On Tuesday, Oct. 22, the Salt Lake City International Airport and the Natural History Museum of Utah unveiled the airport’s first-ever dinosaur—Ally, a 30-foot-long, 15-foot-tall skeleton of Allosaurus fragilis.

“I’m absolutely thrilled to be here today to reveal a project that’s been 150 million years in the making,” Jason Cryan, executive director of NHMU, said to the crowd gathered to celebrate the completed Concourse B. “Turn around as we unveil Utah’s state fossil as it’s never been seen before!”

The Jurassic Park theme boomed from the speakers, and the airport assembly spun around and gasped as the curtain fell to reveal Ally in all her glory.

From the Late Jurassic to Concourse B

The museum has wanted a dinosaur at the airport for decades. The recent expansion and a gift from Kirk Ririe, Bob and Cyndi Douglass, and the Lawrence T. & Janet T. Dee Foundation made it happen.

“I’m originally from the Chicago area, and the O’Hare International Airport has an iconic Brachiosaurus skeleton that gets people excited. I’ve always wanted that for Salt Lake City’s airport,” said Randy Irmis, curator of paleontology at NHMU and professor of geology at the University of Utah. “Utah is known for its dinosaurs. We hope this inspires visitors and locals to explore the really cool dinosaur heritage of our state.”

The Henry Mountains, Great Salt Lake and Coyote Buttes were added to the list of geoheritage sites.

You're probably asking yourself, “What is a geoheritage site?” University of Utah Geology and Geophysics Research Professor Marie Jackson talks about the three Utah sites and what exactly a geoheritage site is, and its importance.

Jackson was part of the team that nominated the Utah sites and compiled descriptions for the IUGS geoheritage catalog.

He observed a “great depth of uplifted and arching strata”, which form domes of sedimentary rock over chambers of hardened “molten rock,” or what came to be called laccoliths.

G.K. Gilbert’s scientific exploration of the Henry Mountains led to the development of a mechanical model for mountain building that has remained valid for 150 years. In recognition of the its role in the history of geoscience, the southern Utah range has been selected as a world geoheritage site by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), along with two other features in Utah: the Great Salt Lake and Coyote Buttes, the sandstone landscape on the Arizona state line that includes The Wave.

Nominated by University of Utah geoscientists, the three sites were among the Second 100 IUGS Geological Heritage sites announced on Aug. 27 at the 37th International Geological Congress in South Korea.  “These are the world’s best demonstrations of geologic features and processes,” the union said in a statement. “They are the sites of fabulous discoveries of the Earth and its history. They are sites that served to develop the science of geology.”

U research professor Marie Jackson, who mapped the three southern domes of the Henry Mountains for her doctoral dissertation in the 1980s, applauded the selection, which is a testament to G. K. Gilbert’s forward-thinking genius in the 19th century.

“This world was unexplored. These domes record raw geologic processes that were here for the viewing,” she said.

Jackson and Marjorie Chan, both professors in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, nominated the Utah sites and compiled descriptions for the IUGS geoheritage catalog. The MSc thesis of their former U graduate student Winston Seiler is devoted to The Wave.

Even without a name, fingerprints, or facial features, our history leaves indelible marks on us, locked in the atoms of the toughest structures in our bodies: the enamel of our teeth. Subtle differences in tooth chemistry could help determine the identity of fallen soldiers and other human remains—if we can learn to read that history.

Gabe Bowen, the lead researcher for the FIND-EM project, takes a groundwater sample from a well. Credit: Bowen Lab.

Now, a collaboration between geography and dentistry researchers aims to find ways to map a person’s remains to the region where they grew up, based on slight differences in tooth enamel that are determined by the composition of local tap water.

While the researchers’ immediate goal is to help identify fallen soldiers, the project has the potential to strengthen the field of forensic investigation as a whole, according to Gabe Bowen, PhD, professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah and the lead on the project. “The ultimate goal is to produce a resource that will be very broadly useful,” Bowen says. “Cold cases, border crossers, humanitarian crises—any situation where we end up with individuals of unknown identity.”

The molar code:

To match someone’s teeth to where they grew up, the researchers are amassing a database of teeth donated by volunteers nationwide and comparing their enamel composition to groundwater data. They’re using wisdom teeth, which are commonly removed in modern dental care.

