check it out . . . NOT mima mounds

Earthquake is our uncle

it me and my book paragraph 1

A local thumper woke me just before 3 with a bang and a long lurch. The bang tells me it was close enough for the shock to rise from below, not the side. None of the pictures on the wall were disturbed, either.

Coming up tonight at 19:19 BST/20:19 CEST: the September #Equinox! This image from Meteosat-12, taken this morning, shows Earth near the equinox - when the terminator appears as a straight line dividing the planet into equal halves of light and dark. @wmo-global.bsky.social @eumetsat.int

Colorful day in Oakland's bonsai garden

Wang, H., Li, C., Peng, Y. et al. Two-billion-year transitional oxygenation of the Earth’s surface. #stableisotopes Nature 645, 665–671 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Verbatim: "White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson described Mr Swain as a "longtime Democrat donor who has spent hundreds of dollars supporting liberal politicians, including loser Kamala Harris, with radical climate policies that the American people have repeatedly rejected."

New fact sheet for this important region

James Hutton's unpublished "Elements of Agriculture" manuscript

Enigmatic rocks in Joaquin Miller Park

🧪⚒️ Today's Kamchatka M7.8 ticks all the boxes for being an aftershock of July's M8.8: 1. In the same area. 2. Smaller. 3. Activity in that area hadn't returned to pre-M8.8 levels. Aftershocks a magnitude unit below the mainshock are normal. For a huge mainshock, aftershocks can also be really big!

PNAS has yet another Younger Dryas impact paper.

getting ready to start

I'm RTing this without reading it, because Facebook

Traffic calming measures CALM TRAFFIC. During an evacuation, ORDERLY traffic is the most efficient, least panic-inducing driving environment.

I want to return to that part of Alaska too. Image taken late summer 1979.

I'm going to be lecturing the Geology/Climate/Soil section of this course, which starts 2 weeks from Saturday. Oakland area folks please RT

While scootching around the Interwebs this morning looking for fresh geopetal imagery, I learned of the company "Geopetal Fabric," which makes astoundingly cool geonerd apparel. I just bought this one: ⚒️ geopetalfabric.com/products/geo...

New blog post on the geology to be seen and visited on out newest bus line, the 31. oaklandgeology.com/2025/09/15/g...

When #Ikaite ran in #MinCup22, we learned that in Greenlandic folklore the columns are the souls of drowned invaders. Source: ‘Eskimoiske eventyr og sagn', H.J. Rink (1866) via @eemuranta.bsky.social

This one roused me to actually vote -- for the uncollectable, highly significant secret mineral ikaite.

had no idea the Lake District was this cool; now I want to go there

The revised @geosociety.bsky.social Statement on licensing professional geologists notes that state licensure laws are threatened, and e.g. "the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published a rule that excludes professional geologists from any compliance oversight with coal ash waste management."

[sigh] For those thinking of breaking that glass in case of emergency

This is a deep joke. They're based on equivocal evidence and have little rigorous definition, making them easy to invoke and easy to elaborate whenever needed. mantleplumes.org has argued against them for decades to little effect.

New blog post drops on Monday morning

We call it crust, but above a certain thickness it gets warm and gooey

"Putting solar arrays above water can help keep panels cool, in turn improving their efficiency and electricity output. Shade from the panels can also prevent water loss through evaporation in drought-prone regions and can limit algae growth in waterways." Looks good too!

Saturday's geology walk in downtown Oakland has tickets available! The sales cutoff was an operator error. Get tickets now til then!

RT with the rocks you use for your desktop screen (with alt tag).

I think I'll add "I hope this message finds you well" to my email spam filter.

"We only pulled the plug for a few days and it's back now, no harm done OK?"

"we have noticed a number of . . . videos that raise questions like: ‘Is this a SUPERVOLCANO WAKING from its SLUMBER?’; or ‘Will this SWARM cause the San Andreas Fault to BREAK?’" Remember Betteridge's Law of Headlines: if they end with a question mark, the answer is almost always NO.

Always a good day for this classic Nature paper: Peer review and suggested rewrite of Shelley's "Ozymandias." "Twin limb-like basalt columns ('trunkless legs') near Wadi Al-Fazar, and their relationship to plate tectonics" "lbn Batuta1 and P. B . Shelley2"

Pioneering engineering geologist J. David Rogers has died. When he lived in the Bay area he contributed to NCGS events.

More proof I retired from the scientific copyediting business just in time.

What a view captured yesterday by Curiosity #Mars Sep. 1, 2025 - Sol 4647 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech 🧪🔭

Cool time lapse animations on the NASA Earth Observatory site of the rapidly (crazy rapidly!) shifting channels of the Yarlung Zangbo River

I think this beauty should be the official #bluesky mineral.

The annual #mineralcup contest is underway here on Bluesky. I don't think this mineral is part of it this time, but admire it anyway.

Join me on Sept. 14 at 3:00 EST for this SSP Curiosity lab talk “Living with Earthquakes: how can science help keep us safe when the Earth shakes?” Register: ssp.org/events/curio...

As a geologist concerned about earthquakes, I follow Dr. Montano closely. This is a clarion call to everyone who thinks about dealing with disasters.

And the "curly quotes" on Bluesky (at least on my screen) are single and double prime symbols, also correctly used for minutes and seconds or arc.

And here it is

New blog post tomorrow

New Substack going out tomorrow