New NSF Support

The Tulane Sediment Dynamics and Stratigraphy (TSDS) Lab is celebrating new support from the National Science Foundation for SEACHANNEL, a collaborative project with researchers at Loughborough University that will investigate how submarine channels form, grow, and remain active across the seafloor. Submarine channels are among the largest sediment-routing systems on Earth, carrying sediment, organic carbon, and nutrients from continental margins into the deep ocean, while the powerful turbidity currents that move through them can also threaten critical seafloor infrastructure, including submarine telecommunications cables. Yet despite their global importance, the processes responsible for building and maintaining these channels remain poorly understood. SEACHANNEL will address this challenge by combining innovative physical experiments with next-generation numerical modeling to test new ideas about the roles of sediment transport, levee growth, and turbidity-current dynamics in channel development. The project will also produce new open-source modeling tools and experimental datasets that can be used to improve understanding of marine geohazards, long-term carbon burial, the stratigraphic record of submarine fans, and subsurface fluid reservoirs. In addition to advancing fundamental Earth science, SEACHANNEL will create research and educational opportunities for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty. The TSDS Lab is excited to begin this new NSF-supported collaboration and to contribute to a better understanding of one of the planet's most important, and still enigmatic, sediment transport systems.