Yesterday I flew from London to Minneapolis – a westbound and therefore endless afternoon, a trick played against winter’s abstemious daytime clock. I’m in Minneapolis for a two-week stint at St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, where I’ll be running some experiments in a custom-rigged sandbox. But more on that in posts to come. Right now I’m…
Read MoreThinking in (human–environmental) systems – a research triptych
Three papers were released into the wild this winter, making for exciting times at the Lab. Walking to and from the office the past few days, I’ve been thinking about where and how their themes overlap. Seems to me these three papers are connected by a process of argumentation: the work of sketching out the…
Read MoreHarold Fisk’s #Mississippi
I didn’t discover Harold Fisk’s legendary maps of the Lower Mississippi channel belt until two years ago. Now I find myself returning to them with regularity, as to a favorite kitchen cookbook or to an album whose sounds keep getting richer. I encountered them through this New York Times article by Isabel Wilkerson, part of…
Read MoreOn sinuosity (a discursive recap)
Sinuosity sneaked up on me. A couple of miles north of Portland, Maine, there is a mudflat visible from 295, northbound, just before the highway bridge over the Presumpscot River into Falmouth. (I’ve shown it here in Slide 1, via Google Earth.) The mudflat hosts an incised channel that takes a dramatic hook near its…
Read MoreOverwash patterns – intial results from a little numerical model
I’ve been working today on a simplified model of storm overwash. According to my own sparse comments, I’d last tinkered with this code in December 2011. Not surprising, then, that it took all day to get reacquainted before I tore it down to the sills and started over. In this movie, there are four points…
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The Environmental Dynamics Lab (EDL) 