Mars was once a wet world, like Earth, but did water hang around long enough on its surface to sustain life? That’s the question on the mind of Eric Hiatt, a graduate student at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, who’s supported by UT’s Center for Planetary Systems Habitability to study the history of water… Continue Reading Meet the Mars Student Researcher Who Wants to Rewrite Fluid Dynamics
Newly Discovered Lake May Hold Secret to Antarctic Ice Sheet’s Rise and Fall
Scientists investigating the underside of the world’s largest ice sheet in East Antarctica have discovered a city-size lake whose sediments might contain a history of the ice sheet since its earliest beginnings. That would answer questions about what Antarctica was like before it froze, how climate change has affected it over its history, and how… Continue Reading Newly Discovered Lake May Hold Secret to Antarctic Ice Sheet’s Rise and Fall
UT Graduate Student Research Solves Plate Tectonics Mystery
The longstanding enigma of how tectonic plates can break Earth’s rock-hard shell may have been solved by a recent graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin who caught the Earth in the act of starting a new tectonic conveyor belt off the coast of New Zealand. The world’s tectonic conveyor belts – called… Continue Reading UT Graduate Student Research Solves Plate Tectonics Mystery
Are Deep Fluids Behind the Largest Earthquakes? ‘Not So Fast!’ Says UT Graduate Student
Sandwiched between tectonic plates are layers of material that show up as thin shadows on seismic tomography, a kind of CT scan of the Earth. For years, scientists assumed the anomalies were signs of highly pressurized water squeezed into densely packed rock and that the fluid acted as a kind of hair-trigger on earthquake faults.… Continue Reading Are Deep Fluids Behind the Largest Earthquakes? ‘Not So Fast!’ Says UT Graduate Student