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!
Nature Communications: Molecular hydrogen in minerals as a clue to interpret ∂D variations in the mantle
B. N. Moine, N. Bolfan-Casanova, I. B. Radu, D. A. Ionov, G. Costin, A. V. Korsakov, A. V. Golovin, O. B. Oleinikov, E. Deloule & J. Y. Cottin
Abstract
Trace amounts of water dissolved in minerals affect density, viscosity and melting behaviour of the Earth’s mantle and play an important role in global tectonics, magmatism and volatile cycle. Water concentrations and the ratios of hydrogen isotopes in the mantle give insight into these processes, as well as into the origin of terrestrial water. Here we show the presence of molecular H2 in minerals (omphacites) from eclogites from the Kaapvaal and Siberian cratons. These omphacites contain both high amounts of H2 (70 to 460 wt. ppm) and OH. Furthermore, their ∂D values increase with dehydration, suggesting a positive H isotope fractionation factor between minerals and H2–bearing fluid, contrary to what is expected in case of isotopic exchange between minerals and H2O-fluids. The possibility of incorporation of large quantities of H as H2 in nominally anhydrous minerals implies that the storage capacity of H in the mantle may have been underestimated, and sheds new light on H isotope variations in mantle magmas and minerals.
Moine, B.N., Bolfan-Casanova, N., Radu, I.B. et al. Molecular hydrogen in minerals as a clue to interpret ∂D variations in the mantle. Nat Commun 11, 3604 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17442-8
Future Texas hurricanes: Fast like Ike or slow like Harvey?
– JULY 6, 2020
Climate change will make fast-moving storms more likely in late 21st-century Texas
Climate change will intensify winds that steer hurricanes north over Texas in the final 25 years of this century, increasing the odds for fast-moving storms like 2008’s Ike compared with slow-movers like 2017’s Harvey, according to new research.
Hurricane Harvey as seen from the International Space Station on Aug. 28, 2017. (Photo courtesy of Randy Bresnik/NASA)
The study published online July 3 in Nature Communications examined regional atmospheric wind patterns that are likely to exist over Texas from 2075-2100 as Earth’s climate changes due to increased greenhouse emissions.
The research began in Houston as Harvey deluged the city with 30-40 inches of rain over five days. Rice University researchers riding out the storm began collaborating with colleagues from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and Harvard University to explore whether climate change would increase the likelihood of slow-moving rainmakers like Harvey.
“We find that the probability of having strong northward steering winds will increase with climate change, meaning hurricanes over Texas will be more likely to move like Ike than Harvey,” said study lead author Pedram Hassanzadeh of Rice.
Pedram Hassanzadeh
Harvey caused an estimated $125 billion in damage, matching 2005’s Katrina as the costliest hurricane in U.S. history. Ike was marked by coastal flooding and high winds that caused $38 billion damage across several states. It was the second-costliest U.S. hurricane at the time and has since moved to sixth. Ike struck Galveston around 2 a.m. Sept. 13, 2008, crossed Texas in less than one day and caused record power outages from Arkansas to Ohio on Sept. 14.
Hassanzadeh, a fluid dynamicist, atmospheric modeler and assistant professor of both mechanical engineering and Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, said the findings don’t suggest that slow-moving storms like Harvey won’t happen in late 21st century. Rather, they suggest that storms during the period will be more likely to be fast-moving than slow-moving. The study found the chances that a Texas hurricane will be fast-moving as opposed to slow-moving will rise by about 50% in the last quarter of the 21st century compared with the final quarter of the 20th century.
Suzana Camargo
“These results are very interesting, given that a previous study that considered the Atlantic basin as a whole noticed a trend for slower-moving storms in the past 30 years,” said study co-author Suzana Camargo, LDEO’s Marie Tharp Lamont Research Professor. “By contrast, our study focused on changes at the end of the 21st century and shows that we need to consider much smaller regional scales, as their trends might differ from the average across much larger regions.”
Hassanzadeh said the researchers used more than a dozen different computer models to produce several hundred simulations and found that “all of them agreed on an increase in northward steering winds over Texas.”
Steering winds are strong currents in the lower 10 kilometers of the atmosphere that move hurricanes.
Map depicting total rainfall from 2017’s Hurricane Harvey. (Image courtesy of NOAA)
“It doesn’t happen a lot, in studying the climate system, that you get such a robust regional signal in wind patterns,” he said.
Harvey was the first hurricane Hassanzadeh experienced. He’d moved to Houston the previous year and was stunned by the slow-motion destruction that played out as bayous, creeks and rivers in and around the city topped their banks.
“I was sitting at home watching, just looking at the rain when (study co-author) Laurence (Yeung) emailed a bunch of us, asking ‘What’s going on? Why is this thing not moving?’” Hassanzadeh recalled. “That got things going. People started replying. That’s the good thing about being surrounded by smart people. Laurence got us started, and things took off.”
