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Published news and blog articles, organized by category. Browse older coverage by month or search for a topic. Undated blog guides appear after dated news.
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River deltas explained: the ideas that matter
The key ideas for understanding river deltas are sediment budgets, channel switching, relative sea level and the feedbacks between human infrastructure and natural processes.
The engineering challenge behind glacier movement
Predicting glacier movement is an engineering challenge because the important boundary is hidden beneath ice, the material deforms over many timescales, and water, sediment, weather, and terrain continually alter the system.
The engineering challenge behind river deltas
Engineering in river deltas means balancing flood protection, navigation, sediment delivery, subsidence, ecosystems and rising water across a changing coastal landscape.
The engineering challenge behind tsunami physics
Tsunami risk reduction is an engineering problem under uncertainty: models must become warnings, maps, buildings, routes, and decisions before the next wave makes the assumptions visible.
The hidden history of glacier movement
The history of glacier movement is a history of changing observations: field sketches, stakes, maps, aerial photographs, satellites, and ice-core evidence turned motion too slow for human eyes into a measurable process.
The hidden history of river deltas
The history of river deltas is recorded in shifting channels, buried soils, ancient settlements and changing coastlines as rivers and people respond to floods, subsidence and sea level.
The hidden history of tsunami physics
The science of tsunamis grew from coastal memory, disaster records, seafloor geology, instruments, and warning institutions—not from a single discovery or a single equation.
Tsunami physics explained: the ideas that matter
The clearest way to understand tsunami physics is to keep four ideas connected but distinct: displacement, long-wave motion, depth-dependent shoaling, and coastal exposure.
What glacier movement teaches us about the world
Glacier movement teaches a broad lesson about the world: slow systems can carry immense force, boundaries can matter more than interiors, and a visible change often reflects many hidden processes acting together.
What river deltas teach us about the world
River deltas teach lessons about connected systems, environmental limits, uncertainty and the way societies share risks across time and geography.
What tsunami physics teaches us about the world
Tsunami physics offers a wider systems lesson: distant causes become local consequences through pathways shaped by geometry, thresholds, feedback, preparation, and unequal exposure.
Desertification explained: the ideas that matter
A clear explanation of desertification separates drought from degradation, vegetation from land function, satellite signals from ground truth, and ecological repair from social justice.
How desertification works
Desertification is the interacting loss of land productivity in drylands, where climate variability, vegetation, soil, water, and human decisions can reinforce one another.
How soil ecosystems work
Soil ecosystems run on exchanges among roots, microbes, animals, minerals, water, and air: a hidden network that turns dead material into new growth while shaping the ground itself.
How the jet stream works
The jet stream is a fast, high-altitude current created by temperature contrasts, pressure gradients, and Earth’s rotation—and its waves help steer weather below.
Soil ecosystems explained: the ideas that matter
To understand soil ecosystems, keep four ideas together: living communities, physical structure, cycling matter, and nested scales that connect a pore to a landscape.
The engineering challenge behind desertification
Preventing and reversing desertification is a systems-engineering challenge: interventions must work with water, soils, ecology, livelihoods, governance, and uncertainty at once.
The engineering challenge behind soil ecosystems
Managing soil is an engineering problem with biological constraints: keep pores connected, water available, nutrients cycling, and disturbance within the recovery capacity of a living system.
The engineering challenge behind the jet stream
Working with the jet stream is an engineering problem in prediction and adaptation: the flow is fast, three-dimensional, incompletely observed, and coupled to the weather and systems below it.
The hidden history of desertification
The history of desertification is also a history of maps, colonial categories, scientific debates, local knowledge, and changing ideas about what dryland stewardship should achieve.
The hidden history of soil ecosystems
The history of soil ecosystems is a story of changing landscapes, farming, scientific categories, and instruments that gradually made underground life visible.
The hidden history of the jet stream
The jet stream has a longer history than its familiar name: balloon observations, aviation, forecasting institutions, and satellites gradually turned an invisible flow into a public weather object.
The jet stream explained: the ideas that matter
A clear jet-stream explanation keeps several ideas distinct: the fast core, the wave pattern, the temperature contrast, the polar vortex, and the difference between a forecast line and a weather outcome.
What desertification teaches us about the world
Desertification reveals a general systems lesson: environmental change is produced through feedback among climate, ecology, infrastructure, institutions, and unequal choices.
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