The 8th (and final) installment of the documentary film series on IODP Expedition 342 is now out. The expedition to drill and recover sediments from the Newfoundland Ridge that contain climate archives going back >50 million years was over three years ago (summer 2012) and much work has been done since.

This episode summarizes the post-cruise science meeting we just had in September 2015 where all the participating scientists get together to share the latest on their research and to re-kindle collaborations.

Ultimately, all this work is strengthened through multi-disciplinary collaborations — this meeting was critical to keeping the momentum going. I’m definitely excited about all the science that will come out of this effort.

To view all the past episodes and the 20-minute documentary, go to this page.

The Sedimentary Systems Research group is quite busy this semester with various research, teaching, and other activities. Here’s what we’re up to:

Ph.D. candidate Neal Auchter is immersed in preparing the first manuscript to come out of his work the past few years. This first paper will highlight the occurrence and style of gravitational deformation features (i.e., faults/folds from down-slope movement) preserved in outcropping stratigraphy. What’s intriguing is the relationship of these deformational features with the stratigraphic architecture. Neal plans to submit this paper by December. Neal is also going to be presenting a poster at AGU in December about work he did during his internship this past summer with the Shell clastic sed/strat research team in Houston.

M.S. candidate Kristin Chilton is crazy-busy taking multiple courses and TAing the undergraduate Sed-Strat course. Even with all of this, she is making progress on her research investigating the response of North Atlantic deep-sea circulation to climate change at the Eocene-Oligocene Transition. Kristin will be presenting a poster at GSA in Baltimore in a few weeks sharing the preliminary results. Undergraduate researcher Shauna Flynn, also a co-author on this poster, is working in our lab this semester focused on characterizing the coarse fraction (>63 microns) of these dominantly muddy deposits.

M.S. candidate Sarah Jancuska is taking courses and working up the wealth of data she collected during the field season in Patagonia back in February-March of this year. Right now, Sarah is focused on compiling statistics from the measured stratigraphic sections (e.g., bed thickness, degree of bed amalgamation, etc.) to test ideas about the degree of large-scale confinement, or ponding, of these turbidite deposits.

Ph.D. candidate Cody Mason is TAing the course I’m teaching this semester, Seismic Stratigraphy, and working on the project he’s doing with Virginia Tech faculty Jim Spotila on the Late Cenozoic tectonic evolution of the Coachella Valley region of southern California. Cody, Jim, and their co-authors will be presenting at AGU in December highlighting some new helium thermochronology data.

Finally, my colleague here at Virginia Tech, Ken Eriksson, and I have a new Basin Research paper in press just this week that estimates sediment flux of a ~325 million-year-old river system sourced in the Alleghanian Orogeny mountain belt (the remnants of which are the Appalachian Mountains). We use a remarkable succession of prodeltaic tidal rhythmites as a high-resolution chronometer and make calculations of sediment load and yield. The figure below (Fig. 8 from the paper) compares our range of estimates with a database of modern rivers (Milliman and Farnsworth, 2011).

Uncertainties in these estimates arises from the true total duration of the stratigraphic interval of interest as well as inferences about the size of the paleo-catchment. However, even with conservative uncertainty ranges incorporated, the paleo-flux of this ancient river system is comparable to modern river systems such as the Fly, Po, and Eel. With the sediment yield estimates we then calculate denudation of the long-gone Alleghanian Mountains, which agrees with denudation estimates from independent methods. We suggest that such paleo-sed flux estimates can, in certain types of systems, provide additional insight into surface process response to tectonics in deep-time archives.

It’s getting hot and humid here in Blacksburg, so summer is in full swing. The Sedimentary Systems Research group is scattered a bit as three of the four graduate students (Sarah Jancuska, Neal Auchter, and Cody Mason) are away doing internships in Texas. I saw them and many other colleagues/friends at the recent AAPG conference in Denver, which turned out to be a very good meeting for us. Cody and Sarah both presented posters and Neal gave a great talk.

Master’s candidate Kristin Chilton is here this summer and she is neck-deep in sample preparation for her project. Kristin is building on a preliminary dataset that undergraduate researchers (all now graduated) and I generated to examine the variability in abyssal bottom-current intensity across the Eocene-Oligocene Transition (~34 Ma). Kristin added to this dataset this spring and the preliminary results suggest there is a change that corresponds with the transition, but (as always) it may not be as straightforward as we predicted. She will be working this summer to prep many more samples for grain-size analysis to better constrain the problem.

