Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine
ESS headlines and happenings
An honest and thoughtful account of the ESS graduate student experience
Applying classroom learning to real-world situations
Field work adventures in Alaska

Produced by the University of California, Irvine
Earth System Science (ESS) at the University of California, Irvine focuses on the science of the Earth as a system and how the atmosphere, land and oceans interact
Vol. 4 Issue 1
Department of Earth System Science and manifest variability and change approximately over the human lifetime. We envision a society that understands both the impact of human activities on the global environment and the interactions within the Earth system that preserve the habitability of the planet. In this issue of The Dynamic Earth, we share news and stories about our team’s latest achievements and adventures. Over the past year, our faculty, students and staff continued groundbreaking work in key areas of climate science, including biogeochemistry of the ocean and atmosphere, climate dynamics, atmospheric science, studies of Earth’s ice sheets, the global water cycle, terrestrial and marine ecosystems and human systems. Read on to learn more about how we applied classroom learning to real-world situations through undergraduate student internships (page 7), measured trace gas concentrations in Alaskan air (page 9), traveled to San Francisco for the AGU Fall Meeting (page
3), and recognized our impact on changing global perspectives of Earth system science (page 6).
Gudrun Magnusdottir
Chair and Professor of Earth System Science
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Cover and Back Photo Credit: UC Irvine Communications
Content and Design: Shaine Melnick

Congratulations to our students, faculty and staff on their recent achievements!
Melinda Nicewonger , a graduate student in the Department of Earth System
Science, has been awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship. The
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.
Graduate student Staryl McCabe-Glynn has been named one of the 2013-2014
Chancellor’s Club Fund for Excellence Fellows. The prestigious Chancellor’s
Fund for Excellence Fellowships are awarded to the best and brightest graduate students at UCI who show great promise as future leaders.
James Famiglietti , professor of Earth System Science and head of the UC
Center for Hydrologic Modeling at the University of California, Irvine, has been appointed to the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board by California
Governor Jerry Brown. Professor Famiglietti also received the 2014 David
Keith Todd Distinguished Lectureship award from the Groundwater Resources
Association of California.
Professor Eric Rignot was named a fellow by the American Geophysical Union and honored with the award in December at the 2013 American Geophysical
Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
Congratulations to our graduates! The following Ph.D. students successfully defended their dissertations in the Fall 2013 and Winter 2014 quarters.
Karli Ouellette
Kathe Todd-Brown
Brendan Rogers
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Earth System Science faculty and graduate students joined more than 22,000 Earth and space scientists, educators, students and other leaders in San Francisco in
December 2013 for the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency honored UC Irvine with the 2014 Climate
Leadership Award for Organizational
Leadership for reducing carbon pollution and addressing climate change.
President Barack Obama will speak to UC Irvine’s class of 2014 in a commencement ceremony set for
Saturday, June 14.
During Winter Quarter, the ESS 60B class on
Regional Environmental
Issues focused on campus outreach about the
California drought. Their
“DroughtReach” campaign used social media to provide daily water conservation tips and highlight successes and needs-improvements on the
UC Irvine campus and in the wider community.
Graduate students Aimee, Colene and Erin sat at the department’s booth and spoke with faculty and graduate recruitment candidates at the American
Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting.
Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences published findings co-authored by
Assistant Professor Steven J. Davis about the impacts of China’s export industry on air pollution in the United States. “We’ve outsourced our manufacturing and much of our pollution, but some of it is blowing back across the Pacific to haunt us,” says Davis.
“Given the complaints about how Chinese pollution is corrupting other countries’ air, this paper shows that there may be plenty of blame to go around.”
The Nature Climate Change journal published the study “High Arctic wetting dampens permafrost carbon feedbacks to climate warming,” which suggests the northernmost parts of the rapidly warming Arctic have the potential to remain a strong sink for carbon even as the rest of the permafrost region transitions to a net source of carbon to the atmosphere. This large North Greenland field study was led by Massimo Lupascu, a postdoctoral scholar in the Czimczik
Research Group.

