Hawaii has long been viewed as the textbook example for a plume-fed hotspot. Yet, the plume model has been contested because the collected seismic data to support or disprove it have so far been inconclusive. Compelling constraints on even the most basic features such as the plume conduit and its head have been elusive. One major problem that seismology has faced has been its complete reliance on land-based stations.
During the Jan. 2005 – May 2007 Hawaiian PLUME experiment we occupied nearly 70 sites with broad-band ocean bottom seismometers (OBSs). We collected continuous time series at a 1000 km-wide array that was augmented by 10 dedicated sites on the Hawaiian islands. The seismic data will facilitate the construction of surface wave and body wave tomographic images of never-before obtained coverage and a depth-extent that reaches well into the lower mantle. The data will also be used to constrain the topography of mantle discontinuities through receiver functions and anisotropy through shear-wave splitting. The data analysis has just begun and in my talk, I will present our first images obtain from surface waves.

AAPG’s Imperial Barrel Award Program (IBA) is an annual prospect/exploration evaluation competition/presentation competition between university student teams competing to win scholarship funds dedicated to petroleum geoscience education created for geoscience graduate students. The program is rigorous and contributes to AAPG’s mission of promoting petroleum geoscience training and advancing the careers of geoscience students. This is a global competition, where the University teams analyze a complete dataset in six to eight weeks prior to the competition and (geology, geophysics, land, economics, production infrastructure, and other relevant materials). Each team delivers their results in a 30-minute presentation to a panel of industry experts. Students gain experience using real technology on a real dataset. Additionally, students benefit from the feedback from the industry panel, the opportunity to impress potential employers in the audience, and the chance to win cash prizes for their schools, who will select the winning team on the basis of technical quality, clarity and originality. The IBA is a hands-on opportunity for students to experience the creative process and the high-tech science that is the foundation of the Energy Industry today.

It is generally accepted that there were no large glaciers on the poles prior to the development of the Antarctic ice sheet about 33 million years ago which initiated the “Icehouse world”. Before this, the world was in a “greenhouse” state which reached the warmest temperatures of the past ~300 million years during the “Cretaceous Thermal Maximum” about 91 million yeas ago. I show that despite very warm conditions during the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, with tropical ocean temperatures of 35-37°C [95-98.6°F], an ice sheet about 50-60% the size of the modern Antarctic ice cap existed for about 200,000 years. The common assumption that substantial ice could not have existed during past super-warm climates is apparently wrong. Certainly, ice sheets were much less common during the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum than they are during more recent “Icehouse” climates, allowing tropical plants and animals like breadfruit trees and alligators to occasionally frequent the high arctic. However, paradoxically past greenhouse climates may actually have aided ice growth by increasing the amount of moisture in the atmosphere and creating more winter snowfall at high elevations and high latitudes.

See also: Bornemann, A., Norris, R.D. et al. 2008, Isotopic evidence for glaciation during the Cretaceous supergreenhouse: Science 319:189, DOI: 10.1126/science.1148777.