My PhD research with Michael Eddy and Kenneth Ridgway focused on testing the hypothesis that the Siletzia terrane (located in OR&WA) and Yakutat terrane (south-eastern AK) originated as the same oceanic plateau offshore of the continental margin at the latitude of the Pacific Northwest. My research characterized the depositional and tectonic history of Cenozoic sedimentary basins that formed on both Siletzia and Yakutat terranes to test if they had an early shared history. Basin evolution was placed in context of a high-precision chronostratigraphy using CA-ID-TIMS of zircon from volcanic interbeds in the Cenozoic sedimentary cover on both terranes to document timing of changes in depositional environments and sediment provenance. Results from this study support an early shared history between the Siletzia and Yakutat terrane as a spreading ridge-centered oceanic plateau. Following collision of this composite oceanic plateau to the continental margin near latitudes of the Pacific Northwest at ~50 Ma, the Yakutat terrane split from Siletzia and began its northward journey along major dextral strike-slip faults to where its currently colliding in south-eastern Alaska. These new findings provide a better understanding of how oceanic plateau collision and terrane translation impacted the geologic development of the northern part of the western Cordillera in the last 50 million years.

See videos of my research here! Research abstracts here.

Publications:

we must have a stratigraphic section that has frequent felsic volcanic interbeds. Zircon can be extracted from these volcanic interbeds and dated using chemical abrasion-isotope dilution-thermal ionization mass spectrometry (CA-ID-TIMS). This technique can determine crystallization ages of igneous zircons with high-precision (<0.01%), making it a valuable tool in understanding how depositional environments and sediment routing pathways vary over timescales of 0.5-1.5 myr timescales.