Earth Sciences Commons^™

Reprocessing Of The 2 Hz P-P Data From The Blackfoot 3c-2d Survey With Special Reference To Multicomponent Seismic Processing, Onur Akturk

Masters Theses

"The 3C-2D multicomponent seismic survey was acquired in the Blackfoot Field, which is located 15 km southeast of Strathmore, Alberta. The 2 Hz vertical component data were reprocessed to better image the target reservoir, the Glauconitic sand formation at approximately 1150 ms. The zone of the major reflector at about 1550 ms was also taken into consideration to determine the better seismic section for further processing. The main characteristics of the converted wave processing, such as common conversion point (CCP), asymptotic binning, gamma ratios, receiver statics, rotation of the data, positive/negative offsets, and anisotropy, were also summarized in this study. …

Reprocessing Of 3c-2d Seismic Reflection Data From The Spring Coulee Field, Alberta, Yasin Demir

Masters Theses

"The 3C-2D seismic datasets were acquired in 2008 in the Spring Coulee Field, Alberta, which is located in Township 4, Range 23, and west of the 4th Meridian in the Alberta Basin. Line 2008-SC-01 was reprocessed to obtain better image of the formation targeted at between 1300 ms and 1400 ms. The depositional settings of the Madison Formation consist of shallow and carbonate shelf deposits. The processing workflow was designed by testing several methods, algorithms, and parameters, and finding the optimal processing solution. The processing steps included elevation statics, noise suppression, deconvolution operator, and 2D Kirchhoff poststack time migration. In …

Salt Mobility Under Different Geological Regimes, Oznur Surek

Masters Theses

"This study investigates the evolution of Dan Salt Structure in the southern salt dome province, Danish Central Graben and Mars-Ursa Basin in the Northern Gulf of Mexico to understand salt and sediment interaction over time under different geologic regimes. An integration of structural and stratigraphic analyses is conducted to understand the relationship between halokinesis and sedimentation.

Interpretation of the seismic data in Dan Salt Structure shows that the structure has a complex geometry, which is divided into upper and lower parts. The evolutionary stage of both the upper and lower parts of the structure has been influenced by salt. The …

Conical Folds -- An Artifact Of Using Simple Geometric Shapes To Describe A Complex Geologic Structure, Avery Joseph Welker

Masters Theses

"Accurate representation of the 3D shapes of natural folds is essential to characterization of the dynamic models for fold formation. Geometrical analysis of folds commonly relies upon analyzing patterns defined by the variation in the orientation of poles to planar surfaces deformed by a shortening event when plotted using graphical calculators (e.g., stereogram, polar tangent diagrams) to interpret the shape of folds. Stereograms for which orientation data define small circles are classified as non-cylindrical regular folds and are interpreted as "conical folds," where the shape of the fold is represented by a cone that terminates at a point. Utilizing similar …

Spatial And Temporal Analysis Of Surface Water Quality In Relation To Marcellus Shale Gas Development In The Northern Panhandle Of West Virginia, Rachel Yesenchak

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Pre-existing water chemistry data available from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection were used to examine temporal changes in surface water quality related to the onset of Marcellus Shale gas drilling activity in the state of West Virginia. Drilling is concentrated in the northwestern portion of the state. Watersheds were delineated for twelve discrete stream sampling locations in the Upper Ohio-Wheeling HUC-8 sub-basin, where shale gas drilling is prevalent. Kruskal-Wallis tests were deployed to compare pre- and post-drilling concentrations of conductivity, chloride, and total suspended solids for each location. Increased concentrations of these parameters are associated with surface water …

A Quantitative Analysis Of Intermediate Forms Within Astarte From The Atlantic Coastal Plain, Philip Roberson

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

The Atlantic Coastal Plain has long been recognized as a natural laboratory useful for testing hypotheses about various environmental and ecological effects on marine fauna. For studies such as these to continue being conducted in a rigorous and easily repeatable manner, a reliable taxonomy must be established for genera within this physiographic province. The bivalve genus, Astarte, is a cosmopolitan genus that is commonly found within the Atlantic Coastal Plain. This genus has many formally recognized species, even though it lacks many features that would encourage diversification, marking it as a taxonomic group in need of potential revision. The …

Winter Rain Versus Snow In Headwater Catchments: Responses Of An Unconfined Pumice Aquifer, South-Central Oregon, Usa, Michael L. Cummings, David A. Eibert

