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 …
The Secret Life of Rivers from S Solomon Leaping Frog Films on Vimeo.
Kent State University Department of Geology’s Watershed Hydrology class visited the Susquehanna Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory on April 5-6, 2014. Penn State post-doc Pamela Sullivan gave them a tour of the watershed and its instrumentation, with a focus on how the measurements could contribute to understanding how hydrology drives …
Today in Fluvial Processes, I’ll be talking about sediment transport. It’s one of those subjects that can easily get bogged down in lots and lots of math, but I prefer to start out with getting students to watch and describe the processes that occur as grains move along the bed …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous This summer we were treated to not one but two dam removals on the Cuyahoga River, ~10 miles downstream from Kent. Those following me on twitter know that I obsessed about these removals all summer long, first as they were delayed by weeks of high water, …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous We’ve been having one of those perfect spring weeks, where the weather is warm and sunny, the flowers are blooming, and there is nothing more enticing at the end of a workday than to take a nice long wander down by the local river. Fortunately, I …
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. …
No excited Gordon like at Marmot Dam, but this is one exciting “blow and go” dam removal video. This was Condit Dam on the White Salmon River in Washington in October 2011. Spectacular to watch, and even neater knowing that there was important (and hair-raising) science being done both upstream …
My favorite way to get students excited about dam removal is this video produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting, on the removal of Marmot Dam, near Portland, Oregon in 2008. Part of the reason I love this video is it shows off Gordon Grant‘s enthusiasm for river science.
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 …