Geology Open Night

Geology Open night lectures are usually on topics in the geosciences related to the current research of the faculty, staff and students at SUNY Stony Brook. These presentations are intended for:

• those interested in new developments in the sciences

• earth science high school students and teachers

• undergraduate and graduate students in geosciences

• professional geologists

“Pebbly Loess and Carolina Bays 
on Long Island”

Prof. Gil Hanson

7:30 PM Friday September 12, 2014
ESS 001 (Lecture Hall)

Pebbly loess is a common surficial deposit on Long Island that forms the soil that allows Suffolk County to be the leading agricultural county in the state of New York. Loess is wind-blown sediment consisting dominantly of well sorted silt with minor sand. However, this “wind-blown, sandy silt” is poorly sorted and contains pebbles up to several cm in diameter. This unit has been dated at Stony Brook University and at Wildwood State Park. The ages suggest that it was deposited about 13,000 years ago during the Younger Dryas event when the climate which had been warming since the glaciers left Long Island about 20,000 years ago suddenly became very cold and stayed cold for about 1,500 years.

Carolina bays are elliptical to circular-shaped, shallow depressions, usually 100 hundreds of meters in diameter, which are found in abundance along the Atlantic Coastal Plain. They have recently been found in undeveloped areas of Suffolk County. Carolina bays are characterized by a closed elevated rim and a flat bottom. In this talk we will explore the possibility that the Carolina bays are secondary impact craters associated with a bolide that struck the Laurentide ice sheet 12,900 years ago at the beginning of the Younger Dryas cooling event and that the pebbly loess on Long Island is the ejecta from the secondary impacts.

Evaluation of Ar-Ar ages of Individual Mica Grains for Provenance Studies of Loess,  
Long Island, NY by Jian Zhong, 2001

Age and Provenance of Long Island Loess by Vesna Kundic, 2005

Documenting the Occurrence of Carolina Bays on Long Island by Gloria Gill, 2013

Examples of LiDAR imagery of the Carolina bays on Cintos Research

"Environmental Applications of 
Thermal Imaging"

Prof. Deanne Rogers

7:30 PM Friday
October 17, 2014
ESS 001

Remote sensing is a powerful tool used by Earth scientists to understand a variety of problems related to climate, environment and natural hazards. Example applications using just one form of remote sensing, thermal imaging, include: quantifying groundwater discharge into marine waters, mapping soil moisture variability in time and space, quantifying the effect of urban development on local air temperatures and climate, and monitoring the onset and progression of volcanic eruptions worldwide. Rogers will discuss some of these applications, and focus on recent efforts by her research group and colleagues to quantify groundwater flux into the harbor waters of Long Island’s northern shore using a combination of airborne thermal imaging and water geochemical sampling.

Deanne Rogers is an Assistant Professor of Geosciences at Stony Brook University. Her research group studies a range of surface processes on the Earth, Moon, and Mars, using a common tool: remote sensing. She teaches Natural Hazards and Remote Sensing, and was named a NASA Early Career Fellow in 2009.

"Impact of Hurricane Sandy on the Solid Earth: The Measurement of a Slow and Enigmatic High Amplitude Wave in the Northeast U.S. using GPS Sensors"

Prof. Bill Holt

7:30  PM Friday 
November 14, 2014
ESS 001