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Reposted by Brandon Bishop

Ben Stanley @benstanley.eu · 2h

Truly we live in the most Trump-brained timeline. Maybe, just maybe the Nobel Prize committee gave María Corina Machado the peace prize on her own merits, rather than so as not to give Trump the award while making it impossible for him to criticise their choice.

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Reposted by Brandon Bishop

Callan Bentley @callanbentley.bsky.social · 8m

A #FridayFold in the Contorted Bed of the Witwatersrand Group in South Africa. ⚒️
More photos of this outcrop in this 2012 blog post: mountainbeltway.all-geo.org/2012/01/06/f...

13 years ago, Callan sits on an outcrop of banded iron formation with tight to isoclinal folds of various shapes. He wears a baseball cap with sunglasses perched on top. The rock layers are red, white, and black.

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 1h

The widespread media decision to frame international affairs as "will Donnie get the prize he wants?" is pathetic.

He's not the protagonist of human events. And to the extent he's a significant character in world affairs, whether or not he gets a prize is one of the least important things about it.

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Jordi Diaz @jdiazcusi.bsky.social · 7m

Last night magnitude 7.4 earthquake in the Philippines Islands, recorded by the seismometers of the @geo3bcn-csic.bsky.social Educational Seismic Network in NE Spain

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Reposted by Brandon Bishop

Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 8h

Picture how big the Hoover Dam is. An absolute unit. The Hoover Dam has a power capacity of 2 gigawatts (GW).

The solar farm that the Admin just cancelled could have produces 6.2 GW of power. That's more than 3 Hoover Dams.

jael holzman @jael.bsky.social · 9h

SCOOP: The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada — the Esmeralda 7 mega-farm — has been canceled

The news was quietly dropped via a sudden website update with no public word from any of the companies involved or a statement from the agency

@heatmap.news

Esmeralda 7 Solar Project Has Been Canceled, BLM Says

It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.

heatmap.news

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Robin Lacassin @rlacassin.bsky.social · 12m

A big aftershock (Mw 6.9) of the magnitude 7.4 #earthquake that happened today offshore Mindanao, Philippines. Same mechanism, roughly same depth.
⚒️

Earthquake information from Geoscope Observatory @geoscope-ipgp.bsky.social · 39m

Mw=6.9, MINDANAO, PHILIPPINES (Depth: 48 km), 2025/10/10 11:12:07 UTC - Full details here: http://geoscope.ipgp.fr/scripts/seismes/fiche.php?seis=us6000rg2r

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 7h

The version that will get its plates into and out of a locked state on its own is here:

Tectonic Explorer

tectonic-explorer.concord.org

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 7h

Not as fun as the older version where you could not impose a force and subduction would self-initiate eventually, but still interesting....

Tectonic Explorer

tectonic-explorer.concord.org

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 7h

Not saying people need to do field stuff, but we *have* to be able to showcase stuff that's more interesting/technical than dumping water on sand.

(At least not until we've hooked them on sedimentology.)

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 7h

This should be a *big* hint that these represent some kind of process like others we see in warming and cooling intervals throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene, but that's not dramatic and flashy.

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 7h

There are multiple periods named after this flower and associated with century to millennia long cold snaps as the Pleistocene ended (hence the *younger* part of the name).

The Oldest Dryas at ~18 to ~15 thousand, the Older Dryas at ~14 thousand, and the Younger Dryas at ~13-12 thousand years ago.

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 7h

Any Younger Dryas article in the popular press needs to be illustrated with an actual mountain avens (Dryas octopetala) instead of a comet.

This is little tundra flower is what the period is named for (they got to be really, really common during several cold periods after the last glacial maximum).

Two Dryas flowers, simple white flowers with 8 petals arranged in a circle around a center with many small anthers. A bee and a fly are crawling on one of the flowers. From Wikipedia.

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 8h

Missed this, this is a good overview of why the Younger Dryas impact stuff is bullshit (and why the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is arguably only recently a real peer-reviewed journal).

Mark Boslough @boslough.bsky.social · 10d

My opinion piece on the pseudoscience of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis was published today by Skeptical Inquirer.

skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/th...

The Problem with Inadequately Reviewed Fringe Science | Skeptical Inquirer

Skeptics usually recognize pseudoscience when we see it. Our heuristics include an assessment of the qualifications and reputations of an idea’s proponents ...

skepticalinquirer.org

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 8h

It's either that or a specific set of skills the postdoc was hired for--either way really weird to talk wistfully of outsourcing the work to an LLM.

