About 2,600 miles of rivers and streams run through Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in Northern California. These waterways provide irrigation to the fertile San Joaquin Valley, whose agricultural production, including food manufacturing and wineries, generated more than $4 billion in 2023. These waterways also serve as the perfect outdoor classroom to train the next generation of water resource managers, environmental scientists, and others who will help California better manage one of its most precious natural resources. Every two years, John Keyantash, professor and chair of the Department of Earth Science and Geography at CSUDH, leads field work here and elsewhere in the ... Read More
Earth Sciences
Study Finds Megadroughts and Humans Caused Extinction of Giant Species on Madagascar
Ashish Sinha, a professor of earth sciences at CSUDH, has co-authored a recent research study which found that while droughts on the island of Madagascar contributed to the extinction of such giant species the Dodo bird, gorilla-sized lemurs, and the Elephant Bird, it may have been humans that ultimately sealed their fate. Published Oct. 16 in Science Advances, the study shows that the crash of megafauna (large or giant animals, especially of a given region) that happened around 1,500 years ago took place after a couple of centuries of human settlement. This heightened human activity, in combination with a particularly severe spell of region-wide drought, may have doomed the large birds ... Read More
Tree-Ring Lab Gives Students ‘Core’ Hands-On Experience
Education is all about empowering students, according to Parveen Chhetri, assistant professor in the Department of Earth Science and Geography at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH). For the trio of student assistants working in CSUDH's Tree-Ring Lab -- David “Skip” Saldana, Michelle Mohr, and Gabriel Angulo -- that means getting invaluable hands-on experience in the skills of dendrochronology, the dating and study of annual growth rings in trees. The Tree-Ring Lab is currently working on a project analyzing the history of drought events in California. By examining the thickness of trees' yearly growth rings, they can deduce the amount of rainfall an area received in a ... Read More
Professor Ashish Sinha Helps Discover the Holy Grail of Radiocarbon Dating
A groundbreaking recent discovery will enable scientists to accurately date objects from much earlier in Earth's history than ever before. California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) Professor of Earth Sciences Ashish Sinha is among the team of international researchers who found what can be best described as the “Holy Grail” of radiocarbon dating: The team's research was published in the December 2018 issue of Science magazine. The new study revealed how a pair of rare stalagmites inside the Hulu Cave, located near Nanjing, China, have unusually low levels of dead carbon, allowing an accurate carbon-14 (C-14) calibration–all the way to the limit of radiocarbon dating, about ... Read More
