Geological Sciences

CU ��ý�� scholars elected members of the National Academy of Sciences

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:47:49 +0000

CU ��ý�� scholars elected members of the National Academy of Sciences Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/01/2026 - 14:47

Lee Niswander and Bethany Ehlmann recognized ‘for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research’

Two ��ý�� scientists have been elected members of the National Academy of Sciences, joining a cohort of more than 140 scholars around the world who are recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Lee Niswander, a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and Bethany Ehlmann, a professor of geological sciences and director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and—with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine—provides science, engineering and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

Lee Niswander is a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology.

Pursuing clinical therapies

Niswander is head of the Niswander Lab, where she and her group investigate mouse models of embryonic development to provide insights into fundamental developmental processes, major human birth defects and potential clinical therapies. Her studies have revealed the molecular mechanisms that control formation of the central and peripheral nervous system, as well as lung, limb and neuromuscular development.

Niswander’s current focus is on early brain formation and birth defects that arise when normal brain formation goes awry, like failure of neural tube closure or maintenance of neural progenitor cells, resulting in spina bifida or microcephaly.

The Niswander Lab uses the mouse embryo and human-induced pluripotent stem cells as models of human development. The lab’s studies encompass genetics, epigenetics, environmental factors and live imaging to couple molecular insights to cell behaviors. Through collaborative efforts, Niswander Lab researchers are also exploring the genetic causes of neural tube defects in humans.

Niswander recently received the Hazel Barnes Prize, which celebrates the enriching interrelationship between teaching and research. It is the largest and most prestigious award funded by the university. This summer she will be honored with an Edwin G. Conklin Medal, which is awarded annually by the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) to recognize a developmental biologist who has made and is continuing to make extraordinary research contributions to the field and is an excellent mentor, helping train the next generation of outstanding scientists.

Niswander received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from CU ��ý��, her master’s degree in biochemistry and genetics from University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (now CU Anschutz) and her doctorate in genetics from Case Western University. She performed her postdoctoral training in developmental biology at the University of California San Francisco.

“I am deeply honored to become a member of the National Academy of Sciences,” Niswander says. “I am grateful to the numerous trainees and their research discoveries that provided the foundation of this honor. I am excited to join the Academy in their mission to advise on scientific matters important for human health.”

Bethany Ehlmann is a professor of geological sciences and director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

Studying space

Ehlmann is a planetary scientist who holds the faculty roles of Provost’s Chair in the Research and Innovation Office and affiliate professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. Her research focuses on water in the solar system, the evolution of habitable worlds and remote sensing techniques and instruments for planetary missions.

Ehlmann is a science team member of multiple missions, including the Jupiter-bound Europa Clipper; the Earth-orbiting EMIT imaging spectrometer; the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover; the Mars2020 Perseverance rover; the ExoMars rover; and orbiting and landed spectrometers for the Artemis lunar program. Previously, she was a science team member for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter CRISM instrument, the Dawn mission during its exploration of the asteroid Ceres, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity and principal investigator of Lunar Trailblazer.

Active in science policy and outreach, Ehlmann is president of the board of directors of The Planetary Society. She served as a member of the National Academies Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey and the National Academies Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science. She is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the Mineralogical Society of America, and has authored a children's book, “Dr. E's Super Stellar Solar System,” with National Geographic.

Ehlmann earned a bachelor’s degree from Washington University, where she double majored in earth and planetary sciences and environmental studies with a minor in math; two master’s degrees from the University of Oxford, in environmental change and management and geography; and master’s and doctoral degrees in geological sciences from Brown University.

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Lee Niswander and Bethany Ehlmann recognized ‘for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.’

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Film builds science into beaver tales

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:46:49 +0000

Film builds science into beaver tales Rachel Sauer Mon, 03/09/2026 - 10:46

Rachel Sauer

CU ��ý�� alumna Emily Fairfax shared her scientific expertise as the beaver consultant on the new Pixar film Hoppers

Emily Fairfax came home one evening from her job as a weapons engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory feeling a bit sad. Yes, she was using her degrees in chemistry and physics, but the work just wasn’t a good fit for her.

She sat on the couch and turned on the TV, happening across an episode of Nature on PBS called “Leave it to Beavers.”

“I was so hooked,” recalls Fairfax (PhDGeol’19). “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. There were all these aerial images of beaver wetlands in places like the Nevada desert, which was amazing and I couldn’t get it out of my head. So, I thought, ‘I’ve got to go to grad school and study beavers.’”

CU ��ý�� alumnus Emily Fairfax (PhDGeol’19) was the scientific beaver consultant for the new Pixar film Hoppers. (Photo: Emily Fairfax)

Fast forward to the evening of Feb. 23 on the red carpet outside the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California. There, wearing a beautiful teal and black dress with a lace and sequin overlay—and having received glam tips from her grad students—Fairfax posed for photographers in front of a yellow screen bearing the images of animated beavers she’d helped bring to life.

Fairfax, whose “a-ha beavers!” moment led her to the ��ý�� Department of Geological Sciences, was the scientific beaver consultant for the acclaimed new Pixar film Hoppers, which opened nationwide Friday.

The story of an animal-loving college student whose mind is transferred into a robotic beaver so she can help save a pristine glade from being paved for a freeway, Hoppers highlights a keystone species in a scientifically accurate way that is, frankly, adorable.

“People need to know that they’re a keystone species,” says Fairfax, who signed on to the film project with the assurance that this point would be emphasized. “When you lose the beaver, you lose the ecosystem, and I think (Pixar filmmakers) made that crystal clear.

“The other point that I really wanted to be in the film is that beavers are not just off in national parks. You can have beavers living in cities, living adjacent to cities, and we can coexist with them to our benefit, not just the benefit of the beaver. I wanted to highlight the idea that protecting beavers and habitats isn’t just about protecting nature out of the goodness of our hearts; we benefit greatly.”

The force of a glacier

Long before her pivot from Los Alamos to CU ��ý��, Fairfax, who now is an assistant professor of geography, environment and society at the University of Minnesota, was a Girl Scout in a troop that took its role as stewards of the natural world very seriously.

“We learned the basic principles of ‘Leave No Trace’ very early on, but then our troop leaders took it a step further,” she wrote on her personal website. “They urged us to put in that little bit of extra effort and leave things better than we found them. When we went camping this usually panned out as picking up trash off of trails, but the sentiment stuck with me. If everyone strives to leave things better than they started—even if only by a little bit—then the overall state of things will consistently improve.”

It’s a sentiment that dovetailed neatly with her graduate work at CU ��ý��, where she studied beavers through the lens of ecohydrology, combining remote sensing, modeling and field work to understand how beaver damming changes the landscape and the timescales on which that change happens.

“I’m at heart a water scientist—how fast it’s moving, if it’s being slowed or stored or just blasting downstream superfast,” Fairfax says. “I care about the shape of rivers as a geomorphologist, and I’m very hyper-focused on how one specific animal controls water or the shape of water.”

