A fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of America, geochemist Kari Cooper, a professor of earth and planetary sciences in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, won the American Geophysical Union’s Norman L. Bowen Award, which honors a mid-career or senior scientist for outstanding contributions to the fields of petrology, volcanology and geochemistry.

A little over four and a half billion years ago, dust circling our young sun was collecting into balls that would become planets. Heat from radioactive decay melted these balls of dust into blobs of molten rock, growing as they accumulated more material. A small piece of one of these molten objects broke away and traveled around the solar system for eons before falling to Earth as a meteorite in the Algerian desert. Now, very accurate dating of this meteorite is giving new insight into the formation of the Solar System. The work, by an international team including Professor Qingzhu Yin and colleagues at the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Science and collaborators at Australian National University, was published Aug. 29 in Nature Communications.

An international research team led by a UC Davis alum has created a new method to reconstruct the drift path and origin of debris from Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which went missing over the Indian Ocean with 239 passengers onboard.

Over the course of her career, Distinguished Professor Isabel Montañez has created a research niche in the fields of geochemistry and paleoclimatology: applying an Earth systems science approach to recreate Earth from eons past. For her monumental work in the geology field, Montañez recently received the Geological Society of America’s Arthur L. Day Medal.

As we reckon with the effects of climate change, so too must the other organisms that call Earth home. But what if you couldn’t move away from your dwelling to escape a threat? What if your shelter, your refuge, was a part of your body? Shellfish face this plight. Supported by an $80,000 California Sea Grant Graduate Research Fellowship, UC Davis doctoral candidate Hannah Kempf is exploring how to unify modern scientific techniques with Indigenous shellfish management practices to help protect shellfish from ocean acidification.

A UC Davis doctoral candidate investigating the hydrochemistry of southern Africa’s largest and most precious freshwater wetland was recently selected as a winner of the National Geographic Society’s 2023 Wayfinder Award. Goabaone Jaqueline Ramatlapeng joins 14 other trailblazers who were selected for their exemplary achievements in exploration through science, education, conservation, technology and storytelling.

Working in the lab of Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Ryosuke Motani, doctoral candidate Benjamin Faulkner is exploring how plant-eating developed in diapsids, a lineage that includes dinosaurs and modern day lizards, snakes, turtles, birds and crocodilians.

Is it possible to predict earthquakes? For decades, earthquake researchers like Distinguished Professor John Rundle have explored various methods attempting to tackle this question. Rundle and his colleagues are exploring “nowcasting,” which uses methods inspired from the fields of finance, economics and meteorology to determine the earthquake potential of a region through time. In this video, Rundle discusses his interest in earthquake nowcasting and why this field of research is more important than ever.

Caden Williams is among 413 college students nationwide selected from a pool of more than 5,000 applicants to receive the prestigious STEM scholarship, which was established by Congress in 1986 to honor the late U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater. The award provides up to $7,500 for college expenses. This is the sixth consecutive year that a UC Davis student has been named a Goldwater Scholar.