May 11, 2021
April 26, 2021
Early Mars had rivers and lakes, which is surprising because the planet orbited far from a faint star - the young Sun. Assistant Professor Edwin Kite and former postdoctoral researcher Liam Steele (now at JPL) used a global climate model to show that warm climates can be explained through the greenhouse effect of high-altitude water ice clouds. The results have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
April 09, 2021
Department Chair Fred Ciesla has co-authored two new papers that examine carbon and its role in creating the building blocks for the beginning of Earth as a planet. The papers propose a new theory that winnows down the formation of Earth's building blocks into the first million or so years of the solar system's existence from a previously estimated period of 150 million years.