Sedimentologist and geoinformaticist. Postdoc at UNC Chapel Hill’s Global Hydrology Lab. PhD from Indiana University, 2025.

I study sedimentary landscape organization through remote sensing and geospatial data engineering. Current work uses SWOT satellite data to image coastal backwater profiles globally, identifying regions vulnerable to compound flood hazards and river avulsion.

github / scholar / orcid / email

questions / publications / cv

Questions

What I’m trying to understand:

• Where will rivers go? Can we predict the path of an avulsing river before it moves? What geometric signatures in floodplain topography encode avulsion risk?

• How do coasts feel the ocean? How far upstream does tidal and backwater influence extend, and how does this change with discharge, sea level, and sediment supply?

• What controls landscape memory? How do sedimentary systems record, preserve, and erase signals of environmental change across timescales?

• Can we see process from pattern? What can remotely-sensed surface morphology tell us about subsurface stratigraphy and active transport processes?

Publications

1. Fighting Fires from Space: Leveraging Vision Transformers for Enhanced Wildfire Detection and Characterization

   Aman Agarwal, James Gearon, Raksha Rank, Etienne Chenevert

   arXiv preprint, 2025

2. River Avulsion Precursors Encoded in Alluvial Ridge Geometry

   James H. Gearon, Douglas A. Edmonds

   Geophysical Research Letters, 2025

3. Martian chaos terrain fracture geometry indicates drainage and compaction of laterally heterogeneous confined aquifers

   Joseph S. Levy, Thomas F. Subak, Ian Armstrong, Izzy King, Lingfeng Kuang, Lily Kuentz, James H. Gearon, Sophie Naylor, MC Rapoza, Haobo Wang

   Icarus, 2025

4. Topographic roughness as an emergent property of geomorphic processes and events

   T. H. Doane, J. H. Gearon, H. K. Martin, B. J. Yanites, D. A. Edmonds

   AGU Advances, 2024

5. Rules of river avulsion change downstream

   James H. Gearon, Harrison Martin, Clarke DeLisle, Eric Barefoot, David Mohrig, Chris Paola, Douglas Edmonds

   Nature, 2024

6. Increased sediment connectivity between deltas and deep-water fans in closed lake basins

   Puyu Liu, Chenglin Gong, James H. Gearon, et al.

   Sedimentary Geology, 2023

7. The supply-generated sequence: A unified sequence-stratigraphic model for closed lacustrine sedimentary basins

   James H. Gearon, Cornel Olariu, Ronald J. Steel

   Journal of Sedimentary Research, 2022

8. Geomorphic controls on shrub canopy volume and spacing of creosote bush in northern Mojave Desert, USA

   James H. Gearon, Michael H. Young

   Landscape Ecology, 2020