This study will use a multi-disciplinary approach to unravel the depositional history of the Kootznahoo Formation in Southeast Alaska with a specific focus on the exhumation history of the Coast Mountains batholith (CMB), and how high latitudes (~57°N) recorded overall global cooling from the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) through the Eocene-Oligocene transition to the present icehouse state.
At Franklin & Marshall College, 2009.
At Franklin & Marshall College, 2009.
The Abitibi Greenstone Belt (AGB), and specifically the Blake River Group, affords us the relatively rare opportunity to study seafloor volcanic and hydrothermal processes in an area that is both accessible and has a significant thickness of exposed extrusive pile. We plan to study mafic volcanic rocks of the AGB that were erupted as part of an ancient Archean seafloor sequence. Our proposed detailed mapping, physical properties, geochemical, and petrographic studies will contribute to the geologic understanding of seafloor volcanic and hydrothermal processes within the context of modern ocean crustal processes and provide us with a better understanding of how hydrothermal fluid flow patterns may have operated early in Earth’s history.
This project will join a large interdisciplinary study (Boulder Creek Critical Zone Observatory: Weathered profile development in a rocky environment and its influence on watershed hydrology and biogeochemistry—NSF 0724960) directed by Suzanne Anderson, University of Colorado and Institute for Arctic and Alpine Studies (INSTAAR). The “observatory” will consist of 3 small, instrumented sites in the Boulder Creek basin: (1) a steep alpine area in the Boulder watershed; (2) a forested, mid-elevation catchment developed in deeply weathered materials, and (3) a steep, lower-elevation basin where surficial deposits are of variable thickness.
