Kirsten Menking

Associate Professor of Earth Science

office: Ely Hall 115
box: 59
phone: 845-437-5545

A.B., Geology, Occidental College, Los Angeles, California, 1990.
Ph.D., Earth Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1995.

Kirsten Menking conducts research on past climate change and on landscape evolution due to climatic and tectonic processes. For her dissertation she took part in a U.S. Geological Survey Project to study sediments from Owens Lake in eastern California where she reconstructed cycles of glaciation and lake level change over the last 800,000 years. More recently she has worked on the climate record contained within Lake Estancia in central New Mexico and on the late glacial and Holocene history of southeastern New York. The latter work has taken her to lakes in the Shawangunk Mts. and to Lozier Pond, a small lake from which the Hyde Park mastodon was unearthed in 2000.

After obtaining her Ph.D., Kirsten worked as a visiting assistant professor at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA where she co-authored an environmental Geology textbook with colleagues Dorothy Merritts and Andrew DeWet. Kirsten joined the faculty at Vassar in the fall of 1997. She teaches courses in Introductory Environmental Geoscience, Geomorphology, Paleoclimatology, Geology and Field Ecology of the Bahamas, Computer Methods and Modeling in Geology, and Structural Geology. In teaching, she enjoys relating the material to students' everyday experiences and using hands-on experiments to illustrate geologic principles.

Selected publications:

Menking, K.M., Anderson, R.Y., Shafike, N.G., Syed, K.H., and Allen, B.D., 2004, Wetter of colder during the Last Glacial Maximum? Revisiting the pluvial lake question in southwestern North America. Quaternary Research, v. 62, p. 280-288.
Menking, K.M., Syed, K.H., Anderson, R.Y., Shafike, N.G., and Arnold, J.G., 2003, Model estimates of runoff in the closed, semiarid Estancia basin, central New Mexico, USA, Hydrological Sciences Journal, v. 48, p. 953-970.
Menking, K.M., and Anderson, R.Y., 2003, Contributions of La Niña and El Niño to middle Holocene drought and late Holocene moisture in the American Southwest, Geology, v. 31, p. 937-940.
Anderson, R.Y., Allen, B.D., and Menking, K.M., 2002, Geomorphic expression of abrupt climate change in southwestern North America at the glacial termination, Quaternary Research, v. 57, p. 371-381.
Menking, K.M., Anderson, R.Y., Brunsell, N.A., Allen, B.D., Ellwein, A.L., Loveland, T.A., and Hostetler, S.W., 2000, Evaporation from groundwater discharge playas, Estancia Basin, central New Mexico, Global and Planetary Change, v. 25, p. 133-147.
Menking, K.M., 2000, A record of climate change from Owens Lake sediment, in Schneiderman, J.S. (ed.), The Earth Around Us: Maintaining a Livable Planet, New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, p. 322-335.
Menking, K.M., Bischoff, J.L., Fitzpatrick, J.A., Burdette, J.W., and Rye, R.O., 1997, Climatic/Hydrologic oscillations since 155,000 yr B.P. at Owens Lake, California, reflected in abundance and stable isotope composition of sediment carbonate, Quaternary Research 48, p. 58-68.
Menking, K.M., 1997, Climatic signal contained in clay mineralogy and grain size variations in the Owens Lake core, eastern California, Geological Society of America Special Paper 317, p. 25-36.
Bischoff, J.L., Menking, K.M., Fitts, J.P., and Fitzpatrick, J.A., 1997. Climatic Oscillations 10,000-155,000 yr B.P. at Owens Lake California Reflected in Glacial Rock Flour Abundance and Lake Salinity in Core OL-92. Quaternary Research, v. 48, p. 313-325.
Anderson, R.S. and Menking, K.M., 1994. The Quaternary marine terraces of Santa Cruz, California: evidence for coseismic uplift on two faults. Geological Society of America Bulletin, v.106, p.649-664.

Books:

Earth Science

Geography

Staff

Earth Science & Geography