Upcoming Events

Online: UTIG talks (whether in person or virtual) are streamed via Zoom. See UT Zoom requirements. For a link please email costa@ig.utexas.edu.

In person: In person seminars and live screenings will be held at the UTIG Seminar Conference Room, ROC 1.603

	March 2023
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6	7 UTIG Discussion Hour: Ethan Conrad, UTIG UTIG Discussion Hour: Ethan Conrad, UTIG March 7, 2023 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm 2nd Floor Conference Room, UTIG View Event Contact edward.clennett@utexas.edu for a link to join the talk. Speaker: Ethan Conrad, PhD Candidate, UTIG Title: The tectonic geomorphology of Hispaniola – a record of multistage deformation and exhumation at an oblique convergent margin See more details •	8	9	10 UTIG Seminar Series: Liz Drenkard, GFDL NOAA UTIG Seminar Series: Liz Drenkard, GFDL NOAA March 10, 2023 @ 10:30 am - 11:30 am BEG Conference Room, BEG 1.202 Contact costa@ig.utexas.edu. Note: This week's seminar will be held at BEG 1.202, at the Bureau of Economic Geology, next door to UTIG. Signs will be posted. View Event Speaker: Liz Drenkard, Research Oceanographer, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, NOAA Host: Patrick Heimbach Title: Modeling the ocean at different scales for marine ecosystem management in a changing climate Abstract: Earth System Models (ESMs) are invaluable for understanding the ocean’s role in climate change and anticipating future global ocean conditions. Ongoing model developments toward more holistic representation of the Earth System continue to shape our knowledge of global change but, in order to capture the regional ocean processes most relevant to coastal communities and the living marine resources (LMRs) on which they depend, these models sometimes need to be translated to smaller scales. Downscaling ESMs to limited area domains can address this need, but only with significant improvements relative to past efforts, including strategic budgeting of finite computational resources to balance resolution, uncertainty quantification, and comprehensiveness needs. I will share some of my research at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory where I use ocean models to study the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems at different scales. At the global-scale, I’ve been investigating the impact of advances in coupled land-air-sea interactions, specifically the dynamic deposition of dust to the ocean in GFDL’s ESM4, on projections of ocean biogeochemistry. We’ve found that permitting dust deposition to reflect changes in land use and aridity (rather than prescribing a deposition climatology to the ocean) dramatically impacts the distribution of Pacific Ocean iron limitation under different emission scenarios. At the regional scale, I will delve into recommendations for next-generation regional ocean projections for LMR management (e.g., considerations for model domain size, resolution, ensemble size) arising from a recent synthesis of two decades of ocean downscaling efforts. Finally, I will describe nascent NOAA-led efforts to develop high-resolution ocean and biogeochemical modeling and climate-scale prediction frameworks for the Northeast Pacific and other U.S. coastal waters. See more details See more details •	11	12
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20	21 UTIG Discussion Hour: Dallas Sherman, UTIG UTIG Discussion Hour: Dallas Sherman, UTIG March 21, 2023 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm 2nd Floor Conference Room, UTIG View Event Contact edward.clennett@utexas.edu for a link to join the talk. Speaker: Dallas Sherman, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, UTIG Title: Mapping extend of subsea permafrost on the Beaufort shelf, AK, with surface-towed controlled source electromagnetic system See more details •	22	23	24 UTIG Seminar Series: Ben Phrampus, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory UTIG Seminar Series: Ben Phrampus, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory March 24, 2023 @ 10:30 am - 11:30 am UTIG Seminar Room PRC 196/ROC 1.603 Contact costa@ig.utexas.edu. View event Speaker: Ben Phrampus, Physicist, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Host: Kehua You Title: Why does the US Navy care about geology? -- Geospatial machine learning and an application to Arctic gas hydrates. Abstract: The US Navy is the seaborne branch of the United States military. To fulfill the Navy’s mission of maintaining security and deterrence, the Navy relies on all earth sciences including geology and geophysics. In this talk I will introduce how the Naval Research Laboratory uses geology and tools, such as machine learning, to safeguard Navy personnel and the warfighter. As an example of this work, I will discuss recent results of an Arctic-wide assessment of methane gas and hydrate. This work utilizes geospatial machine learned and physics-based inputs, combined with deterministic models to quantify the distribution of methane gas and hydrate contemporarily and during the Last Glacial Maximum (~20 kyrs). These assessments, when used in conjunction, can identify regions most likely to experience hydrate dissociation, potential locations of seafloor fluid flow and gas migration, and regions of active seafloor deformation due to melting permafrost. See more details •	25	26
27 Planetary Habitability Series: Katie Teixeira & Jialong Ren, UT Austin Planetary Habitability Series: Katie Teixeira & Jialong Ren, UT Austin March 27, 2023 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm PMA 15.216B, Physics, Math and Astronomy Bldg. UT Austin, Department of Astronomy 2515 Speedway, Stop C1400 Austin, Texas 78712-1205 View Event Center for Planetary Systems Habitability Seminar Series. TALK ONE Speaker: Katie Teixeira, Graduate Student, Department of Astronomy, UT Austin College of Natural Sciences Host: Brandon Jones Title: Modeling the Evolution of Terrestrial Planet Atmospheres Through Outgassing and Escape Abstract: With the successful deployment of JWST, and its aim to potentially search for biosignatures on exoplanets, an important endeavor, at present, is to determine whether the rocky planets we observe are likely to have atmospheres at all. M dwarfs, the main host stars of JWST’s rocky planet targets, are thought to pose a major threat to planetary atmospheres due to their high magnetic activity over several billion-year timescales, and might completely strip planets down to bare rocks. Physical models are necessary to understand