Tag: Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Nat’l Geographic: One of Earth’s most dangerous supervolcanoes is rumbling

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 13, 2017

Italy’s Campi Flegrei may be awakening from a long slumber, scientists warn.

Vulcanologist James E. Quick, SMU’s associate vice president for research and dean of Graduate Studies, is quoted for his expertise in the magazine National Geographic.

Quick, a geologist in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, is quoted in “One of Earth’s most dangerous supervolcanoes is rumbling.” The article was published Dec. 23, 2016.

An expert in volcano hazards, Quick is an expert in geologic science and volcano risk assessment, particularly the study of magmatic systems. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 2009 Quick led the international scientific team that discovered a 280-million-year-old fossil supervolcano in the Italian Alps. The supervolcano’s magmatic plumbing system is exposed to an unprecedented depth of 25 kilometers, giving scientists new understanding into the phenomenon of explosive supervolcanos.

Italian geologists in 2010 awarded Quick the Capellini Medal to recognize the discovery. In 2013 an area encompassing the supervolcano won designation as the Sesia-Val Grande Geopark by the UNESCO Global Network of National Geoparks.

Prior to SMU, Quick served a distinguished 25-year scientific career with the USGS, including as program coordinator for the Volcano Hazards Program.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Brian Clark Howard
National Geographic
A long-quiet yet huge supervolcano that lies under 500,000 people in Italy may be waking up and approaching a “critical state,” scientists report this week in the journal Nature Communications.

Based on physical measurements and computer modeling, “we propose that magma could be approaching the CDP [critical degassing pressure] at Campi Flegrei, a volcano in the metropolitan area of Naples, one of the most densely inhabited areas in the world, and where accelerating deformation and heating are currently being observed,” wrote the scientists—who are led by Giovanni Chiodini of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics in Rome.

A sudden release of hot magmatic gasses is possible in the near future, which could trigger a large eruption, the scientists warn. Yet the timing of any possible eruption is unknown and is currently not possible to predict….

The scars of another supervolcano were recently found in the Sesia Valley in the Italian Alps. That eight-mile-wide caldera likely last erupted 280 million years ago, when it blasted out a thousand times more material than Mount St. Helens spewed during its infamous 1980 eruption. The result was the blocking out of the sun, which led to global cooling.

“There will be another supervolcano explosion,” scientist James Quick, a geologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas, said in a statement when that volcano was found.
“We don’t know where, [but] Sesia Valley could help us to predict the next event.”

Read the full story.

Tags Dedman College, James E. Quick, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

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

LiveScience: Tough Turtle — Dino-Killing Asteroid Spared Sea Creature

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 14, 2016

“If these sea turtles do, in fact, form a tightly knit group, evolutionarily speaking, the [African] specimen provides proof that members of that group survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.” — Timothy Myers, SMU

Live Science Senior Writer Laura Geggel covered the research of paleontologist Timothy Scott Myers, a postdoctoral researcher in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

Myers analyzed an ancient sea turtle, discovered in Angola in 2012, with a triangular-shaped head that lived about 64 million years ago and that is closely related to earlier sea turtles that lived before scientists think an asteroid smashed into the earth sparking a massive mass extinction event.

The article “Tough Turtle: Dino-Killing Asteroid Spared Sea Creature,” cites new findings from Myers’ research, which studied the specimen. It was found along sea cliffs near the town of Landana, in the Angolan province of Cabinda in June 2012.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Laura Geggel
Live Science
Shortly after an asteroid smashed into Earth about 65.5 million years ago, obliterating much of life on Earth,an ancient sea turtle with a triangular-shaped head swam along the relatively arid shores of southern Africa, a new study finds.

The creature, a newly identified species, lived about 64 million years ago during the Paleocene, an epoch within the Paleogene period, the researchers said. The animal is closely related to earlier sea turtles that lived before the asteroid struck, an event known as the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, which marks the mass extinction that killed about 75 percent of all species on Earth, including the nonavian dinosaurs.

“If these sea turtles do, in fact, form a tightly knit group, evolutionarily speaking, then the [African] specimen provides proof that members of that group survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous,” study lead researcher Timothy Myers, a research assistant professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Southern Methodist University in Texas, told Live Science in an email.

Paleontologists found the specimen along the sea cliffs near the town of Landana, in the Angolan province of Cabinda in June 2012. Study senior researcher Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University, noticed part of the bone protruding from the rock. He and his team soon realized it was a nearly complete turtle skull and most of a hyoid, a U-shaped neck bone that supports the tongue.

Read the full story.

Tags Dedman College, Louis L. Jacobs, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Timothy S. Myers

Fossils & Ruins Researcher news SMU In The News

D Magazine: The Trinity Project — More About Bones

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 20, 2016

Answers to these questions can be supplied in part because there’s a fossil record, thanks to the efforts of Winkler, Slaughter, and Ellis W. Shuler, the person for whom the museum is named.

