Field Area

The research project is based here in Maine. The region of interest broadly covers the land between the White Mountains, Katahdin, Bangor, and Portland. I expect that we'll be spending a great deal of time in the greater Farmington area where we’ll be looking at dozens of locations with early post-Ice Age sediments. One of our first logistical tasks? Securing a campsite as our base camp.

Research Objectives

"To see the world in a grain of sand..." William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

When William Blake penned this line, he wasn't thinking about geology, but his phrase reveals a great deal about this project. Sand is typically comprised of 2-3 common minerals and another ~20 less common to scarce minerals (plus hundreds of rare minerals). The identity, proportions and total amounts of the less common minerals are widely used in academic, governmental and industrial geologic investigations to interpret climate, rates of erosion, general physiographic setting, rates of sediment accumulation, and basin-water chemistry and to correlate rock bodies over long distances.

The relative abundance of each of the ~20 less common minerals in any particular sand layer is affected by a variety of factors, the most important of which are:
1) the mineral composition of the source area supplying the sand grains;
2) chemical alteration of the minerals in the source area prior to eventual erosion and transportation to their depositional site;
3) chemical alteration of the minerals in the depositional area prior to consolidation of the loose sand grains into solid sandstone; and
4) sorting based on size, shape, and density of the different minerals during transport from source area to depositional site due to differences in the flow characteristics of streams, rivers, ponds, etc.

This research project addresses the fourth of these factors: how different environments result in measurably different mineral assemblages, even when supplied by the same source area. The project involves analyzing and correlating geologic environment (for example, low-energy stream, below wavebase marine shoreline, high-energy river, etc.) with mineral composition. Consequently, there are two major investigative components to the study:
1) interpretation of the environment of deposition, and
2) determination of the identity, proportions, and total amounts of the less common (but diagnostic) minerals.

Grant Award

Welcome to this new Mineral Sorting blog, a blog designed to document a faculty-student research project based at Saint Joseph's College!

Recently, I received word that my two-year $50,000 grant proposal to the American Chemical Society was accepted. This funding will allow me, and student researchers from the Department of Natural Sciences at Saint Joseph's College, to examine geologic processes affecting the mineral composition of early post-Ice Age sediments in Maine.

The research has implications for interpretation of long-term climate changes and their effects on the landscape. This is basic research on how the rock record preserves a history of events on the Earth’s surface.

The grant supports three weeks of field work during two summers to collect sediments, which will be brought back to the campus lab for mineral identification. Our research team also will figure out the size distribution of the collected sediments in order to shed light on how natural geological sorting processes affect the distribution of minerals in the rock.

I hope that you will consider following our progress.