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CE Home > CE News > St. Anthony Falls Lab wins major NSF grant
St. Anthony Falls Lab wins major NSF grant
The St. Anthony Falls Laboratory has received its largest single grant ever to establish a new center that will bring together researchers across disciplines to study how rainfall, erosion, sediment movement and other forces shape the planet's surface.
Research at the new National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics will help scientists shape a new field—surface process science—that will provide insights into everything from the paths of braided rivers to soil erosion on Mars. The center is funded by a five-year $19.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
University researchers will work with four other schools, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, the University of California-Berkeley, the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in Cloquet, Minn. A fifth partner, the Minnesota Science Museum, will develop new exhibits based on the center's research.
"Rachel Carson described sediments as 'a sort of epic poem of the earth,' " said center Co-Director Chris Paola. "Unfortunately this poem is written in a language we still can't decipher. NCED will be a major step toward developing an integrated understanding of how our planet's surface works."
Critical field
Sediment mechanics has become a critical field in recent years, as population and other pressures have pushed people to inhabit more unstable and risk-prone areas, said Gary Parker, a center co-director and professor of civil engineering.
Population growth in the West and Southwest, for example, has funneled more development in fragile alluvial fans like Death Valley and the San Fernando Valley, former river beds prone to flash floods, landslides and mudslides.
A third of the population in Japan lives in high-risk areas in the line of mudflows and debris flows, Parker said. And development at the base of the Himalayas, coupled with extensive logging, is triggering flash floods and landslides there.
"These are issues in terms of disaster, in terms of planning," Parker said.
Researchers at the center will look for ways to model extreme rainfall, erosion, debris flow and other factors that affect such fragile landscapes. They'll study everything from the role of microorganisms in soil erosion to the pattern of sediment layers in the continental shelf.
In one project, scientists will work with students at the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College to study how rising and sinking water levels affect wild rice production in northern Minnesota. That will help them develop a model of the distribution of plants and animals in a river network.
In another, they will seek ways to better predict the path of braided rivers, such as the Brahma-Putra system in Bangladesh. "Braided rivers shift at a very fast pace," said Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, a center co-director and head of the St. Anthony Falls Lab. "That makes planning major civil engineering projects, like bridges, a challenge."
By analyzing braided rivers of all sizes, from runoff streams on Alaska's North Slope to the Brahma-Putra river system in Bangladesh, researchers hope to create a model that will help predict the future shifts of such rivers. "Big rivers are difficult to monitor," Foufoula-Georgiou said. "But you find statistically similar structures built into all these rivers."
Crossing disciplines
By bringing together scientists in such disparate fields as engineering, geology, biology, oceanography and environmental science, NCED will help create better models for sediment movement from mountaintops to the ocean floor.
Such crossdisciplinary collaboration is still unusual in the field.
"The average fish biologist can't talk to the average sediment engineer," Parker said. Within disciplines, the barriers can be just as steep. "Geomorphologists and stratigraphers don't usually talk to each other," Parker said, referring to geologists who look at erosion and those who look at deposits in basins.
"There hasn't been a whole lot of communication between them, but there will be at our center," he said.
It's no accident that NCED's three directors are all based at the St. Anthony Falls Lab, an experimental facility next to the Mississippi River. The lab received the largest share of the NSF grant, $14.1 million dollars over five years. Its flumes, wind tunnel and giant sediment tank have long drawn engineers, hydrologists, geologists and other scientists from all over the world.
"Researchers at the center are interested in these sorts of natural leaps," said Paola, a professor of geology and geophysics. "We have a long history of collaboration."
Bringing the researchers together across fields "was a natural next step," Paola said. "We realized we could be midwives for a new field that would not be civil, not be geology, not be ecology but would be surface process science."
Paola hopes the center will offer interdisciplinary classes, perhaps even a degree in surface process science. NCED researchers already plan to teach short courses to engineers on submarine sedimentation and stratigraphy, erosion control from hillsides and roads, stream rehabilitation and dam removal. The center will also offer grants to industry and government engineers and scientists to conduct research.
As part of the five-year grant, the Science Museum of Minnesota will create a series of EarthScapes exhibits at its outdoor science park and develop outreach programs for schools across the Upper Midwest. NCED staff also hope to stimulate an interest in science and technology in youths by offering summer classes to American Indian students and other groups.
Unexpected leaps
The NSF grant comes with an option to renew for another five years. If all goes well, the Center for Earth-surface Dynamics will have a long-term impact on the way engineers, geologists and ecologists look at the planet's surface.
What center directors hope for most is the unexpected.
"I'd like to see in 10 years some really important scientific developments, educational developments and applications that we could not in any way have predicted," Parker said.
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