DEPARTMENT OF
EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING • 2013 NEWSLETTER
IN THIS ISSUE Message From The Chair.................. 1 47 Years At Tulane ............................ 2 Isotopes And Climate ........................ 5 A Katrina Refugee Returns................ 6 2013 Award Recipients...................... 9
MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR Welcome to our 2013 newsletter, the second already since I became Department Chair. The past academic year has been eventful and there are several interesting developments to report on, including two changes amongst the senior faculty in the department. Ron Parsley announced last winter his plans to retire in the summer of 2013. He will soon relocate to North Carolina, but we are pleased that he expects to visit the department frequently and remain active in paleontology as an Emeritus Professor. His retirement, after almost 50 years of service at Tulane, will not go unnoticed! We are excited to welcome back Mead Allison, who served an earlier stint as a faculty member in the department (1999-2007). Mead’s extensive research on the Lower Mississippi River and his love of New Orleans were some of the factors that brought him back, along with an exciting joint position between Tulane and the newly established Water Institute of the Gulf. Both Ron and Mead feature prominently in this newsletter, but there are many other things that happen throughout the academic year that we would like to share. Some of these you will be able to read about on the following pages, but of course there is much more than what fits into an annual newsletter. I would therefore encourage you to bookmark our department webpage (http://tulane. edu/sse/eens/) that is skillfully maintained and frequently updated by Nancy Walker. In the “News” section, you will be able to read new entries on a regular basis; in addition, the webpages show profiles of all the new people that join the department. Our Alumni Party takes place on Friday, October 4, as part of the annual Homecoming festivities. This year’s party will be quite a special event: Ron Parsley’s retirement will be front and center with a symposium in his honor, followed by a reception. We hope that all of you who know Ron and have benefited from his insights and mentorship will make an attempt to join us. Further details about this event can be found elsewhere in this newsletter. We look forward to seeing many of you soon!
Torbjörn Törnqvist Chair, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
1
47 TULANE
YEARS AT
an in the m t a o b a s a y le s r a P Ron d Canyon circa 1980 Gran
Serving one academic institution as a faculty member for almost half a century is an increasingly rare accomplishment. Ron Parsley offers a glimpse into his illustrious career at Tulane during a time period that has seen numerous changes.
THE EARLY YEARS To summarize forty seven years of work at Tulane in a few pages is of course impossible, but I will try to hit some of the highpoints – or those anyway that stick in my mind as memorable. I will omit most of the personal aspects of my life ‘cuse it is mostly gossip and chit-chat.
I worked for LSU at their summer field camp south of Colorado Springs, CO. I was sort of “recruited” for the job because many Tulane undergrads were using the LSU field camp and a Tulane professor was deemed desirable under the circumstances. I enjoyed teaching field geology and working outdoors in the mountains. It was near the end of the last camp session when I had a piece of rock break off in my hand that dropped me about 20 feet down a small cliff. My right femur and left wrist were broken and I spent the next year or so as an invalid. To rehabilitate myself I took up running and became a more serious bicycle rider (a sport I still enjoy today). Teaching from a wheel chair and writing with my right hand was difficult but interesting.
I came to Tulane in 1966 as a one-year replacement for John McDowell who was going off to Cornell University to train as an Associate Dean. John came back after a year of training, went into the Dean’s Office full time, and I became a tenure-track Assistant Professor. I started out teaching Paleo 321-321 (each a three credit course taught in fall and spring of the year – yes, Paleo was a full-year course!). I also taught Historical Geology and stints of Physical Geology, Geology for Engineers (Hamilton Johnson went on sabbatical), Stratigraphy, and Seminar in Invertebrate Paleontology. The department in those days consisted of Harold and Emily Vokes, Hugh Skinner, Hamilton Johnson, Ray Steinhoff, Garret Briggs, Joe Meyer, and myself. My early years were concerned with setting up my lectures and labs. Getting my research going was certainly helped by the fact that the Vokes had set up an excellent darkroom and soon there was a new Wild microscope for me – it is still in use today. I refined and expanded some of the chapters in my dissertation in my first years, as well as embarked on the study of new material. Within several years I was the undergraduate major advisor and continued doing the job for over 25 years.
