“the last domestic tsunami came from Alaska, and the next one likely will” Just $300k/year to support these stations, for the benefit of so many future lives.

🧪 For hundreds of thousand of years over the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary, through climate change and hominid evolution itself, a technology/method for making stone tools remained the same. A level of technological stability almost too alien for us to understand. arstechnica.com/science/2025/1…

Today feels like a good day to remind everyone that there is literally no empirical evidence that economic growth will just continue if the world heats up to, say, 3°C by 2100. Continued growth is just *assumed* in every economic model of the relationship between temperatures and growth. 🧵

Grateful to spend two days on the Klamath watching chinook, liberated by dam removal, return to streams from which they’d been precluded since the Titanic sank. Fish are everywhere, in numbers that stagger the mind & locations that biologists figured would take years to repopulate. Too beautiful.

⚒️ Seems a good excuse to note that this whole part of the world seems to have been a mega-landslide (and probably relatedly, large explosive volcano) wonderland in the Cenozoic. In addition to Heart Mountain, Markagunt in Utah and now this one near Salt Lake City have been identified.

what a GREAT thread. Add your entries to the end please!

Imaginative ways to say "I doubt that very much" #37. PJ Wyllie, 1984. 🧪⚒️🌋 #ScienceWriting #scicomm

- As discussed in the article, weather forecasting is a place where machine learning (“AI”) appears to have real promise. - ML-augmented weather models are not LLMs - whoever wrote batshit OMB justification about putting “climate change hysteria in AI models” clearly doesn’t realise this.

Fortunate that @climatecentral.org is keeping the billion-dollar climate-related disaster list going, as the first half of 2025 was a doozy. You can read more here: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Etendeka alkaline dolerite for #ThinSectionThursday. XPL view showing vibrant, equant olivine crystals (mid-right), and classic ophitic texture of plagioclase laths (black and white) surrounded by very large clinopyroxenes. 🧪⚒️

⚒️ So, interesting bit first: modelling to fit observed seismic anisotropic suggests LLSVPs are 100x as viscous and 2% denser than surrounding lower mantle. But then, where is this BLOBs acronym coming from? It apparently stands for ‘big lower-mantle basal structures’ - and how forced is *that*…

The understandable surge of citing Mitchell and Webb’s ‘are we the baddies? sketch is especially funny when you remember how it ends: a moment of self-realisation followed by running for the f***ing hills. Compare and contrast!

I feel that I might have to pass on this exciting opportunity, given that (i) I am not the Chris Rowan who authored this paper, and (ii) even so, I know enough to know that the 'Indian hedgehog' it refers to is a gene and not a nocturnal animal.

I’d guess that “paying more often to rebuild the same thing over and over again” is probably not what most people would think of as “growth”. Especially if they live in the thing.

Quite telling that when specifically asked to focus on a particular source, it does not give you information from that source; it just falsely attributes whatever it was going to say anyway. Also, Gemini being considerably worse than the (already bad) others? Ouch, Google.

A long but interesting thread with great info on the actual state of play in, and challenges for, the energy transition.

Lego MRI scanner set (donated to hospitals) a big help for kids who need scans: "more than 1 million children globally have used the sets to help them prepare...96% of healthcare professionals said the model helps to reduce children's anxiety, and 46% reported a lesser need to use sedation"

Even without considering the particulars, “opposition party is running against a President who belongs to the other party” is a “water is wet”-level statement, and implying otherwise is deeply weird.

This is so cool. We spent spring break in Klamath Falls a few years back and explored all of these areas the Salmon are now returning to. I can’t imagine how happy the tribes must be.

4,300 cubic kilometres! The scale of this ancient submarine landslide is hard to comprehend. Imagine a pile of rock 1 km wide and 1 km tall, extending from New York to Los Angeles. That would be a little smaller than this landslide.

When I did this on my field trips, my students loved them as a tool for seeing the regional context of our stops. They also refused to return them at the end of the trip…

It’s going to be confidently bullshitting turtles all the way down.

⚒️ The Proterozoic Earth had radically different ocean and atmospheric chemistry, was ruled by bacterial mats, and was possibly being shaped by not-plate-tectonics, or at least different-plate-tectonics. Calling it boring is such a depressing failure of the imagination.

Reading William Whewell's 1832 review of Lyell's Principles of Geology, Vol 2, in which he coined "uniformitarianism", and I just love this passage summarizing what in many modern geological textbooks would describe as the principle of uniformitarianism. babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hv...

I was thrilled to help to excavate more of this huge Oxfordshire dinosaur track site earlier this year. The BBC's new article has a ton of fantastic images and graphics that bring the tracks to life, including a moment where a sauropod paused to... do something?

