Our new paper in Nature takes a critical look at what happens when you drill into a magma body. We find that by understanding that response properly, you can unwind the processes and get back to what the conditions of magma storage really were. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What an amazing antidote to doomscrolling. Never thought that complex logarithms could be this interesting

Excited to announce Groundsource - an open-source dataset of historic flood events! This has easily been one of the coolest projects I've worked on recently! Thread 🧵 for details and all relevant links. 1/n

Gorgeous thin section images of inversely graded grain flows in the Navajo Sandstone, by Jim Elder ⚒️🧪 smallpond.ca/jim/sand/sam...

"migration rates are a highly nonlinear function of channel curvature and they cannot be predicted" migration rates:

Did some vibracoring over the weekend on the barrier island between the Gulf of Mexico and East Matagorda Bay, to study how barrier islands are impacted by hurricanes

3D-printable time: An evolving meandering river as a 3D model where time is the 3rd (vertical) dimension 🧪⚒️

Here is a piece of the Yazoo River:

I know that there a ton of significant issues with AI and the companies that are behind the technology, but this is an excellent writeup of how thoughtful use of AI tools can speed up scientific work. I have been using Claude Code since January and it has been incredibly useful.

Good to see 'segmenteverygrain' being used as the starting point for a model that reconstructs 3D grain shapes from 2D data onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... ⚒️🧪

The trove of files released by the Department of Justice, illuminates Epstein’s deep interest and entrenchment in the scientific community. But the files also underscore how he used his power and money in ways that kept women out of places where they might succeed. https://bit.ly/4qWgPLz

TFW you have to read a paper about sequence stratigraphy

I’m so confused. I thought it was the illiberal left that demanded safe spaces and used cancel culture to silence anyone who threatened to disturb their snowflake ideological purity. Can someone help me out here? www.texastribune.org/2026/02/19/t...

Among the many good friends of Jeffrey Epstein the one who infuriates me the most is Steven Pinker. I read “How the mind works” soon after it came out and I was impressed. I hate to think about how many years it took me to realize who this guy really was.

So far in 2026, I have successfully stayed outside of the recommended weekly training effort ranges #running

If anyone’s opinion on AI can be trusted to have merit, it’s Terence Tao. 🧪⚛️🧮 This interview between two mathematicians is as awkward as you might expect it to be, but what they are discussing is a promising new direction.

I gave a talk last week at the University of New Mexico and one thing people seem to have remembered from it was this old animation that shows how migration rate depends on curvature in meandering rivers. It was created using Manim, a Python package written by @3blue1brown.com

This beautiful book by Stephen Welch explains really well some of the key concepts in ML/AI, often from a historical perspective. The YouTube videos are not bad either: youtube.com/@welchlabs?s...

Excited that this paper, led by former PhD student Natalia Varela (based on her dissertation), is now out! We use the occurrence & characteristics of thin, silty turbidites from the Ross Sea to interpret Antarctic Bottom Water outflow since ~3.3 Ma. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Hello Bjorn! #EpsteinFiles #BjornLomborg www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

My advice to undergraduates: Do *not* sign on to a PhD just because it's a 'next step' and you don't know what else to do. A master's program is a much better option in that scenario. You can find out if you genuinely enjoy the endeavor and, if not, it's only 2 years and you get a great degree! 1/2

“We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.” Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Just an incredible and unusual landslide at Niscemi, Sicily, Italy, as captured by @planet.com SuperDove satellites 🧪⚒️🛰️

Want to know how we used AI to classify and identify dinosaur footprints? Check out this breezy summary of our new study by coauthor Paige dePolo in @uk.theconversation.com Including a tutorial for our free DinoTracker app, which YOU can use to study tracks. theconversation.com/identifying-...

I added a page to my website that hints at the idea that I am interested in experimenting with artsy stuff when exploring landscapes with rocks and rivers zsylvester.github.io/art/

The US Winter Storm Seen from Space – January 25, 2026 Watch the 2026 U.S. Winter Storm unfold from space in this stunning satellite timelapse created with just a few clicks using the QGIS Timelapse Plugin.

