Category: Locations of Interest

02-23-2019 Steve Cox: Dating Ground Water in our Region

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About the talk

In the Puget Sound region environmental tracers utilized in groundwater studies include: (1) isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen that help to identify recharge areas, (2) tritium (a product of atmospheric bomb testing) and various manmade compounds (sulfur hexafluoride and chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs) that are used to date modern groundwater that entered the aquifer within the last century, and (3) carbon-14, which is used primarily to date groundwaters older than 100 years. The age of groundwater, which is the time elapsed since precipitation entered the groundwater system and became isolated from the atmosphere, is measured with isotopic tracers such as tritium and carbon-14.

Estimates of groundwater age in Pierce County and Kitsap County range from less than 50 to roughly 5,000 years, and in general, groundwater in shallow aquifers is younger that groundwater in deeper aquifers.  Click here to find the age-dating Bangor report…

About the speaker

Steve Cox earned his B.S. in Environmental Science from the University of Puget Sound in 1978, and was hired by the USGS following the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980.  Since 1983 he has been with groundwater water-quality section of the USGS Washington Water Science Center, located in Tacoma.  Much of his work has been focused on the age, movement, and quality of groundwater in aquifers throughout western Washington, but he has also worked on smelter-derived contamination of water and sediment at Lake Roosevelt, behind Grand Coulee Dam.

01-19-2019 Deborah Kelly: Seamounts on Cascadia’s margin

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About the lecture

Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Exotic Deep Sea Life Off Our Coast

In this talk you’ll learn all about deep-sea habitats off the coast of Washington and Oregon, which are some of the most dynamic environments on Earth.  Using high-definition video from deep-diving remotely operated vehicles, we will “visit” the Cascadia Margin where methane-rich fluids rise from hundreds of vents on the seafloor, sometimes explosively.

Debbie Kelley looks at how submarine volcanoes support life in the absence of sunlight. She has dived in the submersible Alvin more than 50 times, reaching depths of 4000 m beneath the ocean’s surface, and routinely uses robotic vehicles to study some of the most extreme environments on Earth – submarine underwater hot springs. Her fieldwork takes her to volcanoes and hot springs off the Washington and Oregon coasts, the novel Lost City hydrothermal field on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and to the island of Cyprus.

NEW JAN. 30, 2019.  Dr. Kelley’s pertinent publications, videos and references can be found at the following urls:

https://interactiveoceans.washington.edu/   This has imagery associated with each expedition, but also can be reached through resources.
https://interactiveoceans.washington.edu/story/Biology_at_Axial_Seamount
https://interactiveoceans.washington.edu/story/Coastal_Biology

There is also an ~ 30-minute fun video that was done called “Down to the Volcano,” which is a general audience film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIUKej4_XMU highlighting some of the points I raised during the talk.

About the Speaker

Dr. Debbie Kelley is a marine geologist with the University of Washington and Associate Director for Science for the cabled component of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative. This project utilizes high-power and bandwidth, submarine fiber-optic cables to bring the Internet into the Pacific Ocean and onto the seafloor providing high-quality, real-time data from more than 100 instruments (e.g., high definition video, seismicity, ocean acidity, oxygen) to a global audience.

11-03-2018 Megan Anderson: Active Tectonics of Puget Sound Region

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Revelations about active faulting in the Puget Sound region from geology and geophysics

On Saturday, Nov. 3, you’ll have a chance to learn all about the Active Tectonics of the Puget Lowland in a lecture by Megan Anderson.

In the early-2000’s, only a few active faults were known to exist in the Seattle urban area and greater Puget Lowland.  Since the advent of LiDAR, geologists have put this tool to use in understanding where active faults are lurking, just under the surface of our cities and towns, and exactly how likely they are to create damaging earthquakes.

Another such tool is geophysics, which allows geologists to understand what rocks might be underfoot even when covered by soil, vegetation, and pavement.  Geophysics has been instrumental in allowing us to extend our interpretations across the entire Puget Lowland.  In this presentation, Megan will show just how much our understanding has grown over the last decade+ and where we are still working to characterize active faults, including places on the Olympic Peninsula near Port Townsend

The hour-long lecture is sponsored by the Jefferson Land Trust’s Geology Group and is open to the public; a donation of $5 would be appreciated to defray expenses.

Megan Anderson is an earthquake geophysicist at the Washington Geological Survey.  Megan spent her early years in Kent, WA during which the eruption of Mt. St. Helens probably spurred her fascination with geology, which was her major at Carleton College in Minnesota.  She studied subduction processes and earthquakes in South America for her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona.  She has studied numerous tectonic regions of the world but has always made her way back to the Pacific Northwest because there is so much left to discover.  She taught for 10 years at Colorado College, dragging her students and equipment across the country to do research here every summer, but now (as of June) has made her home at the WGS in Olympia.