What an absolute legend this vessel is and forever will be. I was fortunate enough to go on three expeditions (2012, 2018, 2023). I snapped this pic in Oct 2023 (at the end of Exp400) in Reykjavík. We disembarked and were about to board that bus to drive away and I stepped aside for a moment 🥲

imagine if the 'masculine charisma' he's seeking is a commitment to serve/help others (family, community, etc) with modesty and hard work –– instead, the model of 'manly' that these 20-somethings have seen most of their life is self-aggrandizing, bullying narcissism www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/u...

I'm old enough to have watched those pretending to be experts in climate science now pretend to be experts in battery chemistry

in the training I'm now required to take by my institution about use/misuse of generative AI, the video starts off saying that AI is streamlining and boosting productivity –– so, 'streamlining' means spending my valuable time on compliance about the thing that claims to be streamlining 😑

💯!!! these notes keep us going –– I got one earlier this week in the genre of "I didn't think I would like this class at the beginning, but you made it interesting", which made me genuinely feel better (in a visceral way)

Canvas is back up! ... live shot of me downloading all the final-project reports and exporting the grade book just in case we get locked out again 😅

oh boy, Canvas (our learning mgmt system) has been hacked and everyone on campus is locked out ... just in time for the end of the semester 🫨 an article from a couple days ago about this: www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

To the students (and their parents) who agree with this, then do not enroll in college. You don't have to be here! I will continue to devote my efforts and time to delivering the best education I can to the students who want to be here. If you think it's all a waste, then please take another path.

this iris in our backyard blooms every year in the first few days of May #bloomscrolling

is one of those times where multiple things converge –– two proposal deadlines + the end of the semester with several other obligations 🫨 –– just need to get through the next couple of weeks of working essentially all-day-everyday and can take a breather and regroup

interesting piece about the similarities and differences between the energy shocks of the 2020s and those of the 1970s ember-energy.org/latest-insig...

the beauty and drama of this image, my gosh

discussing the last deglaciation (~20-10 ka) in my undergrad gen-ed climate course this week and want to incorporate more about the marine biosphere –– for example, what were effects of meltwater pulses (e.g., MWP-1a) on marine life? (besides the drowning of shallow-water corals from SL rise)

oh my

"The project isn't the deliverable. The project is the vehicle. The deliverable is the scientist that comes out the other end." I encourage grad student advisors (and grad students) to read this. All the pithy hot takes miss the point, this is a breath of fresh air. ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

Maybe some are going to chatbots, but others (me 👋) have ditched most social media and are spending time doing things in the physical world w/ real people –– and I have several text threads w/ friends and others that are fun and engaging (and that don't need to be broadcast b/c come on who cares)

beautiful day here 😎 –– did some spring cleanup of the moss between flagstone in our little backyard garden, which is basically removing the tiny debris that is covering the tiny plants –– it's either meditative or tedious depending on my mood

my guess is that this particular ultra-wealthy person is an outlier –– it seems that most that get to this level of wealth have at least one component (likely multiple) of the 'Dark Triad' personality traits and are focused on wealth-as-power www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/o...

I don't have any data to back this up, but ... (a great way to start, right?) ... I feel like students are submitting assignments as close as possible to the deadline more than they used to. As if the stated deadline (e.g., 11:59pm in Canvas) is the "target" instead of simply sometime before then.

"In a bid to make sure a repeat of last year’s scandal does not happen, the competition's official Tossmaster, Kyle Mathews, has enlisted a specialist rock expert to help protect the championship's integrity." Tossmaster! 🤩

BlueSky is one of the few social media sites I'm still on at this point (and, even then, I don't engage much) –– maybe this leads to increasing enshitification and the demise of the platform and my mood is that if these tech companies fail and go under, oh well techcrunch.com/2026/03/19/b...

Prudhoe Dome, a 2,500 km^2 by 500 m thick ice cap in NW, Greenland, completely melted away and then regrew all within the Holocene 🤯 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hello BlueSky! We’re here to bring you the latest opportunities and news in U.S. scientific ocean drilling and amplify the work of our community and partners. This account is managed by the U.S. Scientific Ocean Drilling Coordination Office (SODCO).

