Emily Carter the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and Applied and Computational Mathematics, will present “Carbon Utilization and Other Needed…
One of the major challenges of rheology is to formulate laws that are relevant to the time scales of nature that are inaccessible in the laboratory. We are convinced that this requires a rigorous control of the deformation mechanisms at work. Transmission electron microscopy is traditionally the tool of choice for characterizing deformation…
Ultramafic rocks are unstable in the presence of water near the Earth’s surface, and can produce abundant energy sources such as hydrogen and methane where there is sufficient fluid circulation. In the near future, these rocks will become intensive targets for “stimulated hydrogen production” in efforts to harness hydrogen as a clean energy…
Plate tectonics injects continental and altered oceanic crust into the mantle. This process facilitates communication between shallow terrestrial reservoirs—lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere—and Earth’s deep interior over geologic time. Geochemists trace this communication with a variety of novel tools. A key result of this effort…
Join us as Paul Lewis, Professor of Architecture, presents our third spring ’23 HMEI Faculty Seminar, “Buildings from Plants: Architecture and Embodied Carbon,” at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 4.
The discovery of an enrichment of the element iridium (Ir) in a clay layer marking the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary led to the meteorite impact theory for the end-Cretaceous extinction. This theory has been corroborated by much subsequent evidence including recognition of the Chicxulub crater as the point of impact. What could possibly…
Magnetic fields are thought to govern the dynamics of protoplanetary disks by mediating inward gas accretion and, possibly, setting up turbulent concentrations of dust to form the first planetesimals. A subset of these planetesimals then accrete to form rocky planets, which may eventually host magnetic core dynamos and mobile-lid plate…
Paul Chirik, Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Chemistry, will present “Re-Imagining the Periodic Table: Sustainability Challenges in the 21st Century” in Guyot Hall, Room 10, and online via Zoom. Chirik is the second speaker in the spring 2023
Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, prokaryotic microbes evolved to form a global metabolic network. That network is based on electron transfer reactions with and without protons. The responsible enzymes, the oxidoreductases, encoded by only 400 core genes, literally have evolved to become a planetary electrical…