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  • Extreme Heat Waves: Why Are They Surging? with Noboru Nakamura

    July 12, 2022

    It’s not your imagination, summers have been getting hotter and hotter with extreme heatwaves occurring earlier and more frequently. But why is this happening and can we better predict heatwaves in advance to give people time to prepare?

    In June of 2021, an unprecedented heatwave shocked the Pacific Northwest and Canada. It ended up being one of the most deadly extreme weather events in the region. But no one could figure out how it occurred, until one Professor of Geophysical Science at the University of Chicago, Noboru Nakamura, saw it as an opportunity to test a new theoretical framework he had developed for understanding atmospheric phenomena.

    Check out the full transcript of this interview right here.

  • Dauphas selected for Mars Sample Return Campaign Science Group

    June 17, 2022

    Louis Block Professor Nicolas Dauphas has been named one of the members of the Mars Sample Return Campaign Science Group. According to NASA, the Group "will be the standard-bearers for Mars Sample Return science. [...] They will build the roadmap by which science for this historic endeavor is accomplished – including establishing the processes for sample-related decision-making and designing the procedures that will allow the worldwide scientific community to become involved with these first samples from another world."

    Samples are now being collected by the Perseverance rover for intended future return to Earth.

    More information can be found at https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-partner-establish-new-research-group-for-mars-sample-return-program

    And at UChicago News

  • UChicago’s Andrew Davis, Nicolas Dauphas and Reika Yokochi are all part of a team that have released first analysis of rocks plucked from speeding asteroid

    June 15, 2022

    “We really haven’t had a sample like this before. It’s spectacular.”-Andrew Davis

    The rock is similar to a class of meteorites known as “Ivuna-type carbonaceous chondrites.” These rocks have a similar chemical composition to what we measure from the sun and are thought to date back to the very beginnings of the solar system approximately four-and-a-half billion years ago—before the formation of the sun, the moon and Earth.

    “We previously only had a handful of these rocks to study, and all of them were meteorites that fell to Earth and were stored in museums for decades to centuries, which changed their compositions,” said geochemist Nicolas Dauphas, one of the three University of Chicago researchers who worked with a Japan-led international team of scientists to analyze the fragments. “Having pristine samples from outer space is simply incredible. They are witnesses from parts of the solar system that we have not otherwise explored.”

    “By examining these samples, we can constrain the temperatures and conditions that must have been occurring in their lifetimes, and try to understand what happened,” Yokochi explained.

    Learn more about the "gift that keeps on giving" right here

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