I am heading to the NOC (National Oceanography Centre) in Southampton, UK, next week to give a talk and work with some collaborators on this same Eocene-Oligocene Transition effort. Following that, I’ll be attending the IODP (International Ocean Discovery Program) Science Evaluation Panel meeting in Brest, France.

The Chile Slope Systems project is highlighted in our department’s April 2015 newsletter. Click here or on the image above to read the full feature (note: link opens a PDF).

The 2015 field season for the Chile Slope Systems project is now over and a great success. Despite some not-so-great weather towards the end of the 7-week season the team was very productive. Ph.D. candidate Neal Auchter and M.S. student Sarah Jancuska amassed an impressive amount of data this season.

Here are some photos (captions are below each photo):

Neal and Sarah measuring section along Rio Zamora. The first half of the field season was unusually dry and the river level quite a bit lower. We were able to see some new section that is typically under water!

Neal with Rio Zamora in the background. The outcrops Neal is working up are a result of rapid incision by this river over the past several thousand years, which has produced some magnificent exposures along the river canyon walls.

We did a bit of mudstone sampling this year.

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a trip to the Argentine side of the border where these same Upper Cretaceous foreland basin strata are exposed. This outcrop, not far from Perito Moreno glacier, highlights some fascinating transitional flow deposits of the Punta Barrosa Formation. These rocks are currently being studied by the Stanford Project of Deep-water Depositional Systems group.

Stunning view of Upsala glacier in Argentina while examining the older part of the basin history.

Typical Patagonia traffic jam.

What I ate for lunch most of the field season: canned tuna, avacado, and hot sauce on a cracker.

Some spirited debate during our sponsor’s trip regarding the nature of inclined surfaces in submarine channel strata.

A view of Cordillera Manuel Senoret from one of the areas worked up this year by a Univ of Calgary student as part of the collaborative Chile Slope Systems effort.

Ph.D. candidate Cody Mason and I spent the past week out at his research area in Panamint Valley, California. This was the final field data and sample collection trip for this project (at least on this grant). There’s still much to do on the project, but field work is done!

January in the greater Death Valley region is a lovely time of year for field work — not too hot and very few gnats to contend with. Here are some photos with the caption that describes the image below the photo:

Standing on an alluvial fan looking west toward the basin (Panamint Valley). Note the bar and swale morphology.

View of the Panamint Valley playa (which actually had some water in it) from a canyon incised into the outcropping Pleistocene deposits we are studying.

The research we are doing requires good age control, which is notoriously difficult to get in alluvial deposits. The main goal of this trip was to collect samples for optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating. Here’s Cody hammering the sampling tube into the sediment.

A view of the Panamint Mountains in the late afternoon sun light. The lower hills in the middle ground is the proximal part of the now-exhumed alluvial/lacustrine deposits we are characterizing.

Geologist, educator, and GigaPanner extraordinaire Ron Schott was kind enough to meet up with us one afternoon to shoot a few GigaPan images of the field site. The photo above shows the GigaPan rig doing it’s thing. There are three GigaPans, from three locations in the playa: Position #1, Position #2, and Position #3. Cody and I will be using these images to help with facies correlations across the outcrop.

There was actually standing water down in the playa and one morning it was so still we had to stop and appreciate the reflections.

Although these sedimentary deposits are geologically young (<1 Ma) they are cemented and indurated enough to erode into vertical cliffs. Here, we took a quick detour into a very narrow slot canyon.

The focus of our work here is the ~0.2 to 1.5 Ma old deposits but we spent a day exploring the younger (<0.15 Ma) deposits associated with more recent lake highstands. These deposits sit atop the outcrops we’ve been studying in small and sparse outcrops. Above you can see a roadcut exposure behind Cody.

These exposures of the younger sediments may not be extensive but they are quite interesting. Here are some dipping laminated sands interbedded with granule-pebble conglomerate truncated by flatter-lying pebble-cobble conglomerate beds. The Jake staff in the upper right is 1.5 m tall. We interpret the lower dipping beds to have been deposited on steeply dipping foresets of a fan delta building out into the lake.

