The Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory is a forested, small, temperate-climate catchment in central Pennsylvania in which the regolith is developing upon homogeneous shale. The purpose of the observatory and associated interdisciplinary research is to quantitatively predict the creation, evolution, and structure of regolith as a function of the geochemical, hydrologic, biologic, and geomorphologic processes operating in a temperate, forested landscape. By creating an interdisciplinary team working collaboratively in one observatory we aim to advance methods for characterizing regolith, to provide a theoretical basis for predicting the distribution and properties of regolith, and to theoretically and experimentally study the impacts of regolith on fluid pathways, flow rates, and residence times. The research site, the focus of National Science Foundation-supported research since the 1970s, has comprehensive datasets on distributed water budgets (1970-75), has served as a model test bed for hydrological response (1998-present), and will be augmented here by new geochemical, geomorphological, ecological, lidar, and soils datasets, all available to the research community.
Learn more ...
