Brandi Lenz and Nick Rodgers spent much of their 2016 summer at Ohio State’s field camp in Utah. One week involved exploring glacial cut canyons in Alta and the next week they were traversing basalt flows and climbing cinder cones in Marysvale. They learned many important skills including mapping, recognizing lithologies in the field, and interpreting geologic history. Ohio State’s field camp is led by Professor Terry Wilson and is based out of Ephraim Utah for the past several decades.
Immediate opening: Seeking a postdoctoral scholar position to work with Dr. Ann Cook and I on a Gulf of Mexico gas hydrates project. The project is funded by the US Department of Energy with collaborators at UT Austin and Lamont-Doherty (Columbia University).
For Fall 2017: I am seeking a doctoral student to join my research group to work on submarine landslides.
I work on a wide variety of marine geology and geophysics projects. Currently, the major projects that we have ongoing are:
Deepwater:
Geohazards and gas hydrates in the Gulf of Mexico
Role of earthquakes on underwater landslides
Role of microfossils and volcanic ashes in submarine landslides
Retrogressive submarine landslides offshore North Carolina (GeoPRISMS ENAM)
Slope stability of channel-levee systems
Shear strength of marine sediments
Coastal:
Sediment dynamics in mixed siliciclastic-carbonate systems, St. John, US Virgin Islands
Tsunami deposits preserved in coastal salt ponds, St. John, US Virgin Islands
Lake floor sedimentary processes in Lake Erie.
The Basin Research Lab says goodbye to Josh DeVore but we welcome new graduate student Paul Russell to the team. Paul graduated from the University of Washington School of Oceanography and just completed a summer in Alaska with the Bureau of Land Management.
It was a busy spring semester for the Basin Research Group!
Post-Doc and Graduate Students:
Dr. Jess Hillman just completed her post-doc with us and we are sad to see her go. She will be joining Geomar in Kiel, Germany in a project jointly with ExxonMobil Research Co. Josh DeVore successfully defended his MS thesis and will be joining the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Geologic survey here in Columbus. Katie Treiber was recognized at the annual banquet as an outstanding Teaching Assistant for Reflection Seismology and Energy Geophysics. Katie will be interning with Oxy in Houston, TX for the summer as soon as she gets her MS thesis proposal completed and approved. Trevor Browning has an article in press with the Caribbean Journal of Science and successfully transferred into the PhD program. Chen Yang, Katie Treiber, and Jess Hillman all presented work at the Gordon Research Conference on Gas Hydrates in Galveston, TX.
Undergraduate Students:
Congratulations to Mario Gutierrez, Tyler Rohan, and Ryan Haugh who successfully completed and defended their undergraduate theses. Mario will be interning with Statoil in Houston for the summer and then begin graduate school at UT Austin in the fall. Tyler won first place for his poster presentation at the Ohio State undergraduate research forum and he’ll be continuing his research in the lab over the summer.
Alan Moore and Tom Copeland will be Shell Undergraduate Research Fellows for the summer in the lab. In addition, Nick Rodgers and Brandi Lenz will be working on research projects in the group before they head out to Utah for field camp!
Congratulations to Tyler Rohan for his 1st place finish in the Natural and Mathematical Sciences division at the 2016 Ohio State University Denman undergraduate research forum! Tyler presented his work on “Grain Size Analysis of Submarine Landslides in the Nankai Trough.” Well done Tyler!
Sawyer and DeVore’s 2015 article in Geophysical Research Letters has been highlighted by AGU’s Eos.
Click on the image below to access the article:
SES assistant professors Ann Cook and Derek Sawyer attended the Gordon Research Conference on Natural Gas Hydrates in Galveston, TX Feb. 28 – March 04, 2016. Post-doc Jess Hillman and graduate students Li Wei (PhD), Chen Yang (MS) and Katie Treiber also attended and presented their research.
The week featured a wide range of current topics on gas hydrates encompassing field programs to assess gas hydrate formation, accumulation and destabilization in the Arctic, Gulf of Mexico, North Atlantic, eastern and western Pacific and Indian Oceans; gas transport in pipelines, sediments and the water column; geo-mechanics and sediment-hydrate interaction; sensor development and monitoring strategies; applications and challenges in cabled observatories; numerical simulations of reservoirs.
Dr. Sawyer has been selected to receive a grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund in the amount of $110,000 for 2 years beginning in September, 2016.
The proposal title is Seismicity-enhanced compaction in deepwater fine-grained sediments. This proposal will fund graduate student research and builds off the work published in Geophysical Research Letters:
Sawyer, D. E., and J. R. DeVore (2015), Elevated shear strength of sediments on active margins: Evidence for seismic strengthening, Geophys. Res. Lett., 42, doi:10.1002/2015GL066603.
Derek Sawyer and his graduate student Joshua DeVore published a study in December 2015 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that sheds light on a paradox: given that earthquakes are a primary trigger of underwater landslides, why do the most earthquake- active areas on Earth have fewer submarine landslides than passive margins?
Sawyer and DeVore provide an answer to this paradox by demonstrating a simple, but surprising, result: sediments are stronger on active margins and thus are less prone to landsliding. Their dataset contains over 1000 shear strength measurements made by the Ocean Drilling Program in a range of active and passive margins (Figure). They show that within the upper 100 meters below seafloor, which is where seafloor landslides originate, sediments on active margins have higher shear strength by a factor of 2-3 relative to the same interval on passive margins.
The fact that active margin sediments are stronger than passive margins is a surprising result in light of conventional understanding that seafloor sediments compact at similar rates with burial depth regardless of location (Athy’s Law). The more compaction, the higher the shear strength, which is the key parameter to withstand landsliding. This study suggests additional mechanisms other than progressive burial should be considered in compaction models along active margins.
The paper lends support to the conceptual model of ‘seismic strengthening’ in which it is proposed that the repeated exposure to shaking from small-magnitude earthquake events can physically dewater sediments and thus enhance compaction and strength. This model remains mostly untested however.
Sawyer has been awarded 2 years of funding from the American Chemical Society to investigate the mechanism behind the enhanced strengthening and results can have important implications for understanding the feedbacks between earthquakes and submarine landslides as well as for understanding the physical processes that govern mudrock properties early in burial history. Funding will support graduate student research beginning in September of this year.
More details can be found in the published article:
Sawyer, D. E., and J. R. DeVore (2015), Elevated shear strength of sediments on active margins: Evidence for seismic strengthening, Geophysical Research Letters, 42, doi:10.1002/2015GL066603.
Levent Akinci successfully defended his MS thesis titled “An Analytical Modelling Approach to Test if a Rising Salt Diapir Triggered The Cape Fear Landslide”