Students selected 2 real cobbles, & then learned sculpture & painting techniques to produce (very!) convincing fakes. In the group photo, all those cobbles are fakes. A colleague & I judged 3 rounds of “best rock” & then a best-in-show round. The long image is the top contender pairs, real and fake

Clawligarchy?

Adding a bunch of good stuff (cation rich octahedral layers in the form of Chips Ahoy) in between the TOT Oreos gives you chlorites.

It's a favorite! Oreo cookie crust is tetrahedral layers, creme is octahedral. So, kaolinite is open-faced oreos stacked up, while 2:1 clays like smectites are stacked whole cookies. They're expandable! But if you add frosting (interlayer cations) btw cookies, they become unexpandable like illite.

Writing a good paragraph is a solid cobble of effort! It’s more than the pebble of finding a citation or making tweaks to a plot, but definitely less than the boulder of outlining or writing a full section of a paper. I think I knocked out two pebbles today between classes. I’ll take it.

One concept that @akoleszar.bsky.social brought into our Senior Thesis workshop at Colgate has been breaking down writing into pebbles, cobbles, & boulders (see UW link). I use it for my projects, too! Got 5 minutes? Knock a pebble off your to-do

advance-resource-admin.engr.uw.edu/file/EKQe1pZ...

I mean, most patients are probably proficient at reading an unspecified, vaguely log-scale axis.

I couldn’t resist looking at the gage data. The Vance family bump is a small plateau on Aug 2. So it’s smaller than rainstorm related pulses on the river. But still a classic example of ruling class humans who are used to exerting their will over people trying to also rule nature. Earth dissents.

They're very cool! Fully lacustrine in origin? Or is there a glacial process involved (not just as a till source)?

This is a very rough cut. Next steps are reflectance processing with the calibration tarp and incorporation of concurrent hyperspectral data. Very high cadence imagery like this helps us figure out the water budget of these wetlands which are the incubators in which Antarctic soil is being born.

I sometimes think I did much of my best research in grad school and as a postdoc, which is also when I had the greatest commitment to post-lunch naps in a hammock strung across my cubicle. There may be other confounding factors, but I think the 20 minute power naps were key.

Even more fun--sand wedge polygons! Even though there's ice-cemented permafrost about 40 cm down, the active layer under these polygons is nearly dry, so the wedges are all winnowed sand and pebbles.

This is why I tell my students that “Geology is destiny.” Politicians often think they’re imposing their will on people, who are famously squishy. But if you want to explain why some policies or state actions work or don’t, the answer is often in the rock, soil, and water underlying those people.

I love Garamond, even if I recognize it as The Font of Borrowed Authority