Earth Sciences Commons^™

Ua66/8/2 Ogden College Of Science & Engineering Geography & Geology Centers & Institutes, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about Centers and Institutes administered by the Geography & Geology Department. Including:

• Center for Cave & Karst Studies
• Center for Local Government Services
• Hoffman Environmental Research Institute
• Kentucky Climate Center
• Resources Management Institute
• Small Public Water System Technology Center

Ua66/8/1 Ogden College Of Science & Engineering Geography & Geology Events, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created for Geography & Geology department events.

Ua66/8/5 Ogden College Of Science & Engineering Geography & Geology Student Organizations, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about student organizations associated with the Geography & Geology department, including the Geography & Geology Club aka Semple Geographic Society.

Daily Meteorological Report, Cercom, Molloy University, John Tanacredi Ph.D., Kyle F. Maurelli

CERCOM Reports

Meteorological Methodologies and Equipment: - Davis 6152 Wireless Vantage Pro2 Weather Station - USGS Tide Gauge - NOAA Rain (precipitation) Gauge - Hand held salt water thermometer - Yard stick - NOAA anemometer CERCOM’s Research Assistant Mr. Kyle Maurelli is responsible for maintenance of co-op NWS weather station at CERCOM and submission of daily weather data to NOAA-NWS database 365 days per year.

The Bear River's Diversion And The Cutting Of Oneida Narrows At ~55-50 Ka And Relations To The Lake Bonneville Record, Joel L. Pederson, Tammy M. Rittenour, Susanne U. Jänecke, Robert Q. Oaks Jr.

Geosciences Presentations

The Bear River’s course has shifted over Quaternary time, and its late Pleistocene integration into the Bonneville basin long has been recognized as a possible explanation for why Lake Bonneville was apparently larger than the preceding lakes in its basin, and the only one to overflow its topographic threshold.

The middle-Pleistocene Bear River joined the Snake River to the north, likely via the Portneuf River drainage. Then an episode of volcanism in the Blackfoot-Gem Valley volcanic field ~100–50 ka diverted the Bear River southward into Gem Valley. Previous chronostratigraphic and isotopic work on the Main Canyon Formation in southern Gem …

The Story Of Worldwide Muscle Work (1800-2015), Paul Steenwyk, Matthew Kuperus Heun, Paul Brockway

Summer Research

Energy. It’s the driver of our lives, and our systems of production.

In many pre-industrial societies, one of the most widely used forms of energy that drives useful work is food.

People and animals need this food to fuel their labor, which has primarily been used for:

1. Food production (ex. Farmers hoeing row crops, Oxen plowing fields)
2. Transport of goods/people (ex. Horses carrying mail)

A model for the amount of food consumed for these purposes, and the amount of useful work produced was created for the span 1800-2015.

Cut, Fill, Repeat: Slot Canyons Of Dry Fork, Kane County, David Loope

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

The slot canyons of southern Utah (figure 1) have become popular destinations for hikers, climbers, and photographers. For most of these canyons, the geology is simple: sediment carried by flowing water abrades a thick, homogeneous sandstone. As time passes, the rate of down-cutting is rapid compared to the rate of cliff retreat. End of story. The strange abundance and configuration of the slot canyons along Dry Fork Coyote (a tributary of Coyote Gulch and the Escalante River), however, have a convoluted geologic history that is climate-driven and involves canyon cutting, canyon filling, and more canyon cutting.

Geological And Environmental Sciences - 2019, Dept. Of Geological And Environmental Sciences

Geological and Environmental Sciences News

Annual newsletter for 2019 of the Geological and Environmental Sciences department.

• Faculty Updates
• The Resource Play (feature story)
• Dinosaur Park and the Schmaltz Museum
• Hydrogeology Field Course
• Alumni Awards
• Advisory Council and CoreKids
• Michigan Geological Repository for Research and Education (MGRRE)
• Michigan Geological Survey
• Student News (new graduate students, SEG, AAPG, Geology club)
• Department Achievements (grants, donors, awards, and publications)

Ua66/8/6 Ogden College Of Science & Engineering Geography & Geology Allied Organizations, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about allied organizations associated with the Geography & Geology department, including the Council of Geography Teachers, Green River Grotto, and Kentucky Geographic Alliance.

