Year: 2025

Speaker/Affiliation: Ken Kamrin, UC Berkeley Title: Continuum modeling and simulation of dry and saturated granular media across applications Time: Friday, November 14 12:00pm PST Location: EMS B210Abstract: Granular media are common in industry, the natural world, and our day-to-day lives, but have been historically resistant to modeling.  While grain-by-grain discrete element methods (DEM) exist, these are often far too costly at…

Speaker/Affiliation: Pulkit Singh, Stanford University Title: The rise and fall of carbonate skeletons Time: Wednesday, November 12 12:00pm PST Location: EMS B210Abstract: Mineralized skeletons revolutionized marine ecosystems, yet their long-term biomass history has remained poorly constrained. We compiled data from ~7,400 carbonate thin sections spanning 540 million years to reconstruct proportional skeletal biomass produced by skeleton forming organisms across geologic time. The…

Speaker/Affiliation: Ching-Yao Lai, Stanford University Title: Changing ice in a warming climate: a data-driven approach Time: Wednesday, November 19 12:00pm PST Location: EMS B210Abstract: One of the greatest uncertainties in sea-level rise projections arises from our incomplete understanding of how ice sheets would lose mass in a warming climate. In this talk, I will discuss two poorly understood aspects of ice…

Speaker/Affiliation: Debanjan Sengupta, New Mexico State University Title: Pathway to the Formation of Planetesimals in Early Solar Nebula by Turbulent Concentration Time: Friday, November 7 12:00pm PST Location: EMS B210Abstract: The formation of planets was shaped by the formation of the first large planetesimals in the protoplanetary nebula. Moreover, the properties of primitive meteorites derived from these planetesimals provide our only ground…

Speaker: Francis Macdonald, UC Berkeley  Title: Snowball Earth and the Great Unconformity Time: Wednesday, Nov 5 at 12:00pm PST Location: EMS B210 Abstract: The Great Unconformity is an iconic feature across North America marked by the contact between Archean-Proterozoic igneous and metamorphic rocks and overlying Phanerozoic sedimentary rocks. It has been proposed the Great Unconformity was…

Speaker: Hadar Cohen Sadon, UC Santa Cruz Title: The Role of the Reactive Iron-to-Sulfate Ratio in Organic Matter Preservation and the δ³⁴S Record of Sedimentary Rocks Time: Wednesday, Oct 22 at 12:00pm PST Location: EMS B210 Abstract: Microbial sulfate reduction (MSR) occurs in oxygen-depleted environments and is one of the most effective processes shaping global sulfur…

Speaker: Voon Hui Lai, Australian National University Title: Advancing Fault and Coastal Monitoring with Fibre Optic Sensing Time: Monday, Oct 20 at 1:00pm PST Location: EMS C332 Abstract: Understanding and monitoring environmental hazards, ranging from catastrophic events like landslides and debris flows to gradual processes such as ground subsidence, requires high-resolution, long-term observational data. However, these processes often…

Speaker: Ian McBrearty, Stanford University Title: Enhanced Earthquake Detection with Graph Neural Networks Time: Friday, Oct 24 at 12:00pm PST Location: EMS B210 Abstract: Developing accurate earthquake catalogs is an essential goal in seismology, where improved catalogs can enhance our view of active seismogenic processes, fault network distributions, velocity models of the Earth, and earthquake…

Speaker: V.K. Pedersen, Aarhus University, Denmark Title: The influence of Quaternary erosion and deposition on solid Earth deformation, ice sheets, and sea level Time: Wednesday, Oct 29 at 12:00pm PST Location: EMS B210 Abstract: For decades, scientists have studied the interactions between ice sheets, the solid Earth, and sea level. However, the role of surface processes…