University of Texas Institute for Geophysics

Last week, researchers from around the country traveled to Austin for the fifth annual COLDEX All-Hands meeting! Members gathered to share research updates, give a retrospective of the work done in the past five years and plan for the next stage in the center’s evolution.

COLDEX is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded center that is looking for the world’s oldest ice in Antarctica. They’re on the hunt for ice that’s millions of years old with tiny pockets of Earth’s ancient atmosphere trapped in air bubbles within the ice. These small air samples can hold information about the planet’s prehistoric climate.

The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics joined COLDEX when it was founded in 2021 and provides one of the airborne-radar systems used to map and track the internal flow of ice sheets during missions to the Antarctic. This information is critical for finding good places to o drill and collect ice cores.

Don Blankenship and Duncan Young, who also spearheaded this year’s annual meeting, lead UTIG’s efforts at the center.

📸 UTIG and Kelly Brunt

The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) seeks to hire multiple research faculty at the Research Assistant or Research Associate Professor rank in the broadly defined field of Coastal Science, including the interconnected fields of Physical Oceanography and Weather and Climate Extremes.

Areas of expertise may include, but are not limited to: beach processes, estuarine dynamics, ice-ocean interactions, ocean circulation, paleoceanography, paleotempestology, permafrost degradation, sea level change, and tropical cyclones).

For more information on this opportunity or to apply, click here: https://ig.utexas.edu/jobs/2026/research-assistant-research-associate-professor-coastal-science/

2026 is an El Niño year, with current forecasts showing it intensifying through the end of the year and remaining through the beginning of 2027.

The weather phenomenon affects the entire world, but what’s the potential impact on Texas? Jud Partin, a research associate professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin, spoke with Texas Public Radio about the strengthening El Niño.

Partin said expect fewer tropical storms, higher precipitation amounts and a cooler and wetter winter.

Super El Niño could bring a wetter Texas winter as weather extremes intensify With a Super El Niño brewing in the atmosphere, there's concern about what the weather pattern means for the U.S. and the Southwest. Texas is already experiencing another summer of weather extremes: destructive rainfall and flooding followed by dangerous heat, with Tropical Storm Bertha now moving ...

Seasonal summer warming — not just high annual temperatures — in southern tropical oceans is the reason for a longstanding error in climate models, according to research co-authored by research associate professor Yuko Okumura and published in Nature.

The finding can help improve climate models, setting the stage for better seasonal climate predictions and future climate projection.

The higher summer temperature is only about 1 degree Celsius higher than observed but sets off chain reaction of processes in climate models that ends up creating the erroneous band of rain in the eastern Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean of the southern hemisphere. This seasonal event is strong enough to affect the annual mean climate.

Climatologists have long struggled to model the tropical rain belt or Intertropical Convergence Zone in the western hemisphere. On average, the rain belt is located north of the equator and migrates toward the equator during the southern hemisphere summer. But current climate models typically fail to portray this, often creating a rogue rain band in the south, resulting in double annual rain belts straddling the equator.

Accurately modeling this seasonal warming sets the stage for better climate models. It also highlights how small changes in temperature can make a big difference.

“This study highlights the nonlinear nature of interactions between the tropical ocean and atmosphere,” said Okumura. “Small temperature changes can have disproportionately large effects once a critical threshold for tropical convection is crossed.”

Read the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-026-02046-6

Research Assistant Professor Danielle Touma is a co-author of a new report published by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on extreme event attribution – a field of science that analyzes individual extreme weather events and quantifies the extent that human-caused climate change influenced them.

The report shows that human-caused climate change is altering the frequency and intensity of several types of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, heat waves, and extreme rainfall.

While Touma contributed to all parts of the report, she mainly provided expertise on the representation of extreme climate events in climate models and observational datasets, and the state of extreme event attribution of extreme precipitation, drought, and wildfires.

“The biggest takeaway from this report is that this field of climate event attribution is maturing at a high level given its rapidly expanding needs,” said Touma. “This information allows communities to understand how we assess the impacts that climate change has already caused, and how to begin adapting to changes expected under warmer climates.”

This year’s report also includes an assessment of the state of the emerging field of extreme event impact attribution, which analyzes the downstream impacts of extreme weather events driven by climate change, such as deaths and economic losses.

Read the full report: https://www.nationalacademies.org/projects/DELS-BASCPR-23-02/publication/28590

Last week, faculty, students and staff gathered to celebrate another year of hard work at the annual UTIG Awards! 🏆

In addition to operational and scientific accomplishments, the UTIG Awards celebrate service milestones, retirements and more.

“It’s always terrific to gather, celebrate and recognize the many outstanding accomplishments of everyone at the institute,” said UTIG Director Demian Saffer.

See a full album of photos and winners here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCWNQ7

Congratulations to everyone recognized!

