The department of Geology is pleased to announce recent awards from prestigious funding agencies.
Dr. Claudia Adam receives a grant from American Chemical Society to Model the stress field along continental rifts from tomography models
Passive margins created by rifting of the continental lithosphere are economically important, because they are prolific sources for oil and gas. Better understanding of the tectonic phenomena that have shaped them is required for conducting broad, integrative thinking in basin analysis. It may therefore facilitate our efforts to explore for these valuable natural resources. Despite the tremendous progress that has been made during the last 40 years through data acquisition and the design of complex analogical, analytical and numerical models, there are still some open questions. The role of mantle on the rift initiation and propagation is still debated, for example. Within this project, we propose to usehighly resolved tomography models to model the instantaneous mantle flow under three regions, the Baikal rift, the central East African rift, and the Afar triple junction. This modeling allows the computation of the dynamic topography, the geoid/gravity anomalies, the stresses induced in the lithosphere, and the inferred tectonic regimes. These model outputs will be compared to surface observations in order to calibrate our models, and to quantitatively infer the role of the mantle on the observed surface deformation.
Dr. Brueseke receives a National Science Foundation grant
Matt Brueseke was awarded an ~$240,000 National Science Foundation grant (Investigating out-of-sequence magmatism and mantle plume-lithosphere interactions adjacent to the Snake River plain (U.S.A.)) to study volcanism adjacent to the Yellowstone hotspot track in southwest Montana and northwest Wyoming (USA).
Volcanic eruptions are significant hazards and drivers of societal and environmental change. Eruptions range in size and scope, and continental hotspot eruptions are the largest documented on Earth. Hotspots are locations were volcanism occurs away from plate boundaries, as a result of upwelling mantle. As this buyout mantle rises, it melts (and can melt the overlying Earth’s crust) and forms magma bodies that often erupt catastrophically. Many hotspots are also thought to be sourced in the deep mantle of the Earth, thus hotspot eruptive products are often studied to provide some of the only clues about the internal composition of the Earth that is impossible to study otherwise.
Hotspot magmatism is recognized in part on identification of a linear chain of volcanoes that young in one direction. These age-progressions may be unclear when volcanism along a hotspot “track” does not temporally fit in the age progression and is therefore, out of sequence. The Snake River plain-Yellowstone (SRPY) volcanic province (Wyoming-Montana-Idaho, including Yellowstone National Park) is the classic example of continental hotspot magmatism and major SRPY “supervolcano” eruptions are well documented. However, small-volume volcanoes exist adjacent to the SRPY. This project will investigate these small volume volcanoes to provide an analog to better identify hotspots in the geological record, yield new constraints on how the Yellowstone hotspot interacts with North America, and be used to help refine models for the origin and eruptive history of volcanism associated with this hotspot.
Student training and public outreach are also key aspects of this project. K-State students and Matt B. will use field, age, petrographic, and geochemical data to study these small volume volcanoes in the Centennial Range-Valley area of Montana and the Jackson Hole-Upper Wind River Basin of Wyoming. The research will provide opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to learn a diverse suite of field, presentation, and laboratory skills. We will also communicate our science to the public via an ongoing collaboration with the Dubois Museum (Fremont County, WY) through public outreach efforts.
1st Year K-State Geology M.S. student Alex Karrasch sampling the edge of a dacite lava, near Shadow Mountain (western side of Jackson Hole, WY valley).
Drs Lacroix, Kempton and Brueseke have been awarded a NSF Grant: RAPID: PetCAT-Scan: A high definition scanning tool for geoscientists in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond
In this uncertain time, moving from in-person to on-line teaching has become a requirement for most faculty worldwide. This raises concerns about how to transition other courses that involve optical microscope work (e.g., mineralogy, sedimentology-stratigraphy, structural geology) as well as how to improve on current (rather crude) attempts to provide instruction in igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary petrology. The National Science Foundation recently funded the PetCAT-Scan facility: a high definition thin section scanner to establish the that will help faculty in geoscience departments in our region to generate high quality online resources for their classes at rates much faster than can be done by manual methods during this period of uncertainty associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. This facility will also be used for ongoing (and future) research by K-State geoscientists. The selected instrument is a Zeiss Axio Z1 instrument that will be set-up in the Department of Geology this Fall. We will give you update on that facility withing our next newsletters. In the meantime, people interested by this facility may find more information here.