California Academy of Sciences Honors UC Davis Geochemists

Two professors from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences were inducted into the ranks of California Academy of Sciences Fellows. They are among 14 new fellows honored at the Academy’s annual meeting, held virtually this year on Oct. 13.

Meteorites Show Transport of Material in Early Solar System

New studies of a rare type of meteorite show that material from close to the sun reached the outer solar system even as the planet Jupiter cleared a gap in the disk of dust and gas from which the planets formed. The results, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, add to an emerging understanding of how our solar system formed and how planets form around other stars.

Ichthyosaur’s Last Meal Is Evidence of Triassic Megapredation

Some 240 million years ago, a dolphin-like ichthyosaur ripped to pieces and swallowed another marine reptile only a little smaller than itself. Then it almost immediately died and was fossilized, preserving the first evidence of megapredation, or a large animal preying on another large animal. The fossil, discovered in 2010 in southwestern China, is described in a paper published Aug. 20 in the journal iScience.

Managing Resources in a Water-Limited World

An interdisciplinary team from UC Davis is collaborating with the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education—the largest graduate water education facility in the world, based in the Netherlands—to develop a summer school on “Sustainable Water Management in a Water-Limited World.”

Explaining the Tiger Stripes of Enceladus

Saturn’s tiny, frozen moon Enceladus is a strange place. Just 300 miles across, the moon is thought to have an outer shell of ice covering a global ocean 20 miles deep, encasing a rocky core. Slashed across Enceladus’ south pole are four straight, parallel fissures or “tiger stripes” from which water erupts. These fissures aren’t quite like anything else in the solar system.