It’s been an exciting several months since the last update. The Sedimentary Systems Research group and collaborators are busy working on a bunch of different projects.
First off, some papers that have been published so far in 2019:
- SSR group alum (PhD student and post-doc) Cody Mason, now an assistant professor at University of West Georgia, led a paper published in Geology about our work on the Amazon sediment routing system: Detrital zircons reveal sea-level and hydroclimate controls on Amazon river to deep-sea fan sediment transfer
- Collaborators Allie Jackson and Lisa Stright (co-PI of Chile Slope Systems project) led a paper that is in the ‘ahead of print’ section for AAPG Bulletin summarizing a study using detailed outcrop data to examine reservoir characteristics: Static connectivity of stacked deep-water channel elements constrained by high-resolution digital outcrop models
- Chile Slope Systems PhD student (at University of Calgary), Ben Daniels, led a paper in Journal of South American Earth Sciences that presents an updated chronostratigraphic framework for the strata we’ve been working on in southern Chile for many years now: Revised chronostratigraphic framework for the Cretaceous Magallanes-Austral Basin, Ultima Esperanza Province, Chile
- Brian Romans contributed to a study led by James Spray (based on his PhD work at University of Southampton) published in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology examining the characteristics of sand grains within dominantly muddy contourite drifts offshore Newfoundland to address long-standing questions about timing of initiation of significant land ice in the Northern Hemisphere: North Atlantic evidence for unipolar icehouse state at the Eocene-Oligocene Transition
We have a couple other papers currently in review and several others in the pipeline for 2020.
Here’s a brief update of what we’ve been up to so far in 2019 (this is just a sampling):
Sebastian Kaempfe (PhD student) had another successful field season in southern Chile in February-March, collecting loads of data for all three chapters of his PhD dissertation. He presented a poster at the AAPG Annual Meeting in San Antonio in May 2019 as well as presenting an update to the sponsors of the Chile Slope Systems program. The biggest highlight of the past several months for Sebastian is successfully passing his PhD preliminary examination, congrats SK!!
Natalia Varela (PhD student) had another busy spring semester, taking multiple classes and TAing our department’s “Resources” course for non-majors. During the semester and into this summer, she has been hard at work in our lab processing samples from IODP Exp 374 (West Antarctic Ice Sheet History, Ross Sea) and generating grain-size data. Natalia also attended the Antarctic Core Workshop in June 2019 organized by IODP and held at Texas A&M University.
Drew Parent (PhD student) is juggling multiple research projects this summer, making significant progress on finalizing the data set of terrigenous grain-size data from Newfoundland contourite drifts (IODP Exp 342), which we are using to reconstruct the history of deep-ocean circulation in the North Atlantic in response to the Eocene-Oligocene Transition. Additionally, he and Brian Romans visited the Maryland Geological Survey in May 2019 to sample cores of Early Cretaceous sandstones for detrital zircon work. Drew visited Danny Stockli’s (UT Austin) lab in August 2019 to generate U-Pb ages from detrital zircons from U.S. Atlantic continental margin sandstones.
Brian Romans (director of SSR) finished the second half of a speaking tour for the IODP Discovery Lecture Series in the early part of 2019 with visits to Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Cincinnati, Colorado School of Mines, University Texas Austin, University Nebraska-Lincoln, and University of Arkansas. In the spring semester, Brian led a graduate student seminar on deep-marine depositional systems where eleven students chose topics, readings, gave a presentation, and led a discussion. Thanks to the enthusiasm and efforts of the participating students we also ran a field trip to outcrops in the region to view sediment gravity flow deposits in Paleozoic strata.