The VT Sedimentary Systems Research group has a combination of continuing ‘veterans’ and some new faces to start off the 2014-2015 academic year.
Ph.D. candidates Neal Auchter and Cody Mason are starting their 3rd year and are plugging away at their respective research projects. Neal will be working on sample preparation for strontium isotope analysis this semester. Cody is anxiously awaiting cosmogenic radionuclide results from PRIME Lab, where he spent several weeks this summer preparing his samples for analysis. We expect those data to come in any time! In addition, both Neal and Cody will be taking their Ph.D. preliminary examinations (aka ‘prelims’) later this semester.
New master’s candidate, Sarah Jancuska, joined the group this semester and will be part of the Chile Slope Systems consortium examining Cretaceous deep-marine strata in southern Chile. Sarah is diving right into graduate school by helping me teach our undergraduate Sedimentology-Stratigraphy course as a teaching assistant in addition to taking courses and starting research.
Undergraduate researcher Rachel Corrigan started some work last spring semester and will be continuing this semester, which is her last in the department. Rachel is investigating the response of a long-lived abyssal current in the deep North Atlantic Ocean to climate change at the Oligocene-Miocene boundary. She’ll be documenting changes in terrigenous grain size, including amounts of outsized material that is likely ice-rated debris.
New undergraduate researcher Eric Lahart, also in his last semester before graduating, will be doing similar work as Rachel, but over the Eocene-Oligocene boundary.
Finally, sophomore Rob Ulrich will be investigating grain-size and textural differences in thin sections of Cretaceous submarine channel sandstones. Rob will be developing and testing image-analysis methods to detect and quantify differences between sandstone deposits as a function of stratigraphic architecture.
I am teaching Sedimentology-Stratigraphy, as I do every fall, and co-teaching a graduate Basin Analysis course with colleague Dr. Ken Eriksson. In the meantime, I’m also working with co-authors on a review paper for the journal Earth-Science Reviews that discusses the propagation of tectonic and climatic signals through sedimentary systems at different timescales. We are within a few weeks of submitting and excited about the contribution.