Current and Recent PROJECTS

   

East Antarctic Ice Sheet Response to Past, Present and Future Warming

When does East Antarctic ice grow and melt? What role does it play in global climate?       

This project is funded by National Science Foundation, grant ANT - 1043554. 

Adam Lewis & Ken Lepper, North Dakota State University, are PI & co-PI on this grant.  

Rachel Valletta (Ph.D. student), Felix Zamora (M.Sci. student) and Ashley Steffen (undergraduate) also work on this project.

I work on the GIS portion of this grant with Paul Morin, University of Minnesota (Polar Geospatial Center)


Erosion and the atmospheric CO2 cycle


Charles Lyell wrote in The Principles of Geology in 1867, “Deposition and denudation are processes inseparably connected, and what is true of the rate of one of them, must be true for the rate of the other.


How has weathering changed globally over the last 12 Million years?  Has it been impacted by climate perturbations?


I collaborate with Friedhelm von Blanckenburg, GFZ-Potsdam on this topic - especially as it relates to meteoric Beryllium-10.


I collaborate with Jochen Schmitt, Uni. Bern, on this topic as it relates to ice cores and with Anders Carlson, Oregon State, and Liviu Gioson, WHOI, as it pertains to ocean cores.  


How much sediment leaves Earth’s continents in a year? How has that amount changed in the past?  Why should we care?  


Alexandru ‘Tibi’ Codillean, GFZ-Potsdam, Germany, and Brandon McElroy, University of Wyoming, collaborate on this work with me and it was partly funded through the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics. The dataset can be found here - as it was also funded by GFZ-Potsdam.


Do rates of erosion appear to change over different timescales even when they should be constant?  


We used cosmogenic nuclides and tree roots exposures to calculate rates of erosion over different timescales in a famous network of sapping channels upstream of the Apalachicola delta around Bristol, Florida and in N. California to show that Lyell was right and that the ‘Sadler effect‘ holds for erosional environments as well as the traditional effect from depositional environments.  


Brandon McElroy, University of Wyoming, collaborates on this work and it was funded through the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics.


River Response to Tectonic Uplift


How do rivers respond to uplift and how do we measure it?


We used cosmogenic nuclides to quantify the pattern of erosion rates in the South Fork of the Eel River in N. California, USA.  I worked on this project through the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics, where I hold an affiliate scientist position. 


Nicole Gasparini, Tulane University, and Ben Crosby, Idaho State, have collaborated on this with me.  Ben Crosby used GIS to analyze LiDAR images from NCALM and Nicole used the model CHILD - free and downloadable from the CSDMS website.


Noah Finnegan, University of California-Santa Cruz; Joel Scheingross, Cal Tech, and Bill Dietrich are also collaborators on this N. California work. 


Burial Dating of Fluvial Deposits


Gilles Brocard (postdoc) and Christian Teyssier University of Minnesota (PI) and I have used burial dating to understand hydrologic controls on tectonic reorganization of river networks in Guatemala and also how long ago Puerto Rico uplifted.


Continental Dynamics - Central Anatolian Tectonics: From Collision to Escape

What are the plate dynamics from the mantle to the Earth's surface, the origin and consequences of magmatism, the timing and mechanisms by which distributed strain became localized in large strike-slip faults, and the evolution of relief and landscape?

Starting in Winter 2011, the Willenbring lab will be participating in a five-year, NSF-funded research project in Turkey to examine the Earth-surface response to Anatolian Plateau uplift. Click here for more information on the research being done in Turkey and the CD-CAT team: http://www.geo.umn.edu/orgs/whitney/CD-CAT-index.html 

Donna Whitney, University of Minnesota are lead PIs on this grant.  Gilles Brocard works on the geomophology component of this project with Lindsay Schoenbohm, University of Toronto and Andreas Mulch, University of Frankfurt.     

Sediment and Carbon Transport and Fate


How do fine sediment sources vary during a flood and how has that changed over the last few centuries and millennia?  How long is sediment stored in floodplains? Are floodplain sedimentation rate records supporting a false paradigm of anthropogenic erosion?


Thomas Hoffmann, University of Bonn, works with me on this topic.


Patrick Belmont, Utah State, is also a PI on a grant studying this topic in the Minnesota River catchment.


Wes Lauer, Seattle University, has collaborated with me on this topic too in general terms, but also specifically on the Neuse River with Nat Lifton, Purdue University.


How does carbon cycle through soil and floodplains and how can we determine its fate?  How does anthropogenic erosion affect the carbon cycle?


I collaborate with Alain Plante, Penn, and Kyungsoo Yoo and Nic Jelinski, University of Minnesota, on this work. 


I learn a lot from the LUCIFS carbon working group on this topic. 


Vanessa Boschi (PhD student) is working on this project as well as on the retention behavior of Beryllium.

Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory

How (and where) does rain erode a mountain?  How long has Puerto Rico had mountain peaks?  When did the stratosphere become contaminated with Mercury? 

Gilles Brocard (Postdoctoral Researcher) & Jaivime Evaristo (PhD student) and Marcie Occhi (Masters project) are working on this project.  Hyejung Lee, a Penn undergraduate, also worked on this project.

Jamie Shanley, USGS, Martha Scholl, USGS, Jim Kaste, College of William and Mary, have collaborated on this with us. 

 

Tracing Paleo-permafrost in Siberia


We use meteoric cosmogenic nuclides to date permafrost build-up since the Pliocene at Lake El’gygytgyn in Northern Siberia.  See more info on ‘Lake E‘ on this website for the AWI and this website for the NSF drilling contingent.  Here is a photo.


This project is funded by a German National Science Foundation (DFG) grant.  The Lake drilling funding was shared between NSF and DFG.  Georg Schwamborn, Alfred Wegener Institute, is also a PI on this grant.

photo: f. von Blanckenburg