Changes

On 7/14/2023 I left West Virginia University to join the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station as a Research Geomorphologist. Given my new job, I will not be routinely taking on new graduate students except through collaborations with university PIs. I remain happy to collaborate with anyone to whom I might be of help.

Paper on suspended-sediment response to wildfire and post-fire floods

A team led by USFS scientist Dr. Sandra Ryan monitored fluvial suspended-sediment concentrations for three years after a severe wildfire in northern Colorado. One year after the fire, our study area experienced a ~100-year flood. In this paper we explore how watersheds respond to fire-flood sequences, which has important implications for the sustainability of the water supply in the American West. Find it here.

How impervious are solar arrays?

My new opinion piece in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms uses a recent public policy dust-up over stormwater regulations for solar installations in Virginia to examine the broader question of how we should weigh up the environmental benefits and geomorphic impacts of energy transition infrastructure. Find it here.

Big, big piles of sediment…

…sit at Earth’s passive continental margins. How can we use forward models of landscape and seascape evolution to read that stratigraphic record and infer something about past landscapes? In this new paper we use beautiful stratigraphic data from the southern Atlantic Ocean to find the optimal form of models for the development of passive margin stratigraphy over geologic time. Spoiler alert: margin evolution is dominated by nonlocal sediment transport events like marine landslides, turbidity currents, and marine debris flows.

WVU ESD students win a bunch of stuff in 2021-2022

Grad and undergrad group members are winning awards left and right!

  • Undergraduate researcher Olga Hawranick took home second runner up in the WVU Undergraduate Research Symposium for her poster titled Patterns of channel sinuosity in the Appalachian Valley and Ridge. We will miss Olga next year as she begins her MS in Mathematics at Boise State University!
  • Grad student Nick Colaianne was awarded a NASA WV Space Grant graduate fellowship as well as a WVU Geology graduate research grant.
  • Undergrad student Corey Crowder was awarded a NASA WV Space Grant undergraduate scholarship.
  • Grad student Sam Bower is off to Golden, CO for a summer 2022 USGS Pathways internship. He also got a GSA student research grant.