[LTER-mcm-pi] Fwd: Re: Collaboration on Lake Fryxell and Bonney

Thu Mar 10 15:57:09 MST 2016

Peter—too wordy! What is the punch line?

From: mcm-pi [mailto:mcm-pi-bounces at lists.lternet.edu] On Behalf Of Peter Doran
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2016 3:24 PM
To: mcm-pi at lists.lternet.edu
Subject: [LTER-mcm-pi] Fwd: Re: Collaboration on Lake Fryxell and Bonney

This guy is really pushy. Here's a draft (not sending until tomorrow) of my response to him in case you want to follow the saga. I'd also like input since he's now involved Paul. This is much more wordy than my initial idea for a response which just involved a few colorful words...

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:

Re: Collaboration on Lake Fryxell and Bonney

Date:

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 16:17:40 -0600

From:

Peter Doran <pdoran at lsu.edu><mailto:pdoran at lsu.edu>

To:

Huang, Yongsong <yongsong_huang at brown.edu><mailto:yongsong_huang at brown.edu>

CC:

Cutler, Paul M <pcutler at nsf.gov><mailto:pcutler at nsf.gov>

Hi Huang,

As I said, I'm always open to collaboration, but I am also trying to keep a promise to a young career scientist to collaborate with him on similar work. But having just talked to Guangsheng, we can try to do complimentary work and more process type stuff. He is quite confident in his ability to do the alkenone paleothermometry work after his two year Postdoc at Yale with Mark Pagani who he still collaborates with.  So we will work in parallel once his lab is established in a month or so.

More to the point though is the complete unknown state of the sediment "archive". I really have no idea what is left. It's been a long time since I laid eyes on any of these samples and there's been a move across the country in the mean time, a few freezer failures and some cleaning house during the move (NSF does not have rules on archiving samples, but also sometimes the reality of long term sample storage with no budget for it, is not a good reality). I'll have to get someone to check on what we have. The Bonney sediment cores were not really sediment cores at all, but dirty salt cores. I know we do not have anything from West Lobe Bonney and East Lobe Bonney is probably scarce and patchy since we had to use a lot of it to do the analysis we have already done. There is also no real chronological control on those sediments - my guess is they are a few thousand years old at best (and that's what we published in Wagner et al. 2010) so do not meet your needs. Fryxell holds the most promise and we will check on those sediments, but I can give no promises that we still have samples spanning the full record. Plus, even with Fryxell, with the radiocarbon reservoir issues, I view the chronology with a grain of salt.

All the best
-Peter

Peter T. Doran

Professor and John Franks Chair

Geology and Geophysics

Louisiana State University

E235 Howe Russell Geosciences Complex, Baton Rouge, LA  70803

office 2255783955 | fax 2255782302

www.lsu.edu/science/geology/<http://www.lsu.edu/science/geology/>

On 3/10/16 2:25 PM, Huang, Yongsong wrote:
Dear Peter:

I had a nice conversation with Paul this morning. He told me about his recent contact with you regarding our sample requests for Lake Fryxell.

As I mentioned repeatedly, I am very interested in collaborating with you on Fryxell and Bonney, and we have been working on generating preliminary data from the lakes.

Paul assured me that it is NSF policy that samples sponsored by federal grants should be utilized to the maximum to get new science discoveries.

To test a set of novel alkenone based proxies that we discovered, Lake Fryxell core sediments provide irreplaceable opportunities for our investigation. We need ~ a dozen samples that go through the glacial to interglacial periods. Your existing samples as you mentioned are just fine for our purpose.

We will be happy to have you as a co-author on our papers from these samples.

Thanks!

Yongsong

On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 8:05 PM, Huang, Yongsong <yongsong_huang at brown.edu<mailto:yongsong_huang at brown.edu>> wrote:
Peter:

I also do have a specific scientific reason to use the sediment cores from Fryxell and Bonney for calibration a new alkenone based proxy we discovered. No other lakes have the special features like Fryxell and Bonney that meet our need. We do not need super clear history for the sediments, all we need is that they span the long history for the past 40,000 years. A dozen samples from different stratigraphic horizons will meet our needs.

Storage in freezer will not affect our analyses at all.

It will be great if we talk on the phone. I think collaboration will be mutually beneficial.

Thanks

Yongsong

On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 6:02 PM, Peter Doran <pdoran at lsu.edu<mailto:pdoran at lsu.edu>> wrote:
Hi Yongsong,

Sorry for the delay in replying. It's been a very very busy period and your email got buried deep. I had intended to reply. I also had to do a search for Nora's email. I missed that one all together I'm afraid.