Earth isn’t the only planet with a magnetic field. 🌎🧲

In fact, scientists use data gathered from magnetic anomalies of other cosmic bodies in our solar system to help better understand things like their crustal composition, magmatism, thermal evolution, and more. The process is called crustal source modeling, and uses magnetized rectangular prism as a building block for these models.

Research Assistant Professor Doug Hemingway revisits these building blocks to provide a generalized method and new software for calculating and visualizing the resulting magnetic field.

“It’s an old idea but the point here is to clarify the math and help people with building their physical intuition about magnetic anomalies,” Hemingway said.

Read about this modeling approach in a new paper published in RAS Techniques and Instruments:

Geometric properties of the magnetic field outside a magnetized rectangular prism ABSTRACT. Characterization of crustal magnetic anomalies can yield valuable insights into the current state and history of a planet’s interior. Such charac

Breakups are complicated, even when it comes to supercontinents. 🌎💔

New research led by and UT Jackson School of Geosciences Research Professor Harm Van Avendonk finds that the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, a gargantuan amount of molten igneous rock that closed out the Triassic, played a smaller a role in the breakup of Pangea than previously thought.

This research was published in Geological Society of America and revises the story of the way Pangea fragmented.

The team conducted a series of seismic surveys in 2014 and 2015 to create a more complete picture of the Earth’s crust at the U.S. Atlantic coastal plain. The team boarded the marine seismic vessel R/V Marcus Langseth, seen in photo one, and used multiple surveying methods, like the ocean-bottom seismometer seen in photo two, to map the area.

On land, researchers surveyed beneath the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, seen in photo three, and created a schematic interpretation of the seismic velocity and density structure seen in photo four.

The survey results showed that the crust beneath the foothills was about 35 kilometers thick and narrowed closer to the anomaly, with only the lower few kilometers of crust containing seismic velocities matching speeds of magmatic rock. For CAMP to have had significant influence on crustal separation, a much thicker layer of material with seismic wave speeds matching those of magmatic rock would need to be present.

In contrast, at the anomaly there are signs of narrow rifts that were filled up by magma after they formed, exemplifying the type of crustal structure formed by continental separation.

“These findings demonstrate that the volume and distribution of magmatism on this margin, including from CAMP, is highly variable, and that the connection between CAMP and continental breakup is not as simple and clear as previously supposed,” said Donna Shillington, co-author of the paper and professor in the School of Earth and Sustainability at Northern Arizona University.

Read the full story of the complicated new origins of Pangea’s breakup: https://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/2026/06/the-complicated-new-origins-of-pangeas-big-breakup/

That's a wrap on our annual Marine Geology and Geophysics field camp! 🏖️🏖️🏖️

GEO349/397 provides hands-on training in marine geological and geophysical data collection and processing for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Working in teams, students travel to Port Aransas, TX and hop on University of Texas Marine Science Institute research vessels to learn sediment coring and analysis and seafloor mapping techniques using streamer seismic reflection, side-scan sonar and multibeam bathymetry.

Teams then integrate and interpret data collected here to examine Gulf Coast shelf geology and present findings to their peers and members of the energy industry.

Congrats to this year's teams!🎉

Summertime means more time in the field at ! 🪨🪨🪨

Research professor Sean Gulick (left), UTIG Postdoctoral Fellow Greg Gosselin (center) and Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin doctoral student Soraya Alfred recently traveled to Scottish Highlands to visit the Stac Fada Member impact ejecta sequence as part of the i-CREATE Magellan3 & USSSP workshop. This workshop brought scientists together to discuss the benefits of drilling impact craters and how such activities can further research in the realm of planetary processes, biological processes and astrobiology, among many others. UTIG Research Associate Professor Chris Lowery also joined the trio on this workshop and trek.

“My current research focuses on the post-impact hydrothermal system at Chicxulub impact basin and the mechanisms affecting its evolution through time, and while I study this impact in particular, this workshop opened my eyes to the wide range of impact sites that are being studied by other scientists in the impact cratering community,” said Alfred. “The discussions we had isolated the gaps in our collective understanding of the cratering process, shaping questions I now hope to answer in my future research.”

In photo one, Gulick points at the fault plane for the Moine Thrust at Knockan Crag. The grey formation above the fault plane is the Moine Schist and the lighter colored material below is mylonite, a rock that is broken, stretched and fragmented, formed as a result of the thrusting process.

The circles in the rock of the second photo are called accretionary lapilli and were formed by material melted and vaporized after an impactor struck the Earth somewhere within the Highlands and then accreted into small stones that fell back near the impact site. These lapilli have been confirmed to be linked to this impact event that occurred 1 billion years ago although the crater itself has not been found.

In the final photo, the stratigraphic sequence at Knockan Crag National Nature Reserve protrudes out of the Earth, showing rock that is over 500 million years old. The thrust is visible beneath the Moine Schist and above the Durness Limestone.