Billion years of Nebraska landscape evolution at Nov. 19 Olson Seminar

The landscape of eastern Nebraska has undergone immense changes over the last billion-plus years, yet most of the region's inhabitants are utterly unaware of this geological history.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln geologist R.M. "Matt" Joeckel will attempt to fill in those knowledge gaps Nov. 19 when he delivers the next Paul A. Olson Seminar in Great Plains Studies at UNL. Joeckel, an associate professor in the Conservation and Survey Division, the School of Natural Resources and the Department of Geosciences, will present "From Fire to Ice: A Geological Perspective on 1 Billion Years of Landscape Evolution in Eastern Nebraska" from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St. His talk and a 3 p.m. reception in the museum are free and open to the public.

Joeckel's review will start more than 1 billion years ago when a large rift -- not unlike the Great Rift Valley of today's East Africa -- spread southward into eastern Nebraska from the Lake Superior region. He will describe how over the next several hundred million years, the area we no know as Nebraska was shaped and reshaped by rises and falls in global sea level, the tectonic ups and downs of the Earth's crust, and the action of wind, running water, weathering processes and glaciers.

From the volcanic eruptions of the ancient continental rift to the multiple glacial advances that covered the region between 2.5 million and 600,000 years ago, eastern Nebraska truly was shaped by fire and ice. Joeckel will discuss how the region's geologic record of rocks and sediments provide us with mere "camera stills" from the past, but reveal a rich record of environmental and landscape change.