On google earth timelapse you can see how the Aral Sea shrivels up to almost nothing. The Aral Sea is fed by the Amu Darya River in the south and the Syr Darya in the east/north. The Aral Sea began drying up after the Soviets began diverting the rivers for irrigation. By 2007 it was […]

Google Earth timelapse shows amazing imagery of what happened before and after several landslides in Oso, WA. The river experiences a large build up of sediment upstream while downstream the river does not get as sediment choked. The landslide dams the river causing an increase in slope upstream, increasing basal shear stress, causing more sediment […]

https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/#v=-43.53499,171.73082,10.818,latLng&t=0.00 After being inspired be a class discussion on rivers, and Google Earth Engine, I decided to look at rivers in New Zealand, and make a timelapse of its changes over time. I looked at the Rakaia River, which seems to be both meandering, and braided in parts. I think this helps exemplify that identify […]

Most people assume that the rotation of the planets in our solar system around our sun is a fixed, predictable thing. These  orbits can be mathematically computed and relied upon, and not much changes in a rotation besides the known Milankovitch cycles. The real world, it turns out, is much more complex. The planets actually […]

Zion National Park is the home of many spectacular landscapes, perhaps most notably, Angels Landing.  This, like many of the other features within the park, were formed by rivers carving through the sandstone, forming massive slot canyons and carving the landscape around the plateaus.  While treacherous due to the height of some of these cliffs, […]

California is having a rough couple of weeks.  Over the weekend a huge rainstorm hit Southern California.  They received between 2-6 inches of rain, with almost 10 inches of rain in some areas.  Because the ground was already oversaturated from what has been a very wet winter, there were major flash floods and a few sinkholes.  There […]

Have you ever wondered what happens to sediment once dams are removed? Scientists from Boston College and Franklin and Marshall are studying the effects. They’ve discovered that sediment once ponded by a dam in Lancaster County, PA traveled all the way to the Chesapeake Bay! This sediment transport effects nutrient availability and river morphology. Links […]

The area around the Oroville Dam is still flooded and more rain is predicted per the latest weather forecast. The reservoir is lower than in previous days. However, the dam still remains a threat. The interactive model in the link below shows what the height difference looks like between the dam and the town below. […]

Shoveling has been a reoccurring theme for the previous week with two winter storm systems coming through. Snow/ice is classified as a mineral meaning that we have the ability to classify it! Take out your hand lens and grain size chart and determine what size particles you are shoveling, skiing, or sledding in! Bonus-the snowflakes […]

I learned about this mixture in my soils class last week, called plinthite. I am not sure whether or not it is considered a rock, or soil. It is a mixture of clay, quartz and other minerals that hardens when it gets wet, supposedly irreversibly hard. I find this rather interesting, because I would think […]

Downhill skiing can be an analogy for sediment transport in fluvial systems. Skiers that stay on their feet can be thought of as suspended particles. Skiers that end up summersaulting can be thought of as incipiently suspended load. Skiers that fall flat on their face can be thought of as bedload where the critical shear […]

Wanna hear some bad news? Scientists have recently discovered that the Mariana Trench, a huge void caused at the intersection between two tectonic plates, is absolutely loaded with harmful pollutants that are damaging all sorts of ecosystems. We used to be confident that the Mariana Trench, a setting even more hostile than the top of […]

On the eastern coast of Taiwan, we examined these large intrusions in the rock, which we interpreted to be bombs expelled by massive volcanic eruptions, estimated to have occurred between 7 and 12 ma. Additionally at this site, we observed very obvious and powerful faults. With a water bottle and my friend Santos as a […]

I found the pictures I took of our sediments when we were analyzing QFR ratios to be really cool. Using my microlens, I was able to use my smartphone camera to focus on the sample. It’s cool how the optics only allowed the image to focus on the center of the sample, giving the image […]

Remembering my trip to Taiwan last month, I figured a lot of the sites we observed could be relevant to sedimentology. When we traveled to the Taroko Gorge, an enormous deep canyon flowing out to the eastern coast of Taiwan, there were some amazing sediments along the river. This image depicts some of the massive […]

The Feather River is is the outlet for the Oroville Dam. Floodplain deposits besides this river would tell us the shear velocity during certain floods and what particle sizes would comprise the suspended, incipiently suspended, and bedload. If the sediments behind the dam were cored, we could figure out what shear velocity is necessary for […]

http://www.courant.com/breaking-news/hc-tolland-crash-evacuations-0213-20170212-story.html As many of you have probably already heard, a tractor trailer slid off of I-84 in Tolland Sunday night.  This vehicle was carrying roughly 900 barrels of chemicals that were being transported to a facility in Massachusetts.  When it slid off the road, on a section state police Sgt. Kenneth Albert described as a […]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/12/us/california-oroville-dam-failure/index.html The area around the Oroville Dam in California is currently being evacuated as the primary spillway of the dam has been damaged from erosion. This article shows the huge holes in the concrete spillway that were caused by overflow of the dam from recent large amounts of rainfall. California was facing a huge draught […]

http://www.equipmentworld.com/portland-begins-cleaning-sand-and-gravel-off-roadways-after-recent-snow-storm/ This link brings you to an article about the Portland Bureau of Transportation, and how they use sand and gravel to provide traction for cars on the road, and the cleanup afterward. While cleaning up the sand and gravel may seem tedious, I believe that it is a much better alternative than an excessive […]

How did the mighty Sahara Desert form? This huge desert, the largest in the world not counting the Arctic or Antartica, covers roughly 10% of Africa. How does such a structure form? According to this article: (http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/paleoclimatology/science-sahara-desert-formed-7-million-years-ago-02160.html) the region in the north of Africa first started experiencing desertification over 7 million years ago during the […]

http://www.loyolamaroon.com/10012165/worldview/state/christmas-trees-stop-coastal-erosion-in-jefferson-parish/ I came across this article recently and, while a little late for this winter, it may get people thinking about what to do when the holidays are over in future years.  Louisiana is very susceptible to coastal erosion, which can affect both domestic and commercial structures and activities.  To combat this, a state project […]

The National Parks website explains how the White Sands National Monument was created over the last 280 million years.  From a sea, to a mountain range, to a rift basin, to a lake, to a playa, to a desert, to the dunes.  More sediment is added to the dunes by wind and water breaking down […]

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-invasive-sedge-dunes-native-grass.html I saw this article about invasive species being better at protecting a dune from erosion than native species, and it got me to thinking. When we were outside Wilbur Cross we talked about two different types of dunes, barchan dunes, and parabolic dunes. Barchan dunes move with the limbs first, while parabolic dunes move […]

Below are two different articles about different rivers located in very different parts of the country, both bodies of water have issues with sediment in the flow of the river. The south river located in Maryland will have less sediment in the water, as the current load of sediment has clouded up the water, and […]

http://sfist.com/2017/02/01/video_lava_stream_dramatically_pour.php Check out the video from this link. In Hawaii, the Kiluea volcano has been producing an igneous delta with non-viscous magma. Recently there was a landslide of sorts, which exposed a huge opening adjacent to an active lava tube. The result is this incredible outpouring of liquid rock…some of the most incredible nature footage […]

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/12/2016-the-year-in-volcanic-activity/510641/ http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/volcanic-lightning While this article from The Atlantic was more of a slideshow, the captions for many of the photos did a good job simplifying complex processes.  The image that really captured my attention was the first image in the slideshow.  This was a picture of volcanic lightning forming above the erupting Sinabung volcano in […]