Date of Completion
2019
Document Type
Honors College Thesis
Department
Geology
Thesis Type
Honors College, College of Arts and Science Honors
First Advisor
Paul Bierman
Keywords
cosmogenic nuclide, 10Be, watershed, basin, geomorphology, geochemistry
Abstract
Extreme storms, such as hurricanes, have the potential to cause widespread erosion. One way to measure landscape evolution is by tracing cosmogenic isotopic concentration over time because episodic events can change the source of sediment and thus its isotopic concentration. Here, we examine the effect of Hurricane Maria on the Caribbean island of Dominica – a tropical setting where erosion rates have not previously been measured – by measuring beryllium isotopes in river sand collected before (July 2017) and after the hurricane (January 2018). We test for temporal and spatial variance of these nuclides as a result of storm-induced erosion and sediment transport by comparing our data sets to landscape-scale factors of watersheds. Even though isotope concentration of individual samples does change from before to after the hurricane, there is no observed correlation between our isotopic concentration data sets and landscape characteristics. Similar average isotopic data before and after the hurricane show that the hurricane added noise, but did not invalidate the assumption of long-term steady state erosion on Dominica.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Quock, Melinda, "Assessing Hurricane Maria’s Effect on Landscape Erosion Using In Stream Sediment From the Caribbean Island of Dominica" (2019). UVM Honors College Senior Theses. 315.
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/hcoltheses/315