UW Madison Geography, opinions are mine. Geomorphology, soils, dunes, loess, in the Midwest, Great Plains, northern China. He/him. Living on Ho-Chunk lands.
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⚒️ 🧪 A magnitude 6 earthquake struck northeastern Afghanistan just before midnight on August 31st. Vulnerable homes built of mud, brick, stone, and wood collapsed; the reported death toll has exceeded 800 people. Why do earthquakes occur here, what happened in this one, and why was it so deadly?
There was an Onion story about Bob Marley rising from the grave "to free frat boys from oppression" or something like that.
Regardless of whether grasslands in general are in trouble, a lot of people definitely do not realize how much grassland remains on the Great Plains (the I-80 through the Platte Valley effect, in part)
This is great reporting on what's happening in one county in western Nebraska, one where I've spent a lot of time, as people watch ICE raids and deportations in other places and expect it will get to Chase County sooner or later. So much better than NYT-style stories on rural places and politics.
from @forrest.nyc on linkedin www.linkedin.com/posts/mbforr... A year of Earth’s seasons, seen through the eyes of NASA’s PACE satellite. longer explanation in the next post
Information and a link to access the data with GEE scripts available here: www.linkedin.com/pulse/nasas-...
Yep
We are all doing this, might as well admit it.
Now they're getting fed clichés and hackneyed phrases by ever-present AI "helpers" instead of vaguely, often inaccurately, recalling them from something they read. Maybe younger teachers with more energy can use this, somehow, in turning students against the bots. I'm not that confident about it.
This may be a useful guide to typical AI style. But it may be even more useful in making it clear, this is just *bad writing* littered with clichés! That's always been one of the main ways writers lacking confidence/experience/good mentoring have gone wrong. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
Franco took a long time, too, but he's still dead decades later.
Yeah, their chanterelles are actually pfifferlinge
This wasn't one of the seven chanterelle-based dishes on the menu I was handed in Eisenach, Germany, last summer.
Despite the rapidly changing, and frankly, frightening situation, academics all over the US are spending time this holiday weekend carefully crafting letters of recommendation or review so they will be decoded in the desired ways.
Today is the National Disaster Prevention Day in Japan, commemorating the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama. Here is the ground displacements map after the EQ, which was of course made without GPS or InSAR... www.gsi.go.jp/kohokocho/ko...
The headline here is pretty extraordinary when you think about, and it would be even more so if a US media outlet used it, though it is 100% accurate. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
I check the bear hunting season, which can be fairly early in the fall, before going hiking. But a few years ago I heard bearhounds not far away that sounded like they were on the trail of something. Eventually decided they were training.
Also bear hunting with dogs, but I better not get started about that.
Deer baiting and feeding is currently prohibited in Wisconsin where CWD-positive deer have been found, but that's now most counties. dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/hunt/b.... Bear baiting still totally legal, though.
Map of colors produced from soil survey data using R packages including {aqp}, {soilDB}, and {terra}. The colors are aggregated across the component series included in each mapunit, so some the reddest colors are lost.
reddish brown colors are related to lithology of the bedrock, ranging from Archaean to Paleoproterozoic schist and Proterozoic quartzite to Cambrian sandstone. The reddest colors may be in remnants of a ancient weathering profile on the Precambrian rocks. 100 cm is in deep B horizons or saprolite.
Maps of soil color at 65 and 100 cm for the area around Lonely Rd. 65 cm is in B horizons, which range from very clay-rich to clay-poor. The variable colors reflect both drainage and bedrock lithology. Gray colors on the east side reflect poor drainage in that less dissected area. Brown and
A vast #DustStorm develops over the Surxondaryo Basin, funneled through valleys and lifted by #desert winds. The basin’s bowl-shaped terrain amplifies dispersion, sending plumes across #Uzbekistan, #Tajikistan, and #Afghanistan. Closer views show wave-like #dust fronts, a dense moving wall of sand.
almost intractable as a subject for quick and easily published research. So I worked on the Plains and the desert margin in China, with lots of "flat" landscapes but also lots of low-hanging fruit and I ended up loving those places too. Now how do I work this into an first-day class topic?
