Kraken VMS

ESS Department - November 21st, 2024
he Europa Clipper mission, the largest outer solar system mission ever constructed, launched last month from Florida and embarked on a 5.5-year journey to Jupiter, with a planned arrival in April 2030. The mission’s primary objective is to investigate Europa’s potential habitability and pave the way for future exploration endeavors focused on icy worlds. Equipped with a diverse array of instruments, the spacecraft will investigate, among others the depth and composition of Europa’s deep ocean. We will discuss the strategies employed by the mission, and the efforts of the teams at JPL and UW using cutting-edge experimental techniques and geophysical modeling to prepare for the upcoming observations.

ESS Department - November 14th, 2024

The offshore reaches of subduction megathrusts fail in a broad spectrum of slip modes, spanning from coseismic slip in great earthquakes, to tsunami earthquakes, to tremor and low frequency earthquakes, to slow slip events (SSEs) and aseismic creep. Understanding the nature of strain accumulation and release in this region is central to assessing hazards associated with shallow earthquake rupture and tsunamigenesis. In this talk I describe a family of recently discovered repeating SSE in the Nankai subduction zone offshore of Honshu Japan, up-dip of rupture zone of great (M8) earthquakes, using formation pore pressure data from instrumented borehole observatories. I then draw on a rapidly advancing body of drilling, laboratory, geophysical, and geodetic data from concerted efforts at several subduction zones over the last two decades, which have enabled an increasingly quantitative understanding of linked fluid- and frictional processes...

ESS Department - October 31st, 2024

Water isotope records retrieved from ice cores contain valuable climate information. Stable water isotopes are natural tracers in the water cycle that track changes in environmental conditions. The isotopic composition of precipitation thus contains a climate signal that can be extracted from ice cores in regions where snow turns to ice. Interpretations of ice core isotope records as paleoclimate signals currently assume that the precipitation snow signal remains unaltered during the snow-ice transition. However, snow processes happen continuously after the snow has settled and have the potential to influence the isotopic composition of snow and, thus, the climate signal. Here, we demonstrate, through field observations and laboratory experiments, how snow processes influence the isotopic climate signal stored in the snow and attempt to quantify their effect on the ice core isotope record. We present in-situ snow data from the Greenland...