The largest source of uncertainty among climate models simulating the climate system response to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations is the cloud feedback, the amplification or dampening of the warming from the carbon dioxide forcing by clouds. Refining our knowledge of the cloud feedback is therefore essential to gaining a...
Cascadia’s 1700 earthquake generated a tsunami and widespread subsidence along Pacific Northwest coastline. The tsunami deposited sandy sediments in many Oregon coastal estuaries, such as Alsea Bay. Although the recurrence of subduction-generated megathrust earthquakes and tsunami events in this region are recorded in the stratigraphy, knowledge of the full inland...
The details of the 1700 Cascadia Subdction Zone earthquake and tsunami can be better constrained using data from tsunami sand sheets, provided knowledge of the waveform, estuary geometry and bed roughness controls on the deposition pattern of the sand sheet. In this study, we use the hydrodynamic and sediment transport...
Ice core records provide us a way to investigate past climate and look in detail at past atmospheric conditions. With, on average, higher CO2 concentrations in the Greenland record, the focus of this project was on the potential mechanisms responsible for the higher CO2 concentrations in the Greenland ice core...
There are few modern isotopic ages of igneous rocks and polymetallic (Pb-Zn-Ag-Cu-Au) hydrothermal mineral veins of the Mt. Thompson quadrangle in southwestern Montana. Lithology ages of this region vary from approximately 85-80 Ma Butte granite(Kbg) (Lund et al. 2002) to 48.6 Ma of Lowland Creek Volcanic Field (LCVF) (Dudas et...
The Marinoan Snowball Earth ended 635 Ma ago during the Neoproterozoic Era, after an interval in which the Earth was completely covered by glaciers. Thawing of these glaciers formed cap carbonates across shallow marine depositional environments. The Noonday Formation is a cap carbonate that formed after the deglaciation of the...
The Ratio Mountain Quadrangle is located in Southwest Montana, East of the city of
Butte. This quadrangle features two major geologic units; the Elkhorn Mountain
Volcanics, a series of several ignimbrites of varying composition, and the Boulder
Batholith, a large granite pluton that rose through the EMV. Previous studies in...
Over 70% of the Antarctic krill population exists along the Antarctic Peninsula, a region undergoing rapid climate change. Recent studies have shown a clear correlation between krill recruitment each spring and the timing and coverage of sea ice the winter before, with less sea ice and a shorter duration being...
Over the last several years, the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, in collaboration with the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission and Oregon State University, has been sampling young-of-the-year groundfishes and other small demersal fishes along the Newport Hydrographic (NH) line. An important question concerning these surveys is whether the NH line...
Warm, high pressure systems are measured from a weather station on a high elevation peak in the Oregon Coast range during the winter months. Temperature observations on Mary’s Peak show abnormally warm air in relation to the surrounding areas. The goal of this study was to characterize the frequency and...
IODP 351 cruise to the back arc region of the Izu Bonin contained cores with tephra layers intermitted within. These tephra layers under went electron micro probe analysis to gather major earth element abundances in order to put a parameter of a. where did the tephra originate from (volcanic source)...
During volcanic eruptions ascending magma undergoes decompression, resulting in a decrease of dissolved H2O. This creates unstable conditions for the hydrous mineral amphibole. As a result a reaction rim forms from anhydrous minerals such as pyroxene, plagioclase, and Fe-Ti oxides (Rutherford and Hill, 1993). There have been numerous studies done...
The origin of hornblendite and other mafic mineral-rich veins found in Cretaceous plutonic rocks from the Northern Cascades is currently not well known. This study seeks to investigate the possible relationship between host plutonic rocks and hornblendite and pyroxene-rich veins by comparing the chemical compositions and petrographic features between the...
The origin of hornblendite and other mafic mineral-rich veins found in Cretaceous plutonic rocks from the Northern Cascades is currently not well known. This study seeks to investigate the possible relationship between host plutonic rocks and hornblendite and pyroxene-rich veins by comparing the chemical compositions and petrographic features between the...
The undergradtuate research project was the completion, manipulation and assessment of a population model. The stage based population model assessed the late larval and juveniles stages of the hard shell clam Mercenaria mercenaria. There were seven class sizes input into the model starting with pediveligers and ending with juveniles at...
Three key tectonic domains of western North America, the Walker Lane Fault Zone (WLFZ), northwestern Basin and Range (NWBR), and Cascade arc, intersect in south-central Oregon. Bounded by Cascade arc volcanoes in the west, the Klamath Graben is traditionally regarded as the western-most extent of the Basin and Range extensional...