Each lecture has a theme that links concepts in soft matter to problems in geophysics. Target audience is geoscientists and physicists looking for new approaches and problems, but hopefully is accessible to anyone passionate about science learning.

If you wanna find out why soil is creepy, why rocks are soft, why the world is a sandpile, why earth is made of cubes, why details don't matter until they very much do, and why i'm the Nas of geophysics...then dive in!

New lectures will drop every few days on our PennSED channel: youtube.com/@pennsed?si=... We just posted the prologue to learn what the series is all about, and "Lecture 1. Everything flows: The squishy concept of solid". Please have a look and share!

Just dropped: "Lecture 2: The world is a sandpile. Why everything is threshold, and threshold is everything" in the Soft Earth Chalk Talk series youtube.com/@pennsed?si=... #SoftEarthGeophysics Mountains, faults, rivers & sand dunes are perched on the threshold of failure.

I introduce the concept of self organized criticality, and its consequences for the dynamics of the Earth's surface. You'll never look at a sandpile the same!

@apsdsoft.bsky.social @aguepsp.bsky.social

Just dropped: "Lecture 3: Things Fall Apart. The Geometry of Failure". I introduce a simple geometric framework for describing the geometry of fracture networks, and show how this lens reveals distinct patterns that are related to the mechanisms of cracking.

Find out why Plato was right about one of the elements, and how water can be detected on other planets from fractures alone!

Just dropped: "Soft Earth 4: Earth is fragile". 'Fragile' has a special meaning for materials. It means that particles -- molecules, colloids, sand grains -- form metastable structures that incessantly rearrange, even under very little disturbance. Fragile solids don't stay HOW you put them.

We explore the consequences of fragility in disordered materials for the Earth's surface, with a special focus on soil creep. This lecture pairs with Lecture 5.

Dropped "Soft Earth 5: Earth is resilient". Although Earth materials are fragile they're also resilient; soils, for example, evolved to withstand the barrage of environmental stresses under which they formed. This resilience is key to building sustainably using Earth materials. Pairs with Lecture 4.

Now up: "Soft Earth 6: Landscapes are memories". From river beds to faults, particles arrange into structures that indicate the direction and magnitude of stresses that act on them. Particles conspire to create landforms such as sand dunes, which encode the history of transport at larger scales.

Sedimentary rocks preserve snippets of these grain and landform memories. We discuss how these memories are stored in landscapes, and how they are erased.

"Soft Earth 7: Details don't matter" is the key "theoretical" lecture in the series. I discuss how and why we might expect generality in the behavior of different geophysical systems, especially in the vicinity of critical points.