I was promoted to Associate Professor in 1971 and tenured the following year. In 1971, I became Department Chair – perhaps the only case where an untenured professor (and actually an Assistant Professor at the time of appointment) became chair of a department. I lasted for about two years until lack of support from the administration was such that I resigned the chair rather than making things more unpleasant for members of the department. This was also an interesting time for me because I applied for and was awarded a NASA grant to study the surface features on Mars, based on Mariner 6 and 7 photographs. From what I observed, along with Amanda Hunt, a grad student involved in the study, we based most of our interpretations on the belief that water played little or no part in sculpting the Martian surface. The ink was barely dry on the report when photos of the next Mars orbiter showed the deepest water-cut canyons in the solar system. Nary was a reprint sent out and when I was invited to resubmit a proposal for the next round of NASA investigations, I passed my relationship to NASA on to Joe Meyer who co-authored a paper and map of one of the Martian quadrangles. It was clear to me that my talents were in paleobiology and it was best to stay there.
In 1967, I went to the GSA Annual Meeting in San Francisco and helped Gary Lane – a former professor of mine at UCLA – organize an informal meeting of echinoderm paleontologists (Friends of the Echinoderms). We all decided that this was a good idea and we would continue the practice. Several years later Lane could not attend GSA, so I organized the meeting and have been doing it ever sense. It is always fun and a great way to keep in contact with paleontologists with similar interests.
In those days my research was pretty much limited, as it is today, to the study of primitive echinoderms. Most
During the summers of 1968, 1969, 1970, 1976, and 1977, 2
are essentially bilaterally symmetrical echinoderms. My work mainly focused on stylophorans solutans (Cambrian to Devonian). In addition to systematics, I became very interested in functional morphology. This expanded to testing 1:1 scale models in a flume, which was carried out at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. In the late 1970s my research interests would further broaden when I began studying primitive echinoderm groups such as paracrinoids and pleurocystitids.
adventure; even under socialism it was a vibrant city. This was especially true in 1989 when I was present during the early days of the “Velvet Revolution� which led to the fall of socialism and the establishment of a new government. The demonstrations were scary but gave one a real sense of reality, coming from a democratic society. I have been back in post-revolution Prague and the free atmosphere is great to experience. One personal aspect must be inserted here. A friend of mine was insistent that I meet a woman who was exceptionally nice and like me was single and an avid bike rider. We had a blind date and it clicked. Shirley and I have been married for 27 years and she still puts up with me. We still ride our bikes, enjoy travel and outdoor activities together. Research wise, the 1990s were pretty much a continuation of the 1980s. I joined forces with a Czech colleague (Ladislav Marek) and together we embarked on a new line of research for me. We tried to figure out the functional morphology of mollusk-like hyolithids and my part of the work was to build 1:1 scale models of the beasts and test them in the flume at the Stennis Space Center. We were able to contribute some interesting and significant data in terms of life style, feeding mode, and probable food type. However, most of my work continued in primitive echinoderms.
Ron teaching geology in the Grand Canyon.
RECOGNITION In 1997, I accepted membership to the Sepkoski Grants Committee of the Paleontological Society. This is a committee that reviews and awards grants to paleontologists in the former Soviet Union and countries in eastern Europe (Warsaw Pact) formerly under Soviet domination. The following year I was made chair of the committee and have been doing the job ever since. It has been a lot of fun and gives one a good notion what kind of paleontological research is going on in those countries.
It is in the early 1970s, following Colorado River trips during Thanksgiving 1969 with John Warme (then of Rice University, now at the Colorado School of Mines) and a summer NSF Field Conference several years later that I, with urging from John McDowell, put the wheels in motion to begin the Grand Canyon Colloquium. In the early days we routinely had three boat trips with 36 students, but with the rising costs over the years we are now lucky to fill half a boat. We have run a trip virtually every year (the post-Katrina year messed us up quite a bit). At this point we have just completed Grand Canyon XXXIX. Early in the days of the Colloquium I became interested in becoming a boatman so I too could drive a boat down the canyon and through the rapids. For the next four or five years I trained under the tutelage of various Hatch River Expeditions boatmen and was finally allowed to drive a boat on my own. I enjoyed this a great deal and was probably the only boatman on the river who chartered the trip, drove the boat, and taught the passengers as part of a university course. My injuries occurred at the LSU field camp put an end to my boatman days but I still very much enjoyed taking my students down the river. Steve Nelson will take over and run Grand Canyon XL this coming spring (2014).
