Biological Sciences Blog

Tag: Trista Vick-Majors

In the News: Vick-Majors on Winter, Ecosystems, and Agriculture

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Trista Vick-Majors (BioSci/GLRC) was interviewed in a WLUC TV6 segment about how a continuing lack of winter ice cover could change ecosystems, the Great Lakes, and the future of agriculture. It also touches on how these changes could impact small businesses and outdoor winter activities–such as ice fishing and snowmobiling. The WLUC TV6 story mentioned the project launched by Trista Vick-Majors to gather winter-specific lake samples for comparison to summer data, with researchers around the Great Lakes participating in sampling this month. The story was picked up by more than 300 news outlets nationwide, including the Washington Post, Houston Chronicle and Seattle Times.

Trista Vick-Majors
Trista Vick-Majors

Dr. Trista Vick-Majors is a microbial ecologist who studies biogeochemical processes in aquatic ecosystems and microbial communities. She is interested in how microbial communities and their diversity are impacted by physical and chemical characteristics. In addition, her work focuses on how seasonal change or ecosystem change, such as the formation of ice-cover, has an effect on these microbial communities. The interface of microbial ecology and biogeochemistry is where her research takes place.

About the Biological Sciences Department

Biological scientists at Michigan Technological University help students apply academic concepts to real-world issues: improving healthcare, conserving biodiversity, advancing agriculture, and unlocking the secrets of evolution and genetics. The Biological Sciences Department offers seven undergraduate degrees and three graduate degrees. Supercharge your biology skills to meet the demands of a technology-driven society at a flagship public research university powered by science, technology, engineering, and math. Graduate with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to solve real-world problems and succeed in academia, research, and tomorrow’s high-tech business landscape.

Questions? Contact us at biology@mtu.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for the latest happenings.

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In the News: Trista Vick-Majors and the Associated Press

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Trista Vick-Majors (BioSci/GLRC) was quoted by the Associated Press, Canada’s National Observer, ABC News, MLive, Daily Mining Gazette, and Yahoo! News U.K. in a story exploring how an ongoing lack of winter ice cover could change the Great Lakes. The story mentioned a project launched by Vick-Majors to gather winter-specific lake samples for comparison to summer data, with researchers around the Great Lakes participating in sampling this month. The story was picked up by more than 300 news outlets nationwide, including the Washington Post, Houston Chronicle and Seattle Times. Vick-Majors was also interviewed in a WLUC TV6 segment about the impact low snow totals and ice cover have on ecosystems and agriculture.

Trista Vick-Majors
Trista Vick-Majors

Dr. Trista Vick-Majors is a microbial ecologist who studies microbial communities and biogeochemical processes in aquatic ecosystems. She is interested in how physical and chemical characteristics interact with microbial communities and their diversity. In addition, her work focuses on how seasonal change or ecosystem change, such as the formation of ice-cover, impacts these microbial communities. The interface of microbial ecology and biogeochemistry is where her research takes place.

About the Biological Sciences Department

Biological scientists at Michigan Technological University help students apply academic concepts to real-world issues: improving healthcare, conserving biodiversity, advancing agriculture, and unlocking the secrets of evolution and genetics. The Biological Sciences Department offers seven undergraduate degrees and three graduate degrees. Supercharge your biology skills to meet the demands of a technology-driven society at a flagship public research university powered by science, technology, engineering, and math. Graduate with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to solve real-world problems and succeed in academia, research, and tomorrow’s high-tech business landscape.

Questions? Contact us at biology@mtu.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for the latest happenings.

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New Funding: Stephen Techtmann’s Ice Control Co-Op

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Stephen Techtmann is the principal investigator (PI) on a project which has received a $798,426 research and development co-op joint agreement from the U.S. Department of Defense, DARPA. The title of the project is “Ice Control Compounds from Bacterial Isolates and Functional Metagenomics.”

Stephen Techtmann
Stephen Techtmann

Trista Vick-Majors is the co-PI on this potential two and a half year project.

Dr. Stephen Techtmann is an environmental microbiologist who studies microbial communities in diverse ecosystems. In addition to ice control compounds, he studies how complex microbial communities can perform functions of industrial interest. He seeks to use culture-based and culture-independent methods to understand how microbial communities respond to anthropogenic activity and environmental change, in addition to how we can leverage these microbes for a biotechnological application. 

