From Early Earth to Acid Rain and Agriculture: A Broad Look at the Changing Global Sulfur Cycle

Sulfur (S) is a key component of life and an element that has been dramatically changed by human industrial activities, including mining and fossil fuel combustion. Today, the nature of how humans alter the global S cycle is changing. As atmospheric S deposition has declined in response to air quality regulations in the United States and Europe, there has been an increase in S fertilizer applications reported in many large-scale regional crop systems. In addition, intensification...

TBD

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The role of meltwater in reshaping the structures of icy porous media

Icy porous materials such as snow or firn are ubiquitous in both Earth and planetary settings. Their microstructures (e.g., porosity) play an important role in dictating the reflectivity, fluid storage capacity, thermal conductivity, and mechanical properties of the larger-scale systems. Thus, understanding the complex physics that control the microstructure evolution of icy porous media is an important component in creating robust predictions of Earth’s cryosphere in response to climate warming, and in...

The Deep Earth Oxygen Cycle

Earth’s mantle has been oxidized compared to its cosmochemical building blocks since the earliest Hadean. This oxidation is linked to Earth’s initial differentiation, including processes in magma oceans, but these remain poorly understood. During its subsequent evolution to the present, Earth has developed a substantial oxidized surface reservoir that amounts to approximately 20% of the oxidative power of the accessible Earth, with the other 80% remaining in the mantle. This surface reservoir is essential to the modern surface environment, but...

Forest Recovery from Hurricane Disturbances

Hurricanes are a major disturbance to tropical forests. We used census observations at Bisley Experimental Watersheds (BEW) in Puerto Rico to study the mortality after hurricane Hugo in 1989 and after hurricane Maria in 2017 and the subsequent recovery of the forest after hurricane Hugo between 1989 and 2014 (the last census before hurricane Maria). We found that hurricane-induced mortality varied with species/plant functional types (PFTs) and stem sizes. Specifically, palms had the lowest mortality, followed by mid and late...

Talk Title:  Raising our expectations for DEI work in geoscience faculty evaluation systems: an insight into who sustains this work and how this labor is recognized and rewarded

Abstract: The geosciences have an ethical obligation to increase the low racial and...

Talk Title:  The Thermal Histories of Solar System Moons and Small Bodies

Abstract:  The heat flow of a planetary body plays a major role in defining its evolution and current composition, driving processes from internal differentiation during its formation period through geological activity at the current time. However, these same active processes erase many of the surface signatures that would allow us to reconstruct its long-term thermal history. In this talk, I will present novel observational approaches, using primarily the ALMA interferometer...