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!
ESCI 555 – Mountain building, carbon cycling, and climate (spring, 2015)
ESCI 555. SEMINAR ON INTERPLAYS BETWEEN MOUNTAIN BUILDING, CLIMATE, AND GLOBAL CARBON CYCLING
Spring, 2015
Instructors: Albarede, Blichert-Toft, Dasgupta, Gonnermann, Lee, Lenardic, Levander, Morgan, Niu, Oncken, Yeung, Yokoyama, Nittrouer, Masiello, Gordon, Dickens
MONDAY: 12-2 PM, Geology 100
This course will meet once a week for two hours to discuss the interplays between tectonics, specifically mountain building, with climate and the global carbon cycle. We will discuss the different tectonic and geodynamic processes that drive mountain building and surface uplift, such as subduction, continent collisions, and magmatism. We will also discuss how uplift influences climate, erosion, weathering and sedimentation, and how climate, in turn, influences uplift. We will interrogate various geologic archives to evaluate whether major long-term climatic events correlate with observed geologic events, such as enhanced mountain building, sedimentary deposition, and changes in biogeochemical cycling. The goal of this seminar is to bring together expertise from vastly different fields to address an inherently interdisciplinary problem.
In the first hour of each session, a faculty or graduate student/post-doct will provide a general overview of a particular topic and lead the discussions. One or two papers will be discussed in the second hour with the aim of ending with a series of important questions to follow up on. Students will be expected to follow up on the discussed topics and present a synthesis at the end of the course. This synthesis should identify key questions for future research and provide a roadmap for how these questions can be addressed or answered. Each student team will consistent of 2 students and one faculty mentor. The two students should come from different disciplines, e.g., seismologist and geochemist, in order to take advantage of the interdisciplinary setting.
Discussions on REDDIT
We have set up a Reddit account for ALL the faculty and ONLY students who signed up on the paper today. Visit http://www.reddit.com/r/RiceESCI555/ to use the forum. Bookmark this page, and use it to access the forum, not the overall reddit homepage. Your username is first initial (lowercase), full last name (lowercase), underscore, ESCI (e.g. amoodie_ESCI). You can change the password in the settings if you want to. If you have two initials (e.g. Cin-Ty) we used both initials, and we used full names whenever we knew them (e.g. Gerald Dickens).
26 January – Overview of Mountains and climate (Cin-Ty Lee)
Required reading – click here for presentation
Raymo and Ruddiman, 1992, Tectonic forcing of late Cenozoic climate, Nature 359:117-122.
Supplemental reading
2 February – Kinematics of mountain building, mass fluxes, tectonics, erosion (ONNO ONCKEN)
Required reading – click here for presentation
Whipple, KX (2009)The influence of climate on the tectonic evolution of mountain belts. NATURE GEOSCIENCE, Volume: 2, 2: 97-104, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo413
Strecker, MR;Alonso, RN; Bookhagen, B; Carrapa, B; Hilley, GE; Sobel, ER; Trauth, MH (2007) Tectonics and climate of the southern central Andes. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 35: 747-787; DOI: 10.1146/annurev.earth.35.031306.140158
Supplemenral reading:
9 February – Paleo-altimetry: prospects and pitfalls(LAURENCE YEUNG)
Required:
Rowley and Garzione, 2007, Stable-isotope based paleoaltimetry, AREPS 35:463-508
Supplemental:
Garzione et al. 2008, Rise of the Andes, Science 320:1304-1307.
16 February – Deep structure of continents and mountains
readings
23 February – Glacial Buzz saw (JOHN ANDERSON)
9 March – Origin of melts of orogenic processes (Cin-Ty Lee)
16 March – Exhumation, paleoclimate (Yusuke Yokoyama)
23 March – Global volatile cycling (e.g., carbon), metamorphism, volcanism (RAJDEEP DASGUPTA)
30 March – Thermochronology (Francis Albarede)
Reiners and Brandon, 2006, Using thermochronology to understand orogenic erosion, AREPS 34:419-466
6 April – Free-form discussions (Julia Morgan moderator)
Students should self-organize and come prepared to informally discuss some of the past lectures, highlighting what they think were some of the key points and laying out a list of outstandi36:531-567ng questions. Students should work things out on the white-board, i.e., no need for powerpoints. Julia Morgan will moderate.
13 April – Magma emplacement (Helge Gonnermann)
Kohn, M. J., 2014, Himalayan metamorphism and its tectonic implications, AREPS 42:381-419.
20 April – Student presentations
Rice Earth Scientists at CIDER 2015 Summer Program
Several Rice Earth Scientists (PhD students Laura Carter, Shuo Ding, Michael Farner, and Lacey Pyle, post-doc Julia Ribiero, and Professor Helge Gonnermann) have just returned from the month-long CIDER workshop hosted at UC Berkeley in California. CIDER (Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth Research) is a FESD-funded grant tasked with the ambitious goals of: 1) providing an optimal environment for transformative studies requiring a concerted effort of leading researchers from different areas of Earth Sciences: high pressure material science, geodynamics, seismology, geochemistry and geomagnetism, and 2) educating a new generation of Earth scientists with breadth of competence across the disciplines contributing to understanding of the deep earth.
This summer’s theme was “Solid Earth Dynamics and Climate—Mantle Interactions with the Hydrosphere and Carbosphere,” (http://www.deep-earth.org/summer15.shtml) focusing on interactions between the mantle and the major surface reservoirs of water and carbon influence sea level, icesheet dynamics, the volume of the ocean, magma production, the volcanic flux of CO2 to the atmosphere, and the loss of carbon via subduction into the mantle. The first 2 weeks were lecture-based. Lectures were given by various renowned senior scientists in various disciplines from all over the world, with topics including solid Earth dynamics, ocean/glacial loading driving volcanism, paleoclimate models and sensitivity. In afternoon tutorials, we learned how to use various computational, laboratory, and field based tools, including ASPECT (convection software), SEATREE (seismic tomography software), MELTS (melting/crystallization software), cheese deformation (hands-on lab about rheology, see picture with Shuo and Mike in the upper left corner), and CO2 diffusive degassing (in-the-field measuring with CO2 IR sensor). The last 2 weeks we were broken up into student-run groups, each focusing on a different research question relating to what we’d learned in the first 2 weeks. Shuo was part of a group investigating the transport of carbon between atmosphere/ocean and the Earth’s interior in the Archean, Laura and Lacey calculated CO2 fluxes in the Eocene to explain anomalous global temperature curves, Mike and Helge explored the effects of glacial melting on Mount Mazama eruptions, and Julia looked into the fate of water in bend faulting during subduction.
We all thoroughly enjoyed our experience. We learned a lot about various aspects and in diverse disciplines within Earth Science, and networked with colleagues and well-established senior scientists. We presented our own research in poster sessions, and look forward to continuing collaborations started with CIDER projects. California was also a beautiful location, and many of us took advantage of the local mountains and ocean on the weekend, for example hiking at Yosemite National Park (see picture with Laura Carter and Lacey Pyle).
Students in the Rice Earth Science department have a long-running tradition of attending this workshop each year. If interested, you can find more information about the fully-funded summer 2016 program, titled “Flow in the Deep Earth” at http://www.deep-earth.org/summer16.shtml (applications end February 1, 2016). Additionally, CIDER hosts a 1-day pre-AGU workshop where summer 2015 participants will present their projects, and invited speakers will introduce the theme for summer 2016 (sign up to attend here: http://www.deep-earth.org/preagu2015.shtml).
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.