Scientific Ocean Drilling: UT Researcher Wins Prestigious Prize for Work on Mass Extinctions

October 1, 2024

From plate tectonics to the dinosaur extinction, scientific ocean drilling has led to major discoveries about our planet’s history and evolution. Now, the field has a new rising star in Chris Lowery, a researcher at The University of Texas at Austin, who was named the 2024 Asahiko Taira International Scientific Ocean Drilling Research Prize recipient by the American Geophysical Union.

The prize, which recognizes an “outstanding, transdisciplinary research accomplishment” is the highest honor available for early-to-mid career scientists in the field of scientific ocean drilling.

Lowery is a research assistant professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, a research unit of UT Jackson School of Geosciences, where he also teaches at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

According to Jackson School Professor Sean Gulick, Lowery’s most substantial mark on the science has been a series of papers on how life responded to the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Gulick was co-chief scientist on the expedition that drilled the dinosaur-extinction crater in 2015, on which Lowery was a mission scientist.

Using drilling samples from the expedition and a later one in the South Atlantic, Lowery and colleague Andy Fraass, now at University of Victoria, discovered that the rate of species diversification during the recovery periods is directly linked to the time it takes for organisms to rebuild complex webs of interaction between each other. That means that although a handful of survivor species quickly repopulated the oceans, it took at least 10 million years after mass extinction for species diversity to recover — an ominous finding considering the impact of human activity on life on Earth today.

“It’s an important piece of transdisciplinary work and exactly what the award was designed to recognize,” Gulick said.

Lowery’s current focus is the Gulf of Mexico Loop Current, an ocean circulation pattern that flows directly into the Gulf Stream and has impacts worldwide. He has led two geophysical surveys of the seafloor where the Loop Current’s imprint is most visible and hopes to soon lead a major drilling expedition there to uncover whether the current was vulnerable to collapse during past global warming.

“It’s right in our backyard, it affects fisheries and offshore infrastructure and sea level rise in the Gulf of Mexico, and it directly feeds into the Gulf Stream, which is really important for climate and weather, not just for the eastern US but the entire Northern Hemisphere,” Lowery said.

In 2017, Lowery co-founded a series of ongoing workshops to help early-career scientists develop successful scientific ocean drilling projects. He’s also helped lead community efforts to guide future scientific ocean drilling and was an author on 2050 Science Framework: Exploring Earth by Scientific Ocean Drilling, a road map detailing the community’s research strategy for the coming decades.

The AGU award comes with a cash prize and the opportunity to deliver a lecture at AGU’s December Fall Meeting, the world’s largest gathering of Earth scientists. Lowery plans to present his Loop Current drilling project and demonstrate the broader importance of scientific ocean drilling.

The Asahiko Taira International Scientific Ocean Drilling Research Prize will be presented at AGU’s Fall Meeting in December 2024 in Washington D.C.

For more information, contact: Anton Caputo, Jackson School of Geosciences, 512-232-9623; Monica Kortsha, Jackson School of Geosciences, 512-471-2241; Constantino Panagopulos, University of Texas Institute for Geophysics.