Quoting IU Newsroom: "On the evening of March 31, 2023, McCormick’s Creek State Park in Spencer, Indiana, was hit by an EF-3 tornado hurling 138 mph winds. More than 280 acres of the 1,961-acre park were seriously damaged, and two people died in the park’s campground. Brian Yanites, an associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington, drove to the park and saw hundreds of destroyed trees.
Yanites, who studies how the Earth’s surface and topography are shaped by atmospheric and geologic processes, and his colleague Doug Edmonds had just been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a process for mapping tree throw, or the deep depressions made in soil once a tree is uprooted by extreme atmospheric events, and to investigate the implications it has on the surrounding soil and biosphere. What happened at McCormick’s Creek State Park would give them an important opportunity to do so."
The College of Arts