Snow on the north China plain, December 14, 2025. The villages, dark gray surrounded by light snow-covered fields on this image, are one to two kilometers apart. The Yellow River crosses the lower right part of the image on the left. Sentinel 2 image.

Zoom meeting is now competing with a text conversation with my sisters, in which I'm learning great stories I'd completely forgotten. Chairs my dad made from trees cut down by the local developer. Our parents' friend Masao showing up at our house in Palatine, IL, ca. 1962-3, with gifts from Hawaii.

Pierogi and pickled herring currently big topics in the family zoom meeting. Barrels of pickled herring at the front of the grocery store in Stevens Point this time of year.

🗺️ Map showing Tanzania – Potential Natural Vegetation 🌍 Made with QGIS & Blender using: 🌱 Vegetationmap4Africa (EcoDiv.earth) 🏔️ DIVA-GIS DEM Data Credit: @ecodiv.bsky.social #Tanzania #VegetationMap #QGIS #Blender #Cartography #OpenData #Biodiversity #EcodivEarth #FOSS4G

Another lichen college. On lakeside rock, Northwest Territories, Canada. #lichen #fungi #fungifriends

This afternoon, looking over the Turkey River valley from the Chicken Ridge scenic overlook:

2025 yule log cake reveal! Shagbark hickory with chicken of the woods, puffballs, green-stain, and rhizomorphs of honey mushroom. Orange cake, cranberry filling, chocolate ganache and chocolate shags

I know exactly where these are, just east of Hwy 14 where it runs along the foot of the moraine from Harvard across the state line to Walworth. Glad to see this, I grew up under big old oaks farther south in McHenry. The conservation district owns that land now too and has done a good job with it.

These declines are MASSIVE. And the comparative silence in media coverage is absolutely DAMNING. “Why are ppl always so afraid of crime?” THIS is why. When crime goes up, media trips over itself to report it. Falls to pre-war (!!) levels? Just CRICKETS.

While procuring big raises for themselves, these presidents were dismantling entire departments, firing faculty en masse, and signing expensive contracts with the epistemicide company in defiance of shared governance. Abject betrayal of the university mission. www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

Another thought on the generative AI debate. As more and more AI slop papers come out, it becomes *more* important to actually read the papers and *more* important to gain domain expertise to spot fakes. An AI generated summary of an AI generated paper isn't going to tell you the paper is fake.

larry summers, the one-time executor of jeffrey epstein's will, wrote 7 NYT op-eds in 2025

Here’s the gift link wapo.st/4s6YnC5 as Brendan says “this machine - social media - created fascists” (thanks to Woody G for the inspiration)

via The New Yorker, Ellis Rosen cartoon

When I was a kid, a nearby town set up a little house on the square and a guy in a Santa suit sat inside to take kids' wishlists. But someone had written "Fuck you, Santa" on the outside of the door. I'd like to say that's when I lost my illusions about Christmas, but I just thought it was funny.

I just want people to know that the mexican national archives are in a panopticon prison, and the documents are kept in the cells

More snow-enhanced topography. The Turkey River in northeastern Iowa joining the Mississippi across from Cassville, Wisconsin. South of the Turkey River valley, you can see the high Silurian (Niagara) Escarpment running WNW-ESE. In 1994-95, I helped Jim Knox sample historical flood deposits on the

Junction of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, enhanced by the interaction of topography, land cover, and snow. A glacial advance from the northwest more than 780,000 years ago reached the mouth of the Wisconsin valley. Meltwater from that ice margin flowed east,

New Trump class flagship of the Great White Fleet (note the gold-plated superstructure).

Up close with lampreys at the Bonneville Dam’s fish viewing window. Columbia River, Oregon. #25DaysofFishmas

Seems like a reasonable idea (not to be confused with a new idea): “The lack of progress, and occasional bad blood between the commissioners, has prompted some to call for including more people at the negotiating table.” www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Bob and I were among the hundreds of researchers that were supposed to conduct the 6th U.S. National Climate Assessment. Now it looks like they're gonna produce it with a few people and Grok? Communities need rigorous and accurate information about climate change. This will put communities at risk.

I look forward to the legally required, transparent peer review process required by the US Global Change Research Act and the Information Quality Act. I always thought they would try to do a NCA with Judith Curry, five old men and a LLM.

