Oceanography Among the Tumbleweeds in Utah
Lincoln Pratson Looks to the Desert's Lake Powell to Shed
Light on One of the Deep Sea's Murkiest Processes
By Tim Lucas
A landlocked reservoir in Utah’s southern desert
may seem an unlikely place for oceanography research. But
here, amid sagebrush and tumbleweeds, Lincoln Pratson is working
to shed new light on one of the deep sea’s murkiest processes.
Pratson is associate professor of sedimentary
geology in the Nicholas School’s Division of Earth and Ocean
Sciences.
This May, he’ll return to the arid environment
of Utah’s Glen Canyon National Recreation Area for his third
research expedition in five years to map the floor of Lake
Powell, a beautiful but incongruous 186-mile stretch of blue-green
water amid the region’s sun-bleached sands and red rock canyons.
His study of sediment buildup on the manmade
lake’s bottom is adding new insights to scientists’ understanding
of similar forces shaping the ocean’s floor in the murky depths
beneath 3,000 meters, and it may aid oil companies’ search
for new hydrocarbon deposits located there.
His work has implications here on land, too.
Preliminary results from Pratson’s surveys of Lake Powell
suggest it is now filling with sediment more quickly than
in the past. This finding could add new fuel to the debate
about development in the drought-prone Southwest—where a rapidly
growing population is largely dependent on the holding capacity
of reservoirs like Lake Powell for its water supply.
“An oceanographer in the desert is about as
incongruous as Lake Powell itself,” he says with a grin, as
he shows a visitor a photo of his research team untangling
waterlogged tumbleweeds from their sonar device. “But sometimes,
answers are found in unexpected places.”
Pratson, a calm, affable man with a love of
the outdoors, has spent the past 20 years searching for them.
He received his PhD in geology from Columbia University in
1993, and continued his research in marine geology at Columbia’s
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory before moving in 1996 to
the University of Colorado.Two years later he joined the Nicholas
School faculty. Since 2004, he also has served as head of
the School’s certificate program in Energy and Environment.
His study of the dynamics of marine sedimentation—how
mud, sand and other sediment are transported and formed into
strata on the ocean’s floor—has taken him to far-flung conferences
and research sites, from the Mediterranean to Minnesota, and
from northern California to the southern oceans off New Zealand.
In recent years, he’s become especially interested
in the role turbidity currents play in the sediment transport
process.
Turbidity currents—so called because of their
turbid and turbulent nature—are underwater avalanches that
can occur without warning in nearly all parts of the world’s
oceans and many inland waterways.
At the large end of their scale, they can move
across the sea floor at speeds exceeding 20 miles per hour
and push thousands, or even millions, of tons of mud, sand
and gravel off the continental shelf and down the continental
slope into the deep abyss, more than 3,000 meters beneath
the ocean surface.
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