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...

I probably spend too much time on my lecture slides/content, it's a habit I have a difficult time breaking ... sure, maybe my lectures are good (I hope so) but I should be spending more time writing papers and proposals

currently on page 24 of a response-to-reviewers document for a paper with 'minor revisions' ... they are valuable comments/suggestions that will ultimately improve the manuscript (which I'm glad about), but 'minor' they are not IMO

This better be giant, all-caps type in headlines on every news outlet in the country for days. This is our government literally declaring war on it's own citizens. This isn't nuanced or ambiguous, he is saying it very clearly. But I have zero confidence in our national media to meet this moment.

This summary figure from a 1990 paper by Boulton depicts the local/relative SL change (what I show in blue) as opposite to the global/eustatic change –– that is, a relative rise in SL during maximum ice sheet extent/size at that location when the global condition is lower SL, due to ... 1/3

one of the great advantages of ditching most social media platforms and checking the few I'm still on only occasionally (a few times a week) is that I'm blissfully unaware of the discourse about discourse on social media

I've started reading @peterbrannen.bsky.social's "The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything" and I'm going old school by underlining and jotting down notes in the margins here are a couple of excerpts in the section introducing silicate weathering and the carbon cycle ⚒️📚

difficult choice between D and G

this exists it is called thinking

a fantastic four days at the IODP Exp400 science meeting at GEUS (Geological Survey of Denmark & Greenland) in Copenhagen –– didn't have much time to explore and sight-see, hope to come back one day very excited about all the interesting science already coming out of this expedition, lots to do!

in Copenhagen this week for the IODP Exp400 post-cruise science meeting and our hosts at GEUS (Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland) led a day trip to Stevns Klint, a UNESCO World Heritage Site featuring a K-Pg boundary section ⚒️🧪

headed to Copenhagen for the IODP Exp 400 post-cruise science meeting –– these meetings a couple of years after an expedition and an opportunity to share results and rekindle collaborative ideas –– this photo from exactly 2 years ago, enjoying my morning coffee on the deck of the JR in Baffin Bay

thread from one of the authors of the Mars study that is making some new

my gosh, these people need to go for a walk, watch a sunset, stare at a campfire ... something, snap out of this let's move this hype/bubble along quicker, get it over with

Our 400+ page comment on the DOE climate working group report is now out. Our conclusion: The merchants of doubt are back, and they're coming for climate science.

my favorite people are those who complain about too many emails and, simultaneously, explain that they would've gotten that task done on time if there had been more reminder emails 😑

"Those involved in the climate.us project are also seeking seed funding and planning a crowdfunding campaign ..." A single, ultra-wealthy individual could bankroll this whole effort. Why aren't the billionaires stepping up? Be anonymous if you don't want attention. www.cnn.com/2025/08/28/c...

Sand battery? I love sand, I'm in! Now I'm wondering how the characteristics of the sand particles (size, shape, composition) and the characteristics of the pile of sand (packing, porosity, etc.) relate to heat-storage properties. 🤔 www.fastcompany.com/91393820/in-...

🤩⚒️🧪

picked up my copy of @peterbrannen.bsky.social's new book yesterday (preordered it from our local indie bookstore) –– looking forward to reading it!

I'm teaching my Sedimentary Basins course this semester (which has 7 grad + 4 undergrad students) –– I typically have a great mix of students with interests including sedimentology, paleobiology, paleoclimate/paleoceanography, tectonics, applied subsurface geoscience, and more

I haven't had the opportunity to dive into this, but at quick glance this looks like a great resource –– especially for those teaching at the intersection of climate science and geoscience

finally getting myself set up on GitHub (yes, I'm a decade late) and will be trying it out w/ grad students this semester –– need to collab on R code with both of the students individually and we also want to create a project all three of us will access/use –– this seems to be the optimal way

As I get emails from prospective graduate students, I'm using the opportunity to explain (calmly and concisely) what is going on regarding U.S. science. I'm hoping the U.S. students in particular listen, it seems many are unaware, not (yet) impacted, and think what is happening is all 'normal'.

I've written just over a page (of words organized into sentences and paragraphs) today, and the day isn't over –– I know there are prolific writers out there who do this all the time, no big deal, but that is not me –– this is in the upper percentiles of my writing productivity in the current era

I'm trying to encourage moss to grow in-between flagstone in our little backyard –– there are at least two types: one that looks like teeny-tiny ferns and another with oval-shaped leaves –– coverage is still only about ⅓ of the space but it's spreading 🌿

we need more of this, love seeing people using their creativity and talent shaming and making fun of can be a powerful way to diminish those participating (or thinking about participating) in the cruelty of this era youtu.be/OjGHf7OvglM?...

this morning I spent an hour sitting outside reading a hard-copy book (borrowed from the university library) and took notes about what I was learning with pen-and-paper –– this method still works FYI

there's no multi-tasking when eating a peach

I'm old enough to remember conservatives and the Republican Party in the U.S. opposing the idea of the federal government (much less a single individual in the federal government) unilaterally controlling entire sectors of private enterprise

My LinkedIn network is not nearly this bad, and some of it I genuinely enjoy (e.g., seeing what former students of our department our up to) but there are the people who think they know how higher education and academia works because they went to grad school for a few years two decades ago