With the beginning of the new century I was introduced to the latest segment of my research. Shuhai Xiao had joined our faculty and showed me some Chinese reprints concerning very fine molds of Middle Cambrian gogiid echinoderms from Southwest China. In addition, he knew the lead author, Prof. Zhao of Guizhou University. What I saw was the possibility of making high fidelity latex casts. Introduction by Xiao led to an invitation to come to China and work on the material. Two NSF-grants sent me to Guiyang, Guizhou Province, three times and netted us a wealth of data. There are so many specimens that I was able to work out A gogiid eocrinoid (Guizhoueocrinus) complete growth series from the Lower Cambrian Balang Formation, Guizhou Province, China. in several species
GOING INTERNATIONAL In 1979 I became a Full Professor which netted me a lot more committee assignments, but my research went on nonetheless. In the early 1980s I entered into a new research direction, the primitive echinoderms of the Barrandium (central Bohemia, then Czechoslovakia). I studied more diverse groups and had accesses to the Barrande Collection in the Czech National Museum in Prague. Because these were the Cold War days I gained access to the collections by being sponsored as a National Academy of Sciences Exchange Scientist (1981, 1983, 1986, 1989, and 1992). Living in Prague under a socialist government was a great 3
and describe or re-describe several new forms. I thought I had developed some pretty good ideas on how gogiids functioned and discussed them in several papers. On the eve of my retirement I tested some models of these Chinese gogiids in Kyle Straub’s lab and found that their life posture and feeding modes were not quite as we had believed. It is good, I suppose, to discover your own mistakes and we will be giving a paper at GSA in Denver this October to set the record straight. During my career I have been asked to give papers at meetings that had some special meaning to me. This includes presentations on paracrinoids (Norwegian Paleontological Society, Oslo, 1974); early patterns in echinoderm evolution (Barrande Centennial, Czech National Museum–Czech Academy of Science, Prague, 1983); the identification of Cornutes and Mitrates as echinoderms (Sixth International Echinoderm Conference, Victoria, BC, 1987); and the evolution of non-pentradiate echinoderms (70th Anniversary, Paleontological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 2000). My first fellowship came in the early 1970s when I became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2011, I was honored with two fellowships. The first was to the Geological Society of America (GSA) and the second was the Paleontological Society (PS). Nominations led by John Pojeta were a great help in these matters.
Ron enjoying a refreshing shower during the Grand Canyon Colloquium (2008).
Now that I am retired, quo vadis? Shirley and I are relocating to Hendersonville, NC, and have bought a home on its outskirts. I will continue to do research and publish. I am committed to writing a book on the early history of the echinoderms that will occupy my time for several years. To do this I am in the process of setting up a lab and research
library in the walk-in basement of our home that is larger than the lab I have at Tulane. This old prof is not going to fade away, he just decided – along with a lot of encouragement from Shirley – to get out of the heat and out of the paths of hurricanes.
HALF A CENTURY OF PALEONTOLOGY AT TULANE PROGRAM
A SYMPOSIUM IN HONOR OF
RONALD L. PARSLEY FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2013
The symposium will be held in the Stone Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center (Room 210, Building #82 on Tulane campus map; http://tulane.edu/ about/visiting/uptown-campusmap.cfm) A subsequent reception (also the annual EES Alumni Party) will take place in Woodward Way, Woldenberg Art Center, near the Stone Auditorium
4:00
Opening remarks
4:10
John Pojeta (Smithsonian Institution) – Chitons: Natural History and Early Evolution
4:40
Rebecca Freeman (University of Kentucky) – The Curse of Rafinesquina: Negative Taphonomic Feedback Exerted by Strophomenid Shells on Storm-Buried Lingulids in the Ordovician of Ohio
5:10
Shuhai Xiao (Virginia Tech) – On the Eve of the Cambrian Explosion
5:40
Ron Parsley (Tulane) – Early History of the Echinodermata: A 50+ Year Perspective
6:15
Reception/Alumni Party
Please RSVP to Marilyn Reine (mreine@tulane.edu, 504-865-5198) by September 23, 2013 4
ISOTOPES AND
CLIMATE In this continuing series that features one of our most promising graduate students, we hear from Alvaro Fernandez, Vokes Fellow for academic year 2013-2014. Alvaro received this prestigious award for his cutting-edge work in isotope geochemistry that includes dirt burners and clumped isotopes.
