Julia Kelson‘s (IU professor, former IPL postdoc) study on soil water triple oxygen isotopes was just accepted in G-Cubed!

Kelson JR, Levin NE, Huber DP, Jin L, Gutiérrez Jurado HA, Pierce JL, Triple oxygen and hydrogen isotopes of soil water across climates, seasons, and depths. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, accepted 6/23/26

This is the product of work that Julia did at UM on an NSF funded project to study soil waters and soil carbonates at four locations in the US. s.

Elena has been writing grant proposals for her work in late Jurassic Morrison Formation and May was a big month as we got word that two of them were funded

Elena received an International Association of GeoChemistry student grant for her a project Applications for Clumped (∆₄₇) and Triple Oxygen Isotopes (∆^’17O) in Characterizing the Burial History and Paleoenvironment of the Morrison Formation.

Naomi and Elena were also funded by the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund with a New Directions grant for work on Tracking Isotopic Variation Across the Morrison Formation: The Impacts of Burial and Fluid Flow on Records of Environmental Change.

Stay tuned for more on the Morrison coming out of the lab!

Congratulation to Sarah Katz, former PhD and postdoc, for publishing a top cited article for 2024 by Paleoceanography & Paleoclimatology!

Katz SA, Levin NE, Abbott MD, Rodbell DT, Passey BH, *DeLuca NM, Larsen DJ, Woods A, 2024. Holocene temperature and water stress in the Peruvian Andes: insights from lake carbonate clumped and triple oxygen isotopes, Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, 39, e2023PA004827, doi.org/10.1029/ 2023PA004827.

Naomi and colleagues just published the results of study on the co-existence of two mid-Pliocene hominins and how they vary in diet and locomotion. Check out the paper in Nature.

Naomi’s contributions include isotopic data from hominin teeth. The isotopic data show dietary distinctions among hominins that lived in close-proximity to one another and that walked in different ways. It’s exciting that we can use the isotopic data to evaluate hominin behavior in a way that is truly complementary to the information we get from the morphology of the bones and teeth.

Haile-Selassie Y, Schwartz GT, Prang TC, Saylor BZ, Deino AL, Gibert L, Ragni A, Levin NE. 2025. New finds shed light on diet and locomotion in Australopithecus deyiremeda. Nature, doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09714-4.   

Nature News and Views by Fred Spoor, Mystery owner of African hominin foot identified. doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03451-4

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News articles about the work that include Naomi’s take on the study and what the isotope data mean.

UM press release: Discovery gives insight into how 2 ancient human ancestors coexisted in the same area

ASU press release: New research by ASU paleoanthropologists: 2 ancient human ancestors were neighbors — see video of colleague Yohannes Haile-Selassie discussing impacts of work

Reuters article: Scientists solve the mystery of the prehistoric ‘Burtele Foot’

Congratulations to now former IPL postdoc Anne Fetrow for starting as as Assistant Professor at Colorado College. We will miss you!

Congratulation to Sarah, recent PhD, for publishing the 3rd chapter of her dissertation!

Katz Sarah A, Levin NE, Rodbell DT, Abbott MB, Passey BH, Katz Scott A. 2025. Orbital forcing drives both the South American monsoon and local water balance in the central Andes during interglacials. Geophysical Research Letters, 52, e2025GL116249. doi.org/10.1029/2025GL116249.

Elena and Naomi just got back from the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming where they were studying late Jurassic paleosols from the Morrison Formation as part of Elena’s dissertation work.

Million was just awarded a Francis H. Brown Leakey Grant to study sediment provenance and hydrologic connectivity at Hadar and Woranso-Mille in the Afar region of Ethiopia.

Check out the announcement here: https://leakeyfoundation.org/announcing-the-spring-2025-francis-h-brown-african-scholars/

Former IPL postdocs Julia Kelson and Tyler Huth led an effort to study soil carbonates in our backyard — a project started in 2020 when far away fieldwork was challenging. Undergrad alums Miriam Bartleson, Kirsten Andrews and Matthew Salinas were key contributors to the lab and field components to the work.

The study was just published online today!

Kelson JR, Huth TE, Andrews K, Bartleson MN, Cerling TE, Jin J, Salinas MP, Levin NE. Pedogenic carbonate as a transient soil component in a humid, temperate forest (Michigan, USA). Quaternary Research. Published online 2025:1-16. doi:10.1017/qua.2024.41, link to paper

After a long hiatus, the field trips for Stratigraphy & Basin Analysis (EARTH 467) are back!!

The last trip was in April 2019. Even though the class was last taught in Winter 2020, we went remote before the field trips.

But with classes back in-person this semester we were determined to get into the field — and we did. Twice! The first was overnight trip to western Ohio in October to check out the Ordovician and Silurian Stratigraphy. We had another trip to Grand Ledge MI to explore and describe the Pennsylvanian strata and fossils. It was so so good to get out again into the field. This picture is of the class on the Ohio trip — at Charleston Falls where we met up with  Dr. Zelalem Bedaso (Univ Dayton) who gave us a tour of the area.