Matthew Morriss
Tell us about yourself?
Hello! My name is Matthew Morriss. I use he/him pronouns. I'm a physical scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), based out of the Utah Water Science Center in Salt Lake City. I completed my PhD in Geomorphology at the University of Oregon in 2020, but I moved to Utah in 2019. I grew up in Austin, Texas but moved around a lot! Walla Walla, Washington for college; Raleigh, North Carolina for a Masters; Eugene, Oregon for a PhD, and now Salt Lake!
What is your research about?
Most of my graduate work was in the realm of fluvial geomorphology. Specifically, I was looking into the history of North America's deepest canyon: Hells Canyon (2000' deeper than the grand canyon ;-) located on the border of Oregon and Idaho. Despite its depth, the age and origin of the canyon have been a mystery for some time, and my goal was to elucidate or bring to light the timing of when the canyon was carved and provide potential rate of incision estimates and develop a conceptual model for the mechanism of canyon carving. This work involved a fair amount of field work, including caving! looking for river deposits in limestone caverns, empirical measurements from remote sensing, and numerical landscape evolution models. As I build my career with the survey, I'm still working on wrapping up and publishing these loose ends from my dissertation. Since starting at the USGS, I've mostly been involved in a large database effort, the Watershed Boundary Database (WBD), which is a USGS driven effort to map the drainage divides of every catchment in the country in high resolution. I've also slowly been developing some of my own research projects, including understanding rock glacier mechanics and hydrology more effectively.
What excites you about your research?
I've often enjoyed working on and in more obscure topics: a canyon no one's heard of or on rock glaciers which not many people in the U.S. are actively studying. It provides a bit more intellectual freedom as not many people are currently working in that region and you have a chance to hopefully provide some interesting and compelling results. The flipside is that it can be hard to get funding or attract interest from a committee of faculty at a given time, so some creativity is needed too. Geomorphology and specifically rivers I find exciting as they can be true tape recordings of the tectonic and dynamic evolution of a region. You can also actively see how they are evolving based on their long profile, which is readily extractable from our various remotely sensed datasets. I found this type of accessible and intuitive framework very tangible and exciting! As a plus, the literature is constantly evolving in fluvial geomorphology so there's always new things to learn!
What broader importance does your research have for society?
The largest canyons on Earth, the Grand Canyon or the Tsangpo gorge, often inspire questions from the general public of "Why is that canyon there?" or "How old is that canyon." Geomorphology is the field of landscapes and how they form, and geomorphologic inquiry is the means to answering these fundamental questions about the Earth and how it works and formed. So in short, answering a question about the age and origin of Hells Canyon has a public interests angle. I gave several public talks throughout my PhD in eastern Oregon and the public loved to hear about my newest pieces of data from the canyon. My newer work on rock glaciers has a much more tangible effect on society. With an increasing temperature and decreasing surface water/precipitation regime taking place across the west, source hydrology is becoming more important. At this point in time, it looks like rock glaciers have not been included in large basin scale models, yet they represent reservoirs of freshwater that will continue to melt at an accelerated rate with warming temperatures. Capturing that rate of change and estimating the melt rate is key to understanding their role across the Western U.S. as water sources. I'm hoping to in the new few years come up with basin scale estimates of how much melt rock glaciers currently contribute to various rivers in the west and model how this melt rate could change with time moving forward.
What inspired you to pursue a career in Earth Science?
In a word: teachers. I was very lucky to have some phenomenal teachers in high school who taught Earth Science and the other physical sciences. One teacher in particular, Frank Mikan, had spent years as a mining geologist in Montana. His stories of prospecting and mapping ore bodies captured my imagination as someone who already loved being outside but had no concept of geology as a career before that moment. The idea of studying how the rocks on the earth formed or building a story of a particular geologic unit or event made so much sense to me and was truly captivating. I declared my major as geology the second month of my freshman year at Whitman College and never looked back. I pursued graduate school hoping to teach at a small liberal arts school and be an inspire others to study Earth Science, but as life takes interesting turns I am now here at the Survey. My PhD is dedicated to Frank Mikan and all the inspirational teachers in my life.
What are you looking to do after you complete your PhD or postdoc?
I'm very lucky to have started a full time position with the USGS here after working as what's called a Pathways Intern for 5 months in 2020. I hope to stay at the survey and build a successful career here!
Given unlimited funding and access to resources, what is your dream project that you would pursue?
Oh wow, that's an exciting question. I think I would go back to Hells Canyon and collect more samples: both for bedrock thermochronology and basin wide averaged erosion rates. There was so much left undone in that area just due to limited funding and time; there could be projects there for the rest of my life. But maybe to do something new, I would love to do field work in Alaska or Antarctica, so maybe some tectonic geomorph needs doing in Alaska!
What else do you do? Any hobbies or interests outside of work?
I've long been a rock climber, but during Covid times I opted to take up trail running more seriously. I'm currently training for my first 50 km run in September. Very excited! My partner and I also adopted a dog which is filling a lot of our time and energy!
Find out more about Matthew at: https://matthewmorriss.weebly.com/