Tag: Dedman

WFAA Channel 8: SMU study — Quakes shallow, concentrated at fault line

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 12, 2015
No Comments on WFAA Channel 8: SMU study — Quakes shallow, concentrated at fault line

Next step is to investigate what triggered the earthquakes, both natural and man-made.

WFAA Channel 8 reporters Byron Harris and Marjorie Owens covered the recent interim report about the research findings of Southern Methodist University’s seismology team surrounding a recent series of earthquakes in the Irving, Texas area.

The Channel 8 report, “SMU study: Quakes shallow, concentrated at fault line,” covered a briefing with the press on Friday, Feb. 6, to explain progress on the team’s earthquake research.

Initial results reveal that the earthquakes that occurred near the site of the old Texas Stadium were relatively shallow and concentrated along a narrow two mile line that indicates a fault extending from Irving into West Dallas.

SMU and the United States Geological Survey shared the report with the mayors of Dallas and Irving spelling out preliminary information gleaned after SMU’s installation in January of more than 20 portable earthquake monitors around the earthquake sites. SMU seismologists Heather DeShon and Brian Stump, in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, answered questions during the briefing with reporters.

The segment aired Feb. 6, 2015.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Byron Harris and Marjorie Owens
WFAA
Southern Methodist University has released preliminary results from a study spurred by the recent earthquakes that have rattled North Texas.

The quakes, which have primarily centered near the site of the old Texas Stadium in Irving, “were relatively shallow and concentrated along a narrow two mile line that indicates a fault extending from Irving into West Dallas,” read a statement based on SMU’s findings.

According to the statement, SMU and the United States Geological Survey shared their preliminary findings with the mayors of Dallas and Irving after the university installed 20 portable monitors around the area of the quakes’ epicenters.

“They’re moving a little bit north and they form a linear trend,” said SMU Seismologist Heather DeShon.

Instead of a random pattern of quakes inferred from distant sensors, more-refined data now suggests the January quakes happened in a more focused pattern of major quakes and aftershocks, east and north of the University of Dallas. The scientists estimate the fault that caused the quakes is two miles long and from three-to-five miles deep.

“In order to have an earthquake of 3.6 (as occurred in Irving in January), there has to be a fault there,” Dr. DeShon said.

The study is in its beginning phase, but SMU seismologist said the initial findings are an important start to their investigation.

“We can begin studying how this fault moves – both the amount and direction of motion,” he said.

The seismologists said the reason why the quakes have been felt in far North Texas is because of their relatively close proximity to the surface in the granite “basement.”

Read the full story.

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SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

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Tags Beatrice Magnani, Brian W. Stump, Chris Hayward, Dedman, Heather R. DeShon, Hornbach, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News

SMU Daily Campus: Navigating neutrinos — Professor studies most elusive particle in the universe

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 28, 2014

Thomas Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, works with more than 200 scientists around the world to study one of the universe's most elusive particles — the neutrino. (Photo: Ellen Smith, The Daily Campus) — Thomas Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, works with more than 200 scientists around the world to study one of the universe’s most elusive particles — the neutrino.
(Photo: Ellen Smith, The Daily Campus)

Journalist Lauren Aguirre of the SMU Daily Campus covered the research of SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics.

Coan collaborates with more than 200 scientists around the world to study one of the universe’s most elusive particles — the neutrino.

Neutrinos could yield crucial information about the early moments of the universe, according to Coan and other scientists on the NOvA experiment, which will gather data from a detector in Minnesota.

“Neutrinos are fascinating. They are, besides light, the most numerous particle in the universe yet are notoriously difficult to study since they interact with the rest of matter so feebly,” he said. “Produced in many venues, from laboratories to stars and even bones, they may be their own anti-particles and perhaps play a key role in explaining why any matter at all exists today and survived annihilation with its sister anti-matter produced all the way back in the Big Bang, many billions of years ago.”

The NUMI Off-Axis electron neutrino Appearance, or NOvA, is the world’s longest-distance neutrino experiment. It consists of two huge particle detectors placed 500 miles apart, and its job is to explore the properties of an intense beam of neutrinos.