Her first Colorado field site was in Lefthand Canyon west of ��ý��—where, if you drive slowly and look closely, it’s possible to see an 11-foot-tall beaver dam from the road—and her dissertation research was inspired by “Leave It to Beavers”: “In the documentary, they were interviewing hydrologists and geomorphologists, who kept bringing up how beaver wetlands in these areas are the only things staying green during droughts.

Emily Fairfax takes measurements of a beaver dam in Lefthand Canyon west of ��ý��. (Photo: Emily Fairfax)

“I get that beavers can seem really chaotic—they don’t draw any blueprints, they don’t pull permits, they don’t let anybody know what they’re going to do before they do it. But beavers are second only to us, humans, in terms of animals that can change the physical earth. They’ve been damming for at least 7.5 million years, maybe as long as 25 million years, so thinking about beavers as this geological force is really intellectually exciting—this rodent in my yard carries the force of a glacier.”

Inquiry from Pixar

Two years after earning her PhD and joining the California State University Channel Islands faculty, where she worked before joining the University of Minnesota faculty in 2023, Fairfax presented a Zoom webinar about beavers and drought in California that several Pixar employees attended. “I thought, ‘OK, cool, they have a right to be interested in what’s going on in their state,’” she remembers. Several months later, she received an email with the subject line “Inquiry from Pixar” and thought it was a prank.

Nope: It was legitimate.

Pixar filmmakers wanted her to give a presentation to studio staff about beavers, which she did. It turns out that Pixar was making a film about them, and after signing reams of non-disclosure agreements and securing a promise that the filmmakers wouldn’t even think about having the beaver characters eat fish—because beavers do not eat fish—Fairfax was officially the Hoppers beaver consultant.

At first, Fairfax answered a lot of basic questions about beaver behaviors, ecology, what they can and can’t do, how long they live, their family units, their size and why their teeth are orange. Then the questions started getting more specific: What other animals would you see in a beaver wetland? How do beavers get along with humans? If someone tried to build a road by a beaver wetland, how would beavers react? She brought a group of Pixar filmmakers to Lefthand Canyon for a week of beaver observation, which yielded even more questions.

“At every step along the way, they were turning seemingly disconnected beaver facts into scenes,” Fairfax says. For example, as with humans, beavers’ tailbones tuck under, allowing them to sit on their tails like little chairs. So, the scene in Hoppers in which the real beaver George sits on his tail is accurate, and the fact that the character Mabel sits with her tail outstretched is a clue that she’s not a real beaver.

The dam-building sequence in Hoppers is also scientifically accurate: “A lot of people don’t know how beavers build dams,” Fairfax explains. "It can be very sudden, and they will often use relatively large cobbles and stones to start, which they put along the base of their dams. Then they’ll put on some sticks and then pack it with mud. Everyone thinks they pat the mud on with their tails, but they actually use their paws. So, the sequence in the film where you see these super buff beavers lifting up stones and rolling them down, then you see other beavers waddling in carrying mud and patting it down, that actually shows the real sequence of dam building.”

Among the questions that Pixar filmmakers asked scientist Emily Fairfax was how beavers relate to and get along with other animals in the areas where they live. (Photo: Disney/Pixar)

Throughout the filmmaking process, Fairfax received scenes to review, so the accurately rotund beavers in the film are her doing. “The very first time I saw one of the (film) beavers, I told them it was too skinny. Beavers are shaped like a bowling ball, so when I saw it again it was a little fatter, and then I saw it again and it was a little fatter. Finally, people with Pixar were like, ‘If it’s sitting on its tail, it needs more rolls’ and ‘It should be jiggling more when it’s running.’ I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is adorable.’ They’re like big, fuzzy bowling balls, and I’m collecting all the little plushies.”

Science and storytelling

Through the process, Fairfax says, the filmmakers balanced storytelling and science. There were times when total accuracy had to concede a little to the story, “but they always asked me, ‘Is this realistic enough? Is it going to hurt beavers, is it going to hurt climate change work if we do it this way?’ They were always really good about asking me how much certain things mattered, because they are people trying to create a compelling narrative, but they also wanted to respect the science.”

(And speaking of respecting the science—and scientist—the full name of the film character Dr. Sam is Dr. Samatha Emily Fairfax.)

Fairfax’s work on the film was also a matter of balancing the often solitary, generally unglamorous work of science with the razzle-dazzle of Hollywood. She jokes that she considered wearing her waders to the Hollywood premiere, but her grad students stepped in with hair and makeup tips. And then she was on the red carpet with A-list stars like Jon Hamm, then inside the ornate theater watching the velvet curtain rise on her research via Hollywood movie magic.

“It was just so surreal,” she says. “I’d seen the movie many times before that, but it was so real in that moment, packed into this theater, all the voice actors there, and immediately I’m crying. In many ways, it felt like there was a lot of myself on that screen, and seeing people’s reactions to it felt like seeing reactions to my research.

“Trying to translate what I know in a way that’s relevant to artists was not a normal part of my job, and it felt very high risk at first because what if people don’t like the movie and it sets beavers back? Beavers are still coming back from the fur trade, plus we have the rising challenge of climate change, so it felt risky. But it’s a beautiful movie and people seem to love it, so that makes me feel very hopeful about how science and storytelling can benefit all species.”

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CU ��ý�� alumna Emily Fairfax shared her scientific expertise as the beaver consultant on the new Pixar film Hoppers.

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Top image: Disney/Pixar

Reading the past, engineering the future

Julie Chiron — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:34:31 +0000

Reading the past, engineering the future Julie Chiron Mon, 12/22/2025 - 15:34

Julie Chiron

CU ��ý�� geobiologist Lizzy Trower received a Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship, allowing her to acquire new tools and redirect her deep-time expertise toward urgent environmental challenges

For most of her career, Lizzy Trower has been a time traveler.

The associate professor of geological sciences at the ��ý�� studies rocks that are hundreds of millions of years old to decode how microbial life first shaped our planet, such as oxygenating our atmosphere and paving the way for animal life.

But as a field researcher, Trower has found herself increasingly aware of the present and yearning to look toward the future. In the field, she witnessed pristine microbial mounds in Great Salt Lake frequently exposed and stressed by megadrought, and hurricane scars etched across fragile ecosystems in the Turks and Caicos. Those experiences reshaped her scientific priorities.

CU ��ý�� scientist Lizzy Trower

"The more time I spend in modern environments, the harder it is to ignore the challenges that are happening now related to climate," says Trower. "The questions I work on in Earth’s history are really interesting, but sometimes they don’t feel quite as relevant or urgent."

The features at Great Salt Lake have thrived underwater for more than 10,000 years. Long fascinating to geoscientists as a way to understand what they might see in rocks, these windows into the past are now under threat. Trower worries that some of these systems may simply disappear, no longer available for study or teaching.

