I’m very happy to announce that Ph.D. candidate Cody Mason is now Dr. Cody Mason! Cody successfully defended in late April and submitted his finalized dissertation a few days ago. His research interests are in the interactions of tectonics, climate, and surface processes (erosion and deposition). Cody was co-advised by me and my colleague Jim Spotila (neotectonics, geomorphology) and ended up conducting two stand-alone projects, but both within the overall theme of climate-tectonic-surface process interactions and both projects examining normal-fault-bounded mountain ranges in California.
Cody’s project with Jim Spotila is titled “Two-phase exhumation of the Santa Rosa Mountains: Low- and high-angle normal faulting during initiation and evolution of the southern San Andreas fault system”. In this study, Cody and co-authors used (U-Th)/He thermochronometry combined with geologic mapping to test models about the timing and kinematics for initiation of the southern San Andreas system. This paper was submitted earlier this year and is currently in review.
figure from Mason et al. (in review); Two-phase exhumation of the Santa Rosa Mountains: Low- and high-angle normal faulting during initiation and evolution of the southern San Andreas fault system
The project that Cody and I worked on together is titled “Climate-driven unsteady denudation and sediment flux in a high-relief unglaciated catchment-fan system using 26Al and 10Be, Panamint Valley, California”. In this study, Cody calculated catchment-wide denudation rates from a now-exhumed Pleistocene succession of alluvial-lacustrine deposits at the mouth of a short and steep catchment in the Panamint Valley of California. These cosmogenic radionuclide-derived erosion rates are integrated with sedimentological characterization of the deposits to quantify the magnitude and variability in sediment flux in this catchment-fan system. Such catchment-fan systems are ideal natural laboratories to test hypotheses about the transfer of climate and/or tectonic signals to stratigraphy. Cody and I are currently putting the finishing touches on this manuscript and will be submitting it very soon.
figure from Mason & Romans (in prep); Climate-driven unsteady denudation and sediment flux in a high-relief unglaciated catchment-fan system using 26Al and 10Be, Panamint Valley, California
In addition to the above projects, Cody first-authored a paper that came out in Earth & Planetary Science Letters a few months ago that examines millennial to multi-millennial scale sediment mixing in the Mississippi River sediment routing system.
Fig. 4 from Mason et al. (2017); Climatic and anthropogenic influences on sediment mixing in the Mississippi source-to-sink system using detrital zircons: Late Pleistocene to recent; EPSL
Finally, I’m also happy to announce that Cody will be sticking around the Sedimentary Systems Research group for another couple years as a post-doctoral researcher. We will be applying this source-to-sink approach to the behavior of the Amazon sediment-routing system. More on this project later this summer.
Congratulations to Cody on his Ph.D. and these exciting contributions to geoscience!