The Office of Sustainability and The Climate Solutions Initiative have announced the recipients for the Fall 2022 Seed Grants for Sustainability. Recipients include the research project, "Quantifying Carbon Dioxide and Methane Concentrations in Providence, RI," led by Professor Meredith Hastings, and "Detection and Measurement of Methane Gas Leaks on Brown’s College Hill Campus" led by Caitlyn Carpenter ‘25 and advised by Hastings.

Seven Brown University undergrads and five of the undergrads from the 2022 DEEPS-Leadership Alliance REU are presenting research posters at this year's AGU Fall Meeting. We'd like to congratulate all of these students on their research, and if you are attending the AGU conference we encourage you to see their poster in person. 

Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper explains the effects of different emissions scenarios on our ocean & frozen parts of our planet. Fox-Kemper was one of the Coordinating Lead Authors for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Chapter 9: "Ocean, Cryosphere and Sea Level Change."

A vital part of future planetary science missions will be the development of more inclusive teams. As NASA’s InSight mission comes to its end on Mars, Professor Ingrid J. Daubar and the team share strategies that have helped them to work toward this goal in a new Nature Astronomy article.

NASA has built a new rocket and spacecraft to get astronauts to Earth's nearest neighbor, and it's developing a new toolkit for them to use on the lunar surface as well. Professor James Head reflects on Apollo tool handling with Space.com

Two Brown researchers are part of an international science expedition currently off the coast of Portugal. DEEPS graduate student Bryce Mitsunaga and professor Tim Herbert are at sea onboard the JOIDES Resolution, part of a team that wants to learn more about the past and help us plan for, and possibly avert, the worst impacts of climate change.

Assistant Professor (Research) Christopher Horvat and colleagues, using underwater instruments and a NASA satellite, have found evidence of potentially significant blooms beneath the sea ice encircling Antarctica.

Panelists, including DEEPS professor James Head, discuss the year in space from China’s space station to hidden galaxies.

Professor Laurence Smith reflects on the impact of drought and climate change on “economic powerhouse rivers” and offers ideas to reimagine their use, such as diverting rivers to deposit sediment on fragile coastline or removing structures to restore rivers to a free-flowing state. “Radical new thinking is the only way to make sure our rivers endure,” he said. “There are no new rivers left to tap.”

To better understand the local distribution of air quality, University researchers (including professor Meredith Hastings) are setting up air pollution monitors across Providence in a study called Breathe Providence. Funded by the Clean Air Fund, the study aims to provide communities — especially those of lower socioeconomic status — with data to inform pollution reduction initiatives.

The NASA Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium has opened applications for 2023 scholarships.

DEEPS Assistant Professor Daniel Ibarra shared his thoughts with the Brown Daily Herald in their recent story about Brown's Southeast Asian Studies Initiative: "It’s a way for the students to push the faculty and the upper administration to think: How can we not just be a local university, but how can we expand our global impact?”

DEEPS alumnus David Grinspoon ’82, senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, has been selected by NASA to participate in its independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena, aka UFOs. The first of its kind at NASA, the team will analyze unclassified data on documented UFO sightings with the aim to shed light on the potential nature of the recorded encounters.

“All bets are off” when it comes to how climate systems will respond to more warming, warned DEEPS Professor Kim Cobb. This story is part of an ongoing series answering some of the most fundamental questions around climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet, and how the world is addressing it.

A special review of the DEEPS Mass Spectrometer Naming Contest taking place on Instagram and Twitter.

Ethan Kyzivat, PhD candidate in Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, discusses the challenges in making maps of wetlands and their importance to climate change. This talk was part of Research Matters, featuring short talks about research by Brown University Graduate Students on April 21, 2022.

Kristin Kimble, PhD Candidate in Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, describes how she uses marine sediment from the tropical Pacific Ocean to reconstruct how Earth’s climate has changed from three million years ago to the present. This talk was part of Research Matters, featuring short talks about research by Brown University Graduate Students on April 21, 2022.

NASA’s InSight lander recorded a magnitude 4 marsquake caused by a massive meteoroid strike. “It’s unprecedented to find a fresh impact of this size,” said Assistant Professor (Research) Ingrid Daubar, who leads InSight’s Impact Science Working Group. “It’s an exciting moment in geologic history, and we got to witness it.”

A recent Eos Editors Highlight, titled "Can Anelastic Attenuation of Oceanic Mantle be Reliably Measured?" features research by Postdoc Joshua Russell and Associate Professor Colleen Dalton.

DEEPS is inviting our Instagram and Twitter followers to name two of the department's Mass Spectrometers.

NASA will host a virtual media briefing at 2 p.m. EDT (11 a.m. PDT) on Thursday, Oct. 27, to share new scientific findings based on observations from the agency’s InSight Mars lander and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). One of the participants will be Ingrid Daubar, DEEPS Assistant Professor (Research) and InSight impact science lead.

One of the newest DEEPS faculty members, Assistant Professor Harriet Lau, has received the prestigious Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. This is in recognition of Harriet's outstanding work to understand the relationships between Earth's deformation and climate.

