What has the Sedimentary Systems Research group been up to lately? This post provides an update on the activities and accomplishments of the current and recently-finished SSR students and a bit about what I’ve been doing and have planned.

Ph.D. student Natalia Varela is on her way back from the 2023 Urbino Summer School in Paleoclimatology in Italy. This school is for doctoral students and focuses on …

… past climate dynamics with special emphasis on the analysis of long-term carbon cycling and its implications in the understanding of present and future climates. USSP integrates lectures, symposia, field trips, and exercises on the many different areas of paleoclimatology including biogeochemical cycling, paleoceanography, continental systems, and all aspects of deep-time climate modelling. These techniques and systems are explored through interactive discussions of Cretaceous OAEs, P/E hyperthermals, the Greenhouse-Icehouse transition, Neogene and Quaternary climate dynamics.

This content and training is a fantastic addition to Natalia’s strong background in sedimentology, stratigraphy, and basin analysis and sets her up nicely to make scientific contributions in deep-time paleoclimate research going forward. Natalia will be wrapping up her Ph.D. and her time at Virginia Tech later this year, so stay tuned for updates about exciting next steps in her career.

M.S. student Michala Puckett has finished her first year in the program (time flies!) and is busy this summer working on her thesis research. Michala joined the Chile Slope Systems team for the 2023 field season in southern Chile in February-March. In addition to helping out other students with field work and attending the sponsor’s field workshop, Michala collected more than 50 sandstone samples from submarine channel deposits of the Tres Pasos Formation for her thesis project. Here’s Michala at one of the sampling transects along Alvarez Ridge.

Michala will be generating quantitative grain size and sorting data from thin sections to investigate textural variability as a function of channel architecture. Additionally, we plan to make her photomicrographs and size/sorting data available to use as a ‘benchmark’ data set for emerging automated workflows and other image-analysis methods. Michala’s thin sections (pictured below) arrived a couple weeks ago and she’s now getting to work on the characterization.

SSR alum Sebastian Kaempfe (Ph.D., 2022) participated in this year’s field season, helping the team immensely with data collection, field planning and logistics, and as a translator and liaison with the local communities. Sebastian also has the first (of three) dissertation chapters submitted and currently in review (at Sedimentology). This first paper focuses on submarine channel architecture of the Tres Pasos Formation and will hopefully be out and available this fall. The next chapter will be submitted soon!

One of the chapter’s of the dissertation of SSR alum Drew Parent (Ph.D., 2022) is now submitted and in review at Paleoceanography & Paleoclimatology. This study summarizes our work on reconstructing the bottom-current history of the Newfoundland Ridges contourite drifts (using cores from IODP Exp 342) with an emphasis on addressing the long-standing question: Did North Atlantic circulation intensify in response to the Eocene-Oligocene Transition? This work goes back several years, including initial work on one of the sites by SSR alum Kristin Chilton (M.S., 2016) and in collaboration with Tim van Peer, Paul Wilson, Steve Bohaty, and several others working on these questions. I’m very excited to get this work out to the Cenozoic paleoceanography community, stay tuned for updates.

As for me, I’m currently on research leave, and the first of two major activities was a five-week visit at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) in June and early July working with my host Sebastien Castelltort, colleagues, and students. Sebastien and I had collaborated on a source-to-sink review paper several years ago, but haven’t had the opportunity to collaborate more closely since then. Thus, my visit was aimed at revisiting key ideas about signal propagation in source-to-sink sedimentary systems and thinking about what work has been done over the past several years, where we are, and next steps. As part of this, we organized and ran a two-day workshop (pictured below) with other sedimentary system researchers in Europe and with a focus on the Ph.D. students participating in the S2S Future program. It was really fantastic to see the amazing work these students are doing.

During this time I was able to make some progress on a long-languishing paper that includes Sebastien (among others). Time for deep focus on a single research task is exceedingly rare at this point in my career, so I was very happy to be able to regain momentum on several ideas for papers and future proposals. Many thanks to Sebastien for being a fantastic host and to the Swiss National Science Foundation for funding. Additionally, we made sure to visit the Alps for both geology and fun while there.

My second major activity during this research leave is participating as a shipboard scientist on IODP Expedition 400 (NW Greenland Margin), which departs Reykjavik on August 12th. I’m sailing on the core description team and very excited about the sediment cores we hope to recover. More about this expedition in a future post.