Lee Kump and I recently had our proposal, Quantifying the impact of shallow wastewater injection on groundwater nutrient fluxes to surface waters in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, funded by the EPA! With this funding we will be able to support two new graduate students, Kate Meyers and Megan Martin, in their studies with the intent to improve wastewater management practices in the FL Keys. Currently, wastewater is injected under pressure directly into the carbonate karst aquifer beneath the Keys. Because of the density contrast between fresh wastewater and saline groundwater, wastewater plumes buoyantly return to the surface and have a propensity to contaminate nearshore waters important to human and animal habitats, such as coral reefs. We will be studying nitrogen fixation and phosphate adsorption in the Key Largo Limestone for the next 3 years. Wish us luck!

With colleagues at UChicago (i.e. most of my dissertation committee), we revisited an oft studied sedimentary basin with excellent isotopic and textural preservation on the northern margin of the Lhasa terrane to reconsider the question of the timing of peneplanation (when the plateau became a plateaued surface) of the Tibetan Plateau. Our tome is now out in the American Journal of Science! Expect more of the Lunpola and organic geochemistry in the near future!  

New MS student, Hanna Leapaldt, has arrived! Hanna is interested in the interface of paleoclimate, policy, and society. She'll be working on improving our understanding of the lacustrine carbonate record of ancient climate by ground trotting proxy data in Fayetteville Green Lake (NY, USA). Welcome, Hanna!

A long time coming (2 year time series, to be exact): our paper on the interplay of microbial metabolisms, aqueous chemistry, and the carbonate record is out in Geobiology!

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gbi.12386

A collaborative effort led by Shanying Li (China University of Petroleum, Qingdao) on the effects of shallow burial on carbonate textures and stable isotopic compositions is now out in Sedimentary Geology! Here's a temporary open access link: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1Z5r38RVhr7IU. 

Li, S., Currie, B.S., Rowley, D.B., Ingalls, M., Qiu, L., and Wu, Z. (2019) Diagenesis of shallowly buried Miocene lacustrine carbonates from the Hoh Xil Basin, northern Tibetan Plateau: Implications for stable-isotope based elevation estimates, 388: 20-36, doi:10.1016/j.sedgeo.2019.05.001.

I am VERY excited to say that my paper investigating the effects of burial alteration on marine limestone, cements, and biogenic carbonates in orogenic basins is available now in GCA! I use an array of microanalytical techniques to identify textural and chemical alteration, and water-rock exchange and solid-state reordering modeling find the limits of what we can explain based on current knowledge of isotopic exchange behavior. Here's the link! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016703719300821

​Ingalls, M.(2019) Reconstructing carbonate alteration histories in orogenic sedimentary basins: Xigaze forearc, southern Tibet, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, 251: 284-300, doi:10.1016/j.gca.2019.02.005.

Miquela will be joining the faculty in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State in 2020! We're actively recruiting masters and PhD students for Fall 2020. Students interested in carbonate alteration, the interplay of biology and chemistry in the formation of microbialite carbonate, and the sedimentary archive of alkaline lakes, please email Miquela! 

Postdocs interested in discussing research ideas and funding opportunities should please reach out.