Geology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Winter precipitation in two headwaters catchments (elevation ~1600 m) in the rain shadow of the Cascades volcanic arc in south-central Oregon normally falls as snow. However, in water year 2015, winter precipitation fell mainly as rain. An eight year study of the unconfined pumice aquifer allowed inter-annual comparison of groundwater recharge during the freshet and discharge during the growing season. During these water years precipitation ranged from 67% (WY2014) to 132% (WY2017) of the 30 year average, and included the rain dominated winter of WY2015 when precipitation during the water year was 98% of the 30 year average. Change in …

A Simplified, Object-Based Framework For Efficient Landslide Inventorying Using Lidar Digital Elevation Model Derivatives, Michael D. Bunn, Ben A. Leshcinsky, Michael J. Olsen, Adam M. Booth

Geology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Landslide inventory maps are critical to understand the factors governing landslide occurrence and estimate hazards or sediment delivery to channels. Numerous semi-automated approaches for landslide inventory mapping have been proposed to improve the efficiency and objectivity of the process, but these methods have not been widely adopted by practitioners because of the use of input parameters without physical meaning, a lack of transparency in machine-learning based mapping techniques, and limitations in resulting products, which are not ordinarily designed or tested on a large-scale or in diverse geologic units. To this end, this work presents a new semi-automated method, called the …

Environmental Governance And Climate Change Adaptation In The Okavango Delta, Botswana, Jamie Shinn

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Increased environmental variability as a result of climate change will continue to intensify in coming decades, with particularly acute consequences for those living in already marginal conditions. The impacts of these biophysical changes require new approaches to environmental governance to facilitate successful forms of climate change adaptation for individuals and communities in changing social-ecological systems.

Reducing Uncertainties In Applying Remotely Sensed Land Use And Land Cover Maps In Land-Atmosphere Interaction: Identifying Change In Space And Time, Yaqian He, Timothy A. Warner, Brenden E. Mcneil, Eungul Lee

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Land use and land cover (LULC) data are a central component of most land-atmosphere interaction studies, but there are two common and highly problematic scale mismatches between LULC and climate data. First, in the spatial domain, researchers rarely consider the impact of scaling up fine-scale LULC data to match coarse-scale climate datasets. Second, in the temporal domain, climate data typically have sub-daily, daily, monthly, or annual resolution, but LULC datasets often have much coarser (e.g., decadal) resolution. We first explored the effect of three spatial scaling methods on correlations among LULC data and a land surface climatic variable, latent heat …

Past And Future Drought In Mongolia, Amy Hessl, Kevin J. Anchukaitis, Casey Jelsema, Benjamin Cook, Oyunsanaa Byambasuren, Caroline Leland, Baatarbileg Nachin, Neil Pederson, Hanqin Tian, Laia Andreu Hayles

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The severity of recent droughts in semiarid regions is increasingly attributed to anthropogenic climate change, but it is unclear whether these moisture anomalies exceed those of the past and how past variability compares to future projections. On the Mongolian Plateau, a recent decade-long drought that exceeded the variability in the instrumental record was associated with economic, social, and environmental change. We evaluate this drought using an annual reconstruction of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) spanning the last 2060 years in concert with simulations of past and future drought through the year 2100 CE.We show that although the most recent …

Improved Kerogen Models For Determining Thermal Maturity And Hydrocarbon Potential Of Shale, Vikas Agrawal, Shikha Sharma

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Kerogen is the insoluble component of organic-rich shales that controls the type and amount of

hydrocarbons generated in conventional and unconventional reservoirs. Significant progress has

recently been made in developing structural models of kerogen. However, there is still a large gap in understanding the evolution of the molecular components of kerogen with thermal maturation and their hydrocarbon (HC) generative potential. Here, we determine the variations in different molecular fragments of kerogen from a Marcellus Shale maturity series (with VRo ranging from 0.8 to 3) using quantitative 13C MultiCP/MAS NMR and MultiCP NMR/DD (dipolar dephasing). These molecular variations provide insight into …

Risk Assessment And Mapping Of Hand, Foot, And Mouth Disease At The County Level In Mainland China Using Spatiotemporal Zero-Inflated Bayesian Hierarchical Models, Chao Song, Yaqian He, Yanchen Bo, Jinfeng Wang, Zhoupeng Ren, Huibin Yang

