Our CoRPS (Collaborative Research on Paleoenvironments and Societies) group research on paleoflooding and in the Tennessee River valley was recently featured on the UA News. UA Researchers use nature to discover how waterways behaved before recorded history
My colleagues and I will be giving talks and hosting sessions on Paleofloods at next weeks AAG meeting. Come hear all about it! Past Perspectives on River Environments 1: Flood Reconstructions in Locations Outside the U.S. Napoleon B2, Sheraton 3rd Floor 08:00 am Past Perspectives on River Environments 2: Flood Reconstructions in the Mississippi River Basin and the Western U.S. Napoleon B2, Sheraton 3rd Floor 10:00 am Past Perspectives on River Environments 3: Flood Reconstructions in the Southeastern U.S. Napoleon […]
A UA News feature covers our recent Nature paper on Mississippi River flooding “More than Climate, Engineering Worsening Flooding Along Mississippi” “TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Through discovering ancient floods along the Mississippi River, a group of scientists, including a University of Alabama professor, found human-led engineering, not climate, is the largest influence on worsening floods.”
Interesting story in the Washington Post about infrastructure and flooding on the Mississippi River.
One of the best trips I took this summer was to Columbia Missouri to see my good buddy Mike Stambaugh and take a sample from the huge Bur Oak cross section they have in their lab. This tree was the National Champion Bur Oak until it died in the early 1950s. It had been growing in Big Oak Tree State Park in the Bootheel of MO. This site is one of the only virgin bottomland hardwood forests left in MO, […]
After visiting WSL I traveled to Grenoble France to attend the PAGES-Cross-Community Workshop on past flood variability. This was an amazing meeting of scientists mostly from Europe, but some others studying floods mostly from a historical or paleo perspective. (http://www.pages-igbp.org/ini/wg/peat-carbon/160-initiatives/working-group/floods/1277-floods). I learned a great deal at this meeting and very much enjoyed Grenoble. The food was fantastic the views were amazing and the people extremely warm-hearted.
Geological Society of America (GSA) Annual Meeting 2016. Denver, Colorado, USA September 25-28. http://community.geosociety.org/gsa2016/home Abstracts open April 1, close July 31st. (T59). Paleofloods and Related Fluvial Processes during the Late Quaternary: Reconstructions and Causes. This session aims to bring together scientists with interests in developing and applying a broad array of reconstruction techniques for characterizing the magnitude, frequency, geographic distribution and causes of paleofloods. Convenors: Lisa Davis and Matthew Therrell, University of Alabama, Samuel Munoz, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Sponsors: American […]
Spent a couple of days this past week with some dendro folks from USM and Indiana coring trees in the bottomlands near Yazoo City , Mississippi. We were looking for more evidence of flooding on the lower Mississippi River. The weather was near perfect and we made a nice collection of overcup oak and saw the largest and oldest looking sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua I)’ve ever seen.
Really proud of this article that my former grad student Emma Bialecki and I recently published. This work developed out of Emma’s masters research at Big Oak Tree State Park in southern Missouri. It is the first publication to report using flood rings in bottomland hardwoods to develop long flood history records for the Mississippi River. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2014.11.005
Read More from A multi-century tree-ring record of spring flooding on the Mississippi River
Made a quick trip up to eastern Illinois in December to sample bottomland oak at Sielbeck Forest and Beall Woods, both of which have some very nice old growth oak. Sielbeck is just north of Metropolis IL, in the former channel of the Ohio River (8K years ago) and Beall Woods is adjacent to the Wabash River. Both locations have several species of spectacular old oaks (300+ years old) such as overcup (Q. lyrata), bur oak (Q. macrocarpa), swamp white […]