Department of the GeoPhysical Sciences

Geophysical Science News

• Bergner will be this week’s speaker in the PSD Origin of Life Series

  October 27, 2020

  DoGS very own Hubble-Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow Jenny Bergner will be this week's speaker in the Physical Sciences Division's Origin of Life Series.

• Ted Fujita: How one scientist reshaped what we know about tornadoes

  October 27, 2020

  UChicago News remembers Ted Fujita, the professor who was known as "Mr. Tornado," and his groundbreaking research that saved thousands of lives.

  

• Heard and Dauphas constrain transient oxygenation events on Archean Earth

  October 22, 2020

  What factors controlled the accumulation of atmospheric oxygen gas (O₂) early in the history of Earth? In a paper just published in Science, graduate student Andy Heard and Louis Block Professor Nicolas Dauphas used high-precision iron isotopic measurements of Archean-Paleoproterozoic sediments, with ages between 3.8 billion and 2.3 billion years ago, and laboratory data about synthetic pyrites to show that pyrite, or iron sulfide, burial could have resulted in net O₂ export. These reactions therefore may have contributed to early episodes of transient oxygenation before the Great Oxidation Event that began about 2.4 billion years ago.

• Bergner talks about the possibility of life on Venus on WGN9

  September 22, 2020

  Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Jenny Bergner, shared her thoughts on the possibility of life on Venus with WGN9.