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) is a worldwide infectious disease, prominent in China. China’s HFMD data are sparse with a large number of observed zeros across locations and over time. However, no previous studies have considered such a zero-inflated problem on HFMD’s spatiotemporal risk analysis and mapping, not to mention for the entire Mainland China at county level. Monthly county-level HFMD cases data combined with related climate and socioeconomic variables were collected. We developed four models, including spatiotemporal Poisson, negative binomial, zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP), and zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) models under the Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework to explore disease …

Temporal And Geochemical Signatures In Granitoids Of Northwestern Nevada: Evidence For The Continuity Of The Mesozoic Magmatic Arc Through The Western Great Basin, Kenneth L. Brown, William K. Hart, Richard J. Stuck

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Granitoid magmatism in the Basin and Range Province of northwestern Nevada remains an important gap in our understanding of the along-strike variability of Mesozoic Cordilleran arc systems. We present a comprehensive investigation on a suite of intrusions within the Santa Rosa Range (SRR) and Bloody Run Hills (BRH) of northwestern Nevada. Petrography, whole-rock geochemistry, and zircon U-Pb geochronology indicate two distinct magmatic systems in the SRR: an older, mafic, and metaluminous pulse (Santa Rosa/Andorno [SRA] group—ca. 102–100 Ma) and a younger, felsic, and peraluminous pulse (Granite Peak/Sawtooth [GPS] group—ca. 94–92 Ma). Within the BRH to the south, the Flynn (ca. …

Spatiotemporal Evolution Of Land Subsidence In The Beijing Plain 2003–2015 Using Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (Psi) With Multi-Source Sar Data, Chaodong Zhou, Huili Gong, Youquan Zhang, Timothy A. Warner, Cong Wang

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Land subsidence is one of the most important geological hazards in Beijing, China, and its scope and magnitude have been growing rapidly over the past few decades, mainly due to long-term groundwater withdrawal. Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) has been used to monitor the deformation in Beijing, but there is a lack of analysis of the long-term spatiotemporal evolution of land subsidence. This study focused on detecting and characterizing spatiotemporal changes in subsidence in the Beijing Plain by using Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) and geographic spatial analysis. Land subsidence during 2003–2015 was monitored by using ENVISAT ASAR (2003–2010), RADARSAT-2 (2011–2015) …

Reviews And Syntheses: 210pb-Derived Sediment And Carbon Accumulation Rates In Vegetated Coastal Ecosystems – Setting The Record Straight, Ariane Arias-Ortiz, Pere Masque´, Jordi Garcia-Orellana, Oscar Serrano, Ines Mazarrasa, Nuria Marba, Catherine E. Lovelock, Paul S. Lavery, Carlos M. Duarte

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Vegetated coastal ecosystems, including tidal marshes, mangroves and seagrass meadows, are being increasingly assessed in terms of their potential for carbon dioxide sequestration worldwide. However, there is a paucity of studies that have effectively estimated the accumulation rates of sediment organic carbon (C_org), also termed blue carbon, beyond the mere quantification of C_org stocks. Here, we discuss the use of the ²¹⁰Pb dating technique to determine the rate of C_org accumulation in these habitats. We review the most widely used ²¹⁰Pb dating models to assess their limitations in these ecosystems, often composed of …

On The Spatial Modelling Of Mixed And Constrained Geospatial Data, Hassan Talebi

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Spatial uncertainty modelling and prediction of a set of regionalized dependent variables from various sample spaces (e.g. continuous and categorical) is a common challenge for geoscience modellers and many geoscience applications such as evaluation of mineral resources, characterization of oil reservoirs or hydrology of groundwater. To consider the complex statistical and spatial relationships, categorical data such as rock types, soil types, alteration units, and continental crustal blocks should be modelled jointly with other continuous attributes (e.g. porosity, permeability, seismic velocity, mineral and geochemical compositions or pollutant concentration). These multivariate geospatial data normally have complex statistical and spatial relationships which should …

Qualitative And Quantitative Analysis Of Carbonate Waters In The Peters Mountain Region Of Monroe County, Wv, Emily A. Bausher

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Water in Monroe County, WV is used extensively for public and private supply and requires quantification, chemical analysis, and assessment for contamination susceptibility. Over 250 springs were previously identified in the eastern side of Monroe County on or near Peters Mountain; 14 were continuously monitored in this study. Springs were grouped based on geologic and spatial distribution: interbedded clastic-rock springs on the mountain flanks, carbonate springs in the valley, and a thermal spring associated with the St. Clair thrust fault. Clastic and carbonate springs have calcium-magnesium-bicarbonate chemistries, neutral pHs and high alkalinities; the thermal spring has calcium-magnesium-sulfate-carbonate chemistry, low pH, …