This year, DEEPS graduate student Bryce Mitsunaga and Professor Tim Herbert are participating in the International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 397: Iberian Margin Paleoclimate.

A new paper published by Frontiers, led by Assistant Professor (Research) Christopher Horvat, challenges our current understanding of the Antarctic ecology and the lifecycles of growth that happen under the ice. 

DEEPS Alumna Dr. Karen E. Kohfeld '90 received an Honorary Ph.D. from the Faculty
of Natural Sciences at Stockholm University. She is currently serving as Director and Professor in the School of Environmental Science and Professor in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University.

A recent article by DEEPS Professor Amanda H. Lynch and Maine Law Professor Charles Norchi which appeared in the journal International Law Studies has been awarded the 2022 Myres S. McDougal Prize for International Law. The article is titled "Arctic Navigation and Climate Change: Projections from Science for the Law of the Sea", and is available to read online.

DEEPS Professor Steven Clemens joined Dr. Farah Naureen, Country Director for Pakistan, and Joshua Johnson, host of NBC NOW Tonight, to discuss how low-income countries bear the brunt of climate change.

Assistant Professor Dan Ibarra was featured on the popular educational YouTube channel, "Every Rock Has a Story". 

A new paper co-authored by Associate Professor Ralph Milliken and Senior Research Scientist Takahiro Hiroi examines the Formation and evolution of carbonaceous asteroid Ryugu using samples returned by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft (JAXA mission). DEEPS alumn Seiji Sugita also contributed to the research.

The National Science Foundation ADVANCE Program has funded a $1.2 million collaborative grant to expand on the successful work of the ADVANCEGeo Partnership. Professor Meredith Hastings is one of the principal investigators on the project, which aims to address a range of exclusionary and discriminatory behaviors to better address observed demographic trends in STEM.

An interview with the four Brown University undergraduate researchers who worked on Breath Providence this summer, a research study led by IBES and DEEPS Professor Meredith Hastings.

Each year AGU sections recognize outstanding work within their fields by granting awards and hosting numerous lectures. Professor Kim Cobb, who joined us in July, was named this year's Cesare Emiliani Lecturer for her exceptional work in tropical paleoceanography and paleoclimatology. Harriet Lau, who will be joining us on Jan. 1, won the Jason Morgan Early Career Award from the tectonophysics section for her outstanding contributions in research, education, and outreach.

On Saturday afternoon, August 27th, NASA Apollo Astronaut Dave Scott visited DEEPS Planetary students and staff in Lincoln Filed Building to preview his new movie on the Apollo 15 Mission, the first scientific expedition to the Moon.

Sometimes learning about the past to figure out the future requires crawling beneath tons of rock. Prof. Kim Cobb, Prof. Dan Ibarra, Postdoc Natasha Sekhon, and Grad Cathy Gagnon, and their collaborative fieldwork with partners at Vanderbilt are highlighted in this long-form article in High Country News, exploring Titan Cave (Wyoming). 

Even during the summer break, many DEEPS undergraduate students are engaged in groundbreaking research. We are proud to showcase some of these research projects with this photo series.

As for any consensus among scientists that signs of past or present life have been seen by Perseverance, once again, don't wait for a slam dunk observation. Professor Jack Mustard discusses the Perseverance Rover and the search for life on Mars.

"We're going to see almost a foot – somewhere between nine and 11 inches – of sea level rise by 2050 – a generation and a half, we see that amount," Fox-Kemper explained while standing at the waters’ edge. "And the 2050 numbers are already baked in. So even if we were to cut all of our emissions today, we still are going to see sea level rise."

The SSERVI Awards recognize outstanding achievements in exploration science and recipients have each made unique contributions to NASA’s human exploration efforts. SSERVI Award winners are nominated by their academic peers and are selected by a committee based at SSERVI’s central office. The awards will be presented along with invited lectures from the recipients at the 2022 NASA Exploration Science Forum (NESF).

COSPAR is happy to announce the winners of its 2022 Awards, to be presented during the 44th COSPAR Scientific
Assembly in Athens, Greece. COSPAR bestows a number of medals and awards each year – some jointly with other
institutions or space agencies – upon endorsed candidates of merit.

Why was the long-term global cooling trend of the Cenozoic interrupted by a several-million-year interval of warming during the middle of the Miocene? Herbert et al. present a reconstruction of global ocean crustal production to show that tectonic degassing of carbon can account for most of the long-term ice sheet and global temperature evolution for the past 20 million years (see the Perspective by von der Heydt). These results provide further support for the idea that sea floor spreading rates can control global changes in climate.

Muskrats have been considered so prevalent and unremarkable that even people in tune with environmental goings-on have been unaware of the species’ 50-year decline. Biologists noted the nationwide trend early through trappers’ harvest data, but earnest study is a recent phenomenon.

Brown University students, with a low-cost satellite, are blasting off on a budget.

Sharp fronts and eddies that are ubiquitous in the world ocean, as well as features such as shelf seas and under-ice-shelf cavities, are not captured in climate projections. Such small-scale processes can play a key role in how the large-scale ocean and cryosphere evolve under climate change, posing a challenge to climate models.