“I think it’s beautiful that in the natural progression of people’s treatment, we would be removing these teeth anyway,” says Michael Bingham, clinical research coordinator in the School of Dentistry at the University of Utah. “We can take something that would, in theory, be discarded, and use it to do this beautiful project of reuniting families with their service members’ remains.”

While the researchers need more tooth donors to get a comprehensive map, their results so far are promising.

At the end of the Paleocene and beginning of the Eocene epochs, between 59 to 51 million years ago, Earth experienced dramatic warming periods, both gradual periods stretching millions of years and sudden warming events known as hyperthermals. Driving this planetary heat-up were massive emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases, but other factors like tectonic activity may have also been at play.

Gabriel Bowen

New research led by University of Utah geoscientists pairs sea surface temperatures with levels of atmospheric CO₂ during this period, showing the two were closely linked. The findings also provide case studies to test carbon cycle feedback mechanisms and sensitivities critical for predicting anthropogenic climate change as we continue pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere on an unprecedented scale in the planet’s history.

“The main reason we are interested in these global carbon release events is because they can provide analogs for future change,” said lead author Dustin Harper, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geology & Geophysics. “We really don’t have a perfect analog event with the exact same background conditions and rate of carbon release.”

But the study published on 26th August'24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, suggests emissions during two ancient “thermal maxima” are similar enough to today’s anthropogenic climate change to help scientists forecast its consequences. The research team analyzed microscopic fossils—recovered in drilling cores taken from an undersea plateau in the Pacific—to characterize surface ocean chemistry at the time the shelled creatures were alive. The findings indicate that as atmospheric levels of CO₂ rose, so too did global temperatures.

“We have multiple ways that our planet, that our atmosphere is being influenced by CO₂ additions, but in each case, regardless of the source of CO₂, we’re seeing similar impacts on the climate system,” said co-author Gabriel Bowen, a U professor of geology & geophysics.

The origin of the precursor signals, which arrive ahead of the main seismic waves that travel through Earth’s core, has remained unclear, but research led by University of Utah geophysicists sheds new light on this mysterious seismic energy.

PKP precursors appear to propagate from places deep below North America and the western Pacific and possibly bear an association with “ultra-low velocity zones,” thin layers in the mantle where seismic waves significantly slow down, according to research published in AGU Advances, the American Geophysical Union’s lead journal. (The AGU highlighted the research in its magazine Eos.)

“These are some of the most extreme features discovered on the planet. We legitimately do not know what they are,” said lead author Michael Thorne, a U associate professor of geology and geophysics. “But one thing we know is they seem to end up accumulating underneath hotspot volcanoes. They seem like they may be the root of whole mantle plumes giving rise to hotspot volcanoes.”

These plumes are responsible for the volcanism observed at Yellowstone, the Hawaiian Islands, Samoa, Iceland and the Galapagos Islands.

Thorne’s team, which included research assistant professor Surya Pachhai, devised a way to model waveforms to detect crucial effects that previously went unnoticed. Using a cutting-edge seismic array method and new theoretical observations from earthquake simulations, the researchers developed, they analyzed data from 58 earthquakes that occurred around New Guinea and were recorded in North America after passing through the planet.

Their new method allowed them to pinpoint where the scattering occurred along the boundary between the liquid metal outer core and the mantle, known as the core-mantle boundary, located 2,900 kilometers below Earth’s surface.

The blast occurred about 10 a.m. local time near the Black Diamond Pool in Biscuit Basin, about two miles northwest of Old Faithful. No injuries were reported.

“Steam explosions like Tuesday’s incident have long been considered one of the most significant hazards posed to Yellowstone visitors,” says Tony Lowry, associate professor in Utah State University’s Department of Geosciences. “Biscuit Basin has had smaller, but still dangerous, events in the recent past.”

USU alum Jamie Farrell, research associate professor in the University of Utah’s Department of Geology and Geophysics and chief seismologist of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, says it was “very lucky” no one was hurt in today’s blast.

“Hydrothermal explosions happen quite frequently in the park, though they often occur in the uninhabited back country," says Farrell, who earned a bachelor’s degree in geology from Utah State in 2001. Farrell says the blasts aren’t volcanic eruptions and no magma is involved.“These incidents occur when very hot, mineral-laden water builds up and clogs the plumbing, so to speak; pressure builds up and is forced upward through pre-existing fractures to erupt at the surface,” he says.