Preparing for what will most likely be the last time I teach my soil geomorphology course. I'm realizing that my goal all along--though never really achieved-- has been to study the soil geomorphology (and geomorphology in general) of places like Lonely Road, i.e. "flat" to most people, and
North Side Farmer's Market this morning.
I don't really want to argue with this, but www.estwing.com/shop/?filter...
Curious about which fields poast the most? Medicine / Social science / Environmental science / Biochemistry Note that these aren't corrected for field size, so love the strong showing from earth science too ⚒️🧪
Lonely Road, Wood County, Wisconsin. Shallow bedrock, flat, wet, poor farmland. Utterly fascinating and diverse soils. Soil map in SoilWeb: casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/gmap/?loc=44..., diagram created with AQP: ncss-tech.github.io/AQP/
Since you don't want to share your wealth with your fellow human beings who really need it, go ahead, keep burning it up.
The one place I still see predominantly cash transactions is at farmer's markets. Probably also drug deals, but I don't see many of those...
Well, not long ago you hardly ever saw people even try to pay with cards for purchases of less than, say $5. Now I see that a lot (and no surprise since you can pay vending machines and parking meters with a card). And that's probably irritating even if you're not that grumpy or old.
I mean I hardly see any cybertrucks here. A fair number of Teslas but not more that I see in other parts of the country.
I hardly see any in Madison. But other areas of the state think we're not really part of Wisconsin.
My favorite was one with a plate that said DUMPSTER
Not the way scientists usually think about it, they're more likely to think their science drives their politics.
have become more closely tied to general political views, mostly through highly effective work toward that end by the right. The best audience for good communication about science is probably people who are questioning their political beliefs (whether they know they're doing that yet or not).
I agree that we need better general-audience communication of scientific advances (and new ideas in history, etc., for that matter), in the media people are getting information from now (a huge challenge in itself). But I think the bigger problem is that views on science, medicine, history, etc.
It's true those developments are not covered well in any kind of media, but developments in medical science are covered and they get just as much scorn (and even bigger cuts in dollar amounts). Also lots of coverage of developments in some areas of biological science but they're attacked too.
Yes, marine clays with "quick clay" behavior.
Might have to do with him opposing US entry into WWI.
Not entirely a random thought.
A colleague in the Nebraska state survey, who grew up on the edge of the Sandhills, was very generous with his deep knowledge of Nebraska geology and landscapes. But he told me once that, seeing the whole Uinta Range out in front of him, he said "Why the hell did I spend all that time in Nebraska!?"
Today's sample is just... perfect! 🌲💍😍 Can't wait to find out which part of the Holocene it belongs to! 🧊⏳ #subfossil #glacier #Alps
I learned a lot from this one: www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p0...
Prairie people - does Andropogpn gerardii (Boy bluestem) get smut? I assume so but I’ve never seen this before
Probably there is a USGS document on standard water temp methods that explains this.
There are spikes in both directions. Not sure what the cause is but it looks like they're filtered out before calculating daily max and min.
Diurnal cycles of temperature in a small, shallow stream, across Lake Mendota from Madison, also with a decline in both min and max temperature in the past week.
Volumetric water content at Arlington is much higher, between 0.26 and 0.45, depending on the depth. More textbook behavior. But I like using real examples from places in Wisconsin more than textbook figures.
In a sandy soil at Hancock, daily cycles go deeper and are a bit larger amplitude near the surface (hard to tell with the change in scale). Volumetric water content (theta) here is mostly below 0.08 except for spike on Aug 18-19 because of rainfall, which explains smaller diurnal cycle those days.
Soil temperature responding down to at least 20 in. (51 cm). The soil at Arlington is silt loam, formed in loess > 1 m thick. Textbook soil temperature behavior.