Excited that this paper, led by former PhD student Natalia Varela (based on her dissertation), is now out! We use the occurrence & characteristics of thin, silty turbidites from the Ross Sea to interpret Antarctic Bottom Water outflow since ~3.3 Ma. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

My advice to undergraduates: Do *not* sign on to a PhD just because it's a 'next step' and you don't know what else to do. A master's program is a much better option in that scenario. You can find out if you genuinely enjoy the endeavor and, if not, it's only 2 years and you get a great degree! 1/2

I suppose it's a good moment to mention that the most neglected subdivision of sand is 'very fine' (63-125 µm) so many people, including some sedimentologists, will just completely skip over 'very fine' and go from silt to 'fine' sand (125-250 µm) don't forget about 'very fine' sand! 😁

each day is another 'This must be the line where people have had enough!' and, no, I don't think we are close to that line –– it's quite clear that 10s of millions of Americans are willing to support much worse –– and later, many years from now, these same people will claim they never supported it

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more." took a few sittings to get through, but an insightful article www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

my gosh, these people are ridiculous, a bunch of wannabe-iconoclasts making it all about themselves and their agenda (and, of course, grifting each other) www.politico.com/news/magazin...

new publication out, led by Dr. Molly Patterson, from the IODP Exp 374 team showing obliquity pacing of iceberg calving events in the Ross Sea (based on ice-rafted debris records) during the late Pliocene to early Pleistocene (~3.3-2.3 Ma) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

last day of classes here –– had the final-project team presentations in the final session of my Sedimentary Basins course, which went very well and it was fun to see commonalities (and some differences) in the interpretations

at some point I need to stop playing w/ data and make my AGU talk –– but this pre-AGU push is *exactly* the reason I submitted an abstract, to force myself to spend the hours crunching numbers, making plots, and thinking –– I'm having a wonderful time, don't get to dive into one thing like this much

When I teach my intro climate course in the spring I'll be using resources and links from other countries, published science that is not under U.S. govt control, etc. There's plenty out there, this regime would have to put up a robust firewall to shield students from available information.

recently discovered that with the 'plotly' package in R I can generate an interactive visualization where I can hover over a data point to see some basic info –– very useful for initial stages of data exploration (e.g., quickly/easily learning which data points are outliers) #rstats

campus closed today (due to winter weather 🌨️) –– I spent a good chunk of my weekend preparing for a guest lecture + activity in a colleague's class that is now canceled –– oh well, on the upside, I can now make some progress on paper revisions and, oh yea, I have a talk at #AGU25 next week

I haven't been following every twist and turn of this (and I don't know all the context/history), but I can't help but wonder if this outcome is a harbinger of things to come.

every now and again, everything seems to converge –– the usual end-of-semester chaos colliding with AGU prep (anticipated) is compounded by a handful of other things (not anticipated) you know convergence is upon you when it takes a significant amount of time just to make the to-do list 🫠

fun mash-up of sedimentology and baseball –– these 'muds' have more sand in them than I would've predicted thesedimentaryrecord.scholasticahq.com/article/1448...

university football programs should be financed 100% by alumni, not a dime should come from student fees or cleverly siphoned off from a pot of $$ some very wealthy alumni care deeply about academics and student programs (and donate accordingly), but many others are mainly football fans, pony up

imagine being impressed by this and thinking to yourself 'Yes, these are great ideas, this is the world I want' –– my gosh, grow up already and ditch these guys and this whole vibe, what a waste

I posted this a year ago and here he is discussing the topic a couple weeks ago –– he's not quite to the stage of formalizing the idea into a 'business' (an entity that rips off governments and their citizens), but seems inevitable –– perhaps his falling-out with the regime has delayed things

field trip this weekend for my Sedimentary Basins course –– we went from earliest Cambrian rift basin to Cambro-Ordovician passive margin to the three main foreland-basin phases of the rest of the Paleozoic (>240 Myr of history in two days 😅) ⚒️

an undergraduate in our dept asked me yesterday if the cuts in science funding was affecting me and our dept –– I took this opportunity to explain how things have worked and that, yes, this new paradigm negatively impacts us, including ability to hire ugrads for summer research, for example 1/2

my Sedimentary Basins course is transitioning into the Final Project, which has an initial individual phase where each student receives a unique and partial dataset followed by a team phase where each team collectively has the entire dataset 1/2

let's go Virginia

My straightforward advice to those who don't want to go to college, think it's a waste of time/money, think it's not worth it, aren't interested in doing the work, could do other things in their life, etc.: Don't go to college.

spent yesterday scouting locations for an upcoming field trip and I'd like to share this very Appalachian outcrop: small and covered in lichen and moss ⚒️

most of the labs for my Sedimentary Basins course (9 grad students + 4 ugrads) require R for making calculations, building simple models, data analysis, etc. and I'm trying this 'AI disclosure' statement this time –– we also talk about when these tools are most helpful for improving your code (1/2)

finished my fourth, and final, external letter for P&T (promotion and tenure) evaluation for the year this was the most I've done in one 'season' for these, I ended up doing 4 out of the 5 I was asked to (I try to say yes to all, but there is a limit)

I was recently interviewed by @drlauraguertin.bsky.social as part of her 'Tales from the Deep' series focused on the people involved in scientific ocean drilling ⚒️🧪⛴️ –– lots of great stories from many others there to check out archive.storycorps.org/interviews/i...