Compensation in River, Wave, and Tide dominated deltas
Waves and tides have been shown in modern deltas to change how evenly deltas distribute sediment over given periods of time. This behavior should be reflected in the organization of sediment packages preserved in deltaic stratigraphy. Specifically, tide-dominated deltas should have less even filling patterns over longer amounts of time than river-dominated deltas. During summer 2014, I collected terrestrial lidar data from the tide-dominated Sego Sandstone in San Arroyo Canyon (eastern Utah) and from the wave- and river-dominated Ferron Sandstone near Emery Utah (central Utah). Bed surfaces were digitized and the Compensation Index calculated for each formation.
As part of this project, I used numerical models and experimental data to determine how sensitive the Compensation Index is to outcrop-quality data.
The sedimentary record of the Mid-Atlantic shelf during the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum
The Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a climatic event that occurred ~56Ma with the release of a large amount of carbon dioxide over a geologically short period of time. A record of the PETM is preserved on the U.S. Mid-Atlantic shelf in the Marlboro Clay. I’m part of a large collaboration of Penn State Geosciences professors and grad students looking into the various aspects of the PETM event preserved in the Marlboro Clay in Maryland and New Jersey. My part is to help constrain how the depositional environment changed through the PETM and how that may impact the biological and geochemical records of the event.
Controls on Signal Shredding
While it’s been recognized for a while now that the stratigraphic record is “more gap than record”, we are starting to recognize that the gaps are not the only thing affecting the fidelity of the record–variable sedimentation and erosion, bioturbation, and other processes can alter or remove records (sedimentary, geochemical, or paleontological) in non-intuitive ways. With the use of stochastic modeling I will test how sedimentation variability, mixing, and sampling issues can affect geochemical proxy records.