Students in 322 go on a geology trip across southern California led by their professor Cin-Ty Lee and graduate student Hehe Jiang. This is a mid-term field trip that the department has used to give a students a chance to apply some of their classroom knowledge to the field. When it comes to looking at […]
Masiello award $1 million dollar grant from the Keck Foundation to engineer microbial biosensors for soil [Article]
New faculty paper out! See Laurence Yeung’s paper on a new type of biological signature from the “clumping” of rare isotopes in O2, published in Science. [article] Abstract The abundances of molecules containing more than one rare isotope have been applied broadly to determine formation temperatures of natural materials. These applications of “clumped” isotopes rely […]
Graduating senior Rachel Marzen receives NSF graduate research fellowship.
[article]
New student paper out! Matt Weller, publishing in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, finds that planets migrate through tectonic states over time as their surface temperatures change. A planet even can have multiple stable tectonic states over time! [article] Abstract We use 3D mantle convection and planetary tectonics models to explore the links between tectonic […]
ESCI 334 is one of the Earth Science department’s capstone undergraduate courses. The field trip takes us to a location near San Ysidro, New Mexico, because of the easy access to phenomenal rock exposures, which span approximately one billion years of geological time. Students map in detail rocks that were folded and faulted during the […]
How do you get water back into the mantle? Serpentinites, of course! The main source of water in magmatic arcs like the Cascades comes from altered oceanic lithosphere. Interaction of the seafloor results in extensive hydration of the crust and lithospheric mantle, resulting in the conversion of olivine-rich rocks (peridotite) to a green phyllosilicate-bearing rock […]
A new micro-XRF element mapper (Horiba XGT 7000) has been installed on the third floor. This instrument excites atoms using a Rhodium x-ray source and measures the energy of the re-emitted x-rays using energy dispersive spectrometry. This instrument generates qualitative elemental maps at 50 or 100 micron spatial resolution and can handle sample sizes up to 10 […]
Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences
Rice University
MS-126
6100 Main Street
Houston, TX 77005 USA
Phone: 713.348.4880
Fax: 713.348.5214
Email: geol@rice.edu
