David Gold specializes in molecular paleontology, an area of study that combines geological, genetic and developmental tools to study the early evolution of animal life. A biologist by training, he’s fascinated by the development of life systems over long time scales.
An international team of geoscientists led by a volcanologist at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and including Maxwell Rudolph, associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, has discovered that, contrary to present scientific understanding, ancient volcanoes continued to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from deep within the Earth long past their period of eruptions.
Join Elisabeth Sellinger and Mazie Lewis for a day of seagrass meadow monitoring research in Elkhorn Slough. A nursery habitat for many marine animals, including mammals, shellfish and fish, seagrass meadows are vital ecosystems. But their benefits don’t just touch the ocean-dwellers of our planet.
Palm trees in Alaska, crocodiles in Wyoming: Fossils show that Earth’s temperature has changed over hundreds of millions of years. Now a new study has produced a curve of global mean surface temperatures over the past 485 million years.
New results from China’s Chang’e 5 lunar samples returned to Earth provide evidence for active volcanoes on the Moon as recently as 120 million years ago. Previously, scientists had thought that any activity with magma (molten rock) rising to the Moon’s surface ended billions of years ago.
Is it possible to find a common set of genes for regeneration, that could unlock a new understanding of this process? A comparison of the expression of thousands of genes from six animals found little evidence of a core conserved trait, but does point to some new areas to investigate.
At the most recent Davis Science Café, Professor Tessa Hill, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, discussed the rapid changes occurring in the oceans due to human-induced climate change. But a potential solution may reside in the disappearing seagrass beds hugging the California coastline.
Around 170,000 years ago, the Yellowstone Caldera — a supervolcano — produced a series of small eruptions in frequent pulses lasting roughly 100,000 years. Remnants from those eruptions can be found on the Earth’s surface today as volcanic rock. And those rocks contain critical clues about the interior of the supervolcano.
Magali Billen, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, seeks to unravel the forces that drive plate tectonics from hundreds of kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface. Specifically, she’s interested in subduction zones — areas where two tectonic plates collide, causing one to dive back down into the Earth’s mantle.
Estella Atekwana, dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Davis, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced April 24.