Margaret Boettcher, assistant professor of Earth sciences at UNH, along with graduate students Evangelos Korkolis and Ian Honsberger, will place seismometers – instruments that record earthquakes – at 24 sites across northern New England as part of a nationwide effort that’s been described as a telescope into the Earth’s interior. They are just 3 of the many scientists helping to place seismometers every 70 kilometers throughout the continental U.S.
About 55 million years ago, the Earth burped up a massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – an amount equivalent to burning all the petroleum and other fossil fuels that exist today. “And we don’t know where it came from,” says University of New Hampshire’s Will Clyde, associate professor of geology. “This is a big part of the carbon cycle that affected the climate system, and we don’t understand it.”