Geology/Geophysics Seminar – Fall 2025

Linking Climate, Hydrology, and Land Surface Hydrodynamics Across Scales

Date: 10/9/2025 (Thursday)

Time: 12:00 – 1:00 pm

Location: Geology 1707

Presented By: Chuxuan Li* – TBA

Abstract:
Extreme weather and a warming climate can trigger nonlinear interactions between hydrological and geomorphic processes, altering land surface dynamics and water resource availability. This talk explores the coupling between climate, hydrology, and geomorphology using a combination of field data, modeling, and remote sensing approaches. By examining processes across spatial and temporal scales, we aim to improve predictions of hydrological responses to climate variability and change. This work advances our understanding of how land surface hydrodynamics evolve under the influence of changing environmental conditions.

Linking Climate, Hydrology, and Land Surface Hazards: From Landslides to Permafrost Thaw

Date: 10/9/2025 (Thursday)

Time: 12:00 – 1:00 pm

Location: 3853 Slichter Hall

Presented By: Chuxuan Li* – TBA

Abstract:
Extreme weather and a warming climate can trigger cascading hazards that reshape landscapes and endanger infrastructure. This seminar explores how hydrology, climate, and geomorphology interact to cause or amplify land surface hazards, such as landslides, flooding, and permafrost degradation. By combining hydrologic modeling and remote sensing data, this work enhances understanding of the processes that link surface water, ground ice, and slope stability. The findings highlight the importance of interdisciplinary research in predicting and mitigating climate-related geohazards.

Insights on Groundwater Renewability from Age and Residence Time Analysis

Date: 10/16/2025 (Thursday)

Time: 12:00 – 1:00 pm

Location: Geology 1707

Presented By: Bayani Cardenas* – TBA

Abstract:
Groundwater renewability is essential to understanding and managing water resources in a changing climate. In this seminar, I will discuss how the age and residence time of groundwater can be quantified using environmental tracers, isotopic analysis, and numerical modeling. The results reveal how recharge rates and flow pathways vary spatially and temporally across different aquifer systems. These insights highlight the importance of linking groundwater age data to hydrologic and geologic frameworks for assessing the sustainability of groundwater use.

Landscape Evolution Under Variable Climate and Tectonic Forcing

Date: 10/23/2025 (Thursday)

Time: 12:00 – 1:00 pm

Location: Geology 1707

Presented By: Nicole Gasparini* – TBA

Abstract:
Understanding landscape evolution requires integrating climate variability, tectonic uplift, and surface processes that act over multiple timescales. This talk presents recent findings from field studies and numerical models that investigate how climate and tectonics interact to shape mountain ranges and river networks. The discussion will explore how sediment transport, erosion rates, and channel incision patterns reflect the coupling between climate forcing and geologic structure. These findings contribute to improved predictive models of landscape change in active orogenic regions.

Subduction Zone Fluids and Their Role in Crustal Evolution

Date: 10/30/2025 (Thursday)

Time: 12:00 – 1:00 pm

Location: Geology 1707

Presented By: Elizabeth Cottrell* – TBA

Abstract:
Fluids released from subducting slabs play a critical role in driving magmatism, metamorphism, and chemical differentiation in Earth’s crust. In this talk, I will present new geochemical and experimental data that constrain how fluid compositions evolve under high-pressure conditions in subduction zones. These results shed light on the sources of arc magmas, the mobility of trace elements, and the feedbacks between fluid flow and crustal melting. Understanding these processes helps clarify the role of fluids in the evolution of continental crust and the global geochemical cycle.

Insights on Groundwater Renewability from Age and Residence Time Analysis

Date: 10/16/2025 (Thursday)

Time: 12:00 – 1:00 pm

Location: 3853 Slichter Hall

Presented By: Dr. Bayani Cardenas – University of Texas, Austin

Abstract:
Groundwater renewability is a key factor in managing sustainable water resources in a changing climate. This seminar discusses new insights into groundwater age, flow pathways, and residence times across diverse aquifer systems. By integrating isotopic data and numerical modeling, the analysis reveals how recharge dynamics vary under different hydrogeologic settings. The results underscore the role of geologic structure and climate forcing in controlling groundwater sustainability and inform strategies for water management and policy.

Using meandering rivers to study the present and future carbon fluxes from Arctic landscapes

Presented by: Emily C. Geyman

Affiliation: Caltech

Location: 3853 Slichter Hall

Abstract: The vast accumulation of carbon in Arctic soils—an estimated 1,700 Pg—has been referred to as a carbon bomb, a sleeping giant, and Pandora’s freezer. These terms all refer to the so-called ‘permafrost–carbon feedback,’ the cascading cycle in which warming temperatures destabilize permafrost soils, liberating large quantities of carbon to the atmosphere and driving further warming. But predicting whether Arctic landscapes will be a net source or sink of carbon requires tracking the transport and fate of the mobilized soil carbon and quantifying the strength of counteracting processes such as enhanced primary productivity of vegetation. I’ll show how the deposits of meandering rivers provide natural landscape-scale experiments that juxtapose frozen and thawed (permafrost and non-permafrost) terrain in the same environment, allowing us to track the changes to soil carbon and biomass reservoirs over timescales of years to millennia. These observations suggest that permafrost thaw may cause some Arctic landscapes to become a net carbon sink rather than a carbon source.

Deep subduction zone deformation: what exhumed rocks reveal about the slow slip and tremor source region

Presented by: Whitney Behr

Affiliation: ETH Zurich

Location: 3853 Slichter Hall

Abstract: The deep sections of many modern subduction zones release strain through slow slip and tremor (SST), but the structures responsible, deformation mechanisms, and the role of syn-kinematic fluid flow remain hard to resolve from geodetic and seismologic data alone. Exhumed subduction zone rocks, such as those on Syros Island, Greece, provide key insights into the mechanical and hydrologic conditions within the SST source region. In this talk, I will present field-based and microstructural observations that reveal heterogeneity in viscosity, permeability, friction, and mineral fabrics, and discuss how these properties potentially influence deformation styles along subduction interfaces. These rock-based constraints help bridge the gap between geophysical observations and models, shedding light on the physical conditions that govern transitions between stable creep, slow slip, and seismic failure at depth.