Opportunities

There is an opportunity for a graduate student to join our research group in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Minnesota starting in Fall 2025. It is a fantastic department with excellent analytical facilities including those associated with the Institute for Rock Magnetism. Interested prospective students could either apply to our PhD program or to our MS program. More information about both programs is available here: https://cse.umn.edu/esci/why-university-minnesota. Applications are due on December 15th. 

Oman + Arabian-Nubian Shield paleogeography in the Neoproterozoic Era

The graduate student working on this research would join a collaborative project that was just funded by the NASA Exobiology program focused on the paleoenvironmental context of animal evolution and Snowball Earth glaciation. Sedimentary rocks in Oman record ca. 717 to 660 million-year-old global glaciation as well as ca. 650 million-year-old molecular fossils that can be interpreted as the earliest record of animals on Earth. We seek to constrain the paleolatitude where these sedimentary rocks were deposited to better reconstruct the ancient environment in which these early animals evolved. In conjunction with this effort, we want to understand the tectonic context of Oman which was situated on the margin of an ocean basin that had abundant arc volcanic arcs that would collide with one another to make the Arabian-Nubian shield. The research will include fieldwork and the development of paleomagnetic and magnetic mineralogy data from sedimentary rocks in southern Oman in a stratigraphic context. It will additionally involve field research on volcanic and intrusive rocks elsewhere in the Arabian-Nubian Shield. Associated paleomagnetic analysis presented the opportunity to constrain the paleolatitude of ophiolites as well as post-accretion intrusions associated with the assembly of the Arabian-Nubian Shield. Reconstructing the paleogeography of these volcanic arc terranes could hold the key to understanding changes on Earth that led to cooling and the onset of Snowball Earth.

Interested prospective students should reach out to Nick via email: nicks-h@umn.edu