The lab had 3 graduate students successfully complete theses in 2021! Congratulations to Dr. Brandi Lenz for completing her PhD on submarine landslides, offshore Oregon, Gabriel Martinez for completing his MS thesis on the Chandeleur Submarine Landslides in the Gulf of Mexico, and Jacob Fillingham for his MS thesis on Sedimentary Waves of the Cape Fear Submarine Landslide complex.

Brandi will be joining the Department of Geology & Geophysics at Texas A&M as an instructional assistant professor in the summer of 2022. Gabriel has joined Estudios Tecnicos in his native Puerto Rico as a GIS analyst. Jacob has joined Fugro as a staff geoscientist. Congratulations to all 3!

In 2020 we had to say goodbye to postdoc extraordinaire Dr. Alexey Portnov and our first Ph.D. student, Dr. Trevor Browning! Both will be missed but are moving on to exciting opportunities. Alexey is joining to University of Texas Institute for Geophysics as a research scientist and Trevor is currently a visiting assistant professor at Redlands University. Good luck to them both!

It has been an eventful academic year, here is a quick recap of highlights:

1. Funding: Dr. Sawyer was awarded a 2-year early career fellowship from the National Academies of Science, Technology, and Engineering. He has also been awarded a 5-year NSF CAREER Grant to study the impacts of earthquake shaking on seafloor landslide activity.
2. Students: Trevor Browning successfully defended his PhD degree in May, 2020. Brandi Lenz successfully passed candidacy in spring, 2019. 3 new graduate students have joined the group within the last year. In Fall, 2019, we welcomed Jacob Fillingham and Gabriel Martinez to the team, and this summer, 2020, we are welcoming Bailey Fitzgerald!

Dr. Derek Sawyer led a field trip of SES students to the Guadalupe Mountains of west Texas and southern New Mexico during Spring Break March 11-16, 2019. The 6-day trip featured visits to classic locations of the Permian Reef Trail, Last Chance, Bone, Shumard, Slaughter, and Walnut Canyons, plus the Carlsbad Caverns and roadside stops at the Castille Evaporites and the Rader Slide.

The Guadalupe Mountains provide outstanding continuous exposures of a wide spectrum of carbonate and siliciclastic environments across a shelf-to-basin transect. Prior to the trip, students paired up to research an outcrop locality of their choosing. In the field, day trips were led by each team and as a group worked together to interpret depositional environments and synthesize observations to infer paleogeographic evolution. The goals of the course were to increase educational field-course opportunities for students and to provide direct experience in mixed carbonate-siliciclastic systems.

Class participants included: SES graduate students Christopher Conwell, Teresa Avila, Ryan Heber, Brent Lary, Datu Adiatma, and Brandi Lenz; SES undergraduate Jonathan Bell; and Ohio Department of Natural Resources geologists Erika Danielsen and Chris Waid.

“This trip provided an excellent opportunity to see both the stratal geometry and lithological patterns of depositional sequences in one region (and even at single outcrops!), helping expand my understanding of sequence stratigraphy in mixed clastic-carbonate environments.”

“The Guadalupe Mts region is a textbook case study of sequence stratigraphy. In locations like Last Chance Canyon, we were able to walk along exposed facies and study the sequence stratigraphy in person, which really helped to illuminate concepts that were harder to grasp in theory.”

“The best part of this trip is simply being able to put my finger on Sequence Boundaries (SBs). It is just spectacular!”

“My favorite part of the trip was in Bone Canyon, where we saw amazing angular unconformities, channel scours, breccias, and deformed sandstones in close proximity.”

“As a professional geologist, continuing to take field courses like this is invaluable to me. The mixed carbonate-siliciclastic deposits exposed in the Guadalupe Mountains provided excellent analogues to rocks that are not as well exposed here in the Midwest.  It’s great to bring new knowledge back with me and apply the concepts I studied on this trip to my research in Ohio.”

The field trip expenses were fully supported by The Ohio State University Center for Energy Research, Training, and Innovation (CERTAIN) Faculty Fellows Program award to Dr. Sawyer.

A new journal article led by Dr. Derek Sawyer published in Scientific Reports describes extremely large-amplitude waves that can be generated in hypersaline seafloor brine pools by the impact forces of submarine landslides.
Subsea hypersaline anoxic brine pools are among the most extreme habitable environments on Earth that offer clues to life on other planets. The hypersaline brine is too salty and anoxic to support all but extremophiles. The anoxic and abiotic conditions are favorable for outstanding preservation of sedimentary layers and organics, which makes them well-suited for paleoceanographic studies.

