Legendary fluvial geomorphologist Reds Wolman once said “Floods come from too much water,” and that’s the phenomenon distilled to its core essence. But this bit of wisdom doesn’t give us much to go on if we want to understand what creates floods or why some areas are more flood-prone than …
It’s been about a year since I’ve updated this blog, but it’s not that I didn’t have anything to say. Instead, members of the Watershed Hydrology lab were doing so many great things that I just didn’t do a good job of stopping to write them down here. But below, …
August 30th: Harvey reminds us that we should treat climate change as we treat other public health threats. That’s the argument in this New York Times op-ed: Harvey, the storm that humans helped cause. August 29th: The most sobering hot-take on Harvey is by Eric Holthaus: Harvey is what climate …
Our changing climate is already affecting lives in a multitude of ways, and the impacts of climate change will only increase as the world continues to heat up. But because climate operates in the background, it’s easy to ignore the magnitude of the changes happening around us, as we are …
Yesterday, I posted an epic analysis of my scientific reading habits in 2016, but I didn’t tell you about the papers I read last year that made my heart sing. And I didn’t take much time to brag about my own contributions to the scientific literature. So I’m going to …
Students in GEOL 21062, Spring 2016, at Kent State University have been sharing interesting news stories with me all semester long. Here’s our complilation. Hopefully these are interesting things for other people too!
Today, Brock Freyer will be defending the results of his M.S. research. The title of his research project is: Fluvial Response to River Management and Sediment Supply: Pool 6 of the Upper Mississippi River System, Southeastern Minnesota. Brock’s committee is composed of Anne Jefferson (advisor), John Diemer and Ross Meentemeyer. …
A student and I are working on finishing a project that has lingered for too many years: a careful analysis of the cumulative effects of river management on islands in the lower part of Pool 6 of the Mississippi River, near my hometown of Winona, Minnesota. There will be a …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous It all began at the end of February, when I travelled to La Crosse, Wisconsin to the Upper Midwest Stream Restoration Symposium, which was a really stimulating and vital mix of academics, consultants, and government folks all interested in improving the state of the science and …
The 100th anniversary of Ohio’s greatest disaster is just days away. This epic hydro-meteorological event utterly ravaged river towns from Illinois to Ohio and beyond, but it seems like the event has largely been forgotten in history’s annals. Even flood-obsessed me had lived in Ohio for a few months before …