It’s been a busy several months for the VT Sed Systems Research group. I have three graduate students that started back in August, working on three separate projects.

Neal Auchter (Ph.D. candidate) and I traveled down to Chilean Patagonia together last month for his first field season in the Magallanes Basin. I spent a week and a half with Neal getting him oriented — geologically and logistically — in the region. I have returned to teach, but Neal is still down there working with our collaborators collecting outcrop data from Cretaceous deep-marine slope deposits as part of the Chile Slope Systems consortium. Neal will be presenting a poster about his work on submarine channel architecture at this year’s AAPG conference in Pittsburgh (May 2013).

Patrick Boyle (M.S. candidate) spent several weeks last semester trouble-shooting loading seismic-reflection data into interpretation/visualization software. Pat’s persistence and some help from experts in the marine geology/geophysics community paid off and he is now analyzing the data. Pat is mapping the distribution and character of deep-sea ‘drift’ deposits on the Newfoundland Ridge to test hypotheses about the onset and history of the Deep Western Boundary Current in the Cenozoic, an important component of global oceanic circulation. Pat is also presenting a poster at AAPG this year about his work.

Cody Mason (Ph.D. candidate) is working on a project with VT faculty member, Jim Spotila, investigating the exhumation and tectonic history in the Coachella Valley region of southern California. He’s been to the field area twice and has a bunch of samples keeping him busy. Cody and I will be heading out to the Panamint Valley area (near Death Valley, CA) next month for some reconnaissance field work related to a new project examining the role of sediment flux variability in stratigraphic architecture. Stay tuned for more about that in coming months.

Our computing and laboratory facilities are up and running in newly renovated space here in Derring Hall. We’ve got two workstations that can run Petrel, Kingdom, ArcGIS, Python, Adobe Creative Suite, and many other software packages. I am working on the finishing touches of a grain size lab, which features a SediGraph 5120 particle size analyzer (accurately measures distributions from <1 micron to 100s of microns). I will have an undergraduate from the Geosciences department working on a research project this summer utilizing this new lab. Additionally, my sedimentary geology colleague here, Ben Gill, has set up a stable isotope lab in the same lab suite that he and his students are using to investigate environmental change in Earth’s past (from Paleozoic to Mesozoic carbonate successions).

I am teaching a seismic stratigraphy course this semester, which hasn’t been offered in our department for several years. We were able to acquire seismic-reflection data, industry-standard software, and even some new hardware from generous donors to the department, all of which is helping to modernize the course and give the students valuable experience.

Next week, I head to Bremen, Germany to help sample the nearly 5 km of sediment cores acquired on IODP Expedition 342 in summer 2012. Over the next few years I will be collaborating with other Exp 342 scientists investigating the history and influence of the Deep Western Boundary Current in the North Atlantic Ocean, especially through significant global climatic change (e.g., Eocene-Oligocene boundary).

Exciting times ahead for the group, stay tuned!

Collaborators at University of Calgary (Steve Hubbard) and University of Utah (Lisa Stright) and I are proposing a new phase of research on the world-class exposures of deep-marine (turbidite) to deltaic strata in the Cretaceous Magallanes Basin of southern Chile. We are building on recent work by Steve Hubbard and his graduate students looking at submarine channel-fill facies relationships and stacking patterns of multiple channel-fill bodies.

The Chile Slope Systems project proposes a multi-disciplinary approach integrating detailed sedimentological characterization and high-resolution stratigraphy to construct 3-D architectural models that can be used to better design reservoir models in analogous subsurface systems. Additionally, continued research on regional correlation and basin evolution provides exceptional system-scale context. Visit this link for much more.

The preliminary report for IODP Expedition 342 that I sailed on this past summer is now published and available here (or click on image below).

The report is >250 pages long, including >70 figures, and summarizes the operations, methods, and preliminary findings of the two-month long expedition. It’s amazing how much work gets done on these expeditions. But the best part is that this report is just the beginning, it really just sets up the framework — much more science to come.

The Fall 2012 semester is now well underway and it’s time for a quick update on what’s going on with the VT Sed Systems Research group.

Firstly, three new students have arrived and are settling in to the Dept. of Geosciences and Blacksburg:

• Patrick Boyle finished his B.S. in geology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) in May 2012. For his master’s thesis, Pat will use seismic-reflection data and information from sediment cores obtained on IODP Expedition 342 to reconstruct the history and dynamics of the Deep Western Boundary Current in the North Atlantic Ocean during the Cenozoic. Pat is also a TA this semester for our Sedimentology-Stratigraphy course for undergrad majors.
• Neal Auchter comes to us from University of Montana where he completed a master’s degree in geology this past summer. Neal’s PhD research will be focused on improving our understanding of submarine channel processes by analyzing Cretaceous deposits exposed as outcrops in the Magallanes Basin of southern Chile. The first field season for Neal will be in early 2013.
• Cody Mason has a B.S. in geology from Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO and will be doing a PhD with both me and VT faculty member Jim Spotila. Cody will be using geologically young sedimentary deposits to investigate the linkage of erosional processes with stratigraphic patterns in a single ‘source to sink’ system in the Great Basin, eastern California.

In other news, I spent two months aboard the JOIDES Resolution scientific drillship this summer for Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 342. This expedition targeted Eocene to earliest Miocene deep-sea drift deposits offshore the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. These sediment records are an exceptional archive of paleoceanographic and paleoclimatic change through significant Earth history events, including global warming events (‘hyperthermals’) in the Eocene and transition to a much cooler planet across the Eocene-Oligocene boundary. There are several research projects that will come out of participating on this expedition. More about that science in the coming months.

The best way to get a sense of the science and day-to-day life during the expedition is to watch this series of short videos (each about 10 minutes long) that were produced during the two-month cruise:

• Episode One: ‘Departure’ — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWO6LnsGj1s&hd=1
• Episode Two: ‘Core on Deck’ – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgouMVdqLDI&hd=1
• Episode Three: ‘Time Machine’ — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qtvK35YhNE&hd=1
• Episode Four: ‘Stormy Science’ — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp8pez3PLQ4&hd=1
• Episode Five: ‘Back to the Future’ — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eudbroUnSPs&hd=1
• Episode Six: ‘Newfoundland’ — http://youtu.be/bWOOoqN0Ec8

That’s it for now, we’ll be using this site in the future to post updates about papers we publish, conferences we attend, photos and stories from field excursions, and much more.

The Sedimentary Systems Research group in the Dept. of Geosciences at Virginia Tech investigates the evolution and dynamics of sedimentary systems across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales using an integrated, source-to-sink approach. Specific research interests include clastic sedimentology, stratigraphic architecture, tectonics of sedimentary basins, deep-sea sedimentation, and erosional-depositional system linkage.

We study ancient and modern sedimentary systems using outcrop, subsurface, and Earth-surface data to address geologic problems related to tectonic and/or climatic change as well as the relationship of intrinsic sedimentary dynamics to patterns observed in the stratigraphic record. Much of our research has implications for improving prediction and characterization of subsurface geology.

The Sedimentary Systems Research group is directed by Brian Romans. Visit the People, Research, and Publications pages to learn more.

We’ll be using this site to post updates about our activities. Stay tuned!