Wednesday Nite at the Lab
press release: WN@TL goes hybrid both with Zoom and with in-person (Room 1111) presentations. The zoom registration link is still go.wisc.edu/240r59. You can also watch a live web stream at on YouTube.
On March 29 we finish our five-presentation-March with a flourish as Joe Mason of Geography speaks on “Dunes, Dust, Drought, and Downpours: Evolution of Great Plains Landscapes in Changing Past and Future Climates.”
Description: The strong winds of the central Great Plains have built the largest dune field in North America—now stabilized by grass—and thick deposits of dust, or loess. This talk will begin with an overview of 25 years of research on past intervals of dune activity and rapid dust deposition linked to more frequent severe drought or other climatic conditions in the central Plains over the past 25,000 years, using methods including luminescence dating, stable isotope analysis, and studies of buried soils that record past environmental conditions.
I will then describe our current research on understanding how intense rainfall—also typical of the Great Plains—erodes both the tablelands built by loess deposition and the stable sand dunes, using studies of soil hydrology and landscape evolution models.
Finally, I will consider what this research tells us about how these landscapes of sand and loess may change in response to present and future climate change, with implications for grassland ecosystems, prime agricultural land and rangeland, and the High Plains (Ogallala) Aquifer.
Bio: Joe Mason is a professor and former chair of the Department of Geography at UW Madison. His Ph.D. is from UW Madison, and he worked as a Research Geologist in Nebraska’s state geological survey for six years before returning to Madison in 2003. His research has focused on wind-blown sand and dust and the soils and landscapes formed in those sediments, including extensive research on the Great Plains and in northern China, with more local projects in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Explore More: https://joseph-a-mason.
Possibly of interest given results I will show in the talk: http://landlab.github.
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