Sophie Bodek

KITP Conference | Hard Problems in Soft Earth Geophysics (#softearth-c26) We live on a soft matter landscape. Earth materials such as soil, mud, ice and rocks exist in a fuzzy state between solid and fluid, depending on the timesca...

Watch recorded talks from this week at #KITP's Hard Problems in Soft Earth Geophysics conference buff.ly/UjqsoZ8

Stay tuned for the associated program, Soft Earth Geophysics (#softearth26), continuing next week!

Photograph of a presentation at a conference showing the speaker at a podium, panel of conveners/moderators, and screen with the presentation title. In the foreground are several rows of chairs occupied by a few listeners.

Sneak peak of chapter 2 was presented at #AGU25

Anisotropic Stress History Effects in Erodible Sediment Beds We use particle tracks from laboratory experiments to study grain velocities and activity subject to fluid flows from different directions Our sand bed strengthens under unidirectional flows, but...

First chapter of the PhD has officially been published in @jgrearthsurface.bsky.social!

We subject a sand bed to directional flows, then examine grain velocity and activity statistics to show that stress history is stored anisotropically in sediment beds. Check it out: doi.org/10.1029/2025...

‘Every Single Dollar Mattered’: Donations Save Museum of the Earth From Foreclosure Just days before a year-end foreclosure deadline, the Museum of the Earth has paid off its mortgage following a wide fundraising campaign that rescued the Ithaca area landmark.

ACTUAL GOOD NEWS EVERYONE: The Paleontological Research Institution and the Museum of the Earth have made it through the crisis!

Thanks to everyone who shared or donated-every donation mattered! Please share the good news just as widely!⚒️🧪🦑 Together we did #savePRI

www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/...

Scientific poster session in an open room – people are standing and talking in front of various posters around the room perimeter. Projector screen at the far end of the room reads "Geomorphology Symposium".

Group of people are gathered along the sandy bank of the Merced River. Two volunteers are holding up a poster while the presenter speaks to the rest of the group. Behind the poster and presenter is Yosemite Falls.

I had an absolute blast at the NorCal/Northern Nevada Geomorphology Symposium this past weekend in Yosemite Valley! Who knew camping for conference lodging could be so fun! Many thanks to the organizers for making this happen in such a beautiful part of the world

eBook Preview

Statistical Physics of Rarefied Sediment Particle Motions and Transport: Applications to Hillslopes and Rivers

Posting this preview of material from my next (unfinished) book might be a mistake. But eh… what the hell.

1/n

cdn.vanderbilt.edu/t2-my/my-prd...

Tell a sad geology story in five words:

Almandine garnet is my favorite mineral because it looks like little soccer balls!

Check out the @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social conference we're (Vashan Wright, Sujit Datta, Nathalie Vriend) organizing:
www.kitp.ucsb.edu/activities/s... for THIS JANUARY 6-9!
Geoscientists, physicists and engineers: are you intellectually adventurous and been wondering "is this all there is?" 🧪

I'm incredibly proud of PhD student Nacere Mohamed Samassi for submitting her first ever paper, as well as the first experimental paper from the DRIP lab! Check out the preprint here: eartharxiv.org/repository/v...

I finally got around to learning about version control and using Git and Github. I've been putting it off, but it's secretly Totally Fine and actually better than having 5+ scripts named things like plottracks, plottracks_old, and plottracks_party, then forgetting why you named your code "party"

Subway-style map of the itinerary in The Hobbit. The main journey is show in three different lines: red (Hobbiton to Goblin Town); green (Goblin Town to the Elvenking's Halls); and blue (Elvenking's Halls to Erebor). There are multiple stops on these lines. There is a yellow line going back from Erebor to Hobbiton, making stops at Beorn's Hall, Rivendell, and the Troll's Lair. There is an orange line directly from the Iron Hills on the map's right side to Erebor, and a purple line from Gundabad directly to Erebor. The map's title reads: "Hobbit Transit Map" and there are directions for both There and Back Again listing the lines and transfer points. Between them, in the middle of the page, is a dragon drawn to resemble the dragon on Thror's Map from The Hobbit. A key shows the names of each colored line: Red: Western Lands Line Green: Mountains and Forests Line Blue: Barrel Line Yellow: Gandalf Express Orange: Iron Hills Business Line Purple: Orc and Goblin Reserve Line Text at the bottom right reads Surprised Eel Maps, 2025

Subway style map to go with The Lord of the Rings, showing the different pathways of various parties throughout the book. The title reads: "Lord of the Rings Transit Map: One Does Not Simply Walk Ino Mordor When One Can Ride." The map takes up the middle part of the page, and there are two keys. The one on the left is titles "Standard Service Lines, and has color keys matched to the subway lines on the map. Lines are named: "Shire-Bree Commuter Line Old Forrest Crescent Wildland Scenic Line Fellowship Line Gollum / Sméagol Line Uruk Hai Express Three Hunters Line Fangorn Slow Service Rohan to Gondor Business Line Black Ships Ferry Service Oliphant Direct Line Army of the West Line Gandalf Express A smaller key on the right side of the map is labeled: "Limited Service Lines" and has color keys matched to the following names lines: "Eagle Express Paths of the Dead Line Nazgûl Search & Resuce Valinor Ltd." Two notes at the bottom read: "* Mount Doom station only accepts Rings of Power in payment. Plan accordingly. + Transfer voucher for ferry service at Grey Havens station is for outbound tafle only."