Introductory R For Water Resources - Fall 2019 - University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, David Gorelick, Gregory Characklis

All ECSTATIC Materials

This is all course material for R for Researchers, a one-credit course taught at UNC Chapel Hill in Fall 2019 to introduce upperclassmen and graduate students to the R programming language and apply learned skills in basic water resources applications, as well as other (semi-related) topics of interest to students.

Lecture notes were distributed before (as a subset of full lecture notes) and after lectures, and lectures involved collaborative coding exercises with students in class without any powerpoint material. Course material here includes:

Syllabus: rough schedule and description of lectures

Lectures: pdf lecture notes with embedded code, including …

Correlates Of Snake Entanglement In Erosion Control Blankets, Sarah E. Ebert, Kasey L. Jobe, Christopher M. Schalk, Daniel Saenz, Cory K. Adams, Christopher E. Comer

Faculty Publications

In road construction projects across the United States, erosion control methods (e.g., erosion control blankets [ECBs]), are mandated to stimulate seedbed regeneration and prevent soil loss. Previous reports have suggested that snakes are vulnerable to entanglement in ECBs. We conducted a literature review, field surveys, and an entanglement experiment to examine what factors increase a snake’s risk of ECB entanglement. Our literature review produced reports of 175 reptiles entangled in mesh products, 89.1% of which were snakes, with 43.6% of snake entanglements occurring in erosion control products. During our field surveys, we found 10 entangled snakes (n = 2 alive; …

Stable Isotopes Of Clay Minerals From Autoclave Tests Of Oil Sands: Implications For Clay Formation During Steaming Of Alberta Clearwater Oil Sands, Shaoneng He, Fred J. Longstaffe, Zhihong Zhou

Earth Sciences Publications

In an effort to evaluate mineral-water isotopic exchange during cyclic steam stimulation (CSS), solutions and<2 μm berthierine-dominated solids from the Clearwater Formation oil sands of Alberta, Canada were analyzed for stable isotope compositions before and after reaction in autoclaves for 1008 h at 250 °C. There was no significant change in solution δ¹⁸O and δ²H, which is consistent with the high water/mineral ratio used in the experiments. The solids showed a marked decrease in both δ¹⁸O and δ²H following the experiments. Pre-run solids have δ¹⁸O of +9.5 to +12.9‰and …

Reframing The Mammoth Steppe: Insights From Analysis Of Isotopic Niches, Rachel Schwartz-Narbonne, Fred J. Longstaffe, Kevin J. Karydynal, Patrick Druckenmiller, Keith A. Hobson, Christopher N. Jass, Jessica Z. Metcalfe, Grant Zazula

Earth Sciences Publications

Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), horse (Equus spp.) and bison (Bisonspp.) coexisted with a variety of mammalian megafauna across the Pleistocene mammoth steppe e a megacontinental ecosystem that spanned northern Eurasia and northwestern North America. Previous research has suggested that highly conserved niches with minimal niche overlap allowed high levels of species diversity on the mammoth steppe. Here we evaluate previously published and some new collagen carbon and nitrogen isotope data (delta¹³C, delta¹⁵N) for mammoth steppe megaherbivores using Stable Isotope Bayesian Ellipses in R (SIBER) and linear regression models to determine isotopic …

Fluid-Present Anatexis Of Neoarchean Tonalite And Amphibolite In The Western Shandong Province, Chris Yakymchuk, Wenran Zhao, Yusheng Wan, Shoufa Lin, Fred Longstaffe

Earth Sciences Publications

Metatonalite and amphibolite from the Taishan region of the Western Shandong Province in the North China Craton record c. 2.60 Ga fluid-present partial melting via the breakdown of biotite, plagioclase and quartz to produce peritectic hornblende and anatectic melt. Eight paired leucosome–melanosome samples from metatonalite and three paired samples from amphibolite were investigated to evaluate the composition of the melt. Hornblende, biotite and plagioclase in the leucosomes and hornblende and plagioclase in melanosomes from both rock types have similar compositions. Two leucosome samples from the metatonalite were influenced by the removal of heavy rare earth element-rich hornblende and the accumulation …

