Taking student researchers to Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, and Spitsbergen--an island in the Arctic Sea, Alan Werner exhorts,"The answers are in the mud!"

Discover magazine called Mark McMenamin's "hypersea" theory that life forms that moved from the sea to the land diversified to a far greater extent than marine life did one of "seven ideas that could change the world."

"I study how rocks get 'mushed,'" Michelle Markley says. "I look at rock deformation, at their folds and faults and how they get their texture, or fabric."

Steven Dunn's research focuses on processes that affect rocks and minerals during metamorphic events, on fluids present during metamorphism, and on the use of stable isotopes as geochemical tracers for fluid-rock interactions.