This event is over.
Event Details:
Abstract
Rivers widen and narrow, deepen and shallow, and fill up their valleys and cut down again. Integrated over time, these changes – driven by variations in water supply, sediment supply, and ecosystems – form riverine landscapes. Accelerating and ongoing changes in climate and land use affect all of these drivers, quickly reshaping rivers and their surroundings. I will first share the evolution of the upper Mississippi valley since the start of the Quaternary glaciations and continuing through the time of Euro-American settlement. I will follow this past perspective with physics-based theory and numerical models to predict transient changes in rivers as they respond to external forcings. Taken together, geoscientific stories and physical process understanding provide tools to forecast river futures, and perhaps motivation to change them.
Bio
Andy Wickert approaches science as a mission to understand landscapes and rivers — telling their stories and quantitatively predicting their futures. He generates theory and numerical simulations, investigates glaciation and isostatic adjustment, develops open-source environmental sensing systems, and gathers field data tailored to test and advance model predictive capacity. Under the growing urgency of climate and land-use change, he nucleates the community to collectively address complex problems.
Wickert received his SB (2008) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his PhD (2014) from the University of Colorado Boulder. He was a postdoctoral research scientist (2014–2015) and later an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (2022–2024) at the Universität Potsdam and GFZ Potsdam. Since 2015, he has been on the faculty at the University of Minnesota, with appointments at the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory and in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences. He teaches and studies the landscapes near his original home.
For Zoom access, please email Xueyao Cheng <xc272@stanford.edu>