Collaborative Research: An Inter-disciplinary Approach to Constraining Paleo-geomorphic Responses to the Eocene-Oligocene Hothouse to Icehouse Transition

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Rivers are the arteries of the nation and are vital as sources of water and recreation, and avenues of commerce. They are also bellwethers for change in the landscape. However, a question of fundamental importance for national interest is how river systems respond to major environmental changes. Predicting how changes in environmental conditions affect river processes, such as flooding and erosion, is critical for water resource management. This project uses knowledge of the past as a key to better inform the present through examining ~35 million year old sediments from an ancient river network in western Nebraska and South Dakota to quantify how changes in precipitation, vegetation and temperature in the past caused changes in river discharge and flood magnitude. These data, integrated with hydraulic models, will improve our ability to predict how rivers flood, sediment is transported and catchments evolve. Results of this work will have far reaching implications for understanding, modeling and planning for changes to river systems in the future. Three key broader impacts of this study include: 1) support of graduate and undergraduate students to develop interdisciplinary expertise; 2) sharing of data, methods and results as teaching data-sets on open-access platforms; 3) science outreach modules for children to explore 3-dimensional rock outcrops and animations from computational models. The goal of the proposed research is to reconstruct the coevolution of paleoriver and ecosystems dynamics with environmental change in western North America during the Eocene-Oligocene transition (EOT), perhaps the largest climate state change of the last 65 million years. This will be accomplished by integrating geochemical records of paleoclimate, sedimentologic indicators of river transport and deposition, and hydraulic-geomorphic models. To achieve the project goals a team of geochemists, sedimentologists and hydraulic engineers will develop an integrated approach to understanding how rivers respond to environmental change. Success in this cross-disciplinary approach could provide a paradigm shift in utilizing modern and ancient terrestrial geologic archives to quantify environmental perturbations that manifest in the hydraulics, morphodynamics and regional ecosystem responses.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.