Really enjoyed @patrickwyman.bsky.social's latest. Societies endlessly rise and fall over the millennia, as the climate and ecosystems shift, and people either collectively adapt or don't. We're way too complacent about the indefinite durability of our society and way of life. Also RIPs to the LBK

Honestly didn't know the scale went this high

Quebec must be the world capital of google maps-able craters, from the weirdly unrelated Ordovician and Permian Clearwater lakes craters, to the truly massive Triassic Manicuoagan crater

This guy is now in charge of the US National Climate Assessment

Interesting move being the governor of Louisiana and deciding to drown New Orleans to "save" $3 billion. (LECZ=low-elevation coastal zone) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Everyone's attributing this to AI but it's also possible to just be super sloppy, reminds me of a Times classic.

It's based in part on Robert Berner's Rock-Abundance model (which also does predict very high O2 in the early Permian), and the widespread fossil record of (very shiny) charcoal in the everwet tropics of the Carboniferous. From George McGhee's "Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction"

Happy publication to my friend @stevebrusatte.bsky.social, who wrote a fantastic and sweeping evolutionary history of birds! A great gift for the theropod-head in your life

Pictured: my butt cheeks spanning 1.5 billion years across The Great Unconformity

Tracked down a couple recent Scientific Americans in which I have a weird feature on how far into the future you could possibly send a time capsule, as well as a cool spread on my new-ish book (complete with actual photograph of me holding a giant CO2 molecule) pls read at your convenience thx

Thanks! Yeah, the creation of organic carbon by photosynthesis creates oxygen but unless that OC gets buried O2 won't accumulate in the atmosphere because the OC will just be respired/oxidized again, using it up, unless the OC is buried and shielded from surface, or as Shanan Peters put it better

Behold, the biggest point source of CO2 outside humanity, the volcanic system of Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira in the DRC, which emits an astonishing 16 thousand tons of CO2 a day (we emit over 100 million tons a day)

Thomas Friedman-level mixed metaphor achievement unlocked. Hate politicizing the bathwater while coming home to roost as a chicken that overeggs my pudding

ha, whaat? It wasn't my impression that Cambrian schist makes for very good petroleum source rock

This line, that it's everyone's fault, is also indistinguishable from the oil industry's own legal defense

Here's what I wrote about oil shocks in my new-ish book (that also talks about Snowball Earth and the end-Permian mass extinction if you're into that sort of thing)

New Orleans, this afternoon👇🏻

Good (very short) book for understanding why everything got weird and bad

wrote about the Strait of Hormuz in my new book

Maybe a stupid question but is there a reason Claude AI went with Kurt Vonnegut’s drawing of an asshole from Breakfast of Champions for its logo?

At lower elevations this clay layer stands out (as in the picture above, and at the base of the mountains looming over Cortina), but at altitude this more erodible layer of rock reveals itself as a dramatic break, high in the mountains. (As here in Pordoi Pass)

I was lucky enough to tag along with Italian geologists studying this event, which you can see in the rocks as they switch from the signature offshore carbonate rocks of the Dolomites, to a thin, curious million-year-long shock of red clays that mark the planet destabilizing.

Not really a thread guy but an interesting thing about the mountains around Cortina and throughout the Italian Alps is that they’re fundamentally shaped by global warming, only it happened 234 million years ago

Deeply ashamed to live in a country where tweeting this isn’t instant career suicide

I really do hate that people who are geological illiterate keep pointing to records compiled by paleoclimatologists to downplay climate change because, if anything, the lessons of deep time only emphasize how extraordinary and unprecedented the rate of modern warming is.

I mean, depending on how big the universe is, things start getting pretty silly if you go far away enough

Some great book recs from @powells.bsky.social 👀

Any prospective government shutdown should not end until and unless this ghoul is removed from public life