Professor Kathy Benison will give the ESE Departmental Seminar on 28 January, “Salt, Heat, Acid, Wind: Extreme Continental Environments of Pangaea”
Join us online on Thursday 28 January by clicking “Livestream” on the seminar page at 12pm.
Abstract
The Permo-Triassic rocks of much of Pangaea are dominated by fossil-poor red bed siliciclastics and evaporites and mark a warming climate and a biotic crisis. This talk will describe how sedimentology and fluid inclusion studies of red beds and evaporites of the USA midcontinent and Northern Ireland record environmental processes and conditions, including sheet floods, eolian deposition, ephemeral saline lakes, desert soils, and saline groundwater. High-resolution data from fluid inclusions in halite provide clues about lake water salinity, temperatures, pH, and microbial communities. Much of Pangaea was likely an extremely salty, warm, arid, and windy place.
Biography
Kathy Benison grew up along the shore near Boston, Massachusetts, where she beachcombed year-round and learned to rock climb in granite quarries. She earned a B.S. in geology and chemistry at Bridgewater State College in 1990, a masters in geology from Binghamton University in 1993, and a PhD in geology from the University of Kansas in 1997. She was a professor at Central Michigan University for 15 years, before moving to West Virginia University in 2012, where she is now Professor of Geology. Kathy is a Geological Society of America fellow, an Explorers’ Club fellow, and a return sample selection team member for the Mars 2020 mission. Her research has been funded by the National Geographic Society, the American Chemical Society, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and NASA.