"Faculty, staff and students at the University of California, Riverside will join 10 million people expected to participate in the annual Great California ShakeOut earthquake drill on Thursday, Oct. 15 at 10:15 a.m. The approximately two-minute drill is a voluntary exercise as a first response to a simulated magnitude 7.8 earthquake along the southern San...
"Certain specimens of the fossil Dickinsonia are incomplete because ancient currents lifted them from the sea floor, a team of researchers led by paleontologists at the University of California, Riverside has found. Sand then got deposited beneath the lifted portion, the researchers report, strongly suggesting that Dickinsonia was mobile, easily separated from the sea floor...
"On Saturday, April 11, 2015, aspiring and professional scientists gathered at the University of California, Riverside to share research and interest in the integrative field of geobiology. The 12th Annual Southern California Geobiology Symposium, organized for and by graduate students, displayed current work within geology, geochemistry, biology, astrobiology, microbiology, oceanography, paleobiology, paleoecology and environmental sciences."...
"An earthquake expert at the University of California, Riverside is leading a team of seismologists and volcanologists to conduct an experiment in Alaska that will record a variety of seismic events in that state. The experiment will also help better describe the characteristics of the Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone, one of the most seismically active regions...
"If we’re looking at Mars, or planets in solar systems far, far away, how can we tell whether they support life? Researchers at the University of California, Riverside will share a $50 million grant from the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) to help answer that question by studying ancient rocks on Earth to determine how oxygen...
"Geologists are letting the air out of a nagging mystery about the development of animal life on Earth. Scientists have long speculated as to why animal species didn’t flourish sooner, once sufficient oxygen covered the Earth’s surface. Animals first appeared and began to prosper at the end of the Proterozoic period, about 600 to 700...
"Oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean rose dramatically about 600 million years ago, coinciding with the first proliferation of animal life. Since then, numerous short-lived biotic events — typically marked by significant climatic perturbations — took place when oxygen concentrations in the ocean dipped episodically." Read More
" Wilfred Elders, a professor emeritus of geology at the University of California, Riverside, convened the “International Geothermal Workshop” in Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains, Oct. 13-16, to discuss developing new ways to produce electrical energy from geothermal fields." Read More
"More than 20 years ago, geologist Harry Green, now a distinguished professor of the graduate division at the University of California, Riverside, and colleagues discovered a high-pressure failure mechanism that they proposed then was the long-sought mechanism of very deep earthquakes (earthquakes occurring at more than 400 km depth). The result was controversial because seismologists...
"The Summit fire burned more than 3,000 acres of vegetation near Banning, Calif., in early May this year, giving Southern California’s fire season an early start. What lies in store for the rest of the fire season this year? Richard Minnich, a professor of Earth sciences and a noted fire ecologist at the University of...
"A research team of biogeochemists at the University of California, Riverside has provided a new view on the relationship between the earliest accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere, arguably the most important biological event in Earth history, and its relationship to the sulfur cycle." Read More
"Most researchers imagine the initial oxygenation of the ocean and atmosphere to have been something like a staircase, but with steps only going up. The first step, so the story goes, occurred around 2.4 billion years ago, and this, the so-called Great Oxidation Event, has obvious implications for the origins and evolution of the first...
" Peter M. Sadler, a professor of geology at the University of California, Riverside, has received two prestigious honors: He has been awarded the 2012 ICS Medal of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) for his high-quality research in stratigraphy, the branch of geology that studies rock layers as an archive of Earth history; and...
"A team of paleontologists has discovered the oldest animal with a skeleton. Called Coronacollina acula, the organism is between 560 million and 550 million years old, which places it in the Ediacaran period, before the explosion of life and diversification of organisms took place on Earth in the Cambrian. The finding provides insight into the...
"A series of small earthquakes in the Inland Empire has UC Riverside geologist Dr. Gareth Funning struggling to identify just what they are. Jacob Rascon reports for the NBC4 News at 6 p.m. on April 24, 2012." Read More
"Geologists drilling an exploratory geothermal well in 2009 in the Krafla volcano in Iceland encountered a problem they were simply unprepared for: magma (molten rock or lava underground) which flowed unexpectedly into the well at 2.1 kilometers (6,900 ft) depth, forcing the researchers to terminate the drilling. “To the best of our knowledge, only one...
"The University of California, Riverside's Mary Droser discusses why she believes teaching climate change to young students is crucial and why, despite abundant research, some people remain skeptical about global warming. In 2010 Droser, a paleontologist, received a NASA grant to develop innovative approaches for communicating climate change science to undergraduates and high school students...
"The annual gathering of Earth and space scientists in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union meeting draws thousands of researchers, including many involved with NASA research. Gareth Funning of the University of California-Riverside talks about his work monitoring "creeping faults" in the Bay area. His NASA-sponsored project enlists high school students to document the...
