Burlington Standard

The University of Vermont issued the following announcement.

UVM’s geosciences department has won more than $200,000 to research New England’s geologic past through a National Science Foundation grant.

The funding, which UVM received at the end of March, is part of a regional $1 million grant split with Williams College, Yale University and Rutgers University. Four lead researchers, one from each college, will share data to better understand the processes that have shaped the deep surface of New England through geologic history.

The project seeks to use seismic imaging of the crust and the upper mantle, analyze geological structures and date the motion on ancient faults. Earth’s crust and uppermost mantle are part of the planet’s plate tectonic system.

“Plate tectonics appears to be unique among all planetary bodies in our solar system and plays a crucial role in making our planet hospitable to life,” according to UVM’s grant proposal.

How the crust and uppermost mantle layers have evolved through time remains one of the most important challenges in Earth sciences, the proposal says.

The tectonic history of New England is not a simple one. Preserved within rocks across Vermont, researchers have repeatedly seen mountains rise and plates collide, with some of these events occurring upward of 400 million years ago. Eventually the chaos subsided, leaving the picturesque mountain landscape that exists in the Northeast today.

"The consensus was that Northeast was all mapped and it was all understood,” said Professor Laura Webb, a Department of Geology professor and one of the lead researchers on the project. “And with geophysical campaign, some questions started coming up like the ‘Northern Appalachian Anomaly.’”

The anomaly, as it’s known in academic spheres, sits directly under Vermont, in the deep surface of the earth, where material tends to flow like molasses. The research project essentially asks if New England’s ancient geologic chaos created consequences on deep structures far into the future. 

Researchers plan to use scores of datasets, observations and analysis through the project, says the grant proposal. Some of this includes using data collected from the New England Seismic Transect, a seismic monitoring project where more than 25 seismometers monitored background earthquakes across New England.

The teams are likely to use radioactive dating, too, to pin down when mountains were formed, Webb said. Then researchers will combine their data with field observations and analysis of deformed structures in rocks to investigate the extent and relative timing of faults.

The hope, said Webb, is that this project will help solve long-unanswered questions.

Original source can be found here.