Rob Ettema on River Ice, Ice-Sediment Interactions, and Sediment Scientist Biographies

RSM River Mechanics Podcast

I grew up in one of North America’s great snow belts…and started my career in Buffalo NY
So, that background and my fascination with sediment transport primes curiosity in ice transport.
I’m sure my ice friends would cringe at this, but I sometimes call ice transport as upside down sediment transport.
But despite the symmetry of ice and sediment transport, they are separate, complicated, disciplines with little overlapping expertise.
Which is why its remarkable, that this episode’s guest is not only is not only world class in both disciplines, but unquestionably the go-to global expert in how they interact.
It is fair to say that just about everything I know about how ice effects sediment transport and river morphology, I learned from Dr. Rob Ettema
So I wanted to have Rob on the podcast to talk about the interactions between ice and the other river processes we tend to talk about in this feed. But recognizing that maybe not everyone who listens to this podcast, is initiated into the wild world of fluvial ice dynamics, we start out with some basics of river ice-formation and transport.
But then we not only dove into the differences between ice-affected and ice-free rivers, but also how ice affects rivers of different latitudes, depths, and even flow directions.
Dr. Rob Ettema retired Colorado State University last year, where he has been a professor since 2015 and continues to work as a research scientist. Before that he taught (and served as Engineering Dean) at the Universities of Iowa and Wyoming.
He has edited ASCE’s cold regions journal, and won that society’s Rouse and Einstein (2015) Awards, which is particularly apt as he has written biographical works on the scientists both of those awards are named after.
He is well know for his work on ice and scour; the former we talked about at length and the latter we barely touched. But Dr. Ettema, is also one of those researchers, that has multiple self-contained, bodies of work, which have each influenced me enough, that I would have invited him on the podcast for either topic.
So in the second half of the conversation, we explore Dr Ettema’s interest in the history of the hydraulic and sediment disciplines, and a genre of literature in which he is second to none: sediment science biography.
We talk about lessons from the characters he has written about, including names like Rouse, Einstein, and Radkivi.
This will wrap up our Colorado State trilogy.
Kind of…we are also releasing some remarkable bonus content with this episode.
Jennifer Bountry (Bureau of Reclamation) invited Dr. Ettema and Dr Julien down to the Bureau’s technical service center to teach a short course together. She provided the zoom footage.
So I edited a little bit and we are releasing the whole short course on the HEC sediment Youtube channel. If you found the last two episodes interesting, we have about 8 hours, of formal technical content for you to dig into.
We’ll link to the playlist in the episode notes and post the

This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.
Mike Loretto edited the first three seasons and created the theme music.
Tessa Hall is editing most of Season 4.
Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.
Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast
...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson
If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248