Grant Will Support Study of Lake Champlain Resilience

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Professor of Geology Pat Manley and Visiting Assistant Professor of Geology Tom Manley have received funding as part of a statewide grant awarded to the VT-EPSCoR program at the University of Vermont by the National Science Foundation. The goal of this five-year grant, titled Basin Resiliency to Extreme Events (BREE), is to study and promote resiliency in the Lake Champlain Basin.

The wife and husband team will be working with UVM researchers and Middlebury students to study circulation and sediment dynamic of the Winooski River outflow in order to better understand the delivery and disposition of sediment, nutrients and potential contaminants into Lake Champlain.

Year one of the five-year program will focus on the deployment of 10 year-long subsurface moorings, high resolution bottom mapping of the region and the deployment of four subsurface neutrally buoyant Lagrangian drifters that will map water movement throughout the main lake at various depths. In subsequent years, these operations will be repeated to produce a long-term data set that will concurrently be used to calibrate a three-dimensional numerical model of lake circulation.