"You look around and think, 'Yep, this is it. Paramilitary deportations, apocalyptic foreign policy, and private corporations looting the federal government. This has to be the Fourth Reich.' Not so fast. It’s only the Fourth Reich if it comes from the Reich region of Germany."

A man was murdered today for filming the American Gestapo. There's no other way to put that. I watched the footage, it is horrifying. The only reason ICE initiated violence was because he was standing in place filming their lawless actions.

Exploring Death Valley w/ @zzsylvester.bsky.social for fall field trip this week

Spending half an hour to figure out how to log in to a for-profit journal website to let them know that I don't have time to review a paper: not my favorite activity. You are making more than enough money to build (or pay for) a decent editorial management system. #elsevier

This PBS Terra / Weathered episode is not easy to watch but it gives a great overview of the science and the aftermath of the 2025 fires in LA, one year later youtu.be/tYNwfj74WsI?...

New #OA @geosociety.bsky.social Geosphere pub 'landslide influenced delta stratigraphy' w/ @zzsylvester.bsky.social, Dunlap & Covault: pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geospher.... Paper's Figure 11 compares deltas w/ landslides v 'typical' delta ('typical' see: zsylvester.github.io/papers/fuji_...).

I've been sitting on this for over a month...but given how cross I am with @royalsociety.org at their ongoing inaction over #Elon #Musk I thought I'd share this. They invited me to serve on their Public Engagement Committee; I could have been more eloquent, but I had to give a firm "no"...

One task for which I would highly recommend using AI is improving poorly designed websites. I just asked Gemini to tweak the design of a conference page that makes me want to stay away from the conference, and the result is an order of magnitude better than the input

Here's a summary of all the data that supports adding more red meat to your diet

Fuck this man's grotesque narcissism.

Just like climate change , there are two sides to this but one side is lying and we can just report the truth.

How is salt tectonics affected by salt rheology, rift tectonics, and sedimentation rates? ⚒️🧂 In this article of Zhichen Wang, we use cross-scale geodynamic models of lithosphere deformation, evaporite flow and surface processes: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Came across this old video of a sphere rolling down a 3D-printed meandering submarine channel. Even if you start out with a channel that has a constant slope, the meandering process results in a variable along-channel slope which is reflected in how the sphere speeds up and slows down ⚒️🧪

One of the best things that happened to me in 2025 was that we got a permit to visit The Wave in Arizona. Here are some photos from last Friday; needless to say, photos do not do justice to this place

Back to my year in review... In June it was back to #Iceland, first to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula with a dear friend. Light and wave conditions were dull, so photography wasn't great, but at the end I drove up to the Highlands & finally visited Hveravellir. Got some nice drone shots there.

TFW you have been trying to get a permit for The Wave for years, without success, and then you get not one but two permits for the same day

Will be giving one of the last talks today at #AGU25, focusing on how well simple curvature-based models work on meandering rivers with a range of sediment loads. It turns out these models are not so robust if the sediment load is high and the river is migrating with crazy-high rates

Photos from the Patapsco River in Maryland yesterday. Lucky to have the snow stick to the trees despite the high winds! #riversfromabove

Downstream fining on a point bar, Trinity River, Texas. Scale bar units: centimeters in first photo, millimeters in the rest 🧪⚒️

A couple of days ago we went to check out one of the most beautiful bends of the Trinity River in east Texas, a bend that is likely to be cut off in the near future 🧪⚒️

Possible desiccation cracks (mudcracks) in rock found by the Mars Curiosity Rover this week. flic.kr/p/2rLi9Lh flic.kr/p/2rLoXm3 flic.kr/p/2rL7ntV

While cleaning up I came across a large set of TIFF files. Zooming turned out to be worthwhile. Had to look up where it is. Here we go: a small part of the amazing Haast River, West Coast Region, New Zealand.

Didn’t know about this event but was wandering in the NOMA today to clear my mind and there it was: so for AGUans… Wednesday evening at New Orleans Museum of Art! Which is close to my house 😀

Fluorescent barite from the “Skunk Pocket” at Linwood Mine, Iowa. Not much seems to be known about this find except that it was a small one from around 2019. Shown under longwave UV (365nm). Visible light comparison in comments. Person collection, photo my own. #geology #uvphotography #barite