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AEG Event 11/14/24: Coastal Plain Glauconites and Offshore Wind Farms

Start
1 Nov 2024
6:00 PM (EDT)
End
14 Nov 2024
10:00 PM (EDT)
Location
60 Cottontail Lane, Somerset, NJ 08873

Registration

Payment
In-Person Registration Fees
$40 for AEG members / $50 non-members / $5 for students with RSVP /
Professors attend as our guests at no charge.
Remote Attendance Registration Fee - $15.00 (no CEC credits)
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We are continuing to celebrate our return to in-person meetings, bring a guest who is new to AEG, and they pay half-price!

Registration is closed

DINNER MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT

Coastal Plain Glauconites and Offshore Wind Farms

Thursday, November 14, 2024
At the Clarion Hotel in Somerset, New Jersey

Kenneth G. Miller, PhD, Distinguished Professor,
Rutgers University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Crushed Glauconite Sand from a hollow stem auger boring at Fort Monmouth, NJ (credit: Rutgers University) from Westgate et al, 2023.

Time:	Social Hour 6:00 pm – 6:45 pm / Dinner 6:45 pm – 7:45 pm Presentation begins at 8:00 pm
Place:	Clarion Hotel / 60 Cottontail Lane, Somerset, NJ 08873 / (732) 560-9880
RSVP:	End of Business, Tuesday, November 12, 2024. A timely RSVP is appreciated! Please note, you can register more than one individual at a time! Don't forget to add the event to your calendar!
Cost:	In-Person Registration Fees $40 for AEG members / $50 non-members / $5 for students with RSVP / Professors attend as our guests at no charge. Remote Attendance Registration Fee - $15

CECs:

One professional development hour (pdh) for continuing education credit (CEC) will be awarded for attending the presentation.

SRPLB Approval for One Hour of LSRP Technical CEC may be requested.

ABSTRACT
Driving through fertile farmlands of South Jersey adjacent to poor soils of the Pine Barrens reminds geologists of the importance of the underlying geology. Glauconite is a green potassium iron phyllosilicate mineral familiar to most New Jersey geologists, and it provides fertile farmland in the “marls” of the coastal plain. The Cretaceous-Paleogene outcrop belt paralleling the NJ Turnpike is rich in glauconite, whereas beachy sands of the Kirkwood-Cohansey Formations are quartz rich. The presence of the glauconites deposited in deep continental shelf environments has long been used to identify transgressive deposits of the sea-level cycles that molded the coastal plain.

In addition to the soil and sea-level studies, glauconite has become an important obstacle in engineering. Engineers installing offshore wind farms are finding that unusual properties of the mineral glauconite, sand size that easily shatters into gummy muds, pose geotechnical challenges. To address these challenges, a team of Rutgers scientists led by Rutgers Prof. Ken Miller, together with the University of Massachusetts Prof. Zack Westgate (UMass Amherst) and Ryan Beemer (UMass Dartmouth) and Haley & Aldrich, were contracted by a Joint Industry Partnership (JIP) with two major offshore energy developers to locate sites to study the geotechnical properties of glauconites.

After an extensive search, we identified the Search Farm in Upper Freehold Township as an ideal location for tests. The site is adjacent to the “Contact Creek” and Crosswicks Creek localities identified by Dick Olsson in 1960, containing the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary. Drilling on the Search Farm in 2009 to study the K/Pg boundary showed that this site has ~50 ft thick succession of glauconite sands comprising the Paleocene Hornerstown, overlying the Maastrichtian Navesink “greensands” and a world-class K/Pg boundary. Mr. Search agreed to lend his farm to the causes of science again in 2022-2023. In February to April 2023 engineering studies were conducted on the greensands to evaluate their geotechnical properties. The knowledge obtained will inform efforts to establish offshore wind farms. These offshore wind tracts are valuable resources with recent lease sales of over $4 billion, exceeding the $3 billion spent (in 2022 dollars) for oil and gas leases in the 1970’s.

BIOGRAPHY

Kenneth G. Miller is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He received an A.B. from Rutgers College (1978) and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography (1982). He was an Associate Research Scientist at Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory from 1983-1988.

A veteran of 9 scientific cruises (6 as co-chief including ODP Leg 150), he has integrated offshore seismic and drilling activities with onshore drilling: since 1993, he has been Chief Scientist of the New Jersey Coastal Plain Drilling Project (Ocean Drilling Program Legs 150X and 174AX) that continuously cored thirteen sites. He has recently participated in IODP Leg 113 (Drilling the New Jersey Shallow Shelf).

Author of over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers, his most significant publications include a widely cited synthesis of Cenozoic oxygen isotopes (Miller et al., 1987) and a synthesis of global sea-level change (Miller et al., 1998, 2005). He was awarded the 2003 Rosenstiel Award from the University of Miami and is a two-time JOI/USSAC (1995, 2006) and AAPG (2014) Distinguished Lecturer.

A resident of Pennington, NJ, Ken grew up in Medford, NJ in the heart of the pine barrens. He just sold his shore house in Waretown, NJ, the home of the sounds of the NJ pines, where he used to watch the inexorable rise in sea level from his deck 16 ft above Barnegat Bay.

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AEG Event 11/14/24: Coastal Plain Glauconites and Offshore Wind Farms

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