James (Jake) Gearon

James (Jake) Gearon

A sedimentology/geoinformatics PhD candidate @ Indiana University. Looking at sand from space. I also like LLMs. opinions are my own. email: jhgearon@iu.edu

James (Jake) Gearon

Sedimentary Dynamics & Analytics

Research Focus

A side channel on the Magdalena River, Colombia. Taken on a recent NSF trip.
A side channel on the Magdalena River, Colombia. Taken on a recent NSF trip.

I study sedimentary landscape organization and response to perturbations across scales, focusing on the patterns, thresholds, and transitions that emerge from fundamental physical processes. By quantifying spatial and temporal relationships in alluvial systems, I investigate how landscapes maintain, destabilize, and reestablish their structure. My data-driven approach seeks to uncover mechanistic controls on sedimentary and alluvial landscape processes, advancing both theoretical understanding and hazard prediction.

The Earth sciences is currently transitioning from a data-poor field to a data-rich one. I use geospatial data engineering and applied data science—largely through the lens of remote sensing—to investigate classic problems in geomorphology and sedimentology.

Key Research Areas:

  1. Natural Hazards under Climate Change: Investigating river avulsions and their impact on flooding and infrastructure. Recent avulsions in India alone have displaced millions and damaged agricultural and transportation infrastructure.

  2. Ecogeomorphology: Analyzing the interplay between geomorphology and vegetation patterns through big-data approaches. My work includes the largest analysis of creosote shrub distributions to date (~23 million samples).

  3. Data Engineering & Machine Learning in Geosciences:

    • Developing novel applications of ICESat-2 data for floodplain topography
    • Creating BASED (Boost-Assisted Stream Estimator for Depth)
    • Building infrastructure for Army Corps of Engineers levee analysis
    • Designing LakePy for global lake water level analysis

Publications

  1. James H. Gearon, Harrison Martin, Clarke DeLisle, Eric Barefoot, David Mohrig, Chris Paola, and Douglas Edmonds. Rules of river avulsion change downstream. Nature, 2024.

  2. James H. Gearon, Cornel Olariu, and Ronald J. Steel. The supply-generated sequence: A unified sequence-stratigraphic model for closed lacustrine sedimentary basins with evidence from the Green River Formation, Uinta Basin, Utah, U.S.A. Journal of Sedimentary Research, 92(9):813–835, 2022.

  3. James H. Gearon and Michael H. Young. Geomorphic controls on shrub canopy volume and spacing of creosote bush in northern Mojave Desert, USA. Landscape Ecology, 2020.

  4. T. H. Doane, J. H. Gearon, H. K. Martin, B. J. Yanites, and D. A. Edmonds. Topographic roughness as an emergent property of geomorphic processes and events. AGU Advances, 5(5), 2024.

  5. Puyu Liu, Chenglin Gong, James H. Gearon, et al. Increased sediment connectivity between deltas and deep-water fans in closed lake basins: A case study from Bozhong Sag, Bohai Bay Basin, China. Sedimentary Geology, 2023.

  6. Joseph S. Levy, Thomas F. Subak, Ian Armstrong, Izzy King, Lingfeng Kuang, Lily Kuentz, James H. Gearon, Sophie Naylor, MC Rapoza, Haobo Wang. Martian chaos terrain fracture geometry indicates drainage and compaction of laterally heterogeneous confined aquifers. Icarus, 426:116377, 2025.

  7. James H. Gearon and Douglas A. Edmonds. River Avulsion Precursors Encoded in Alluvial Ridge Geometry [In review at Geophysical Research Letters].