Joe Mason

@moreorloess.bsky.social

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UW Madison Geography, opinions are mine. Geomorphology, soils, dunes, loess, in the Midwest, Great Plains, northern China. He/him. Living on Ho-Chunk lands.

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Thanks to Karin Kirk, I have a good possible source for these, metagabbro quarried near Mosinee, WI. The company also sells glacially eroded boulders of it (maybe pre-rounded as corestones in a weathering profile?). usenaturalstone.org/greener-past...

Someone had big boulders hauled in to build this berm, and I was surprised to see they're all the same lithology, not the variety you see in glacial erratics. Anyone know a possible source for these and how far it is from Madison, WI?

Greener Pastures: Krukowski Stone Company Began as a Wisconsin Dairy Farm - Use Natural Stoneusenaturalstone.org As the Krukowski family worked to develop new pastures on their farm in Wisconsin, one thing stubbornly stood in the way: rocks.

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Joe Mason

don't have the time to dive in right now, but this looks like a really cool study: "we present a 1,500-year-long annually laminated (varved) offshore sediment record that tracks the seasonal discharge of the Nile River during the North African Humid Period." ⚒️🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I agree with the quote "amazing and not surprising", from someone in Paonia, Colorado, identified as having the least accurate temperature forecasts.

How accurate is the weather forecast in your city? Niko Kommenda and I learned that NWS just began doing gridded assessments of forecast accuracy. We got the data and mapped of how many days into the future they get within 3°F of the observed high temp. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Steps in the walking path climbing up from Bacharach in the Rhine Gorge are cut in the slate bedrock (Hunsrück Slate, Early Devonian, according to RockD)

Loess and more loess

Has anyone made a DEM of Mt St. Helens using a pre-1980 topo map?

Should I wait up and hope for a break in these clouds rolling in? Or should I just hang on to the memory of my dad waking us up in the middle of the night south of The Pas, Manitoba, to see the northern lights across the whole sky?

Two photos from an October, 1996, field trip to the Nebraska Sandhills. Vibracoring through peat in an interdune, and a small lake in the western Sandhills seen across little bluestem in fall color. This is when and why I decided I really wanted to work there.

Posted earlier this am on twitter: Police breaking up the encampment at UW Madison. The administrators who ordered this all went through and praised the Sifting and Reckoning exhibit last year. They know this was a peaceful protest. They know the "no tents" rule is a ridiculous pretext. Shameful.

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Seems like a reasonable ask

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Atmospheric rivers aren't just a west coast thang! Open access article on "Atmospheric Rivers in the Eastern and Midwestern United States Associated With Baroclinic Waves" by several of my Indiana University colleagues.

Atmospheric Rivers in the Eastern and Midwestern United States Associated With Baroclinic Wavesagupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com <em>Geophysical Research Letters</em> is an AGU journal publishing high-impact, innovative articles on major advances spanning all of the major geoscience disciplines.

A small bur oak in its protective cage, which believe me, is necessary

First bloodroot I've seen with fully open flowers. Not saying others weren't flowering already in this part of Wisconsin---this is my "personal first"

North Loup River flowing out of the Nebraska Sandhills. The visibility of bedforms through clear water is characteristic of Sandhills streams. Probably Sept., 1997, when I drove out through the Sandhills with the late Vern Souders, listening to his opinions on the geology and bad coffee of Nebraska.

Old River Bed section, Lake Bonneville field trip, 2000. Snow in the air, but patches of light breaking through the clouds on the long drive down a gravel road south of Tooele, Utah.

Geomorphologists may disagree: "No stream or river, the Rhine included, needs more than one bed; as a rule, multiple branches are redundant." --Johann Gottfried Tulla, engineer known as the "Tamer of the Wild Rhine"

Trees on a lake shore in evening light, Sylvania Wilderness, Upper Peninsula of Michigan, 1996

Not giving up

Hydrogeology field methods class in 1993, taught by Jean Bahr. Turned out to be valuable experience when I started at job at the Nebraska state geological survey 4 years later. Also note pre-drone method for getting images of fractures on a dolomite quarry floor, from above

Found a couple more photos of my field assistant in 1994

A stop to look at bedload on the Smith River, northern California, on a weekend family trip south from Eugene, Oregon, to see the redwoods. 1995.

Sun and shadow in a coast redwoods stand, 1995.

An Irish settlement in western Minnesota, surrounded on all sides by Norwegians, and this is the name they chose

Woke up at 3am, worrying about one thing and another, couldn't get back to sleep. Then I saw a long back and forth on twitter about Tolkien vs. Frank Herbert, and instantly I was asleep for a few more hours.

Sediment mixing in the Yolo Bypass, Sacramento River system, California (Feb 28, 2024, Sentinel 2). Sacramento at lower right, Woodland and Davis on the left. Dark brown sediment injected from the Knights Landing Ridge Cut, I believe. 1/2

Eel River, northern California, doing what it does (March 7, 2024). The "highest recorded average suspended sediment yield per drainage area of any river of its size or larger unaffected by volcanic eruptions or active glaciers in the conterminous United States" www.fs.usda.gov/research/tre...

Nebraska. Great Plains. Enough said.

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Anil Dash

Just *one* NYPD cop’s abuses caused the city to pay out more in settlements than the amount of money saved with all the cuts to libraries. Cops aren’t content just to abuse and kill our neighbors, they want to abuse & kill our neighborhoods too. legalaidnyc.org/news/nypd-wo...

Okay, seeing a version of this with Nebraska and South Dakota at the least good looking end, and trying very, very hard not to respond *at length* or just throw my phone down in disgust.

Midwestern states ranked by how good they look: 1. Michigan 2. Wisconsin 3. Minnesota 4. Pennsylvania 5. Illinois 6. Iowa 7. Ohio 8. Indiana