INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH GROUPS

FROM INVESTIGATING RARE EARTH ELEMENT RESOURCES IN ABANDONED COAL MINES TO MEASURING GRAVITY AND AMBIENT SEISMIC NOISE DYNAMICS IN THE FARMINGTON BAY PLAYA, DEPARTMENT RESEARCHERS HAVE ENLISTED TEAM MEMBERS THAT EXTEND FAR BEYOND THE DEPARTMENT OF GEOLOGY & GEOPHYSICS.

Others include faculty and students from different departments in the College of Science as well as those from state and national geological surveys and even the Assistant VP at the U for Faculty Equity and Diversity. The stories these research groups are telling are ones of impactful collaboration as they work together across disciplines on critical issues, such as saving the Great Salt Lake and better predicting water sources for the arid Mountain and Southwest.

The confluence of critical funding, cumulative decades of research experience, and the enthusiasm and new blood of student geologists and geophysicists provide a gallery of remarkable work by equally remarkable people shown here. <

Groundwater And Sustaining The Great Salt Lake

Kip Solomon, Paul Brooks, Tonie VanDam, Mike Thorne, Fan-Chi Lin, and Bill Johnson

This group, assisted by students, is installing piezometers (which measure pore pressures in the ground), analyzing environmental tracers, measuring gravity and ambient seismic noise dynamics, and collecting resistivity profiles. These assessments and measurements are occurring at locations ranging from the high Wasatch to the Farmington Bay playa for the purpose of understanding what portion of water reaching Great Salt Lake becomes groundwater during its transit from snowpack downward. The results will elucidate the role of groundwater in sustaining wetland habitat on the lake’s eastern shore and the lake itself. <

Analyzing Sediment In The Great Salt Lake

Gabriel Bowen and Deming Yang

This research duo is analyzing geochemical and sedimentological records from Great Salt Lake sediment cores to reconstruct lake-level and salinity variation over the Holocene. These records document both natural and early human influences on the lake and provide context for recent and ongoing changes. <

Groundwater Storage In Mountain Catchments

Paul Brooks and Kip Solomon

Graduate students under the direction of Brooks and Solomon have demonstrated that groundwater storage in mountain catchments throughout western North America is the primary control on variability in runoff efficiency each spring. Hydrochemical sampling and tritium age dating indicate that these mountain groundwater stores are much larger and more variable than previously assumed, calling for fundamental changes in how we predict water supply in response to climate change. The team has incorporated simple, transferable metrics of these groundwater stores into tools for water managers that reduce the uncertainty of annual streamflow prediction by 50 percent. These improvements in predictability allow for more efficient allocation of water resources as demand increases and supplies become more variable. <

A New Climatic Drive for Precipitation & Temperature

Court Strong and Paul Brooks

A collaborative project between students and Strong and Brooks has used a regionally coherent, periodic variability in groundwater storage to identify a previously unrecognized climatic driver for precipitation and temperature in the western US. Found in the North Atlantic Ocean, the Atlantic Quadpole Mode (AQM) interacts with the well-known El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) pattern in the Pacific Ocean to influence winter snowfall. Although the interaction of AQM and ENSO improves climate predictability throughout the West, the advances are most notable in the area between roughly 38 and 42 degrees N latitude where ENSO exhibits little to no skill in predictability. This region includes the source waters for the Colorado River, Great Salt Lake, and the Northern Sierra Nevada range, three of the most important and most water-stressed environments in the U.S.. Advanced knowledge of how wet the winter will be in this region represents a major advance in water resource management in western

The Last Ice In The American West

Leif Anderson, Mike Thorne, Tonie Van Dam, FanChi Lin, and Surya Pachhai

As air temperatures continue to rise in the American West the remaining alpine, glacial ice is disappearing with implications for downstream water and life. This team is documenting the remaining ice in the Wasatch using geophysical, glaciological, and numerical modeling techniques. They revealed massive, glacial ice in both Timpanogos and Gad Valley rock glaciers using electrical resistivity tomography and wrote a new numerical model to represent hillslope-ice accumulation processes at these rock glaciers. They are continuing to measure the downslope movement of ice-bearing landforms with Jeff Moore and Molly McCreary and are dating rock glaciers using 3He surface-exposure dating with Wil Mace and Kip Solomon. Alec Phips-Wirtz, with help from Bill Johnson, is measuring microplastics in Emerald Lake in front of Timpanogos Glacier. Students as well as geologists from the Utah Geological Survey and biologists from Utah State University have contributed to this

Spatial, Isotope Geochemistry

Gabriel Bowen and Chris Stantis

This research duo is helping to lead two international efforts that will create interdisciplinary databases promoting the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets (FAIR) exchange of stable isotope data (IsoBank and IsoArch). PhD student Paige Austin and former PhD student Clement Bataille are exploring the use of machine learning and AI methods for isotopic modeling and data interpretation. The whole team contributes to the annual SPATIAL summer course, which this year trained its 10th cohort of graduate students and postdocs in "big data" methods for isotopeenabled science. <

Gabe Bowen and some of the SPATIAL team

Advance Grant For Women in STEM

Brenda Bowen, Claudia Geist, Ramón Barthelemy, and Myra Washington

This team is leading an institutional transformation project using a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation under its ADVANCE program, devoted to enhancing the role of women in the nation’s STEM workforce. The challenges faced by women scientists are compounded by their additional identities, including being women of color and/or part of the LGBTQ+ community, who experience additional barriers as faculty members. <

The University of Utah's ADVANCE IT project team.

Credit: Harriet Richardson

Critical Minerals in Coal

Lauren Birgenheier and Emma Morris

This duo, assisted by students Haley Coe, Laura Wilcock, Peyton Fausett, Brittney Hoskins, Logan AshurstMcGee, Nicholas Bailey, as well as colleagues from Utah Geological Survey and Colorado Geological Survey are investigating the rare earth element resources that may be available across Utah and western Colorado’s active coal mines for mining and the clean energy transition. The project is interdisciplinary, involving several faculty in the U’s Mining Engineering and Metallurgy or Materials Science and Engineering departments, including Michael Free, Prashant Sarswat, Jan Miller, ChenLuh Lin, Swomitra Mohanty, Rajive Ganguli, Pratt Rogers, and Jessica Wempen. Current results suggest that there may be significant rare earth elements found in mudstone units above and below coal seams, which provide an opportunity to leverage and develop non-fuel critical mineral resources in active mines in Utah and western Colorado. <