Jessica Stanley
University of Idaho, ID·Earth & Environmental Science
Can heat rising from deep inside the Earth lift up an entire region's landscape? Yellowstone sits above a mantle hotspot, a plume of hot rock rising from deep below the continent.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
Yellowstone hotspot
mantle plume
tectonics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Quantify Cenozoic exhumation and relief growth in the upper Gallatin drainage using apatite (U-Th)/He and 4He/3He thermochronology, methods that date when rocks cooled near the surface, on valley-to-ridge transects of Cretaceous and Eocene intrusive rocks.
- Constrain Quaternary river incision and deformation by mapping terraces along the Gallatin River and dating them with luminescence, which measures when sediment was last exposed to sunlight.
- Measure exhumation rates over the Miocene to Quaternary using detrital apatite fission track, U-Pb, and luminescence dating of sediments stored in the Gallatin valley.
- Test hypotheses for what drove regional surface uplift by integrating geologic and dating data into a numerical landscape evolution model with an inversion scheme that estimates uplift magnitude.
More about the research
The hotspot feeds Yellowstone's volcanoes and geysers. It may also have pushed up the surrounding topography as it passed beneath the area. How strongly processes deep in the mantle shape Earth's surface is still an open question in tectonics, the study of how Earth's crust moves and deforms. Yellowstone is an ideal place to test it.
Why it matters
The work could clarify how deep mantle activity reshapes landscapes at the surface, using one of the most-visited regions in the United States as a natural laboratory. Its record of uplift and erosion near Yellowstone may help geoscientists test competing explanations for how hotspots build topography, and it adds to public understanding of how this landscape formed.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marissa Tremblay
Purdue University, IN·Earth & Environmental Science
Constrain when and where the Arizaro and Antofalla basins of the southern Puna plateau deformed and subsided, using geologic mapping, measured stratigraphic sections, and geo- and thermochronology.
Chelsea Mackaman-Lofland
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether high mountains in western Anatolia delayed hominoid migration from Africa into Eurasia. Reconstruct basin history, crustal thickness from zircon geochemistry, and past elevation using proxy-based paleoaltimetry.
Francis Sousa
Oregon State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether the ancient Tyee river drained a large continental interior from western Idaho or began in the Klamath Mountains, using U-Pb and Lu-Hf analysis of zircon sand grains to trace sediment sources.
The school
University of Idaho: 8 labs on PI Pages, $140M a year on research, 71 research doctorates a year.
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