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Dr. Wendy Bohon @drwendyrocks.bsky.social · 8h

This link will take you to PHIVOLCS, the Philippines national institution dedicated to providing information on the activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

Be sure to use and reference official sources whenever possible.

www.phivolcs.dost.gov.ph/index.php/ea...

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Reposted by Brandon Bishop

Jason "Jay" R. Patton @earthjay.bsky.social · 9h

#EarthquakeReport for M7.4 #Earthquake #Lindol offshore of the #Philippines

Reverse (Compressional) earthquake mechanism
Probably on megathrust subduction zone fault
Possible local #Tsunami

Tectonic background in 2023 report earthjay.com?p=11611

earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 8h

"We study the Eldritch Powers of the Earth, the Raw Matter of Industrial Civilization, and the Strange Beasts of Deep Time, what shall we show the undeclared majors to attract their attention?"

"What if we dump a bucket of sand on their desks and have them poor a little water on it?"

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 8h

I am happy you at least got to go outside and do something--was getting kind of concerned with the descriptions in that thread that they'd not bothered to show you *any* of the good bits of the field.

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Reposted by Brandon Bishop

hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social · 9h

I missed every lecture of a geology class I took to fulfill my science requirement because the lectures conflicted with my favorite soap opera. We had to write papers on some mineral resource, saying when we would run out of it and how we might cope. I wrote a paper called‘Our Friend The Diamond’…

Dane 🔜 NYCC AA L-34 @monkeyminion.com · 1d

I wrote a 15 page report on heraldic symbolism in medieval armor and weapon design for my art history class the night before it was due (8am class). Made up 90% of it (only found one book for reference) and got an A. GenAI could fucking never.

wrote 20 pages on Faulkner's The Bear four hours before final papers were due on trucker pills and coffee and cigarettes and got an A, fuck you.
You people couldn't hang with real slackers.
finn
wokeupchic • 4d
It's fuck Al till your homework due in 25 minutes

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 8h

I wonder why we can't get people interested in going into the geosciences. 😑

hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social · 8h

In the other geology course I took, we had to spend an entire lab with a clear hemisphere over a globe, on which we drew Pangaea in crayon. Another lab: pouring water onto a big pile of sand and drawing the resulting channels and sand deposits.

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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 17h

China's Tianwen-2 is on its way to Kamoʻoalewa, an asteroid that currently doubles as a "quasi-moon" of Earth. The spacecraft will collect samples & bring them back home.

On its outward trajectory, Tianwen-2 looked back and got this lovely view of our planet. 🧪🔭

english.news.cn/20251001/ef3...

This image released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Oct. 1, 2025 shows a view of the Tianwen-2 probe alongside Earth, captured by the probe during its deep-space journey. The newly released image, acquired by a monitoring camera mounted on the probe's robotic arm, showcases China's five-starred red flag and the white return capsule against the backdrop of a distant, blue Earth. (Some slight image processing by me.)

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Dr. Wendy Bohon @drwendyrocks.bsky.social · 9h

POTENTIAL TSUNAMI THREAT

⚠️ 1-3 meters Philippines
⚠️ 0.3-1 meters Palau

www.tsunami.gov

Map showing the location of potential tsunami.

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 8h

It's now been over an hour since the surface waves first started to arrive and they're still coming. They'll continue to circle the planet until they eventually attenuate away due to friction (to simplify a bit). Until then, they'll make it difficult to observe anything else.

Last 3 and 3/4 hours of station TUC's vertical component. Surface waves arrived about an hour and ten minutes before this screenshot of IRIS's Station Monitor app was taken. The surface waves are not quite as intense as their initial ten minutes, but are still much much higher than the pre-earthquake background noise level at this station.

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 8h

The SS, SSS, S4 (which I don't see clearly here) and S5/S6 S-waves have bounced once, twice, three times, etc. off the underside of the Earth's surface before arriving at the station.

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 8h

Station TUC is about 1/3 of the Earth's diameter away from where the Earthquake occurred, meaning all direct S-waves have been eliminated by passing through the Earth's liquid outer core. SKS pass through the outer core as a P-wave that converts back to an S as it passes back into the mantle.

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