"It's shocking to be in a moment where these things that have been around for thousands of years and have been useful and cool for generations of scientists might not be there much longer,” she says.

Increasingly, conversations in the field have shifted from how these systems grow to how they degrade when exposed for long periods above the lake’s surface. "The destruction and degradation weren’t something we talked about when I was a grad student," Trower says.

Unbounded exploration leads to breakthroughs

As a newly named 2025 Simons Foundation Pivot Fellow, Trower is undertaking a bold research shift and acquiring new skills to apply her deep knowledge of geobiology to help address today’s urgent environmental challenges.

The highly competitive Pivot Fellowship supports midcareer scientists who are seeking to "pivot" into a new discipline, offering a year of immersive mentorship, training and resources for scholars to acquire entirely new skills. The program celebrates the idea that breakthroughs often emerge when researchers cross disciplinary boundaries, a principle that resonates with the College of Arts and Sciences emphasis on interdisciplinary exploration.

"I love experimentation, but I’m at a point where my ideas exceed my toolset. I want to culture microbes, design experiments and teach students how to work with them," says Trower. "It's rare to get dedicated time to develop new skills. I want my work to feel urgent, impactful, relevant — and this helps me move toward that."

Microbes in a headwind

Trower’s pivot centers on euendoliths—microbes that bore microscopic cavities into calcium carbonate minerals. In doing so, they generate alkalinity, a chemical process that raises pH and could counteract ocean acidification, one of the most pressing threats to marine ecosystems.

"What’s fascinating about these microbes is that they dissolve minerals to create tiny tunnel systems," says Trower. "But here’s what’s wild: they do this in places where dissolving these minerals should be thermodynamically unfavorable."

"In those environments, these minerals should be forming—not dissolving," says Trower. "So, I imagine these microbes like hikers walking into the headwind, stubbornly using a lot of energy to carve out tunnels even though the environment is against them."

If scientists can understand and harness this ability, the implications are far-reaching: targeted mitigation of ocean acidification, enhanced carbon removal strategies, improved wastewater treatment and even innovations in engineered living building materials.

A year outside the comfort zone

The science is still in its infancy. Only one euendolith has ever been isolated in pure culture, a cyanobacterium discovered on a Puerto Rican beach. Trower’s fellowship year will focus on building the toolkit to change that. Alongside microbial ecologist John Spear in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, she will learn to culture environmental microbes, apply genomic tools and characterize the diversity and behavior of these organisms.

Beyond the lab, Trower’s pivot reflects a philosophical shift from basic science grounded in the past to applied research aimed at solutions. "My goal is to prepare students for impactful careers beyond academia," she says. Research shows that today’s undergraduates value altruistic motivators, helping people and the environment, when choosing STEM careers. Trower’s new direction aligns with those ideals, offering students opportunities to address climate challenges through innovative science.

The Simons Foundation announced the 2025 Pivot Fellows on Nov. 13, highlighting researchers who pursue bold, interdisciplinary ideas and acquire new tools that can open entirely new avenues of discovery. For Trower, the fellowship is more than a career milestone, it’s a chance to honor the memory of a close CU ��ý�� colleague whose expertise she hoped to draw on. The loss of her friend and esteemed researcher inspired her to gain new expertise to continue the work herself.

For a geobiologist who has spent her career translating the planet’s oldest stories, the pivot is less a departure than a continuation, carrying the lessons from billions of years ago into a future that urgently needs them.

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Department of Geological Sciences to become Department of Earth Science

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 16:06:36 +0000

Department of Geological Sciences to become Department of Earth Science Rachel Sauer Tue, 10/28/2025 - 10:06

New name reflects more than a century of evolution and a commitment to understanding the whole planet

Beginning in August 2026, the ��ý��'s Department of Geological Sciences will become the Department of Earth Science, a change that reflects both the department's contemporary research capabilities and the evolution of the discipline itself.

The decision, unanimously approved by department faculty and endorsed by campus and CU system leadership, comes after decades of expansion in the research and teaching mission to include areas of inquiry not typically associated with traditional notions of geology. Today, CU ��ý��'s Earth scientists study everything from the forces that shape landscapes and the movement of water to the evolution of ancient animals and the modern threats natural hazards pose to humans.

"'Geological Sciences' has served us well, but it also carries some old-fashioned connotations—people think of rocks and minerals. Our work today spans so much more. We study glaciers, water resources, tectonics, marine geochemistry and even the connections between life and the Earth's chemistry," says Anne Sheehan, professor and chair of the department. "'Earth Science' simply fits who we are now."

Reflecting national trends

The department’s name change follows similar updates at leading research universities across the country, including Yale, Stanford and the University of Texas at Austin, all of which have rebranded their programs to better represent the interdisciplinary nature of Earth and planetary sciences. CU ��ý��’s department, which is ranked among the top programs in the nation for geosciences and Earth science by U.S. News & World Report, joins this growing movement to modernize terminology and public understanding of the field.

“It’s a broader term that more accurately represents who we are and what we do. It aligns with some of our funding agencies,” says Sheehan. “The National Science Foundation has a Division of Earth Sciences and NASA has an Earth Sciences Division. The new department name also fits perfectly with our home on campus, the Benson Earth Sciences Building.”

A natural shift

Founded in 1902 as the Department of Geology and renamed Geological Sciences in 1969, the program has evolved in step with the science itself. Research once focused largely on identifying rock formations and fossil records now uses advanced tools including satellite sensing and isotopic dating to reveal the planet's deep past and forecast its future.

“Our department is over 100 years old. It was one of the first departments at the university and the first handful of faculty at the university included people teaching geology because mining was so central to Colorado and to ��ý��,” says Sheehan. “The field has expanded, and technologies such as satellites and GPS have opened up all sorts of new avenues of exploration. The field has definitely grown as you hope a vital field would do.”

Preparing the next generation

The name change coincides with another significant milestone: the conversion of the department's Bachelor of Arts degree to a Bachelor of Science degree beginning in fall 2026, a change that better reflects the scientific training students already receive. The change from a Geology BA to an Earth Science BS will not affect current students' academic requirements or degrees; it will help the department better convey its identity to future generations.

For Irene Blair, dean of the Division of Natural Sciences, the new name is about clarity and connection.

“Students increasingly seek programs that connect scientific inquiry with solutions to global challenges such as sustainability and resource management,” says Blair. “Adopting the name ‘Earth Science’ clarifies for prospective students what this department already offers—a comprehensive, forward-looking education that prepares graduates to lead in science, industry and policy.”

As the department looks ahead to its next chapter, Sheehan emphasized that the new name honors both tradition and transformation.

"This change honors our history while positioning us for the future," Sheehan says. "It better represents the collective mission of the excellent faculty we have recruited, the research programs we have built and the important questions in the Earth sciences we are tackling. We bring these discoveries into our classrooms and our graduate programs to successfully train the next generation of Earth scientists.”

