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 concludes 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, in-person lectures during winter/spring 2026 are Mondays at 7:00 PM CT on the University of Minnesota campus, Keller Hall, Room 3-210. 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: October 13, 2025
Seminar Lab Subject: The Upper Mississippi Valley: Proglacial Origins to Modern Evolution
Seminar Lab Presenter: Andrew Wickert, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Minnesota
Link to Presenter https://cse.umn.edu/esci/andrew-wickert
Second Link to Presenter https://www.linkedin.com/in/andywickert
Seminar Lab Location:
In-person only at University of Minnesota, Keller Hall, Room 3-230
Lecture start time 7:00 PM CT.
Seminar Lab Detail:
Summary: The upper Mississippi River valley formed and integrated when early Pleistocene glaciations dammed north-flowing rivers, causing them to overtop and incise ancient drainage divides to the south. These steeplands evolved in the ca. 1–2 million years that followed, growing a network of tributaries that dissected the surrounding plateaus. When we step forward to the Wisconsin ice-sheet advance, ca. 30,000 years ago, sediments sourced from glacial erosion filled the Mississippi valley, forming high floodplains. During deglaciation, proglacial lakes trapped coarse sediments, and sediment-starved meltwater entrained and incised through these proglacial river deposits, leaving them high above the modern Mississippi. Both Indigenous and Euro-American cities were built on the resultant high terrace surfaces. The arrival of Euro-American agriculture increased erosion 10x beyond background rates, filling valleys with sediments. Looking to the future of climate and land-use change, we hope to use these stories from the upper Mississippi valley to benchmark process-based models and better predict how today’s actions shape tomorrow’s landscapes.
Biography: Prof. Andrew Wickert conducts field investigations, develops physics-based theory, designs and deploys instrumentation, and builds numerical models to understand and forecast how rivers and landscapes change.