I use the MEC Minerals Baby every time I teach mineralseducationcoalition.org/mining-miner... My students always learn about mining 😆

It takes between 10 and 20 years to go from discovery to production for mines. Mostly closer to 20 years. This includes the exploration, resource modeling, feasibility studies, permitting, and construction. Financing can also take time. Mines are expensive to build!

Modern noise ordinances are often incapable of handling data centers because they’re engineered around unique loudness events, not 24/7 hums & they do not usually account for frequency differences in the hums (a big issue with data centers)

A University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa study shows that Waikīkī faces increasing sewage flood risks from sea-level rise through storm-drain backflow and groundwater emergence. The findings call for updated flood strategies focused on contamination, not just surface damage and economic loss.

my sister got me hooked on the extremely lesbian crime dramedy “Deadloch” and my two favorite jokes so far are: —sign in an outdoor gear store saying NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCOUNT TENTS —referring to sex standing up as “portrait mode”

"the losses suffered by farmworkers in Santa Barbara County alone — where I conduct research — could range from $126 million to $152 million annually, with subsequent decreases in spending and tax revenue reverberating through the region." www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

“If you ask tobacco companies to help write your school’s policy on cigarettes…you’re going to end up with guidance on how to smoke responsibly in school.”

These are amazing and I want them all!

It is an honor to be featured in the latest California Native Plant Society magazine Flora! CNPS has been hugely important through various stages of my career development and I am grateful for their continued support. 💚

Excited to be speaking at Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve Tuesday May 5. The Big Fire in the Big Basin: The Long History & Short Memory of Wildfire in the #SantaCruzMountains explores the history of wildfire and role of colonial resource extraction. jrbp.stanford.edu/events/dr-du...

🌟OPEN ACCESS🌟 MyShake is a free app that delivers earthquake early warning alerts across California, Washington and Oregon. Users can also report how an earthquake felt. How useful is that information? #TSR ⚒️ buff.ly/a3XC0wI

F__k!

In a small Arizona community, millions of dollars were spent upgrading a drinking water system to meet federal safety standards. Residents were relieved to learn their water was safe. But many still didn’t drink it. My latest on counterintuitive research findings. news.asu.edu/20260423-env...

The richest man owns X. The second and fourth richest men control Google. The third richest man owns The Washington Post. The fifth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

Holy smokes, our team just got another grant for the California Solar Canal Initiative!! This latest funding will help build a decision-support tool to scale solar canals across the state, conduct research with communities on environmental justice dimensions, and start to look at neighboring states.

ICE has violated almost 100 court orders. Let me say that another way. 100 times ICE was caught brazenly ignoring the law. 100 times a court told them to immediately stop. And 100 times they ignored the order. That's an out-of-control agency that shouldn't get another dime.

ICE kidnapped a Virginia Tech student

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

Declassified photos of Stasi agents modeling undercover disguises.

Reupping to see if anyone has a CPG through AIPG

When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research.

GPS satellites move at 1/100000 the speed of light, causing their clocks to tick slower by 7 microseconds per day, and orbit at a height that makes their clocks tick faster by 45 microseconds per day. Two relativistic effects, both at the 1 part in 10 billion level, both essential for GPS accuracy 🧪

Feels like a good time to share these earth-themed starter packs: go.bsky.app/CQzthwb

Is anyone a CPG (certified professional geologist)?

Hey folks! We are looking to fill a visiting assistant professorship in Earth & Env Sciences at Denison. Are you an Environmental Scientist who can teach GIS and geomorphology and want to hone your skills at teaching here at a liberal arts college? Then apply by May 4! apply.interfolio.com/183740

Aside from who started it, states like CA and VA putting a counter-gerrymander up to a referendum, where people are told and can make a decision on the context for why it's being done, has vastly more democratic legitimacy than state legislators rushing it through because they got bullied by POTUS.

Lot of people on the right crying about the Virginia redistricting vote. We told you this would happen while you were celebrating the illegal off-cycle seat grab in Texas. Stop playing stupid games if you don’t want to win stupid prizes.

AOC represents EVERY WOMAN in America right now who is sick and tired of misogyny & misinformation. She represents us and the rage we feel.

