Research Interests:
My interests involve reactive fluid flow and mineralization in sedimentary and volcanic systems in both ancient and modern environments, as well as microbially mediated reactions at the Earth's surface. As a National Geographic Explorer, I primarily focus on the geochemistry of mass extinctions and the paleogeography of shale gas development (particularly during the late Devonian), and manganese geomicrobiology of cave deposits and wetlands.
Research group websites:
News and Updates
- April 2020 - Congratulations to Katie Duckett and Alex Zacher, who won Explorers Club Youth Activity Fund awards to fund their trip to Mongolia! Although the trip has been delayed to due Covid-19, we will get there eventually!
- April 2020 - Congratulations to Allison Dombrowski and Ginny Brown for successfully defending their senior theses! You can check out their work here: 2020 Senior Honor Thesis Presentations
- April 2020 - Thank you so much to my former students for your nomination and letters of support! Dr. Carmichael Earns UNC Board of Governors' Award for Excellence in Teaching
- April 2020 - Congratulations to graduate student Morgan Smith, who was just awarded the KWI Wilson Scholarship!
- March 2020 - Thank you to the Karst Waters Institute for awarding me the 2020 KWI Distinguished Service Award!
- March 2020 - Appalachian's College of Arts and Sciences wrote up a story on my Petrology class - NASA Rocks App State Geological and Environmental Sciences classroom
- December 2019 - Congratulations to graduate student Morgan Smith, who was just awarded a grant from the Cave Conservancy Foundation!
- July 2019 - another DAGGER group paper is published... this one is a culmination of a lot of stuff we've been thinking about for the past few years and we finally compiled it into a review article ("Paleogeography and paleoenvironments of the Late Devonian Kellwasser event: A review of its sedimentological and geochemical expression" by Carmichael et al, 2019). For an institutional repository (NCDocks) copy that includes the immense supplemental table that lists every single F-F boundary section we could find, please click here.
- March 2019 - The DAGGER group publishes the first of a series of new research papers from our work in western Mongolia ("Conodonts from Late Devonian island arc settings (Baruunhuurai Terrane, western Mongolia" by Suttner et al., 2019)
- February 2019 - The DAGGER group (with undergraduate Olivia Paschall as first author!) publishes new work on the D-C boundary and Hangenberg Event in Vietnam (we're not saying it was volcanoes, but it was volcanoes) ("The Hangenberg Event in Vietnam: sustained ocean anoxia with a volcanic trigger?" by Paschall et al., 2019) - institutional repository (NCDocks) copy
- December 2018 - We are awarded the Expedition of the Year Award from the Atlanta Chapter of the Explorers Club for our EC Flag Expedition "Looking for Mass Extinctions in all the Wrong Places"
Note to international students: Appalachian State University's Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences is an undergraduate geology program, and does not have opportunities for graduate students. If you are interested in graduate work with the manganese geomicrobiology research team, you must have a background in microbiology and apply to the MS in Biology program. Please contact Dr. Suzanna Bräuer in the Department of Biology for more information.