“And you know,” Sheehan adds, “I’m kind of hoping that there will be fewer rock jokes, but that might be hoping for too much.”

Learn more about the change

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New name reflects more than a century of evolution and a commitment to understanding the whole planet.

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Top image: a pool at Yellowstone National Park ( Photo: Denys Nevozhai/Unspalsh)

Scholar studies hydrogen gas as a clean energy source for meeting decarbonization goals

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 20:11:12 +0000

Scholar studies hydrogen gas as a clean energy source for meeting decarbonization goals Rachel Sauer Mon, 10/27/2025 - 14:11

CU ��ý�� Professor Alexis Templeton will discuss hydrogen as a clean energy source and as an energy source for life in the Earth during her Nov. 20 Distinguished Research Lecture

As nations around the world work to decarbonize and bolster their energy security, many of them are turning to hydrogen gas as an alternative energy source.

At the ��ý��, Alexis Templeton, a professor of geological sciences, is developing projects around the world with academic, government and industry partners to harvest naturally occurring, low-carbon hydrogen from beneath the Earth’s surface.

Alexis Templeton, a CU ��ý�� professor of geological sciences, studies how microbial life interacts with geology in extreme environments.

“Hydrogen is one of the most powerful and versatile energy sources on Earth. It has long been used to power microbial life activity in dark, rocky parts of our planet where other forms of energy are scarce, and excitingly now humans are trying to harness this globally abundant energy source as well,” Templeton says.

Templeton’s research into the geochemistry of subsurface rocks—how they interact with water to produce hydrogen—offers the promise of clean energy innovation in the not-too-distant future. She will share details about that aspect of her research—as well as how hydrogen sustains microbial life in Earth’s deep subsurface environments—in the 126th Distinguished Research Lecture, “Hydrogen: Integrating the Searches for New Energy Sources and Novel Life Activity Within the Earth,” at 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20, at the Chancellor’s Hall and Auditorium, Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE). A question-and-answer session and reception will follow the lecture.

“I’m deeply honored to be selected to deliver a Distinguished Research Lecture on the CU ��ý�� campus. I truly appreciate the support of my colleagues here at the University of Colorado and in the international geochemistry and geobiology community who supported this nomination and the work that will be shared,” Templeton says.

About Alexis Templeton

Templeton is a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and the CU Center for Astrobiology. Her research spans the globe—from volcanoes in the Pacific to cold springs in the High Arctic to the mountains and deserts of the Arabian Peninsula—but it all centers on one goal: understanding how microbial life interacts with geology in extreme environments.

If you go

What: 126th Distinguished Research Lecture, Hydrogen: Integrating the Searches for New Energy Sources and Novel Life Activity Within the Earth

Who: Professor Alexis Templeton of the Department of Geological Sciences and Center for Astrobiology

When: 4-5 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20, followed by a Q&A and reception

Where: Chancellor's Hall and Auditorium, Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE)

With funding from NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Grantham, Packard and Simons Foundations, she has led several large multidisciplinary projects to investigate the subsurface biosphere on Earth and the potential for similar life forms to exist elsewhere in the solar system.

At CU ��ý��, Templeton trains students and postdoctoral scholars in the realms of geochemistry, geomicrobiology and astrobiology and co-directs the Raman Chemical Imaging laboratory, a CU-��ý�� Core Facility. She is an active member of the geobiology program, and she teaches several courses in geochemistry that blend classroom learning with field experiences in the mountains of Colorado.

Templeton received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Dartmouth College, her PhD from Stanford University and her postdoctoral training from Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

About the distinguished research lectureship

The Distinguished Research Lectureship is one the highest honors bestowed by CU ��ý�� faculty upon a colleague. Awarded annually by the Research and Innovation Office, it recognizes tenured faculty members, research professors (associate or full) or adjunct professors who have been with CU ��ý�� for at least five years for a distinguished body of academic or creative work, as well as contributions to the educational and service missions. Each recipient gives a lecture in the fall or spring and receives a $2,000 honorarium.

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CU ��ý�� Professor Alexis Templeton will discuss hydrogen as a clean energy source and as an energy source for life in the Earth during her Nov. 20 Distinguished Research Lecture.

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Top image: iStock

CU ��ý�� scholar receives Fulbright support to study fossil mammals in Poland

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 19:23:11 +0000

CU ��ý�� scholar receives Fulbright support to study fossil mammals in Poland Rachel Sauer Fri, 08/22/2025 - 13:23

Professor Jaelyn Eberle will teach and pursue a hypothesis that a Cretaceous land bridge between Asia and North America was a dispersal route for land mammals at the time

Jaelyn Eberle, a ��ý�� professor of geological sciences and CU Museum of Natural History curator of fossil vertebrates, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to study the extensive collection of Cretaceous (about 75 million years old) Mongolian mammals housed at the Institute of Paleobiology in Warsaw, Poland.

Eberle will travel to Poland Aug. 31 to begin work comparing the Mongolian mammal collection with fossil mammals that she and her colleagues discovered on the North Slope of Alaska, in the hopes of identifying some of the earliest mammals to cross from Asia into North America via Beringia, a prehistoric land bridge that once connected the two continents. Along with Professor Lucja Fostowicz-Frelik, Eberle also will team-teach a graduate seminar on the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary for the BioPlanet Doctoral School in Poland, which attracts PhD students in biology, geology and biochemistry from across Europe.

Jaelyn Eberle, a CU ��ý�� professor of geological sciences and CU Museum of Natural History curator of fossil vertebrates, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to study the Cretaceous Mongolian mammals housed at the Institute of Paleobiology in Warsaw, Poland.

“Until now, my research has focused mostly on North American fossil mammals,” Eberle explains. “The Fulbright award allows me to broaden my research to include ancient Mongolian mammals and collaborate with the foremost expert on them, Dr. Fostowicz-Frelik. I am also excited to co-teach a class with Dr. Fostowicz-Frelik; this will build my knowledge of the Eurasian fossil record and inject new content, perspective and teaching styles into my courses at CU ��ý��.

“Being immersed in the language and culture of Poland for four months and teaching PhD students from across Europe will also give me perspective on how to better support CU students from international backgrounds, too.”

Fulbright U.S. Scholars are faculty, researchers, administrators and established professionals teaching or conducting research in affiliation with institutes abroad. Fulbright Scholars engage in cutting-edge research and expand their professional networks, often continuing research collaborations started abroad and laying the groundwork for forging future partnerships between institutions.

“Professor Eberle’s fascinating research is important not only because it advances scientific knowledge, it also expands the Museum Institute’s vibrant international collaborations, helping us to connect with scholars around the globe,” says Nancy Stevens, director of the Museum Institute and professor of anthropology.

Upon returning to their home countries, institutions, labs and classrooms, they share their stories and often become active supporters of international exchange, inviting foreign scholars to campus and encouraging colleagues and students to go abroad.