MY PATH TO ISOTOPE GEOCHEMISTRY I came to Tulane to pursue a doctorate and to make a career out of my interest in earth’s history. My training started at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where I obtained BS and MS degrees in geology. During the course of my master’s research, I made my first isotope ratio measurements and learned how useful they can be to geologists. This experience inspired me to join Tulane and study isotope geochemistry under Dr. Rosenheim. Since then, I’ve worked in several different projects that use isotopes to explore various aspects of our planet. RECENT CLIMATE CHANGE Historical records of weather and climate are not long enough to get a complete picture of how human activities have affected climate. Geologists can help expand the historical record using geochemical signals archived in rocks and sediments. My main dissertation project is an attempt to elucidate climatic history for key climate variables in the Atlantic Ocean over the past 300 years. I use measurements of oxygen and carbon isotopes in the skeletons of corals and sclerosponges as ‘proxy’ indicators of temperature, salinity, and ocean circulation. Employing these data, I compose a climate record using my reconstruction along with historical data and climate models.
THE DIRT BURNER Much of what we have learned about the Holocene would not have been possible without accurate radiocarbon ages of sediments. Some sediments, however, are notoriously difficult to date because they do not have large organic particles that can be used for radiocarbon analyses. In Dr. Rosenheim’s laboratory we use a ramped-pyrolysis system, which we affectionately call the ‘dirt burner’, to date these complex sediments. My work in this area has focused in dating paleosol (ancient soil) profiles from the Mississippi River Delta. My goal is to give a calendar date to the time when the paleosol was buried as well as when it first started to form. CLUMPED ISOTOPES The last project of my dissertation deals with the rapidly developing field of carbonate clumped isotope geochemistry. The ‘clumping’ in the term refers to chemical bonds between the rare isotopes of carbon and oxygen (13C-18O) in a mineral. It turns out that the extent that these two isotopes bond to each other depends on temperature; therefore, measurements of the number of bonds can be used to construct a reliable paleothermometer. This method has generated much interest because we can use these measurements to estimate the temperature at which a 5
mineral formed. For instance, it has been used to provide the first reliable estimates of the body temperatures of dinosaurs! At Tulane I am involved in the development of analytical procedures used to measure clumping in different carbonate minerals using a retrofitted mass spectrometer. My work in this area has resulted in one first author manuscript and two other manuscripts on which I am a co-author. I am proud to be a part of one of the few laboratories in the world capable of performing this difficult type of measurement. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to take this opportunity to thank several people at Tulane who have helped me in my research over the past three years. First, my fellow graduate students Elizabeth K. Williams and Mathew Pendergraft who kindly provided a lot of help in the laboratory. My dissertation committee, Dr. Brad Rosenheim and Dr. Torbjörn Törnqvist for their helpful advice and guidance. Dr. Karen Johannesson for lending me a lot of her laboratory equipment. Dr. Jianwu Tang for many helpful discussions. And, the late Erich Scholz who provided invaluable support in setting up our laboratory and who always had the right solution for many technical problems that I encountered.
A KATRINA REFUGEE RETURNS A number of faculty members who left in the post-Katrina years and later returned to Tulane have made for some great feel-good stories. Mead Allison is now one of them – he just returned to New Orleans to rejoin our department and here reflects on his remarkable journey.
A CHANGE OF HEART I have been based on the Gulf Coast since late in 1994 and became a faculty member in EES (then known as the Department of Geology) in summer 1999. Like many at Tulane and in southeastern Louisiana, my life was turned upside down in August 2005. My wife Victoria, daughter Libby, and I evacuated to northern Virginia and lived with relatives and Libby went to school there until the following January when Tulane resumed operations. My passion for Mississippi Delta science was such that, despite the personal disruption, I organized a rapid-response program to examine Katrina’s effects on the continental shelf off the river’s mouth funded by the Office of Naval Research that had my lab group working out of Venice, Louisiana only weeks after Katrina and before the road reopened to lower Plaquemines Parish.
