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Meander: generating historical maps of rivers that never existed

Meander: generating historical maps of rivers that never existed
source: http://roberthodgin.com/project...

Some gorgeous videos of the process, too. Styled after Harold Fisk's famous 1944 Army Corps of Engineers map of the Mississippi.
2 years ago

Steve pro

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snarkout pro 2 years ago
This seems like something @williwaw would enjoy.
octaneTom pro 2 years ago
This is something I enjoy
williwaw pro 2 years ago
Thank you, you're correct, this is very much in my wheelhouse.

One of the hardest geologic tasks I do is figuring out beds from fluvial deposits because rivers fucking love to move. They also love to flood and erode and deposit. So deciphering from clues like a sandstone body here and a clay bed there and drag marks left behind by logs what direction a river was really going, how fast or slow, how much volume, etc., and the why of all that gets pretty tricky. A single flooding event that sends the main channel a completely different direction or an ice age can screw up data in a flash. It's super important for climate change research, however, because climate on smaller scales and tectonics on large scales are the big drivers of fluvial change and that gives us an idea of what's happened in the past and what will happen in the future. (Fun fact! You can tell when the Rockies started rising up because suddenly the rivers *completely changed directions* from east to west to west to east (or the opposite). That is SO COOL.) Which one can then apply to rivers like the Mississippi, which has galloped up and down the Louisiana and Texas coast line for tens of millions of years, or areas like Chesapeake Bay which is actually like a river that the sea drowned.

So where they've gone and why is difficult to discern but important to know, which makes me wonder if I could input data from an ancient fluvial system into this and get meaningful results. It wouldn't be that hard to test the output, actually.

(Also I have some posters from Fisk's maps and they're SO PRETTY and I love them so much.)
snarkout pro 2 years ago
@williwaw The creator is a fairly well known computer artist; I'm sure if you pinged him about the degree to which it's viable for accurate simulations he would have something cogent to say.
KMAlexander pro 2 years ago
This is incredible. WOW
infini pro 2 years ago
I need to be the @williwaw of something... way cool!
williwaw pro 2 years ago
@snarkout thanks! I was thinking about doing that already but that gives me more confidence to do so!

@infini well I think you know lots about all kinds of things! . . . also I frequently get lost in parking lots

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