UMD News Releases

Thomas Johnson, University of Minnesota Regents Professor in UMD's Large Lakes Observatory and Department of Geological Sciences, has been elected as a 2011 Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

The Fellowship award is an honor given to only one in a thousand members each year. In December 2011, Johnson will be presented with the award at the official AGU Meeting in San Francisco, Calif.

Additional Information about Thomas Johnson
Johnson is a native of Virginia, Minnesota. In 1994 he moved from Duke University to UMD to establish the Large Lakes Observatory. He is considered to be one of the leading experts on the evolution of large lakes worldwide.

He and his students analyze lake sediments for evidence of past climate change. Prof. Johnson and colleagues from three other universities led a major drilling program on Lake Malawi, East Africa, in 2005, recovering an intriguing record of past climate change extending back several hundred thousand years, that revealed Africa to have undergone mega-droughts far more severe than the continent experiences today. Analyses continue on this unique, long record from tropical Africa.

RESEARCH AREAS
The nature of tropical climate change in East Africa based on analysis of sediment cores from the large lakes of the Rift Valley.
Developing new analytical approaches for improving our interpretation of lake sediment records in terms of past environmental conditions and refining the geochronology in lake sediment cores.
Carbon cycles in large lakes.
Sedimentary processes in large lakes: turbidity plumes and the effects of surface and internal waves on sediment dynamics.

For more information about Thomas Johnson, see http://www.d.umn.edu/llo/people/tjohnson.html