Stable Isotopic Characterization Of A Coastal Floodplain Forest Community: A Case Study For Isotopic Reconstruction Of Mesozoic Vertebrate Assemblages, Thomas M. Cullen, Fred Longstaffe, Ulrich G. Wortmann, Mark B. Goodwin, Li Huang, David C. Evans

Earth Sciences Publications

Stable isotopes are powerful tools for elucidating ecological trends in extant vertebrate communities, though their application to Mesozoic ecosystems is complicated by a lack of extant isotope data from comparable environments/ecosystems (e.g. coastal floodplain forest environments, lacking significant C₄ plant components). We sampled 20 taxa across a broad phylogenetic, body size, and physiological scope from the Atchafalaya River Basin of Louisiana as an environmental analogue to the Late Cretaceous coastal floodplains of North America. Samples were analysed for stable carbon, oxygen and nitrogen isotope compositions from bioapatite and keratin tissues to test the degree of ecological resolution that can …

Role Of Sea Surface Temperatures In Forcing Circulation Anomalies Driving U.S. Great Plains Pluvial Years, Paul X. Flanagan, Jeffrey B. Basara, Jason C. Furtado, Elinor R. Martin, Xiangming Xiao

High Plains Regional Climate Center: Staff Publications

In the U.S. Great Plains (GP), diagnosing precipitation variability is key in developing an understanding of the present and future availability of water in the region. Building on previous work investigating U.S. GP pluvial years, this study usesERAtwentieth century (ERA-20C) reanalysis data to investigate key circulation anomalies driving GP precipitation anomalies during a subset of GP pluvial years (called in this paper Pattern pluvial years). With previous research showing links between tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies and GP climate variability, this study diagnoses the key circulation anomalies through an analysis of SSTs and their influence on the atmosphere. …

Stormwater Capture Via Green Infrastructure In The Plaster Creek Watershed, Kyle Dankert, Ana Singh, Deanna Geelhoed, Dave Warners

Summer Research

Calvin University’s campus is located within the Plaster Creek watershed, an area of land from Caledonia to the Grand River near downtown Grand Rapids. All the water within this region drains into Plaster Creek, which, after many years of neglect and mistreatment, has become one of the most polluted waterways in West Michigan. Plaster Creek Stewards (PCS) aims to restore the local watershed by focusing on education, research and “on the ground” restoration. The focus of the restoration work is to reduce stormwater runoff containing high amounts of sediment, chemicals, and other pollutants. A variety of green infrastructure practices are …

Plaster Creek Microbial Ecosystem And Source Tracking, Sarah Gibes, Luke Vander Meer, Kelly Dubois

Summer Research

In 2013, Plaster Creek Stewards built Kreiser Pond, a green infrastructure bioswale in East Grand Rapids that flows into Plaster Creek. It has reduced the creek’s water flow, making the creek less prone to flooding. A similar green infrastructure project was completed at Shadyside Park in Dutton in 2019. At Shadyside Park, a floodplain was built to slow the flow of the creek when there is heavy rainfall and prevent erosion caused by flooding.1 Plaster Creek’s flow rate isn’t the only concern. There is also significant microbial (bacterial and viral) contamination in Plaster Creek.2 This project investigated whether the green …

Trace Elements Of Volcanic Soils And Coffee – Kona, Kathryn Mollison, Nathaniel Bos, C. Renee Sparks

Summer Research

Much of the world's coffee is grown on soils that have developed from the chemical and physical weathering of basalt, a volcanic rock with relatively high iron content. Volcanic rocks vary in composition depending on the relative amounts of major elements that produce minerals such as plagioclase, pyroxene and olivine. The breakdown of these minerals is dependent on climate and slope as well as the initial composition. Chemical weathering associated with climate, eventually leads to the development of clay minerals, oxides, and hydroxides that are key components of the soil chemistry. The soil transfers elements to the coffee plant through …

Mapping The Spatial-Temporal Dynamics Of Vegetation Response Lag To Drought In A Semi-Arid Region, Li Hua, Huidong Wang, Haigang Sui, Brian Wardlow, Michael Hayes, Jianxun Wang

