Sluice Pond research gives students glimpse of North Shore’s glacial past

LYNN – Clues to what the North Shore looked like thousands of years ago are encased in layers of soil at the bottom of Sluice Pond, and Salem State College geology professor Brad Hubeny is bringing them to the surface.Over the past two years, Hubeny and his students have been engaged in a series of research projects, some of which have taken them to Lynn, where they continue to extract core samples from deep ponds carved out by the receding glaciers thousands of years ago.Hubeny and his students also make observations and conduct experiments in remote stretches of Montana, beneath lakes in Canada, alongside Chesapeake Bay, and in the Valley of Fire, an hour drive from Las Vegas, Nev.Hubeny, 33, grew up in Hingham, earned a bachelor’s degree in geology from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and completed his Ph.D in geological oceanography at the University of Rhode Island in 2006. A few months later he began teaching as an assistant professor at Salem, offering classes in physical geology, historical geology, and hydrology, and soon became involved in the department’s field camp programs.To be closer to campus, Hubeny and his wife, KC, along with their newborn son, Clark, and mongrel dog, Eddie, moved from Cranston, R.I. to Swampscott. KC Hubeny, who holds a Master’s degree in outdoor education, has been working as a freelance graphic designer while caring for Clark.”I sort of stumbled into geology,” said Hubeny, recalling the influence of Michael Retelle, his faculty advisor at Bates College and an alumnus of the SSC geology program. “We met playing hockey. He was this down-to-Earth guy who got excited when he talked about a subject.”In summer 1996, Hubeny accompanied Retelle to the Canadian Arctic and developed a taste for field research. He was hooked. As a graduate student in 2004, Hubeny was part of a funded drilling and research project on a lake in Ghana, Africa, and his enthusiasm for such work has carried over to his teaching at SSC.The core sampling at Sluice Pond in Lynn is aimed at understanding climate change by discovering what the immediate environment was like about 16,000 years ago when the glacial ice sheets first began to melt.”Sluice Pond is probably the best site in the region because it’s so deep and small,” explained Hubeny. “When a lake turns over, if it’s deep enough, the very bottom water stays stagnant. And since there’s no oxygen at that level, it prohibits clams and worms from moving around in the sediment. That’s important when you’re taking core samples, which can include a series of light and dark rings, called varves, similar to the annual rings of a tree. To get them, you want the sediment to be undisturbed.”According to Hubeny, though the field studies have not yet determined whether Sluice Pond contains varves in its bottom sediment, the body of water holds the best chance of any on the North Shore for obtaining such evidence.Come mid-June, students will again be aboard an anchored pontoon boat that Hubeny donated to the program, ready to extract more core samples.Meanwhile, six SSC geology students – Nicole Ritch, Michael Reddin, Timothy Vaillancourt, James Randall, David Chiaradonna and Jocelyn Brotherton – in March presented their research findings at a regional conference of the Geological Society of America in Buffalo, N.Y. Vaillancourt and Hubeny have been studying lead contamination in the Forest River Estuary in Salem. Ritch has been working on the Sluice Pond project by analyzing core samples, hoping to determine the geological history and patterns in past climate change.Randall’s research includes conducting a geophysical survey of Chesapeake Bay off the shores of Maryland and Virginia to confirm and analyze changing sea levels. Reddin has been reconstructing lake sediments to draw conclusions on precipitation variability in the Northeast U.S.”This was all independent work they did while under faculty advising,” said Hubeny, noting he and Reddin presented the results of their resea