However, while brine pools are often assumed to be quiescent and stably stratified environments, our work describes how the impact forces of underwater landslides can cause significant disturbances of the brine as well as inject mass gravity flows into the sedimentary basin to disrupt the otherwise simple stratigraphy.
This study uses high-resolution seafloor bathymetry and three-dimensional seismic data to image the subsurface geology in the southern half of the Orca Basin in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. Orca is one of the largest known brine pools in the world and is up to 220 meters deep, approximately 8,000 years old, and was discovered in the mid-1970s. Since its discovery, the Orca Basin, has been the site of important paleoceanographic studies, microbiological, geochemical, and a deep sea drilling program.

We use geophysical data that reveal large landslide scarps that lie hundreds of meters above the brine pool with debris and blocky deposits lying at the bottom of the brine pool (Figure 1). We describe the large-scale disruption to the brine pool that results from submarine landslides impacting the brine pool. Submarine landslides are capable of generating waves with amplitudes on the order of 200 meters, which rival the largest known ocean waves. A vigorous mixing will occur that will introduce significant amounts of oxygen, sediment, and organic matter to the brine pool system. The wave heights could exceed the confinement of their basins thereby spreading hypersaline brines to surrounding topographic lows. Landslides and their impact waves will greatly affect the physical structure of the biological community that are typically observed living at the edges and above brine pools.

2-year NSF-Supported Graduate Research Assistantship

I am seeking a graduate student to join my team at Ohio State University to work on a new 2-year NSF-funded award to study submarine landslide hazards off the U.S. east coast. This project is a collaborative effort with researchers at Columbia University to constrain sediment physical properties associated with the Cape Fear and Currituck landslides from velocity analysis of recently acquired open access seismic reflection data.

Underwater landslides pose hazard threats to populated coastal areas worldwide because of the potential to generate tsunamis. On the continental margin offshore of the heavily populated U.S. Mid-Atlantic, ~15% of the continental slope are scars from large submarine landslides. If a large slope failure were to occur today on the Eastern US Margin, the negative economic and societal impact could be severe.

This study aims to understand the driving mechanisms by examining the role that fluid pressure within the sediments plays in slope failure and the subsequent motion of those sediments. Slope failure can occur gradually or catastrophically, and have different implications for the type and severity of impacts to coastal areas. Our findings will better constrain the preconditioning factors that lead to slope failure and the hazard risk from tsunamis generated by catastrophic failures.

This study dovetails with an ongoing IODP proposal through the Cape Fear and Currituck headwalls.

Student Qualifications: PhD student preferred but Master’s students will be considered. Experience in seismic reflection data processing and interpretation preferred. Availability starting in Spring/Summer/or Fall 2019.

If interested and for more information, please send your CV and statement of interest to me (sawyer.144@osu.edu).

As part of a new course being taught by Dr. Derek Sawyer, 11 SES graduate students participated in a weekend field trip (Sep. 15-17th, 2017) to collect a multibeam sonar dataset off South Bass Island in Lake Erie.
The course is a graduate level seminar on the theory and application of multibeam sonar systems capable of generating high-resolution maps and backscatter intensity of bed topography and morphology in lakes, rivers, and marine environments. In addition to a traditional seminar format with weekly readings and discussions, the highlight of the seminar is the weekend field trip to Lake Erie in the early part of the semester to acquire data which will be processed throughout the rest of the semester. The class will also leverage the newly released and extensive multibeam data acquired in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean.
The weather and lake conditions were ideal for the weekend field trip. The class camped at South Bass Island State Park and utilized Ohio State’s Stone Laboratory’s Biolab vessel throughout the day on Saturday. The class spent 8 hours in the area offshore South Bass and Gibraltar Islands and acquired detailed data over rock reef structures, a large lakebed hole, and a shipwreck. The class will process the data throughout the remainder of the semester. The class thanks the School of Earth Sciences for financial support and Captain Arthur Wolf, Justin Chaffin, and Matt Thomas of Stone Lab for helping make the field trip a success.

The spring and summer of 2017 featured a number of exciting events. In April we welcomed Dr. Alexey Portnov to the research group. Alexey is from Prof. Jurgen Mienert’s group at the Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate (CAGE) in Norway nad he joins us at Ohio State to work on the methane hydrates project in the Gulf of Mexico. Two outstanding undergraduate students (Brandi Lenz and Nick Rodgers) defended their theses and graduated. Nick will be pursuing graduate school at the University of Minnesota and Brandi will be pursuing a PhD here at Ohio State.

