Dennis A Darby

Dr. Dennis A. Darby, professor in the Department of Ocean, Earth, & Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Sciences. Over the last 10 years he has published 24 refereed papers in the leading journals of his field and was lead investigator in six, highly competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) funded projects totaling $1.823 million. His total grants awarded, including support for investigators at other institutions where he was the lead investigator are nearly $8 million. His publications include a sole-authored paper in Nature and papers in Science, Geological Society of America Bulletin, Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, Quaternary Research, Paleoceanography, Global and Planetary Change, Quaternary Science Reviews, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, Journal of Geophysical Research, EOS, Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, Journal of Sedimentary Research, Deep-Sea Research, Science of the Total Environment, Sedimentary Geology, Economic Geology, and Earth and Planetary Science Letters among others. He is lead author on 60% of his publications. He has been a leader in Arctic Ocean paleoceanography in the U.S. and led the Healy-Oden Trans-Arctic Expedition (HOTRAX’05) as Chief Scientist in charge of coring and ice studies. This was the second only scientific expedition to cross the central Arctic Ocean with icebreakers. His pioneering research in developing the Fe grain chemical fingerprinting technique has lead to the discovery of massive surges of glacial icebergs into the Arctic Ocean several times in the past corresponding to and perhaps matching in ice volume the well-documented Heinrich Events in the North Atlantic, the influence of the Arctic Oscillation on ice drift over the last 10,000 years and that it has both century-scale and millennial-scale cyclicity, the routine occurrence of Russian sea ice off the coast of Alaska, the fact that the perennial ice cover in the Arctic has been a stable feature for at least the last 14 million years, that airborne dust is a relatively minor component in Arctic sediment, and that ice may have circulated differently during glacial intervals than today. While Arctic research has been his focus for most of his career, he has also studied shelf sediments along the U.S. Atlantic coast where he discovered that about half the sand grains along the Virginia coast come from the Hudson River and that this sand required hundreds of thousands of years to be transported from New York. This finding has implications for beach erosion and replenishment and was written up in Science News, Earth Science, Insight, Earth, and the Atlantic Constitution.