Research

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Eden Cenote is a beautiful example of the collapse features that populate one of my fieldwork areas.

Research Focuses Include:

Karstified carbonate terrains and caves, their scientific study and socio-economic management:

  • Hydrogeology, geochemistry, geomorphology, and sedimentology
  • Paleoenvironmental records of sea level, climate change, and landscape evolution from sediments, speleothems, and fluid inclusions in speleothems.

Applied research includes water resource management, remote mapping of hydrological resources, biological interactions at the ecosystem to the bacterial level, geo-archaeology, and water born contaminant and disease vectors.

Karst environments provide direct access to the aquifer for logger deployments.

Field Research experience includes:

  • Neo-tropical coastlines and large-scale carbonate platforms, such as the Yucatan, Florida and Bahamas
  • Tracing water and contaminant flows using environmental and introduced tracers
  • Glaciated and mantled karst of Ontario, New York state, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri
  • Alpine karst of the Pacific North West including Vancouver Island and the Rockies.

Scallops are hollows in cave walls, produced by the flow of turbulent water. They can be used to indicate the direction of flow when they were formed. These are in Upana Cave, in British Columbia.

Instrument Development:

I have used a fair number of environmental sensors and flow monitoring loggers for my work.  While most are well engineered for the jobs they are designed for, they often leave much to be desired when it comes to research in caves.  So I started building my own. The Cave Pearl Project grew out of those humble beginnings, and we now get results from our inexpensive data logging system that are comparable to commercial instruments.  The current generation includes most of the features I’ve wanted in high end equipment from the very beginning:

  • One full year of operation on standard batteries (the current generation achieves this on a coin cell!)
  • Small portable housings that can be easily carried into the caves (esp. while diving)
  • Easily assembled (and repaired!) with common components, user editable software
  • CSV format files with no custom download cables, standard SD cards where needed.
  • Coded indicator LED’s so you know the unit is working OK before you deploy it

 (SeeA Flexible Arduino-Based Logging Platform for Long-Term Monitoring in Harsh Environments
Sensors 2018, 18(2), 530; doi:10.3390/s18020530 to download the PDF)

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My first custom instrument network was installed in high elevation caves. The latest generation are underwater.

Building our own equipment enables significant and continuous evolution of the design
to suit new research questions. In my time at Northwestern, three different generations
of drip sensors have been developed and deployed:

With a similar progression of designs in the units built for underwater deployment. Even modest research budgets can sustain a “network” of these sensors, gathering data from multiple points in a cave system. This distributed information gathering capability will mean that future models of seasonal cycles, flow direction, and contaminant dispersal, can be based on substantial time-series data sets, instead of being constrained to information gathered on a few sample dives:

However simply creating instruments for underwater applications is not enough, you also need to develop entirely new techniques to deploy them and then train divers with those science related skills. Since 2019, intensive ‘Science week’ training events have been run in collaboration with Natalie Gibb to build stronger links with the cave diving community. With significant contributions of volunteer time from many highly skilled people, we are building a new community of research divers:

Setting up a transect rig for discharge calibration in a coastal outflow. [Photo by Natalie Gibb]

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