Welcome to GeoUnion, the graduate student body of the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. GeoUnion strives to supplement the overall graduate student experience at Rice and DEEPS. GeoUnion represents DEEPS in the overall Rice grad student community, acts as a liaison between students and faculty and organizes a number of intra- and inter-departmental events throughout the academic year.
Date | Event |
---|---|
August 19-23 | O-Week |
September 6-8 | Overnight Camping at San Marcos |
September 13 | Welcome Barbecue |
Cancelled because of Imelda | Pre-GSA talk |
October 12-15 | Field Trip to Big Bend |
October 25 | Halloween Kickball Tournament |
November 26 | Multicultural Thanksgiving! |
Dec 6 | Pre-AGU practice session |
TBA | Enlightenment |
Here’s a list of the resources that you would need to use frequently as graduate students at Rice. The websites of the Rice Graduate Student Association (GSA), Office of International Students and Scholars (OISS), Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS) are platforms which graduate students can use to keep track of upcoming events, funding opportunities, changes in rules and regulations, etc.
Living in a vast city like Houston and exploring a new place can also be challenging, and so we have compiled a list of recommendations for housing and fun things to do in the Space City!
PNAS: A lead isotope perspective on urban development in ancient Naples
A lead isotope perspective on urban development in ancient Naples
Hugo Delile, Duncan Keenan-Jones, Janne Blichert-Toft, Jean-Philippe Goiran, Florent Arnaud-Godet, Paola Romano and Francis Albarède
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2016: doi: 10.1073/pnas.1600893113
A well-dated sedimentary sequence from the ancient harbor of Naples sheds new light on an old problem: could the great AD 79 Vesuvius eruption have affected the water supply of the cities around the Bay of Naples? We here show, using Pb isotopes, that this volcanic catastrophe not only destroyed the urban lead pipe water supply network, but that it took the Roman administration several decades to replace it, and that the commissioning of the new system, once built, occurred nearly instantaneously. Moreover, discontinuities in the Pb isotopic record of the harbor deposits prove a powerful tool for tracking both Naples’ urbanization and later major conflicts at the end of the Roman period and in early Byzantine times.
NATURE GEOSCIENCE: Two step rise of atmospheric oxygen
Two-step rise of atmospheric oxygen linked to the growth of continents
Cin-Ty A. Lee, Laurence Y. Yeung, N. Ryan McKenzie, Yusuke Yokoyama, Kazumi Ozaki, & Adrian Lenardic
Nature Geoscience (2016) doi:10.1038/ngeo2707
Earth owes its oxygenated atmosphere to its unique claim on life, but how the atmosphere evolved from an initially oxygen-free state remains unresolved. The rise of atmospheric oxygen occurred in two stages: approximately 2.5 to 2.0 billion years ago during the Great Oxidation Event and roughly 2 billion years later during the Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event. We propose that the formation of continents about 2.7 to 2.5 billion years ago, perhaps due to the initiation of plate tectonics, may have led to oxygenation by the following mechanisms. In the first stage, the change in composition of Earth’s crust from iron- and magnesium-rich mafic rocks to feldspar- and quartz-rich felsic rocks could have caused a decrease in the oxidative efficiency of the Earth’s surface, allowing atmospheric O2 to rise. Over the next billion years, as carbon steadily accumulated on the continents, metamorphic and magmatic reactions within this growing continental carbon reservoir facilitated a gradual increase in the total long-term input of CO2 to the ocean–atmosphere system. Given that O2 is produced during organic carbon burial, the increased CO2 input may have triggered a second rise in O2. A two-step rise in atmospheric O2 may therefore be a natural consequence of plate tectonics, continent formation and the growth of a crustal carbon reservoir.
A Graduating Senior’s Geologic Retrospective
I am Adeene Denton, a senior in this Earth Science department, and that means I’m graduating in a very short time because Rice has decided that I am worthy even if I still feel like I have so, so much to learn. I want to thank the department and look back on what it did for me, and all of us.
There are not enough words to explain how grateful I am to this department, or to express what it has done for me. It was in my classes here that I learned how to think like a scientist, how to frame my questions and shape my logic. This department taught me how to think as it fed me information, and it gave me some of the best friends I’ve ever had in the cohort that I graduate with this year.
Very few of the Earth Science majors graduating this year came in to Rice as Earth Science. This is common – maybe it’s because most of us were barely taught earth science in high school, if at all. Maybe it’s because we thought we should be engineers – or lawyers, in my case – based on the people we knew were successful back home. I came in to Rice convinced that I would be a lawyer or a politician, and the metric of my success would be measured by the quality of the suits I would wear or the slickness of my vocabulary.
Then I discovered the Earth Science department, in a crazy turn of events that led to me taking Dr. Alan Levander’s ESCI 324 as a freshman – a class that turned out to be incredibly hard for a humanities major who hadn’t taken physics since freshman year of high school, but also incredibly rewarding. When Alan traced the Earth’s formation back to the Big Bang, vividly describing how the swirling dust of the planetary disk formed the hot, wobbly Earth, I knew I was hooked for life. I wanted to understand the Earth more than anything – from how the mountains rise and fall to the stratification of its interior to its rapidly changing atmosphere and everything in between.