This is what's happened all across Wisconsin in the last two weeks, and as usual I am surprised at how much difference it makes. Source: wisconet.wisc.edu/stations/arl...
My youngest, a freshman at my university, just got campus library job. I joked that I have an ILL book that’s three months overdue (which is true), and they straight up ratted me out. The library fuzz are now breathing down my neck. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, indeed. #academicsky
Foreign students are already getting squeezed in terms of how long they can stay in the US, and it's adversely restricting my PhD students. Cutting it to 4 years will eliminate many PhD opportunities for international students in the US & kill many PhD programs www.insidehighered.com/news/global/...
More #MinCup related content: www.miningjournal.net/sports/2024/...
Plus the Ishpeming, Michigan, high school teams are the Hematites. www.miningjournal.net/sports/local...
Nowadays it seems like I can't afford any hotel that has enough working, accessible outlets.
A camel-colored arc of dust, originating from the Sahara, is swept westward by strong winds toward the Canary Islands. As it advances, the plume breaks apart, disperses, and merges with swirling Von Kármán vortex streets, creating a striking interaction of dust and cloud dynamics.💨🌊🌀
Too provocative
And sanidine will knock out the only remaining mineral I care about in the first round.
I bet a lot of you out there are gloating over the fact that MinCup doesn't even include quartz or kaolinite this time.
I think it's the concluding unscientific postscript to Fear and Loathing
Pulled out that guidebook looking for something else.
Parts of Herb Wright's map of glacial landforms in central and NE Minnesota, for a field trip in 1956. Includes several drumlin fields, moraines (gray shade), and drainageways (some of which are tunnel channels). When I took glacial geology at U of MN, we met Herb at a gravel pit on the map at left.
Fires started on private lands and transmitted to public are more damaging than the reverse - relatively uncommon for destructive fires to start in public wildlands and spread to private communities. Fig 6 is esp striking. www.nature.com/articles/s41... HT @jaishrijuice.bsky.social for re-upping
Yes, and worth noting that Nature and Science need multiple reviewers who will respond quickly.
Within specific fields or subfields, there's often a roughly defined range of what's an appropriate claim. That isn't true for these papers where the claims are at least partly in an area outside the authors' expertise and experience.
I agree on the point about how these papers deal with causation. It's also true that natural scientists often disagree about what exactly is needed to establish causation and how to accurately describe results in that respect.
My perspective as a physical scientist, if that isn't clear.
I resisted putting "explaining" in quotes, because I do think paleoclimate is relevant to history and who knows, maybe the epidemiological analysis turned up something interesting. It's the implicit downplaying of the methods and all the work of historians that really bothers me in both cases.
That Nature paper using epidemiological methods to explain the Great Fear during the French Revolution is definitely reminiscent of papers explaining historical events using paleoclimate records.
"This interactive map explores five centuries of Indigenous histories on the land now known as Chicago. Stretching across time, it emphasizes that Chicago is, and has always been, an Indigenous place." (via Urban Archive)
One more point on this topic (like I said, I think about this a lot!): There were lots of trails and openings in these forests in the pre-colonial period. It makes sense that there are native graminoids that thrive in those settings. It seems important that many of them still do.
One of my favs from the Quilt National. BIG BARK SEASON.
When this is complete, you will be able to visit it and visualize how thick the loess of the last glaciation is across large areas in western Nebraska.
This is the clearest case in Wisconsin, but in general in the northern and central parts of the state, the moraines are high relief and hummocky, with a sharp break to the outwash plain.
His background is in tech industry, isn't it? Seems to have been really fertile ground for bogus health theories and eugenics. (Among top execs and VC people specifically).
Most of what I'm saying really applies to northern WI. Southern WI forests are a different story in terms of ubiquitous non-native shrubs, past history of grazing, etc. Also many were savanna or woodland in the recent past. Probably harder to distinguish specific effects of roads.
