Building on almost 20 years of work studying the late Quaternary history of the Uintas, I received funding from NSF in 2015 to expand my work on dust deposition in the alpine zone. Passive and active dust samplers deployed since 2011 have provided information about the properties of modern dust, rates of dust deposition, and impacts of dust deposition over time. Ongoing work involves maintaining this network of 8 collectors, field and lab study of alpine soils to more completely understand dust impacts on pedogenesis, and study of lake sediment cores to reconstruct dust deposition over the post-glacial period. I recently summarized the first decade of dust collection in a paper published in Science of the Total Environment, which also included full plans for constructing the dust collectors.
In September, 2020 this work was expanded as part of DUST^2, a Critical Zone Thematic Cluster supported by the National Science Foundation. Together with colleagues Janice Brahney (Utah State University), Greg Carling (Brigham Young University), Maura Hahnenberger (Salt Lake Community College), Kevin Perry (University of Utah), and McKenzie Skiles (University of Utah), the dust system in the southwestern US is being investigated from source to sink. At sites in dryland settings the controls on dust emissions are studied with field and laboratory methods. Atmospheric modeling is illuminating downwind transport pathways for emitted dust. And study sites in mountain location are revealing ways in which dust deposition impacts snowmelt, nutrient cycling, and soil formation in high-elevation ecosystems. You can follow the DUST^2 project on Mastodon.