Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous I’ve got a shiny new Emriver Em2 river processes simulator (i.e., stream table), thanks to departmental equipment funds and enthusiastic colleagues. I’ve been on sabbatical this semester and away from campus, so I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but it is enticing …
14,000 years ago there was direct connection between what is now the Red River basin and the Minnesota River basin. Today, there’s a continental divide – with the Red flowing toward Hudson Bay and the Minnesota flowing toward the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico. But what a strange continental divide it is – for it runs through the former outlet of Lake Agassiz, in what is now known as the Traverse Gap. This divide is not so much a high point in the landscape, but a just-not-quite-as-low area.
These four papers all attempt to understand what controls the sediments that make up the streambed and floodplain and that get preserved in the geologic record. White et al. look at how riffle positions are governed by valley width variations, while Jerolmack and Brzinski find striking similarities in grain size transitions observed in rivers and dune fields. Hart et al. examine the relationship between glacial advances and downstream sediment deposition, while Sambrook Smith et al. investigate the sedimentological record of floods.
How do rivers erode bedrock streams, during big floods, and in the presence of groundwater? Laboratory and accidental experiments are providing some cool new insights.
How large reservoirs affect our measurements of global sea level rise…and how the world’s biggest river basins are going to respond to mid-century climate change
Though I don’t think anything can top Kyle’s pathologically misdirected RYNHO, I recently had cause to contemplate a river that everyone has heard of – the Snake River of the northwestern United States. Now, the Snake River has a famous gorge, a famous lava plain, and it’s had a famously …
How does a landscape go from looking like this… to looking like this? Find out in my new paper in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms. Hint: Using a chronosequence of watersheds in the Oregon Cascades, we argue that the rates and processes of landscape evolution are driven by whether the …
For large urban streams, the standard practices in stream and habitat restoration are sometimes not possible, often because decades of infrastructure development have pinned the stream into a narrow corridor. So other approaches need to be considered, and Robert Francis and Simon Hoggart of King’s College London discuss ways that existing artificial structures can be put to work to mitigate some of the ecological impacts of urbanization
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous The geo-image bonanza of this month’s Accretionary Wedge gives me a good reason to make good on a promise I made a few months ago. I promised to write about what can happen on the flanks of Pacific Northwest volcanoes when a warm, heavy rainfall hits …
I basically recommend anything this NCED group puts together. The short courses on Mountain Rivers and Sand-bed Rivers that I took as late-stage PhD student were absolutely fantastic. HOW DOES VEGETATION INFLUENCE LARGE-SCALE TOPOGRAPHIC FORM? —————————————————————————————————————————– In order to adequately describe the interactions among the physical, biological, geochemical, and anthropogenic …