Publications

The perennial shrub Larrea tridentata is widely successful in North American warm deserts but is also susceptible to climatic perturbations. Understanding its response to rainfall variability requires consideration of multiple timescales. We examine intra-annual to multi-year relationships using model simulations of soil moisture and vegetation growth over 50 years in the Mojave National...

Forty years ago, the demolition of large dams was mostly fiction, notably plotted in Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Its 1975 publication roughly coincided with the end of large-dam construction in the United States. Since then, dams have been taken down in increasing numbers as they have filled with sediment, become unsafe or inefficient, or otherwise outlived their...

The Mesozoic magmatic history of the North American margin records the evolution from a more segmented assemblage of parautochthonous and allochthonous terranes to the more cohesive northern Cordilleran orogenic belt. We characterize the setting of magmatism, tectonism, and epigenetic mineralization in the western Fortymile mining district, east-central Alaska, where parautochthonous and...

Slag is a waste product from the pyrometallurgical processing of various ores. Based on over 150 published studies, this paper provides an overview of mineralogical and geochemical characteristics of different types of slag and their environmental consequences, particularly from the release of potentially toxic elements to water. This chapter reviews the characteristics of both ferrous...

The Hideaway Park tuff is the only preserved extrusive volcanic unit related to the Red Mountain intrusive complex, which produced the world-class Henderson porphyry Mo deposit. Located within the Colorado Mineral Belt, USA, Henderson is the second largest Climax-type Mo deposit in the world, and is therefore an excellent location to investigate magmatic processes leading to Climax-type...

No abstract available.

Fluoride is considered beneficial to teeth and bones when consumed in low concentrations, but at elevated concentrations it can cause dental and skeletal fluorosis. Most fluoride-related health problems occur in poor, rural communities of the developing world where groundwater fluoride concentrations are high and the primary sources of drinking water are from community hand-pump borehole...

Antimony is a brittle, silvery-white semimetal that conducts heat poorly. The chemical compound antimony trioxide (Sb2O3) is widely used in plastics, rubbers, paints, and textiles, including industrial safety suits and some children’s clothing, to make them resistant to the spread of flames. Also, sodium antimonate (NaSbO3) is used during manufacturing of high-quality glass, which is...

Rhenium is a silvery-white, metallic element with an extremely high melting point (3,180 degrees Celsius) and a heat-stable crystalline structure, making it exceptionally resistant to heat and wear. Since the late 1980s, rhenium has been critical for superalloys used in turbine blades and in catalysts used to produce lead-free gasoline. One of the rarest elements, rhenium has an average...

Tellurium is one of the least common elements on Earth. Most rocks contain an average of about 3 parts per billion tellurium, making it rarer than the rare earth elements and eight times less abundant than gold. Grains of native tellurium appear in rocks as a brittle, silvery-white material, but tellurium more commonly occurs in telluride minerals that include varied quantities of gold...

The mineral sector plays a key role in the economies of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The onset of the Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in early 2014, together with changes in mineral market conditions, raised questions regarding the status of mining operations and of mineral development and exploration projects in all three countries. Mineral projects were the underpinnings of...

A thick Quaternary alluvial section fills a sedimentary basin beneath the Santa Clara Valley, California, located within the San Andreas Fault system at the south end of San Francisco Bay. This section consists of an upper sequence about 1,000 feet thick containing eight sedimentary cycles and a lower fine-grained unit as thick as several hundred feet. Together these constitute the...