Probably more amused than I should be that the subtitles for Muppet Christmas Carol literally read ‘no cheeses for us “meeces” ‘. Is that the transcriber’s equivalent of an eye-roll?

It’s deeply disturbing to see the COVID pandemic becoming a Y2K bug-like myth where there was lots of fuss and panic over nothing - a falsehood pushed by people who blithely wave over a death toll of millions.

Very welcome news if this happens in time for the anniversary next year. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Did you know that magma can ascend like rain through the upper mantle? Learn more from this new #Geology paper by Changyeol Lee and colleagues: geosociety.co/4iHVNhk#Geology#GSAPubs #IntraplateVolcanism #Geodynamics #Magmatic

I think we need a mega thread of everyone's craziest archive stories.

1. This is really interesting! 2. It is also a timely addition to the “you really need to understand how much important data is still non-digital” discourse.

🧪⚒️ Lamppost #geology in #Chicago !

To add to this excellent thread, when you are reading something, you are reading in the context of everything else you’ve read and thought. That’s what allows you to make connections and draw out what is important to you. That’s what an LLMs context window will always lack.

I would dearly love to know what, if any, “what happens if…” discussions were had before deploying these things on city streets. A traffic light going out is not much of a black swan! Waymo halts service during massive S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

This is like the British Museum complaining that someone took their stuff

Now imagine how downed robot cars would hamper response after major quake.

⚒️ The weird perspective on this makes it look like the Eye of Sauron is boring through from the far side of the Earth. #aieee

@ncar-ral.bsky.social President Dr Antonio Busalacchi is giving an emergency press briefing at #AGU25 Says he has really seen outpouring support from community today at AGU NCAR is the "jewel in the crown" of efforts to predict the Earth as a coupled system, he tells journalists

At an @agu.org Town Hall today, @ncar-ucar.bsky.social President Antonio Busalacchi spoke to #AGU25 attendees about what's at stake if NCAR is dismantled. One attendee asked anyone who uses NCAR research to stand up. Almost everyone in the room stood. Read more here: eos.org/research-and...

Day 18 of ☕️ advent: Winter Wonderland No real clues as to what to expect for this one from the title, but the ground coffee smells strongly of nut and vanilla. This carries through on brewing: a strong punch of nuttiness with a subtle and pleasant vanilla finish.

On the other hand, it’s not really a surprise that a political columnist firmly believes that “your ideas suck and provably don’t match reality” shouldn’t be disqualifying.

Last #ThinSectionThursday this year from me. Beautiful Balvenie troctolite in XPL. A large olivine crystal is cross cut by oxide veins representing fluid pathways, which become thinner but more numerous as they radiate out through the surrounding plagioclase, which retains striking twinning. 🧪⚒️🌋

⚒️ I love this idea of expanding the idea of a geological "rock garden" into more of an outdoor lab that builds in processes and structure/spatial distribution, as well as lithology and geological time.

When leading poll questions are still not enough to get you the results you want…

Day 16 of ☕️ advent: A disappointing duplication! And of all the varieties I've sampled so far, it has to be the one I genuinely did not care for at all. I have no desire for a second sip of 'Spice Kissed Egg Nog'. As the packet says, I'm braver, smarter and stronger than that!

I’m not saying I always successfully internalised and lived it, but I was about 14 when I realised that whatever I did, I was never going to be “cool”, so I might as well just do what I actually wanted to do. My best life decisions were made when I was closest to achieving that state of mind.

I keep seeing the data centre boom being presented as a sort of 'training gym' for infrastructure build-out, as if it's a tide that lifts all boats (particularly for renewables, transmissions etc). The reality: it's a black hole whose gravity well is sucking resources from socially-useful stuff

In Texas' Permian Basin, where to put the massive amounts of "produced water" from oil drilling is a big problem. Injecting it deep: you can trigger earthquakes. Injecting it less deep: blowouts and subsidence. www.eenews.net/articles/frack…

At first glance I thought “nah… even a huge amount of air warming won’t get to the bed!” But then recalled intrusions of meltwater 💧 through new moulins at ever-higher elevations from the surface (adjacent to my previous research) and I’m like “Wait. Oh, shit. 🥺”

⚒️🧪 Subglacial sediments in Greenland may be up to 200m thick in places, according to analysis of seismic waves from distant large earthquakes arriving at seismometers deployed on Greenland ice sheet. If these sediments thaw as Greenland warms, has big impacts on future ice loss and sea level rise.

