Undergraduate Best Poster Award: Quinn Wenning won the Undergraduate Best Poster Award at the 1st Annual Jackson School Research Symposium, for his project Characterizing Reactive Flow Paths in Fractured Cement with PhD student Nicolas Huerta.

12/18/2011: 100-th citation Marc's first PhD paper is cited 100 times. The work with Amir Riaz, at the time postdoc at Stanford, and my advisors Hamdi Tchelepi and Lynn Orr looks at the stability of a gravitationally unstable diffusive boundary layer. A theoretical analysis of the classic Elder problem in porous media convection.

Undergraduate research fellowship competition Quinn Wenning won a $1000 a Spring 2012  Undergraduate Research Fellowship for his project on reactive flow on in cement fractures with PhD student Nicolas Huerta.

Cover art: Communications in Computational Physics The cover of for volume 10, number 1 of Communications in Computational Physics features a simulation from our article Modelling magma dynamics with a mixed Fourier collocation - discontinuous Galerkin method co-authored with Dr. Alan Schiemenz (LMU Munich) and Prof. Jan Hesthaven (Brown). The image, shown on the right, shows the localization of the melt flow due to reactive feedback in the top row and the orthopyroxene abundance in the mantle in the lower row.

Abraham Taicher receives NIMS Fellowship 2011-2012 PhD student Abraham Taicher has received the 2011-2012 National Initiative for Modeling and Simulations Fellowship from the CSEM graduate program.

15-16/08/11: Reactive Flow Summer School by Peter Lichtner (LANL) and Glenn Hammond (PNNL) This shortcourse will provide a hands-on introduction to PFLOTRAN, a massively parallel subsurface reactive flow and transport computer code that runs on labtops to high-end supercomputers. The code includes Richards equation for variably saturated media, two-phase CO2-H2O, and thermal-hydrologic-chemical (THC) modes coupled to reactive transport in multicomponent systems.

5/3/11: Austin Statesman features JSG Explore UT experiment With great support from the Jackson School Marc Hesse and Kelly Quinney built a large version of the famous cornstarch & water experiment for Explore UT. The  experiment demonstrates shear thickening behavior and allows you to "walk on water".  It was a big success and more than 500 children walked the walk.

Kyung-won wins AAPG - Allan & Eleanor Martini Grant Kyung-won Chang received the grant to study buoyancy driven exchange flows at the BP-Institute. He developed a technique to quantify the exchange flow and is now using it to constrain leakage rates along permeable conduits and the role of hydro-mechanical dispersion in counter current flows.

12/8/10: GRL editor’s highlight: Characterizing channels for transport of melt in mantle To investigate how dunite channels would form and how melt would flow through them in an upwelling mantle, Liang et al. (2010) conducted numerical simulations. They found that interconnected dunite channels form the shallow part of the porous channels through which melt passes; deeper in the mantle, melt travels through channels composed of the rocks harzburgite and lherzolite. These results could help geologists interpret field measurements and improve models for mantle melt migration, shedding light on mantle dynamics and crust formation. Liang, Y., A. Schiemenz, M. A. Hesse, E. M. Parmentier, and J. S. Hesthaven (2010), High-porosity channels for melt migration in the mantle: Top is the dunite and bottom is the harzburgite and lherzolite, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L15306, doi:10.1029/2010GL044162.