Late Mississippian, Mauch Chunk Group strata constitute a westward-thinning clastic wedge of strata up to 1000m thick that developed in the Central Appalachian Basin over a ~ 7 million year time interval. Included within the Mauch Chunk Group are multiple incised-valley fills and a distinctive prodeltaic succession of laminated sandstones and mudstones. Calculated estimates of drainage basin areas for incised-valley fills in the Mauch Chunk Group range from > 1,000,000 km2 for the Stony Gap Sandstone to < 100,000 km2 for the Princeton Formation. Drainage area estimates are consistent with detrital zircon geochronology and petrographic data and suggest that the Stony Gap and Ravencliff incised-valley fills were derived from distal, northern and northwestern cratonic sources that dispersed sediment into NE-SW-oriented, longitudinal incised-valley drainages and that the Princeton Formation was derived from proximal tectonic highland sources along the eastern margin of the Appalachian Basin which dispersed sediment into a transverse incised-valley. The Pride Shale overlies the Princeton incised valley fill and records a hierarchy of tidal periodicities is preserved in the Pride Shale. Microlaminated, semi-diurnal sandstone-siltstone/shale couplets record the dominant ebb tide of the day. Up to 17 semi-diurnal couplets are stacked into neap-spring (fortnightly) tidal cycles. Neap-spring cycles are arranged in thickening and thinning that record seasonal cycles driven by the annual monsoon. Total organic carbon (TOC) values are a proxy for annual climatic cycles. TOC contents are higher within intermonsoonal and lower within monsoonal components of annual cycles reflecting, respectively, lesser and greater dilution by terrestrial flux. / Master of Science

A commercial-off-the-shelf Ku-band Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system is coupled with a custom built two-dimensional scanning system. This system is installed in an alpine environment and pointed at a snow-unstable mountain slope for the duration of a Utah winter. The radar scanning system, designed to be capable of mapping a snowpack and its layers, is employed to create a series of three-dimensional images from a remote location. Individual images demonstrate the ability to directly detect snow layers, Furthermore, successive images are compared to track volume magnitude and phase values over the course of winter, including many snow deposition and melt events. The digital signal processing techniques used to create a high-resolution voxel (a three-dimensional pixel) map describing these snow layers is discussed. Results are discussed and further work is suggested for improving upon the results of this work.

The Paradox Basin is a northwest-southeast trending intracratonic basin that formed in southwestern Colorado, southeastern Utah and adjacent parts of Arizona and New Mexico during the late Paleozoic Era. During rise of the adjacent Uncompahgre Uplift (Ancestral Rocky Mountains), the rapidly subsiding basin was filled with over 2000 m of Permo-Pennsylvanian sediments that reflect a complex interplay of changing tectonic, paleoecological, and climatic conditions that resulted in cyclic packages of mixed lowstand and non-marine siliciclastics and highstand shallow-platform carbonates. The 150 m-thick Honaker Trail formation straddles the transition from mostly marine carbonates to mostly non-marine siliciclastics on the southwest shelf of the Paradox Basin during late Moscovian to early Gzhelian (late Desmoinesian to early Virgilian) time. The carbonate-dominated lower 70 m of the formation were divided into two 4th-order sequences and thirteen 5th-order cycles by Goldhammer et al. (1991). We subdivide the remaining overlying 80 m of the Honaker Trail Formation, up to the top of the Shafer Limestone into an additional five 4th-order sequences named, from lowest to highest, the Raplee Limestone (named herein as a replacement for "unnamed limestone" of previous literature), Little Loop Limestone, W"“130 Limestone, Mendenhall Sandstone, and Shafer Limestone sequences and provide a detailed sequence stratigraphic framework of the Raplee, Little Loop, and W-130 sequences. In addition, we provide a conodont sequence biostratigraphic framework for the southwestern (carbonate) shelf of the Paradox Basin to correlate these sequences to Midcontinent (eastern Kansas) cycles using Idiognathodus and Streptognathodus-dominated conodont faunas. From the conodont fauna described herein, the Raplee Limestone sequence likely correlates with the Dennis major cycle of the Midcontinent, and suggests a correlation between the Little Loop Sequence and the minor Hogshooter cyclothem. We also propose the extension of these species' biostratigraphic zones within the Paradox Basin: I. swadei, I. papulatus, I. eccentricus, and I. sulciferus; all of which have been defined by Barrick and Rosscoe (2013) and others as extinct in the Midcontinent Basin at the end of the Swope cyclothem.

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