Welcome!
The Rice Earth Science Department has 17 professors with 16 adjunct professors from the local energy industry and space science community. The department includes 13 post docs and staff scientists, 40 graduate students, 22 undergraduate majors, and 14 administrative and technical staff. Research topics include the evolution of Venus, Mars and the Moon, the Earth's core, mantle, crust, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and atmosphere, climate change and paleoclimate, and the genesis and migration of hydrocarbons.
Department focus areas include the structure and evolution of the continental lithosphere (Earth Structure and Dynamics), the past and present evolution of the Earth's climate, surface, and environment (Earth System Science), and the physics and chemistry of fluid flow and rock-fluid interactions (Environment and Energy Resources).
We pride ourselves on having strong connections to NASA, the Lunar Planetary Institute, and the Houston energy industry as well as having a creative and dynamic faculty pursuing fundamental questions about the Earth and our environment.
In Memoriam
We are sad to report that Don Baker, a professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science,
passed away on July 18, 2010. Dr. Baker was a professor of geology at Rice from 1966-1988
and served as the department chairman of what was then the Geology Department from 1977-1980.
From the field
Rice Department of Earth Science students recently returned from a North African field trip under the direction of department chair, Alan Levander.
See their photos from Morocco...
Latest News
Earth Science student earns Outstanding Student Paper Award from AGU
Jeniffer Masy, a graduate student in seismology, was awarded an Outstanding Student Paper Award for a work presented to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) at the Fall 2009 meeting in San Francisco. Ms. Masy's work, titled "Seismic anisotropy and mantle flow beneath western Venezuela", co-authored with advisors Drs. Fenglin Niu and Alan Levander, interprets measurements of shear wave splitting from SKS and SKKS data recorded by the national seismic network of Venezuela and a linear broadband PASSCAL/Rice seismic array across the Merida Andes. The linear array, in place as a second phase of the passive seismic component of the BOLIVAR project (Broadband Onshore-offshore Lithospheric Investigation of Venezuela and the Antilles arc Region) has been installed to better understand the complicated regional tectonics in western Venezuela.
Read the paper: Seismic anisotropy and mantle flow beneath western Venezuela
A river flipped: humans trump nature on Texas river
Rice study: Human activity eclipses Brazos River's native carbon cycle
A new study by geochemists at Rice University finds that damming and other human activity has completely obscured the natural carbon dioxide cycle in Texas' longest river, the Brazos.
"The natural factors that influence carbon dioxide cycling in the Brazos are fairly obvious, and we expected the radiocarbon signature of the river to reflect those influences," said study co-author Caroline Masiello, assistant professor of Earth science at Rice. "But it looks like whatever the natural process was in the Brazos, in terms of sources and sinks of carbon dioxide, it has been completely overprinted by human activities."
The study, which is available online in the journal Biogeochemistry, is the first to document such an overwhelming influence of human activity on carbon dioxide in a major river.
The full story: http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=14629
Core constituency
Rice scientist looks deep beneath Great Barrier Reef for climate clues
André Droxler, a professor of Earth science who specializes in ocean sedimentology and past climate, was one of 28 researchers from nine countries who gathered in Bremen, Germany in July, for an "onshore science party" to study a set of cores drilled from the Great Barrier Reef of Australia.
Dr. Droxler was in Bremen when long-buried coral arrived for weeks of intense study by the researchers of Expedition 325, part of an extensive survey of the globe's undersea structure and climate history by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP).
The new samples excite scientists "because cores are excellent recorders of sea level," he said. "Corals live in very specific water depths—and not just one species, but an assemblage of species." So certain species at certain depths along the cores are both a time stamp and measure of sea level when the coral lived. Carbon-14 and thorium dating refined the timeline, he said.
Read more: http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp#063;MODE=VIEW&ID=14591
Local coastal impacts underestimated from sea-level rise
Most studies indicate that sea levels will rise over the next century due to melting glaciers, more ice breaking off the Antarctic ice sheet and thermal expansion—and there is great variation in how much scientists estimate seas will rise. But that's not even the most important question, according to a new study. Instead, researchers should be looking at relative sea-level rise—how much rising seas will affect individual regions. And when you break it down by region, the study suggests, the outlook isn't promising.
One of the regions likely to be most affected by even a small rise in sea levels is the Gulf Coast of the United States, reported John Anderson, a geologist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and his colleagues in a recent issue of EOS. When it comes to relative sea-level rise, even if the rise is just a couple of millimeters—at the lower end of the projected sea-level rise over the next century—the Mississippi Delta is in danger, Anderson says.
The article: http://www.earthmagazine.org/earth/article/360-7da-7-9
Research Highlights
Graphene oxide goes green
Rice researchers show environmentally friendly ways to make it in bulk, break it down
A new paper from the lab of Rice chemist James Tour demonstrates an environmentally friendly way to make bulk quantities of graphene oxide (GO), an insulating version of single-atom-thick graphene expected to find use in all kinds of material and electronic applications.
A second paper from Tour and Andreas Lüttge, a Rice professor of Earth science and chemistry, shows how GO is broken down by common bacteria that leave behind only harmless, natural graphite.
Dr. Lüttge and Everett Salas, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab and primary author of the second paper, had already been studying the effects of bacteria on carbon, so it was simple to shift their attention to GO. They found bacteria from the genus Shewanella easily convert GO to harmless graphene. The graphene then stacks itself into graphite.
"That's a big plus for green nano, because these ubiquitous bacteria are quickly converting GO into an environmentally benign mineral," Dr. Tour said.
Photo credit: Everett Salas and Zhengzong Sun
Tectonics: Precision is hallmark of 20-year study
Richard Gordon, the W.M. Keck Foundation Chair in Geophysics, and collaborators Chuck DeMets of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Donald Argus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., have just put the finishing touches on a 20-year labor of love, a precise description of the relative movements of the interlocking tectonic plates that account for about 97 percent of Earth's surface.
Facebook