Announcing the 2015 Kleinman Grants for Volcano Research
*****************************************************************************************************
Announcing the 2015 Kleinman Grants for Volcano Research
The Community Foundation for Southwest Washington announces that the following students have been awarded 2015 Kleinman Grants for Volcano Research. Jack Kleinman was a USGS employee at the David. A. Johnston Cascades Volcano Observatory who died in a kayaking accident in 1994. By supporting field-oriented research projects in volcanology, the Kleinman Grants memorialize Jack’s exuberance for fieldwork, volcanoes, and the natural world. During the past 20 years, the program has helped dozens of aspiring volcanologists who seek to learn more about volcanoes and how they work.
Erin Fitch is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who will be working with her research adviser, Dr. Sarah Fagents, and with USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory geologists Frank Trusdell and Matt Patrick on a field and laboratory study of the Nā Pu’u a Pele Littoral Cone Group along the south coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. The cones formed during the Hapimamo eruption along the southwest rift zone of Mauna Loa volcano about 240 years ago, when a large-volume lava flow entered the ocean and interacted explosively with seawater. Erin’s project will include field work to map the littoral deposits and an extensive ejecta blanket, plus laboratory measurements of grain-size, clast morphologies, and density. Results will be compared to those from a similar study of the Raudholar littoral cone group in Iceland, which Fagents and Fitch have undertaken with support from the National Science Foundation. The ultimate goal of Erin’s research is to better understand the range of formation mechanisms of rootless cones resulting from explosive lava-water interactions in the littoral environment.
Shawn Gahagan is a graduate student at Washington State University, Pullman, who has selected a challenging field area in the high desert of southern Idaho for his M.S. research project. Working with his research adviser, John Wolff, Shawn plans to map and sample extensive rhyolitic units in western portions of the Tuff of Little Jacks Creek and others related to the Juniper Mountain volcanic center in the central Snake River Plain. The deposits were produced by volcanism related to the Yellowstone hotspot and share an unusual low-δ18O isotopic signature. Past studies have resulted in two hypotheses for formation of low-δ18O rhyolites: (1) cannibalization of hydrothermally altered intracaldera materials or (2) assimilation of a pre-existing low-δ18O protolith. After mapping the deposits to identify distinct lavas and tuffs, Shawn will analyze samples collected from the gradational boundary between normal and low-δ18O rhyolites to evaluate the alternative hypotheses for formation of the low-δ18O units.
Cassie Geraghty is an M.S. candidate at Washington State University, Pullman, working under the direction of her research adviser, Dr. David Gaylord. Her research combines elements of volcanology, lake processes, and climate science¾a combination with unusually broad appeal. Cassie’s field area comprises the Clarkia fossil beds in Clarkia, Idaho, which resulted from the blockage of the ancestral St. Maries fluvial system by the Priest Rapids flow of the Columbia River Basalts. Current age estimates for Clarkia’s distinctively fossiliferous lake deposits rest largely on correlations of index fossils, which makes deposition rates difficult to constrain. Cassie’s project will attempt to provide tighter constraints by chemically correlating dispersed ash fall deposits to their volcanic centers, with known ages. The results of the proposed research will help address long-standing issues about Clarkia Lake’s depositional history, paleoclimate record, and relation to Columbia River Basalt volcanism.
Angela Seligman is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oregon in Eugene. For her thesis project under the supervision of Dr. Ilya Bindeman, she hopes to develop a new approach for establishing rates of secondary hydration in volcanic glass by exploiting a unique field opportunity at Mount St. Helens, Washington. Water content in volcanic glass can reflect a history of magmatic degassing, followed by secondary hydration from meteoric water. However, modern analytical techniques lack the ability to reliably distinguish the original magmatic water from secondary meteoric water. Working with Larry Mastin, Alexa Van Eaton, and Rick Hoblitt from the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory, Angela will resample pyroclastic flow and blast deposits from Mount St. Helens’ 1980 eruption at the same sites collected by Hoblitt soon after the eruption. By comparing glass from samples taken in 1980, which are available from USGS archives, to that from samples taken in 2015, Angela will be able to determine whether, under normal surface conditions, volcanic ash can become secondarily hydrated within decades by exposure to meteoric water. Understanding the hydration of volcanic ash is important for various geologic studies including degassing and relative explosivity of eruptions, studies that utilize stable isotope-based paleo-altimetry or paleoclimate, dating of obsidian artifacts, and the effects of ash ingestion into jet aircraft engines.
Congratulations to this year’s Kleinman Grant recipients. We look forward to hearing about your results at scientific meetings and reading about them in the research literature.
Volcano Listserv is a collaborative venture among Arizona State University (ASU), Portland State University (PSU), the Global Volcanism Program (GVP) of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, and the International Association for Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI).
ASU - http://www.asu.edu/ PSU - http://pdx.edu/ GVP - http://www.volcano.si.edu/ IAVCEI - http://www.iavcei.org/
To unsubscribe from the volcano list, send the message: signoff volcano to: listserv@xxxxxxx, or write to: volcano-request@xxxxxxx.
To contribute to the volcano list, send your message to: volcano@xxxxxxx. Please do not send attachments.
==============================================================