Center for Advanced Land Management Information Technologies: Publications

Drought, as an extreme climate event, affects the ecological environment for vegetation and agricultural production. Studies of the vegetative response to drought are paramount to providing scientific information for drought risk mitigation. In this paper, the spatial-temporal pattern of drought and the response lag of vegetation in Nebraska were analyzed from 2000 to 2015. Based on the long-term Daymet data set, the standard precipitation index (SPI) was computed to identify precipitation anomalies, and the Gaussian function was applied to obtain temperature anomalies. Vegetation anomaly was identified by dynamic time warping technique using a remote sensing Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) …

Monitoring Spatial And Temporal Variabilities Of Gross Primary Production Using Maiac Modis Data, Marcos Fernandez-Martinez, Rong Yu, John Gamon, Gabriel Hmimina, Iolanda Filella, Manuela Balzarolo, Benjamin Stocker, Josep Penuelas

Center for Advanced Land Management Information Technologies: Publications

Remotely sensed vegetation indices (RSVIs) can be used to efficiently estimate terrestrial primary productivity across space and time. Terrestrial productivity, however, has many facets (e.g., spatial and temporal variability, including seasonality, interannual variability, and trends), and different vegetation indices may not be equally good at predicting them. Their accuracy in monitoring productivity has been mostly tested in single-ecosystem studies, but their performance in different ecosystems distributed over large areas still needs to be fully explored. To fill this gap, we identified the facets of terrestrial gross primary production (GPP) that could be monitored using RSVIs. We compared the temporal and …

Prehistoric Chaco Canyon, New Mexico: Importation Of Meat And Mmaize, Larry V. Benson, Deanna Grimstead, John R. Stein, David A. Rith, Terry L. Plowman

United States Geological Survey: Staff Publications

In a recent paper, Benson and Grimstead (2019) determined that only minimal amounts of maize could have been grown in Chaco Canyon due to its aridity, short growing season, and frequent summer flooding of the valley floor. In this paper it is shown that deer and rabbit densities within semiarid regions such as the Canyon are such that 2300 Canyon residents would eliminate essentially all small and large mammals within a year. This implies that food (meat and maize) must have been imported from one or more outlying areas to feed the Canyon's residential population. This would have entailed ~18,000 …

Chaco Canyon, New Mexico: A Caretaker City And A Pilgrimage Destination, Larry Benson, Deanna N. Grimstead, John R. Stein, David A. Roth, Terry I. Plowman

United States Geological Survey: Staff Publications

Some Southwestern archaeologists continue to ascribe to the hypothesis that Chaco was agriculturally productive to the point that it could support at least a few thousand full-time residents. This paper suggests an alternative hypothesis; i.e., Chaco was marginally productive and could only support a few hundred permanent residents. Isotopic analysis of mammal teeth found in trenches cut through platform mounds fronting Pueblo Bonito indicate the possibility that much of the meat consumed by Chacoan residents and visitors came from higher elevation sites bordering the San Juan Basin. We suggest that resident population estimates based on great house room numbers and …

Improved Flow Frequency Techniques With Frequency-Based Storms And Bulletin 17c, Katherine M. Werner

United States Geological Survey: Water Reports and Publications

This paper summarizes the hydrologic evaluation performed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Omaha District as part of the Elkhorn Basin Flood Plain Management Services (FPMS) Flood Risk Identification Study. The Elkhorn Basin FPMS Study is a collaborative effort between the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources (NeDNR), the USACE, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region VII. The Elkhorn River is located in northeastern Nebraska, covers approximately 7,000 square miles, and includes 11 Federally Constructed Levees, 5 high hazard dams, and dozens of NFIP participating communities. Previous flood risk information in the basin was developed specific …

Flood-Inundation Maps For The North Platte River At Scottsbluff And Gering, Nebraska, 2018, Kellan R. Strauch

United States Geological Survey: Publications

Digital flood-inundation maps for an 8.8-mile reach of the North Platte River, from 1.5 miles upstream from the Highway 92 bridge to 3 miles downstream from the Highway 71 bridge in Scottsbluff County, were created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the Cities of Scottsbluff and Gering, Nebraska. The flood-inundation maps, which can be accessed through the Flood Inundation Mapping (FIM) Program website at https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/flood-inundation-mapping-fim-program?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects, depict estimates of the areal extent and depth of flooding corresponding to selected water levels (stages) at the USGS streamgage on the North Platte River at Scottsbluff, Nebr. (station number 06680500). Near-real-time …

