Earth and Planetary Sciences

William B. McKinnon, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, is a co-investigator on the NASA New Horizons team that published the first comprehensive profile of Ultima Thule in the May 17 issue of the journal Science.

The university’s interdisciplinary Center for Quantum Sensors aims to harness the power of quantum mechanics to detect and decipher some of the universe’s greatest mysteries. The effort is timely as Congress recently approved a federal program supporting the development of quantum technologies.

NASA’s Astrobiology Program has awarded $9 million to a multi-institution team for the Earth First Origins project, led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Jeffrey G. Catalano of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis is a co-investigator.

A recent study in Geophysical Research Letters proposes a new way to leverage signals contained in water molecules to decode the atmospheric processes that accompany changing tropical weather and climate patterns.

Jeffrey G. Catalano, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, has been appointed the next executive editor of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, the official journal of Geochemical Society and the Meteoritical Society. His term will begin Jan. 1. 

Even the youngest students are ready to learn about climate science, according to Michael Wysession, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences and executive director of the Teaching Center at Washington University in St. Louis.

Slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates under the ocean drag about three times more water down into the deep Earth than previously estimated, according to a first-of-its-kind seismic study that spans the Mariana Trench. The work has important implications for the global water cycle, according to Douglas A. Wiens in Arts & Sciences.

Storms help form an important chemical that is highly significant in the search for life on Mars. A team led by Alian Wang of Arts & Sciences created a simulation in the lab that sheds new light on what’s being kicked up by those massive Martian dust devils.

At the river’s edge, where water and soil meet, microbes churn out methane and other greenhouse gasses. Jeffrey G. Catalano, of Arts & Sciences, wades into local Missouri wetlands to determine the role of heavy metals in this process.

Students in an undergraduate class in Arts & Sciences traveled to the remote Portuguese Azores archipelago to study field geology techniques in a rugged landscape shaped by volcanoes and shifting tectonic plates.