More than 800 individuals teach or conduct research abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program annually. In addition, more than 2,000 Fulbright U.S. Student Program participants—recent college graduates, graduate students and early-career professionals—participate in study/research exchanges or as English teaching assistants in local schools abroad each year.

Fulbright is a program of the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide.

As a Fulbright U.S. Scholar, Eberle will further her study of fossil mammals, their evolution during past intervals of global warmth and their dispersal across the Northern Hemisphere when polar land bridges connected North America to both Asia and Europe.

“I hypothesize that some of the Cretaceous Alaskan mammals belong to Asian lineages; if true, this would provide direct evidence that Beringia was a dispersal route for land mammals at the time,” Eberle explains. “The Alaskan fauna preserves the northernmost known mammals of the Mesozoic Era (or Age of Dinosaurs), and our team’s latest findings mean it may also include among the earliest mammalian immigrants from Asia to North America.

Jaelyn Eberle (foreground, yellow jacket) and her colleagues quarry for tiny vertebrate fossils in Alaska's Prince Creek Formation. (Photo: Kevin May)

Many of the mammal teeth Jaelyn Eberle studies are the size of sand grains. This is a tooth of the tiny Alaskan mammal Sikuomys mikros (meaning "tiny ice mouse") that lived in northern Alaska about 72 million years ago. (Photo: Jaelyn Eberle)

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Professor Jaelyn Eberle will teach and pursue a hypothesis that a Cretaceous land bridge between Asia and North America was a dispersal route for land mammals at the time.

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Top illustration: James Havens

How deep is that snow? Machine learning helps us know

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 13:30:00 +0000

How deep is that snow? Machine learning helps us know Rachel Sauer Thu, 07/10/2025 - 07:30

Blake Puscher

CU ��ý�� researchers apply machine learning to snow hydrology in Colorado mountain drainage basins, finding a new way to accurately predict the availability of water

Determining how much water is contained as snow in mountain drainage basins is very important for water management, because measuring it is a necessary part of predicting the availability of water—especially in places that rely on snowmelt for their water supply, like Colorado and other western states.

Snow water equivalent is the amount of water in a mass of snow or snowpack. The depth of this water is a fraction of the snow depth, and this fraction is obtained by multiplying the depth by the snow density, which is expressed as a percentage of the density of water. If there are 10 inches of snow with a density of 10%, the snow water equivalent is 1 inch.

A persistent challenge is that snow water content is calculated from both snow depth and snow density, yet it remains unfeasible to directly measure snow density over a large area. Traditionally, this issue has been addressed with remote sensing, which allows for consistent and relatively large-scale measurements. However, remote sensing methods have their own limitations, which has prompted the search for an alternative in machine-learning technology.

CU ��ý�� researchers Jordan Herbert (left), a PhD candidate, and Eric Small, a professor of geological sciences, developed a model that can estimate the snow density at times when and in places where it has not been observed or sensed.

In their study on the subject, ��ý�� Ph.D. candidate Jordan Herbert and Professor Eric Small of the Department of Geological Sciences developed a model that can estimate the snow density at times when and in places where it has not been observed or sensed. This model is split into different scenarios, each trained on a different subset of the data, and while performance varied, all scenarios were more accurate than extrapolation from remote sensing methods, according to Herbert and Small.

Model performance analyses also demonstrated that information from Airborne light detection and ranging (LIDAR) can be transferred to different times and places within the region it was collected.

LIDAR and SNOTEL data

LIDAR surveys are an important tool in snow hydrology, as they provide detailed information about snow properties, specifically through their detection of snow depth.

“You fly the plane twice,” Small says, “once when there’s no snow, once when there is snow. The laser reflects off the surface, and if you know where the plane is and the distance to the surface, then you know the height of the snow relative to the ground surface.” This is called differential LIDAR altimetry.

While LIDAR is very useful in snow hydrology, it does have some limitations. The first is that it only measures snow depth, but snow density (either measured or modeled) is also needed to determine snow water equivalent. This isn’t a unique limitation, however, because snow density cannot be surveyed in the same way as snow depth.

“Measuring snow density in the field reveals just how variable the snowpack is,” Herbert explains. “Depending on if you dig a snow pit under a tree or on a north versus south facing aspect, you can get a completely different answer.”

This is a major limitation of on-site observations. Density also varies with depth, and remote sensing signals will be affected by the amount of liquid water content in snow, which makes measuring snow density remotely or over a broad scale impossible for the foreseeable future.

The second and more easily addressed issue with LIDAR surveys is the logistical issues associated with necessary plane flights.

“You can’t fly a plane all the time,” Small says. “It’s too expensive, and we don’t have enough planes to fly everywhere.” Planes also cannot be flown when the weather is bad, and surveys only provide a snapshot of snow depth, which can change rapidly as snow falls or melts.

“Measuring snow density in the field reveals just how variable the snowpack is. Depending on if you dig a snow pit under a tree or on a north versus south facing aspect, you can get a completely different answer,” says CU ��ý�� researcher Jordan Herbert. (Photo: Pixabay)

These limitations can be worked around by using the LIDAR data to train computer models. “Based on that,” Small says, “you can use the LIDAR information to make predictions in the absence of LIDAR at another time or date or location. So, you’re leveraging the scientific information from LIDAR to improve your knowledge generally.”

Snow telemetry (SNOTEL) is an automated system of snow and climate sensors run by the National Resource Conservation Service, which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There are about a thousand SNOTEL sites across the western United States—small wilderness areas filled with sensing equipment that measures precipitation, snow mass and snow depth.

“All snow hydrology is based on data from these stations,” Small says. “The problem is that they only cover a small area. If you take all the SNOTEL stations in the western U.S. and put them next to each other, they’d be about the size of a football field, so they’re vastly under sampling. That’s why people want to use LIDAR to fill in all the spaces around them.”

The random forest model

Linear regression makes quantitative predictions based on one or more variables, but it becomes difficult to perform when many of these variables interact with each other in complex ways. In this case, some examples are elevation, solar radiation, slope, tree cover and so on. The difficulty of working with all these variables can be minimized by a modeling tool called a regression tree.

“A binary regression tree splits your sample into two groups, and it splits that sample to figure out which variable has the most effect on the thing you're trying to predict,” Small explains. The branching structure created by these splits gives the model its name and is designed to minimize errors. Each branching point is a condition like true/false or yes/no, the answer to which determines the path taken.

Regression trees are useful in that they fit the data better than multiple linear regression models, which are the other option when it comes to using linear regression when there are many variables involved. The better a model fits the observed data, the better it will be at predicting data that have not been observed, Small says.

However, regression trees have their own limitations.

“The downside of a binary regression tree is that it only gives you categorized values,” Small says. “For example, snow depth could be 70 centimeters, 92 centimeters or 123 centimeters. You end up with a map that just has these particular values.” This issue can be solved by combining multiple regression trees into a random forest model.

