January 24, 2017
Associate Professor (part time) Phillip Heck, whose main appointment is at the Field Museum, has published a paper in Nature Astronomy in which his team determined that meteorites that hit Earth 466 million years ago were drastically different from those of today. This implies that recent large collisions in the astroid belt, rather than the particular astroids that cross Earth's orbit, tend to determine Earth's meteorite population. Click on the link to read NYTimes coverage of this work.
January 20, 2017
Daniel Koll, who defended his PhD this fall and is now a postdoc at MIT, has won an outstanding student paper award at the December meeting of the American Geophysical Union for his poster titled, "Interpreting Atmospheric Circulations of Rocky Exoplanets as Heat Engines." This prestigious award is only granted to the top 5% of student participants. Congratulations Daniel!
January 19, 2017
Professor David Rowley is the lead author of a new study that combines a geological study of the East Pacific Rise with mantle modeling to show that heat from the core is responsible for roughly half of plate dynamics. This is a shocking revision of previous thinking, which held that plate tectonics was largely driven by plate cooling at the surface. “The implication of our work is that textbooks will need to be rewritten,” says Rowley.