News - Irina Overeem

25 students from diverse backgrounds are in SEEC completing the CSDMS Spring School, a week-long coding camp designed to build students’ cyberinfrastructure skills needed in Earth science careers.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a highly competitive grant to a team of scientists building OpenEarthScape, a set of models and simulations to help anticipate changes in river flow, beach erosion, landslides and more. The $2.56M grant will support five years of work by earth surface scientists, including modelers, who are determined to better understand the forces that re-shape our landscapes over hours to epochs. Eric Hutton, Albert Kettner, Irina Overeem, Mark Piper are co-PIs on the grant.

River deltas change over time, and the freedom to shift river location is important to maintaining a healthy ecosystem. However, humans are used to the stability of fixed infrastructure, so they struggle dealing with dynamic landforms like river deltas. But rivers changing course and evolving over time is a good sign for the delta and the environment around it. In a new commentary published in Earth’s Future, a national team of experts including Irina Overeem examines the ongoing conflict between stability and sustainability in heavily populated river deltas, such as the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna in India/Bangladesh and Mississippi in the U.S.