*soils/clays since most MREEs and HREEs come from ion adsorption deposits

I want you to also notice the American source, Mountain Pass California, mostly has three things Lanthanum (La), Cerium (Ce), and Neodymium (Nd). We *do not have* a source domestically for significant amounts of other rare earths elements. We *are unlikely to* find a similar source domestically.

The helium here was formed by radioactive decay of underlying Precambrian granitic rocks and apparently trapped by an overlying gabbro intrusion. The folks who discovered this occurrence (disclosure, I know some of them) were drilling for Cu-Ni in that intrusion, named the Bald Eagle Intrusion.

Maoist Extractivism: we're going to will that lithium and bauxite and missing rare earth elements into existance in *American* rocks.

I understand supply chain concern but for contractors to provide DOD with full mapping, receipts and all, tracing every step of every component + software back to "raw material" origin sounds... hard? not the sort of paperwork agile El Segundo bros enjoy. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Nice isoclinal folds in marbles from the Island of Gorgona, Italy. This place is a prison where you need a permit to go and another special permit to shot photos, so please enjoy something that's really hard to photograph 😘 ⚒️ #geology

I used to describe by PhD research as "firing frikin' lasers into discarded Nazi incendiary gas"

In a typical pattern, to the dismay of many scientists the National Academy of Sciences leadership had been going out of its way to try to placate the Trump Administration to avoid being targeted. Worked as well as usual.

Thesis: Geoscientists must try very hard to not make their work sound like some ley-line kook *or* what a four-year-old does in a sand box. Geophysicist of any flavor? Ley-line kook. Sedimentologist or petrologist? Four-year-old in a sand box. Structural geologist? Both.

A really interesting piece on reducing AI cheating in the classroom from a Professor of English and former Dean of Humanities at University of Utah. The solutions? Smaller classes, lower teaching loads for faculty, and in-person classes.

Wouldn't want too much time to go by without reminding the public at large that my book Contesting Earth's History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935 would probably look very nice in your local library, so you could ask them to buy it and test this hypothesis.

The entire point of a liberal arts education (the A part in a BA) is that learning (and learning how to keep learning) is intrinsically valuable. College is different from a trade school. Both have value, but not the same value.

Hey Siri, show me a system that looks to filter out the scientific discoveries of women with seniority. The paper confirms the hostility many of us feel is baked into the editorial & peer review community (sitting behind a veil of anonymity) that prefer to see papers led by women thrown out.

NEW ANALYSIS: One of the most consequential discoveries of the 20th century is marked by a small blue plaque near my office. The lithium-ion cathode, Oxford, 1980. Grid batteries have since gone from one 5 MW project to 267 GW worldwide. New Bright Spots 👇 open.substack.com/pub/janrosen...

I know y'all *just* finished writing you public comments on the fascist NIH takeover plan but the fascist NSF takeover plan public comment period is now open (until August 24) www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Begging people to realize that abundance in the crust means jackshit when it comes to how much is available to mine “Sodium is an almost inexhaustible resource,” says Zhang Yizhi, a spokesperson for CATL. It is more than 1,000 times as abundant as lithium in Earth’s crust…”

Congrats we just made it impossible to come here for a PhD www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/16/m...

I know a lot of US universities have AI initiatives. I don’t know of any (probably some do) that have climate initiatives. It helps to show how ideological and irrational curricular initiatives are. Young people are going to have to develop climate skills as much or more than AI.

Meanwhile Congress is about to confirm a ~completely unqualified~ far right dude to be the FEMA administrator.

Hell is 250 academics making decisions on resolutions using Roberts rules

Geologist Reunited With Beloved Rock He Studied 20 Years Ago https://theonion.com/geologist-reunited-with-beloved-rock-he-studied-20-years-ago/

Great start to @goldschmidt-confer.bsky.social with back-and-forth about mantle source heterogeneity of ocean island, rift, and intraplate 🌋. My favorite so far was the talk given by Emily Cunningham on her Bayesian inverse models of mantle modal mineralogy. I have much to read!

Omw to @goldschmidt-confer.bsky.social in Montreal. Can't wait to see some awesome geochem research! Check out my talk on Ijen volcano first thing Tuesday (conf.goldschmidt.info/goldschmidt/...) and a poster on REEs in Kalimantan granites (conf.goldschmidt.info/goldschmidt/...) Tuesday evening 😁

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a proposed rule that threatens to reshape how scientific research is funded and conducted in the U.S. We encourage our community to speak up and add a comment by 13 July. The deadline is almost here: spklr.io/63326EP34r

⚒️ Ok ig-pet and metamorphic folks. I need your help. WTF is going on with this amazing glacial erratic. It’s meta ash-flow tuff of Greentstone Lake known for feldspar phenocrysts that has been intruded by the Cathedral Peak Granodiorite. But WTF is up with the dendritic feldspar? I’ve never seen it.