The Daily Campus article published Feb. 27, “Navigating neutrinos: Professor studies most elusive particle in the universe.”

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Lauren Aguirre
The Daily Campus
Thomas Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is working with over 200 scientists from around the world to study one of the universe’s most elusive particles — the neutrino.

Neutrinos are one of the most abundant particles in the universe, but are hard to detect because they rarely interact with other particles. The NuMI Off-Axis electron neutrino Appearance, or NOvA, experiment may explain the makeup of the universe.

“Neutrinos play a key role in explaining why anti-matter still exists,” Coan said.

Anti-matter are particles that have the same mass as ordinary matter people are familiar with, but anti-matter has opposite charges. When matter and anti-matter collide, they annihilate each other. According to the NOvA experiment website, studying neutrinos can help explain why the universe has more matter than anti-matter. Because humans are made of regular matter, understanding the balance between these two particles can explain why humans exist.

“By understanding these fundamental questions, we can get down to the fundamental levels of how the universe works,” said Brian Rebel, a staff scientist at Fermilab, the organization that is managing NOvA.

Coan started working at SMU in 1994 and joined the NOvA collaboration in 2005.

Read the full story.

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For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

Tags Dedman, SMU Department of Physics, Thomas E. Coan

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

NatGeo: Shark-like Tails Sped Ancient Sea Monsters Through Oceans

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date September 13, 2013

A new study finds that the prehistoric predators of the ocean, mosasaurs, were not as slow as scholars once thought.

The first mosasaur tail on record with a preserved soft tissue outline (top picture). In similarity with whales and ichthyosaurs, Mosasaurs gradually attained a shark-like appearance (bottom picture) Image courtesy NatGeo.

Science journalist Jane J. Lee with National Geographic reported on the research of SMU Research Associate Michael J. Polcyn, who co-authored a new study that found the ancient sea monsters known as mosasaurs were not as slow as paleontologists once thought, thanks to their shark-like tails.

The National Geographic article, “Shark-like Tails Sped Ancient Sea Monsters Through Oceans,” was published in September.

Polcyn is a vertebrate paleontologist and director of the Visualization Laboratory in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences whose current research interests include the early evolution of Mosasauroidea and adaptations in secondarily aquatic tetrapods. His research involves the application of advanced imaging techniques and other computer-based technology to problems in paleontology. Polcyn’s fieldwork is currently focused in Upper Cretaceous marine deposits of Angola.

Read the National Geographic article.

EXCERPT:

By Jane J. Lee
National Geographic
Sea monsters lying in wait for unsuspecting prey sounds scary enough. But slap on a tail that let them run down their dinner—much like today’s great white sharks—and mosasaurs could truly be considered one of the ancient world’s nightmares.

And that’s exactly what a new study published September 10 in Nature Communications has confirmed.

A 72-million-year-old fossil specimen of Prognathodon—a genus of mosasaur—found in a Jordanian quarry in 2008 revealed fin-like soft-tissue imprints along its tail. Those imprints demonstrate that this group of ancient sea monsters possessed powerful tails similar to ones seen on sharks today, rather than the puny ones on eels or sea snakes.

Mosasaurs were aquatic reptiles that prowled the seas and freshwater streams toward the end of the age of dinosaurs, about 98 to 66 million years ago.

Although they are fairly well represented in the fossil record, finding soft-tissue evidence for shark-like tails on these lizard ancestors isn’t something that study co-author Michael Polcyn, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, expected to come across in his lifetime.

This fossil is so well preserved that researchers can discern the direction of stiffening fibers in the tail, he added.

“You can [also] see the outlines of scales,” said study co-author Johan Lindgren, a vertebrate paleontologist at Lund University in Sweden.

Questioning the Past
For over 200 years, scholars thought mosasaurs sported paddle-shaped tails much like sea snakes, said Lindgren. Since mosasaurs are true lizards, scholars formerly thought that the ancient reptile’s tail should look like those on their living lizard relatives.

But this limited mosasaurs — some of which could grow to over 33 feet (10 meters) long — to short bursts of speed typical of ambush predators.

