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What happens to rivers and soils as climate changes?
What happens to rivers and soils as climate changes?
The US has incurred billions of dollars in damage from extreme precipitation events linked to anthropogenic climate change since 1980s. Increased erosion and increased sediment yield is likely to damage soils, clogs our rivers and cripple our hydraulic infrastructure, but we have little information on the magnitude of the response of our rivers and landscapes to global climate change because this change occurs on timescales difficult to measure in our lifetimes. Therefore, we must look to times in Earth’s past when atmospheric CO2 concentrations rose rapidly along with temperature to study the landscape response. In the early Eocene, which began ~56 million years ago, there were repeated intervals known as hyperthermal events where global temperatures rapidly increased due to releases in CO2 over a period of ~20,000 years. These are not a perfect analog anthropogenic climate change because we are increasing CO2 over several hundred years, but they are one of the best analogs we have.
Shown here are projected CO2 levels and temperatures from different models of shared socioeconomic pathways, which depend on the choices we make over the next 50 to 100 years. These temperatures reach heights not seen on earth since the Pliocene and at the worse, the Early Eocene (from Tierney et al. 2020).
Where can we study rivers and soils during the Eocene?
Where can we study rivers and soils during the Eocene?
This project will focus on improving scientific and public understanding of how climate change will affect our rivers systems by using analogs from the early Eocene in New Mexico, Wyoming, and North Dakota.
This project will generate new terrestrial paleoclimate records from three fluvially dominated basins from the western US: 1) San Juan Basin of New Mexico, 2) Wind River Basin of Wyoming, and 3) Williston Basin of North Dakota. It will use a novel method that integrates datasets from both sandstone channel facies and floodplain paleosols to test the hypothesized connection between hyperthermals and the large sand bodies and thick packages of kaolinite previously identified in these basins that indicate increased weathering and erosion due to an intensification of the hydrologic cycle. This project will use a multi-proxy approach that includes geochemistry, mineralogy, stable isotopes (δ13C, δ18O, and Δ47), sedimentology and stratigraphy, sandstone petrography, detrital zircon and 40Ar/39Ar geochronology, and magnetostratigraphy to reconstruct the paleoclimate and constrain landscape response to the hyperthermal events both spatially and temporally.
The resulting dataset will be integrated into quantitative models to test how rapid pCO2 increases, global warming, and the resulting hydrologic cycle intensification will increase the magnitude of weathering and sediment yield, which causes billions of dollars in damage to infrastructure and ecosystems from soil loss, erosion, and increased flooding.
Education Plan
Education Plan
The education plan will target a diverse population of students that will strengthen undergraduate exposure to field geology using virtual field trips.
Outreach: How can we share this information with others?
Outreach: How can we share this information with others?
Because climate change can be an abstract and intimidating concept for some groups, collaborations with a world-renowned climate-artist, Jill Pelto, will be used to break down mental barriers and communicate science to the general public and low-income and minority K-12 students.
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