At lab group today we took the lab sled out for a spin. We pioneered a new never-before-attempted sled run beyond the air handlers …

Um, there was some really big hail during this most recent blizzard… This one hatched

Columnar basalts deserve their own footnote in art history… they crop out often (or maybe I am just attuned to them). Eg 1) Isamu Noguchi’s Unidentified Object @metmuseum.org 2) part of Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks on 22nd street, with some recent snow

@agu.org has a tool to help you submit a comment to NSF on the importance of NCAR: agu.quorum.us/campaign/154... #SaveNCAR

NCAR is an amazing place that demonstrates what can be accomplished—from the climate of the past to forecasting—with depth of expertise and long term, coordinated effort. I called my representatives. You should too—AGU makes it easy! agu.quorum.us/campaign/151...

Cowboy and sidekick herding cattle off the road and into the frenchglen corral. Mooo

Pre-Steens rhyolites with the Alvord Desert in the background Just for your eyes to feel better

What is better than pet photos? You know the answer is a praying mantis on a rock hammer Columbia River Basalts in the background

Highly recommend this essay, which underscores the risks posed by under-the-radar volcanoes

The world has so much to learn from Norwegians about the critical importance of saunas. (did you guess that I would end the sentence with that word?) Here is a nice sauna overlooking the harbor in Storekorsnes. Spotted while waiting for a ferry transfer back to Alta.

These are cloudberries (with a gabbro intrusion cutting metasedimentary rocks in the background). Cloudberries have a short Arctic growing season and have twice as much vitamin C as an orange by weight.

I will just put these photos here without much comment beyond wow this is a nice place

One way to judge how fresh a rock is: the sound it makes when the 4.5 kilo sledge lands on it (Wielding the hammer: Ben Klein)

There were a lot of mosquitoes and biting flies in Siberia. But Norway may have Siberia beat for the sheer diversity of biters… a very heterogeneous mix of small biting flies, giant biting flies, and mosquitoes. All living their best lives

We climbed through a remote Norwegian valley on a reindeer path, and you’ll never guess what we saw next… It was a cliff of hornblendite and carbonatite!

Yesterday we were working near a mine. We thought maybe mining the carbonatites because they are one of the major sources of rare earth elements. But actually they were mining the nephrite syenite to make porcelain! Just a reminder that we use rocks for all kinds of things. Rocks->teacups

Tomorrow we will try a new way to reach the interior of the island and then meet the boat on the other side. There are some bugs… but the geology is very exciting!

First cell reception after two great field days! We are looking at an enormous magmatic system at 5-10 kbar pressure (mid to lower crust). Very volatile rich, including carbonatites (inaccesible today due to snow). Big thank you to @fredrhog.bsky.social for sharing some nice NGU maps of the area.

Quick run around Alta in the morning. Tons of wildflowers on the streets. Some old classic wooden houses…. Plus lots of buildings that feel like bunkers against the winter months

Made it to Alta! Some photos from the flight in. It is 11 PM and the sunlight is golden. Tomorrow we meet up with colleagues from Uni of Lausanne to take a boat out to the rocks

The compare/contrast between Denmark and Norway—photos taken just a few minutes apart across the Skagerrak strait—is stark. Sand vs rock. Next: the journey 1500 km north, to the Arctic

How do others feel about packing for field work? I don’t especially enjoy normal packing, but there is a pleasure in trying to imagine a future moment on an unknown mountain, and what you might wish for in that moment—and then later, with luck, being on the mountain and having just what you need

Leaving for field work tomorrow with a team heading to northern Norway to explore the exhumed remnants of a very large mafic magmatic system—possibly the lower crustal roots of an Ediacaran large igneous province! I don’t know if I will have any internet, but if so I will try to tweet along the way…

I see we are talking about ROSES-2025 and Mike Wong’s analysis (which implies a dismal 5% funding rate for solar system science). I will say, as depressing as the NASA funding outlook is, I appreciate these nice visualizations of that depressing funding. research.ssl.berkeley.edu/~mikewong/bl...

