwokonko (HYDRO25) On 9/22/25, Dr. Wiles’ Hydrology class (plus our wonderful ESCI technician Nick Wiesenberg) had the opportunity to tour the Wooster, Ohio Water Treatment Plant. On the way there, we stopped t… Continue reading →