DEEPS Shorts is a video series highlighting the diverse research within Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. This week, we hear from Justin Custado, a Geochemist studying weathering and climate history in the Philippines. Created by PhD Candidate Élise Beaudin, with support from Communications Specialist Mae Jackson.

DEEPS Graduate Student Sara Cuevas-Quiñones recently published a new paper in Communications Earth & Environment, exploring the morphological, thermophysical, and mineralogical properties of a mountain on the Jezero crater of Mars. Cuevas-Quiñones and her team explain how radioisotope dating of igneous rock samples cached by Perseverance could eventually make this the first volcano of precisely known age on another terrestrial planet.

This summer, DEEPS Assistant Professor Emily H. G. Cooperdock, graduate student Anahi Carrera, and Columbia University Professor Steven L. Goldstein visited the island of Unalaska to collect samples that will help interpret data from a 2015 NSF GeoPRISMS campaign, as well as pave the way for future research.

Each year, AGU celebrates individuals who have made significant contributions to the Earth and space sciences. This year, DEEPS graduate student Manar Al Asad was honored with the 2024 Study of the Earth's Deep Interior Section Award for Graduate Research.

Voss Postdoctoral Research Associate Lina Pérez-Angel discussed the rapid acceleration of climate change in an interview with The Guardian, saying “there’s nothing in Earth’s history that shows a change happening this quickly.”

In a recent study published in Science Advances, DEEPS PhD candidate Manar Al Asad and Assistant Professor Harriet Lau demonstrate that Earth's early tectonic activity was likely very different from what we see today. They propose a 'sluggish-lid' mode, where the Earth's outer layer moved slowly and was partially disconnected from the mantle. The new model addresses previous challenges in understanding Earth's thermal history and tectonic evolution, offering new insights into how Earth's magnetic field is maintained throughout most of Earth's history.

Gabriel Traietti ‘25, concentrating in Geochemistry, investigates the terrestrial paleoclimate of the Congo River Basin in Senior Associate Dean James Russell’s lab. He emphasizes how DEEPS gave him the tools to explore his passion for reconstructing ancient climate to help anticipate the effects of climate change on a local level.

Celia Kong-Johnson ’25 is a rising senior studying Geochemistry and Applied Mathematics who works as a research assistant in Assistant Professor Dan Ibarra’s lab, studying past hydroclimate variability in the Philippines. In our fourth Student Research Story, Celia spoke of the friendliness of DEEPS faculty and the department’s welcoming, tight-knit community.

Recent Postdoctoral Research Fellow Kai-Xun Chen has published a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters, titled “Seismic evidence for a mid-lithospheric discontinuity in 155 million-year-old Pacific lithosphere. Consistent with now-frozen melt that was trapped in the young lithosphere close to the ridge.” The publication lays out evidence for a low velocity layer inside old oceanic lithosphere. Dr. Chen completed this research while he was a postdoctoral researcher in DEEPS, working with Prof. Don Forsyth and Prof. Karen Fischer.

Professor Tim Herbert commented on new research in Science, saying “The dance of global temperature is primarily not called by ice, but more likely by [carbon dioxide]."

In a new paper published in Science Advances, Professor Donald Fisher, a Geosciences faculty member at Penn State and Brown alumnus, and DEEPS Chair Greg Hirth propose that rocks buried deep in ancient subduction zones could help scientists make better predictions of how these zones behave during the years between major earthquakes.

DEEPS PhD students Brianna Hoegler and Jared Nirenberg, with the support of hundreds of fellow scientists, have written a letter to the National Science Foundation expressing their concerns regarding the future of scientific ocean drilling research. The letter is published in AGU Perspectives, and garnered signatures from nearly three hundred scientists, a majority being early career scientists.

DEEPS Professor Timothy D. Herbert spoke with Times Evoke about sea sediments, uncovering secrets of ancient Earth and climate change.

The Brown Daily Herald featured a review of a new EEPS course exploring New England, teaching geological mapping and hands-on skills to ‘read rocks.’EEPS 1250: “New England Field Geology” is teaching hands-on fieldwork skills to 11 students over the course of nine field trips during the semester.

A new 3-year grant from the Department of Energy will investigate carbon storage in soil. The project is led by Rice University scientists, Assistant Professor Mark Torres and Postdoctoral Fellow Evan Ramos. DEEPS Assistant Professor Daniel Ibarra is one of the grant's co-investigators.

Professors Kim Cobb and Alberto Saal have been elected as American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Fellows. They join 53 other individuals in the 2023 Class of Fellows. AGU, the world's largest Earth and space sciences association, annually recognizes a select number of individuals for its highest honors. Since 1962, the AGU Union Fellows Committee has selected less than 0.1% of members as new Fellows.

The ancient glaciers hint at an Archaean Earth that may have looked similar in some ways to our own time. Assistant Professor Dan Ibarra commented on the researchers' work, saying that the Pongola oxygen-18 values “would be some of the highest elevations [found on Earth today] like Tibet or the peaks of the Rocky Mountains."

A new technique for measuring past topography shows the Himalayas were more than halfway to their summit before a continental collision made them the highest range in the world. “Experts have long thought that it takes a massive tectonic collision, on the order of continent-to-continent scale, to produce the sort of uplift required to produce Himalaya-scale elevations,” said DEEPS Assistant Professor Daniel Ibarra. “This study disproves that and sends the field in some interesting new directions.”

Steven Clemens speaks with Srijana Mitra Das at Times of India about the factors that make the Indian monsoon.

Jim Russell, Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, has been elected as a Geological Society of America Fellow. Society Fellowship is an honor in recognition of a sustained record of distinguished contributions to the geosciences.

For the past two years, paleoclimatologist Natasha Sekhon has enriched IBES & DEEPS with her collaborative work. In a recent IBES article, Natasha discussed the connections she's made by teaching at Brown & conducting cave research in the Philippines.

Assistant Professor Gerrit Budde received a Salomon award for his work establishing new procedures for complete sample digestion of meteorite samples utilizing laser-assisted melting and for combined isotope analyses of oxygen and ‘heavy’ elements. Professor Timothy Herbert received a Salomon award for his project developing proof of concept data directly relevant to the long-term stability of the Antarctic ice cap to be submitted to the NSF Marine Geology and Geophysics program.

A new study shows vascular plants may have contributed to shaping Earth’s atmosphere long before trees evolved. DEEPS Assistant Professor Daniel Ibarra, who was not involved in the study, is quoted saying “It would be interesting to see this method applied to the whole time series from the Devonian to our time.”

In a WFLA interview, IBES Director & DEEPS Professor Kim Cobb discusses marine limestone as a climate proxy. “The corals that I work with in the middle of the Pacific Ocean are as good, if not better than the temperature records from satellites.”

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.

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.

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.

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). 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Between 26-15 My ago, forests covering west-central North America gave way to open, grassy habitats. Now, oxygen isotope records suggest this shift is owed to drier winters and increased aridity.