William Guenthner

Interested in joining our group Fall 2019? Please contact me and apply! We’re looking for MS or PhD students interested in working on projects focused on understanding the erosion history of the Great Unconformity.

Check out our new paper here, led by Alexis Ault at Utah State, on how to best exploit date-eU correlations in zircon

A lot happened in the Guenthner Lab group over the past year.

First, we got funded! Twice! In collaboration with Dave Pearson at Idaho State, Emily Finzel at U. Iowa, and their students, Guenthner Lab PhD student Jenna Kaempfer is currently working on a project examining the timing of the transition from thin-skinned to thick-skinned style thrusting in the Idaho-Montana portion of the U.S. Cordillera. The other big funding news is that the HAL is getting an NSF-supported research scientist that will greatly aid our ability to serve the broader geoscience community for all of their (U-Th)/He needs.

We’ve also published a number of papers in 2017-2018, including PhD student Mike DeLucia’s (co-advised with Steve Marshak) paper (his first!) in Geology. This is an exciting dataset that directly constrains the timing and magnitude of erosion of the Great Unconformity surface. It got some really good press in Eos (click here).

Finally, the HAL moved across the street into its new home in NHB. The noble gas line is already in place and up and running, and the finishing touches are just now being placed in our class 1000 clean room space.

I am excited to announce that a collaborative project with Dr. Jessica Conroy here at UIUC was recently funded by NSF! The project is entitled “Chronologies and mechanisms of last glacial loess deposition in the Central Lowlands of North America” and comes with guaranteed RA support for a PhD student. This project combines detrital zircon U-Pb provenance, stable isotopes in gastropods, and radiocarbon dating of loess from the Last Glacial Maximum in the central U.S. Please contact me or Dr. Conroy if you would like more details.

Check out our new manuscript on “deep-time” thermochronology in the Laramide province of Wyoming:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X16304022

Check out our new article that outlines a new isotope dilution approach to calculating eU concentrations in zircon and apatite. It’s out in G-cubed: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GC006311/full

I had a chance to attend EGU2016 to give an invited talk on some of our recent western U.S. thermochronology results. Thanks to Cecile Gautheron, Pierre Valla, and Raph Pik for organizing a great session!

Just back from a visit and colloquium presentation in the Dept. of Geology (http://geology.usu.edu/) at Utah State. Thanks for the great visit!

I’ve finally checked out this new fangled thing called “Twitter”. Tweet at me here: @HeliumHarvester

I’ll be accepting graduate students for next fall semester (2016). If you’re interested in working on field projects in the western US or diffusion studies in my lab, please fell free to contact me! Email (wrg@illinois.edu) is best.