Next week is the annual Fall Meeting for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a contingent of Sedimentary Systems Research group be there presenting the latest on our work:

Monday is a big day for us:

• Julie Fosdick (Indiana Univ) is giving an invited talk (Brian Romans is a collaborator and co-author) in session EP11C-01 about detrital records of tectonics titled “Unraveling burial heating and sediment recycling in retroarc foreland basins: Detrital thermochronologic insights from the northern Magallanes Basin, Patagonian Andes”
  • when: Monday at 8:00am (first talk of the early morning session)
  • where: Moscone West 2005

• Brian Romans is giving an invited talk in session EP12A-08 about the propagation and preservation of signals in the sedimentary record titled “Sediment flux from stratigraphy: Insights from <1 Ma and >300 Ma sedimentary archives” 
  • when: Monday at 12:05pm (final talk in the late morning session)
  • where: Moscone West 2003

• Ph.D. candidate Neal Auchter is presenting poster EP13C-3533 titled “Multi-phase submarine channel history recorded by stratigraphic architectures in outcropping slope-channel deposits, Tres Pasos Formation, Chile”
  • when: Monday afternoon (1:40-6:00pm)
  • where: Moscone South poster hall

• Ph.D. candidate Cody Mason is presenting poser EP13B-3519 titled “Are catchment denudation signals stored in alluvial-fan stratigraphy? Measuring paleodenudation rates using cosmogenic radionuclides in Pleistocene Pleasant Canyon Complex, Panamint Mountains, California”
  • when: Monday afternoon (1:40-6:00pm)
  • where: Moscone South poster hall

Cody and Neal’s posters are in different sessions, but in the same theme, so they will likely be somewhat close to each other. Come on by and see the latest and greatest related to their Ph.D. projects.

And then we have a couple of presentations on Friday:

• Former SSR student Patrick Boyle has a poster (PP51E-1175) based on his completed master’s thesis titled “Cenozoic circulation history of the North Atlantic Ocean from seismic stratigraphy of the Newfoundland Drift Complex”. Unfortunately, Pat cannot make it to AGU so Brian Romans (2nd author) will be presenting the poster.
  • when: Friday morning (8:00am-12:20pm)
  • where: Moscone West poster hall

• Steve Hubbard (Univ of Calgary) is giving an invited talk (Brian Romans is collaborator and co-author) in session EP53E-04 about comparison of fluvial and submarine channel processes and deposits titled “The stratigraphic expression of formative processes in channels”
  • when: Friday 2:25-2:40pm (early afternoon session)
  • where: Moscone West 2007

Hope to see you there!

UPDATE (August 2015): This position is filled.

My department is advertising for a new faculty position in the broad field of ‘energy geoscience’. Below is the full advertisement text and here is where to apply: https://listings.jobs.vt.edu/postings/52633

I was recently interviewed by a podcast called People Behind the Science, whose goal is to tell the stories of scientists and researchers from a personal point of view. That is, what path did I take to find myself doing this, what failures and successes have I experienced, and how do I keep motivated? PBtS has interviewed more than 150 scientists, including several National Academy of Science scientists.

Here’s the link to my interview: http://www.peoplebehindthescience.com/dr-brian-romans/ 

A quick summer update from the Sedimentary Systems Research group.

We say farewell to Patrick Boyle who finished his master’s degree in May and is soon starting a career as an applied geoscientist in Houston, Texas. Pat and I are still working together this summer, along with some collaborators, to prepare a manuscript based on his thesis for submission to a journal by the end of the summer. At the same time, we welcome new master’s student, Sarah Jancuska, who will join the department next month. Sarah will be doing her research as part of the Chile Slope Systems project. So, one student out, but another student in — we remain at steady state!

Ph.D candidate Neal Auchter is away this summer doing an internship in Houston, Texas. Ph.D candidate Cody Mason spent a few intense weeks at the PRIME Lab at Purdue University last month preparing his samples for cosmogenic radionuclide (10Be and 26Al) analysis. If all goes according to plan, we should have some initial results this fall.

I’ve been spending my time working on multiple manuscripts, including a review paper to be submitted to Earth-Science Reviews next month on the topic of signal propagation in sedimentary systems across a wide range of timescales. I’m also working on some new/updated exercises for my Sed-Strat course as well as some content for a Basin Analysis course I’ll be co-teaching this fall.

I’m co-chairing a session (along with David Van Rooij from Ghent University) at the 2014 AGU Fall Meeting titled The Paleoceanographic Value of Contourite Archives. If you work on the sedimentary dynamics of contourites and/or use them to reconstruct paleoceanographic conditions, please consider submitting to the session. Abstract deadline is August 6th.