News and Updates (archive)
December 2021 - Congratulations to Logan Little for successfully defending his senior thesis!
May 2021 - Congratulations to Katie Duckett for successfully defending her senior thesis!
December 2020 - Congratulations to graduate student Morgan Smith, who successfully defended her MS Thesis!
August 2020 - What happens if we burn all the fossil fuels? (Interview with Gizmodo)
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"
December 2017 - Sarah receives National Geographic funding to go to the Gobi Altai, southwestern Mongolia in 2018 to study Late Devonian mass extinctions with the DAGGER group.
November 2017 - Sarah and Johnny are awarded a 2018 Explorers Club Flag Expedition to the Gobi Altai, southwestern Mongolia in 2018 to study Late Devonian mass extinctions (see Explorers Club Flag Expeditions for more information)
April/May 2017 - More manganese, please! The manganese research groups at Appalachian have published two more papers on manganese mineralization, one on in situ biomineral experiments in modern caves ("Carbon quantity and quality drives variation in cave microbial communities and regulates Mn(II) oxidation" by Cloutier et al, 2017) and one on manganese ore deposits in deep time ("New insight into the origin of manganese oxide ore deposits in the Appalachian Valley and Ridge of northeastern Tennessee and northern Virginia, USA" by Carmichael et al., 2017).
March 2017 - Sarah is named a Fellow of the Explorers Club (stories at Appalachian Magazine and Appalachian News)
October 2016 - The Engare Sero research team's radioisotope dates for the human footprints have been published in P-cubed: Radioisotopic age, formation, and preservation of Late Pleistocene human footprints at Engare Sero, Tanzania. This work is now being showcased in the media, at the Washington Post, National Geographic, the Huffington Post, the Daily Mail, and many others!
August 2016 - Sarah (PI) and co-PIs (Ellen Cowan, Jamie Levine, Gabe Casale, and Guichuan Hou) receive NSF-MRI grant (NSF-MRI-EAR #1625137) for purchase of a new scanning electron microscope for the Dewel Microscopy Facility at Appalachian!
August 2016 - Sarah is elected a Councilor for the Mineralogical Society of America (2017-2019)
April 2016 - Congratulations to Travis Hartney '16 for his research award at the 19th Annual Celebration of Student Research and Creative Endeavors!
March 2016 - Sarah receives GRAM (Graduate Research Associate Mentoring) funding for incoming graduate students in the geomicrobiology program.
December 2015 - Sarah and Suzanna Bräuer receive RIEEE-CONCERT funding to study biological Mn oxidation in acid mine drainage at the Ore Knob Superfund Site, Ashe County, NC.
June 2015 - Recent work by DAGGER group published: Shallow water facies setting around the Kačák Event – a multidisciplinary approach, in Devonian Climate, Sea-Level and Evolutionary Events (a Special Publication of the Geological Society of London)
April 2015 - Recent work by the geomicrobiology research group in press: Nutrient input influences fungal community composition and size and can stimulate Mn(II) oxidation in caves, Environmental Microbiology Reports (doi:10.1111/1758-2229.12291)
March 2015 - Recent work by the DAGGER group in press: Climate instability and tipping points in the Late Devonian: Detection of the Hangenberg Event in an open oceanic island arc in the Central Asian Orogenic Belt, Gondwana Research (doi:10.1016/j.gr.2015.02.009)
October 2014 - Sarah wins the William C. Strickland Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from the College of Arts and Sciences
September 2014 - Recent work by the Geomicrobiology Research Group accepted: Microbial diversity and manganese cycling: a review of Mn-oxidizing microbial cave communities, (invited book chapter for Microbial Life of Cave Systems, in Life in Extreme Environments, Volume 3, De Gruyter, Boston, MA) - anticipated publication date of October 2015
April 2014 - Sarah receives a QEP Targeted Learning Grant ("The Rocks Don't Care Where You Live") to develop international collaborations on projects in Paleozoic field sites (with co-PI Johnny Waters).
March 2014 - Congratulations to Cameron Batchelor '16 for receiving the Explorer's Club Youth Activity Grant
Feburary 2014 - Recent work by the DAGGER group published: A New Model for the Kellwasser Anoxia Events (Late Devonian): Shallow Water Anoxia in an Open Oceanic Setting in the Central Asian Orogenic Belt, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (DOI:10.1016/j.palaeo.2014.02.016)
December 2013 - Hot off the presses, all the things you (never?) wanted to know about human feces in caves, and the interplay with manganese oxide mineralization! Evidence of Sustained Anthropogenic Impact in Carter Saltpeter Cave, Carter County, Tennessee, Journal of Cave and Karst Science
December 2013 - Sarah's work on the geochemistry of mass extinctions in the Late Devonian (a collaboration with Dr. Johnny Waters and a UNESCO-sponsored team of international researchers) highlighted in Science Daily.
August 2013 - Sarah traveled to Kunming, China to participate in the NSF- and CNSF-sponsored Sino-US Critical Transitions Workshop: History of Life Evolution in Critical Geological Periodsworkshop. She presented her collaborative work with Dr. Johnny Waters on the geochemistry of the Frasnian-Fammenian extinction.
March 2013 - Recent work by the Carmichael-Bräuer geomicrobiology research group now in press: Mn(II)-oxidizing bacteria are abundant and environmentally relevant members of ferromanganese deposits in caves of the upper Tennessee River Basin (Geomicrobiology Journal).
March 2013 - Sarah receives grant to study the geochemistry of an early human footprinted ash in Tanzania from the Appalachian State University Board of Trustees
January 2013 - Sarah receives ShaRE grant to study biological Mn oxidation via TEM-EELS microscopy at Oak Ridge National Laboratories
June 2012 - Congratulations to Leigh Anne Roble '12 and Aubry DeReuil '13 for presenting their research at the V.M. Goldschmidt Conference in Montreal, QB, Canada.
December 2011 - Carmichael-Bräuer geomicrobiology research group's work on microbial biominerals spotlighted in the Appalachian news
April 2011 - Sarah receives grant to study biominerals from NC Space Grant New Investigator's Program