It’s getting hot and humid here in Blacksburg, so summer is in full swing. The Sedimentary Systems Research group is scattered a bit as three of the four graduate students (Sarah Jancuska, Neal Auchter, and Cody Mason) are away doing internships in Texas. I saw them and many other colleagues/friends at the recent AAPG conference in Denver, which turned out to be a very good meeting for us. Cody and Sarah both presented posters and Neal gave a great talk.

Master’s candidate Kristin Chilton is here this summer and she is neck-deep in sample preparation for her project. Kristin is building on a preliminary dataset that undergraduate researchers (all now graduated) and I generated to examine the variability in abyssal bottom-current intensity across the Eocene-Oligocene Transition (~34 Ma). Kristin added to this dataset this spring and the preliminary results suggest there is a change that corresponds with the transition, but (as always) it may not be as straightforward as we predicted. She will be working this summer to prep many more samples for grain-size analysis to better constrain the problem.

I am heading to the NOC (National Oceanography Centre) in Southampton, UK, next week to give a talk and work with some collaborators on this same Eocene-Oligocene Transition effort. Following that, I’ll be attending the IODP (International Ocean Discovery Program) Science Evaluation Panel meeting in Brest, France.