Joe Mason

Tracking the trajectory of alluvial channel adjustment along a river's profile Alluvial rivers adjust their geometry to convey water and sediment downstream. While multi-river compilations reveal robust downstream scaling relationships, how these patterns manifest along a single...

New preprint out!

We tracked the trajectory of channel adjustment along the SF Eel River - showing that sediment mobility increases drastically downstream.

By decomposing modes of channel adjustment, we highlight the critical role of channel width in regulating shear stress.

shorturl.at/D99zw

Every single paper is like this. We couldn't reproduce the age-depth model in their second PNAS paper. They regularly report spikes from one layer without analyzing layers above and below. Their results can't be reproduced in the rare cases they do share samples. They get really basic things wrong.

I often think about the panel discussions at AMQUA and AGU in 2010. Their story was so obviously full of holes already, yet here we are still talking about it more than 15 years later.

Four grandparents, three teachers and a nurse. Later on, two school administrators. Two in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Two in Minnesota and (briefly) South Dakota.

Good plan, there’s no way that the US would ever betray Kurds who fought on their behalf, or that Turkey would be upset by and seek to frustrate any US-backed Kurdish forces, or that an invasion from Iraq would trigger Iranian nationalist opposition. None of those things have ever happened.

The names and ages of children killed in the strike on Iran school MEE has collected the names and ages of some of those killed in the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school strike

The names and ages of children killed in the strike on Iran school - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/names-and-ages-children-iran-school-strike

Coffee is always healthy sorry

Oh, I don't doubt they could pull a big trailer, I'd just like to see it.

I would actually like to see one of those trailers they have lined up in fields there pulled by a team of horses. Or oxen.

In situ cosmogenic 10Be and 26Al reveal the complex exposure and erosion history of the landscape once covered by the Quebec-Labrador Ice Dome Abstract. The rate at which ice sheets erode rock and produce sediment is poorly known. Here, we use paired cosmogenic nuclides in both deglacial and modern sediment to understand better the efficacy ...

Guess what. Glaciers aren't as good at eroding the landscape as we might have thought. New paper with collaborators from Quebec, France, and across the US. Internationalism lives on at least in science!

gchron.copernicus.org/articles/8/1...

❄️🧪💙📚
#scicomm
#climate
#UVMresearch
#science
 🌎 🔬 ⚒️

Map of daily total precipitation for 4 Feb 2026, showing a swath of 2.5+ inch totals across central Indiana

It went sploosh across central Indiana yesterday #INwx

Autism researchers rebuke Kennedy, form independent advisory group A group of autism researchers and advocates are forming an independent advisory body to develop a scientific agenda for the autism community.

nice move to counter pseudoscience
www.statnews.com/2026/03/03/a...

Several oak trees in a yard with more beyond the back fence. Everything is lit by late, low angle sunlight.

Back yard, an hour ago. Spring weather, swinging wildly from snow to this to more snow to thunderstorms and bloodroot coming up, is an even more welcome distraction this year than it usually is.

There are certain streets in Madison that will always be my favorites. North St., Waubesa, Lakeview Avenue, and some others. None west of the Capitol, not coincidentally.

Vince Dreeszen came out to give advice on my first drilling project for geologic mapping near Omaha. Showed up in his Honda Accord, and commented on the samples while chain smoking. Went back to Lincoln and told survey staff, "Mason's going to do all right."

The striations were under John Boellstorff's C till, the oldest in the sequence in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa.

Photo of a light gray rock with closely spaced parallel grooves on one face. The rock is on a wood desk, with a small model of a reddish orange chair from the Memorial Union Terrace in Madison.

Glacially striated limestone bedrock from the Citywide Quarry, near Omaha, with a Union Terrace chair* for scale. A gift from Vince Dreeszen, former Nebraska state geologist.

*Okay, a very small Union Terrace chair

Photo of the entrance to the Mining and Mineral Resources Building on the University of Kentucky campus, the home of the Kentucky Geological Survey.

Photos of the geologic map of the State of Kentucky. Text on the map reads: Celebrating Geologic Mapping in Kentucky, first in the United States: topographic maps (1:24000 scale), geologic maps (1:24000 scale), digital geology, web accessibility

Photo of a fossil casted tree stump and attached rooting structures. This Carboniferous-age tree was a club moss (lycopod), and the rooting structures are called Stigmaria.

Photo of a polished slab of colorful petrified wood. Tree rings are visible in the red, gray, and black mineralized wood.

I've started my new job as a geologist with the Kentucky Geological Survey. There are exhibits of two types of fossil trees in and around the KGS building: a cast of a Carboniferous lycopod (my MS thesis) and petrified wood from the Triassic Chinle Formation (my PhD). The universe is a closed loop.

3 or 4 blocks before the stop for the 9 block walk

Explanation in the alt text

Part of a topographic map showing the small city of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. There are red dashed lines defining long narrow parcels of land perpendicular to the river. These have been labeled with the red numbers normally used for one square mile sections in the Public Land Survey System.

USGS topographic map of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, with the old long lots numbered as sections to fit them into the Public Land Survey System.

Almost every day I debate whether I should get off the bus and walk the last ~9 blocks to campus or stay on while it gets packed full of students riding 3 to 6 blocks to campus.

'UNIMAGINABLE CRUELTY': Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointeee from NY, thrashes DHS' treatment of a man who came to the US at 9 as an abuse/neglect victim, has no criminal record and became a college grad.

"The laws of decency condemn such villainy." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The process has slowed down in the last few years, for sure, but if your papers always zipped right through in the past you were very lucky.

As both an author and an associate editor in the era of review by mail, three months from submission to publication was unusually fast turnaround. My first published paper, which needed only minor revision, took almost a year. And it has always been hard to find reviewers for some papers.

The photo is from at or near the Snake River Overlook: 43.753, -110.624

Has a nice photo of those amazing stream terraces, and one of workers driving over Teton Pass in winter. And a lot about the legal but utterly corrupt ways assholes like Joe Ricketts and Foster Friess use their money in local, state, and national politics to get even richer.

Pentagon tells Congress no sign that Iran was going to attack US first, sources say Trump administration officials acknowledged in closed-door briefings with congressional staff on Sunday that there was no intelligence suggesting Iran planned to attack U.S. forces first, two people f...

we reached the “no WMDs” phase in two days.

Hampton University, Stripped of Land Grant Status 100 Years Ago, May Get It Back As Va. lawmakers move to restore a designation lost during the Jim Crow era, students await the resources and opportunities its return could bring.

In 1920, Hampton University was stripped of its land grant status during a wave of segregation-era policies — cutting the university off from decades of potential federal funding.Now, a bill in the Virginia legislature aims to make amends and help the university recoup the money lost.
bit.ly/4l6uz5o

Anybody who has tried to take photos in the perpetual twilight of the tropical forest understory knows how frustrating it can be.
This is where you need an artist.
Debby Cotter Kaspari is a whiz with pen and ink. And this is one of her understory drawings from Isla Barro Colorado, Panama, 2001.