Research at EPL


Discovering new materials at the frontier of human knowledge
We aim to discover new worlds, observe and understand the path from dust and gas to planets, illuminate the history and inner workings of Earth and other planets and understand how their surface environments form and evolve, determine the properties of planetary materials at the extreme pressures and temperatures of planetary interiors and create new materials of benefit to mankind.
Our Research Areas
Exploring outer space to find distant planets and understand their origin.
Exploring outer space to find distant planets and understand their origin.
Understanding the origins of life on Earth and beyond.
Investigating the interior dynamics of our planet.
Exploring the origins of Earth and our Solar System.
Discovering what planets are made of and how they got that way.
Discovering new materials at the frontier of human knowledge.

A collaborative approach
We combine a broad range of traditional disciplines to investigate fundamental questions ranging from the galactic to the atomic in scale, and which are best solved by integrating the many viewpoints of our scientists that together reveal the complexity and interconnectivity of the processes that determined the current state of Earth and other planets.
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Our rich research history
The Earth and Planets Laboratory unites two Carnegie departments (the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and the Geophysical Laboratory) with century-long traditions of making new observations of the natural world, experimentally investigating the properties of the material from which it is made, and developing theory to understand complex natural phenomenon.
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