I saw what happened to my father's house in the last 15 years of his life when he lived alone in a farmhouse in western Minnesota, and it was completely overrun by books, mostly used and bought online. My goal has been to avoid that, but...

Learning how hard it is to maintain steady state in number or volume of books.

support independent media. idk what else to say right now.

Huge opening for anyone with power to do a single right thing

There's a story, or many stories, in every township in this ca. 1925 plat book showing property ownership in a northern Wisconsin county. And though many plat books have been digitized and are available online, many others, like this one, have not.

I love this corner. Monroe and Fifth Ave., Chicago

If you look closely at this satellite image of farmland in SE Minnesota, you can draw a roughly NW to SE line across it. To the north, light and dark tones show there's more topography, also networks of small drainageways. That's loess, 5-8 m thick. To the south it's smoother. Little or no loess.

Got stuck in solstice bonfire traffic this afternoon.

Winter solstice sun and shadows in small valleys of Driftless-like southeastern Minnesota. View is from the northwest. Uses #rayshader and suntools R packages.

Happy Winter Solstice! Beer can, pinhole camera photos of the Summer to Winter Solstice (2024) and the Winter to Summer Solstice (2025). You never know quite what you're going to get with these photos, set the beer can pointing towards the sun at hopefully the correct angle and wait 6 months!

Update: very active weather week to come in CA! First, a persistent and very warm atmospheric river will remain draped over NorCal, continuing to generate rain--and snow levels in the Sierra will rise yet further, above 8k-9k feet. SoCal stays warm/dry through Tue. [Thread] #CAwx

For geo folks: Barrick and Newmont want to pump groundwater to dewater their gold mines. That lowers groundwater, and groundwater and surface water are connected physically (if not legally).

View of western Colorado and a bit of Utah centered in the Gunnision River, December 14, 2025. Grand Mesa, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, the Uncompahgre Plateau and Unaweap Canyon, and the La Sal Mountains are all visible. Sentinel 2. I'm just having fun roaming around, wishing I was everywhere.

Snow on the Great Sand Dunes, Colorado, last week. Sentinel 2 image.

On the thinning edge of the High Plains (Ogallala) Aquifer, northeastern Colorado. A few years ago, I drove through Cope, location of the red marker, and thought "Not seeing center pivots anymore. Hmm..." The High Plains surface continues west some distance from Cope, but not the usable aquifer.

Looking east onto the Plains through a window of the observation car on the Amtrak California Zephyr. Downtown Denver visible on the skyline. December 6, 2019. Seems like a very long time ago.

Tracks like these are often preserved in aeolian sand. Holocene bison tracks are common in the Nebraska Sandhills and I've also seen tracks that look like they could be from sheep in dune exposures in China.

USA 🇺🇸 Buffalo, état de New York 1963. Le garage ''French Car Service'' avec toute une panoplie des modèles français mais également une Opel Olympia Rekord Caravan.

This is a really important paper and such a privilege to be involved moving it forward. Sharon did a masterful job of synthesizing data from a diverse array of sites and drawing some super important conclusions for Critical Zone science. I’m confident the community will be interested in this paper

Ice on the braided Platte River near Elm Creek, Nebraska. Dec 15, Sentinel 2 image.

Bulgarian Chicago business owner dies in ICE custody, sparking calls for 'immediate investigation' https://abc7chicago.com/post/bulgarian-chicago-business-owner-nenko-gantchev-dies-ice-custody-family-congresswoman-call-immediate-investigation/18301520/

Still digesting 48 hours in Las Vegas and everything that happened at this pretty tense meeting about the Colorado River. 2026 should be very "interesting" www.politico.com/news/2025/12...

Redacted Fayette, AL

By early June 2025 it was time to explore the dark art of Sedgology. Here are Dotted Sedge Carex punctata, Bog Sedge Carex limosa, Slender Sedge Carex lasiocarpa, and Soft-leaved Sedge Carex montana, all in Hampshire's New Forest. @bsbibotany.bsky.social

Wisconsin has a new 24-hour precipitation record: 14.55" This was recorded by a rain gauge in Milwaukee during the August flooding event and shatters the previous record of 11.72" that was measured on June 24, 1946. www.weather.gov/mkx/NewWisco...

Cold day, empty campus.