Department of Environmental Sciences

Research is primarily focused on:

Reconstructing the history, timing, and magnitude of discharge from the outlets of Lake Agassiz. This data can be considered baseline information for a variety of scientific disciplines. Importantly, oceanographers and climate modelers require this data to understand past climate changes (e.g. Younger Dryas) that may have been triggered by outlet switching.

Documenting and reconstructing paleo lake levels in the Great Lakes. Water levels in the Great Lakes, specifically the upper Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron) have changed as much as 100 m in the past 11,000 years, with much of that change driven by glacio-isostatic adjustment (GIA) processes of the Earth’s crust rebounding from the weight of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last ice age. Superimposed upon the GIA are changes in climate (precipitation, evapotranspiration) that result in water level variations of < 1m to ~ 2m over time periods of ~11 yrs to ~160 yrs. Unfortunately the investigations pf paleo lake level only have available records of high stands in water level to work with (e.g., beach ridges), thus what we know about fluctuation in lake levels is really fluctuations in high lake levels. How low the lakes dropped between high lake levels remains poorly understood. Submerged stumps and other geomorphic data can be used to develop a more thorough history of low stands in the Great Lakes.

Resolving triggering mechanism to sand dunes along the Great Lakes Coastlines. Many studies now have documented that most of the sand dunes along the Great Lakes coastlines formed after the Nipissing peak in lake level 4500 years ago. Informal consensus is that dunes were reactivated when lake levels and wave energy were high, brought about by increased storminess (cyclogenesis). Because age models to reconstruct dune history and lake levels have errors similar to quasi-periodic cycles of high stands, different approaches to establishing dune histories with new paleoenvironmental indicators are needed.