Donald Rodbell, the Jane and John Wold Professor of Geosciences, has been awarded the Israel C. Russell Award of the Geological Society of America.

The award, given by the Geological Society of America Limnogeology Division, honors major achievements in limnogeology through contributions in research, teaching and service. Rodbell, also a recent Stillman Research Prize winner, has been studying and teaching about lake paleoclimate records for more than 30 years.

Rodbell is an internationally recognized paleoclimatologist, who focuses on lake cores from the Cordillera Blanca, Peru. The GSA gives 17 division awards annually, but Rodbell was the only scientist to represent a small liberal arts college.

The geosciences professor's climate change research in Peru has received generous funding from the National Science Foundation and his work has been published in many journals and publications, most recently in Nature.

The Union College magazine covered a 2015 research trip to Peru in which Rodbell led a group of 30 paleoclimatologists and Union geosciences students to answer some urgent questions on the Earth's climate history.