MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR Another year has passed so it is time to share some of the latest about the EES department. Hopefully this newsletter will provide you with some enjoyable early fall reading. As is the case in higher education nationwide, we are becoming increasingly dependent on the support from alumni and friends. Thankfully, several generous donors have stepped up in recent years and created endowments that support both faculty and graduate students. The past academic year has been very successful in terms of fundraising, as illustrated by the newly established Cochran Family Professorship that is held by Karen Johannesson. Moreover, a search is ongoing for the new Marshall-Heape Chair in Geology, established by Bob Marshall and Scott Heape. We have also received other important gifts, among others from Freeport-McMoRan, to support our graduate students. Our hope is that these acts of generosity will inspire others to help sustain the department and to ensure its long-term health. The importance of such endowments cannot be understated, as illustrated by some great successes in 2015. As described in more detail elsewhere in this newsletter, Karen Johannesson recently received the highly prestigious C.C. Patterson Award from the Geochemical Society in recognition of her pioneering research in environmental geochemistry. Alvaro Fernandez, one of our recent Vokes Fellows (see our 2013 newsletter) successfully defended his PhD dissertation this past January and is now a postdoctoral fellow at ETH in Zürich, one of the most prominent academic institutions in Europe. Clearly, these funds are well spent! A noteworthy event that we initiated in the past year was an alumni party in San Francisco during the AGU Fall Meeting. This was a great success with at least 30 attendants, bringing together current EES faculty and students and alumni representing a number of generations. We look forward to continuing this tradition and encourage anyone who plans to attend AGU and who is not yet on our mailing list to get in touch. Of course, our long-standing tradition of Homecoming parties also continues. This year it will take place on Friday, November 6. Further details about this event can be found elsewhere in this newsletter. We wish you all a great year and please keep in touch!
Torbjörn Törnqvist Vokes Geology Professor and Chair, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
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HONORED
KAREN JOHANNESSON
During the 2015 Goldschmidt Conference in Prague, Karen Johannesson received one of the most prestigious awards in geochemistry. The Patterson Medal recognizes an innovative breakthrough of fundamental significance in environmental geochemistry. matter complexes in “average” river water. The modeling also suggested that organic matter speciation could be extremely important in understanding rare earth element distribution as well. In addition, this work clearly showed that competition between rare earth elements and other metals like Fe and Al, and pH, all play a significant role in the interactions of organic matter and rare earth elements. This was a major contribution in our overall understanding of rare earth element behavior in the aquatic environment, and it is Karen’s most highly cited paper. Her other three most cited papers, Johannesson et al. (1999), Johannesson et al. (1997), and Johannesson et al. (1996) also deal with the chemical speciation of rare earth elements in aquatic systems. As I alluded above, her interests are not just in the understanding of chemical speciation and the controls of trace metal solubility, but also in using rare earth element measurements to trace groundwater flow in the Great Basin region in the US. She has contributed to such big-picture issues as determining REE fluxes to the global ocean (Johannesson and Burdige, 2007).
The following citation was written by Berry Lyons, Ohio State University.
Colleagues: It is with great pleasure, enthusiasm and pride that I present the 2015 recipient of the C.C. Patterson Award, Professor Karen H. Johannesson. I have known Karen since she was an undergraduate Earth science student at the University of New Hampshire and had the great fortune of mentoring her as a graduate student at the University of Nevada, Reno in the mid-1990s. Karen combines countless skills in analytical geochemistry, geochemical modeling and hydrology/hydrogeology along with an insightful approach to the understanding of trace element dynamics in the aquatic environment. Although her recent work on the biogeochemistry and speciation of oxyanion forming elements in aquatic systems, especially groundwater, is of the highest quality, I think that most would agree that Karen is probably best known for her long list of publications on the dynamics and chemical behavior of rare earth elements in terrestrial water systems. Although there are many highlights of her work to date, I will attempt to point out a few. Karen was among the first to estimate the chemical speciation of REEs in terrestrial aquatic systems. In a series of papers published in the 1990s, she demonstrated the importance of both phosphate and carbonate complexes, depending on the pH of the solution, in controlling rare earth element concentrations. The influence of organic matter on the behavior of metals in aquatic systems has been of interest to the environmental geochemistry community since the 1970s. However little to no work had been done on REEs.