Journalist Laray Polk wrote about the Shuler Museum of Paleontology at SMU in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences as part of an essay on The Trinity Project and prehistoric bones native to the Dallas area.

The article, “The Trinity Project: More About Bones,” published Oct. 11, 2016.

Dale Winkler, director of the museum, showed Polk around the museum’s collections relevant to the article.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Laray Polk
D Magazine
In addition to Pioneer Cemetery, there’s another quiet space in Dallas that holds the bones of ancestors: the Shuler Museum of Paleontology, located on the SMU campus. The Shuler Museum has no fully assembled skeletons of prehistoric carnivores on premises or other dazzling displays (though the day I visited, there was a stack of giant turtle shells in plaster jackets in the hallway, outside the entrance). For one, the museum is a shoebox of a space located on the basement floor of the Earth Sciences building. There isn’t the room for that sort of thing. Second, the fossils here function as teaching and research collections. A casual visit from a non-expert like me requires an appointment and a great amount of patience from the host, which I received in abundance from vertebrate paleontologist and museum director Dale A. Winkler.

The museum is arranged library-style with mastodon tusks and similar large bones laid out neatly on gray industrial shelving, while smaller specimens — teeth, small bone, shell, scute, and more — are held in cabinets with pullout trays lined in soft material and organized by collection. The occasion for my visit was to view those specimens described by Bob H. Slaughter and others in the 1962 report “The Hill-Shuler Local Faunas of the Upper Trinity River, Dallas and Denton Counties, Texas.”

My questions, then as now, are basic: what kinds of animal roamed the area now known as the Great Trinity Forest? What kinds of plants and trees were present? What was the climate like? How was the Trinity River floodplain formed?

Answers to these questions can be supplied in part because there’s a fossil record, thanks to the efforts of Winkler, Slaughter, and Ellis W. Shuler, the person for whom the museum is named. Shuler was hired by SMU in 1915, the year it opened, to teach geology and related courses. He served as head of the Geology Department and Dean of Graduate Studies until his retirement, in 1953.

Read the full story.

Tags Dale A. Winkler, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

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

Laser Beats Rock: Armored Dinosaur May Have Relied Most on Sense of Smell

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 26, 2016

CT scans offer new insight into the little-understood Pawpawsaurus: One clue that led the researchers to determine that the sense of smell was Pawpawsaurus’s strongest sense was the large olfactory ratio.

Independent science journalist Sarah Puschmann covered the research of SMU Earth Sciences Professor Louis L. Jacobs in a post on her blog “Armored Dinosaur May Have Relied Most on Sense of Smell.”

A professor in Dedman College‘s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Jacobs is co-author of a new analysis of the Cretaceous Period dinosaur Pawpawsaurus based on the first CT scans ever taken of the dinosaur’s skull.

A Texas native from what is now Tarrant County, Pawpawsaurus lived 100 million years ago, making its home along the shores of an inland sea that split North America from Texas northward to the Arctic Sea.

The Laser Beats Rock article published July 25, 2016.

Pawpawsaurus campbelli is the prehistoric cousin of the well-known armored dinosaur Ankylosaurus, famous for a hard knobby layer of bone across its back and a football-sized club on its tail.

Jacobs, a world-renowned vertebrate paleontologist, joined SMU’s faculty in 1983 and in 2012 was honored by the 7,200-member Science Teachers Association of Texas with their prestigious Skoog Cup for his significant contributions to advance quality science education.

Jacobs is president of SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Sarah Puschmann
Laser Beats Rock
In 1819, the German naturalist Lorenz Oken found something astonishing inside a pterodactyl’s broken skull: petrified mud in the form of the long deceased dinosaur’s brain, so well molded into the crevices as to reveal the brain’s two distinct halves.

This so-called “fossil brain” is one of the first known instances of a cranial endocast, an internal cast of the skull that makes the impressions of the decayed soft tissue visible. For paleoneurologists not lucky enough to uncover a natural endocast, some have opted to slice open skulls and made molds using liquid latex rubber or plaster of Paris.

But cutting open a skull for study isn’t always an option, particularly if it is a holotype, the singular specimen used to define a species for the first time. This is the case for the 100 million year old skull from a dinosaur called Pawpawsaurus campbelli studied by Ariana Paulina-Carabajal of the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) and the Institute of Investigations in Biodiversity and the Environment (INIBIOMA) and her team, led by Louis Jacobs.

By CT scanning the skull, it was possible to make important insights about the dinosaur’s olfaction and hearing while leaving the precious holotype intact. Their analysis led the researchers to conclude that smell was the sense Pawpawsaurus most likely relied on most, as reported in the journal PLOS ONE.

