Not to be crassly opportunistic, but if you’re genuinely curious about how there came to be an ocean of fossil fuels in the crust, why humans now emit 100x more CO2 than all volcanoes on earth, and want to begin that story 4 billion years ago, might I recommend www.harpercollins.com/products/the...
At lab group today we took the lab sled out for a spin. We pioneered a new never-before-attempted sled run beyond the air handlers …
Um, there was some really big hail during this most recent blizzard…
This one hatched
Sculpture outside museum
Basalt on a sidewalk
Columnar basalts deserve their own footnote in art history… they crop out often (or maybe I am just attuned to them). Eg
1) Isamu Noguchi’s Unidentified Object @metmuseum.org
2) part of Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks on 22nd street, with some recent snow
@agu.org has a tool to help you submit a comment to NSF on the importance of NCAR: agu.quorum.us/campaign/154...
#SaveNCAR
NCAR is an amazing place that demonstrates what can be accomplished—from the climate of the past to forecasting—with depth of expertise and long term, coordinated effort.
I called my representatives. You should too—AGU makes it easy!
agu.quorum.us/campaign/151...
Interesting point in the editorial. They say: “A good peer-reviewer should be responsible and reliable. He/she should (1) accept promptly an invitation, (2) not turn down any invitation for review…”
I agree with most of their points. But never turning down an invite? That’s a heavy lift… thoughts?
It really helps me just to start by reading what I have written already. Sometimes the day before I plan to spend some time writing so that ideas can settle and grow
Cowboy and sidekick herding cattle off the road and into the frenchglen corral. Mooo
Rocky canyon with sunlit flats
Pre-Steens rhyolites with the Alvord Desert in the background
Just for your eyes to feel better
What is better than pet photos?
You know the answer is a praying mantis on a rock hammer
Columbia River Basalts in the background
Highly recommend this essay, which underscores the risks posed by under-the-radar volcanoes
Photos or it didn’t happen!
The world has so much to learn from Norwegians about the critical importance of saunas.
(did you guess that I would end the sentence with that word?)
Here is a nice sauna overlooking the harbor in Storekorsnes. Spotted while waiting for a ferry transfer back to Alta.
These are cloudberries (with a gabbro intrusion cutting metasedimentary rocks in the background).
Cloudberries have a short Arctic growing season and have twice as much vitamin C as an orange by weight.
Rocks
Rocks
Rocks
I will just put these photos here without much comment beyond wow this is a nice place
One way to judge how fresh a rock is: the sound it makes when the 4.5 kilo sledge lands on it
(Wielding the hammer: Ben Klein)
There were a lot of mosquitoes and biting flies in Siberia. But Norway may have Siberia beat for the sheer diversity of biters… a very heterogeneous mix of small biting flies, giant biting flies, and mosquitoes.
All living their best lives
We climbed through a remote Norwegian valley on a reindeer path, and you’ll never guess what we saw next…
It was a cliff of hornblendite and carbonatite!
We have been discussing the extent to which this place could be analogous to the plumbing system beneath that place (guessing you are thinking of Ol Doinyo Lengai?)
Yesterday we were working near a mine. We thought maybe mining the carbonatites because they are one of the major sources of rare earth elements.
But actually they were mining the nephrite syenite to make porcelain! Just a reminder that we use rocks for all kinds of things. Rocks->teacups
Tomorrow we will try a new way to reach the interior of the island and then meet the boat on the other side. There are some bugs… but the geology is very exciting!
First cell reception after two great field days! We are looking at an enormous magmatic system at 5-10 kbar pressure (mid to lower crust). Very volatile rich, including carbonatites (inaccesible today due to snow). Big thank you to @fredrhog.bsky.social for sharing some nice NGU maps of the area.
Quick run around Alta in the morning. Tons of wildflowers on the streets. Some old classic wooden houses…. Plus lots of buildings that feel like bunkers against the winter months
Made it to Alta! Some photos from the flight in. It is 11 PM and the sunlight is golden.
Tomorrow we meet up with colleagues from Uni of Lausanne to take a boat out to the rocks
The compare/contrast between Denmark and Norway—photos taken just a few minutes apart across the Skagerrak strait—is stark. Sand vs rock. Next: the journey 1500 km north, to the Arctic
How do others feel about packing for field work? I don’t especially enjoy normal packing, but there is a pleasure in trying to imagine a future moment on an unknown mountain, and what you might wish for in that moment—and then later, with luck, being on the mountain and having just what you need
Leaving for field work tomorrow with a team heading to northern Norway to explore the exhumed remnants of a very large mafic magmatic system—possibly the lower crustal roots of an Ediacaran large igneous province! I don’t know if I will have any internet, but if so I will try to tweet along the way…
I see we are talking about ROSES-2025 and Mike Wong’s analysis (which implies a dismal 5% funding rate for solar system science).
I will say, as depressing as the NASA funding outlook is, I appreciate these nice visualizations of that depressing funding.
research.ssl.berkeley.edu/~mikewong/bl...
Hi Goldschmidt! Catch my Berner Lecture at 2.30 today!