In May, Derek traveled to Texas A&M to present at the Environmental Protection and Safety Panel for the International Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) on behalf of the proponent team for Expedition 386 to study gas hydrate systems in the Gulf of Mexico. Prof. Ann Cook and Dr. Alexey Portnov participated in a drilling expedition to Green Canyon Block 955.

In June, Trevor Browning successfully passed his PhD candidacy exams, and several faculty and graduate students from Ohio State presented at the 9th International Conference on Gas Hydrates in Denver, Colorado.

In July,  Derek, Trevor, and Paul traveled to St. Croix and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands to collect sediment cores and multibeam data (pictures below). We also hosted Prof. Joel Johnson from the University of New Hampshire to split, describe, and subsample sediment cores collected on the coring expedition that took place in May.

SES professors Derek Sawyer, Ann Cook, and Wendy Panero are using seismometers in Ohio Stadium to measure the shaking that occurs during Ohio State football games. As fans jump up and down, the vibrations are measured by seismometers and can be used as a teaching tool for students and the public about earthquake science. The team also includes professor Mike Brudzinski from Miami University, Jeff Fox and Daniel Blake from the Ohio Seismic Netowrk, Ohio Stadium facilities staff, and students.

The hazard potential of earthquakes and the science behind using seismic waves to understand Earth’s interior are core subjects taught across all levels of earth science from elementary school through higher-level graduate classes. Often though, very few students have experienced a real earthquake. This lack of intuition for the underlying physics is often a major barrier to students who might otherwise be curious.

“We’ll feature the measurements in classes, so that students can engage with real-world data and connect it to an experience many of them have had in person,” said project leader Derek Sawyer, assistant professor of earth sciences at Ohio State, who brainstormed the project with Wendy Panero, associate professor, and Ann Cook, assistant professor. “At a more advanced level, we’ll use the data to teach data reduction and collection as well as wave propagation, earthquakes and the local geology. We’ve already achieved some exciting preliminary results.”

The Seattle Seahawks measured fan quakes first, inspired by the “Beast Quake” in a 2011 playoff game during which running back Marshawn Lynch scored on a touchdown run, and the resulting celebration registered on seismographs outside Century Link Field. Sawyer and his team wanted to adopt this approach to the collegiate level. Ohio Stadium is one of the largest in the world and seats at least 30,000 more than the Seahawks’ stadium.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources operates the Ohio seismic network (OhioSeis). In recent years, hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking,’ of Ohio’s Utica shale, as well as wastewater injection has brought the issue of human-induced earthquakes to the forefront. As a result, more students and public are inquiring about earthquakes in Ohio. Team member Jeffrey Fox, a seismologist at the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and Ohio State alumnus, said that fan quakes present a good opportunity to get people thinking about earthquake hazards in general. “As more and more people move to and live in earthquake-prone areas, they should be aware of seismic risk,” Fox said. “Even in areas such as Ohio, where the risk is low, it’s not zero.”

The team created a “FanQuakes Magnitude Scale,” which converts shaking from fans into the perceived magnitude of a naturally occurring earthquake, if one were to occur centered 10 kilometers (about 6.2 miles) below ground underneath the stadium. “We expected that the most exciting plays would make the biggest fan quakes, and that’s true,” explained Miami University seismologist Michael Brudzinski, “but sometimes the fan quakes grow even larger after the play is done, because the music starts. The music helps the fans to jump in unison, which leads to even stronger shaking of the stands.”

The team recorded 5 home games this season. The Buckeye fans saved their best for last during the Michigan game on November 26^th with a record attendance of 110,045. After Curtis Samuel’s double overtime touchdown, the stadium shook with 5.79 on the FanQuake Magnitude scale, which was the largest FanQuake recorded during the season. Other large FanQuakes during the season occurred during the Nebraska game on Nov. 5^th: Damon Webb’s interception and touchdown in the first quarter, generated a 5.1-magnitude quake and Curtis Samuel’s touchdown catch at the beginning of the second half reached a FanQuake Magnitude of 5.2.

The project has been featured in social media and several media outlets including the Columbus Dispatch, local TV stations, and ESPN. The team plans publish their results and continue the project for the 2017 season.

Image: FanQuake seismogram recorded after the game-winning play by Curtis Samuel during in the Ohio State-Michigan game on Nov. 26^th, 2016. The FanQuake magnitude eventually peaked at 5.79, which was the largest FanQuake measured during the season.

Alan Mason has been selected to receive an Undergraduate Research Scholarship by the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Committee.

Alan’s research is on the effects of underwater landslides on ocean floor brine pools using 3D seismic data. Alan recently presented his work at the 2016 Geological Society of America meeting (photo).

Well done Alan!