E S S C l u b P r e s e n t s
F a c u l t y N e t w o r k i n g L u n c h e o n
The Earth System Science Club kicked off the Winter Quarter with their second annual Faculty
Networking Luncheon on Friday, January 24. The event provided undergraduate students the opportunity to meet and speak with faculty and graduate students outside the classroom.
Physical Sciences academic counselors were also present to answer questions about the department’s majors. The ESS Club works to support the education and career development of Earth System Science and Environmental Studies students through a variety of meetings, field trips, workshops and events. Student registration for the club’s spring event, the Industry
Networking Night on Thursday, May 8, opens in April. Learn more at www.ess.uci.edu/updates.
I n a u g u r a l R e e b u r g h L e c t u r e
On Wednesday, November 20,
2013, the department hosted the inaugural Carelyn Y. & William S.
Reeburgh Endowed Earth System
Science Lecture, thanks to a generous donation from Professor
Emertis William Reeburgh and his wife Carelyn. A committee of faculty, researchers and students selected James White, Professor of Geological Sciences at the
University of Colorado, Boulder, as the first guest speaker for the annual event. In his lecture, “Ice
Cores, Sea Level and Abrupt
Climate Change,” Dr. White spoke about the latest findings from the NEEM deep ice core in
Greenland, with specific attention to how these findings inform our understanding of sea level, past and future, as well as the nature of abrupt climate change, in front of a standing-room-only audience in
Croul Hall. The event also included a round-table discussion attended by Dr. White, Dr. Reeburgh and
ESS graduate students. Dr. and
Mrs. Reeburgh hope the Reeburgh
Lecture Series will foster continued collegiality centered on lectures with broad interests by outstanding scientists like Dr. White. Please visit the department’s website to learn more.
Carelyn & William Reeburgh
“Departments exist to discover, interpret and transmit new knowledge, and what better way to do that than to have an outstanding outside speaker come in once a year for a big event.”
-- Dr. William Reeburgh
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This year, the Department of Earth System Science and Associate
Professor Isabella Velicogna introduced EarthSS 174/274: Ice in the
Climate System, a new interdisciplanary course for undergraduate and graduate students on ice and its role in the climate system. In EarthSS
174/274, Professor Velicogna examines the major components of the
Earth’s cryosphere, including glaciers, ice sheets, ice caps, sea ice, lake ice, river ice, snow and permafrost, and discusses their characteristics, volume, extent, remote sensing observations, long-term trends, mass balance, key physical processes, relevance and importance to the climate system, response and feedbacks, future evolution and key uncertainties.
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by Erin Delman gas exploration and use. The longer I study as an ESS student, the more cognizant I become of the extent to which the national and international communities are interconnected politically, economically, and environmentally. I examine things and events by their explicit role in a much larger context, as necessary, albeit small, components of a much larger whole.
Erin Delman, third from right, and her ESS graduate student peers at the university’s ropes course for the 2012 Graduate Retreat.
It may be the start of spring, but in a few short months, summer will arrive, and in Southern California, summer means “more.” More tourists, more beach trips, and more warm nights. Seemingly ubiquitous to these hot, carefree days are also more rolling blackouts, more media attention to conservation, and more financial pressure at the pump. Although I was faintly conscious of these issues growing up in waterstarved Los Angeles, I paid them scant attention, except when power outages made for awesome hide and seek games or rising gas prices limited when and where I could drive. Although I lived in a state that required copious quantities of resources, I failed to see how I was personally affected or responsible.
After all, I grew up in a region where manicured lawns and irrigated cropland abound, creating the illusion of oasis and drowning out the purveyors of doom who warn of shortage in a parched state.
When I was asked to write a quick article about life as an ESS graduate student, my first impulse was to focus on the personal and emotional impact of an at-times stressful, constantly busy but ultimately rewarding program. I was tempted to describe how the journey from first year student to fifth-year PhD candidate is characterized by divergent sentiments of pride and inadequacy, celebration and dismay. I planned to divulge the unique and crucial relationships forged among the graduate students, a cadre of likeminded and hard-working peers that offer support, camaraderie, and opportunities for collaboration along the way.
Yet as important as those things are to our collective graduate experience, they are not what unite us.
Regardless of our individual interests, -- whether fire, ice, soil, water, emissions, or oceans -- we are joined by the desire to study the science of the Earth and its components as a system. We spend each day searching for interconnections in the world around us, addressing enigmas and aiming to elucidate interactions. In doing so, we work toward a degree, but perhaps more importantly, we contribute to a new perspective and promote a grander, comprehensive world-view.
As a second-year graduate student studying the complex relationships among climate change, energy and water, my outlook has been transformed. Now during power outages, I wonder about the demand for air conditioning and the strain it exerts on the electric grid. I read about the drought and worry about the implications for wildfires, wildlife, and the state’s agricultural sector. Sticker shock at the pump leads to musings about the externalities of oil and
Erin Delman is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Earth System Science at the
University of California, Irvine.
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Dinali Mallikage, Undergraduate Student at the University of California, Irvine
C lass
s tanding
: Senior
M ajor
: Earth System Science, M inor
: Informatics i nternship
C oMpany
: Irvine Ranch Conservancy and California EPA Department of Toxic Substance Control
I switched my major to Earth System Science during the fall of my third year at UC Irvine and started my first ESS internship a year later. Currently, I am an intern for both the Irvine Ranch Conservancy (IRC) and California EPA
Department of Toxic Substance Control (Cal-EPA DTSC), as well as a research assistant for Dr. Steven J. Davis.
In addition to the invaluable technical skills and experience I am gaining as an intern at IRC and Cal-EPA DTSC, I am also inspired and motivated by meeting science professionals and learning about their personal paths to their current professional appointments. The people I work with come from vastly different educational and cultural backgrounds and yet all of them have achieved success in the field of environmental quality. My internships have helped me feel optimistic about graduation and my career path.