“It was generally assumed that their swimming speeds were low and at best they could do a quick lunge,” said Bruce Young, a researcher at the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in Missouri who is studying how reptiles move.

Read the National Geographic article.

Tags Dedman, Michael J. Polcyn, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

Dallas Morning News: Fort Worth coelacanth fossil is missing link among world’s oldest animal lineages

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 5, 2013

The coelacanth research of SMU paleontology doctoral student John Graf was covered by Dallas Morning News journalist Marc Ramirez.

Graf identified a new species of coelacanth from fossil fish bones discovered in Texas. Ramirez described the discovery and identification in a Feb. 1 article, “Fort Worth coelacanth fossil proves to be a missing link in one of the world’s oldest animal lineages.”

Graf discusses the fossil in this video: “100 million-year-old coelacanth discovered in Texas is new fish species from Cretaceous.”

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Marc Ramirez
Dallas Morning News
Never mind that it took more than 20 years to give the celebrity critter its due, because out here in Dino Land, things tend to move s-l-o-w-l-y.

And let’s be honest — when you’ve been waiting a million centuries to be identified, what’s another couple of decades, really?

Last year, Reidus hilli officially earned its stripes as a new species of coelacanth, quite the feat for a fish whose path to reality began as a Fort Worth fossil the size of a Girl Scout cookie.

For those who spend their time rebuilding prehistory’s narrative, the find was — as earth science professor Louis Jacobs of Southern Methodist University puts it — “tremendously fascinating.”

“Every place in the world is unique, so every place is a single piece of a puzzle that fits into the whole story of the world,” Jacobs said.

“Our piece is here. This coelacanth provides a piece of our puzzle that we didn’t have before of what life was like and what was here.”

The area known as the Albian Duck Creek Formation stretches over southwest Tarrant County, a one-time marine environment rich in Cretaceous-era fossils between 90 million and 100 million years old, any present company excluded.

Before it was largely developed, a plucky amateur geologist could regularly turn up evidence of ancient sea life, especially after rains that would free clay earth from its moorings.

Around 1990, Fort Worth design artist Robert Reid and a fossil-hunting friend were trolling the soggy wash, seeing what they could find. Typically that would be bits of turtle, shark vertebrae or ammonites, spiral-shelled cephalopods that once filled the seas.
The piece of rock that caught Reid’s eye was small, barely a couple of inches in length.

“I could tell it was some kind of bone material,” he said. “I didn’t know it was fish.”

He could just as easily have left it behind. Instead, he packed it into a Baggie, took it home and washed it off.

And thus the fragment eventually ended up in Reid’s geology cabinet, a millennia-old fossil stored in a cushioned box alongside dozens of other millennia-old fossils stored in cushioned boxes.

And there it would sit for years.

Long assumed extinct
The coelacanth is so old that for a long time people figured it was dead.

Read the full story.

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For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

Tags Dedman, John F. Graf, Louis L. Jacobs, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Shuler Museum of Paleontology

Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News Student researchers

Nature: Seismic signs of escaping methane under the sea

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 25, 2012

A changing Gulf Stream is warming deep waters along the eastern United States and destabilizing greenhouse gases trapped in sediments.

1.11652-79716744 — Sand is not the only thing on the move in the waters off the eastern United States — a shift in the Gulf Stream is melting methane hydrate in sediments that could release methane gas.
(Image: D. Harvey/Natl. Geographic/Getty Images)

Nature magazine covered the research of SMU marine geologist Matthew Hornbach, who led the study that has uncovered a powerful new way to use data from the geological record to discover non-anthropogenic climate changes underway.

The study suggests warmer temperatures are destabilizing up to 2.5 gigatonnes of methane hydrate along the continental slope of the eastern United States.