became an ironic situation, where I was transiting back-andforth to Louisiana frequently to conduct the field elements of my research and to attend meetings with collaborators and State and Federal coastal managers. These years were also marked by a growing fascination with the enormous societal implications and complexities of restoring and preserving southeastern Louisiana. As I have been willingly drawn into the applied side of deltaic coastal science, my interests diverged further and further from the basic science research institute that is UTIG. In retrospect, these elements in my scientific life were unlikely to have crystallized in the way that they did if I had not left Louisiana for a time. It was kismet, when, in spring of 2012, Dr. Chip Groat came into my office. Chip, a former director of the US Geological Survey, had just been made the President of a new research organization, The Water Institute of the Gulf, created to assist the State in the science behind restoring coastal Louisiana. Chip was talking to scientists working in coastal Louisiana about what they thought the Water Institute should evolve into, how it should interact with Louisiana universities and consulting firms, and what types of scientists it should have on staff. The folks I found myself describing sounded a great deal like me! One thing led to another, and in the fall, Chip offered me a position at the Water Institute as Director of Physical Processes and Sediment Systems.
The experiences of seeing firsthand the destruction in the deltaic wetlands, and that in New Orleans (we were in the city in September to recover field equipment from Tulane) and surrounding communities, had a profound impact on me in ways that I did not foresee at the time. I was proud of the fine graduate students working in my lab group and the way they responded to the crisis – several lost all of their possessions in the storm. My two PhD students who were early in their program I helped transfer to other universities, where they thrived. The two MS students, who were further along, elected to come back to Tulane and finish their research for their degrees. One, Jeffrey Nittrouer (MS, 2006), is now an Assistant Professor at Rice, and the other, Carol Wilson (MS, 2007), is now a post-doc at Vanderbilt.
The first thing I said to Chip in our negotiations was that I would only accept a position if I could also return to Tulane, and, to his credit, he immediately got in touch with Dean Altiero. I love teaching and mentoring students, and one of the guiding principles of the Water Institute is to facilitate scientific interaction with Louisiana universities. In my mind, the best way to do this would be to have a university home. My family and I also missed New Orleans greatly... sorry Austin. My greatest concern was how my EES colleagues would respond, but after a few initial questions like “you want to come back to where you left six years ago?” They have graciously and warmly welcomed me back. I will be forever grateful that Tulane took me back. A “mea culpa” on my part for leaving in the first place!
In my own case, I returned to EES to see four of my closest faculty research collaborators in the department either not return, or leave shortly thereafter. In an atmosphere that now seems somewhat surreal, my family and I made the decision to leave for Austin, Texas in the summer of 2007 where I accepted a position as a Senior Research Scientist and Associate Director at the Institute for Geophysics at UT–Austin (UTIG). UTIG is a wonderful scientific atmosphere with huge opportunities for collaboration within the Jackson School of Geosciences. I think of the decision to move to the University of Texas now as both the best and one of the worst decisions of my life. I went to Texas thinking that my scientific interests in coastal geology in general, and big river continental margins, specifically, would lead in many new directions with colleagues there, and away from a focus on the Mississippi Delta.
HURRICANE EVACUATION ROUTE
Instead, my interests and work, in spite of many fine collaborations with folks at the University of Texas, became ever more tied to Louisiana and I began working closely with State and Federal projects focused on coastal restoration. As my lab has always been field-data collection oriented, this
I began working full time at the Water Institute in February 2013, and I have 6
now taken up a split appointment with Tulane. My family and I moved to New Orleans in July and I have begun life as an I-10 commuter to Baton Rouge, the home base of the Water Institute, for part of each week. I’m home again. WHAT IS THE WATER INSTITUTE? The impetus for what became the Water Institute came from a visit Senator Mary Landrieu and others made to The Netherlands in 2010. The idea was born to create a notfor-profit (.org) science institute, built on the Deltares model, with close ties to the State of Louisiana as well as academic, corporate, Federal and NGO partners. The central focus is to address the science needs associated with the massive coastal protection and restoration initiative outlined in the State’s Master Plan of 2012. Beginning operations in February 2012 with seed funds from the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) and the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, the Water Institute will finish an exhaustive strategic planning process, including feedback from a committee of experts appointed independently by the National Research Council, by the fall of 2013. In the meantime, the baby has begun to take a few first steps towards fulfilling its mission. The staff, technical and administrative, reached 20 by June 2013, and we have begun working on planning-level science tasks associated with several of the large restoration projects initiated by CPRA with funds from the criminal settlement of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. All of these new projects involve partnerships with individual scientists from Louisiana universities, as it is envisioned that the Water Institute will remain a relatively small organization, with some in-house abilities to carry out scientific studies, but relying on teaming with external partners to carry out its science directives. And while CPRA is the main client at present, and will continue to be in the future, it is envisioned that, with a portfolio of work in integrative Louisiana water science to show, the Water Institute and its partners may be become involved in the future in other river delta settings internationally. Deltas worldwide are facing many of the same threats that we grapple with here – rising sea levels, coastal
Our research boat collecting water samples and measuring turbidity in the Mississippi River down river of New Orleans.
