Dawn, 165 million years ago: The breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea is ongoing, the brand new Atlantic Ocean is widening, and North America is moving westward. Significant geological and biological events are shaping the evolution of the landscape, the climate, and various life forms. And amid the western Sierran foothills in California, Kathleen Surpless, Ph.D., Trinity University professor of earth and environmental geosciences, is right in the middle of it all.
Surpless was recently awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in the amount of $191,257 for her project, "Collaborative Research: RUI: Continental-Scale Study of Jura-Cretaceous Basins and Melanges along the Backbone of the North American Cordillera-A Test of Mesozoic Subduction Models." In short, Surpless and her team are studying the geologic processes that formed the North American Cordillera, mountains that extend from western Mexico to Alaska. But in depth—figuratively and literally—Surpless hopes to discover more about how the Cordillera developed, despite more than a century of accepted findings.
We sat down with Surpless and asked her to dig into her research with us.
What does it mean to you to receive this grant? How will it support you in your project?
Without this grant, I would not be able to do this research at all. So the grant is tremendously important in helping me keep my research program active. The grant supports partial summer salary for me and full summer stipends for two Trinity undergraduates in each summer of the grant (three summers). Additionally, it covers the costs associated with travel to complete summer field work in California and southern British Columbia, all of the costs associated with travel to work in a lab at the University of Arizona, all of the analytical costs, and all of the costs to travel and present our results at conferences (for my students and for me). The project is a collaboration with researchers at Montana State University, Purdue University, and the University of Arizona. One of my students, a Trinity alumna, is now completing her Master of Science at Montana State, working with the person I have been collaborating with on research for a few years now.
What kind of research or work does your project entail?
We are studying the geologic processes that formed the North American Cordillera, mountains that extend from western Mexico to Alaska. Despite well over a century of study, there are still lots of questions about how the Cordillera developed. These mountain ranges and neighboring basins (such as the Sierra Nevada and Great Valley basin within California) are conventionally interpreted to have formed due to eastward subduction of an oceanic plate beneath the western margin of the North American continent.
However, recent studies challenge this model. These models propose that much of the western Cordillera formed as an island archipelago—a chain of islands clustered together in a body of water—above westward subduction of an oceanic plate far from the margin of North America. In this alternative model, the island archipelago became part of the Cordillera when the North American continent collided with the archipelago. Our continental-scale study will test these two models along four east-west transects across the western Cordillera in central Alaska, South East Alaska, British Columbia, and California.
How will Trinity students participate in this research?
Field teams from the four universities, which include undergraduates from Trinity University and Ph.D. students and undergraduates from the other three universities, will map and sample along these four transects during summer months. My Trinity students and I will process samples on campus to isolate specific minerals for analysis. We'll also use two different mass spectrometers at the LaserChron Center at the University of Arizona to collect isotopic data from those isolated minerals. Together with the field work, we hope our isotopic and age data will allow us to test various hypotheses related to the two main models of Cordilleran development.
How do you plan on compiling your findings, and how will you share them?
Initially, we'll share findings at conferences. Students will be lead presenters on posters to disseminate their parts of the project, and I will give conference talks that likely pull together results from several students. We'll be working with researchers at the other universities to eventually write papers to submit to scientific journals, such as Geological Society of America Bulletin, Geology, or Tectonics.
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