David Peate Talk Title: ”Why do we get volcanoes away from the plate boundary in Iceland”

Abstract: In Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, Snaefellsjökull volcano in western Iceland provided the gateway to access the Earth's interior. This large stratovolcano and other young volcanism found along the Snaefellsnes peninsula occurs well away from the rift zones that represent the plate boundary, and why volcanoes exist in this region is not clear. In this presentation, I will summarize results from an NSF-funded project that allowed a comprehensive sampling of volcanic samples from Snaefellsnes. Spatial compositional variations coupled with differences in erupted volumes require different origins for melting along the peninsula. The larger magma volumes in the west (including Snaefellsjökull) result from hotter pulses of plume mantle decompressing beneath the shallower lithosphere of the now extinct Snaefellsnes-Hunafloi rift. The smaller magma volumes in the east come from the leaky flanks of the melting regime of the western rift zone.

Matt Dannenberg Talk Title: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall: Plant responses to a warmer and more extreme hydroclimate”

Abstract: Anthropogenic climate change has increased the intensity of Earth’s hydrologic cycle and altered the frequency and severity of extreme events, which could pose new and novel stresses to many of Earth’s ecosystems. Here, I discuss the effects of past, present, and future hydroclimatic change on the growth and productivity of U.S. ecosystems, including their responses to increased precipitation variability and atmospheric aridity. I show that growth and primary productivity of many ecosystems are negatively affected by recent hydroclimatic change, with important implications for regional-to-global scale ecosystem services in a warmer and more variable world.