Techtmann has experience in teaching Environmental Microbiology, Microbial Physiology, Applied Genomics, Modern BMB Laboratory, and Principles of Computational Biology.

About the Biological Sciences Department

Biological scientists at Michigan Technological University help students apply academic concepts to real-world issues: improving healthcare, conserving biodiversity, advancing agriculture, and unlocking the secrets of evolution and genetics. The Biological Sciences Department offers seven undergraduate degrees and three graduate degrees. Supercharge your biology skills to meet the demands of a technology-driven society at a flagship public research university powered by science, technology, engineering, and math. Graduate with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to solve real-world problems and succeed in academia, research, and tomorrow’s high-tech business landscape.

Questions? Contact us at biology@mtu.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram, or read the Biological Sciences Newsblog for the latest happenings.

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New Funding: Trista Vick-Majors Collaborative Research

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Trista Vick-Majors
Trista Vick-Majors

Trista Vick-Majors is the principal investigator (PI) on a project that has received a $481,851 research and development grant from the National Science Foundation. The project is titled “Collaborative Research: Advancing a comprehensive model of year-round ecosystem function in seasonally frozen lakes through networked science.” This is a potential four-year project.

About the Biological Sciences Department

Biological scientists at Michigan Technological University help students apply academic concepts to real-world issues: improving healthcare, conserving biodiversity, advancing agriculture, and unlocking the secrets of evolution and genetics. The Biological Sciences Department offers seven undergraduate degrees and three graduate degrees. Supercharge your biology skills to meet the demands of a technology-driven society at a flagship public research university powered by science, technology, engineering, and math. Graduate with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to solve real-world problems and succeed in academia, research, and tomorrow’s high-tech business landscape.

Questions? Contact us at biology@mtu.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for the latest happenings

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In Print: Trista Vick-Majors

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Congratulations to Trista Vick-Majors and colleagues who recently published a paper titled “Constraints on the Timing and Extent of Deglacial Grounding Line Retreat in West Antarctica” in AGU Adventures.

Graph indicating the subglacial core locations along with filling and draining amounts
(a) Southern Ross Sea sector ice streams with previous subglacial core locations (Whillans Subglacial Lake (SLW; Tulaczyk et al., 2014), Whillans Grounding Zone (WGZ; Venturelli et al., 2020), the upstream site at of Whillans Ice Stream (UpB; Engelhardt & Kamb, 1997), and Crary Ice Rise (CIR; Bindschadler et al., 1988) marked with gray circles, Mercer Subglacial Lake (SLM) indicated with a purple circle, and the lake directly upstream Conway Subglacial Lake (SLC) labeled. Ice velocity (Mouginot et al., 2019) is overlain on an imagery mosaic (Scambos et al., 2007), with active subglacial lake areas (blue polygons; Siegfried & Fricker, 2018), hydropotential flow paths (blue lines; Siegfried & Fricker, 2018), and grounding line (black; Depoorter et al., 2013) indicated. (b) Volume changes in Mercer Subglacial Lake inferred from CryoSat-2 radar altimetry (Siegfried et al., 2023) with a yellow star marking the timing of sampling.

Abstract

Projections of Antarctica’s contribution to future sea level rise are associated with significant uncertainty, in part because the observational record is too short to capture long-term processes necessary to estimate ice mass changes over societally relevant timescales. Records of grounding line retreat from the geologic past offer an opportunity to extend our observations of these processes beyond the modern record and to gain a more comprehensive understanding of ice-sheet change. Here, we present constraints on the timing and inland extent of deglacial grounding line retreat in the southern Ross Sea, Antarctica, obtained via direct sampling of a subglacial lake located 150 km inland from the modern grounding line and beneath >1 km of ice. Isotopic measurements of water and sediment from the lake enabled us to evaluate how the subglacial microbial community accessed radiocarbon-bearing organic carbon for energy, as well as where it transferred carbon metabolically. Using radiocarbon as a natural tracer, we found that sedimentary organic carbon was microbially translocated to dissolved carbon pools in the subglacial hydrologic system during the 4.5-year period of water accumulation prior to our sampling. This finding indicates that the grounding line along the Siple Coast of West Antarctica retreated more than 250 km inland during the mid-Holocene (6.3 ± 1.0 ka), prior to re-advancing to its modern position.

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