“What a random forest does,” Small explains, “is take a bunch of these binary regression trees and samples them randomly to give you continuous distributions of the variable that you care about. So instead of it being in these categories, it's more like how we think about snow depth.”

“All snow hydrology is based on data from (SNOTEL) stations. The problem is that they only cover a small area. If you take all the SNOTEL stations in the western U.S. and put them next to each other, they’d be about the size of a football field, so they’re vastly under sampling," says CU ��ý�� Professor Eric Small. (Photo: Ruvin Miksanskiy/Pexels)

Machine learning

While using binary regression trees allows the predictive model discussed in this study to fit the data better, there are other things to consider, Small says. “In machine learning and other statistics, there’s this trade-off between how well a model can fit the information you give it and how generalizable it is. If I keep adding training data, training the model and tuning the parameters, I can have it fit the data pretty well, but then it becomes fixated on those very specific data, and it’s not going to make good predictions elsewhere.”

This is called “overfitting,” and it can be described simply as the model becoming too used to patterns in the data it was trained on. In anticipating these patterns, the model will make incorrect predictions that would have been right in the same place or under the same circumstances as the training data were collected, but aren’t otherwise.

This explains the different performance of the three different versions of the model: the site-specific model, the regional model and the site-specific and regional (SS+Reg) model. The site-specific model makes predictions about a given basin using LIDAR data from the same basin that was collected at other dates, whereas the regional model makes predictions about a basin using data from other basins and at other dates. The SS+Reg model was trained using all available data.

The SS+Reg model was the most accurate, but all models were generally accurate, both compared to models from prior studies and remote sensing methods. Because models of the sort used in this study output on the 50-meter scale, this scale was used to compare this study’s models to existing ones, and the former were more accurate. The models’ outputs were at a scale of 50 meters, but these were upscaled to 1- and 4-kilometer scales as well.

The 1- and 4-kilometer scales are more typically used in water management applications, and all three models became more accurate when applied to these scales, outperforming SNOTEL. This means that the models were more accurate than extrapolation from observation data. The success of both the SS+Reg and regional models indicates that information gained from LIDAR is transferable to different times and locations within the Rocky Mountain Region.

Besides fitting the data well and being adaptable to different scales between the three model scenarios, this approach is also beneficial because it does not rely on modeling physical processes (like snow formation, accumulation and melt) or on uncertain weather data. This makes it so that, once a model is trained, it doesn’t take long to make predictions. “The big gain is that it's much more computationally efficient and it just takes a fraction of the time,” Small says. “It's about 100 times faster.”

Herbert says “machine learning has been a huge benefit to my research, with the results to back it up. It’s freed up my time in the winter to put skis on and dig more snow pits to get the density data we desperately need.”

“For whatever reason, all our physically based models and our knowledge of science just gets in our way of making predictions,” Small explains, “because we've tried to boil it down to these simple equations, but it's not simple.”

"Machine learning has been a huge benefit to my research, with the results to back it up. It’s freed up my time in the winter to put skis on and dig more snow pits to get the density data we desperately need."

Expanding to other regions

The primary limitation of the snow density-measuring framework that the researchers created for this study was its reliance on on-site and LIDAR data for snow depth measurements. Small says that this could be addressed by bringing in other data sets, which would provide a more independent test of success than models’ ability to predict snow density in regions they were not trained on.

One of these data sets, the fractional snow-covered area (how much of the ground is covered by snow), could be measured using LIDAR equipment mounted to a satellite rather than relying on airplanes. While LIDAR has been used with satellite technology, this doesn’t address the limitations of plane-mounted LIDAR, because as Small says, “the (satellite) overpass interval is very slow. It’s about 90 days before it comes back to the place you’re looking at. So, you get a snapshot very infrequently, but it’s everywhere on the planet.”

The next step of developing this kind of model is to apply it to other regions, and it remains to be seen how easily that translation can be made, Herbert says.

“We’ve just begun running the model in California to see if the model works in regions with different climates,” he says. “We want to see how transferable data from one region is to another, and California is an ideal test site since it has more LIDAR than anywhere else in the world.”

The presence of LIDAR is important because these data were the most useful when it came to statistical model validation, or making sure that the models were accurate and reliable, compared to data limited by the small-area reporting of SNOTEL and the variability of on-the-ground snow density measurements. Without data to judge models’ predictions against, it is impossible to determine how well they do, because the actual snow depth is unknown.

Also, because LIDAR isn’t available everywhere, it is important to continue developing other methods of validation, the researchers say. Small says reducing reliance on LIDAR will help the innovative modeling framework apply to many parts of the country.

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CU ��ý�� researchers apply machine learning to snow hydrology in Colorado mountain drainage basins, finding a new way to accurately predict the availability of water.

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Life endured inside the snowball

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 18:31:15 +0000

Life endured inside the snowball Rachel Sauer Wed, 11/13/2024 - 11:31

Liam Courtney-Davies , Rebecca Flowers and Christine Siddoway

Evidence from Snowball Earth found in ancient rocks on Colorado’s Pikes Peak—it’s a missing link

Around 700 million years ago, the Earth cooled so much that scientists believe massive ice sheets encased the entire planet like a giant snowball. This global deep freeze, known as Snowball Earth, endured for tens of millions of years.

Yet, miraculously, early life not only held on, but thrived. When the ice melted and the ground thawed, complex multicellular life emerged, eventually leading to life-forms we recognize today.

CU ��ý�� researchers Liam Courtney-Davies (left) and Rebecca Flowers (right), along with Colorado College colleague Christine Siddoway, have found that life endured during Snowball Earth.

The Snowball Earth hypothesis has been largely based on evidence from sedimentary rocks exposed in areas that once were along coastlines and shallow seas, as well as climate modeling. Physical evidence that ice sheets covered the interior of continents in warm equatorial regions had eluded scientists – until now.

In new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our team of geologists describes the missing link, found in an unusual pebbly sandstone encapsulated within the granite that forms Colorado’s Pikes Peak.

Solving a Snowball Earth mystery on a mountain

Pikes Peak, originally named Tavá Kaa-vi by the Ute people, lends its ancestral name, Tava, to these notable rocks. They are composed of solidified sand injectites, which formed in a similar manner to a medical injection when sand-rich fluid was forced into underlying rock.

A possible explanation for what created these enigmatic sandstones is the immense pressure of an overlying Snowball Earth ice sheet forcing sediment mixed with meltwater into weakened rock below.

An obstacle for testing this idea, however, has been the lack of an age for the rocks to reveal when the right geological circumstances existed for sand injection.

We found a way to solve that mystery, using veins of iron found alongside the Tava injectites, near Pikes Peak and elsewhere in Colorado.

