In the late 1970s, when my parents bought the land I grew up on in rural midcoast Maine, two of the three adjoining woodlots had just been cut over. Along our back property line, ruts from the skidders are still evident after 40 years. Their scars, which I slopped around in as a kid, have…
Read MoreChannel migration and beach erosion at Popham Beach, Maine
I grew up going to Popham Beach and its wilder neighbor across the outlet of the Morse River, part of the Morse Mountain Conservation Area maintained by Bates College. In late February, 2010, the Morse River became a state-wide news highlight (in the paper and on the radio) after it avulsed at its outlet during…
Read MoreCoastal infrastructure (for @ebgoldstein)
Colleague and friend Evan Goldstein collects “pictures of infrastructure” that he sorts into various types. In October, riding along on a field course for our second-year undergraduates, I had the opportunity to tour several coastal engineering installations across the Netherlands. I tried to walk around with Evan’s eye for infrastructure. Easy, superficially, because flood-management infrastructure…
Read MoreWriting season (another Top Five list)
It’s been an autumn of writing. Maybe not enough in these blog pages – apologies, readers – but plenty of writing, all told: manuscripts for the long road to publication (or not); grant proposals; new content for the departmental Website. The variety of problem solving – broken introductions, unravelled middles, empty-handed conclusions, all capped under…
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 MoreContinental divides
I had the opportunity during holiday time with family back in the States to bop around in the Sangre de Cristo Range, near the Spanish Peaks, in southern Colorado. If you count the Atlantic Ocean as one (kind of) continental divide (lowercase) west of the UK, we were atop the next one over (uppercase) –…
Read MoreBombturbation – a Technocene sediment-transport process
Since reading Roger Hooke’s work on humans as agents of quantifiable geomorphic change (Hooke 1994, 2000; Haff 2003; Hooke & Martin-Duque 2012), I’ve wondered about bombs. (To keep from sounding glib about or oblivious to the very real and very human implications of mechanized warfare, for the purpose of this discussion I’ll “wonder about bombs”…
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 MoreFollowing up: #Capitalocene reading (with thanks to Dr MD)
Better late than never? A follow-up here to my Anthropocene reading “Top Five” list, by way of Dr Michael Dorsey, a member of the Environmental Studies faculty at Dartmouth College, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the 2010 Global Sustainability Summer School (hosted that year by the Santa Fe Institute). After seeing my…
Read MoreJersey time (Channel Islands dispatch)
Back from a brilliant week on Jersey, in the Channel Islands, with the second-year Marine Geography students. After an island reconnoitre last Sunday, we spent Monday walking beaches; Tuesday in the Jersey Museum and Maritime Museum (with market-stall lunch at the Central Market in St Helier); Wednesday with officials from the States of Jersey Department…
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The Environmental Dynamics Lab (EDL) 