This is valuable information, especially because so little is known about this dinosaur. What is known is that the four-legged herbivore most likely had long spines on its shoulders and neck, as was the case for other members of the same family of nodosaurids. It also probable that Pawpawsaurus wasn’t endowed with the knob of bone in its tail characteristic of ankylosaurids, a related dinosaur family, nor did it experience the satisfaction of slamming a club tail against, well, anything. (Was there such a thing as tail envy?)

Read the full story.

Tags Dedman College, Louis L. Jacobs, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Energy & Matter Fossils & Ruins Researcher news SMU In The News

The Texas Tribune: Sinkhole Warnings Don’t Faze West Texas

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 15, 2016

If the hole dramatically expands, “Wink will have some beachfront property,” Keely jokes. “Somebody’s going to make a marina out of it.” — Winkler County Sheriff George Keely to The Texas Tribune.

The Texas Tribune journalist Jim Malewitz covered the research of SMU geophysicists Zhong Lu, professor, Shuler-Foscue Chair, and Jin-Woo Kim research scientist, both in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU. Malewitz’s article, “Sinkhole Warnings Don’t Faze West Texas,” published July 12, 2016.

The Dedman College geophysicists are co-authors of a new analysis using satellite radar images to reveal ground movement of two giant sinkholes near Wink, Texas. They found that the movement suggests the two existing holes are expanding, and new ones are forming as nearby subsidence occurs at an alarming rate.

Lu is world-renowned for leading scientists in InSAR applications, short for a technique called interferometric synthetic aperture radar, to detect surface changes that aren’t visible to the naked eye. Lu is a member of the Science Definition Team for the dedicated U.S. and Indian NASA-ISRO InSAR mission, set for launch in 2020 to study hazards and global environmental change.

InSAR accesses a series of images captured by a read-out radar instrument mounted on the orbiting satellite Sentinel-1A. Sentinel-1A was launched in April 2014 as part of the European Union’s Copernicus program.

Lu and Kim reported the findings in the scientific journal Remote Sensing, in the article “Ongoing deformation of sinkholes in Wink, Texas, observed by time-series Sentinel-1A SAR Interferometry.”

The research was supported by the U.S. Geological Survey Land Remote Sensing Program, the NASA Earth Surface & Interior Program, and the Shuler-Foscue Endowment at Southern Methodist University.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Jim Malewitz
The Texas Tribune
WINK — Sheriff George Keely’s truck bobbed as he cruised down a particularly warped and cracked stretch of county road.

“This is the road I don’t like to drive on if I don’t have to,” he said as brown-green West Texas scrubland reflected in the rearview mirror. The trip is riskier than he’d like.

But here was Keely — a few months away from retirement after more than 20 years as a Winkler County lawman, five of them as sheriff — again escorting a reporter and photographer across the unstable terrain toward the Wink Sinks, the community’s chasms of fascination and fear.

The two gaping sinkholes, which sit between the small towns of Wink and Kermit atop the largely tapped out Hendrick oilfield, aren’t new. Wink Sink No. 1 — more than a football field across and 100 feet deep when it collapsed — turned 36 years old last month. Its more massive cousin to the south, Wink Sink No.2, swallowed a water well, pipelines and surrounding desert back in 2002.

A recent study by two Southern Methodist University geophysicists has thrust the sinkholes back into conversations here and across the wider realm of social media.

The research, published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Remote Sensing, used satellite imagery to chart what other researchers and folks like Keely have noticed: the sinkholes keep growing, and land surrounding them is sinking — likely due to a mix of geology and human intervention.

The instability raises the possibility that more abysses could open without further notice, the SMU researchers suggested.

“A collapse could be catastrophic,” research scientist Jin-Woo Kim said in a statement upon the study’s release.

“I would be very concerned,” his partner Zhong Lu, a professor, said in an interview.

Those findings quickly garnered attention from news media across Texas and the U.S. and other websites. The headlines grew more alarming and less accurate as blogs and other websites aggregated and re-aggregated the news. (“Giant Sinkholes Threaten to Swallow Two Tiny West Texas Towns,” “Sinkholes May Take Texas Down”).

In Winkler County, the prognostications were greeted largely with a yawn.

Read the full story.

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Tags Dedman College, Jin-woo Kim, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Zhong Lu

Italy’s Campi Flegrei may be awakening from a long slumber, scientists warn.

“If these sea turtles do, in fact, form a tightly knit group, evolutionarily speaking, the [African] specimen provides proof that members of that group survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.” — Timothy Myers, SMU

Answers to these questions can be supplied in part because there’s a fossil record, thanks to the efforts of Winkler, Slaughter, and Ellis W. Shuler, the person for whom the museum is named.

CT scans offer new insight into the little-understood Pawpawsaurus: One clue that led the researchers to determine that the sense of smell was Pawpawsaurus’s strongest sense was the large olfactory ratio.

If the hole dramatically expands, “Wink will have some beachfront property,” Keely jokes. “Somebody’s going to make a marina out of it.” — Winkler County Sheriff George Keely to The Texas Tribune.

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