subsidence, alterations in fluvial water and sediment load, ecological disruptions, and human use pressures. In my own case, I am busy with forming a technical group within the Water Institute capable of carrying out fielddata collection and analysis of water and sediment dynamics throughout the range of Holocene Mississippi Delta coastal settings, including fluvial, wetland, estuarine, barrier island, shoreface, and continental shelf. The results will be utilized to (1) build and parameterize numerical and analytical models for use by coastal managers for decision-making about individual environmental restoration projects; and (2) monitor coastal system health and evolution as largescale restoration ramps up in the next decade. I am particularly excited about how my new role at the Water Institute, using science to address problems of great relevance to the future of coastal Louisiana and its citizens, can be translated to Tulane undergraduates and graduate students. With Tulane’s post-Katrina emphasis on service learning and hands-on experience with real-world issues, I hope to use my role at the Water Institute in specialized coursework, field experiences, internships, and in other ways, to transmit this experience to our students. Carrying out what is likely to be the world’s largest environmental restoration project in Louisiana in the coming years will require that the State and its partners work within the 7
framework engendered by a wide range of stakeholder issues (e.g., fisheries, navigation, flood and storm protection, cultural preservation, oil and gas, protection of flora and fauna, etc.). What is at stake is nothing less than the survival of the southern half of the State – physical, economic, and cultural – and Tulane students have much to contribute to (and learn from) this herculean effort. Saving south Louisiana also means educating the next generation of geoscientists who will take up the cause. SCIENCE DIRECTIONS In addition to my science efforts at the Water Institute, which are still in their infancy, I have several other ongoing projects. I am involved in the Mississippi Hydrodynamic and Delta Management Study, a joint CPRA and US Army Corps of Engineers scientific effort to look at the specifics of utilizing large water and sediment diversions from the Mississippi River to create land in the Barataria and Breton Sound basins. These diversions will be designed to mimic the natural crevasse-splay process, building a distributary mouth bar-channel network that will selfevolve and eventually vegetate with wetlands, which will further trap fines to enhance vertical accretion rates. As part of my group’s involvement in this effort, PhD student Michael Ramirez, who will be transferring from UT–Austin to Tulane this summer, is examining the issue of resuspension of bed material
LEFT: Dune evolution on a Mississippi River lateral bar collected with a multibeam bathymetric sonar adjacent to a proposed sediment diversion site, showing the increasing dune size and migration up the bar face with increasing water discharge. RIGHT: Multibeam bathymetric sonar map of the Mississippi River channel near the Bonnet Carré Spillway (A) showing the area of the 2011 flood surveys. Bathymetric change maps show the elevation change between the pre- and post-Bonnet Carré Spillway opening of 2011 (B) and one flood year later (C). These chronicle the channel bed storage of sediment caused by the loss of stream power when the Spillway was operating, and its remobilization in the 2012 river flood when the structure remained closed.
