Again, muting a particular set of words makes reading the skeets that make it through even more fun when you attempt to understand the world.
Professor @ Denison University / Volcanologist / Writer of Eruptions / Baseball, Sumo, Cricket, Soccer fan / Sci Fi aficionado / Amateur Musicologist / Cat person / Dad / Be kind to your bad self. 🇨🇴
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Again, muting a particular set of words makes reading the skeets that make it through even more fun when you attempt to understand the world.
Hey look, new eruption at KÄ«lauea! Return of the "inclined fountain". www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiyt...
See, you make me feel better about the projects that have taken/continue to take years -- mostly for the better.
"Move fast and break things" but the things are kids and the people allowing tech bros to break them are educators.
If you can believe it, a new newsletter will be out tomorrow! If you're not subscribed to Eruptions, you can do that now. Maybe even sooner than now. eruptions.beehiiv.com/subscribe
I have a lot of REM opinions.
Best REM albums you say? 1. Green 2. Automatic for the People 3. Monster 4. Out of Time 5. Document/No.5
If you are truly curious, the top 5 is: 1. Let Me In 2. You are the Everything 3. Country Feedback 4. Leave 5. It's the End of the World as We Know It
Ok, so, here's the deal. I stand outside consensus when it comes to REM. Their best song is "Let Me In". And it isn't even close.
This is not a drill. Boojums album is out at the end of October. Prepare accordingly. youtu.be/nqw5klQ9IDo?...
GenX? Accumulating wealth? Clearly you don't know many GenXers.
AI's best use case will always be scams. It's scamtech, top to bottom. Everything about it is crooked. Its bedrock is theft and its legacy is the destruction of the environment, both physical and virtual. Even most of its 'legitimate' uses are a form of lying. "I wrote this." "I created this."
Keep on being amazed by this Seastar S30. Some images from tonight. If you're into this sort of thing, we live with a Bortle ~5.7 sky here in Granville.
By my count, looking at FlightRadar24 there are at least 2 dozen private jets lined up to take off and another equal amount that have already departed Columbus after the OSU-Texas football game. Real working man's sport, college football is.
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
Excited for the Buckeyes I see!
What's this? A *daily* volcanic activity and unrest list on the Global Volcanism Program? volcano.si.edu/reports_dail...
Second day of classes energy.
Star Wars? See, its about this kid who is not very good at dirt farming ...
Weird, I got the email saying reg was open, but not anything about the changes.
Today's energy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEl1...
A new school year begins tomorrow.
Please close the internet, we will never top this.
Also, that poll is close to meaningless.
Remember, Indiana voted for Obama. Now it is so red. Bleeds over to Ohio while West Virginia creeps northward. Bitter, bitter men, mostly.
You'd like the biggest bribery scandal in state history would have done it. Or Les Wexner. Or any number of things that 15 years ago would have turned people. But here we are.
Boomers and their many kids. People have so many kids in Ohio, especially the white Christians conservatives.
Honestly, the state is getting very old fast and have shut down any D resistance so thoroughly by unethical means, it is like Tammany Hall level governance for the right.
Old, white, rural racists.
We made it [checks notes] 3 days into the new school year before one of our kids had to stay home sick.
Maybe you've heard this before (I hadn't), but this is a nifty little story about being stuck in the ocean off Half Moon Bay in a kayak when a tsunami struck in 1992: explorersweb.com/how-i-surfed...
Rock Looked Way Cooler Wet
True enough! Slitheen then?
No, not the Master. He doesn’t have one hundredth the charm or intelligence. He’s turning into Davros.
Similarly, the AI boom has forced teachers who actually care about student learning to radically reconfigure their classes in order to disincentivize students from using the cheating machines they now have easy access to and which systemically undermine student learning. No one asked for this.
I love our town fair day, but there's always one violent idiot who has to ruin it for everyone, trundling around making threats.
This new storymap of the M8.8 Kamchatka Peninsula Earthquake by the USGS is EXCELLENT and will be of great use to anyone teaching classes that involve quakes or tectonics. ⚒️ earthquake.usgs.gov/storymap/ind...