From the study, the authors write:
“Here, using seismic data combined with thermal models, we show that recent changes in intermediate-depth ocean temperature associated with the Gulf Stream are rapidly destabilizing methane hydrate along a broad swathe of the North American margin. The area of active hydrate destabilization covers at least 10,000 square kilometres of the United States eastern margin, and occurs in a region prone to kilometre-scale slope failures. Previous hypothetical studies, postulated that an increase of five degrees Celsius in intermediate-depth ocean temperatures could release enough methane to explain extreme global warming events like the Palaeocene–Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) and trigger widespread ocean acidification. Our analysis suggests that changes in Gulf Stream flow or temperature within the past 5,000 years or so are warming the western North Atlantic margin by up to eight degrees Celsius and are now triggering the destabilization of 2.5 gigatonnes of methane hydrate (about 0.2 per cent of that required to cause the PETM).”

Co-author on the study is SMU geophysics doctoral student Benjamin Phrampus.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Virginia Gewin
Nature
Somewhere off the eastern coast of North Carolina, a frozen mixture of water and methane gas tucked in seabed sediments is starting to break down. Researchers blame a shifting Gulf Stream — the swift Atlantic Ocean current that flows north from the Gulf of Mexico — which is now delivering warmer waters to areas that had previously only experienced colder temperatures.

“We know methane hydrates exist here and, if warming continues, it can potentially lead to less stable sediments in this region,” says Matthew Hornbach, a marine geologist at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, who led the study that is published online today in Nature1. The results suggest that the warmer temperatures are destabilizing up to 2.5 gigatonnes of methane hydrate along the continental slope of the eastern United States. This region is prone to underwater landslides, which could release the methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Whether that methane would make it to the atmosphere and worsen global warming is unclear, but scientists think that it is unlikely. “We don’t need to worry about any huge blow of methane into the atmosphere,” says Carolyn Ruppel, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Rather, she says, Hornbach and his co-author Benjamin Phrampus, also of the Southern Methodist University, have uncovered a powerful new way to use data from the geological record to catch non-anthropogenic climate changes that are already happening.

Read the full article.

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For more SMU research see www.smuresearch.com.

Tags Benjamin Phrampus, Dedman, Matthew J. Hornbach, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins Researcher news SMU In The News

Wired: Bone Wars — The Texas Connection

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 5, 2012

Science journalist Brian Switek, who blogs for Wired magazine, covered the research of SMU vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs and the infamous Bone Wars of the late 1800s.

The Bone Wars was a flurry of fossil speculation across the American West that escalated into a high-profile national feud. Drawn into the spectacle were two scientists from the Lone Star State, geologist Robert T. Hill, now acclaimed as the Father of Texas Geology, and naturalist Jacob Boll, who made many of the state’s earliest fossil discoveries.

Hill and Boll had supporting roles in the Bone Wars through their work for one of the feud’s antagonists, Edward Drinker Cope, according to Jacobs’ new study.

See an SMU video and press release about the research, “Texas frontier scientists who uncovered state’s fossil history had role in epic Bone Wars.”

A professor in Dedman College‘s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Jacobs joined SMU’s faculty in 1983.

Currently his field projects include work in Mongolia and Angola. His book, “Lone Star Dinosaurs” (1999, Texas A&M University Press) was the basis of an exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that traveled the state. He consulted on the new exhibit, Mysteries of the Texas Dinosaurs, which opened in 2009.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Brian Switek
Wired
No episode in the history of American paleontology has been as discussed, and celebrated, as the Bone Wars of the late 19th century. This contentious scientific showdown, played out during the days of the Wild West, set the foundation for fossil studies in North America, and introduced naturalists and the public alike to magnificent creatures such as Diplodocus, Uintatherium, and Dimetrodon (to pick just three of dozens).

The main figures during this controversial episode were friends-turned-rivals E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh. Both were experienced in the field, but, especially as they cemented their credentials as America’s leading paleontologists, both men increasingly relied on field assistants and a network of scientific connections to keep fossils flowing to their east coast labs.

Read the full story.

Tags Dedman, Institute for the Study of Earth and Man, John Lewis, Louis L. Jacobs, Pia Vogel, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Next step is to investigate what triggered the earthquakes, both natural and man-made.

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A new study finds that the prehistoric predators of the ocean, mosasaurs, were not as slow as scholars once thought.

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news

A changing Gulf Stream is warming deep waters along the eastern United States and destabilizing greenhouse gases trapped in sediments.

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news