Congratulations to Sedimentary Systems Research group member Patrick Boyle on the successful completion of his master’s degree. Pat is the first student to graduate from this new research program and will be moving to Houston, Texas this summer to start a full-time job with ConocoPhillips as a geoscientist.

Pat’s thesis was focused on the investigation of the Cenozoic history of the Deep Western Boundary Current in the North Atlantic Ocean. Pat used seismic-reflection data constrained by Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 342 cores to map the spatial and temporal distribution of deep-sea ‘contourite’ deposits and their relationship to global climatic changes. We are now finishing up a manuscript to be submitted to a journal, which will happen in the next month or so. Stay tuned for the paper!

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Also, the broader sedimentary geology group here at Virginia Tech just got back from a six-day, grad-student-run field trip examining various Paleozoic sedimentary successions in the central Appalachians. This trip was the culmination of a semester-long seminar where each student chose a topic of interest and researched potential outcrops to visit. The students then worked together to produce a field guide and planned the trip. We saw a lot of great geology and had a great time.