Five-Day Trip Covered Washington’s Coastal Areas

During the week of May 15, fourteen graduate students in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences traveled to coastal areas of Washington state for two field courses: Modern Sediments in the Field offered by Dr. Julia Wellner and Terrigenous Depositional Systems offered by Dr. Bill Dupre. Field lecturers from the University of Houston included Drs. William Dupre, Thomas Lapen, Julia Wellner and Yingcai Zheng, as well as Dr. Alexandra Witus from Shell.

The trip consisted of five days in the field examining late Pleistocene-Holocene stratigraphy from sediments deposited during the last glacial maximum, as well as modern tidal depositional systems. We began our trip with stops across northern Washington, where we investigated the geomorphic evidence for the advance and retreat of the most recent glaciation.

This was followed be a two-day excursion to Whidbey Island in the Puget Lowland of Washington, where we examined sediments from subglacial, glaciomarine, proglacial and non-glacial settings. The field trip concluded with Willapa Bay in southwestern Washington, where we were allowed the unique opportunity to compare modern-day tidal systems with analogs from the ancient record.

In the field, the students focused on describing the different lithofacies and interpreting the environment of deposition. Each day concluded with a student-led group discussion to interpret a depositional environment, sequence stratigraphic framework, and the regional climate.

The participating graduate students were Juhi Aggarwal, Joshua Flores, Atif Hariz, Lily Horne, Janet Kong, Marina Kuznetcova, David Lankford-Bravo, Arden Larberg, Carlos Moreira, Yuribia Muñoz, Chase Parsons, Carolina Ramon Dueñas, Delaney Robinson, and Crystal Saadeh.

The Modern Sediments in the Field course was made possible by Chevron.

- Crystal Saadeh