Laurence Yeung
Ebrahim Nabizadeh
Yeung, an atmospheric chemist, Hassanzadeh and two other Rice professors on the original email, atmospheric scientist Dan Cohan and flooding expert Phil Bedient, won one of the first grants from Rice’s Houston Engagement and Recovery Effort (HERE), a research fund Rice established in response to Harvey.
“Without that, we couldn’t have done this work,” Hassanzadeh said. The HERE grant allowed Rice co-author Ebrahim Nabizadeh, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, to work for several months, analyzing the first of hundreds of computer simulations based on large-scale climate models.
The day Harvey made landfall, Hassanzadeh also had reached out to Columbia’s Chia-Ying Lee, an expert in both tropical storms and climate downscaling, procedures that use known information at large scales to make projections at local scales. Lee and Camargo used information from the large-scale simulations to make a regional model that simulated storms’ tracks over Texas in a warming climate.
Chia-Ying Lee
“One challenge of studying the impact of climate change on hurricanes at a regional level is the lack of data,” said Lee, a Lamont Assistant Research Professor at LDEO. “At Columbia University, we have developed a downscaling model that uses physics-based statistics to connect large-scale atmospheric conditions to the formation, movement and intensity of hurricanes. The model’s physical basis allowed us to account for the impact of climate change, and its statistical features allowed us to simulate a sufficient number of Texas storms.”
Hassanzadeh said, “Once we found that robust signal, where all the models agreed, we thought, ‘There should be a robust mechanism that’s causing this.’”
He reached out to tropical climate dynamicist Ding Ma of Harvard to get another perspective.
“We were able to show that changes in two important processes were joining forces and resulting in the strong signal from the models,” said Ma, a postdoctoral researcher in Earth and planetary sciences.
Ding Ma
One of the processes was the Atlantic subtropical high, or Bermuda high, a semipermanent area of high pressure that forms over the Atlantic Ocean during the summer, and the other was the North American monsoon, an uptick in rainfall and thunderstorms over the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico that typically occurs between July and September. Hassanzadeh said recent studies have shown that each of these are projected to change as Earth’s climate warms.
“The subtropical high is a clockwise circulation to the east that is projected to intensify and shift westward, producing more northward winds over Texas,” he said. “The North American monsoon, to the west, produces a clockwise circulation high in the troposphere. That circulation is expected to weaken, resulting in increased, high-level northward winds over Texas.”
Hassanzadeh said the increased northward winds from both east and west “gives you a strong reinforcing effect over the whole troposphere, up to about 10 kilometers, over Texas. This has important implications for the movement of future Texas hurricanes.”
Models showed that the effect extended into western Louisiana, but the picture became murkier as the researchers looked further east, he said.
Map depicting total rainfall from 2008’s Hurricane Ike. (Image by Hal Pierce/SSAI/NASA
“You don’t have the robust signal like you do over Texas,” Hassanzadeh said. “If you look at Florida, for instance, there’s a lot of variation in the models. This shows how important it is to conduct studies that focus on climate impacts in specific regions. If we had looked at all of North America, for example, and tried to average over the whole region, we would have missed this localized mechanism over Texas.”
Bedient is the Herman Brown Professor of Engineering and department chair of civil and environmental engineering and director of Rice’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center. Cohan is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. Yeung is the Maurice Ewing Career Development Assistant Professor in Earth Systems Science in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Early-Career Research Fellowship Program, Rice’s Houston Engagement and Recovery Effort Fund, Columbia’s Center for Climate and Life Fellows Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Computational resources were provided by the National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Computational and Information Systems Lab and Rice’s Center for Research Computing.
Nature Communications: Effects of climate change on the movement of future landfalling Texas tropical cyclones
Pedram Hassanzadeh, Chia-Ying Lee, Ebrahim Nabizadeh, Suzana J. Camargo, Ding Ma, and Laurence Y. Yeung
Nature Communications 11 (2020): 3319. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-17130-7
Abstract
The movement of tropical cyclones (TCs), particularly around the time of landfall, can substantially affect the resulting damage. Recently, trends in TC translation speed and the likelihood of stalled TCs such as Harvey have received significant attention, but findings have remained inconclusive. Here, we examine how the June-September steering wind and translation speed of landfalling Texas TCs change in the future under anthropogenic climate change. Using several large-ensemble/multi-model datasets, we find pronounced regional variations in the meridional steering wind response over North America, but―consistently across models―stronger June-September-averaged northward steering winds over Texas. A cluster analysis of daily wind patterns shows more frequent circulation regimes that steer landfalling TCs northward in the future. Downscaling experiments show a 10-percentage-point shift from the slow-moving to the fast-moving end of the translation-speed distribution in the future. Together, these analyses indicate increases in the likelihood of faster-moving landfalling Texas TCs in the late 21st century.
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.
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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.
Spring 2020 Seminar Papers
Fall 2019 Seminar Papers
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
