In a dark, quiet pod sealed off from the rest of the third-floor lab, IGWS research scientist Jose Luis Antinao grasps a steel disc, smaller than a dime, with tweezers. Suspended inside each disc—40 of them per tray—are a half-dozen grains of sand which may not have seen the light of day in thousands of years. After a few days’ time, the OSL reader working behind Antinao will tell him about how many years it’s been, helping to determine how and when those samples came to be deposited on the Earth, and helping to predict possible future patterns of landscape and climate change.

OSL stands for “optically stimulated luminescence.” Samples of sediment are collected in the field in lightproof containers and their natural radiation is measured; then, research assistant Valerie Beckham-Feller processes them in a darkroom lab before the samples are irradiated and measured in an OSL reader. The amount of natural and induced luminescence they produce points to the samples’ geologic age.

The Indiana Geological and Water Survey is one of 17 labs in the nation and the only lab in Indiana to have an automated luminescence reader, making it an important resource for students and scientists from several states. A trained technician oversees the entire analysis process, but many of the steps—like sifting, washing, and preparing samples for the reader—can be completed by graduate or undergraduate students, giving them valuable career experience, or stimulating an interest in the geosciences.

Luminescence geochronology can date events up to 200,000 years ago. Unlike radiocarbon dating, this method does not analyze an organic component; it looks at mineral grains like quartz and feldspar which absorb radiation underground. Some recent samples from central Indiana sediment have been dated to 160,000 years old.

The IGWS started its OSL lab in the fall of 2017 with one reader (a Lexsyg Smart) in a 50-square-foot room, a lab in an adjacent room with sodium-vapor lamps that were assembled in-house, and a shared vent hood in another room. “In three years, this simple setup allowed the laboratory to grow such that it now routinely runs dozens of internal and external user samples per year, participating in projects funded by grants and contracts at the regional, national and international level,” explained Antinao, the lead researcher.

After recent IGWS building renovations, the OSL lab now has a dedicated fume hood, a dedicated controlled lighting room, and a locked interior darkroom which quadrupled the lab’s square footage.

The lab has the space to add a second OSL reader, but not the funding for it yet. The IGWS has been seeking a single-grain machine (a Risoe OSL DA20C/D), which would enable researchers to run more samples in a shorter amount of time and cut down on a backlog of work. So far, samples have come from Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, and California, as well as South America and Mexico. More are coming in from around Indiana as the IGWS continues its STATEMAP project to map bedrock and ice-marginal sediments in southern Indiana.

“Word has been getting out,” Antinao said—so much that the original machine is continually humming despite not being advertised. “It’s not a lot, but it’s enough.”

At the IGWS, in cooperation with researchers and students from IU Bloomington and IU Northwest, OSL technology has been used to:

• study the effects of intense precipitation on sediment along subtropical regions of North and South America in an effort to understand the effects of future global climate change;

• map and date the final retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet in northern and central Indiana, looking for sediments that could determine and protect aquifers; and

• help predict future water level changes for the Great Lakes by testing material deposited over the last 6,500 years.

OSL equipment can conduct dosimetry and geochronology tests on samples of sediment, rocks, and minerals, and on artifacts, making it useful to researchers and students in geology, geomorphology, archaeology, and paleoenvironmental studies. Known future users will come from IUPUI, IU Southeast, the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at IU Bloomington, the Desert Research Institute at Reno, Nevada, Universidad de Chile at Santiago, Chile, and El Instituto Argentino de Nivologia, Glaciologia y Ciencias Ambientales (IANIGLA) at Mendoza, Argentina.

PUBLISHED IN SCIENCE

The paper, “Methoxyl stable isotopic constraints on the origin and limits of coal-bed methane,” can be read here.

In a foreword (subtitled “Coaling in the deep”), Science editors wrote, “Despite our current reliance on fossil carbon for energy, the biogeochemical reactions that produce coal and natural gas aren’t entirely understood.” Mastalerz and the research team from Penn State and the West Coast sought to dig deeper into the biochemistry of coal and natural gas, as microbial coal-bed methane is both “an important economic resource and source of a potent greenhouse gas,” the team wrote in the abstract.

