Current Year Schedule
GSM seminars with slide show presentations are free and open to the public. They are presented by leading professionals in their fields and are aimed at learners from high school to adult. A question-and-answer session follows each seminar. The labs, also free and open to the public, allow a hands-on learning experience and demonstrate the ideas and principles of geology and earth science. Live lectures and labs require no registration; just show up a few minutes early on the evening of the lecture.
Click on date of any seminar for attendance information and other details. For a printable version of our schedule of seminars and labs, click here.
Except as noted, live lectures during fall 2024 are Mondays at 7:00 PM CT on the University of Minnesota campus, Keller Hall, Room 3-230. The address is 200 Union St. SE, Minneapolis MN. A lecture with (V) following its title is an online virtual lecture. For these, free registration is required by non-members; the instructions are supplied with the lecture description.
Our schedule is planned over 6 months in advance, so changes may occur. Always check this website shortly before each lecture for the latest seminar information.
Winter weather will come and snow might impact our lectures. The GSM will make any decision about cancelling or postponing a lecture due to inclement weather no later than 3:00 PM the day of the lecture. This information will be posted on the GSM home page (http://www.gsmn.org/). So check our home page shortly before each lecture in case there is a cancellation or a last-minute change. Also, we will e‐mail lecture postponement and cancellation information to our members.
Past seminars marked with * were recorded and the recording is available on the Geological Society of Minnesota YouTube channel. Subscribe to this channel for updates.
Seminar Details
Seminar Lab Date: November 11, 2024
Seminar Lab Subject: GEOLOGICAL MAPPING
Seminar Lab Presenter: HARVEY THORLEIFSON, PH.D., PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF EARTH & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, U OF MN
Seminar Lab Location:
In-person only at U of Minnesota, Keller Hall, Room 3-230
Lecture start time 7:00 PM CT.
Seminar Lab Detail:
Summary: People invest in new geoscience, as well as ensuring that published information will be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), to yield energy, materials, water, safety, infrastructure design, and an understanding of Earth and its life. Included are research, which is conceptual, mapping, which is spatial, monitoring, which is temporal, and modeling, which assembles the foregoing, to facilitate management. Mapping is an essential service that is directly and indirectly required by all, as multiple resolution, updated systematic mapping for a jurisdiction. We require ongoing mapping of meteorology and climatology, earth surface features, elevation, underground structures, bathymetry, soil mapping, and geological mapping of sediment and rock. For geology, the forthcoming century seems likely to be a time of concurrent commitment to digital publications, as well as their assembly as evergreen seamless databases to support digital twins, which are indefinitely maintained dynamic models such as groundwater models that incorporate monitoring and support management.
Biography: Harvey Thorleifson did a Masters thesis on Lake Agassiz in Manitoba, and a PhD on Hudson Bay at the University of Colorado. He was at the Geological Survey of Canada for nearly two decades, and he was President of the Geological Association of Canada. He has been a U Professor since 2003, and was State Geologist of Minnesota for two decades. He now leads the International Union of Geological Sciences Commission for Geoscience Information.