Geology

This summer, I interned at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY as a museum assistant in the biology and geology departments. In this role, I organized the university's fossil collections, created a new labelling system for lab specimens, as well as designed and installed a display in the Johnson Hall of Science.  During these weeks, I had the opportunity to work with multiple professors and faculty members to understand their research and expand my proficiency in various skills. 

Each ring in a tree's trunk is a time capsule recording everything from temperature to streamflow in a given year. In the Adirondack Mountains, some Eastern Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) have been keeping this journal for more than 300 years! This summer, I cored 35 trees (16 hemlocks, 15 red spruce, and 4 black spruce) along the edge of Fox Fen, an ecologically sensitive wetland whose unique setting makes the trees especially sensitive to changes in climate.

My research focused on the presence of microplastics in freshwater bivalves. Microplastics are everywhere, and my research explored how filter feeders, like clams, can be used to explore this topic. When collecting clams it was important to not use plastic tools or containers that could possibly impact the microplastic findings. Microplastics can be found in the clam’s tissue and the clam’s fecal matter. I worked with Dr. Oldacre and the chemistry department to dissolve the organic material leaving the microplastics behind.

Over the last 50 years, Caribbean lagoons have undergone a major transformation from coral- to macroalgal-dominated habitats, coupled with a shift from historically dominant reef-building taxa to more opportunistic, stress-tolerant, non- framework building coral species. Although shallow lagoons protected by barrier reefs are well developed along the northern Jamaican coastline, studies documenting their biota, including major carbonate sediment producers are rare.

The advent of remote-sensing technologies (e.g., LiDAR) has been vital to understanding the Earth’s landscape.  The Alaskan transportation sector, for example, relies on these technologies to develop models to better understand landscape stability in Alaska (i.e., Miandad et al., 2020). These desktop models, however, require ground truthing to confirm their accuracy.  Based on a model developed by Miandad et al.

Alaska’s interior transportation corridors are susceptible to landslide events and are often burdened by excessive repair costs and prolonged repair time. The state requires a new model that can project long-term landscape stability given the constraints of a limited landslide inventory. Miandad et al. (2020) developed a remote sensing model using LiDAR and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to identify slope stability.

Recent uplift of the Precambrian Adirondack (ADK) Mountains provides a glimpse into the center of the ancient orogenic belt of the Grenville Province. The ADK Highlands are dominated by the Anorthosite-Mangerite-Charnockite-Granite (AMCG) intrusive suite.  Structural and lithologic diversity in the ADK Highlands have been attributed to the effects of multiple orogenic events. The Marcy Anorthosite Massif, located within the ADK Highlands, is typically depicted as one homogenous geologic unit of metanorthosite and anorthosite gneiss.

Long-runout landslides, though uncommon on Earth, are prevalent throughout the solar system and well-preserved on Mars due to low rates of erosion. Although mineral composition, specifically presence of clay minerals, has been found to be an important predictor variable in susceptibility models of highly mobile terrestrial landslides (Lee and Min, 2001; Van Den Eeckhaut et al., 2006; Yalcin, 2007), most studies of Martian landslides have not directly considered composition (Watkins et al., 2020).

St. Lawrence University is located in a geologically unique location close to the boundary of the Adirondack highlands and lowlands. In these waterways, insoluble elements systematically decrease downriver from the Adirondacks to the St. Lawrence Lowlands, while the water pH increases. Freshwater bivalves are threatened because of degradation of their habitats due to human activities. Anthropogenically induced changes in pH like for example due to acid rain are among the factors imperiling these organisms.

Changes in river discharge have been measured throughout the last century by the U.S. Geological Survey, with data recorded as far back as 1889. The USGS Streamgaging Network provides data related to river flow and chemical and physical parameters, in almost real time. Through the USGS database it is possible to observe long-term trends in discharge rates over a period of time when global population, the use of resources, and a myriad of environmental changes have accelerated. During this project I chose to focus on the Arkansas River and its tributaries.

Coarse-woody debris (CWD) is a basic part of the forest-floor ecosystem and provides stabilization for topsoil and a habitat for various animals and fungi. Understanding differences in CWD across select Adirondack (ADK) lake basins may provide insight into forest dynamics and palaeoclimate work. As an extension of previous works by Freimuth et al. (2020), we selected four basins from their work to evaluate CWD within their catchments: Debar Pond (DP), Moose Pond (MP), Heart Lake (HL), and East Pine Pond (EPP).

This project involves writing a grant proposal for research that will be a component of a NASA Future Investigators in Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) project called “Compositional and Thermophysical Controls on Martian Mass Movements,” by Helen Eifert '18.