Department of Earth, Environmental & Planetary Sciences

Earth History

Investigating how the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, surface, and interior have changed through time to understand fundamentally important climatic, tectonic, and biogeochemical changes.

We use field and geophysical observations, elemental and isotopic analyses, high-pressure experiments, and numerical models to investigate the evolution of the Earth. Research topics include: recent climate reconstruction, glacial-interglacial cycling, the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere, growth of the continents, and cooling of the Earth’s interior. Our community seeks to integrate observations and models of diverse phenomena across different timescales to understand how and why the Earth’s climate, life, and interior have interacted and varied over our planet’s history.

Faculty

Earth History News

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.
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