April 10, 2018
Graduate student Jade Checlair investigated whether tidally locked planets in habitable zones could ever be completely covered by ice, and her research has recently received popular attention online. Jade argues that tidally-locked planets could avoid a global ice-age because it would be difficult to completely glaciate the planet and they would possess a functioning silicate-weather feedback.
April 07, 2018
Graduate student Predrag Popovic and associate professor Dorian Abbot, along with coauthors, have published a new mathematical model to explain the patterns of melt ponds on Arctic Sea ice. Melt ponds are critical for sea ice albedo and therefore modeling the loss of sea ice with global warming in global climate models.
April 06, 2018
Recent astronomical data has indicated that water worlds are likely to be abundant across the cosmos, which has raised questions about how the carbon cycle would function, for example, on a planet covered in 200km of water.
A recent piece in Scientific American tries to answer that question and points to Geophysical Sciences Professor Edwin Kite's work on the habitibility of exoplanet waterworlds. Kite shows that carbon dioxide can shift between ocean and atmosphere to maintain a habitable surface temperature that persists for more than 1 billion years.