I’m always interested in how we view rock from different perspectives. Geologists have a tendency to think they own the language that describes rocks. We don’t. This is a nice article by climber Steve McClure in the BMC’s Summit magazine btpubs.co.uk/article/Love... #rocks #climbing #bmc

“dismantled just as an intense El Niño event—and associated marine heat wave—is expected this summer.” “If we stopped testing [for COVID], we’d have very few cases” turns out to be a very revealing statement, doesn’t it?

⚒️ James Hutton was born 300 years ago today. Celebrated today as one of the parents of uniformitarianism, often articulated as "the present is the key to the past". Which is interesting, given that neither "uniformitarianism" or "the present is the key to the past" is found in Hutton's writing.

One assumes, given the British origin, that unconformi-cake must be accompanied by unconformi-tea.

⚒️ Have to confess that this unconformi-cake looks a lot tastier than my effort of 15 years ago (which did, however, inspire a COVID lockdown structural geology activity)... all-geo.org/highlyalloch...

happy gay sediments month to all who celebrate

Marcia McNutt once again fails to meet the moment by giving a speech which vaguely gestures at “turmoil” and then proceeds to pretend that it’s actually 2023.

ICYMI For the first time, astronomers have found convincing proof that exoplanets could have magnetic fields 🧭 This was achieved by measuring winds on seven very hot, Jupiter-like exoplanets with our VLT & Gemini North. Video summary 🎥 👇 Full story: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2606/ 🔭 🧪 ☄️

I personally believe the main reason that we haven't had a modern dinosaur film that's better than Jurassic Park is because JP is all about how we see dinosaurs. I can think of few blockbusters that are as focused on reinventing how the audience perceives a subject.

How about we gut punch Earth scientists contemplating the vandalisation of the US research apparatus with an excessively on the nose metaphor?

⚒️ A revisit is on the bucket list for my next UK visit (not this year, sadly).

“What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management. It is a complete political control apparatus layered over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle” Non-public competitions & limits on publication costs, conferences, etc all point to “we want to funnel money to corporations”

🧪 File under “weird but potentially true”: the key organ for detecting - and navigating with - the Earth’s magnetic field in birds (and other animals) may be…the liver!

This is unbelievable. The AI boom is now piggybacking on green colonialism, eating up any contribution to emissions reduction while causing harm to Indigenous communities. The Yakama Tribe has been fighting this pumped storage project for years, only to learn it would primarily power…a data center.

This is really good, and “one must regrettably log into LinkedIn” made me genuinely LOL.

“Out of 202 movie geologists found in 141 movies released between 1919 and 2023, 69 die on screen or are found dead—a mortality rate of about one third.” Fortunately for professional pride, mostly not killed by geological hazards…

Putting solar panels in orbit, or even just talking about it, is a way to distract from putting solar panels over parking lots, over canals, on roof tops. It's doing some kind of political work, and that work is at least adjacent to fossil fuel interests.

I refused to take a “confidential” survey in my old department when one of the first questions was whether I was TT or NTT (I was the only NTT professor).

Reading this press release you would think the northern Appalachians are chock full of Li bearing pegmatites, but that isn’t really what the USGS is saying. It’s more like, these areas have a higher probability of having pegmatites and those pegmatites have a higher probability of having Li

The USGS has released a report on lithium for the northern Appalachians. You can find the press release here: www.usgs.gov/news/nationa...

⚒️ Empowering words are cheap - and AGU has had plenty of those over the years - but an organisation shows what it values through what it spends money on; and what it chooses to cut the moment it finds an excuse to.

Increasingly clear that someone working on the energy transition just couldn’t resist the monkey paw.

From today's paper

🌊 Dredging, dams, and coastal development are rewiring estuary tidal systems, amplifying or damping tides and reshaping flood risk in the process. Tides are no longer purely natural; they’re partly engineered. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If it’s not grown, it’s mined. If it’s grown, it requires things that were mined to grow & harvest it.

⚒️🧪 Just for a single 🌋, but interesting: a horizontal "jerk" seismic signal - caused by fractures opening as magma in a shallow reservoir intrudes into overlying rock - was observed a few minutes to a few hours prior to an eruption at Piton de la Fournaise 92% of the time over a 10 year period.