Earth was covered in ice during the Cryogenian Period, but life on the planet survived. (Illustration: NASA)

Iron minerals contain very low amounts of naturally occurring radioactive elements, including uranium, which slowly decays to the element lead at a known rate. Recent advancements in laser-based radiometric dating allowed us to measure the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes in the iron oxide mineral hematite to reveal how long ago the individual crystals formed.

The iron veins appear to have formed both before and after the sand was injected into the Colorado bedrock: We found veins of hematite and quartz that both cut through Tava dikes and were crosscut by Tava dikes. That allowed us to figure out an age bracket for the sand injectites, which must have formed between 690 million and 660 million years ago.

So, what happened?

The time frame means these sandstones formed during the Cryogenian Period, from 720 million to 635 million years ago. The name is derived from “cold birth” in ancient Greek and is synonymous with climate upheaval and disruption of life on our planet – including Snowball Earth.

While the triggers for the extreme cold at that time are debated, prevailing theories involve changes in tectonic plate activity, including the release of particles into the atmosphere that reflected sunlight away from Earth. Eventually, a buildup of carbon dioxide from volcanic outgassing may have warmed the planet again.

The Tava found on Pikes Peak would have formed close to the equator within the heart of an ancient continent named Laurentia, which gradually over time and long tectonic cycles moved into its current northerly position in North America today.

Dark red to purple bands of Tava sandstone dissect pink and white granite. (Photo: Liam Courtney-Davies)

The origin of Tava rocks has been debated for over 125 years, but the new technology allowed us to conclusively link them to the Cryogenian Snowball Earth period for the first time.

The scenario we envision for how the sand injection happened looks something like this:

A giant ice sheet with areas of geothermal heating at its base produced meltwater, which mixed with quartz-rich sediment below. The weight of the ice sheet created immense pressures that forced this sandy fluid into bedrock that had already been weakened over millions of years. Similar to fracking for natural gas or oil today, the pressure cracked the rocks and pushed the sandy meltwater in, eventually creating the injectites we see today.

Clues to another geologic puzzle

Not only do the new findings further cement the global Snowball Earth hypothesis, but the presence of Tava injectites within weak, fractured rocks once overridden by ice sheets provides clues about other geologic phenomena.

Time gaps in the rock record created through erosion and referred to as unconformities can be seen today across the United States, most famously at the Grand Canyon, where in places, over a billion years of time is missing. Unconformities occur when a sustained period of erosion removes and prevents newer layers of rock from forming, leaving an unconformable contact.

Our results support that a Great Unconformity near Pikes Peak must have been formed prior to Cryogenian Snowball Earth. That’s at odds with hypotheses that attribute the formation of the Great Unconformity to large-scale erosion by Snowball Earth ice sheets themselves.

We hope the secrets of these elusive Cryogenian rocks in Colorado will lead to the discovery of further terrestrial records of Snowball Earth. Such findings can help develop a clearer picture of our planet during climate extremes and the processes that led to the habitable planet we live on today.

Liam Courtney-Davies is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Geological Sciences at the ��ý��; Rebecca Flowers is a CU ��ý�� professor of geological sciences. Christine Siddoway is a professor of geology at Colorado College.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Evidence from Snowball Earth found in ancient rocks on Colorado’s Pikes Peak—it’s a missing link.

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Why did a frozen Earth coincide with an evolutionary spurt?

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 17:39:03 +0000

Why did a frozen Earth coincide with an evolutionary spurt? Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/08/2024 - 11:39

Clint Talbott

CU ��ý�� geologists Lizzy Trower and Carl Simpson win $1 million in support from W.M. Keck Foundation to try to solve an evolutionary puzzle and to extend Earth’s temperature record by 2 billion years

What happened during the “Snowball Earth” period is perplexing: Just as the planet endured about 100 million years of deep freeze, with a thick layer of ice covering most of Earth and with low levels of atmospheric oxygen, forms of multicellular life emerged.

Lizzy Trower (top) and Carl Simpson. Trower image courtesy of Lizzy Trower; Simpson photo by CU photographer Glenn Asakawa. At the top of the page: A screen capture from a video of algae clumping together in Simpson's lab. Video by Andrea Halling.

Why? The prevailing scientific view is that such frigid temperatures would slow rather than speed evolution. But fossil records from 720 to 635 million years ago show an evolutionary spurt preceding the development of animals. Two ��ý�� scientists aim to help solve this puzzle.

If they succeed, they would not only help unravel an evolutionary mystery, but also extend the temperature record of Earth by 2 billion years.

Carl Simpson, a macroevolutionary paleobiologist at CU ��ý��, has found evidence that cold seawater could have jump-started—rather than suppressed—evolution from single-celled to multicellular life forms. But to demonstrate that very cold temperatures could have sped up evolution, he needs an accurate temperature record from that period.

Temperature records using existing methods are accurate only to 500 million years ago. That could change, though: Lizzy Trower, a chemical sedimentologist, has developed a novel method of measuring global temperature from 500 million to 2.5 billion years ago.

Together, Trower and Simpson hope to test Simpson’s hypothesis against temperature records from Trower’s novel tool, and they recently won a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to do so.

Both the fossil record and calculations based on a “DNA clock”—which calculates the age of current organisms based on the rate of mutations over eons—indicate that multicellular organisms emerged during Snowball Earth.

Simpson, who is an assistant professor of geological sciences and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the CU Museum of Natural History, has spent a lot of time since coming to CU ��ý�� trying to understand the connection between extreme, prolonged cold and evolution. He describes a breakthrough stemming from a “knuckleheaded” approach: “trying to imagine what the unicellular ancestor of an animal would have been experiencing” during Snowball Earth.

During this “cold, salty and dark” period, there would have been up to a kilometer of ice at the Equator, and liquid water below the ice would have been very cold, about -5 degrees C (about 23 degrees F).

“One thing that you learn about small organisms from a physics point of view is that they don't experience the world the same way that we do, as larger-bodied organisms,” Simpson said. Unicellular organisms are affected by the viscosity, or thickness, of sea water.

The increase in viscosity—which increases as water temperature falls—could yield an evolutionary advantage to those single-celled organisms that clumped together, using their combined propulsion efforts to their mutual advantage. In his laboratory, Simpson and colleagues have found that a type of green algae responds as he hypothesized it would.

Video of algae clumping together in Simpson's lab. (Credit: Andrea Halling)

“And basically, that would trigger the origin of animals, potentially,” he said.

How cold was it?

However, there is uncertainty about how cold it was and how much that cold varied during Snowball Earth. Current methods suggest that the average global temperature in this period was about 20 degrees C, or 68 degrees F, levels that wouldn’t turn the planet into a snowball. That’s where Trower comes in.

Trower, an associate professor of geological sciences, studies grains of sand made from calcium carbonate and called ooids. These sand grains can gather material and get larger as they roll around, “as opposed to any other type of sand grain, which generally just gets smaller the more it’s transported around,” she said.

Trower’s idea was to explore whether the size of ooids could reveal things about the environments in which they formed. Ooids are affected by two kinds of processes: physical and chemical.

