Sedelia Rodriguez

Barnard College of Columbia University · Environmental Science

Brownfield Action is a web-based interactive learning simulation in which students form geotechnical consulting companies and collaboratively solve problems in environmental forensics. Brownfield Action combines a civic-minded, constructivist approach to learning, the environmental, economic, and civic importance of brownfields and the toxification...

Volcanoes have a complex relationship with sustainability and climate: they contributed to the formation of Earth’s atmosphere, can have short-term effects on local climate and world climate, and have been used as a scapegoat for man-made climate change. A better understanding of volcanoes and their relation to climate provides students with a more...

To address the national need to diversify the geosciences, we created the cohort-based Environmental Science Pathways Scholars Program, or E(SP)2, for undergraduates in the Environmental Science Department at Barnard College who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), first generation, or low income. By fostering a more inclusiv...

The most severe mass extinction in the Phanerozoic in the latest Permian Period (251.9 Ma), has been attributed to environmental effects related to the massive coeval Siberian flood-basalt eruptions. A potential causal link between the eruptions and the marine extinctions arises from lethal global warming from greenhouse-gas emissions and the resul...

A latest Permian timeline (251.9 Ma) can be constructed from the perspectives of: a global nickel spike attributed to emissions from the coeval Siberian flood-basalt eruptions, the correlative end-Permian marine mass extinction (EPME), a transition from reversed to normal paleomagnetism, and a negative anomaly in δ¹³Ccarb and δ¹³Corg. In a number o...

Anomalous peaks of nickel abundance have been reported in Permian-Triassic boundary sections in China, Israel, Eastern Europe, Spitzbergen, and the Austrian Carnic Alps. New solution ICP-MS results of enhanced nickel from P-T boundary sections in Hungary, Japan, and Spiti, India suggest that the nickel anomalies at the end of the Permian were a wor...

The Grande Ronde Basalt lavas constitute ~63% of the Columbia River Basalt Group, a large igneous province in the NW United States. The lavas are aphyric or contain less than 5% phenocrysts of plagioclase, augite, pigeonite, and olivine(altered). Plagioclase hygrometry shows that the erupted lavas generally contained less than 0.3% dissolved H2O; h...

Oceanic crust is the carrier of the marine magnetic anomalies and is therefore a valuable archive of geomagnetic information. ODP/IODP Hole 1256D was the first to sample an entire sequence of oceanic crust down to the gabbro. We studied the vertical variation of magnetic remanence carriers by means of scanning electron microscopy, microanalysis and...

Coring at Site 1256 (6.736°N, 91.934°W, 3635 m water depth) during Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 206 and Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expeditions 309 and 312 successfully sampled a complete section of in situ oceanic crust, including sediments of Seismic Layer 1, lavas and dikes of Layer 2, and the uppermost gabbros of Layer 3. The c...

A continuous section from extrusive lavas, through sheeted dikes, and uppermost gabbros recovered from Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Hole 1256D provides important information regarding magma plumbing systems beneath superfast spreading ridges. Petrological examination demonstrates that a model of fractional crystallization from a magma of compo...

Near liquidus experiments on peridotite and other olivine normative compositions from 1.7 to 6 GPa confirm the applicability of exchange-based empirical models of Ni and Co partitioning between olivine and silicate liquids with compositions close to the liquidus of peridotite. Given that most estimates of lunar bulk composition are peridotitic, the...

The identification of magnetic minerals throughout a complete oceanic crustal section yields important information about the carriers of the marine magnetic anomalies, one of the longest continuous archives of the behavior of the geomagnetic field. A study involving the determination of the magnetic hysteresis parameters, Curie temperatures, IRM ac...

Lavas belonging to the Grande Ronde Formation (GRB) constitute about 63% of the Columbia River Basalt Group (CRBG), a flood basalt province in the NW United States. A puzzling feature is the lack of phenocrysts (< 5%) in these chemically evolved lavas. Based mainly on this observation it has been hypothesized that GRB lavas were nearly primary melt...