About

Victoria Petryshyn is an Associate Professor (Teaching) of Environmental Studies at USC Dornsife. She is part of the faculty dedicated to advancing education and research in environmental sciences. Her role involves teaching and contributing to the academic community within the Environmental Studies department, supporting students and the broader university mission in environmental research and education.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Geology
• Geomorphology
• Nuclear physics
• Geography
• Chromatography
• Environmental science
• Chemistry
• Environmental chemistry
• Oceanography
• Meteorology
• Mineralogy

Selected publications

• Exploring Mechanisms of Microbialite Texture Formation through mapping in situ CaCO ₃ precipitation and Microbial Cell Position

  2025-01-01

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  PublisherDOI

• Corrigendum to “Sedimentary records from human-made talavs reveal climate risks in semi-arid watersheds of India” [Quat. Environ. Hum. 3 (2) (2025) 100061]

  Quaternary Environments and Humans · 2025-06-01

  erratumOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Spatially Resolved Deconvolution of Texture Formation and Initial Diagenetic Mechanisms in Carbonate Dendrolitic Microbialites

  Abstracts with programs - Geological Society of America · 2025-01-01

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• Sedimentary records from human-made talavs reveal climate risks in semi-arid watersheds of India

  Quaternary Environments and Humans · 2025-03-12 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Assessing climate impacts in semi-arid watersheds, which are home to populous semi-arid regions of South Asia, are becoming increasingly critical as these regions emerge as climate hotspots. Century-scale records of climate impacts, preserved in terrestrial sedimentary archives, are some of only kinds of investigations that can provide the necessary insights into how local climate variations impact these watersheds. Here, we investigate sedimentary records preserved in a unique type of human-made water bodies, which are commonly present in arid and semi-arid regions of south Asia. Known as ‘ talavs ’, human-made water bodies are ubiquitous in south Asia and have been historically constructed by damming seasonal rain-fed distributaries to conserve rainwater for the purposes of sustenance and agriculture in water-stressed regions. Integrating a multidisciplinary approach comprising remote sensing, lake geophysics, lithostratigraphic (sedimentological, mineralogical & geochemical measurements), and radiometric dating, we reconstruct century-scale records of landscape erosion & resultant run-off and in water-stressed catchments in one of the most climatologically threatened watersheds of western India, namely the Bhima watershed. Our reconstructions show that land erosion and subsequent sediment deposition in talavs are tied to the regional expressions of the Indian summer monsoon (ISM). We also find that while the landscape evolution is sensitive to divisional expressions of hydroclimate variability (associated with the ISM), the intensity of run-off and erosion is not a simple function of rainfall intensity; in fact, we find that land-surface erodibility is impacted by land-use patterns and incidence of prior climate events (e.g. flooding) and that these effects are more prominent in drier catchments (which also experience more extreme climate events) than in wetter parts of the watersheds. Based on our investigation, we conclude that drier catchments of watersheds in semi-arid regions are at an elevated risk of direct climate impacts than the wetter catchments in the same watershed.

  PublisherDOI

• INSIGHT INTO MINERAL FABRICS, BIOFABRICS, AND CHANNEL ARCHITECTURE TO COMPREHENSIVELY CHARACTERIZE MICROBIALITE TEXTURE

  Abstracts with programs - Geological Society of America · 2024-01-01

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• Advancing computational sustainability in higher education

  Nature Computational Science · 2024-06-07 · 1 citations

  letterSenior author
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• MICROBIAL AND MINERAL IMPACT ON TEXTURE IN INCIPIENT DENDROLITIC MICROBIALITES, LITTLE HOT CREEK, CA

  Abstracts with programs - Geological Society of America · 2023-01-01

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  PublisherDOI

• Micro-elemental Analysis of Stromatolites Reveal Fe as Potential Biosignature and Remnant of a Lithification Mechanism

  2023-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• EXAMINING FE-CYCLING IN MICROBIAL MATS AS A LITHIFICATION MECHANISM

  Abstracts with programs - Geological Society of America · 2023-01-01

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  PublisherDOI

• Comparative clumped isotope temperature relationships in freshwater carbonates

  2022-06-13

  preprintOpen access

  Lacustrine, riverine, and spring carbonates are archives of terrestrial climate change and are extensively used to study paleoenvironments. Clumped isotope thermometry has been applied to freshwater carbonates to reconstruct temperatures, however, limited work has been done to evaluate comparative relationships between clumped isotopes and temperature in different types of modern freshwater carbonates. Therefore, in this study, we assemble an extensive calibration dataset with 135 samples of modern lacustrine, fluvial, and spring carbonates from 96 sites and constrain the relationship between independent observations of water temperature and the clumped isotopic composition of carbonates (denoted by Δ47). We restandardize and synthesize published data and report 159 new measurements of 25 samples. We derive a composite freshwater calibration and also evaluate differences in the Δ47-temperature dependence for different types of materials to examine whether material-specific calibrations may be justified. When material type is considered, there is a convergence of slopes between biological carbonates (freshwater gastropods and bivalves), micrite, biologically-mediated carbonates (microbialites and tufas), travertines, and other recently published syntheses, but statistically significant differences in intercepts between some materials, possibly due to seasonal biases, kinetic isotope effects, and/or varying degrees of biological influence. Δ47-based reconstructions of water δ18O generally yield values within 2‰ of measured water δ18O when using a material-specific calibration. We explore the implications of applying these new calibrations in reconstructing temperature in three case studies.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Frank A. Corsetti

  99 shared

• Aradhna Tripati

  Planetary Science Institute

  95 shared

• William M. Berelson

  35 shared

• Carie M. Frantz

  Weber State University

  33 shared

• John R. Spear

  Colorado School of Mines

  26 shared

• Robert Gammariello

  California Air Resources Board

  22 shared

• Anne Marie Kelley

  Planetary Science Institute

  21 shared

• Steve P. Lund

  University of Southern California

  19 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Earth Sciences

  University of Southern California