Sediment Transport

Lacustrine beach ridge reservoirs have become important targets for oil exploration because of their proximity to oil sources and high reservoir porosity and permeability. However, the sedimentary architecture and hydrodynamic processes involved in their formation are still unclear, especially for the embayed beaches.

In the Midwest, a sacred wild rice plant has slowly vanished. University scientists and indigenous resource managers have combined their expertise to try to save it.

The Earth experienced one of the largest and most rapid climate warming events in its history 56 million years ago: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which has similarities to current and future warming. This episode saw global temperatures rise by 5°C–8°C. It was marked by an increase in the seasonality of rainfalls, which led to the movement of large quantities of clay into the ocean, making it…

An MIT team developed a more accurate formula to calculate how much sediment a fluid can push across a granular bed, which could help engineers manage river restoration and coastal erosion. The key to the new formula comes down to the shape of the sediment grains.

The catastrophic debris flow that affected Montecito, Calif., in early January, 2018 was the result of a rare confluence of severe events. The Thomas Fire had been raging for weeks in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, and an unusually strong winter storm dumped half an inch of rain in five minutes on the newly-charred hills above the suburban enclave. With the tough vegetation that holds the hillsides in place…

The German government estimates the total losses resulting from the disastrous floods in July 2021 at 32 billion euros. In two studies, one of which is currently available in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have investigated how precipitation, evaporation processes, water flow, and runoff led to this flooding. To improve future preparedness for such…

The way rivers function is significantly affected by how much sediment they transport and where it gets deposited. River sediment—mostly sand, silt, and clay—plays a critical ecological role, as it provides habitat for organisms downstream and in estuaries. It is also important for human life, resupplying nutrients to floodplain agricultural soils, and buffering sea level rise caused by climate change by delivering…

Southeast Asia's most productive agricultural region and home to 17 million people could be mostly underwater within a lifetime. Saving the Mekong River Delta requires urgent, concerted action among countries in the region to lessen the impact of upstream dams and better manage water and sediments within the delta, according to an international team of researchers who outline solutions to the region's dramatic loss…

Faith Brooks, a student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program and graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, is researching the impact of coastal pond breaching on preventing and mitigating harmful algal blooms. She will report to Naval Aviation Schools Command in Florida to begin flight training this fall.

It's hard to tell when one epoch ends and another begins.

Nebraska's rivers can be thought of as places for quiet contemplation, familiar local landmarks or as precious natural resources to be protected.

Carbon storage has been a key focus in recent years to draw down natural and anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide and help the fight against global warming, and particularly focuses on terrestrial forests and soils, as well as wetland mangroves and seagrasses.

Researchers at the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) published their findings on the drastic short-term alterations in rivers accompanied by shifts in vegetation and geomorphology drawn from actual on-site investigation and analyses and not from model simulations.

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As a river cuts through a landscape, it can operate like a conveyer belt, moving truckloads of sediment over time. Knowing how quickly or slowly this sediment flows can help engineers plan for the downstream impact of restoring a river or removing a dam. But the models currently used to estimate sediment flow can be off by a wide margin.

We've mapped less than 24% of the world's sea floor. We know more about the Moon and Mars in greater detail than that of our own planet

A bogeyman to many environmentalists, dams could actually play a significant role in feeding the world more sustainably, according to new Stanford University research. The study, published the week of Nov. 14 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, quantifies for the first time how much water storage would be required to maximize crop irrigation without depleting water stocks or encroaching on nature,…

After cresting at its second-highest level in over 100 years of record-keeping earlier this year, the Lower Mississippi is once again on the rise, putting America's Achilles' heel—the Old River Control Structure—under unusual stress.

The discovery of ancient rocks at a mid-ocean ridge suggests that if there are lost continents, remnants might still be there.

Saturn's moon Titan looks very much like Earth from space, with rivers, lakes, and seas filled by rain tumbling through a thick atmosphere. While these landscapes may look familiar, they are composed of materials that are undoubtedly different—liquid methane streams streak Titan's icy surface and nitrogen winds build hydrocarbon sand dunes.