Coal is the world’s dominant electricity source despite its combustion carrying great environmental costs, the report says. “Coal-bed methane produces less CO2 per unit of electricity and far less particulate pollution, but its viability as a transition fuel is debated: CBM production wells often have limited life spans, and efforts to enhance microbial methanogenesis [creation of methane] in coal beds have seen inconsistent success. CBM emissions also account for about 10 percent of global atmospheric inputs of this potent greenhouse gas, but substantial uncertainties regarding present and future emissions remain. The outcomes of these efforts depend on understanding what factors limit CBM generation.”

The researchers tested samples ranging in maturity from wood to mature bituminous coal from around the world, monitoring methoxyl group demethylation—changes in chemical composition of the material at the molecular level. Their conclusions were that, rather than a temperature-related chemical reaction, “deep biosphere communities participated in transforming plant matter to coal on geologic time scales”; and that an abundance of methoxyl will affect the yield of methane (natural gas) from a coal bed.

“If these results are generalizable,” the researchers wrote, “the abundance of methoxyl groups that persist until gas can accumulate may be an important control on CBM [coal-bed methane] yield.”

The IGWS is or soon will be hiring for six open jobs in the research and information service divisions. Keep checking https://igws.indiana.edu/jobs for postings and application deadlines or search at https://jobs.iu.edu.

Educators, are you planning your lessons for next semester? Let the IGWS help!

What was once a series of rooms filled with file cabinets is being transformed into a large, open space where students and adults can participate in earth science. The Learning Lab, on the ground floor of the IGWS building on the IU-Bloomington campus, is an open-collections learning center designed to engage visitors in discovering items we’ve gathered over the past 100-plus years that teach us about our geologic past. Pull open drawers to discover our fossil, mineral, and rock collections. Take part in interactive activities. Curate an exhibit. Practice illustrating real natural history specimens. Browse the gallery adjacent to this space to see exhibits centered on practical, everyday uses of geologic knowledge, like the history and science behind earthquakes in Indiana.

The Learning Lab is poised to open in the spring 2022 semester. All ages are welcome, but it’s designed mostly for middle-schoolers on up to adults.

If you are interested in discussing student opportunities, or in attending a Learning Lab open house in the spring, please click here to fill out a brief questionnaire.

The intersections of art and earth science are more plentiful than you might think. This fall, IU Bloomington student Keaton Z. Clulow curated an exhibit for the IGWS lobby showing one of those crossovers.

Clulow, a junior fine arts management major and part-time hourly worker at the IGWS, researched the minerals used to create oil paint pigments in Johannes Vermeer’s 17th century work, Officer and Laughing Girl. Until the 20th century, artists created pigments from plants and minerals—some common, some quite rare and expensive.

In Officer and Laughing Girl, Clulow identified five pigments and their sources: red ochre from hematite, ultramarine from lapis lazuli, lead white from calcite or cerussite, brown ochre from goethite or limonite, and azurite from the mineral of the same name. The exhibit identifies which parts of the painting contain these pigments and displays physical samples of those minerals from the IGWS collection.

The IGWS provides exhibits on earth science topics in the east lobby of the Geology Building, rotating them at least twice a year. Anyone can visit the exhibits free of charge between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, with weekend and evening hours available for special events.

Can’t make it to campus? Take a virtual tour of our current exhibits here.

• IGWS Director Todd Thompson, along with research scientists Maria Mastalerz, Don Tripp, and Isaac Allred, continued the annual fall weekend fieldtrips for undergraduate geology classes from IUPUI and IU Bloomington. These half-day fieldtrips cover the geology of central Monroe County, focusing on Middle Mississippian carbonates and visits to Indiana limestone (Salem Limestone) quarries.

• Allred and a co-author wrote a research paper which has been published in the journal Geosphere. It’s titled “Early Pennsylvanian sediment routing to the Ouachita Basin (southeastern United States) and barriers to transcontinental sediment transport sourced from the Appalachian orogen based on detrital zircon U-Pb and Hf analysis.”

• Mastalerz, IGWS research scientist Agnieszka Drobniak, and two research partners in Poland have published an additional paper on their studies into the environmental and human impact of grilling with wood pellets and chips. They studied the purity of several types of BBQ wood pellets and wood chips sold in the United States and Europe, and found bark, mineral matter, charcoal, coke, metal, rust, slag, and petroleum products in the pellets. Data shows that grilling with wood pellets and chips leads to elevated particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and formaldehyde in comparison with recommended exposure limits, dependent on the type of combusted wood, grilling conditions, and fuel moisture content. Read more in Atmospheric Environment.

