Citation by Thomas C. Johnson
I enthusiastically nominate Prof. Erik T. Brown for the 2025 Israel C. Russell Award. I have known and collaborated with Erik since 1994 when he joined the newly established Large Lakes Observatory (LLO) at the University of Minnesota Duluth. As a Ph.D. student in the joint MIT-WHOI program, followed by a productive 4-year post-doc and research position at the University of Paris-VI in France, Erik's research focused on in situ-produced cosmogenic nuclides, particularly 10Be and 26Al, emphasizing their terrestrial production systematics.
Upon joining LLO, Erik continued studies of past environmental signals preserved in continental sediments, now focusing on inorganic geochemistry of lake sediments, initially measured with ICP-MS. Moving forward, he was instrumental in LLO receiving the second state-of-the-art, scanning x-ray fluorescence system in the U.S. (Woods Hole Oceanographic being the first). Erik was among the first US researchers to employ XRF scanning of lake sediments, demonstrating that the technique provides fast, non-destructive, high-resolution analyses, but also pointing out its limitations.
The advances in XRF core scanning technology occurred at the same time as substantial growth in continental scientific drilling. The rapid analytical capacity of XRF core scanning made it a substantive contribution to many drilling projects over the past 20 years (each recovering 100s of meters of core) including lakes Malawi, Qinghai, Peten Itza, Chalco, Valles Caldera, and the Hominid Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP) and related East African projects at Chew Bahir and Olorgesailie. Through Erik's initiative, his XRF facility has operated as an NSF-supported multi-user facility since 2010, scanning kilometers of core in service to the international geoscience community as part of the National Lacustrine Core Repository/ Continental Scientific Drilling Facility.
Over half of Erik's ~115 peer-reviewed publications, overwhelmingly in first-rate journals and edited books, deal with lakes, for the most part containing XRF scans that have provided key insights into past environmental change.
Erik has taught many courses in geochemistry, oceanography, and environmental sciences over the years at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and I frequently heard from his students that his classes were rigorous but presented with enthusiasm and humor—demanding, useful, and enjoyable.
Erik has had a major impact on the administration of the University of Minnesota Duluth campus in his role as Associate Vice Chancellor for Graduate Education and Research. He instituted orientation programs for early career faculty across campus, established targeted seed grants for new interdisciplinary research projects, and reorganized and expanded the Sponsored Projects Administration Office, making it nimbler and more responsive to opportunities for funding from business and industry.
In summary, Erik's research, teaching and service accomplishments in the fields of environmental science and limnogeology are most impressive. He clearly deserves to be presented the 2025 Israel C. Russell Award by the Limnogeology Division of GSA.
Response by Erik Brown
I would first like to thank Tom Johnson, for his generous words in the citation for the 2025 Israel C. Russell Award.
It is fitting that the Limnogeology Division’s Award is named in honor of Israel Russell—a former GSA president, a founder of the National Geographic Society, and a field geologist and naturalist who combined observations of modern lakes with knowledge of their geological settings in order to unravel their histories. This approach is evident in his seminal studies of the paleolakes of the Great Basin (published in the 1880s) and is reflected in his 1895 treatise Lakes of North America.
Why do we study lakes? In Walden (1854) Henry David Thoreau wrote:
“A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows”
Israel Russell, almost certainly aware of Thoreau’s writing, included the metaphor of lakes as living beings in Lakes of North America:
“Lakes … have life histories which exhibit varying stages from youth through maturity to old age … . The tracing of the life histories of lakes and the recognition of the numerous agencies that vary their lives and lead to their death, gives to this branch of physiography one of its principal charms.”
In our times the “charms” of limnogeology carry growing societal importance. Lake sediments hold records of past environments, providing unique insights on the impact of ongoing anthropogenic changes across a wide swath of the planet, including locations important for our socioeconomic and cultural systems.
I was captivated by the charms of lakes at an early age growing up on the Michigan shores of Lake Superior. In spite of this, I was a bit of a latecomer to limnogeology. After earning an undergraduate chemistry degree at Princeton, and a doctorate in Chemical Oceanography from the MIT/Woods Hole Joint Program, I ended up working in a nuclear physics lab in Paris using cosmogenic nuclides for quantitative studies of geomorphology. After 15 years away from the Upper Midwest, opportunities presented by a new research institute, with commitments for multiple new faculty positions, and with Tom Johnson’s leadership and advocacy, brought me to Minnesota to join the Large Lakes Observatory—then in its infancy—and became part of the limnogeological family. I would like to acknowledge the role of the University of Minnesota Duluth in fostering the LLO’s development into the active and dynamic research institution it is today.
The charms of limnogeology and limnology attract great people. I am fortunate to have had adventures with friends, colleagues and students in Minnesota and from institutions across the planet. This includes many previous Israel Russell Awardees. I would like to take a moment to acknowledge our friend and colleague Andy Cohen, the 2015 Russell Awardee, and who left us far too soon this past February.
I want to thank my family for their ongoing support—for tolerating a husband or father who headed off for fieldwork for extended periods, who sometimes stayed long hours in the office to meet a proposal deadline, and who was even a little cranky when some of those proposals weren’t funded. You guys are the best!
In closing, I am honored to accept this award from the Limogeology Division, but would like to emphasize that science is a collective effort in which any advancement builds on the work and ideas of others. In this spirit, I hope that my contributions lay groundwork to support the efforts of future scientists.