Congratulations to Hanna Leapaldt on receiving the Jack Hess Karst Research Award from the Geological Society of America! The Hess Fund supports student research involving any aspect of cave and karst studies aimed at providing improved understanding of how caves and karst work, including how these resources can be better managed.

Hanna also recently received a fellowship from the Biogeochemistry Dual Title program for the 2022-23 year. Congrats, Hanna!

Big congratulations to Hanna on defending her masters thesis, Seasonal lacustrine carbonate early diagenesis via in situ microbial metabolisms in Green Lake, New York! Hanna will be staying on in the Ingalls Lab as a PhD student starting this fall (after a wild summer of field work!!).

Congrats to Ran He for receiving a Evolving Earth Foundation graduate student research grant to conduct field work in Wyoming this summer and to travel to the USGS Core Repository Center in Denver to sample siderite from the Paleocene!

Congrats to Kate Meyers for receiving both a SEPM Graduate Student Research Grant AND the NASA Pennsylvania Space Consortium Graduate Fellowship!

I haven't kept up with the papers coming out of the group, but we've had one paper on phosphate concentrations on some of the oldest carbonate platforms on Earth, and what this might mean for the origins of life: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022GL098100

Another paper out on the climatic and tectonic controls on giant stromatolite formation in the Eocene Green River Formation: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sed.12967

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New paper out in Geophysical Research Letters! 

Ingalls, M., Grotzinger, J.P., Present, T., Rasmussen, B., and Fischer, W.W., 2022, Carbonate-associated phosphate indicates elevated phosphate availability in Archean shallow marine environments, Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL098100.

​Peter Crockford and Itay Halevy published an open access Commentary on our article as well. Check it out: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2022GL099818  

Friend of the Ingalls lab, Eva Scheller, has a new paper out in Geology on early diagenetic textures within ikaite and monohydrocalcite (MHC) pseudomorphs that provide evidence for dehydration and, thus, primary cold water carbonate formation. A new geologically based proxy for freezing temperatures in ancient environments!  Link here: ​https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/doi/10.1130/G49312.1/607791/Guttulatic-calcite-A-carbonate-microtexture-that 

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!