This post provides an update on the activities of the Sedimentary Research Group over the last year or so. Despite the challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused — most notably, the inability to travel for field work, sample collection, and some lab work — the group is thriving and making advancements in our research. Also, SSR director Brian Romans is looking for a new graduate student to join the group (starting in August 2022) at either the M.S. or Ph.D. level. Please contact Brian to learn more (contact info here).
SSR Group Member Activities:
PhD student Drew Parent presented preliminary results from his project on detrital zircon geochronology along the U.S. Atlantic passive margin at the virtual GSA 2020. (See a video recording of this talk here.) This work is part of a broader collaboration with students and faculty at UT-Austin as well as SSR alum Cody Mason, ultimately aimed at reconstructing the evolution of sediment dispersal systems during and after the rifting of Pangea. Drew worked as an intern with the Clastic & Seismic Stratigraphy group at Chevron this summer and will be starting full-time at Shell in Houston, TX in January 2022.
PhD student Sebastian Kaempfe will be presenting some of his research at the SEG-AAPG IMAGE conference in September 2021. His presentation is titled “Early-stage slope-channel fill deposits preserved at the base of an interval levee succession, Late Cretaceous Tres Pasos Formation, Chile” and will summarize some of the results from his research in southern Chile as part of the Chile Slope Systems program. This specific project is one chapter of Sebastian’s dissertation and presents new insights into deposits interpreted to have accumulated in an active sediment pathway that was subsequently abandoned, thus preserving a phase of channel development that is commonly observed in modern seafloor, but not in the stratigraphic record.
PhD student Natalia Varela participated in two virtual conferences this past summer (2021 SEPM ISGC Virtual Student and Early Career Sessions and the U.S. Scientific Conference Antarctic Research [SCAR]) where she shared her work on the sedimentology of the turbidite record on the levee of the Hillary Canyon, a submarine channel that is a conduit for Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) formation in the Ross Sea, Antarctica. This research is part of IODP Exp 374, which Brian Romans sailed on in early 2018, and focuses on ocean and ice-sheet interactions in the Pliocene-Pleistocene. All the SEPM talks, including Natalia’s, can be viewed on their YouTube channel. Natalia is right now in the North Atlantic Ocean participating as a shipboard scientist on IODP Exp 396 (Mid-Norwegian Continental Margin Magmatism) — the photo below was taken aboard the JOIDES Resolution drillship a few days after they left port to begin the expedition.
New Publications From the SSR Group:
PhD student Drew Parent and SSR director Brian Romans are co-authors on a new paper out in Sedimentology summarizing a collaborative study with Kyle Strom and students in the Civil & Environmental Engineering department to test the physical paleoceanographic proxy known as ‘sortable silt’. Our study generated grain-size data from deposits produced in a controlled setting (laboratory flume) and shows that mean sortable silt (10-63 µm) correlates well with flow velocity (see figure below), suggesting that under certain conditions this proxy is a reliable indicator of bottom-current speed. We have a follow-up paper, led by Drew Parent, in the works that dives into more details about how our experimental results compare to studies that measured bottom currents and grain size in natural systems. Stay tuned!
Brian Romans is a co-author on a new paper out Frontiers in Earth Science titled Times Associated with Source-to-Sink Propagation of Environmental Signals During Landscape Transience that proposes a common conceptual language and definition for aspects related to how signals (e.g., climate, tectonic, anthropogenic) are transferred and preserved in stratigraphic archives. We focus on the various temporal aspects and hope to engage with different Earth science disciplines involved in these ideas (e.g., geomorphologists, hydrologists, sedimentologists, climatologists, and more). For example, the figure below discusses how signals associated with specific grain-size (hydraulic) fractions may have different signal arrival times, which could impact how we interpret stratigraphic archives.
