Daniel Ibarra

What they work on

1. Reconstruct the tectonic and water history of Clayton Valley, Nevada, by constraining when crustal stretching, volcanism, sediment filling and fault activity occurred, to better identify where its lithium came from.
2. Test whether faults act as conduits, barriers or long-lived pathways for lithium-bearing fluids, by building a basin-scale model that links fault evolution, basin development and fluid flow to lithium accumulation over time.
3. Test whether southern Tibet already stood high before the India–Asia collision, using a triple oxygen isotope paleoaltimeter, which reads ancient elevation from three forms of oxygen, on three pre-collision fossil hydrothermal systems of Cretaceous to Paleogene age.
4. Test whether the Tibetan Plateau changed from rugged to high and flat in the Neogene, by comparing triple oxygen isotopes from three post-collision hydrothermal sites with same-age basin sediments in central Tibet, correcting for evaporation and diagenesis.
5. Expand cave monitoring in the Philippines into a multi-year, multi-cave network to track seasonal changes in surface and underground water in karst, the limestone terrain where caves form.
6. Build high-resolution geochemical records from Philippine cave deposits spanning several Heinrich Events and compare them with climate model output, to test how Northern Hemisphere freshwater pulses altered rainfall over the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool.
7. Map and date ancient shorelines of Silver Lake, California, using drone-based Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry, and pair them with dated sediment cores to reconstruct minimum lake depth and volume from 24,000 to 8,000 years ago.
8. Estimate the climate conditions needed to fill and sustain Silver Lake using non-steady-state hydrologic models constrained by oxygen isotopes, and compare the results with climate forcings to identify drivers of past water change.

More about the research

Why it matters

The lithium work could help identify where economically viable lithium resources occur in Nevada and across the Basin and Range and similar regions, supporting U.S. supplies of a critical mineral. Reconstructing past swings in Mojave lake levels could inform California's understanding of how much water availability can vary, a key concern for its agricultural economy. Records from Philippine caves and Tibetan elevations could improve climate models and fill data gaps in the western tropical Pacific.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Closest labs

The school

Brown University: 23 labs on PI Pages, $375M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.

More about Brown University

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