Celebrate the 2025 Friend of Darwin and Friend of the Planet awardees in this recording of our virtual celebration. Hear from the winners, including DEEPS Professor and IBES Director Kim Cobb.

Increasingly severe rain storms are straining an aging city and campus infrastructure. Beneath the recently renovated Ruth J. Simmons Quadrangle, Brown installed water storage tanks “that will accept the high volume” of rainwater produced during high-intensity storms. “There’s not a single campus across the country that is immune to climate-related impacts and threats to its infrastructure,” commented DEEPS Professor and IBES Director Kim Cobb. “You often do need to wait to see those impacts on the ground before you make the deep investments.”

Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper is leading Brown’s team in the SIMCoast initiative modeling microplastics in the Narragansett Bay.

As Project Scientist for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, Associate Professor Ingrid Daubar is at the forefront of efforts to explore Jupiter's icy and intriguing moon Europa. In this article, she shares insights into the mission’s objectives, the challenges of deep space exploration, and the quest to determine whether Europa could support life.

This new policy brief, co-authored by Professor Amanda Lynch, situates the algorithmic transformation of Arctic WWC services within its broader legal and security context. It concludes by outlining three domains for policy intervention: international organisations, international law and international security.

As we prepare for the Spring 2026 semester, DEEPS is proud to announce our upcoming course options.

A recent paper co-authored by Assistant Professor Daniel Ibarra supports the hypothesis of a negative feedback that limits atmospheric carbon dioxide decline during glacial periods.

DEEPS PhD student Alejandra Lopez describes her research on the Salton Sea alongside community volunteers. Through rigorous science and community engagement, Alejandra's work on the Salton Sea Project is demonstrating what environmental research can accomplish when it centers the needs and knowledge of those most impacted.

The Brown Daily Herald highlighted this semester's Thomas A. Mutch Lecture, featuring Benjamin Weiss, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who spoke about his recent research on the lunar dynamo. Weiss argued the magnetic field dissipated as recently as 800 million years ago, which is over one billion years later than previous hypotheses. Attendee Nandita Kumari, a postdoctoral research associate conducting planetary and lunar research at Brown, said these findings can improve the understanding of lunar properties.

This new work combines experimental petrology and modeling to understand the conditions of sedimentary diapir formation occurring in subduction zones. Led by collaborators at University of Arizona along with DEEPS Assistant Professor Emily Cooperdock, the authors find that subducted sediments are unlikely to form diapirs except in warm, slow subducting systems. Sedimentary diapirs may contribute to arc magmatic geochemical signatures under these specific conditions.

DEEPS PhD candidate Hannah Shabtian and Professor Greg Hirth have published a new paper in Geophysics Research Letters. "The paper describes novel characterization of talc rheology and some cool applications of our flow law for understanding strength of earth's crust in subduction zones," Shabtian shared.

Assistant Professor Dan Ibarra, undergraduate alumnus Jonah Bernstein-Schalet, former Postdoctoral Researcher Evan Ramos, and graduate student Sebastian Munoz are coauthors on a recent publication in JGR Biogeosciences. Their research looks into CO2 emissions from headwater streams, comparing chemical signatures of river water samples taken from an Oregon watershed with both very steep and very shallow-sloping rivers. "Results from this study may impact our estimates of how rivers move carbon across the earth's surface and exchange carbon dioxide with the atmosphere."

DEEPS Chair, Professor Meredith Hastings discussed the air quality in Providence, as monitored through her Breathe Providence project.

Last week, DEEPS scientists came together for the Department Poster Session! This annual event allows students, postdocs, faculty, and research groups to introduce their recent work, explore the wide variety of research happening in the department, and meet new additions to the the DEEPS community.

Assistant Professor Daniel Ibarra is co-author of this study, which provides a new framework for examining how organisms have fundamentally altered ecosystems on a global scale across hundreds, thousands, or millions of years.

Assistant Professor Mara Freilich is co-editor on a new book, "Climate Changed: Models and the Built World," available now through Colombia University Press. The book examines models and their imperfect yet central role in understanding the relationship between global climate dynamics and the human-built environment. It compares and synthesizes the methods and function of models in disciplines ranging from architecture and planning to climate science and natural hazards research.

DEEPS PhD student Alejandra López contributes to two new briefs revealing widespread nutrient pollution, dangerously low oxygen levels in the lake, and frequent episodes of hydrogen sulfide emissions that exceed California’s health standards—conditions occurring among residents in areas that rank among the most burdened by pollution in the state. López noted, “Families live with chronic exposure to pollutants that would never be tolerated elsewhere. We call for enforceable standards and local-focused solutions that put residents at the center of restoration.”

New research offer clues to Mars’s history, including what violent collisions it experienced in the past and how it lost its magnetic field. Professor Ingrid Daubar, former member of the InSight science team, commented on these recent studies, saying, “There are connections to our own planet, to how planets form in general and to how we understand different planets outside our solar system.”