• IGWS staff members spoke to students at Cedar Crest Intermediate School in Huntingburg in September about the monitoring station which was being installed on school grounds. The IGWS installed a well near Jasper which is part of the Indiana Water Balance Network, a group with a mission to monitor statewide trends in water loss and gain. This well also will be included in the National Ground-Water Monitoring Network. Climate and soil sensors will be added to complete the new monitoring station. Research scientist Ginger Davis, collections technician Garrett Marietta, and research scientist Babak Shabani—the IGWS point person for the Indiana Water Balance Network—were on hand for the install, and Davis was quoted in a front-page story in the Ferdinand News (Dubois County) about the project at the school.

• Geology students from IU Northwest joined Shabani and Marietta at the Indiana Water Balance Network station in Lake County to discuss the hydrologic cycle and state-level water resources. Students were given a tour of the monitoring station and learned how near-surface atmospheric parameters and soil data are collected. They also observed a pneumatic slug test being conducted on the LakeStation_N monitoring well. Shabani will analyze the test results and share them with the students.

• Davis also has been working with Indiana Private Water Resources (InPWR) to develop information and education resources for private well owners around the state.

The past two years have been full of change for the IGWS: three facility and office moves, a building renovation, multiple staff hires and departures, and the loss of several IGWS alumni to the sands of time. As another year ends, we remember the lives of six men whose work made an impact on the IGWS and the field of geology.

• Donald D. Carr, 90, Zionsville, died June 20, 2021. Carr worked for the IGWS for 33 years before retiring in 1996, serving as head of the industrial minerals section from 1970 to 1981 as well as a part-time geology professor from 1979 to 1996. Dimension and aggregate limestone was his specialty. He’d earned his Ph.D. in geology from Indiana University in 1969.

• Samuel “Sam” A. Freeman, 93, Oklahoma, died Sept. 22, 2020. Freeman’s first professional job was as a coal geologist at the IGWS between 1952 and 1967. He went on to rank “high among America’s most respected geologists,” becoming “a noted authority on the stratigraphy and sedimentology of the Middle Pennsylvanian Period of the Paleozoic Era,” his obituary read.

• Maurice Biggs, 98, Bloomington, died Aug. 16, 2020. Biggs spent his entire 36-year career at the IGWS, serving as a geophysicist, head of geophysics and assistant state geologist. He retired in 1987. He’d earned doctorate degrees in geology and geophysics from IU.

• Wilbur “Bill” Stalions, 79, Martinsville, died Jan. 19, 2020. Stalions worked as an artist-draftsman from 1977 to 2000, creating more than 400 illustrations for IGWS reports, for articles researchers wrote for Outdoor Indiana magazine, and for the geology education newspaper series Our Hoosier State Beneath Us. The 2022 IGWS calendar displays some of his work and a related StoryMap will be published on our website in the spring.

We also lost two alumni of note in 2019:

• William “Bill” J. Wayne, 97, Nebraska, died Nov. 5, 2019. After his graduate studies at IU, Wayne was hired as an IGWS research fellow in 1951, working in glacial geology, then was named section head and earned his Ph.D. the following year. He spent 25 years as a professor of geology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, becoming emeritus in 1993. He continued to publish until 2011. IGWS staff still use his publications on Indiana glacial history.

• Charles E. Wier, 97, Bloomington, died May 5, 2019. Wier began working at the IGWS in 1951 as a geologist and head of the coal section. He also was a geology professor at IU Bloomington, the institution from which he’d earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees. He later worked for private coal and gold mining companies, and until age 95, was a consultant for the Indiana Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Throughout the year, if you learn of the death of a former IGWS employee, please share that news with us.

The staff of the Indiana Geological and Water Survey wishes you a very happy holidays.

If you have items from our bookstore on your gift list which require shipping, those orders must be received by Wednesday, Dec. 15.

Our office will be closed Friday, Dec. 24 through Friday, Dec. 31. We will reopen Monday, Jan. 3.

CONTACT US

The Indiana Geological and Water Survey, a longstanding institute of Indiana University, conducts research, surveys the state, collects and preserves geologic specimens and data, and disseminates information to contribute to the mitigation of geologic hazards and the wise stewardship of the energy, mineral, and water resources of Indiana.

• To join the E-Geo News mailing list, please click here.

• To ask a question of IGWS staff or suggest an E-Geo News topic, email scliffo@iu.edu.