how a planet’s atmosphere evolves to become what we see today. Here, I will present coupled time-dependent simulations of atmospheric escape and planetary outgassing, processes that most influence atmospheric size and composition. I will present a case study of TRAPPIST-1c, a possible “exo-Venus” for which observations have recently been taken. I will review the results of simulations of TRAPPIST-1c, specifically the constraints that they place on the history of TRAPPIST-1c’s atmospheric and geological properties. Finally, I will discuss both simulation and observational developments that will aid in understanding rocky planets like TRAPPIST-1c. Biography: Katie is a 2nd year graduate student in the Department of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. She received a B.S. in Astrophysics and Biology from the University of Florida. There she worked with Sarah Ballard to study the demographics of M dwarf exoplanets and implications for biological evolution. She now works with Caroline Morley, developing and using simulations to model the evolution of CO2-dominated terrestrial planet atmospheres. Broadly, Katie is interested in what makes planets habitable and how to search for both habitable and inhabited planets. TALK TWO Speaker: Jialong Ren, Graduate Student, Department of Geological Sciences, UT Austin Jackson School of Geosciences Host: Brandon Jones Title: Permeability Limited Compaction and (De)Serpentinization of Ceres Abstract: The Dawn Mission revealed a surprise that Ceres is still hydrologically active, so its interior structure is important to explain the energy and mass transport at a later stage. In this work, we investigate the compaction history of dwarf planet Ceres with a two-phase flow scheme: viscous compaction of ductile rock coupled with Darcy’s flow in porous media. In such a scheme first used in the differentiation of volatile rich bodies, compaction is limited by pressure gradient required to expel the pore fluid and permeability as a function of porosity. Moreover, we also considered two phase changes: ice-melting and (de)serpentinization. Biography: My background is in fluid/solid mechanics and numerical simulations. Currently I am interested in planetary science. There are two projects in process: 1) fragmentation and reassembly into rubble piles of planetesimals and 2) compaction and differentiation of small ocean worlds such as Ceres. See more details •	28 UTIG Discussion Hour: Mikayla Pascual, UTIG UTIG Discussion Hour: Mikayla Pascual, UTIG March 28, 2023 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm 2nd Floor Conference Room, UTIG View Event Contact edward.clennett@utexas.edu for a link to join the talk. Speaker: Mikayla Pascual, PhD Student, UTIG Topic: Glaciology See more details •	29	30	31 UTIG Seminar Series: Nicholas Harmon, WHOI UTIG Seminar Series: Nicholas Harmon, WHOI March 31, 2023 @ 10:30 am - 11:30 am UTIG Seminar Room PRC 196/ROC 1.603 View Event Contact costa@ig.utexas.edu. Speaker: Nicholas Harmon, Research Specialist, Geology & Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Host: Eric Attias Title: The Dynamic Oceanic Lithosphere-Asthenosphere System of the Equatorial Mid Atlantic Ridge System: Results from the PI-LAB Experiment Abstract: The transition from the lithosphere to the asthenosphere is an important part of plate tectonic theory. However, its exact depth and the factor(s) that control it are widely debated. The PI-LAB (Passive Imaging of the Lithosphere-Asthenosphere Boundary) experiment included 39 ocean bottom seismometers and 39 ocean bottom magntotelluric instruments near the equatorial Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Seismic and magnetotelluric models are invaluable, given that they offer independent, yet complimentary constraints on the properties of the mantle. We jointly interpret shear-wave velocity tomography from surface waves, compressional and shear velocity tomography from body waves, seismic discontinuity imaging and magnetotelluric (MT) imaging to take advantage of a range of resolutions and sensitivities and illuminate the structure of the oceanic lithosphere and the underlying asthenosphere. We image a tectonic plate thickness that increases with age in one location but undulates in another location. We infer thin and slightly thicker melt channels and punctuated regions of ascending partial melt several hundred kilometers off the ridge axis. This suggests melt persists over geologic timescales, although its character is dynamic, with implications for the lithosphere–asthenosphere boundary (LAB) and the driving forces of the plates. Ascending melt intermittently feeds melt channels at the base of the plate. The associated melt-enhanced buoyancy increases the influence of ridge-push in driving plate motions, whereas the channelized melt reduces the resistance of the plates to motion. Therefore, while temperature plays a first-order role in dictating the lithosphere-asthenosphere transition, melt can also affect the location and sharpness of this interface. This melt likely plays an important and dominant role in driving the plates and facilitating their motions. See more details •

UTIG Seminar Series

The UTIG Seminar Series is a forum for cutting-edge earth and planetary sciences attended by UTIG scientists, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students. Every semester, we invite leading scientists around the U.S. and beyond to present results from their recent research projects. We also occasionally enjoy presentations on geoscience education and workplace diversity and inclusion.

For email updates, subscribe to our seminar mailing list.

Contact: costa@ig.utexas.edu

Seminar Chair: Shuoshuo Han

Guide for Seminar Speakers

UTIG Discussion Hour

The UTIG Discussion Hour hosts weekly talks Tuesday afternoons at 2 pm CST. The Discussion Hour is a flexible format seminar hosted by UTIG and open to all members of our community. Presentations range from spotlighting new geoscience research to less technical talks sharing fieldwork excursions.

Organizer: Edward Clennett

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Seminar Archives

UTIG Seminar Series and Discussion Hour talks are open to the geoscience community and, whenever possible, are made freely available online. Our archive includes almost every UTIG Seminar Series talk since 2010 as well as many recorded Discussion Hour talks. These can be accessed at the links below. If you know of a UTIG science talk not listed in the archive please contact costa@ig.utexas.edu.