Funding success with the American Chemical Society

We were recently notified that we will be receiving funding from the American Chemical Society’s Petroleum Research Fund to study the evolution of the morphology and composition of submarine levees. The grant includes money for graduate and undergraduate support (please contact me if you are interested in pursuing research on this topic). The objective of this project is to improve our ability to invert levee morphology for deposit composition in deep-water environments. At present the processes associated with levee growth and our ability to predict levee composition lags behind our understanding of channelized deep-water deposits. We will build upon an investigation of levee morphology and growth that proposed a levee growth model that utilized an advection settling model for sediment transport coupled to a vertical sediment concentration profile. In this project we will extend the capabilities of this levee growth model to allow it to predict the composition of levees bounding an array of channel configurations.

To the left: Initial modeling results of the evolution of levee morphology and composition resulting from turbidity currents