Events

Energy AI Hackathon

UT PGE’s annual Energy AI Hackathon is one of UT Austin’s premier data analytics events. Over the course of a weekend, current students from across the university work together in teams to solve a real-world energy challenge using machine learning in Python — and compete for thousands in prize money and the opportunity to present to event sponsors at their corporate offices.

This is open to all UT students.

SSL Seminar Series | Mackenzie Day

From sand to stratigraphy: How dunes record the changing landscape of Earth and other planets by Dr. Mackenzie Day

Abstract: Desert dune fields preserve rich sedimentary records of environmental change, providing insight into both past climate and modern landscape evolution. This presentation explores three desert systems on Earth and Mars, using dune fields as a lens to examine how landscapes, both ancient and modern, respond to shifting environmental conditions. These investigations address the longevity of Earth’s dune fields, the interplay between wind and water, and the applicability of aeolian sedimentology to planetary bodies beyond Earth. Together, they highlight how dune fields serve as dynamic archives of change, and how Earth, Mars, and other bodies can be studied in tandem as natural laboratories for generalizing aeolian sediment transport to arbitrary fluid-gravity conditions.

SSL Seminar Series | Marjorie Cantine

Human, climate, sediment and geobiological history of a rapidly-growing carbonate island by Dr. Marjorie Cantine

Abstract: You may have heard the line that real estate is valuable because “they aren’t making more land”; in this talk, I’ll show you that that’s not true. I’ll use the sedimentary and radiocarbon records of a carbonate island in the Caribbean, Little Ambergris Cay, to describe its formation over the last millenium, how its growth relates to past climate, and what it means for mechanisms potentially capable of protecting shorelines in the near future.  I’ll leverage geobiological field experiments to help explain the mechanisms of island growth. Finally, I’ll share how ongoing work in my group is leveraging geoarchaeological archives to better understand the human and climate histories of the Common Era and inform hazard predictions in the region through testing climate models. I will also briefly describe other work ongoing in my group, which tackles questions at the nexus of time, sedimentary processes, and geochemistry from the Precambrian to the Common Era.

15th Annual Jackson School of Geosciences Student Research Symposium

Bureau of Economic Geology Seminar Series

BEG Seminar presented by Stacy Timmons and Mike Timmons, New Mexico Bureau of Geology & Mineral Resources, in person.

Topic: New Mexico Geological Survey

SSL Seminar Series | Vamsi Ganti

From Dunes to Channel Belts: How Rivers Organize and Move Across Scales by Dr. Vamsi Ganti

Abstract: Rivers are Earth’s arteries: they transport water and sediment from uplands to oceans, sustain ecosystems and agriculture, and build the stratigraphic record of past environmental change. Yet rivers are far from static—they are dynamic systems that evolve across scales, from ripples and dunes on the riverbed to entire channel belts.

In this seminar, I will present three discoveries that reveal the mechanisms shaping alluvial river form and motion across these scales. (1) Laboratory experiments and theory identify a previously unrecognized transition in river-dune organization at the onset of significant suspended sediment transport. This transition influences flow roughness, flood-driven dune reconfiguration, and the nature of preserved fluvial strata. (2) Using a new image-processing tool, we analyzed 36 years of satellite imagery from 84 rivers to uncover the origins of single- versus multithread channels. Single-thread rivers achieve a balance between lateral erosion and accretion, maintaining equilibrium width, while multithread rivers arise when erosion outpaces accretion, causing individual threads to widen and split. This mechanistic insight informs both planetary geomorphology and cost-effective river restoration. (3) Finally, I’ll show how human activity and climate change are already altering the way rivers flow and evolve. Dams dampen river motion and reduce the number of active threads, whereas increased sediment supply from land-use change and glacial melt are making rivers in the Global South and High Mountain Asia more dynamic.

Together, these discoveries provide a mechanistic view of river evolution across scales and highlight why understanding river behavior is essential—not only for managing water, life, and landscapes they sustain today, but also for decoding the history of environmental change recorded in sedimentary strata.

DeFord Lecture | Jake Jordan

Enhanced Rock Weathering for Improved Smallholder Farmer Welfare: An At-Scale Case Study for Rice Agriculture in India by Jake Jordan, Chief Science Officer, Mati Carbon

DeFord Lecture | Daniel Minisini

The Consequences of Low Sediment Accumulation Rates in Marine Environments by Daniel Minisini, stratigrapher and explorer at ExxonMobil

UTIG Spring Seminar Series 2026: Elizabeth Spiers

Speaker: Elizabeth Spiers, University of Texas Institute for Geophysics

Title: Transport processes in planetary oceans: Quantifying energy and nutrient delivery for habitability

Host: Duncan Young

Bureau of Economic Geology Seminar Series

BEG Seminar presented by Dallas Dunlap, BEG, in person.

Topic: Channel Architecture Influenced by Precursor Channelized Submarine Landslide Topography in the Taranaki Basin

Hot Science - Cool Talks: The Biology of Love

What does science say about love and long-term relationships? In this Hot Science – Cool Talks event, biologist Dr. Steven Phelps explores the biology of love through the surprising world of prairie voles, one of the few monogamous mammals. By studying how vole brains form lasting bonds, Dr. Phelps reveals what biology, brain chemistry, and evolution can teach us about human connection and commitment. This engaging talk offers a fresh, science-based look at why we pair up right after Valentines Day!

DeFord Lecture | Eileen Martin

Is Seismology Actually Useful for Climate and Hazards Monitoring? by Eileen Martin, associate professor at Colorado School of Mines

Abstract: The past two decades have seen major advances in seismic sensors, with growing application to observe fine-scale changes in the near surface, often forced by climate change or geohazards. This includes technologies such as portable nodes, low-weight accelerometers, and fiber-optic distributed acoustic sensing. With these sensors, we’ve observed new signals, imaged small features in the subsurface, and gotten our first up-close look at more processes. Modern seismic sensors can be the subsurface counterpart to remote sensing observations, which sounds ideal, but most folks in the geohazards and climate communities aren’t racing to adopt seismology into their toolkit. In this talk, we’ll look at the practical challenges keeping seismology from being more useful, and several of our recent advances that are helping us overcome these issues. We’ll explore these challenges in the context of alpine glacier observations, seismic hazards mapping, and a multi-year permafrost monitoring study. This talk will touch on sensor deployment in the field, large-scale data management, making our data analyses faster, and the challenges of automated interpretation of results in these new contexts.

UTIG Spring Seminar Series 2026: Mark Lever

Speaker: Mark Lever, Marine Science Institute, The University of Texas at Austin

Title: Population dynamics of methane-cycling microorganisms in subseafloor sediments

Host: Kehua You

Bureau of Economic Geology Seminar Series

BEG Seminar presented by Dr. Anne Glerum on Zoom.

Topic: Geodynamic controls on clastic-dominated zinc-lead deposit formation