CORVALLIS, Ore. - Three Oregon State University faculty members have been named 2014 fellows of the American Geophysical Union. They are the only three fellows in this class from the state of Oregon.

The three selected as fellows were Edward Brook and Gary Egbert from the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences; and Beverly Law from the College of Forestry.

Brook is a paleoclimatologist who studies the Earth's ancient climates through examination of ice cores, specializing in the history of greenhouse gases. His studies have helped explain the processes that led to large-scale climate shifts throughout Earth's history. In 2011, he was part of a team that completed the excavation of a 10,928-foot ice core - the longest core ever drilled by United States scientists - with ice more than 67,000 years old.

Egbert is a geophysicist and oceanographer whose studies range from ocean tides to electromagnetic imaging of the solid Earth. In one pioneering study, he and his colleagues used satellite altimetry data to show that ocean tides lose significant energy over rough topography in the open ocean. These results imply that the tides may provide an important source of mechanical energy for vertical ocean mixing, and large-scale heat transport in the ocean - processes which are critical to Earth's climate.

Law is a professor of global change biology and terrestrial systems science who examines the role of forests in the global carbon cycle, and the impacts of climate change on those forests. She was science chair of the AmeriFlux network of more than 100 research sites for 11 years, and in 2014 was listed as a "most highly cited" researcher, in the top 1 percent for the period of 2002-12. She is a principal investigator on a five-year, $4 million project studying the impacts of drought, insects and fires on western forests.

The American Geophysical Union established the AGU Fellows program in 1962, and restricts annual recognition to less than 0.1 percent of its overall membership. This year, 62 fellows were named for their scientific eminence, a major breakthrough, a major discovery, paradigm shifts and/or sustained scientific impact. They will be recognized on Dec. 17 at the annual AGU conference in San Francisco.

Source: 

Joan Buhrman, 1+ 202 777-7509, [email protected]

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