Over the weekend I drew these two subway maps for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and shared them. A lot of you asked about purchasing them, and now you can!

You can buy one or both (as digital files or as prints) at my brand new Etsy shop:

surprisedeelmaps.etsy.com

Six pebbles from Nefyn Beach, two igneous, two sedimentary and two metamorphic

You have to love a pebbly beach, but especially one with a great range of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks 😍

OMG there's a Bernie Sanders version too --> github.com/R-CoderDotCo...

"A View to a Kill" is another great James Bond movie with terrible geology - he saves Silicon Valley by preventing an explosion that would cause both the San Andreas and Hayward faults from simultaneously moving. Also his love interest is the buxom state geologist.

Harbor seals rest on sea grass during low tide at Hopkins Beach

How do proposed staffing cuts to California Department of Fish and Wildlife affect the ocean you love?

Omg is the mole named Darcy after Darcy's law???

I was not the creative force behind this cake, but I think they were Bugle chips

Cake decorated to look like an orange wind pressure sensor mounted on a gray building.

Wind pressure sensor mounted on the Space Needle in Seattle. The pressure sensor is mounted on a gray roof with a view of the sun low in the sky across Puget Sound.

More cakes! This time for Dr. Hochschild on "Convergence of full-scale measurements and large-eddy simulations to advance the prediction of high-rise building wind loads". The cake is made to look like the wind pressure sensors he mounted on buildings, like the Space Needle!

The meandering planform of the Purus River (a tributary if the Amazon), shown as white wiggles on a black background. The width of the river and the size of the meanders are increasing downstream (top to bottom, left to right).

What if you laid out all the meanders of a river along a straight line, so that you can break the river into straight-ish segments and fill arbitrary spaces? This is the Purus River in Brazil; you can see how it is getting wider and the meanders are getting larger in the downstream direction

Cake with frosting in a yellow and orange color gradient. The cake is decorated with red and blue cotton candy meant to look like vortices created by wind passing over a building.

This cake is for Dr. Ciarlatani, who presented on "An LES-based multi-fidelity framework for wind loading predictions." The cake is meant to look like a building, where the red and blue cotton candy represent vortices created by wind passing over the structure.

Cake decorated to look like the Y2E2 building on Stanford University's campus. The cake and building are L-shaped with arches along the first floor and balconies on the second and third floors. The cake sits on a baking sheet in a kitchen.

Picture or rendering of the Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy (Y2E2) building on the campus of Stanford University.

Next is a cake based on the Y2E2 building at Stanford for Dr. Vargiemezis, who placed a Y2E2 model in a wind tunnel for his research on "Modeling Wind Loading on Low-Rise Buildings in Urban Environments: Leveraging Large-Eddy Simulations and Deep Neural Networks To Quantify Interference Effects"

Cake decorated to look like a coral reef. The frosting is blue and the corals are made out of melted sugar. There are Swedish Fish candies swimming through the sugar corals.

Here is a coral reef cake for Dr. Hamilton who presented on "The impact of turbulence and waves on mixing in coral reefs." The corals were made by drizzling melted sugar into a bowl of ice!

Starting a thread for the backlog of defense cakes I have photos of... here is a wind turbine and wind rose cake for Dr. LoCasio who presented on "Analytical wind farm flow modeling for power production estimation and optimization"

I have a whole backlog of amazing cakes I've been meaning to post too

This time I'm proud of the ocean mixing cake I baked and decorated for Dr. Hilditch's defense on "The behavior of near-inertial waves in submesoscale flows". The frosting and marbled layers are meant to show mixing at an ocean front!

The Stanford Environmental Research Year in Review is here! bit.ly/Enviro-YIR-2...

Read about all the 2024 highlights, including:
🌊 tracing #microplastics in the ocean
🔥 materials that protect homes from #wildfires
🪱 how #climatechange promotes diseases

Browse the pubs: bit.ly/StanfordEnvi...

Donation spike gives Museum of the Earth new life but future remains uncertain - The Ithaca Voice ITHACA, N.Y. — Following a surge of donations sparked by The Ithaca Voice’s reporting, the Museum of the Earth — one of the last natural history museums in upstate New […]

For #fossilfriday please share this updated article about efforts to save PRI.🦑🧪⚒️

In addition to an anonymous $1 million donation PRI has raised approximately $1.1 million towards the remaining mortgage and needs another $2.2 by year end to be free of the liability

ithacavoice.org/2025/04/dona...

The Impact Map or Federal Cuts Tracker Map is finally live‼️

Check the 🗺️ out theimpactproject.org/the-impact-m...

Explore how federal cuts are affecting your state or community and share this WIDELY 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