About

Brian Romans

Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

clasticdetritus.com/feed | twitter.com/clasticdetritus

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech. I write mostly about Earth science (usually sedimentary and/or marine geology) and like to share photographs from the field. Sometimes I blog about what it’s like to be an academic and educator.

What does Clastic Detritus mean? These words refer to pieces or fragments of other rocks. Sediments and sedimentary geology is what I spend most of my waking hours pondering. See my research page for more.

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Sampling of what I write about on this blog:

• The origin of submarine canyons — Ideas from the 1930s (November 2011 — for Wired Science blog network)
• Listening to rivers (September 2011 — for Wired Science blog network)
• Linking erosional and depositional landscapes (June 2011 — for Wired Science blog network)
• The long beat of rhythmic sedimentation (March 2011 — for Wired Science blog network)
• The art of acid mine drainage (March 2011 — for Wired Science blog network)
• Pondering landscapes: A chat with BLDGBLOG author Geoff Manaugh (February 2011 — for Wired Science blog network)
• Can hurricanes trigger earthquakes? (January 2011 — for Wired Science blog network)
• Using sedimentation rates to infer long-term global climate change (June 2010)
• Rapid canyon formation and uniformitarianism (June 2010)
• Exporting environmental catastrophes (May 2010)
• What do you think of the ‘Anthropocene’? (March 2010)
• Review of the book Sand: The Neverending Story and Q&A with author Michael Welland (January 2010)
• Source-to-Sink: The future of sedimentary geology? (May 2008)

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Articles or posts I wrote elsewhere:

• I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2003-2011. In 2010 I contributed to KQED’s QUEST Community Science Blog with several posts about the geology in that region.
• Guest post at the American Geophysical Union’s blog The Plainspoken Scientist: Communicating Science (June 2010) — Why I Blog: Brian Romans
• Article for EARTH magazine (May 2010) — Must we capture and store carbon from coal to meet emissions-reduction targets?

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Miscellany:

• Flickr photostream
• bookmarks shared on delicious with tag ‘geoscience‘
• Vimeo video stream
• ResearcherID profile
• ResearchBlogging.org home page
• Brief Q&A with me in the Charlotte Observer (July 2010) — Geologist looks at the sea floor, Earth’s surface
• Geotimes article about geology blogs (June 2008) — Geology Bloggers Rock