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.

Three new papers out in JGR: Earth Surface

Which mathematical representation for geomorphic processes best matches a given study site? How can we test agreement or disagreement between models and reality? How should we determine what values to use for model parameters?

Three papers representing the culmination of ~four years of work (led by the indefatigable Katy Barnhart of CU Boulder) on these problems were just published in JGR: Earth Surface. Find part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Paper on river canyons out in Geology

How do feedbacks between rivers and their adjacent hillslopes control the shape and evolution of iconic river canyons? Myself and recently-defended ex-grad-student Rachel Glade did some modeling work to understand how big blocks of rock govern channel-hillslope coupling and canyon shape. Find the paper here.