It’s the nightmare scenario: A magnitude 7.8 earthquake begins at the southern end of the San Andreas Fault and the rupture continues moving northwest 200 miles along the fault to a spot about 50 miles north of Los Angeles. Buildings collapse, wildfires spark, and electric power and water systems are damaged. Experts project such an…
Scientist Profiles
With her research interests and enthusiasm flowing forth like a raging river when she speaks, it’s no surprise that Kevan Moffett studies the dynamic role of water in the earth sciences. As she begins her career at the Jackson School of Geosciences, Moffett will focus on the fields of hydrogeology and ecohydrology, exploring the relationships…
The crowd of about 75 people milled about beneath the giant Texas pterosaur skeleton in the stately polished marble main hall of the Texas Memorial Museum. Display cases filled with gems, fossils and other natural history curiosities lined the walls. In attendance were university professors, staffers, and students, as well as friends and family members….
Like many kids in the Indiana Jones generation, Danny Stockli wanted to be an archaeologist when he grew up. In high school, he volunteered at ancient Roman digs in his native Switzerland. Like most of us though, the dream changed somewhere along the way. “I don’t have a gun or a whip,” he said, “but…
Ian Dalziel is a jocular and spirited Scotsman. As a boy growing up in Glasgow, he and his parents would spend their summers in the Scottish Highlands. They’d rent a cottage on a windy speck of an island called Iona, which had an ancient stone abbey, puffins, and more sheep than people. You could walk…
Ian Dalziel continues to refine his reconstructions of Earth before Pangaea. But he’s also involved in many other research projects designed to answer a host of other questions, such as: How fast is Antarctica losing ice? Scientists use data from the GRACE satellites to measure change in ice mass, but they first have to subtract…
Jaime Barnes is happy to be back home. A San Antonio native who received her bachelor’s degree from The University of Texas at Austin, Barnes left the Lone Star State to pursue her graduate education. Now, the assistant professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences returns to Austin having built an impressive standing in the…
Most geologists can be forgiven for living in the past, but Dan Breecker is making a point of keeping focused on the present. Breecker, who joined the Jackson School of Geosciences as an assistant professor in 2009, concentrates on the interactions between climates, soils, and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, and his research is helping to…
Most of us learned in school that the Himalayan mountains were formed over millions of years as India plowed into Asia. As the two continued to pile into each other, the land in between crumpled, forming a landscape that makes mountaineers salivate. Geologists figured that as the crumpling progressed, a succession of faults opened up…
With Undersecretary of Energy Steven Chu calling for “widespread, affordable deployment” of carbon capture and storage technology within 8 to 10 years, the future looks bright for carbon sequestration researchers. But sequestration will only be viable if scientists can assure the public CO2 won’t leak back to the surface, or worse, into their drinking water…
