Renovation for Climate Change & Environmental Quality Laboratory at North Dakota State University

North Dakota State University Fargo, Fargo ND

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). North Dakota State University's Department of Geosciences is expanding their research program and the laboratories renovated under this award complement this expansion. The renovated space will bring scientists, including two newly hired researchers within the Geosciences Department, to benefit directly from the shared facility. The focus of the renovation will be for research in climate change, environmental quality and Antartic geology. Intellectual merit stemming from their work, and that of collaborating faculty, includes the elucidation of southern hemisphere biogeography, in which Antarctica's role as a center of evolution is mostly unknown, and continued work to date major shifts in Antarctic climate from Oligocene through Pliocene time. Work done by the environmental quality research group in newly renovated laboratory space will further the understanding of how argillaceous matrices such as expansive earth materials function for the remediation of wastewater. Examples of additional research topics to be addressed include the exact timing of North American deglaciation, focusing especially on the drainage of large proglacial lakes and their relation to late glacial climate change and the occurrence of naturally high levels of heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury in glaciogenic soils found throughout the upper Midwestern United States. The broader impacts of this project include the support of early career researchers, undergraduate and graduate student research, a variety of outreach programs to tribal colleges and K-12 students, and extensive international collaboration. The work also has societal relevance in that the outcomes will offer direct constraints on the stability of Antarctica's ice sheet during times when global atmospheric CO2 concentrations were similar to those predicted for Earth in coming decades, and thus will provide data to calibrate predictive models of sea-level rise. Additional important outcomes will include the potential for many countries to address environmental quality problems such as high fluoride, boron, and arsenic concentrations in water, and high cadmium concentrations in soils.