Dutch, Yingst to present at Houston mega-conference

UW-Green Bay’s Steven Dutch and Aileen Yingst will be among the presenters at a joint conference in Houston early next month expected to draw 10,000 scientists from the fields of geology, earth science, soils and crop science.

Dutch, a professor of Natural and Applied Sciences, and Yingst, Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium director, will share their respective research at the 2008 Joint Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America, Soil Science Society of America, American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America and the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies. The meeting will be held Oct. 5 through 9 at Houston’s Brown Convention Center.

The first-ever joint meeting of the five academic societies is in observation of The International Year of Planet Earth.

Dutch’s presentation is “The Largest Act of Environmental Warfare in History.” He will address how—in terms of loss of life and geographic area affected—the largest act of environmental warfare in history was the breaching of the Huang He (Yellow River) levees by the Nationalist Chinese in 1938. Official Chinese figures place the death toll at more than 800,000.

Yingst, who works regularly with NASA and has studied the surface composition of Mars as a geologist for NASA’s Mars Pathfinder and Mars Polar Lander missions, will be presenting two studies: “The Handlens Atlas: A Terrestrial Image Library of Microscale Structures as Analogues for Mars,” along with “Using Remote Rover-Driven Methodology to Conduct Fieldwork on the Moon: Lessons Learned from Mars.”

For more information on the conference visit the Joint Annual Meeting’s home page at https://www.acsmeetings.org/.