Dr. Alex Pullen, Assistant Professor in EEES, has been hard at work studying dust. But not just any dust. Pullen studies the dust that was deposited at the foot of the Andes Mountains in Argentina over the last 1.15 million years. What he and colleagues from the University of South Carolina have learned revealed some surprising insights into climate and wind patterns that shaped the Earth’s environment years ago. The results have important implications for understanding how the Earth will change in response to current climate change. Their research was recently published in Nature Communications, one of the premier journals for reporting advances in science. The title of the article is A westerly wind dominated Puna Plateau during deposition of upper Pleistocene loessic sediments in the subtropical Andes, South America.” You can read more about Dr. Pullen’s research in a press release from the College of Engineering, Computing, and Applied Sciences.