Crossed Tracks: Mesolimulus, Archaeopteryx, And The Nature Of Fossils, Leonard Finkelman

Faculty Publications

Organisms leave a variety of traces in the fossil record. Among these traces, vertebrate and invertebrate paleontologists conventionally recognize a distinction between the remains of an organism’s phenotype (body fossils) and the remains of an organism’s life activities (trace fossils). The same convention recognizes body fossils as biological structures and trace fossils as geological objects. This convention explains some curious practices in the classification, as with the distinction between taxa for trace fossils and for tracemakers. I consider the distinction between “parallel taxonomies,” or parataxonomies, which privileges some kinds of fossil taxa as “natural” and others as “artificial.” The motivations …

Betting & Hierarchy In Paleontology, Leonard Finkelman

Faculty Publications

In his Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences, Adrian Currie argues that historical scientists should be optimistic about success in reconstructing the past on the basis of future research. This optimism follows in part from examples of success in paleontology. I argue that paleontologists’ success in these cases is underwritten by the hierarchical nature of biological information: extinct organisms have extant analogues at various levels of taxonomic, ecological, and physiological hierarchies, and paleontologists are adept at exploiting analogies within one informational hierarchy to infer information in another. On this account, fossils serve the role …

Petrology, Geothermobarometry, And P-T Path Of Spinel-Bearing Symplectite Migmatitesfrom The Simin Area, Hamedan, Sanandaj-Sirjan Zone, Iran, Ali Akbar Baharifar, Donna L. Whitney, Kwan-Nang Pang, Sun-Lin Chung, Yoshiyuki Iizuka

Turkish Journal of Earth Sciences

Migmatitic rocks in the Hamedan area, Sanandaj-Sirjan Zone, Iran, contain symplectite that has partially replaced andalusite. In metatexite, symplectite typically consists of spinel + cordierite + Ca-rich plagioclase ± orthoamphibole, but in diatexite, symplectite consists of spinel + Ca-rich plagioclase; cordierite is typically absent from symplectite although it is present in the matrix of the rock. A calculated P-T pseudosection for an average, nonmigmatitic bulk-rock composition indicates that the whole-rock composition was not the effective bulk composition during the formation of symplectite. Therefore, effective bulk compositions (EBCs) were calculated using modal abundance and the average composition of minerals in contact …

Holocene Seismic Activity Of The Priene?Sazlı Fault Revealed By Cosmogenic 36cl,Western Anatolia, Turkey, Nasim Mozafari Amiri, Ökmen Sümer, Dmitry Tikhomirov, Susan Ivy-Ochs, Vasily Alfimov, Christof Vockenhuber, Uğur İnci̇, Hasan Sözbi̇li̇r, Naki̇ Akçar

Turkish Journal of Earth Sciences

Fault scarps in carbonates are structures well suited to 36Cl analysis of paleoearthquakes to reconstruct the seismic history using cosmogenic 36Cl. In this study, we measured cosmogenic 36Cl concentrations in 117 samples along one of the active faults in Western Anatolia, the Priene?Sazlı Fault scarp, to reconstruct the age of paleoearthquakes along with their slip amounts, beyond the available historical and instrumental archives. Our results indicate four periods of high seismic activity on the Priene?Sazlı Fault since the early Holocene at 8.1 ± 2.0, 6.0 ± 1.5, 3.7 ± 0.9, and 2.2 ± 0.5 ka, with slips of 3.4 ± …

Water For A Hungry World: Innovation In Water And Food Security: Proceedings Of The 2019 Water For Food Global Conference. Lincoln., Daugherty Water For Food Global Institute

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Administrative Materials

Welcome and Opening Remarks : Mike Boehm, Vice President and Vice Chancellor of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Nebraska ; Peter G. McCornick, Executive Director, Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute at the University of Nebraska

How the Irrigation Industry is Driving the Future through Efficient Technologies. Speaker: Deborah Hamlin, CEO, Irrigation Association

Sustainable Solutions for Water and Food Security — Business Perspectives. Speaker: Mark Edge, Director of Collaborations for Developing Countries, Bayer

Value of Water. Speakers: Dustin Garrick, Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford ; …