load sand from lateral bars in the Mississippi River below New Orleans. In a recently published paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research— Earth Surface, Michael documents a process where bed material load in suspension is focused over the areas of large dunes due to the additional turbulence induced by the form drag of the bedforms. Dune size increases and migrates laterally up the bar face as Mississippi water discharge increases, increasing the concentration, height in the water column, and proximity to the bank line of bed material load sand. Michael is utilizing these field data to create analytical and numerical simulations that will reproduce this phenomenon to examine the capture efficiency of sand in future river diversions. Work is also ongoing in this project by my lab group to examine the sediment dynamics associated with salt wedge penetration into the Mississippi River at low discharge and its implications for issues such as channel dredging for navigation. While the Mississippi system is my ongoing scientific focus, I am active in other areas. In a study funded in 2012 by the National Science Foundation Arctic Natural Sciences, former Tulane EES faculty member Dr. Thomas Bianchi (now at the University of Florida in Gainesville) and I are
working on the north slope of Alaska in the Colville River delta and adjacent coastal lagoons. The premise is that we can use our experience in riverdelta coastal sediment environments to identify a new paleoclimate archive in the Arctic. The continuous permafrost zone of the high Arctic is predicted to experience the most extreme climate change in the 21st century, and our knowledge of the character and magnitude of these events in a historical-geological perspective is hindered by our limited instrumental record (some 50-75 years) for key climate parameters such as sea ice and land-fast ice extent, permafrost temperatures, snowfall and glaciation in upland parts of river drainage basins, fall storminess, ocean temperatures, etc.
Ocean, will record multiple processes associated with climate change, such as (1) changing river discharge and sediment delivery and associated glacial sediment supply, (2) permafrost melting and supply via runoff of constituent organics and wind-derived fines, (3) wintertime land-fast ice cover in the coastal zone, and (4) interannual storminess altering shoreline tundra erosion rates and barrier island overwash rates. Our initial results from cores and seismic data collected together by our lab groups indicate that a high-resolution (subdecadal) record exists in coastal sediments in the Colville region, it is not disturbed by sea-ice grounding furrows, and hence contains a stratigraphic “layer cake” that can be sampled layer-by-layer for climate change proxies. A combination of bomb-produced radiotracers (e.g., cesium and plutonium) and radiocarbon dating of benthic foraminifera have produced high quality age models for the cores necessary to reconstruct an event timeline. Several dissertations are now underway in both labs to exploit this paleoclimate archive. It is hoped that this methodology can be exported to other coastal lagoons in the high Arctic to develop a pan-Arctic view of climate change in this basin in the latest part of the Holocene. In my case, it provides a respite from the high temperature world (pun intended) of research into south Louisiana sediment dynamics, but is no less tied to societally relevant issues.
Existing high Arctic paleoclimate archives that extend from the modern instrumented period back several millennia into the late Holocene (e.g., tree rings, ice cores, lake and deep marine sediments) contain records specific to a continental, atmospheric, or marine signal. We hypothesize that sediment proxy records (inorganic and organic) from rapidly accreting coastal lagoons adjacent to large riverine high Arctic sediment sources like the Colville, which has the largest sediment discharge into the Alaskan Arctic 8
Mead Allison in Alaska during fieldwork in the Colville Delta.
CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2013 AWARD RECIPIENTS Graduate Awardees
Jordan Adams, Outstanding Teaching Assistant Jordan was selected the outstanding teaching assistant by the Earth and Environmental Sciences faculty for her outstanding contributions to teaching.
Matt Pendergraft, Outstanding Research Assistant Matt was selected the outstanding research assistant by the Earth and Environmental Sciences faculty for his outstanding contributions to research.
Chris Esposito, Outstanding Senior Teaching Assistant Chris was selected the outstanding senior teaching assistant by the Earth and Environmental Sciences faculty for his outstanding contributions to teaching.
Alvaro Fernandez, Vokes Fellowship Recipient Graduate Awardees from L to R: Jordan Adams, Matt Pendergraft, Chris Esposito, and Alvaro Fernandez.
Alvaro is the recipient of the Vokes Fellowship awarded by the Earth and Environmental Sciences faculty for his outstanding academic performance and excellence in research.
Undergraduate Awardees The R. A. Steinmayer Award Recipient: Katie M. Ahlstrom Katie is the outstanding academic graduating senior in the geology program. She has demonstrated outstanding abilities in the quantitative aspects of the geological sciences, including laboratory and field work. Katie said that her favorite part of the Geology major has been the numerous field trips which allowed her to get to know other students while hammering away at outcrops and collecting samples. Her future plans include graduate school. In the meantime she may work in the oil industry or for the National Park Service. Whatever Katie decides, she is looking forward to a lifelong journey learning about the Earth, its processes and its life.
