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Joe Mason

@moreorloess.bsky.social
3.1K followers 1.4K following 9.7K posts

UW Madison Geography, opinions are mine. Geomorphology, soils, dunes, loess, in the Midwest, Great Plains, northern China. He/him. Living on Ho-Chunk lands.

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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 4h
I think more people will vote absentee-in person when that starts or on election day this year.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 4h
I've been the only one regularly running field trips in my department for some time, I think.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 6h
That's right Walt, all those things I never wanted to be.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 7h
Bitter because they went to "the University of Nebraska instead of Harvard"
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 7h
Still intrigued by this possibility. As I imagine the people that advertise in LRB do, I would find ways to fit in some of my own biases and maybe stretch the truth here and there. Toward a good end, of course.
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Jennifer Jordan @sociologyofplants.bsky.social · 7h
🍺👻📚🗃️
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 8h
I personally think of Narnia every time I drive by Beaver Dam on US 151.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 17h
I am not the one to say what that reality is, though.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 17h
There is (or was) a Wolf River Realty that handled rural land sales over a large area of northeastern Wisconsin. My father in law called it Wolf River Reality, maybe a sly joke on his part—it was always hard to tell with him—but regardless, I like the concept.
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Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 12/10/2026
From paper to proof: revealing Congo Basin warming through rescued climate archives 1 million rescued weather observations from original paper sheets allow @derrickmuheki.bsky.social et al to clearly show warming in a region of very sparse historical observations esd.copernicus.org/articles/17/...
esd.copernicus.org
From paper to proof: revealing Congo Basin warming through rescued climate archives
Abstract. The Congo Basin in Central Africa remains one of the few regions globally where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has neither assessed changes in hot extremes and extreme precipi...
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
It probably happened occasionally
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
It was common to blow up big erratics in the US, probably Canada too. Probably took more skill in placing the charges and estimating how much to use than for a stump.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
Yeah, and the dean (Russell) had invested in a company selling Cutover land, which eventually became known.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
Photo ID W0136TA, Wisconsin Historical Society digital collections. Looking over a case study of the Cutover and 20th century land use and vegetation change in northern Wisconsin.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
Settlers in the Cutover in northern Wisconsin blowing up a stump. Photo by Melvin E. Diemer, 1921. Surplus explosives from WWI, widely distributed to farmers, were used to blow up stumps and boulders. The stumps were from logging white pine and other trees in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Somewhat blurry black and white photo of an open grassy area with stumps. One of the stumps is getting blown up. There is a person in the right foreground and in the background there is a train in front of forest.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
Wetting front from rain the day before in a weakly developed soil formed in loess deposited in the last few hundred years. Southwestern Nebraska, 2019. Part of a large diameter core; the black bars on either side are 10 cm long.
A soil core pushed a short distance out of a steel core tube. There is grass at the top of the core, and a wetting front marked by a transition from darker to lighter soil.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
The Nebraska Sandhills is a little different because the sandy soils don't retain as much carbon but there are lots of other good reasons not to let trees take over that landscape.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
The main point about more secure carbon storage is right, I think, but I wish these people would talk about soils and carbon storage in old growth grasslands. That's where most of the total ecosystem carbon is stored and soil carbon is lost with tree encroachment in at least some cases.
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Duane Froese @tephrafan.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Some coverage of Joe Young’s recent paper in GRL on Permafrost Detachment Slides in the Mackenzie Mountajns, NWT. #PACSLab #Sahtú #DehCho #permafrost #nwt #UAlberta www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
cbc.ca
Study says 'bottom-up' permafrost thaw led to two major N.W.T. landslides | CBC News
New research investigates two massive landslides in the Sahtu and Dehcho regions of the N.W.T. that happened nearly a decade ago. Researchers found the landslides were caused by permafrost thaw deep i...
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
I'm going to start calling the Nebraska Sandhills and the Flint Hills the charismatic megagrasslands of the Great Plains. (there is a serious point to this; I'll get to that later)
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Adam Sawyer @adamjst.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Yeah, people invoke The Hague a lot, but referring members of the present admin to the ICC should be on the table in a very real way.
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Kevin Anchukaitis @thirstygecko.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Extensive glacier loss in the coterminous United States 'since the mid-twentieth century about one-quarter of the glaciers have disappeared and the overall area and volume are reduced by one-third.' www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Extensive glacier loss in the coterminous United States | PNAS
Glaciers populate the mountain ranges of the western conterminous United States and despite their importance to alpine hydrology, their area and vo...
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John Cody @jcody.ca · 12/10/2026
Okotoks Erratic – ‘Big Rock’ located just outside the town of Okotoks Alberta. This is a massive block of quartzite transported a few hundred km’s from its source near Jasper.
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Aaron Becker @aaronjbecker.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
On the night of 9 October, the water at Anchorage dropped 32 feet in seven hours. Here is all of Cook Inlet's tide pouring in and out past the Forelands, hour by hour, 3 to 10 October 2026. Data: NOAA CIOFS model #CookInlet #Anchorage #Alaska
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Silvia Secchi @profsecchi.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
For Indigenous peoples' day, Na’je Nine (No Heart of Fear)'s map of Báxoje (Ioway) land. “It is the lands that we have always claimed from old times. We have the history. We have always owned this land. It is what bears our name.” CC @littlevillage.bsky.social @notesoniowa.bsky.social
littlevillagemag.com
An Ioway map drawn in 1837 offers a treasure trove of historical insight - Little Village
