Department of the GeoPhysical Sciences

Geophysical Science News

• Rossbypalooza2024 is now open for registration!

  April 11, 2024

  Rossbypalooza2024 is now open for registration! Rossbypalooza 2024 aims to provide a platform for interactions among students and faculty to understand climate extremes, their impacts, and their connection to climate change from various perspectives including small-to-large-scale dynamics and data-driven methodologies. For more information on the application process and logistics, see: http://www.rossbypalooza.org/ 

• Sifang Chen Awarded AGU Outstanding Student Presentation Award

  April 04, 2024

  Congratulations to Sifang Chen for being awarded the AGU Outstanding Student Presentation Award! This was based on his presentation, "Basin Effect on Ground Motion Examined Using Laboratory Seismic Data Based on 3D-Printed Los Angeles Basin Structure", in the last AGU of 2023. 

• Congratulations to DOE recipient Logan Cabral-Pelletier

  April 04, 2024

  Congratulation to Logan Cabral-Pelletier on being awarded a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF).  The DOE fellowship provides up to four years of stipend and other benefits to PhD students using hig-performance computing to solve complex sciences and engineering problems. 

• T.C. Chamberlin Fellow Preston Kemeny leads a new holistic look at Earth’s chemical cycling

  March 15, 2024

  T.C. Chamberlin Fellow Preston Kemeny is the lead author of a new holistic look at Earth’s chemical cycling that sheds light on how the planet stays habitable. The study mathematically evaluates a suite of biogeochemical processes to identify combinations of reactions that stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide by balancing fluxes of chemical species among the ocean, atmosphere, and geosphere. Unlike prior modeling efforts, this approach did not prescribe functional relationships between the rates of biogeochemical processes and environmental conditions. Instead, the agnostic framework generates three types of stable reaction combinations: closed sets, where sources and sinks mutually cancel for all chemical reservoirs; exchange sets, where constant ocean – atmosphere conditions are maintained through the growth or destruction of crustal reservoirs; and open sets, where balance in alkalinity and carbon fluxes is accommodated by changes in other chemical components of seawater or the atmosphere. These three modes of operation have different characteristic timescales and may leave distinct evidence in the rock record. Kemeny et al. demonstrate the utility of this framework by applying it to examine and synthesize existing hypotheses for climate change over the last 65 million years. The paper, "Balance and imbalance in biogeochemical cycles reflect the operation of closed, exchange, and open sets" (which also features a contribution from Assistant Professor Clara Blättler), is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.