And 3) the AAUP says that "the administration’s team rejected our proposal to allow faculty to choose whether or not to use AI in their teaching, service, or research." Folks. I don't even know where to begin with this. I have entire assignments created to prohibit reliance on AI (you know, so...

Hi! I'm Danna. I love my job, my university, & my students. For 20 years, I've been teaching young leaders in politics & communication at UD. Our university has a celebrated *leadership* program, entire units dedicated to civic engagement, & freedom of expression. Which is why this is so upsetting:

Volcanologists — does the explosive diarrhoea have a VE Index and is it measured in units of ‘Mount St. Helen’s’? If not, what are you doing? Make it happen!

Labs and field stuff puts hard limits on the student to instructor ratio for geo (and chem and phys) and makes online ed hard/impossible. Uni administrators vastly prefer classes that can be (at least on paper) indefinitely scaled.

“…hired Noem to support the company’s efforts to acquire and advance critical metal exploration opportunities.” I’m wondering about her job description because Kristi Noem’s experience with mining of any kind seems limited to shooting her 14-month old dog in a gravel pit.

For those outside academia who are curious: as someone who has taught for ~25 years, many of us now face an existential crisis in assessing student work. Anything you haven't viewed a student actually writing down with their own hand is basically suspect; it's a shitty feeling, to put it bluntly

Really grateful I’m going to an international conference where the specter of immigration action against attendees isn’t prominent in my mind. Sad for all the US based international scholars who can’t join

Of course Wielicki would eventually show up....

It’s very on brand for Trump to appoint someone who is deeply unqualified for this position.

Well I came in all hot to trot to dunk on another AI flood model, but this paper is actually a great example of both the promise and the peril of AI flood mapping www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

Happy Asteroid Day, to those who celebrate! Want to know how NASA, @esa.int and a global team of scientists and engineers are racing to save the world from killer asteroids? Then buy my book, HOW TO KILL AN ASTEROID—now available in paperback! ☄️ 💥 ☠️ wwnorton.com/books/how-to...

Thin Section Thursday! Image & caption: Nicole Mueller, UG student at James Madison University. Dhofar 287 is a lunar mare basalt meteorite. Note orthopyroxene (white crystals) and plagioclase (dark crystals) and clinopyroxene (the bright crystals). #thinsectionthursday #lunarmeteorite

@weareagc.bsky.social's Volume 2 issue 1 is complete! Read all 10 articles for free here: journals.uu.se/AGC/issue/vi... Thanks Jeanne Caumartin, Karim Benzerara and Christophe Tomazo for providing the cover photo!

A devastating loss to so many geoscience educators

Google Earth Pro will be no longer avaliable for download from June 2027 onwards. It's one of the tools that made my early work possible, so it's really sad to see it go. support.google.com/earth/thread...

This story's getting a lot of attention but I don't think it's very useful in pointing toward possible answers in terms of pedagogy. Just go back to traditional two-three in-class exams and give up what you get from other kinds of work?

transit fact: the subway emergency brake is only appropriate in a VOLCANO (1997)-type situation where the train will otherwise drive into molten lava

Shiveluch, Kamchatka, eruptive ash plume in a Sentinel 2A satellite image from this morning (7 July 2026) 4:19 UTC. It was not yet visible in a Sentinel 2B image from 02:15 UTC.

I’m not saying these things because I think The Situation is hopeless. I’m saying them because we need to strategize according to these possibilities and likely realities. So far institutional science has largely chosen accommodation instead of resistance. It’s a slippery slope.

A summers worth of sample prep begins now! Samples from volcanoes, or deposits, and mountain belts from across the globe 🇮🇩🇮🇹🇺🇸. Rock saw and crushing behind this week - hopefully petrography and Raman analysis not far behind!

Typhoon #Bavi starting to look, unfortunately, stunning again. Passage through the #Marianas archipelago is expected within 24 hours, with the center traversing nearest to #Rota. #Guam #Tinian #Saipan

A nice gneiss! Bergen Natural History Museum.

The sights from the eastern sierras are just out of this world… Devil’s Postpile National Monument

Clip show on viral nature videos is playing on the weather channel right now (my grandma lives for the weather channel). No offense to these meteorologists, but please stay in your lane. Trying to hear them explain why Vinicunca looks like a rainbow was painful…interview a geologist!