The Harold E. Vokes Award Recipient: Thomas P. Schrilla Tom is an outstanding graduate who has demonstrated academic excellence in all aspects of the major. He entered Tulane undecided and quickly discovered that geology and environmental science were the right choices for him. He considers his undergraduate experience in the Earth and Environmental Science department to be one of the best things he has ever done and is excited to see what the future holds for him. After graduation, Tom plans to work near his hometown of Geneva, Illinois before pursuing a graduate degree in geology.
Senior Scholar in Environmental Science Recipient: Meagan J. Knowlton Meagan is graduating with a B.S. in Environmental Science and a secondary major in French. She is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Hollings Scholar and is finishing her second year as president of Tulane's Women in Science group. She wrote an honors thesis on flood magnitudes with Dr. Nicole Gasparini, entitled "Quantifying Flood Magnitudes on the Little Missouri River: Implications for the 2010 Albert Pike Flood." She has also worked with NOAA on drought decision support tools.
EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES ALUMNI PARTY
Friday, October 4, 2013 • 6:15 to 9:00 pm (Following the Ronald L. Parsley Symposium) Woodward Way, Woldenberg Art Center • RSVP to Marilyn Reine (mreine@tulane.edu, 504-865-5198) by September 23
LET US KNOW WHAT YOU'RE UP TO
Send us your photos, news and announcements to share with fellow classmates. Email Nancy Walker at: nwalker@tulane.edu or fill out our Alumni Update Submission Form. 9
DEPARTMENT GRADUATES UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS B.S. GEOLOGY: Laura A. Adams, Katie M. Ahlstrom, Benjamin A. Felbaum, Thomas P. Schrilla (May 2013) B.S. ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE: Mark J. Behnke, Wesley J. Bluvstein, Peter P. Klingelhofer, Meagan J. Knowlton, Elise M. Mills, Haozhe Wang, Shengzhi Wang (May 2013) B.S. GEOLOGY: Erin E. Cunningham (August 2013)
GRADUATE STUDENTS Heather Hoey, M.S. Earth & Environmental Sciences (December 2012) Erika Gonzalez, Ph.D. Earth & Environmental Sciences (May 2013) Matthew Pendergraft, M.S. Earth & Environmental Sciences (August 2013)
SUPPORT TULANE EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES Please print, fill out, and include the donation form with your contribution. It will insure (1) the department's receipt of your gift; and (2) your acknowledgment by the University for tax purposes. After the department receives your donation and donation form, checks are sent to the Development Office of the University. The form will aid the Department in its accounting. Please make your check payable to: TULANE EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES and indicate where you would like your contribution to be credited.
Name: _______________________________________________________________________ Address: _____________________________________________________________________ City: _ ________________________________ State: _ ________ Zip: __________________ I hereby donate: ______ to the Tulane Geology Fund
______ to the W. Kent McWilliams Fund
______ in honor of Harold Vokes
______ to the Earth and Environmental Sciences Field Studies Fund If you work for a corporation that matches contributions to universities, please fill out the following information: Corporation Name: ___________________________________________________________ Percentage of Gift Matched (e.g. 100%): ___________
Please return this form, with your gift, to: Tulane EES Funds Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences 101 Blessey Hall New Orleans, LA 70118 Thank you in advance for your generosity and continued support of Tulane EES!
A BIG THANK YOU The following donors made generous contributions to the department, enabling us to enhance scholarships and to support field trips and student research. We are most grateful! Frances & Robert Alwood (Suffolk, VA) • Brian & Martha Andersen (Rock Hill, SC) • Rodey Batiza (Fairfax, VA) • Robert Carson (Walla Walla, WA) • John & Marybeth Killinger (Houston, TX) • Robert Lane (Montgomery, TX) • Carol & Roy Lombardo (Baltimore, MD) • Eileen & Kenneth Mallon (Houston, TX) • Kathy McLean (Houston, TX) • Peter & Sidra Silton (Bel Air, MD • Ruo & William Watson (San Diego, CA) • Harald & Shirley Werner (Kenner, LA) • Thomas Westbrook (Metairie, LA) 10