More recently, the work of Karen and her students has focused on such elements as arsenic, selenium, antimony, molybdenum, vanadium and tungsten. She published some of the first work on tungsten in groundwater (Johannesson et al., 2013), established the behavior of arsenic along flow paths of a number of important groundwater systems in the USA (Hague and Johannesson, 2006; 2008; Johannesson and Tang, 2009), and was the first to report dissolved arsenic and molybdenum profiles in some of the world’s most pristine Antarctic lakes (Yang et al., 2015). In addition to her outstanding scholarship and seminal contributions to the field of trace metal environmental geochemistry, Karen is a truly exceptional person, collaborator, student, mentor and friend. I always reflect on her wonderful sense of humor, so well illustrated by the fact that she named her two cats adopted after she finished her dissertation on rare earth element geochemistry, Lanthanum and Lutetium!!
In July 2003, Jianwu Tang and Karen published a paper in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta that rectified this lack of information. In that work Karen and her student investigated the potential importance and influence of organic matter on rare earth element behavior. They modified a metal-organic matter speciation code to allow predictions of complexations of rare earth elements with naturally occurring organic matter and then compared their modeling results to previously published ultrafiltration studies of rare earth elements in terrestrial water to confirm their results. They found that at neutral to slightly acidic pHs, their model predicted that the speciation of La, Eu and Lu were dominated by organic
Ms. President, other distinguished award winners, and international colleagues, it is a tremendous honor that I present to you the 2015 C.C. Patterson Medalist, Professor Karen H. Johannesson. 2
COSMIC RAYS
SMASHING INTO ROCKS
Brent Goehring’s fieldwork takes him to various exotic localities across the globe. As he details below, his new cosmogenic isotope laboratory is equally exotic. It brings me great happiness to join the Tulane University faculty in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Never could I have imagined that 15 years ago, when I arrived on the campus of the University of Washington as a material science and engineering student, my studies would take me to quite literally the geographic top and bottom of Earth and many points in between. In some ways this is ironic, as I grew up in the shadow of Mt. Rainier on a mud flow laid down by one its many eruptions and subsequent melting of its glaciers. A freshman introductory geology class changed my path, a path from which I’ve never looked back. Being at Tulane and building my research group, I am now able to look far ahead. Before arriving at Tulane, I was fortunate to spend time at Oregon State University, Columbia University, Pennsylvania State University, and most recently Purdue University. Research in my group is focused around a wide-ranging tool generally known as cosmogenic nuclide surface exposure dating. In my lab we use the interaction of intergalactic cosmic rays with rocks at or near the Earth’s surface, recorded by the production of rare isotopes of elements such as beryllium, as a way to date and measure the rate of geomorphic changes at the Earth’s surface. It is no exaggeration to say that we quite literally count atoms.
Ironically, we do this with a particle accelerator approximately 200 feet long, working with my colleagues at Purdue University’s Rare Isotope Measurement Laboratory.
Half of the accelerator mass spectrometer at Purdue University. The large red tank is the accelerator part of the system.
Current research in my lab is diverse, but it revolves around three general themes: (1) reconstructing past ice sheet and glacier dimensions within the context of climate change, both past and present; (2) dating of sediments produced during mountain building and deformation; and (3) dating of surfaces to better constrain the rates of active tectonics. As such, my research group works on a global scale. We currently have active projects in Alaska, Canada, Antarctica, Norway, Sweden, New Mexico, and California. In the near future, we hope to be working in Greenland, Peru/ Bolivia, and Patagonia as well. This past winter I had the opportunity to travel to Antarctica for six weeks to conduct glacial geologic fieldwork. On my journey I met an amazing number of people that make the McMurdo 3
station run, and facilitate the incredible volume and range of science happening on the Antarctic continent by US and also some international scientists. At the height of the austral summer (Northern Hemisphere winter), there are approximately 8501000 people in McMurdo. The team I am part of was fortunate to spend relatively little time in McMurdo as the weather, always the great decider in Antarctica, cooperated for us on nearly all of our flight days. From McMurdo we flew via a Twin Otter aircraft approximately 600 km north to the Tucker Glacier along the Ross Coast of Victoria Land. You might be asking yourself, just how cold was it? In reality, it wasn’t much colder where we were than a typical winter day in the northern part of the US, 20-35°F. That said, many parts of the continent are quite frigid, and McMurdo daytime temperatures are usually in the teens to twenty-degree range. The Tucker Glacier/Whitehall Glacier confluence is a truly stunning location to conduct fieldwork.
Our Twin Otter transport to the Tucker Glacier. Amazingly, they fly these from Canada every year via South America. Fortunately, flying to Tucker Glacier required a fuel stop at the Italian Station, which meant good food and espresso for us.
