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.

The field of seismology is entering a new era where our understanding of earthquakes and the solid earth is increasingly driven by new Big Data experiments and algorithms.

2022 Brown University Library Innovation Prizes & Carney Institute Brain Science Reproducible Paper Prize

Imprint of the Continental Strike-Slip Fault Geometrical Structure in Geophysical Data

Research Matters, hosted by the Graduate School, is a live event, featuring short talks by graduate students and other scholars from the Brown community on “Why my research matters”. These brief talks showcase exceptional graduate student scholarship and celebrate their discoveries and ideas.

The U.S. National Science Foundation has named its awardees for this year's Alan T. Waterman Award, the nation's highest honor for early-career scientists and engineers.

A new global analysis of the last 19 million years of seafloor spreading rates found they have been slowing down. Geologists want to know why the seafloor is getting sluggish.

DEEPS Visiting Scientist and NASA Citizen Science Officer Marc Kuchner facilitated a seminar on the growing importance of “citizen science” — an uncoordinated collection of independent volunteers around the world — in advancing the discovery of exoplanets and planet formation.

Professor Meredith Hastings Receives Award

New study led by UMass Amherst suggests that increasing aridity, not temperature change, contributed to the Norse abandonment of Greenland settlements in the 15th century.