It's called glaciation. That's the outer moraine of the last glaciation with an outwash plain to the northwest.
along roads being an issue in specific places (sand plains, etc.) or during droughts, but it seems really hard to separate that from the fact that vehicles and people travel along those roads and are often the ignition sources.
is an obvious exception). There are also a lot of native sedges and rushes that really thrive in that trail/road setting if there isn't too much vehicle traffic. And big bluestem is not unusual in sunnier locations on old logging roads. I can see enhanced wildfire ignition because of the vegetation
Interesting paper. This is something I've thought about a lot walking the Ice Age Trail, which often follows old logging roads, ATV trails, etc. There are always a lot of non-native species along the roads and trails, although most don't spread farther into the woods (garlic mustard in southern WI
Colorful cottage built in 1873 for Henry Jenkins, who worked as a mold maker in an iron foundry
The single most important thing to understand about digital futurism is this: When the digital future that Sam Altman ( or Elon, or Andreessen, etc) predicts fails to materialize, he doesn’t have to give the money back.
Get breakfast with the steam coming out of the streets. In a big wool coat and a hat with ear flaps.
This winter I think I'll go see Duluth at 20 below again.
This is cutover land, bought from the US government for the timber, logged, then sold to farmers. Contrary to the well-known Cutover story, this farmland has never been abandoned. Big potato growing area. Glacial outwash with a loess cap. Source: maps.sco.wisc.edu/whaifinder/?...
Field size on the Antigo Flats, northern Wisconsin, in 1938, 1960, 1980, and 2022. Photos are only very roughly aligned with each, marker's in roughly the same place. For this place I could have sat down with the right person 30 years ago and learned something about the changes here. But I didn't.
I just cannot with arguments like “well he does have a point about artificial food dyes.” This isn’t “broken clock is right twice a day” territory, we are firmly in “lying clock is trying to hurt you and your loved ones 20 ways at once and shouldn’t have ever been anywhere near your house” territory
Also closely related: doi.org/10.1029/2017...
DEM produced with lidar point cloud from USGS via @OpenTopography. 3D animation is 540 frames generated with a script slowing shifting camera views on a 3D model in #rayshader. Here's one of a set of three interesting related papers on depression filling and spilling: doi.org/10.5194/esur...
(I saw beaver dams at the spill points of several depressions). Especially downstream of larger depressions, this spilling is an important component of landscape evolution and drainage network establishment. An old beaver dam at spill point of a large depression, damming upper end of a steep valley:
So here's my working model: Closed depressions left as stagnant ice melted out during the last deglaciation, often holding lakes or ponds, sometimes spill over the low point in their rim. Maybe in a wet year or after heavy rain. And maybe also when a beaver dam in an existing shallower outlet fails.
moves to a much larger incised valley that, what do you know, drains a large complex of closed depressions, holding both open water and wetlands. It's the incised valley (L) where I saw evidence of recent flooding including overbank flow down a trail producing a big scour hole.
Some diversion from whatever bad news comes out as I write this: A look at the eastern, recently glaciated part of the Blue Hills in northern Wisconsin. Full of closed depressions, but many of them with incised outlets where they've spilled in the past. This animation zooms in on examples, then...
I don't think most Americans could identify it by name or artist, but most could definitely tell what it's about and will have absorbed a lot of that one way or another.
🌊🧪On our Aleutians expedition, a 0300 onboard message got everyone out of their racks. We unintentionally mapped a MASSIVE landslide along a ridge line. Sent the initial data to USGS onshore SMEs- They were EXCITED. So, we backtracked a few kms to collect a suite of data. Here’s the product:
Yeah, I know, just irritated that they had to include the last part when the first part is fine. I'm actually bothered much more by the inconsistent mapping of loess even when it's thick and its properties have practical implications. But most of that problem is probably on the state surveys.
where the clearest connection is with impacts of glacial-interglacial climate change on non- or only partially glacial loess sources.