My interests are far and wide, but for my thesis I'm studying semiarid geomorphology.

Streams in the southwest United States behave strangely. Many of them are dry for most of the year, and flow only during intense storms. Stranger yet, these streams go through cycles of filling with and cutting into the sediment they carry. When a stream is in the 'cut' phase, it is called an arroyo. Arroyos are steep-walled channels that can be 10s of meters deep. Around 1880, channels throughout the southwest went from marshy 'cienegas' to deeply entrenched arroyos. Stratigraphy exposed in the walls of modern arroyos indicates that there have been many such arroyo-cutting events during the Holocene, separated by long periods of channel-filling. Scientists have been reconstructing and debating the cause of these alluvial cycles for over a century. The data show that the timing of cutting and filling is broadly similar from stream-to-stream on the Colorado Plateau. This has led to the suggestion that these cycles are manifestations of climate signals. Specifically, it has been hypothesized that arroyos are cut by periods with increased frequency of large floods, and are filled during extended periods with few geomorphically-significant floods.

Buckskin Wash is one of these strange, ephemeral streams. It starts out in a wide open upper catchment, then drains into a narrow reach constricted by bedrock. These constrictions are also known as 'slot' canyons. In Buckskin's upper reaches, the stratigraphy exposed in the wall of the modern arroyo reveals prehistoric arroyos that have since filled with alluvium. In the slot canyon downstream are ~10m tall stacks of sandy flood deposits. By studying the stratigraphy from both the arroyo walls upstream and the flood deposits downstream, I will reconstruct and compare the timing of arroyo cutting and filling cycles with the record of paleoflooding in the drainage.

Buckskin Wash drains approximately 900 km^2 near the Arizona-Utah border. Its watershed includes the pink, grey, white, and vermillion cliffs of the 'grand staircase'. Truly spectacular country. Buckskin Gulch goes on to drain into the Paria River. The Paria then drains into the Colorado River just downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, at the head of the Grand Canyon.



More pictures of the area here: coyote wash+buckskin gulch











OLDER

06/06 - 08/06
worked as an intern for the NOAA profiler network in Boulder, CO. duties included maintaining the network, initiating repair of malfunctioning wind profilers, and keeping regular statistics of network performance. also researched how profiler data was being used by NWS forecasters. participated in daily weather briefings with NOAA meteorologists.


06/04 - 09/05
worked on projects in observational astrophysics under the mentorship of Dr. Markus Boettcher. contributions involved the collection, management, and analysis of a large dataset from a global network of observatories. the object of our interest was the blazar 3C 66A, and the goal of the study was to examine the temporal and spectral variability of the object. Publication in the Astrophysical Journal, September 2005.

following that project, i was responsible for the analysis of a new set of images from the MDM telescope on Kitt Peak in AZ. after reduction with IRAF, i extracted the magnitudes of several blazars and comparison stars. the resulting dataset was then analyzed in a way similar to that employed in studying 3C 66A.