New Geologic Mapping Of The Northwestern Willamette Valley, Oregon, And Its American Viticultural Areas (Avas)— A Foundation For Understanding Their Terroir, Ray E. Wells, Ralph Haugerud, Alan Niem, Lina Ma, Ian Madin, Russell Evarts

Geology Faculty Publications and Presentations

A geologic map of the greater Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area is planned that will document the region’s complex geology (currently in review: “Geologic map of the greater Portland metropolitan area and surrounding region, Oregon and Washington,” by Wells, R.E., Haugerud, R.A., Niem, A., Niem, W., Ma, L., Evarts, R., Madin, I., and others). The map, which is planned to be published as a U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Map, will consist of 51 7.5′ quadrangles covering more than 2,500 square miles, and it will represent more than 100 person-years of geologic mapping and studies. The region was mapped at the …

Glacier Recession And The Response Of Summer Streamflow In The Pacific Northwest United States, 1960–2099, Chris Frans, Erkan Istanbulluoglu, Dennis P. Lettenmaier, Andrew G. Fountain, Jon L. Riedel

Geology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Pacific Northwest is the most highly glacierized region in the conterminous United States (858 glaciers; 466 km2). These glaciers have displayed ubiquitous patterns of retreat since the 1980s mostly in response to warming air temperatures. Glacier melt provides water for downstream uses including agricultural water supply, hydroelectric power generation, and for ecological systems adapted to cold reliable streamflow. While changes in glacier area have been studied within the region over an extended period of time, the hydrologic consequences of these changes are not well defined. We applied a high‐resolution glacio‐hydrological model to predict glacier mass balance, glacier area, and …

A Shift From Drought To Extreme Rainfall Drives A Stable Landslide To Catastrophic Failure, Alexander L. Handwerger, Mong-Han Haung, Eric Jameson Fielding, Adam M. Booth, Roland Burgmann

Geology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The addition of water on or below the earth’s surface generates changes in stress that can trigger both stable and unstable sliding of landslides and faults. While these sliding behaviours are well-described by commonly used mechanical models developed from laboratory testing (e.g., critical-state soil mechanics and rate-and-state friction), less is known about the field-scale environmental conditions or kinematic behaviours that occur during the transition from stable to unstable sliding. Here we use radar interferometry (InSAR) and a simple 1D hydrological model to characterize 8 years of stable sliding of the Mud Creek landslide, California, USA, prior to its rapid acceleration …

The Littlefield Rhyolite And Associated Mafic Lavas: Bimodal Volcanism Of The Columbia River Magmatic Province, With Constraints On Age And Storage Sites Of Grande Ronde Basalt Magmas, Brian Mcculloch Webb, Martin J. Streck, William C. Mcintosh, Mark L. Ferns

Geology Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present data that distinguishes the long-known Littlefield Rhyolite of eastern Oregon (northwestern United States) into two distinct, voluminous, Snake River–type, high-temperature rhyolite lava packages that erupted in short sequence overk.y., with minimum volumes of 100 and 150 km3 respectively, contemporaneous with flood basalt volcanism of the Grande Ronde Basalt phase of the Columbia River Basalt Group. Contemporaneity of rhyolites with flood basalts is exceptionally demonstrated within the Malheur Gorge by intercalated mafic units belonging to the Grande Ronde Basalt that are stratigraphically constrained by underlying and overlying Littlefield Rhyolite flows, and the underlying Dinner Creek Tuff (unit 1). Our …

Valley Bottom Position And The Occurrence Of Paleosols Affect Soc Dynamics, Benedict W. Ferguson

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Soil organic carbon (SOC) storage in depositional zones has been a growing topic of interest in recent years as these areas may be sinks of SOC. However, SOC dynamics greater than 1 m in depth in river valley bottom soils are not well understood. This study examines the soil organic carbon along three alluvial landscape positions in the forested, humid-subtropical setting of the Clarks River in the western Kentucky portion of the Mississippi River basin. These soil and depositional profiles range in age from ~8,000 years ago to modern, 21 cal yr. BP, (BP = AD 2010). The mean surface …