UCSB Sedimentology Lab

With colleagues in Argentina, we published another study looking at the raised beaches in the South Shetland Islands. Matias collected some amazing drone images.

https://doi.org/10.1017/qua.2026.10107

Congrats to lab alumnus Elisa Medri who published her final chapter of her dissertation this month. It looks at the subaqueous clinoform of a delta in the Cozy Dell Shale of our own Transverse Ranges here near Santa Barbara.

https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/sepm/jsedres/article-abstract/96/4/814/755974/Geometry-architecture-and-facies-of-an-ancient?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Last week I joined fellow UCSB professor Matt Jackson and Cardiff professor Ricardo Ramalho to examine the examine the vertical motion history of the island of Savaii in Samoa. Amazing geology.

Back in 2023 we did some fieldwork in the Florida panhandle. We were looking at MIS5e shorelines. That work was finally published…

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X26002473

We taught field camp for three at the end of June/beginning of July in New Mexico. Matt and Trap helped out. We lucked out weather wise and the rocks were great as always. Great group of students too.

One of our lab's longtime collaborators - Dr. Ginni DeWitt from East Carolina put together a review on some of the OSL dating in Antarctica we have conducted over the years. Her paper just came out in a new journal for our lab - Radiation Measurements:

www.sciencedirect.com

What would March be without a little more fieldwork, one last time for Claire up to Tomales Bay. This time, we went to try and nail down her story looking at the impact of recent sedimentation on the marshes of the bay...

Earlier this year, we also had another Scotland paper come out. This work was largely one of our UK colleague's (Jerry Lloyd) PhD student, Jennifer Taylor. She has been doing some neat stuff with Osmium isotopes and using them to investigate environmental histories recorded in sediments. This study from Bad na h-Aclaise:

From Ice to Isolation: A geochemical reconstruction of the palaeoenvironmental evolution of Gairloch, NW Scotland (UK), since the Last Glacial Maximum Complex relative sea-level (RSL) changes are associated with the deglaciation of the British and Irish Ice Sheet (BIIS). Sediment archives from Loch Bad na h-Achlaise, an isolation basin in NW Scotla...

We also attended a couple international meetings in the winter of 2026. The first a workshop on sea-level changes in Brazil and the second a pair of meetings in New Zealand - the first the International Association of Geomorphologists and the second the CLIC and INSTANT meetings. Emily did a great job presenting her work on raised beach ridges.

We also returned to Tomales Bay last September for some more work for Claire's PhD up there.