New Semester, New Students

The Fall 2012 semester is now well underway and it’s time for a quick update on what’s going on with the VT Sed Systems Research group.

Firstly, three new students have arrived and are settling in to the Dept. of Geosciences and Blacksburg:

  • Patrick Boyle finished his B.S. in geology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) in May 2012. For his master’s thesis, Pat will use seismic-reflection data and information from sediment cores obtained on IODP Expedition 342 to reconstruct the history and dynamics of the Deep Western Boundary Current in the North Atlantic Ocean during the Cenozoic. Pat is also a TA this semester for our Sedimentology-Stratigraphy course for undergrad majors.
  • Neal Auchter comes to us from University of Montana where he completed a master’s degree in geology this past summer. Neal’s PhD research will be focused on improving our understanding of submarine channel processes by analyzing Cretaceous deposits exposed as outcrops in the Magallanes Basin of southern Chile. The first field season for Neal will be in early 2013.
  • Cody Mason has a B.S. in geology from Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO and will be doing a PhD with both me and VT faculty member Jim Spotila. Cody will be using geologically young sedimentary deposits to investigate the linkage of erosional processes with stratigraphic patterns in a single ‘source to sink’ system in the Great Basin, eastern California.

In other news, I spent two months aboard the JOIDES Resolution scientific drillship this summer for Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 342. This expedition targeted Eocene to earliest Miocene deep-sea drift deposits offshore the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. These sediment records are an exceptional archive of paleoceanographic and paleoclimatic change through significant Earth history events, including global warming events (‘hyperthermals’) in the Eocene and transition to a much cooler planet across the Eocene-Oligocene boundary. There are several research projects that will come out of participating on this expedition. More about that science in the coming months.

The best way to get a sense of the science and day-to-day life during the expedition is to watch this series of short videos (each about 10 minutes long) that were produced during the two-month cruise:

That’s it for now, we’ll be using this site in the future to post updates about papers we publish, conferences we attend, photos and stories from field excursions, and much more.