We collected sediment cores over 10 years ago which have been heavily used for analysis in published papers. What's left of the cores have been in a freezer with a questionable history for a very long time. The Jaraula work you are probably familiar with was done under the supervision of her adviser at UIC, Fabien Kenig. They worked from box cores of the surface mats and I think he still has some of that, but not sure.

We have a new young faculty here  who discussed with me doing alkenone and paleothermometry work well over a year ago when first interviewing. He is still building his lab which apparently he is almost finished (if you are ever finished building a lab). We have not yet gotten to the point of assessing what the quality of my samples are after so long. I'm obviously interested in supporting a young faculty in my own department as a priority. I'm also open to other collaborations if they are complimentary to our efforts. The new faculty is Guangsheng Zhuang, and I'm sure he would be too. I will talk to him about this. I hope this helps.

Thanks
-Peter

Peter T. Doran

Professor and John Franks Chair

Geology and Geophysics

Louisiana State University

E235 Howe Russell Geosciences Complex, Baton Rouge, LA  70803

office 2255783955<tel:2255783955> | fax 2255782302<tel:2255782302>

www.lsu.edu/science/geology/<http://www.lsu.edu/science/geology/>

On 2/24/16 10:11 AM, Huang, Yongsong wrote:
Dear Peter:

My graduate student Nora Richter contacted you a while ago about the collaborations on Lake Fryxell and Bonney.

I would like to provide some background about my research group and why we are so interested in Dry Valley lakes.

My research group has been very active in studying cold norther hemisphere lakes including those from Greenland, Arctic Alaska and Tibetan Plateau. Here is the abstract for my NSF Alaska grant: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1503846&HistoricalAwards=false.

We have been actively publishing alkenones in lakes for the past decade and I would not be ashamed to say, currently, my group is the best in the world in terms of our understanding of lacustrine alkenones and their application for paleoclimate and paleoecological applications. We also developed major technical expertise on studying these compounds and have ability to unambiguously identify alkenone double bond positions - there were major problems with old methodologies and hence many papers publish only tentative identification of double bond positions (such as Caroline Jaraula paper in organic geochemistry on tentative identification of penta unsaturated alkenones). I also work with Linda Amaral at Marine Biological Lab closely (she is expert on DNA sequencing, and has state of the art facilities). My lab is a full scale organic geochemistry lab with all gas and liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry and isotope ratio mass spectrometry (I have four mass spectrometers): few organic geochemistry labs in the U.S. have the scale of analytical capability as in my lab.

Here is our in press paper on lake alkenones: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016703716300576. We will publish a cluster of papers this year since we have made major multiple breakthrough discoveries in the area.

If you are interested, you can find my full paper list in my google citation page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xel8cGsAAAAJ&hl=en

Sorry these may look like I am bragging. However, it has been really difficult to convince experts like you on Antarctic lakes that we can really contribute to the science in ways no other research group can.

We have already carried out initial work on Lake Fryxell and Lake Bonney sediment and water column samples, and found fascinating new things - we can publish a paper, even just based on our data now.

I will be really keen to talk to you on the phone. I really would like to work on sediment cores from Fryxell and Bonney, and can assure you we will make major new discoveries in collaboration with you.

Thanks a lot,

Yongsong

--
Dr. Yongsong Huang
Professor
Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences
Brown University
Providence , Rhode Island 02912
U.S.A.

Tel: 401-863-3822<tel:401-863-3822>
Email: Yongsong_Huang at brown.edu<mailto:Yongsong_Huang at brown.edu>
http://brown.edu/Departments/Geology/people/facultypage.php?id=1106969965

--
Dr. Yongsong Huang
Professor
Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences
Brown University
Providence , Rhode Island 02912
U.S.A.

Tel: 401-863-3822<tel:401-863-3822>
Email: Yongsong_Huang at brown.edu<mailto:Yongsong_Huang at brown.edu>
http://brown.edu/Departments/Geology/people/facultypage.php?id=1106969965

--
Dr. Yongsong Huang
Professor
Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences
Brown University
Providence , Rhode Island 02912
U.S.A.

Tel: 401-863-3822
Email: Yongsong_Huang at brown.edu<mailto:Yongsong_Huang at brown.edu>
http://brown.edu/Departments/Geology/people/facultypage.php?id=1106969965
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