The first bit of news in this update is to congratulate Dr. Natalia Varela on successfully completing her Ph.D.! Natalia passed her defense in December 2023 and submitted the dissertation and officially finished the degree in January 2024. Natalia’s research focused on sediment samples and data from two International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) expeditions: Exp 374 in the Ross Sea (which I sailed on in 2018) and Exp 396 along the Norwegian margin (which Natalia got to participate on in 2021).
Stay tuned for some fantastic papers in the coming year led by Natalia and based on her dissertation research, including the Pliocene-Pleistocene history of turbidite sedimentation offshore West Antarctica. Natalia is now at University of Virginia (just ‘up the road’ from Blacksburg) to continue her work on Antarctic margin sedimentation as part of a post-doctoral fellowship in Dr. Lauren Miller‘s lab.
I’d like to also acknowledge Natalia’s contributions to the department’s education mission. Natalia was not only an excellent TA for several different courses and levels, but was instrumental in helping design and develop a brand new course, an introductory paleoclimate course for any major/year called Climate History. Natalia won a much-deserved teaching award from the department in 2023 acknowledging these achievements. It’s been such a privilege to work with Natalia these past years, we miss her already!
Last month, I traveled to southern Chile to co-lead a field workshop for the sponsors of our Chile Slope Systems project. I realized that this year is my 20th anniversary of first visiting these amazing outcrops (my first field season as a new Ph.D. student in 2004). Time flies! We had a small, but enthusiastic, group for this year’s field workshop. Along with the co-directors of CSS, Lisa Stright (Colorado State Univ) and Steve Hubbard (Univ of Calgary), and SSR alum Sebastian Kaempfe, we showed off some of the ‘classic’ Tres Pasos Formation submarine channel-fill outcrops as well as sharing some of our newest results.
Although she didn’t make the trip to Patagonia this year, we presented results from Michala Puckett‘s M.S. thesis research, which examines the grain-scale textural characteristics of these sandstones. Michala is on track to finish her master’s in the next several weeks. Below is a photo of Michala presenting her research at the department’s Geoscience Student Research Symposium (GSRS) event a couple of weeks ago.
Finally, I’m very pleased that our research on the response of deep ocean circulation in the North Atlantic to significant climate change at the Eocene-Oligocene Transition (EOT; ~34 Ma) is now out in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology. This study goes back several years, starting with Kristin Chilton (M.S., 2016) with the foundational work on Site U1411 and then Drew Parent (Ph.D., 2022) generated data from a second site (Site U1406) and led the integrated analysis. We applied the terrigenous grain-size proxy ‘sortable silt’ to the fine-grained contourite drift deposits on the Newfoundland ridges to investigate the physical bottom-current history during this pivotal transition in Earth’s climate. The samples for this work came from IODP Exp 342, which I sailed on back in 2012. I’ll also note that this new work with sample-based proxy data is an appropriate follow-up to the regional seismic-stratigraphic research of these drift systems led by Patrick Boyle (M.S., 2014), summarized in our 2017 paper in Marine Geology.
Congrats to Drew, Kristin, and the rest of the author team!