This They Might Be Giants TONIGHT SHOW performance of "Birdhouse In Your Soul" from 1990 remains firmly lodged in my noggin thanks to the Tonight Show Band's full commitment and Doc Severinsen's incredible trumpeting... It took an already great song and made it transcendent.
Just in time for the weekend, it's a new eruption at KÄ«lauea: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqmp...
I love synergy.
The best thing about skeets like this is I honestly *have no clue* what it means or what it is referencing in the news, but it is wonderful anyway.
Shared on behalf of the USGS: HVO Volcano Watch for August 21, 2025 #volcano #earthscience #geology "Fringes and fractures for episode 30" www.usgs.gov/observatorie...
I’m imagining Jhostynxon Rzepczynski. That’s straight up Star Trek.
Well, that sucks.
"Leverage the dystopia".
I often find myself saying "what a time to be alive" but friends, today, defector.com/it-took-many...
I'm doomed.
Feels necessary (and a little depressing) that I include this statement in my syllabus:
Not only is the semester starting soon, but I've been trying to finish a big project over the past few weeks. Sorry about the lack of newsletter and podcast, but they will both be back soon!
So, that seems a little extreme, but possible? When I do zircon mounts of grains that are ~50-100 micron, I use a polished metal dental pick that the static charge allows the grain to stick. However, there are lots of different methods.
Hi all! I'm Erik, a volcanologist, science writer & prof at a liberal arts college. I love researching what happens inside a volcano before/during/after an eruption. I also love connecting disciplines - the liberal arts! I have a newsletter (eruptions.beehiiv.com) & a podcast (5mv.buzzsprout.com)
We're a week out from the start of classes here at Denison University. I wanted to welcome our two new faculty in Earth and Env. Sciences: Dr. Tyler Grambling (@crustalrheology.bsky.social‬) and Dr. Stacy Porter (@iceicestacy.bsky.social‬). We're thrilled to have them!
With a single, straight line I give you MLB realignment. Put a team in Charlotte and one in Salt Lake City and it still works.
For all these baseball realignment plans, I give you this: Denver is 888 miles from Kansas City, ~1,000 miles from Dallas ... and 1,500 miles from its nearest "Pacific Coast" neighbour, San Francisco. Why is Denver always lumped "out west"? This isn't 1850.
(I used to be a music critic. I contain multitudes.)
Remember all the way last week when I posted my top 500 songs of the 21st century? Well, that list was flawed. So, I present you with a new list/playlist. Back to writing about volcanoes now that I got this out of my system. intellectualthicket.wordpress.com/2025/08/18/t...
#Etna 's new lava flow is slowly advancing down the southeast flank of the volcano (currently at about 2400 m elevation), and is accompanied by mild Strombolian activity at the Southeast Crater. Photos taken from Nicolosi, on Etna's south flank, on the evening of 16 August 2025
A couple unlucky missed areas, but this is an animated GIF of Terra/MODIS images showing Hurricane Erin spin up from 8/12-8/16.
There is a lot in both this song and video that captures life (sensu lato) right now. youtu.be/FRD0W2-tr64?...
Hurricane Erin went from Category 1 to Category 4 in 15 hours Y'all. That's well beyond our definition of rapid intensification. My update on the hurricane. It may not be done strengthening yet. Where is it going and how strong will it get? www.forbes.com/sites/marsha... --
A point I make in the article. With recent storms, the typical 3 day threshold is outdated for planning and decisions. Rapid intensification and hyper cases like this will need a new playbook
This Air Force Hurricane Hunter pass sealed it. Erin now officially a 160 mph Category 5 hurricane with a 917 mb pressure. Incredible for any time of year, let alone August 16th.
This morning's magnitude 5.6 earthquake is the largest to have occurred in southeast Queensland since the magnitude 5.6 earthquake off Fraser Island in 2015. The Fraser Is quake was followed by magnitude 5.4 and 5.2 aftershocks in the following days, a reminder that further large events are possible
Rush -> Queensrÿche -> Muse -> ? … right?
Maybe what we really need is GenAI that talks smack if you ask it dumb questions. "Why are you bothering me with this? Look it up in a book."
