Geomorphologist Taylor Perron loves figuring out how landscapes tick. His group is particularly intersted in how patterns emerge in landscapes (from river networks to ripples in sand at the shoreline), how climate, and especially rainfall and sunlight, influence landscape, and the landscapes that occur on other planets and moons and how they differ from what is seen on Earth.

In this video Taylor shares two research projects:

"Landscapes on the Move" focuses on Taylor's work modeling river valley evolution. Speeding up the process from hundreds of thousands of years to just a few minutes, Taylor reveals what a dynamic process the evolution of topography is.

In "Ripples in Rocks - A Day at the Plastic Beach" Taylor compares time-lapse video from a laboratory wave-tank with computer animations in an exploration of how ripple structures get set into rock, and the geometries they exhibit.

Read more about Taylor's work to predict the speed of valley spread in the MIT News article The hills are evolving  .

Video credit: Helen Hill