At the Tucker Glacier, our main research goal is to understand the change in thickness of glaciers flowing into the Ross Sea that joined the Ross Ice Shelf during the last ice age, approximately 15 to 25 thousand years ago. While it is widely known that the Antarctic Ice Sheet was more extensive during the last ice age, its change in thickness is poorly understood. Surface exposure dating over the past 20 years has transformed our understanding of Antarctic glacial history and surface processes, but questions remain, notably about ice-sheet thickness. The general approach we employ is to use the mountains above the ice sheet as dipsticks. We look for evidence of past ice cover, commonly collections of boulders left behind by the glaciers. In some locations we are lucky and have plenty of these boulders to sample, while in others we only have bare bedrock or a jumble of material known as till.
Our home away from home on the Whitehall Glacier, which flows into the Tucker Glacier. From here we used snowmobiles and hiked to our field sites.
At the Tucker Glacier, we were both lucky and unlucky, finding very nice boulders in some locations, as well as only bedrock in others. All hope is
Hiking to a field site.
not lost when we only find bedrock, as my expertise, the measurement of radiocarbon produced by cosmic rays in rocks can tell us whether or not the surface has ever been covered during the past 30-40 thousand years, and if it was covered when it was exposed by retreating ice. My research lab at Tulane is only the fifth with such capabilities globally.
never fails to fascinate. Hopefully our research will shed light on our research questions, but at the same time it might also challenge our hypothesis that relatively recent changes in ice-sheet thickness occurred, as evidenced by the weathered state of some boulders on the Antarctic landscape.
Ultimately, we hope to be able to place changes in ice thickness within a broader context of paleoclimate recorded in ice-core records and sealevel records, such as those found in the Mississippi Delta, and give us a better understanding of ice-sheet sensitivity to climate change.
I look forward to many more years at Tulane. My research program is in its infancy, just getting our feet wet in many new research areas. If you ever find yourself on campus, stop by and myself or one of my students would be happy to give you a lab tour and show you some pictures from recent field campaigns.
Working in Antarctica is for some a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I certainly hope that future research takes myself and students back to Antarctica someday. It is a landscape of starkness in many ways, but
This year I am happy to welcome Keir Nichols and Rachel Sortor as PhD students, and Chris Darvill as a postdoctoral researcher splitting time between Tulane and the University of Northern British Columbia.
McMurdo Station as seen from Obs Hill. 4
THE TAO OF DELTAS Chris Esposito is the Vokes Fellow for the present academic year. His story can be seen as a microcosm of post-Katrina New Orleans and its ability to attract bright young minds from around the nation.
I first came to Louisiana as a high school math teacher in 2007, when the city of New Orleans was aggressively recruiting math and science teachers to fill vacancies caused by the Katrina levee failures and the subsequent dissolution of the teachers union. I had taught high school math in my home state of New Jersey and I needed a change of scenery, so New Orleans seemed like a good fit.
sediment transport in lowland rivers and crevasses over very short timescales – months to decades. What Kyle was showing was relevant to interpreting the integrated results of many of the events I had been observing. I could see, for the first time, my affinity for mathematical logic and games connected to my growing love of the Mississippi River Delta.
It was, and at the end of the school year I decided to stay. Even my nonlocal eyes could see the huge changes taking place inside of the city, and I was just beginning to get a sense of the coastal management issues looming outside the floodwalls. Clearly this was an exciting place to be, but I hadn’t yet found my niche. After that school year I decided to leave the classroom and take a job as an experiential education instructor at a school for adjudicated youths in Raceland, nearly 50 miles southwest of New Orleans. This was a court mandated school for adolescents who had gotten in legal trouble, and who did not thrive in a traditional classroom. The heart of my job was to get my students away from the classroom and into another type of environment that they were better suited to engage with.
I’ve been working in Kyle’s lab for four years now, involving myself with experiments in Tulane’s Delta Basin and with fieldwork across Southeast Louisiana. The Delta Basin is a hot tub sized experimental basin (as opposed to the Tulane Deepwater Basin, which is pool sized) into which we introduce carefully controlled mixtures of water and sediments to form experimental river deltas, or alluvial fans. We then use photographs and laser scanners to carefully measure the spatial and temporal trends with which our sedimentary systems fill up a depositional basin. My work in the delta basin is to quantify the effects that floods have on the morphology of distributary channels and their preservation in the stratigraphic record. We hypothesize that rivers that experience more intense floods (flashier
My school had a boat and a bus, and I had permission to take my students anywhere in the state. I had a coastal science background from my undergraduate education, and it didn't take long to figure out that the ideal classroom would be the many and varied environments of South Louisiana. We went canoeing (and capsizing!) in Lake Maurepas, monitored water quality in Golden Meadow, and revegetated the Bay Raccourci Land Bridge in South Terrebonne Parish. These were hard trips, but I could see my students gaining confidence with each journey. This was the beginning of my infatuation with what I now know to call Louisiana’s coastal zone. I decided to return to school myself, first as a Master’s student studying coastal geology at the University of New Orleans. As I was wrapping up my thesis there I saw Kyle Straub, who is now my PhD advisor, give a talk on his work. Kyle talked about quantifying stratigraphic organization over basin filling timescales, and he showed a series of simple models that stacked geometric shapes on top of one another according to simple, sometimes stochastic, rules. The geology that had been on my mind had been
Our lab group was fortunate to be able to host the 2015 Summer Institute for Earth Surface Dynamics for 10 days of experimental sedimentology, workshops, and fieldwork. Here is a group of participants displaying a peat that marks the base of the Lafourche lobe near Napoleonville, Louisiana. We hand drilled to 7 m to pull this up. 5
systems) are able to carve deeper channels for themselves, and will be confined to that channel for longer than systems that have a relatively small contrast between low water and flood.