RFK Jr. just said that immigration is to blame for the outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in the U.S., not him.

Who am I talking to? A Handy Guide: If you are advocating for policies that protect the vulnerable & you get a person commenting that you are choosing to be a victim by addressing abuse - you are talking to an ABUSER.

“Look what you made me do” carries over to relationships, too, where women are the only ones expected to control their own anger and be responsible for managing men’s as well. Evil choices always have to be someone else’s fault.

every conservative political complaint comes back to "those people shouldn't count because they disagree with me"

So much false equivalence in media on gerrymandering in Texas vs California & Virginia. California and Virginia maps approved by the voters. That's a huge difference not enough people pointing out

Help? We’re applying for a geoscience outreach award. We need nomination letters. Are you someone working in geoscience education or outreach, think Mineral Cup is worthy, and are willing to write us kind words by May 22? Please drop a note to [email protected] for details. Thank you!

As we gear up for what may be an intense fire year, here's a thread of advice for PIOs and other crisis communicators out there, including ICs and agency administrators. Be true to yourself. The easiest way to lose credibility is to pretend to be someone else. People will know it immediately. 1/

“That’s why herd immunity is so important. If there hadn’t been an outbreak when Renae was a baby, I don’t think she would have contracted it. She was eligible for the vaccine just seven months later, and I gave it to her, but it was too late.”

“Parents must realize that refusing vaccinations doesn’t just put your own child at risk. It puts other children at risk. I don’t know where Renae picked up measles. It’s one of the most contagious viruses that exists, and it could have been from anywhere.”

“What I didn’t know was that measles can cause long-term complications. A child can seem fine while the virus slowly replicates in her brain… Because both Britain and the United States are confronting outbreaks, I am sharing my story. Parents should know just how dangerous this disease is.”

I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to speak my mind, to state what I believe even when it's directly at odds with billionaire power. I'm among the minority allowed to do it. But it's not a privilege. It's a right. And everyone should possess it.

On the other hand, no one ever lost money by telling billionaires what they want to hear. The airwaves are full of the oligarchs' minions, reciting their creeds as if these were some kind of arcane truth they've stumbled across. Almost every political conversation is dominated by these elite lies.

We claim to treasure free speech, above almost anything. But on the most critical issue, very few of us are free to speak. The majority are silenced by fear of censure or loss of employment. This conspiracy of silence looks more like what you'd expect in an authoritarian regime than in a democracy.

One problem is that many articulate, confident people are forbidden by the terms of their employment to speak out. To acquiesce in the power that threatens everything is acceptable and uncontroversial. To contest it brings your employer "into disrepute" and could have you sacked.

Almost everything we argue about is a substitute for the thing we should be arguing about: the immense wealth & power of an oligarchic class, which captures governments, ruins lives and wrecks the living planet. This class redirects our rage at scapegoats. To resist its lies is to resist its power.

A wild thread: 490 million years ago, the seafloor which would become the city of Baltimore was a serpentinite-hosted hydrothermal vent complex. Those vents laid the ultramafic structures that would, in 1812, be discovered as America's first chromite mine.

we owe our evolutionary success to our social behavior; interdependence is our species' primary survival strategy. it's isolation that will get you killed in an apocalyptic scenario, not the other way around.

NEW: After today's magnitude 7.7 quake off the Pacific coast of Japan, the country has issued a 'megaquake advisory', suggesting there's a 10x greater risk of a magnitude 8.0+ quake in the coming days. I break down what this means for @sciam.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/risk...

As a former StoryCorps facilitator, this is fucking disgusting. End the project already, Dave. You created a good model: you encouraged people to sit and do oral history for 20 yrs. Turning StoryCorps into a surveillance capitalism nightmare is not worth the money to keep the project going.

The motto is StoryCorps was "listening is an act of love." CONSCIOUS LISTENING, intimate listening! I feel sick thinking that this phrase is being used as cover to make people think that list listening all the time (Siri, Alexa, Prego, etc.) is also an act of love.

Coachella is trying to wipe all of the footage of The Strokes protest set so I’m gonna post it here. The last images on the screen made me cry.