Event Details:

What makes and keeps planets habitable? Taking an Earth-centric view, it is clear that an equitable climate is required, which implicates the carbon and related biogeochemical cycles in regulating habitability. To understand the factors that modulate these cycles, my research group studies the chemistry of modern river systems. The premise behind this work is that rivers integrate over land surface heterogeneity and thus provide a means to relate land surface properties (e.g., climate, rock type, etc.) to the rates of different biogeochemical processes. Broadly, this presentation will focus on ways to understand the co-evolution of hydrology, chemical weathering, and landscape form using solute concentrations and isotopic ratios measured in rivers. As an illustrative example, I will focus on how geologic climate change, such as glacial cycles, impacts rates of carbon dioxide sequestration via the growth and decay of glaciers along with changes in rainfall.

Dr. Mark Torres studies the chemistry of natural waters and related problems in biogeochemistry. This work allows him and his laboratory group to ask questions like, “what makes and keeps planets habitable?", "how will climate change impact water quality?", and “how can we use natural processes to mitigate the effects of climate change?". He received a bachelor’s degree in Geology from Pitzer College in 2010 and a Ph.D. in Geochemistry from the University of Southern California in 2015. From 2015 to 2017, Dr. Torres was a Texaco/AGEP postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Since 2017, Dr. Torres has been an assistant professor at Rice University in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences. In 2019, Dr. Torres was selected for the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Ocean Sciences and in 2021, he was awarded the F.W. Clarke Medal by the Geochemical Society.

For the Zoom information, please get in touch with Jannis Simões-Seymens (jseymens@stanford.edu)