Since then, I’ve taken as many classes in this department as possible, and gotten to know so many absolutely amazing, inspirational people. I want to thank the professors of this department for teaching and inspiring me, for instilling all of us with knowledge and making it fun at the same time. Thank you to Dr. Alan Levander, who taught my first Earth Science class, and ensured that I would one day write this. To Dr. John Anderson, Dr. Jerry Dickens, and Dr. Jeff Nitrouer, for introducing us to sedimentation, to rivers and oceans and keeping us from drowning in our workloads. To Dr. Juli Morgan for teaching us that rocks, like college students, are also subject to stress and strain. To Dr. Cin-Ty Lee and Dr. Raj Dasgupta for teaching us our rocks and minerals, so hopefully I will never misidentify a brick as a rock again. To Dr. Helge Gonnermann for taking us out into the field where we learned how to make theoretical knowledge really, really practical, and that geology does not mean one right answer. To Helge and Dr. Adrian Lenardic for helping with my senior thesis and making sure I produce good scientific work and can explain it well. Thank you to all the other professors I have met and worked with – Dr. Dale Sawyer, Dr. Carrie Masiello, Dr. Colin Zelt, and everyone else. If I am a good scientist at all, it is because all of you were there to teach and help me.
It was with this department and its people that we learned that science is not bright and shiny and we pushed onwards anyway – that science sometimes means spending five hours in the lab only to realize that you set the wrong spot size on the laser, or trying to find the bug in your code and see that it’s a missing semicolon in the third line. But that breakthrough moment – that moment is worth everything. That moment when you are standing in the middle of nowhere, looking at the notes on your field map that is so worn it’s tattered, and suddenly the pieces fall together and you know.
We joined this department because we all wanted to know, deep in ourselves, how the earth works. How to map it, how it shapes itself, how it was born and where it will go. Now, we go to grad school or to jobs or to keep figuring ourselves out, still not entirely sure of our passions, but so much surer of our directions than when we came in. I am who I am because of the incredible people in this department, and I am forever grateful that I found this place and these rocks and these humans who love rocks right along with me. There are eleven undergrads leaving Rice, but we are coming out as capable scientists, ready to pursue completely different life paths. We came here looking to understand how the earth works. Maybe an era or an eon from now, we’ll know.
IMPORTANT NOTICE
Because of COVID-19, the field trip is being postponed to later (date TBD) this year. The seminar will continue via remote meetings through the end of the Spring 2020 semester.
As earth scientists we seek to understand the natural processes that have shaped the world around us through time. The most fundamental requirement to acquiring a deeper understanding of these mechanisms is through observation. EEPS has a strong heritage in field-based research that when combined with analytical excellence, produces skilled scientists with a broad view of Earth as a system. While Rice University is well placed to take advantage of a broad array of research resources, students in Houston do not always have immediate access to nearby geological sites that represent Earth as a system.
A generous gift from Mike Johnson enables EEPS students the opportunity to observe classic and fundamental geologic concepts in the field. Students are in charge of proposing, selecting and managing a field excursion that will benefit everyone in the department. A year-long seminar-based class run by the students prepares them to visit the locality they have selected. Papers are selected, presented and discussed, followed by activities that educate the students on how to run a field-based project. During the field excursion, elected stops will be led and presented by individual students. The knowledge gained before and during the field trip will cumulate into a multi-media field guide that will be made available to the department and public following the trips conclusion.
A significant benefit of a department-wide field excursion is the interaction of students with scientists from various disciplines. Many earth scientists only carry out field work with specialists in their own field. The real discoveries in modern earth science occur when the different disciplines are part of a collective discourse. This trip will have scientists with different backgrounds observe the same outcrops; fostering fruitful discussion that results in the generation of new and unique questions. In addition, this trip may inspire fellowship among EEPS graduate students that will hopefully create life-long collaborations and a cohesive department.
General route starting in Albuquerque, New Mexico
This year, EEPS elected to utilize Mike Johnson’s gift to lead graduate students on a 7 day field expedition to observe some of the most diverse and economically important geologic terrains in the United States.
In early June of 2020, EEPS will travel through New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, which have easily accessible exposures of metamorphic, sedimentary, and igneous rocks. Starting from Albuquerque, New Mexico they will explore the Rio Grande Rift, the San Juan Volcanic field, and the well exposed Mezozoic stratigraphy on the Colorado Plateau. Observing these diverse geologic terrains will give EEPS graduate students a chance to see how their research interests dovetail with what they observe in nature and provide opportunities to create new ideas.
Pre-Trip planning seminars
Fall semester: The graduate student of the winning field trip proposal organizes a weekly reading group focusing on the regional geology of the four corners region and come up with potential stops.
Spring semester: The weekly reading group continues. Students pick the final outcrops that they would like to visit. Each student is assigned to be an expert on 1-3 stops. Before the field trip, each student will submit their description(s) of their stop for the field guide.