Lucille Baker-Stahl
Join us for a virtual coffee hour with Lucille on Tuesday, May 20th, 7:00 pm CDT (register here)
Tell us about yourself:
My name is Lucille Baker-Stahl and I’m a trans woman, which feels worth mentioning because I don’t see many of us in the Earth Surface Processes community. I completed my Bachelor’s in Geology at Carleton College in 2023 and then dove headfirst into grad school. I'm now in the 2nd year of my PhD at the University of Houston Morphodynamics Lab where I think about how to model and collect data on fun things like rivers, deltas, and landslides, and how beautifully complicated processes get when you add permafrost to the picture.
What is your research about?
My research tries to link the push and pull of exogenous drivers to the rates and magnitudes of surface processes through physics-based frameworks that can scale with the uncertainty of our planet's future. Currently, I’ve been focusing on predicting erosion potential across permafrost landscapes in a warming climate. I collaborate with civil engineers to ask questions like: “How do freezing and thawing affect the behavior of sediments near the surface?” I incorporate our results into an array of simple physics-based models I’m adapting to test whether landslides I’ve mapped in southwest Greenland could have been predicted, and to assess how vulnerable the landscape will be to warming. Aside from landslides, I will soon be setting up permafrost in a flume to answer questions about how, when, and why channels form in permafrost in a laboratory setting. I’m excited to get to control the degrees of freedom of these complex systems and to break down individual factors driving channelization..
What excites you about your research?
I love seeing landscapes change. On our planet, most rapid changes lead to natural hazards to the built environment and do not seem to be good things for us. Nevertheless, I find that the present provides a fantastic opportunity to link processes to drivers happening on human time scales. Being able to not only synthesize the wide array of geomorphic data we have been collecting about our planet but also link present observations with our understanding of processes leaves so much room for discovery. It also has a very clear link to human impacts, which I appreciate to stay motivated. Deep geologic time can be interesting, but it is the changes happening on human time scales that keep me up at night.
What broader importance does your research have for society?
My current research on permafrost landslides and incipient channelization has direct hazards applications for Arctic communities and infrastructure. Additionally, researching erosion, sediment transport, and landscape evolution in periglacial landscapes under a warming climate also has global implications due to something called the permafrost carbon feedback cycle. Permafrost soils contain large quantities of organic carbon. As permafrost thaws, this carbon can be exposed to the atmosphere, degrading and releasing greenhouse gases. In turn, these gases increase warming and drive thawing in a positive feedback loop. However, the conversion step from thawing permafrost to degradation of organic carbon by the atmosphere requires soils to be exposed to the surface. This turns the erosion of thawing permafrost soils into a critical climate question for the future. If thawed soils remain stable and are not eroded, then even as permafrost continues to thaw, little organic carbon will be converted into greenhouse gases. However, if thawing is linked with increased erosion, then the positive feedback loop may initiate/continue warming our world. My research focuses on understanding how warming influences fundamental erosional processes, with the goal of predicting whether their rates, distributions, and magnitudes will increase in a warming climate.
What inspired you to pursue a career in Earth Science?
Moving from my childhood home of Indiana to Minnesota for my bachelor's, I noticed that the oh-so-familiar cornfields of my childhood had piping (tile drainage) buried underneath to route seasonal snowmelt. Seeing regional differences in something I thought I knew well, corn, led me to realize that humans live on landscape and we must adapt to and understand the world around us. Since that discovery, I have been hooked on trying to understand how surface processes vary across landscapes and how they behave naturally to determine how human development influences and is influenced by surface processes. I love getting to spend as much time as possible outside so fieldwork is a big bonus as well. Curiosity about the world around me and getting to do fieldwork have kept me away from an alternate future where I would be trying to find a job translating novels from French to English.
What are you looking to do after you complete your PhD or postdoc?
As much as I enjoy my research, I’ve sometimes found it hard to stay fully motivated when it’s my sole focus. I’ve found a much more joyful balance as a teaching assistant, getting to interact with students in addition to my computer and data. I love teaching others about Earth Sciences and learning from my students in return, improving my skills as an educator. After my PhD and postdoctoral work, I hope to become faculty, where I can continue researching while also teaching and mentoring.
Given unlimited funding and access to resources, what is your dream project that you would pursue?
I’d love to combine time series hydrology measurements, sediment flux data, and repeat bathymetry surveys to do a full field-based morphodynamic analysis of water and sediment partitioning in a delta. I would monitor changes through a subaerial distributary channel network, all the way to the subaqueous delta front to see how they are coupled. I have already had one set of sensors buried by rapidly migrating half-meter amplitude dunes after mooring them to a braided deltaic channel bed. What could go wrong with trying something like that again?! With endless time and money, figuring out how to moor in rapidly aggrading deltaic settings ought to be possible. With no more risks and a still endless budget, then I’d just strap $100,000’s worth of sensors to each mooring and I’d have my own real-life Delft 3D.
What else do you do? Any hobbies or interests outside of work?
In my brief moments of spare time, I enjoy reading science fiction and fantasy, getting new tattoos and piercings (or fantasizing about what I would get if I had a budget), and brewing mead. I also love getting outdoors when I can and hiking or spending time by the closest body of water I can find.
Check out Lucille's Google Scholar profile.