The forecast from the coronal hole panned out: the night was spectacular; I only wished I had something better than an iPhone to catch it all on! I was watching a great northern lights show (a bright green homogeneous band over the city and the lake, reflecting off the water) when the moon began to […]

This weekend’s drive up the north shore took me to a place I could see the namesake of Palisade rhyolite. I had planned to maybe hit Flood Bay on the way back, but it was late in the day and storms were rolling in, so I went straight home.

TGIF! I really like my new “rock picking” hobby. Today, I found a tiny piece(?) of an agate, and continued to grow my rock collection. I have found lots of basalt (including ophitic, diabase, gabbro, and vesicular). I’d love to find basalt with pipe vesicles but I’m not sure what my odds of that would […]

I kind of hesitate to post “general” R-INLA posts because it’s a.) not my job so b.) I don’t really have time to give it the treatment it deserves. I don’t want to rewrite the website, yet, though I do want to make it more accessible. Right now, I’m mining the R-INLA site for biologically […]

I decided to learn more about the rocks of Lake Superior, knowing that agates were “a thing.” So, I went for a walk along the beach near my apartment. Lo and behold, there was a Lake Superior agate at the water’s edge! I also found what I think is Silver-Beaver rhyolite.

I finally bought a rock picking book to learn to ID rocks on the beach. Looking through the pictures, I think I see a lot of rhyolite and flow-banded rhyolite. I’ll look closer tomorrow.

Unfortunately, my neighbor below me doesn’t like birds, and apparently I thereby spoiled it for everyone by putting a feeder out in the main area. Now everyone has to take theirs down.

Wilson – March 2017 I.O.C.- 2018

This is a photo from outside Pelican Lake Recreation Area (Watertown, SD) that shows a prairie pothole in all its current glory: taken over by agriculture. An astonishing proportion of the Prairie Potholes Region (PPR) has been converted to agriculture, so this is what many of them look like now. Agricultural use has already significantly […]

This is the next facet I did not explore with my dissertation, so I’m all the more excited to get started thinking about these questions and expand my perspective. Wetland modelling in the study regions allows us to think about several aspects of the landscape, such as presence/absence and number of wetlands based on certain […]