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.
Paleontologists are getting a glimpse at life over a billion years in the past based on chemical traces in ancient rocks and the genetics of living animals. Research published in Nature Communications combines geology and genetics, showing how changes in the early Earth prompted a shift in how animals eat.
White abalone shells are magnificent structures. Translucent during the marine snail’s juvenile days, the extremely durable shell increases in opacity as the organism ages, gaining its paint-splatter-esque red, brown and white coloring from the algae it eats. But abalone, along with other marine organisms, are facing a crisis, one that affects the integrity of their shells.
As dean of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, the largest college on campus that more than 14,000 undergraduate students call home, Estella Atekwana envisions the college as a bridge that helps students make their dreams a reality while being a powerhouse for interdisciplinary research.
A fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of America, geochemist Kari Cooper, a professor of earth and planetary sciences in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, won the American Geophysical Union’s Norman L. Bowen Award.
Over the course of her career, Distinguished Professor Isabel Montañez has created a
research niche in the fields of geochemistry and paleoclimatology: applying an Earth
systems science approach to recreate Earth from eons past. For her monumental work
in the geology field, Montañez recently received the Geological Society of America’s
Arthur L. Day Medal.
