"Soft Earth Geophysics"
We live on a soft matter landscape. The Earth's surface is a thin skin of particulate and living material that is fragile; excited by a broad spectrum of perturbations, Earth's surface flickers across many metastable states. Understanding the Soft Earth is existential, to manage the risk of increasingly dangerous natural hazards such as landslides and earthquakes and to learn to build with sustainable geomaterials. Yet, historically there has been little exchange between theoretical physics and observations of Soft Earth states and dynamics, like there is in other fields such as astrophysics. Existing models are largely phenomenological or empirical. The emerging field of "Soft Earth Geophysics" involves the translation of emerging frameworks in soft matter physics to geophysics, while also shining light into dark corners of physics that may influence other areas of science.
See our manifesto on Soft Earth Geophysics here.
News
- 09/04/2024 - Dr. Jerolmack is appointed the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, in acknowledgement of his distinguished scholarship and teaching and his outstanding service to the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and the School of Arts and Sciences.
- 04/10/2024 - Blog news on our recent PNAS paper on surprising simplicity in simulating complex flows over natural topography.
- 04/03/2024 - Penn Today feature and video on our NASA planetary analog research.
- 04/01/2024 - Dr. Jerolmack wins the S. Reid Warren Jr. Award recognizing the outstanding service in intellectual and professional development of Penn Engineering undergraduates
- 03/03/2024 - Postdoctoral researcher Shravan Pradeep is selected to the first cohort of Penn Center of Soft and Living Matter Postdoc Fellows.
- 10/27/2023 - Our ongoing work on mechanical characterization of baseball gripping mud featured in Philadelphia Inquirer and Penn News!
- 04/29/2023 - Dr. Jerolmack is awarded Honorary Faculty in the Department of Morphology and Geometric Modeling, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary.
- 04/13/2023 - Postdoctoral researcher Shravan Pradeep is selected as a finalist for the ACS Colloids and Surface Science Division Victor K. LaMer Award. He will be recognized as a LaMer Keynote Speaker at the ACS Colloids & Surface Science Symposium in Raleigh.
- 01/19/2023 - Live radio interview with Australia Broadcasting Company on flooding and landslides in California.
- 11/08/2022 - Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics “Blackboard Talk” by D. Jerolmack: The Landscape of Multiphase Flows”.
- 06/24/2021 - Media coverage of our Nature Communications paper “The perpetual fragility of creeping hillslopes”: New York Times, Phys.Org
- 05/13/2021 - Science Magazine feature on river avulsions including our work.
- 04/29/2021 - Media coverage of our Geophysical Review Letters paper “Circadian rhythm of dune field activity”.