The Báxoje (Ioway) leaders Na’je Nine (No Heart of Fear) and Ñiyu Mañi (Moving Rain) arrived in Washington D.C. at the end of September 1837 with two sheets of paper, stitched together by hand — caref...
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Kevin Anchukaitis @thirstygecko.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Beautiful piece of writing in the New Yorker - 'How tree rings challenged the myth of American wilderness' www.newyorker.com/science/elem...
newyorker.com
How Tree Rings Challenged the Myth of American Wilderness
By studying fire scars in ancient wood, many scientists have become convinced that Indigenous people transformed North America long before Christopher Columbus arrived.
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Michigan Advance @michiganadvance.com · 12/10/2026
Great Lakes lab hit by DOGE is hanging on — for now  michiganadvance.com/2026/10/12/g...
michiganadvance.com
Great Lakes lab hit by DOGE is hanging on — for now  • Michigan Advance
If the Trump administration had its way, an Ann Arbor-based research lab that studies the Great Lakes and its coastal ecosystems would be gone.
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David Ramos @imagineterrain.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
I'd estimate that there are a total of 6,000 trees on Hains Point, on the golf course and along Ohio Drive combined, so the administration has cut over 8% of the park's trees in one day.
Map of trees around Hains Point
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Titus Seilheimer @drfishsg.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Lake Michigan sunrise. Wisconsin's East Coast. #GreatLakes
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Katie O'Reilly @drkatfish.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Arctic grayling haven't been found in Michigan for nearly a century, and now tribes are raising the species for reintroduction. No released fish have been seen in the wild yet, but it may take several years to tell if reintroduction has been successful www.interlochenpublicradio.org/ipr-news/202...
interlochenpublicradio.org
A year into reintroduction, no grayling seen in Michigan wild. Hope remains
Northern Michigan tribes are releasing Arctic grayling for the second year in a row, in hopes of restoring the native freshwater species. Questions remain about how many have already survived and how ...
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Anna Bagels @anna-bagels.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
I feel for all the staff workers at GLERL below the PI level. the crews that go out and monitor the lakes are so dedicated. I do feel that leadership at the NOAA and UM level could have been stronger and pushed back more against the illegal cuts, but we were told to be quiet and hide instead
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Doctor Apatite @doctorapatite.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Planetary scientist: I was unobservable because I had moved behind the Sun.
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sakura christmas @prof-christmas.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Included in this issue, “Burning the Black Dragon, Creating Dongbei: Fire Social Ecological History in Northeastern China, 1945–2005” by Jack Patrick Hayes (Kwantlen) on fire, firefighting, and fire policy in the transformation of Manchurian forests and wetlands into the Chinese breadbasket #envhist
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helen @helensmith.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume? Early medievalist: there was supposed to be an illustration!!! OBVIOUSLY
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
The photos in this case really do tell the story of this town in the UP.
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Rabih Alameddine @rabihalameddine.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
Otter statue, Egypt, ca. 664–30 B.C.E.
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Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume? Paleoecologist: A gap in the fossil record could be caused by poor preservation (conditions aren’t good for fossils) or by the erosion of sediments if they are exposed to the elements. These gaps can range from centuries to millions of years.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Taller version of the Streamline Moderne Quisling Clinic (now condos I believe) and the Quisling Apartments across the street in downtown Madison. (if you're wondering, not *that* Quisling but probably a relative, from the same area in Norway)
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Linnea Sterte @decassette.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume? comics artist: look at this larger-than-usual gutter space, which is used to imply the passage of time between scenes. you can do all sorts of things with the spaces between panels (actual answer: worked on an animated pilot, probably)
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Ken Wissoker @kwissoker.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Jen Rose Smith and her mom, responding to the Fleck prize panel at #4S2026 @dukepress.bsky.social
Zoom screen with prize author with brown hair and a red top with her mom with long silver and grey hair and glasses
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Ken Wissoker @kwissoker.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
M. Murphy introduces the panel on Jen Rose Smith’s brilliant “Ice Geographies” winner of the #4S2026 Ludwick Fleck Prize, the first Indigenous science winner of this prize. @dukepress.bsky.social
Person in maroon shirt holding the award winning book with a laptop in front of them
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Pilgrim @mountains-rivers.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/... We need to measure rivers before we model rivers.
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
SWOT, Empiricism, and River Modeling
SWOT satellite observations can be used to assess the skill of global river models in absence of in situ gauge data We map the likely skill of global river models, deductively interrogating earli...
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Dr. Kat Napaaqtuk❄️ @napaaqtuk.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Happy Indigenous People's Day! We are still here :)
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Giant apples named for the Wolf River of Wisconsin.
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Madrona Murphy @arbutocrat.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
This is one of the Wolf River trees (this particular orchard on Shaw Island has a whole grove of them!)
A slender apple tree covered in amass of crossing branches and long green leaves turning yellow.
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Space Coast Talon @brashtech.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Planetary Rings Dynamicist: A small moon clears ring particles from its orbit by accretion—they accumulate at its equator, creating the moon's "flying-saucer-like" shape—and it also maintains the gap edges through gravitational "shepherding."
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Broken Bow has the same air about it these days.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
I might have been at that super 8, too. But I left well before sunrise the next morning.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
It's been unusually beautiful in the morning and evening here lately, but a little too hot at mid-day for October.
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Yes, from the left, not from the right
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