Dr. Ryan Ewing
Oct 7, 2016
Ryan’s research aims to understand the evolution of landscapes and the sedimentary record through physical processes operating at the surface-atmosphere interface of Earth, Mars and Titan (a moon of Saturn).
Ryan C. Ewing hails from Rogers, Arkansas and finished an undergraduate Geology degree in 1998 at The Colorado College in Colorado Springs, UT with an honors thesis on Mars geomorphology. His continued interest in Geology led him to the University of Texas at Austin where he finished his PhD in 2009 studying wind-blown sediments on Earth and Mars. Following his PhD, Ewing was awarded a two-year National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2009-2011 and was hosted at Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Ewing held a tenure-track position in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama from 2011-2013 before arriving in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Texas A&M in 2013. Ewing received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor at Texas A&M in 2016. The Ewing’s research uses field work, laboratory experiments, airborne and satellite remote sensing, and numerical modeling to interrogate the climate histories of rocks and landscapes on Earth, Mars, and Titan, a moon of Saturn. He has received external funding from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, National Science Foundation (NSF), National Parks Service, and NASA. Ewing’s field work takes him to the outback of Australia to study 650 million year old rocks formed during an extreme glaciation, southern Utah to study 280 million year old sandy deserts, and White Sands, New Mexico to study modern sand dunes. Ewing’s recent planetary work has been published in the major scientific journals Nature Geoscience and Science. These works focus on present and past climate reconstructions of Titan and Mars using satellite data and data from NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover. Ewing worked on the Curiosity Rover team member for two years. He contributed scientifically through image analysis of rocks and modern sediments and operationally as a Surface Properties Scientists who helps the rover engineers interpret the terrain over which the rover drives. Ewing will continue his research in Earth and Planetary geology and is aiming to expand his field areas to southern California to study the dynamics of giant sand dunes using multi-temporal, high resolution topography and to Padre Island, Texas to study the dynamics of microbially influenced wind-blown sand transport as a potential analog for early Earth and Mars.