Mosasaurs, the giant marine reptiles that roamed the Earth more than 66 million years ago, didn’t just live in the sea. Our new research shows that they could thrive in freshwater too! Let’s dive into what we’ve discovered. #Paleontology #Mosasaurs

🧪🏺🦣 Strong case for *oldest fire-starting* 🔥 capacity, before 400 Ka, suggested by multi-stranded analysis: geochem, magnetic, sedimentary evidence of anthropogenic burning, + heated lithics + remains of iron pyrite. Behaviourally heading towards #Neanderthals. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

⚒️ 🤩

"Generative AI gets an in via systemic overload problems it superficially addresses but doesn't solve", undergraduate education edition:

Possible exotic geodynamos ahoy! ‘Our models have so-called “ionic water” layers which generate magnetic dynamos in locations that explain the observed non-dipolar magnetic fields’

Speaking of films I have definitely seen more than 6 times… Back in the 90s, there was a small set of films that (i) I enjoyed watching and (ii) my family owned on VHS, and I therefore watched the hell out of. But Strictly Ballroom is a genuine delight, for the reasons outlined below.

This year I decided to take another shot at the Coffee and Tea Junkie coffee advent calendar - pour over addition. I had it a few years ago and quite enjoyed it, and it sits towards to affordable end of coffee advent calendars. ☕️ 🧵

⛏ #MineralMonday 🖖 📷 Volcanic bomb with beautiful glassy texture. 📍 Yasur Volcano, Tanna - Vanuatu 🇻🇺 Sample taken shortly after being erupted out of the southern crater. 🌋 📏 Size: 13 x 7cm / 5.1 x 2.8in ⚒ #RockyMonday #geology #geoscience #minerals #Vanuatu #volcano #volcanism

This is really good. Finding the basic “ingredients” for life everywhere means we don’t have to worry to much about where they come from. But the real question is what conditions and processes can turn interesting chemicals into sufficiently interesting chemistry.

🧪 A fascinating read: the popular myth about Alexander Fleming’s serendipitous discovery of penicillin is apparently just that: a myth. A random mould spore contaminating a plate with mature bacterial colonies would not have killed the bacteria. www.asimov.press/p/penicillin-m…

Being allowed to *say* your energy use is carbon neutral is far more important that whether it is actually carbon neutral.

Who killed the hobbit? 💀🐘🦴⛰️🌧️☀️🪨⛏️ Our new paper out today in Communications Earth and Environment reveals the role of a major drought in the disappearance of the diminutive hominin Homo floresiensis. theconversation.com/the-hobbits-...

Unclear if it’s the case here, but delighted to learn that introducing a beaver to a river without official permission is known as “beaver bombing”

This is such an active aftershock sequence. We are going to be busy with this one for a while. We have had more than a dozen M4+ events since this story was posted a few hours ago. We havent even really looked at events that are less than M3.5 bc there are too many of the larger events to keep up.

⚒️ 🌋 Bottom: cause. Top: effect To watch video: bsky.app/profile/davi...

I’ve never seen such a strong starting premise go off the rails so quickly. (Although an AI-directed game probably would be unintentionally hilarious to watch).

🧪⚒️ Attempt to use machine learning to distinguish between biotic & abiotic organics in ancient rocks. Headline results (organic material in 3.3Gyr sediments classified as biological in origin, and material in 2.5Gyr rocks ID’d as being from photosynthetic life) largely in line with other evidence.

“Just like in that amazing documentary, The Core…”

There are people who believe knowledge is about accumulating facts. Then there are people who realize knowledge is learning how to think about those facts. The former is transactional learning. The latter is real.

⚒️ That’s some beautiful looking fault rock there… Core drilled for a proposed pumped hydroelectric storage facility "on the shores of Loch Lochy, beneath the Great Glen", which is the platonic ideal of Scottish locations.

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth! #protistsonsky 🧵

⚒️ Showing that rock fracturing from even relatively small earthquakes can generate the geochemical gradients essential for life has interesting potential implications for life on early Earth and on other planets. Very cool!

Wildfire particles and water being injected into stratosphere by “overshooting” storms: in increasing amounts, and higher up, as climate change generates more fires and more powerful storms. No-one knows yet exactly what effect this will have, but it will have one…

Everyone knows data centers use a ton of water. What hardly anyone knows: they can poison the water that remains. And in eastern Oregon, Amazon is doing exactly that.

🧪 If this observation holds up, I think it’s the first direct signal we’ve detected of a dark matter particle (rather than indirectly inferring their existence from gravitational effects. Exciting! I wonder if it’s consistent with what we (haven’t) seen at the LHC… phys.org/news/2025-11-y…