Two more trips to the West Elks this month – first, Sarah, Trevor, and Oliver the dog revisited the landslide in the lower West Elk Creek. Sam ’21 used numerical modeling to estimate the age of this slide, but we’re hoping to corroborate that age with cosmogenic radionuclide exposure dating. With Trevor’s expertise, we collected 4 samples and are currently prepping some thin sections to examine quartz content.
Later in the month, Kira Ratcliffe ’22 and Sarah headed to the upper West Elk Creek to examine sediment mixing. We took grain size, angularity, and lithology measurements on two talus fields, four debris flows, and three sites along the creek channel. Kira is working on mathematic representations of sediment mixing, and will present work at the Summer Research Symposium in February 2022!