It’s April 18th, so time to repost some of my great-grandfather’s photos of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake

A sunny day after a rainy week means our local Lake Champlain view has bonus sediment plumes! ⚒️ (which are probably, unfortunately, packed with phosphorous from agricultural run-off)

“In order to prevent the dire consequences of this ethically terrible thing we are currently doing, you must let us do this even more ethically terrible thing!” is quite the pitch. Of course, in this case AI doomerism is just a convenient justification for a much longer-term obsession.

We already KNOW how to make super babies, you eugenicist creeps! And it's all the things you fucking fucks are fucking up! THREAD!

It continues to be shocking how few of the top leadership positions at FEMA are filled right now. According to their website (which says it was last updated yesterday, despite the bizarre shutdown situation) FEMA does not have an administrator, deputy administrator or a deputy chief of staff.

Can you close what was never actually reopened? Someone needs to make a version of this chart with a timeline of the grand pronouncements about the status of Hormuz made in the last few weeks. While oil futures zip down on every ‘opening’, actual oil throughput seems...a lot less responsive.

Not totally sure if my instant love of this visual is because it is a really clear illustration, or because it looks like it belongs on Star Trek: TNG. Probably both.

Somebody is trolling somebody here.

This is fabulous. @drspacejunk.bsky.social’s comments on the poorly known and probably irreversible impacts of mining on the moon (not to mention the sovereignty issues and the involvement of dipshit billionaires) are also very reminiscent of the concerns/debate about seafloor mining.

Heat batteries delivering up to 1,200C using off peak electricity: A Scottish whisky distillery just claimed a world first — producing high-temperature steam for distilling using stored green electricity instead of fossil fuels. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

They want to eliminate Ecosystems research. Cut Natural Hazards funding by a third. Cut Water Resources funding by a fifth. And if you think they might care about the finding and digging things out of the ground part of geology, apparently not since they want to cut Core Science Systems by 43%.

My big takeaway from reporting this story is that it's not JUST about the Forest Service. The closure of these stations threatens to upend a delicate system of mutually beneficial collaboration and resource sharing, and the impacts will ripple out far beyond the Forest Service itself.

“maternal health? Nah.” *shrug* I genuinely do not think I could read the whole book without expiring from rage. And you just know that this entire administration has just been full of meetings just like this.

I was thinking just yesterday how the Wayback Machine was perhaps more vital than ever, as a record of online content uncontaminated by AI slop. So of course it’s under threat.

I (almost) did feel that one! It remains my closest encounter with an earthquake. all-geo.org/highlyalloch...

On one hand, I'm skeptical about the safety and effectiveness of vertical evacuation structures. On the other, if I was at the coast, and an urgent warning was issued, I'd sure as hell want one to be there rather than not. ⚒️

Mine detection using drone mounted geophysical sensors and machine learning: it seems like there is still some work to do for this to be an actual thing, but looks promising! ⚒️ (Also lots of info about mine design and distribution that make you despair for humanity)

Slowly letting out the breath I’ve been holding since April 1st.

Holy smokes! An incredible start to the 'Wildfire Season' in the US this year - owing to an abnormally hot and snowless winter in some parts of the country.

I’m fascinated by creeping faults and this week I finally got to visit some examples of fault creep along the Maacama fault in Willits, CA with @drwendyrocks.bsky.social

Thin Section Thursday! Bornite intergrown with chalcopyrite, Reflected Light. Photo by Ingrid Kjarsgaard (c) You can contribute too! Send image(s) and short caption to akoziol1 (at) udayton dot edu. #thinsectionthursday

Key quote for me: “an entire profession might gradually lose its capacity to question and redefine its goals, because AI systems embed assumptions about what those goals are.”

Sure would be nice if most media coverage didn’t continue - in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary - to treat market movements as a proxy for real world conditions. It’s a bundle of irrational herd behaviours, amplified by algorithmic automation.

This whole interview is great, but my guilty laugh of the day came from this statement regarding natural carbon sinks: “it’s incredibly hard to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere when you’re on fire.”