The only surefire way that I know of keeping cool in Louisiana during the summer is to be as subaqueous as possible. Wax Lake Delta, August 10, 2015, the hottest day of the year.
the material that is preserved in a crevasse splay in the Lafourche lobe of the Mississippi River Delta. This crevasse splay, which underlies Napoleonville, Louisiana, is one of many similar splays that constructed the floodplain of the Lower Mississippi River and its distributaries. Characterizing the texture of the material these splays are made of, and relating that to the sediment load of the river, is a critical step in planning land building river diversions, which form the backbone of Louisiana’s coastal Master Plan.
The alternative hypothesis would be that flashier systems overflow their banks more often, and therefore avulse more frequently. Early numerical results suggest that our initial thoughts are correct, but we won’t have a definitive answer until finishing our physical experiment later this fall.
I also work on channel hydraulics and channel network evolution in the Birdsfoot Delta. Recent studies have shown that the pattern of sediment transport in the lower reaches of the trunk channel is controlled by interaction with the downstream water level (i.e., the Gulf of Mexico), and that channel bed friction plays a critical role in modulating this relationship. These studies have typically concentrated on regional scales, and we extend them to the terminal distributary channels which have an additional upstream water level boundary constraint set by the trunk channel. This too has a direct application to Mississippi River management strategies.
I also have two field based projects, both closely connected to managing lowland river systems in the face of subsidence, sea level rise, and growing coastal populations. I have been working with Torbjörn Törnqvist and Zhixiong Shen to quantify the sediment texture of
I will be defending my dissertation in 2016, and looking for jobs that keep me involved in coastal geology research, but with a specific focus on coastal use and management policy. Louisiana is, by necessity, the vanguard of coastal management policy in the United States, and it is likely that my work here will keep me busy for many decades to come.
GIRLS IN STEM Graduate student Jordan Adams has been actively involved in outreach since before she entered the PhD program at Tulane, and she didn’t stop after arriving in New Orleans. She has participated in events with the local Girl Scouts and at the New Orleans Children’s Museum. Last year she brought her outreach to the department through the Girls in STEM at Tulane (GiST) program. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math, and women have been historically underrepresented in STEM fields. The GiST program brings local fifth to eighth grade girls to the Tulane campus for a day every fall and spring semester. The girls participate in a number of activities led primarily by female faculty, staff, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students in the School of Science and Engineering. Last fall Jordan designed an Earth Science GiST project and recruited graduate and undergraduate students to participate. Jordan’s workshop was entitled “Our Diverse Planet”. She introduced the students to Google Earth, software that lets users fly around the Earth (and other planets) and view places of interest. It gives the user access to aerial imagery from multiple times and also provides a number of simple tools, including a measuring tape. The students were introduced to basic concepts such as the cardinal directions, latitude and longitude, and the importance of scale. They also got to learn something about the processes shaping the Earth, as they first explored the Mississippi Delta, and then moved on to Hawaii and the Himalayas. During the session they also got to learn something about rocks, of course. Beyond volunteering, Jordan spends most of her time thinking about the links between surface water hydrology and erosion in burned landscapes. Her dissertation involves fieldwork, analysis of digital maps, and numerical modeling. She and her advisor, Associate Professor Nicole Gasparini, are part of a multi-institutional software development team that is building a new framework for modeling landscape change. So exploring in Google Earth is something Jordan does for her research as well as for outreach, and a bit for fun too. 6
CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2015 AWARD RECIPIENTS Graduate Awardees The Vokes Fellowship
Outstanding Research Assistant
Recipient: Michael Hopkins
Recipient: Chris Esposito
Michael Hopkins was selected the outstanding research assistant by the Earth and Environmental Sciences faculty for his outstanding contributions to research.
