I’ve been thinking a lot about the shifting baseline concept as applied to everyday life. People in their 20’s now have no memory of highly functional systems, products (from blenders to sweaters) that were so well made you could hand them down across generations, or even helpful customer service.

Grades in ✅

California's miserable snow season, and the rapid decline (black line) in snow water equivalent from the recent unprecedented heat wave in the west. This is #climatechange and the long predicted impacts of rising temperatures.

The discovery that the continents are in continuous motion is fairly recent—dating back only to the late 1960s — and one woman was responsible for decoding what it meant for California and much of the West Coast. buff.ly/2vAwspH

In the age of AI paper writing, when I catch a few incorrect sentence structures of mis-conjugated verbs, it kind of warms my heart. The things that used to drive me insane now serve as little assurances of students' humanity.

Are you traveling over the holiday weekend? Be sure to check out some of California’s “Geo Gems” - notable geologic features in California state parks. These geologic wonders illustrate the legacy and continuing geologic evolution of California.   www.parks.ca.gov?page_id=29631

SJSU Geology is offering need-based scholarships of up to $15k/year for undergraduates to come study Geology or Earth Systems Science with us. The application deadline for Fall 26 is soon (12/1), but wanted to share this opportunity with any prospective students. sites.google.com/sjsu.edu/s-s...

I am not a super fan of AI by any means but two things I love: copy and paste formatted citation and it will make you a bibtex entry, make a picture of any data table into a .csv file in seconds.

How does lava sound when it comes to the surface of the Earth? Listen to a lava flow oozing out of its effusive vent high on the southwestern side of #Etna, 28 August 2025. That day no visits by tourists were allowed on the site, which permitted this (relatively) clean recording

It is firmly in the “somebody’s making an active decision to downplay this” territory.

What masochist didn't put sequential page numbers or links in the table of contents of the NSF PAPPG? Sorting through over 200 pages for the correct section and sub section is making my brain hurt unnecessarily.

"Thinking time —the time needed to concentrate without interruptions has always been central to scholarly work. It is essential to designing experiments, compiling data, assessing results, reviewing literature and, of course, writing. Yet, [it] is often undervalued." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This is insane, it is a race to the bottom.

Biggest commitment to a 3 second joke I've ever seen

Are you a researcher in Brazil who's interested in coming to Berlin to work on global change, soil or fungi?

Things are scary, but make sure you vet your info. Don't forget the CRAAP test: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose library.csuchico.edu/sites/defaul... I teach it to all of my students.

If you're at #AGU24 and you want to learn about how we can use semi-continuous isotopes to better understand aspen and spruce water use in an alpine system, check out Raymond Hess's poster: H43M-1043 with @matthiasprenger.bsky.social

As a member of a geology dept. in a geologically interesting/active place, this earthquake/potential tsunami is all over local news (exhaustively), ppl texting me with q's about what to do. Yet, students enrolling to study earth sciences in decline. We need good people to study this stuff!!

Make transit appealing, comfortable, accessible, people will ride. jalopnik.com/ridership-of...

Just as hurricanes haul water from the oceans onto land in the hydrologic cycle, Salmon haul nutrients from the ocean back onto mountains in the nutrient cycle. The Great Migration of millions of animals in the Serengeti is another large nutrient cycle

This is a long shot, but I have a small shipment of research equipment sent to a collaborator being held up in customs in Côte d'Ivoire by UPS asking for paperwork that has never existed.

Cue me trotting out the stats again: over 300,000 people work in US libraries. We are in every state. Coal mining, by contrast, employs less than 50,000 people across a few states. Politicians don't promote libraries because nobody gets rich off owning them but we are everywhere.

SE Minnesota has a lot of agriculture (livestock & corn are the main culprits) as well as a lot of karst. That is a TERRIBLE combination for water quality. Livestock generates manure. Corn requires a lot of fertilizer. Both manure & fertilizer are overapplied, causing massive water quality issues.

As I wrap up my hydrogeology course, question for you hydrogeologists and civil engineers...how useful do you think teaching flownets is? I feel like conceptually you can understand subsurface flow with a nice demo like this one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ezo.... do you use flownets?

We need more goats

Checking my very simple exam question through ChatGPT relating dry and wet masses of a soil core and it cannot get it correct. Decided to present the AI answer and make the exam question "How did ChatGPT get the calculation wrong?" Fun!

“We have to get children back outside and playing again!” Sweetie, your generation made it illegal for children to go outside unaccompanied. Your generation sells military tanks as “cars” and your generation removed urban centers and places the population in strip malls

Hello hydrogeologists, anyone ever done a slug test on a well with artesian conditions (~60 cm above top of casing)? Is it possible? Any resources you know of?

Well then...strikes work. #labor #strike #livingwage abc7.com/cal-state-un...

This description of the episode totally doesn't do it justice; it's a WILD ride through house fires, Bangladeshi political repression, the courage and persistence of migrant workers, a serial social entrepreneur's quest to support an in-progress mobility revolution, and even some adorbz kids

The next best part of the Iceland volcano livestream is the soundtrack: www.ruv.is/english/2023... Stevie Wonder, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and what must be some legit Icelandic popular/folk music. Stay safe out there!

AGU crowd, remember that there is a suite of awesome field trips available to you if you need a break from the Moscone Center... www.agu.org/learn-and-de...

"As the tobacco and car examples show, 'all of the above' is never really all of the above. Pursuing 'light' cigarettes to reduce cancer is incompatible with simply banning tobacco; giving everyone a personal EV is incompatible with remaking our cities for transit, cycling and walking."

Hi All, I am hosting a group of high school students for an open house/demo. I have 20 minutes for a demo and a short chat with ~15 people. What are you WOWiest ideas for earth science/soil/hydrology related demos? I will put a couple ideas and I'd love others.

I am here! It is good to be away from the Cesspool, I hope we can continue the good things we started over there in a more welcoming environment!