Sheesh - a tsunami big enough to push coral boulders 100s of m inland in the British Virgin Islands around the year 1400, likely sourced from an earthquake on the Puerto Rico Trench.

⚒️ #FridayFault

🧪⚒️ “the complex organic molecules Cassini detected…are not just a product of long exposure to space, but are readily available in Enceladus’s ocean.” As ever - these observations show some intriguing chemistry is going on, but that isn’t necessarily life.

On the other hand, LLMs do provide a good in-Universe explanation for technobabble.

Not sea glass but fragments of plastic car tail lights, indicators and brake lights, probably washed into storm drains after heavy rain, eventually making their way to the sea. #oceanplastic

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

I've been asked a few times over the last few days what I think the chances are that the "leopard spots and poppy seeds" on Mars will turn out to be actual evidence of life. People are naturally skeptical given the history of possible signs of life on other planets. Strap in: long thread ahead...

I also strongly feel the urge to say ‘taenite’ in a Scottish accent. #MinCup25

Taenite is the material of protoplanetary cores - from bodies in the early days of the solar system that got big enough to differentiate, then blown apart by impacts. It’s a window into the inaccessible core of our own planet. Sorry clays, but taenite has my vote. #MinCup25

Cuprosklodowskite looks like the anthropomorphic manifestation of a deadly substance, is appropriately radioactive and (also appropriately, if rather morbidly) named after Marie Curie, and is a dead ringer for kryptonite? No, thank you! #MinCup25

So #TIL that at least some topaz forms by vapour deposition in the gas bubbles/cavities of cooling rhyolite lava flows. 😮 Others form in pegmatites, for which my appreciation is already on record 🤩 Two ultra-cool formation mechanisms means #Topaz gets my vote. #MinCup25

🧪 Cool subtext to this cool story on the “little red dots’ - possibly primordial black holes! - dotting the early Universe is that the hopes for the James Webb telescope have been realised. It is pulling back the curtain on puzzling and unexpected things that will help us understand how we got here.

Today in “the myriad ways your children make you feel old”: when I was the age my youngest is now, the year 1999 seemed impossibly far into the future. Now, when they tell me stories, ‘in 1999’ is a shorthand for ‘a long time ago’.

👀 pushing people to rate answers on subjects they have limited knowledge of seems almost designed to push the models towards truthiness. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/11/google-gemini-ai-training-humans

Nothing but word salad from the current NASA administrator, but there are clearly no firm plans (or money) for retrieving those samples. In fairness, it’s been clear for several years that MSR was beyond NASA’s current capacity. I wonder what the likely lifetime of the sealed sample tubes is…

So much to cringe at in this interview: "fusion on the grid in 5 years because AI"; "don't believe your geological survey about fracking, believe me"; but “renewables have had enough subsidies” is top-level chutzpah from a former fossil fuel exec. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqlz5p314z0o

Happy #FossilFriday from the Ediacaran of Newfoundland. For your enjoyment here is a specimen of the most common form of (as yet undescribed) #Charnia from our Inner Meadow site of #Ediacaran age in Newfoundland. It has J shaped branches and i particularly love the arcs the secondaries describe.

Arthur Holmes was, without doubt, one of the greatest geoscientists of the 20th century. His legacies include radiometric-dating of rocks, a mechanism for lateral movement of continents and continental drift, and his inspirational big fat book -'Principles of Physical Geology' (2nd edition).

Fantastic thread on the recent article about the search for an atmosphere around the roughly Earth-sized, habitable zone (of a very small star) planet Trappist-1 e, based on JWST observations. Really not much more than a hint of an atmosphere for now, but stay tuned (& follow @distantworlds.space)!

⚒️🧪 New modelling suggests there might be a "mantle sandwich" beneath the Himalayas, with the underlying slice of Indian crust not underthrust as a rigid block, but flowing as a partially melt beneath the Asian plate, and underplating it. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

For the 40th(!) installment of my "Problematica" series, I'm celebrating one of my favorite writers, Richard Fortey, who died this past May. Fortey wrote these beautiful bouncy sentences that REFUSE to leave your head. Here I've assembled a few of my favorites www.extinctblog.org/extinct/2025...

⚒️ “organic-carbon-bearing mudstones in the Bright Angel formation contain submillimetre-scale nodules and millimetre-scale reaction fronts enriched in ferrous iron phosphate and sulfide minerals, likely vivianite and greigite...” They’ve possibly found my paleomagnetic mineral nemesis on Mars?!!

Wavellite is *still* watching you: minerals never sleep! Its first round opponent this year, dioptase, is also interesting, though… #MinCup25 www.mineralcup.org/2025/vote/r1...

The bogus justification for this (‘course content did not match catalog description’) is like getting upset that the blurb on the back of a novel doesn’t tell you the entire plot. By design, catalog descriptions are short and generic.