UM Geosciences Program Awarded $1.4M for Mountain Watershed Research

As mountain watersheds store and release water, the Earth’s shape changes ever so subtly. The University of Montana Department of Geosciences now can track those changes by GPS, thanks to a $1.4 million cut of a multi-institutional collaborative award from the National Science Foundation. The total value of the award, part of the NSF’s Frontier Research in Earth Sciences program, is $2.43 million.

The project is headed by UM Geosciences Assistant Professor Hilary Martens, who has a background in space science, planetary science and geophysics. After earning not one but three prestigious scholarships – the Presidential Leadership, Marshall and Goldwater – at UM, she received masters’ degrees in space science at University College London and volcano seismology at Cambridge.

For the new project, the team will use GPS to track changes in the shape of the Earth from the storage and flow of water. GPS receivers can determine sagging of Earth’s surface under the weight of water to the accuracy of 1 mm, and the team will use that information to estimate the total amount of water added or removed from a watershed daily or over a period of years. Martens will process and analyze the GPS data, as well as develop models to predict changes in the Earth’s shape due to the differing water amounts.

Read the full story from University of Montana here.