Department of Earth, Environmental & Planetary Sciences

A recent study utilizes ancient plant waxes preserved in sediments from two Utah lakes to investigate ancient climate history. Assistant Professor Dan Ibarra noted that a key reason for analyzing the hydrogen isotopes is to compare the climate patterns revealed by the plant wax to the patterns predicted by current climate models.

DEEPS Assistant Professor Dan Ibarra and Postdoc Gavin Piccione are co-leaders on a collaborative research project funded by the National Science Foundation to examine how climate behaved in past climates when large lakes existed in the Mojave Desert.

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.

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."

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.