Talks organized by graduate students offer a look into ongoing research in the department
By KATELYN BURNS — science@theaggie.org
The Earth and Planetary Sciences Department offers informal seminars on earth sciences in the form of their Friday Lunch Talks series. The talks occur every Friday at noon — the dates are noted on the events calendar for the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department in the Earth and Physical Sciences building.
Eduardo Alatorre-Acevedo, a graduate student and the organizer of the Friday Lunch Talks, explained how he received the role as an organizer for the event.
“Each of the graduate students here in the [Earth and Planetary Sciences] Department gets assigned graduate jobs for the community,” Alatorre-Acevedo said.
At the beginning of the quarter, Alatorre-Acevedo sends out a call and sign-up sheet for speakers. Priority is given to graduate students, particularly those practicing for their qualifying exams or their presentations for conferences. Graduate students also typically make up the majority of the audience, with the number of professors and undergraduate students attending varying every talk.
Alatorre-Acevedo noted that some talks are geared more towards one group or the other, with undergraduates more likely to attend talks on volcanoes and fossils or talks with captivating titles. Given how broad earth sciences are, the topics of the talks vary greatly, ranging from 500 million-year-old fossils from the Cambrian era to models of mantle plumes found at the center of the earth.
“People are always excited about having a slice of pizza and listening to the science talks [no matter the subject],” Alatorre-Acevedo said.
An upcoming talk on Oct. 24 at 12 p.m. will cover two different research cruises that gather data from subduction zones — the boundaries where one tectonic plate goes beneath the other.
“We’ll be having two of our graduate students who were aboard two different research cruise ships,” Alatorre-Acevedo said. “They are using that information to improve their computer models and understand what’s going on at those boundaries.”
The speakers are two graduate students from the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, Nathalie Redick and Lucy Lu. The talk will occur in Room 1348 of the Earth and Physical Sciences building, and is titled “Science at Sea: Summary of the August 2025 PACSAFE & EXTEND Research Cruise & Plume Meets Slab: A Cruise of OBS Recovery and Seamount Dredging in American Samoa.”
Both research cruises sailed in summer this year, and the Friday Lunch Talk on Oct. 24 is an early opportunity to learn about the cruises.
“The acquired data will facilitate precise earthquake locations and structural imaging, provide data for regional tectonic and geodynamic studies, and ultimately contribute to enhanced assessment of seismic and tsunami hazard along British Columbia’s central coastline,” the Seismological Society of America suggested when discussing the PACSAFE Cruise, a multi-year program with its third phase occurring in August 2025.
For students interested in graduate-level earth sciences, the Earth and Planetary Science Department’s Friday Lunch Talks offer a broad range of topics, including the unique opportunity to discuss the recent research cruises in an informal environment.
Written by: Katelyn Burns — science@theaggie.org