Christopher Esposito is the recipient of the Vokes Fellowship awarded by the Earth and Environmental Sciences faculty for his outstanding academic performance and excellence in research.
Outstanding Teaching Assistant
Outstanding Teaching Assistant
Recipient: Ningfang Yang
Recipient: Krista Jankowski
Ningfang Yang was selected the outstanding senior teaching assistant by the Earth and Environmental Sciences faculty for her outstanding contributions to teaching.
Krista Jankowski was selected the outstanding teaching assistant by the Earth and Environmental Sciences faculty for her outstanding contributions to teaching.
Undergraduate Awardees The R. A. Steinmayer Award Recipient: Brianna H. Steinmetz
Brianna has consistently excelled in her major, Environmental science (Earth Science track). She pursued an Honors thesis project that examined the dramatic environmental changes in coastal Louisiana during a period of rapid sea-level rise some 8000 years ago. Her research was based on the analysis of a wide range of micro- and macrofossils from a sediment core she helped collect.
The Harold E. Vokes Award Recipient: Daniel J. Coleman
Dan is the top graduating senior in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences with an overall GPA of 3.98. He is among the top two students to have graduated with a degree in Geology in the last 20 years.
Senior Scholar in Environmental Science Recipient: Jessica Z. Soule
Jessica is one of the top performing graduates in the Earth Science track of Environmental Science program. A diligent and dedicated student, Jesse has consistently shown interest in her major beyond the classroom. She participated in the Hope Garderi’s Project and worked as an intern for the Restore the Mississippi River Delta Campaign. Upon graduating Jesse plans to work in Southeast Asia for an organic farming initiative and hopes to attend graduate school in meteorology.
EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES ALUMNI PARTY Friday, November 6, 2015 • 6:00 to 9:00 PM • Cudd Hall RSVP to Marilyn Reine (mreine@tulane.edu, 504-865-5198) by Friday, October 31.
LET US KNOW WHAT YOU'RE UP TO
Email Karen Muse at: kmuse@tulane.edu or fill out our Alumni Update Submission Form. 7
DEPARTMENT GRADUATES
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Environmental Science Simone Ballard, B.S. • Katey Hockenbury, B.S. • Arye Janoff, B.S. • Patrick Murphy, B.S. • Megan Murray, B.S. • Jessica Soule, B.S. • Brianna Steinmetz, B.S. • Stasia Widerynski, B.S.
May 2015 Earth & Environmental Sciences Alvaro Fernandez, Ph.D. • Annelise Muscietta, M.S. • Vann Smith, M.S.
May 2015 Geology Daniel Coleman, B.S. • Daniel McCarty, B.S. • John Roberson, B.S.
December 2014 Earth & Environmental Sciences Tahmineh Jade Haug, Ph.D. • Elizabeth Williams, Ph.D.
August 2015 Earth & Environmental Sciences Xu Zhou, M.S.
SUPPORT TULANE EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES Please print, fill out, and include the donation form with your contribution. It will insure (1) the department's receipt of your gift; and (2) your acknowledgment by the University for tax purposes. After the department receives your donation and donation form, checks are sent to the Development Office of the University. The form will aid the Department in its accounting. Please make your check payable to: TULANE EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES and indicate where you would like your contribution to be credited.
Name: _______________________________________________________________________ Address: _____________________________________________________________________ City: _________________________________ State: _________ Zip: __________________ I hereby donate: ______ to the Tulane Geology Fund
______ to the W. Kent McWilliams Fund
______ in honor of Harold Vokes If you work for a corporation that matches contributions to universities, please fill out the following information: Corporation Name: ___________________________________________________________ Percentage of Gift Matched (e.g. 100%): ___________
Please return this form, with your gift, to: Tulane EES Funds Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences 101 Blessey Hall New Orleans, LA 70118 Thank you in advance for your generosity and continued support of Tulane EES!
A BIG THANK YOU
The following donors made generous contributions to the department, enabling us to establish an endowed professorship, enhance scholarships, and to support field trips and student research. We are most grateful! Andrew Kronfol (Vicksburg, MS) • Barbara Pyle (Atlanta, GA) • Betsy Strachan Suppes (Johnstown, PA) • David Willis (Roanoke, VA) • Jack Hankins (Bellevue, WA) • Julia and Timothy Doolin (Shreveport, LA) • Kenneth Mallon (Houston, TX) • Loren Setlow (Oakton, VA) • Robert Carson (Walla Walla, WA) • Robert Danos (Denver, CO) • Scott Heape (Addison, TX) • Thomas Westbrook (Metairie, LA) 8