One thing that bugs me here is that they would rather get advice from a machine than other humans with experience. I think it betrays the lack of ability to communicate with people they perceive as "elders"? Or something like that. Long and short: LLM doesn't pass judgement.
In which I bellow at atmospheric phenomena over the latest boggling citation of LLMs: chadorzel.substack.com/p/apres-le-d...
As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...
Built to Contain Stuff
Ha ha ha ... 300 foot tsunami. Somebody doesn't know (a) what that means and (b) what kind of energy would be needed to make that. Anyway, feel free to email me (denison.edu/people/erik-...)
I wrote this back in the day for Jeff Sullivan: www.lookoutlanding.com/2012/9/17/33...
Oh jeez, I just saw the previous comment. You have much less to fear from the Cascades than visiting, I don't know, any place on Earth where humans live. Heck, tornadoes in the Midwest are a much bigger threat than the earthquakes or volcanoes in the Cascades.
Yes! Hit me up!
There are few worse moments of dread than that of feeling a sneeze coming on while holding a cup of coffee.
#Etna #volcano update - A new lava flow erupted from a small vent at the southern base of the summit craters a few days ago. It is emerging from the area between Bocca Nuova and the South-East crater and slowly moving downslope at an altitude of approx. 3,000-3,100 m. The activity began Saturday...
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/15460...
Quabbin Reservoir is one of the largest unfiltered drinking water supplies in the United States. It supplies water to nearly 2.7 million people in the Greater Boston area, as well as three towns in Western Massachusetts 🧪
the intensity of my anger at those who would criminalize the homeless — a population literally created by the greed and callousness of the ruling class — is very hard to contain. it was you who dismantled the safety net. if you don’t like the results, put it back
Marshall’s posts are always worth a read.
So, what’s the deal with *all* the museums in town being closed on Mondays?
"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people
Our current Airbnb has the following check out instructions: “make sure to secure the T Rex’s jaw”.
I spent much of today in a caldera. Can you guess which one?
Want to know about the recent eruptions in Russia? Or climate impacts of volcanoes? Or my thoughts on the AL Rookie of the Year? Or Stargate’s Rodney McKay as a science communicator? Check out the latest Eruptions newsletter eruptions.beehiiv.com/p/eruptions-...
Palette cleanse
Are we having more earthquakes (or more volcanic eruptions) than normal? Nope. I explain in this short article. wendybohon.com/2023/04/15/a...
I still feel like the Blue Scholars have always been wildly under appreciated. youtu.be/bSNzxgcSbj0?...
Arm waving on my part, but it would be interesting to know how many eruptions had magma involved and how many may have been steam-driven. Lots of hydrothermal systems perturbed thanks to the earthquake.
Seven volcanoes wake up in Russia’s Kamchatka after powerful quake! The scientists of the Volcanology and Seismology Institute of Russia’s Academy of Science said it was the first time the mass awakening had happened for the first time in 300 years. apnews.com/video/seven-...
It is.
I mean, if you have kids who had lunch at school at 10:45 am (it happens) then 6 pm is late for dinner.
Volcanic Ash Advisory (#VAAC) for #Krasheninnikov #volcano (Kamchatka, Russia) Explosive activity continues. Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (#VAAC) #Tokyo warned about a volcanic ash plume that rose up to estimated 20000 ft (6100 m) altitude or flight level 200 and is moving at 30 kts in SE direction.
Your plastic pal who is fun to be with.
Welcome to New Mexico. Well, welcome me to New Mexico.
Do you want to read the special mailbag edition of the Eruptions Newsletter next week? Then you should subscribe! It's going to be great. I think. eruptions.beehiiv.com/subscribe
One thing to bear in mind when it comes to this new Krasheninnikov eruption: the volcano was functionally not monitored. No seismometers, webcams, etc. We have no idea at this point if it was showing any signs of restlessness prior to the M8.8 earthquake.
See, now this is interesting! Krasheninnikov in Kamchatka erupted Sunday for the first time in possibly 500 years. Whether or not the eruption might be linked to the M8.8 earthquake will take some work to figure out: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/w...
Did he switch sides of the plate after the ball was pitched?