This was a bit of a labor of love, but our paper documenting the first depositional age constraints on the Konnarock Formation from Virginia is out in Science Advances at this link:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/24/eaay6647.abstract
Working on this project was a real pleasure, a bunch of friends from Princeton went down to Virginia to drink beer, eat BBQ and collect rhyolites for high precision geochronology! This work was inspired by a blog post by Callan Bentley, who summarized that the age of the Konnarock glacial diamictites was essentially unconstrained. Arthur Merschat from the USGS was in the process of getting a new map together of the area and his intuition was that the rhyolites were a part of the stratigraphy (and weren’t thrust in during Phanerozoic deformation for example). After we got the dates and it was clear that the Konnarock diamictites did not correlate in time with either of the Neoproterozoic snowball Earths, the job was then to think what these rocks implied for preSturtian climate! Nadir Jeevanjee and Gabe Vecchi at Princeton were very happy to discuss these data and I learned a bunch about modern climate such as polar amplificiation- the process where the poles heat up much faster than the tropics. I’m hoping to continue this type of research because it was a lot of fun!