by Dinali Mallikage
California EPA Department of Toxic
Substance Control (Cal-EPA DTSC)
I’ve been working as an intern for the
California EPA Department of Toxic
Substance Control since January 2014.
I am a part of the Brownfield’s and
Environmental Restoration Program, which focuses on restoration and remediation of previously industrial, school or other public sites that no longer meet the appropriate environmental standards. My job duties include helping project managers with remediation projects. For example, I worked on the Exide Technologies case where I conducted research on lead contamination through dust. Right now, I am completing an “Initial Study” document
(the first step in complying with California
Environmental Quality Act) for a project in which contaminated soil beneath an industrial plant has impacted water quality in Fullerton and Anaheim. As a Cal-EPA
DTSC intern, I’ve been exposed to many new projects and experiences and learned about the different job roles available, including geologists, GIS technicians, environmental scientists and engineers.
Irvine Ranch Conservancy (IRC)
I started working at the Irvine Ranch
Conservancy in September 2013 as a public programs intern. In this role, I primarily provide assistance to the director of public programs. Over the last few months, I’ve learned about IRC’s non-profit structure and workflow and, through my participation in volunteer activities, gained a better understanding of its environment restoration and stewardship activities in
South Orange County.
Soon I will transition to a position in the
Science and Stewardship department where I will assist the GIS (geographic information systems) coordinator with
Arc GIS support. I am excited about the opportunity to build upon the GIS knowledge I gained in the classroom with hands-on training in the field. Handson GIS experience is hard to find as an undergraduate, and many employers list it as a much-desired trait on entry-level job descriptions.
For more
, please visit
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Nicolas Cuozzo, Participant in the University of California, Irvine’s
2013 Summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program
C lass
s tanding
: Senior at Northeastern University
M ajor
: Environmental Science, M inor
: Chemistry r esearCh
e xperienCe
: Field research in the boreal region in Alaska
Interested in biogeochemical cycles, such as the carbon cycle, & geochemistry
Last summer, I had the amazing opportunity to participate in the 2013 Summer Research
Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program and conduct field research in the boreal region in Alaska with Dr. James Randerson, Dr. Claudia Czimczik and other researchers from the Department of Earth System Science. We set out to measure the trace gas concentrations (CO2 and CH4) of the background air. Our goals were to quantify these gases and discover where and why we were getting fluxes in certain areas. To do this, we set-up a Piccaro Cavity Ring Down Spectrometer in our truck that measured background air concentrations as we drove along transects.
A typical workday consisted of two daily transects lasting about six hours total. I also spent some time helping graduate students with their field research. For example, I worked with
Gergana Mouteva to switch out and store filters measuring organic and elemental carbon and waded through wetlands with Clayton Elder to measure the amount of methane stored.

by Nicolas Cuozzo
Unfortunately, it was a big year for forest fires, but the fires provided us with opportunities for research. We saw effects of vegetation fires on carbon dioxide and methane fluxes. For example, these fires often showed large spikes in our readings of carbon dioxide. We also saw large spikes in methane when driving through a wetland region on the Denali transect.
I found it interesting that these readings often had a diurnal affect (i.e. higher readings in the morning than at night).
Despite having a full schedule each day, the long hours of daylight gave us plenty of opportunities to see new things. It was common when driving along transects, for example, to see wildlife like moose and bears. We also explored a wide range of places in Alaska, including Denali National Park, a local meat shop that sold reindeer and elk, and the northernmost brewery in the United States. Overall, I gained first hand experience working as part of a team to conduct carbon cycle research and learned a lot about the process of collecting and analyzing data.
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3200 Croul Hall
Irvine, CA 92697-2775
(949) 824-8794 ess.uci.edu | essinfo@ess.uci.edu
Contributing to the scientific understanding of the Earth as a coupled system, through research and education.
Would you believe it's been 15 years since our first graduating class?
All of a sudden we have over 500 ESS alumni!
We miss hearing from you and want to know what you're up to these days!
Whether you were in our first graduating class or it's only been a year, now's the perfect time to reconnect with the Department of Earth System Science at UC Irvine. Tell us what you've been up to these past few years so we can highlight your work and achievements on our website and in our newsletter. Or spend some time on campus and help us better prepare our current students to work in industry jobs, earn higher degrees and overcome the next generation of challenges faced in the field of Earth system science.
Call
or email
.