Hi Goldschmidt! Catch my Berner Lecture at 2.30 today!

Some nice fresh looking tephra from Laki. Imagine these fragments quenching in fire fountains a kilometer high

Great to see this finally out today! We show that the collapse of tropical vegetation during the Permo-Triassic extinction is a key driver of the long-term super-greenhouse climate that followed it. Read more at www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you are in Eastern Oregon today, stop by the C2C project’s booth at the Watershed Festival, where we explore how ancient volcanic eruptions have shaped climate and life. Volcanoes, Lava, and Life—words to live by! Featuring Leif Karlstrom, Lauren Adamo, & @pedromonarrez.bsky.social

Shocked to learn this incredibly tragic news - we have lost one of the most influential volcano scientists of our times.

Super valuable live posting of today’s NSF Earth Sciences informational session… (Thanks for this @brandontbishop.bsky.social)

This poses a particular challenge for Neoproterozoic glaciations… if LIP weathering is not the primary driver of cooling, what might be?

The Early Career Workshop for Geoscience faculty needs our help! It helped me (& many others) learn to balance teaching, research, & planning for the future when I was just starting out. Now the NSF grant funding the workshop has been terminated. Donate here! nagt.org/nagt/get_inv...

Here are the NSF funding data by state. Click on your state, peruse data, and then click on the Fact Sheet at the top to see annual spending. Then, please call your congressional reps. NSF money creates stable jobs for people at all career stages. tableau.external.nsf.gov/views/NSFbyN...

For those looking for a meaningful way to push back against the devastation at NSF, here is one way…

Niche joke. And also—it’s not easy to shift tephra production domestically—need to understand the magma supply chain

A crazy thing about middle age, I am learning, is that sometimes you feel the old human inside you clamoring to emerge from its chrysalis

To better understand mantle magma supplies deep beneath volcanoes, scientists must catalyze research progress to address grand challenges, write @magmatist.bsky.social, @compucian.bsky.social, + colleagues from @whoi.edu and @carnegiescience.bsky.social. cc @sz4d.bsky.social eos.org/science-upda...

How are folks at USGS being affected by [gestures] all this?

And how about this granitoid engraved by Ken Hiratsuka at the corner of Prince and Broadway … here is some interesting backstory sohobroadway.org/a-look-back-...

Who’s in the mood for some NYC sidewalk geology? Beautiful snowmelt-speckled migmatitic gneiss sidewalk pavers near the Soho REI… used chewing gum for scale

Really neat study! I remember having conversations 10 years ago imagining a future where we could leverage high temporal resolution geochemical data to understand rapid changes in magmatic systems… as this and other recent studies show, the future is here!

My kids and I have an ice factory going on our fire escape. There are bubbles trapped in the ice. An echo of one of the ways we reconstruct Earth’s atmospheric composition hundreds of thousands of years into the past!

So how small are the zircons that we date in the lab? Here's a Fish Canyon Tuff zircon on a $5 bill for comparison!

Some #AGU24 highlights: -running along the mall in the rain with a friend while discussing curvature & paleo landscapes -so many friends! -attempting to crash a CDR party to which we were not invited (we did not find it) -grad school research group reunion -a sense of the passage of time, and change

What drives protracted warming after some LIPs? Our hypothesis: a long slow leak of CO2 from the deep reaches of LIP plumbing systems Open access paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I tried my hand at making a volcano scientist starter pack… but the number of people on bluesky has been changing almost too fast to keep up with! go.bsky.app/3WDgNKf

Geology Bites is great! It’s like a colloquium in podcast form. I regularly assign an episode to students as a different way of learning about a new subject

In a similar vein, here is a paper that came out this year from Kemeny et al exploring alternatives to our current model for doing science: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

I still think Lindy’s essay on the history and flaws of the hero model of science is one of the most thought provoking things I have read on why we do science the way we do— issues.org/say-goodbye-...