Physically, the sand grains are abraded as they roll around and collide with other grains. These abrasions and collisions make the grains shrink.

Chemically, the sand grains can grow with the precipitation of new minerals. Originally, Trower framed these reactions as reflecting the seawater in which they’re forming. “So, for example, if it's more super-saturated with respect to these calcium carbonate minerals, then the rate of mineral precipitation is faster, and that might explain why you would get ooids that are larger.”

But her calculations based on water viscosity didn’t suggest that ooids would grow as large as they did during Snowball Earth. Giant ooids from this period have been found in some places worldwide. Trower is focusing on a form of calcium carbonate called ikaite, which forms only in very cold conditions and which was discovered in a Norwegian fjord.

The ooids built on these rare, cold-loving carbonate minerals can grow comparatively large, greater than 2 millimeters in diameter. Trower notes that ooids of this size and composition form only in certain temperatures; thus, the diameter of these ooids could be a proxy measurement of Earth’s temperature for the last 2.5 billion years.

Answering a big question

With funding from the W.M. Keck Foundation, Trower, Simpson and colleagues will collect giant ooid samples from around the world, measure them and analyze the samples to determine the nature of minerals they were originally composed of.

Watch Lizzy Trower's talk, “Science Perseverance: What I Learned about Being a Scientist from a Grain of Sand,” in which she tells the story of her love for ooids, her journey from curious student to accomplished researcher, and the unexpected lessons learned along the way.

“That, in turn, can tell us something about the chemistry and water temperature in which they formed,” Trower said, noting that those results would be compared against the physical record.

The goal is to answer a big question: “Does the fossil record agree with the predictions we would make based on this theory from this new record of temperature?”

Undertaking such potentially ground-breaking research is both nerve-wracking and also quite exciting, Simpson and Trower said.

Anne Sheehan, professor and chair of the Department of Geological Sciences, praised the scientists: “The project benefits not only from the talent and creativity of Trower and Simpson but also from their willingness to step outside of their disciplines and take risks. This work exemplifies how cross-disciplinary collaboration can push the boundaries of Earth science and drive groundbreaking discoveries.”

Nancy J. Stevens, professor and research institute director of the CU Natural History Museum, observed: “The origin of complex multicellular life is an exciting puzzle to solve, and it would be remiss not to point out how Trower and Simpson have selected a topic and approach that mirror the contemporary research landscape. Organisms able to join forces to unlock new solutions can navigate challenging environments, and ultimately evolve and thrive.”

Trower and Simpson’s work also has potential implications for the human quest to find life elsewhere in the universe, Trower said. If extremely harsh and cold environments can spur evolutionary change, “then that is a really different type of thing to look for in exoplanets (potentially life-sustaining planets in other solar systems), or think about when and where (life) would exist.”

Based in Los Angeles, the W. M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 by the late W. M. Keck, founder of the Superior Oil Co. The Foundation’s grant making is focused primarily on pioneering efforts in the areas of medical research, science and engineering and undergraduate education. The Foundation also maintains a Southern California Grant Program that provides support for the Los Angeles community, with a special emphasis on children and youth. For more information, please visit www.wmkeck.org.

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When it comes to rock bands, age does matter

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 18:41:22 +0000

When it comes to rock bands, age does matter Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/25/2024 - 12:41

Liam Courtney-Davies

Australia’s largest iron ore deposits are 1 billion years younger than previously thought

Iron ore is the key ingredient in steel production. One of the fundamental resources for the Australian economy, it contributes A$124 billion in national income each year.

This is not surprising, considering Western Australia is home to some of Earth’s largest iron ore deposits, and 96% of Australia’s iron ore comes from this state. Yet despite the metal’s significance, we still don’t know exactly how and when iron deposits formed within the continent.

In new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we answer some of these questions by directly measuring radioactive elements in iron oxide minerals which form the basis of these resources.

Liam Courtney-Davies is a postdoctoral associate in the CU ��ý�� Department of Geological Sciences.

We found that several of Western Australia’s richest iron deposits—such as Mt. Tom Price and Mt. Whaleback—are up to 1 billion years younger than previously understood. This redefines how we think about iron deposits at all scales: from the mining site to supercontinents. It also provides clues on how we might be able to find more iron.

Where does iron ore come from?

Billions of years ago, Earth’s oceans were rich in iron. Then early bacteria started photosynthesising and rapidly introduced huge amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere and oceans. This oxygen combined with iron in the oceans, causing it to settle on the sea floor.

Today, these 2.45-billion-year-old sedimentary rock deposits are called banded iron formations. They represent a unique archive of the interactions between Earth’s continents, oceans and atmosphere through time. And, of course, banded iron formations are what we mine for iron ore.

These sedimentary deposits have distinctive, rhythmic bands of reddish iron and paler silica. They were alternately laid down on the sea floor seasonally. Such remarkable rocks can be visited today in Karijini National Park, WA.

The iron content of these banded iron formations is generally less than 30%. For the rock to become economically viable to mine, it must be naturally converted by later processes to around 60% iron.

The nature of this rock conversion is still debated. In simplest terms, a fluid—such as water—will both remove silica and introduce more iron during an “upgrading” process which transforms the rock’s original makeup.

The geochronology (age dating) of this chemical transformation and upgrading is not well understood, largely because the tools required to directly date the iron minerals have only recently become available.

Previous age estimates for the Pilbara iron deposits were indirect but suggested they were at least 2.2 billion years old.

What did we find out?

You may think of iron ore as rusty, red-coloured dust. However, it’s typically a hard, heavy, steely-blue material. When crushed into a fine powder, iron ore turns red. So the red landscape we see across the Pilbara today is a result of the weathering of iron minerals from beneath our feet.

A banded iron formation at Australia's Fortescue Falls. (Photo: Graeme Churchard/Wikimedia Commons)

We extracted microscopic scale “fresh” iron minerals from drill core samples at several of the most significant Western Australian iron deposits.

Leveraging recent advancements in radiometric dating, we measured naturally occurring radioactive elements in the rocks. In particular, the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes in a sample can reveal how long ago individual mineral grains crystallised.

Using the newly generated iron mineral age data, we constructed the first-ever timeline of the formation of Western Australia’s major iron deposits.

We discovered that all major iron ore deposits in the region formed between 1.4 and 1.1 billion years ago, making them up to 1 billion years younger than previous estimates.

These deposits formed in conjunction with major tectonic events, especially the breakup and reemergence of supercontinents. It shows just how dynamic our planet’s history is, and how complex the processes are that led to the formation of the iron ore we use today.

Now that we know that giant ore deposits are linked to changes in the supercontinent cycle, we can use this knowledge to better predict the places where we are more likely to discover more iron ore.

Liam Courtney-Davies is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Geological Sciences at the ��ý��.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia’s largest iron ore deposits are 1 billion years younger than previously thought.

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