Indifference to process is a pretty good indicator that you don’t truly care about the quality of your output - especially if that output is “facts”.

Volcanoes Send Tiny Warning Signals Before Eruptions. These Scientists Are Decoding Them The team behind

Authors admit this in this interview, which is what led me to the paper (and, for me, does a better job of explaining why eruption forecasting is so difficult than it does of explaining the study)

But volcanic plumbing is complex, so it remains to be seen whether this "jerk" is a reliable precursor signal generally, or it just works for this particular volcano.

Focussing on a single kind of seismic signal to trigger an alert contrasts with the usual method of volcano warning, which tries to integrate a variety of different observations (seismic, gas emissions, tiltmeters etc.).

Jerk, a promising tool for early warning of volcanic eruptions - Nature Communications Authors use subtle ground movements systematically associated with magma injections to develop an automatic alarm system. The ‘Jerk’ tool has been tested in real time at Piton de la Fournaise volcano ...

⚒️🧪 Just for a single 🌋, but interesting: a horizontal "jerk" seismic signal - caused by fractures opening as magma in a shallow reservoir intrudes into overlying rock - was observed a few minutes to a few hours prior to an eruption at Piton de la Fournaise 92% of the time over a 10 year period.

A black and white photo of a row Victorian houses tilted at odd angles presumably due to liquefaction, labeled “Peculiar Effects of Earthquake”

A ghostly black and white photo of people and a cart walking down a street where the buildings are all damaged and some just have the facades standing, labeled “California Street”

A black and white photograph of the burned-out shell of San Francisco city hall with the dome still mostly intact, labeled “City Hall”

A black and white photo of people and makeshift shelters in the earthquake and fire-damaged city, labeled “Refugee Camp”

It’s April 18th, so time to repost some of my great-grandfather’s photos of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake

Lots of Vermont farmers are using injection nowadays, I was told. Not sure whether that improves the smell, though!

Elevated view across a flat agricultural landscape in the foreground, a narrow lake running left to right across the picture in the middleground, and ranges of mountains on the far side of the lake in the background. Under a blue sky, the lake is also blue and sparkling, except where light brownish plumes of suspending sediment can be seen extending into the lake from the near shore, marking the location of rivers carrying water full of run-off from recent heavy rains.

A sunny day after a rainy week means our local Lake Champlain view has bonus sediment plumes! ⚒️

(which are probably, unfortunately, packed with phosphorous from agricultural run-off)

“In order to prevent the dire consequences of this ethically terrible thing we are currently doing, you must let us do this even more ethically terrible thing!” is quite the pitch.

Of course, in this case AI doomerism is just a convenient justification for a much longer-term obsession.

We already KNOW how to make super babies, you eugenicist creeps! And it's all the things you fucking fucks are fucking up! THREAD!

It continues to be shocking how few of the top leadership positions at FEMA are filled right now.

According to their website (which says it was last updated yesterday, despite the bizarre shutdown situation) FEMA does not have an administrator, deputy administrator or a deputy chief of staff.

Bar chart of verified outbound daily ship passages through the Strait of Hormuz from early February through mid-April. Until early March, about 150 ships a day were leaving the Persian Gulf through the Strait. Since then, verified passages have mostly been in the single digits, peaking in the low teens. The choke point has been choked the whole time. Image source: https://hormuztracking.com

Can you close what was never actually reopened?

Someone needs to make a version of this chart with a timeline of the grand pronouncements about the status of Hormuz made in the last few weeks.

While oil futures zip down on every ‘opening’, actual oil throughput seems...a lot less responsive.

Not totally sure if my instant love of this visual is because it is a really clear illustration, or because it looks like it belongs on Star Trek: TNG.

Probably both.

Somebody is trolling somebody here.

It’s this or recognise the unions.

This is fabulous.

@drspacejunk.bsky.social’s comments on the poorly known and probably irreversible impacts of mining on the moon (not to mention the sovereignty issues and the involvement of dipshit billionaires) are also very reminiscent of the concerns/debate about seafloor mining.

Annandale distillery claims 'world first' in bid to produce low-carbon whisky Annandale Distillery claims it is the first to use a new environmentally-friendly way of producing heat to make whisky.

Heat batteries delivering up to 1,200C using off peak electricity:

A Scottish whisky distillery just claimed a world first — producing high-temperature steam for distilling using stored green electricity instead of fossil fuels.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

They want to eliminate Ecosystems research.
Cut Natural Hazards funding by a third.
Cut Water Resources funding by a fifth.

And if you think they might care about the finding and digging things out of the ground part of geology, apparently not since they want to cut Core Science Systems by 43%.

‘It’s just madness’: Trump administration to close three-quarters of Forest Service research stations Between funding cuts, facility closures, and the inevitable resignations that will follow, there’s virtually no way for the Forest Service to continue to do research at its current level or quality, w...

My big takeaway from reporting this story is that it's not JUST about the Forest Service.

The closure of these stations threatens to upend a delicate system of mutually beneficial collaboration and resource sharing, and the impacts will ripple out far beyond the Forest Service itself.

“maternal health? Nah.” *shrug*

I genuinely do not think I could read the whole book without expiring from rage.

And you just know that this entire administration has just been full of meetings just like this.

I was thinking just yesterday how the Wayback Machine was perhaps more vital than ever, as a record of online content uncontaminated by AI slop.

So of course it’s under threat.

I (almost) did feel that one! It remains my closest encounter with an earthquake.

all-geo.org/highlyalloch...

Holy shit. I had always thought that their mistake was assuming a local M8 event (and half-assing that).

When I stayed on the coast 10 years back, I was a little taken aback when the evacuation map on the fridge (good) marked what were obviously just a ridge of dunes in green (???!!!)

When you know what’s lying off shore, that whole coast just gives you the heebie-jeebies.

On one hand, I'm skeptical about the safety and effectiveness of vertical evacuation structures. On the other, if I was at the coast, and an urgent warning was issued, I'd sure as hell want one to be there rather than not. ⚒️

With drones, geophysics and artificial intelligence, researchers prepare to do battle against land mines When Jasper Baur was a freshman at New York's Binghamton University, his interests centered on earth sciences. Then he got involved in a seemingly unrelated pursuit: harnessing drone-mounted geophysical instruments to aid in the slow, dangerous work of detecting land mines.

Mine detection using drone mounted geophysical sensors and machine learning: it seems like there is still some work to do for this to be an actual thing, but looks promising! ⚒️

(Also lots of info about mine design and distribution that make you despair for humanity)

Slowly letting out the breath I’ve been holding since April 1st.

But DM, how can we judge people if they’re not making bad life choices that we can then make worse?

Holy smokes! An incredible start to the 'Wildfire Season' in the US this year - owing to an abnormally hot and snowless winter in some parts of the country.

A white bike lane line right-laterally offset by a few cms with a slight warp in asphalt extending left to right across the image which is the expression of active fault creep.

An offset curb at the lower part of the image and some left stepping cracks in pavement extending across a parking lot that shows the effects of fault creep at the surface.

A concrete curb with a brick sidewalk right-laterally offset by a few centimeters by creep along the Maacama fault in Willits, CA

I’m fascinated by creeping faults and this week I finally got to visit some examples of fault creep along the Maacama fault in Willits, CA with @drwendyrocks.bsky.social