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• https://steppe.org

STEPPE Workshop Program Funds
Three New Projects

The STEPPE Workshop Program has awarded funding for assessing extreme precipitation and seasonal and inter-annual
three new workshops. The workshops are highly different in topic, precipitation variability from the ancient record.”
though all will bring together researchers from different fields to
collaborate and discuss disciplines of interest to the STEPPE With model and data comparison, researchers can assess
community, and to develop multi-investigator proposals for which current and predicted extreme precipitation intensifica-
external funding. We are looking forward to working with these tion should be expected to be long term and linked to anthro-
groups and seeing the success of the projects. pogenic global warming.

EXPERIMENTAL DATA AND DYNAMICS OF DELTAS SEDIMENT SOURCES AND SINKS IN LAKE TANGANYIKA
AND MARGINS
Michael McGlue (University of Kentucky) and Christopher
Steven Goodbred, Ryan Sincavage, Rip Hale, and Jennifer Scholz (Syracuse University) will host “Lake Tanganyika:
Pickering (from Vanderbilt University), will team with Kyle A Miocene-Recent Source-to-Sink Laboratory in the African
Straub (Tulane University), Paola Passalacqua (University of Texas Tropics.” The workshop will bring together interdisciplinary
at Austin), and Carol Wilson (Louisiana State University) to host experts to examine Lake Tanganyika (East Africa) as a natural
the workshop “ONE-Delta—Synthesizing Observational, source-to-sink laboratory, and to provide a framework for new
Numerical, and Experimental data to unravel the complex collaborative research proposals.
dynamics of deltas and margin sequences.”
Lake Tanganyika is considered a premier location to recover a
The workshop will bring together experts in field studies, long-term, high-resolution record of tropical climate, evolutionary
numerical modeling, theory, and experimentation to develop biology, and rift tectonics through scientific drilling. It is also an
plans for integrated NSF-style proposals aimed at a deeper under- active frontier petroleum basin.
standing of processes that govern cross-margin sediment
dispersal, construction of deltaic landscapes, and resulting “Studying these deposits has the potential to transform what we
geological-scale stratigraphy and basin successions. know about the evolution of climate and environments in the
African tropics from the Miocene–present,” McGlue states. “Our
“Large river deltas and their adjacent margins are defined by team (geologists, paleoclimatologists, and paleobiologists) is
the dispersal and accumulation of sediment, which construct rich deeply committed to collecting long scientific drill cores from the
landscapes supporting major human population centers, lake in the future, but prior to doing that, we need to advance our
economic resources, and biodiversity,” the proposal explains. understanding of the source-to-sink continuum that shapes the
basin’s stratigraphy.”
“By their nature, these densely populated environments are
spatially and temporally dynamic and respond sharply to pertur-
bations and change, whether via natural or anthropogenic
sources, and their sediments represent an archive of environ-
mental change through time.”

GSA TODAY | SEPTEMBER 2015 GREENHOUSE PRECIPITATION EXTREMES True-color image of the Mississippi River delta and sediment plume. Credit:
MODIS, NASA.
Piret Plink-Bjorklund (Colorado School of Mines) will lead
“Increased precipitation extremes in greenhouse conditions; An
integrated paleoclimate and anthropogenic perspective.” This
workshop will bring together researchers in sedimentology, paleo-
biology, paleoclimatology, biogeochemistry, and others who aim
to integrate geologic data and climate models of past global
warming events with those of anthropogenic climate change.

The proposal hypothesizes that “the increase in extreme precip-
itation in the subtropics and mid-latitudes is likely to be a signifi-
cant, long-term principal effect of both anthropogenic and
ancient global warming events, and that it is related to Hadley cell
circulation changes. This idea rises from recent research on
ancient river morphodynamics that provides a new proxy for

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