Cue the 2001 Space Odyssey theme! My Etsy Shop for Lawetlat’la tissue box covers is OPEN! Thanks for all the early interest! As a reminder this is a HOBBY for me so I’ll print more as I have time. Definitely look for a few new models this summer too!
Had a student send me their accommodations. I asked them if everything in 1st class had worked for them and if not how could I make it better? They just emailed and said it was the first time any professor in three years has asked them that, and that their mom wants to hug me.
Considering trying to document or experience Hilary remnants Sunday/Monday in Death Valley? Please let me dissuade you. August 5th of 2022, DV got a an all time record 1.7" in Furnace Creek resulting in these NPS images. Now imagine 2" minimum.
My family has been in Turlock multiple generations. I don’t recognize one person in these photos. I am however thoroughly disappointed by these
#DamnFools
in our town. I’m dedicated to teaching scientific reasoning to our students so this insanity is never repeated.
What a day! I just had the first Half Dome sighting from the end of my street in Turlock. About 72.5miles as the crow flies from the end of E Marshall St to peak of Half Dome. These modified Arctic air masses leave behind a great day or two of crystal clear conditions.
Volcano night in my EarthSci class at MJC tonight! This is the best pyroclastic density current (bubble model) that I’ve ever seen in my classes. Just glorious!
I was having a hard time reconciling finding Herkimer “diamonds” in limestone vugs until I found this awesome specimen rolling around like dice after cracking a rock.
I’m not telling folks what to do, but if it were me living anywhere near South Lake Tahoe I’d be gone tonight. I hope to hell there is a coordinated planning of evacuation happening, especially for folks in hospitals, those that can’t afford it.
Making progress
@janinekrippner
! Last few days have been a whirlwind of learning electronics and soldering. A kickstarter will be up soon after I finish design tweaks and legal stuff. This is still the prototyping piece. Final version will be single print w/clean inset font.
Well, there’s two and a half years of sacrifice down the drain. Kiddo is positive. It was our last test. So we’re all headed to get PCR now. Everyone else is asymptomatic. Which strongly points to school transmission. Fuckity, fuck fuck fuck. At least we’re all vaxxed/boosted.
Basin and Range detachment faulting model in the Death Valley Furnace Creek visitor center. Excellent model! The tilted corners are our mountain ranges (Panamints, Funeral Range, etc) and the low spots are our valleys (like Death Valley).
I’m about to cry happy tears because I teach enough units at one campus to get enrolled in healthcare. We currently pay $2200/mo out of pocket for a 70/30 policy. A better policy from same company is going to cost $70/mo out of pocket. Pinch me.
Scariest debris flows I’ve ever seen (Japan). I’m at a loss w/ the many unfathomable disasters this week. BBC reports 20 people missing after receiving month’s-worth of rain in 3 days. This is what climate change-exacerbated events look like.
Saw this cool phenomenon over BC. Small fire in glacially carved valley made smoke that hit an inversion and snaked around a fjord. Sunlight passed through smoke, with mostly longer red/orange wavelengths left to reflect off water and into my window!
Fuuuuuck You. I never use F-bombs on Twitter, but now is the time. I’m not going to sacrifice my parents for the economy you ignoble asshole. I want another 20yrs with them as we rebuild a green economy.
Finished! This ultramafic (olivine) xenolith from Arizona has been, by a wide margin, the most challenging photogrammetric model I’ve ever made. I am truly stoked with how it came out after a month of trial and error. Give it a spin yourself:
Let’s see some geology. Hard to fathom where we’re standing right now was once oceanic crust subducted 50+ miles deep and somehow popped back up to the surface.
1/ The washout of
#HWY1
at Rat Creek is really impressive, so I think I'd like to make a thread about things that I notice in pics & videos, then hypothesize on how the large rain event may have triggered this washout. TLDR I think the road was responsible for its own demise.
Check out this amazing drone video of
#Hwy1
washout at Rat Creek about 15 miles south of
#BigSur
. Our crews are on site securing it, assessing damage & starting clean-up/ repairs. Reminder: the road is OPEN from
#Carmel
thru town of Big Sur.
@bigsurkate
@BigSurCC
@CHP_Coastal
I would have never guessed in my wildest dreams that I'd be able to record volcanically-induced pressure waves in Turlock, CA from an eruption 5342mi away. The first graph is from my weather station, the second from my PurpleAir sensor. Took ~6.5hrs to arrive.
The article has THREE examples of universities drilling illegally and without common sense next to petroglyphs on the Volcanic Tablelands (Bishop Tuff). This is so goddamn galling.
Most any truck would get stuck in this snowy scenario, Cybertruck is no different.
Looking forward to seeing different tires on the truck and how it behaves.
Never did I ever expect to resign from the district I grew up in and then taught in for 18yrs. I planned on going until I was 65yrs old. But new great opportunities arose when others closed, and here we are.
I don't cry often, but they got me good tonight. I'm super proud of how hard my students worked this semester to make sense of (mostly) place-based Earth Science phenomena. Most will be teachers & I know *their* students will be in great hands.
#FilledMyBucket
I FINISHED! After 8000+ photos, nearly 3 weeks of constant attention and the invention of a totally new workflow, I am stoked to announce that 16 of
@StrainShadow
’s carved wooden geologic block models are now ready to be used in your virtual classes!
I am just so fucking numb and stunned. Don’t know whether to cry or scream. Tom was such an amazing and hilarious Twitter friend and IRL conference buddy. So smart. So nice. So thoughtful. I hurt for his family, colleagues and friends. I will miss his interactions immensely
A 70yr old “Farmers for Trump”-hat-wearing man in Costco gave me a long hard stare-down as I waited to grab my pancake mix. Guess he didn’t like my shirt.
Dammit, I am not pleased when my ideas shared with prospective collaborators (pending funding) get taken and implemented without my collaboration. AND finished project they had the audacity to share is not so good. God dammit, I feel robbed and embarrassed for that group.🤬😡
Drumroll, please! Here’s a very rough draft of 1.2 gigapixel photosphere of Golden Dome lava tube in Lava Beds Natl Monument. Take it for a spin and ZOOOOOOOOOM IN! (PS, it was hard to get lighting perfect).
It would be awesome if
@yosemitenps
actually addressed the situation by re-implementing reservations (honoring pre-existing hotel/camp,etc) and massively increasing shuttle capacity. via
@SFGate
Here’s the Monterey, CA tidal gauge clearly showing 2’+ tsunami pulse from the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption in Tonga. Red line is observed water level, blue is predicted tide. Subtracting the two gives us tsunami depth/height.
Holy shit. I thought this was bad CGI, or making a sarcastic joke about what the future holds. But no. It’s real. It’s happening right now. I’ve never seen anything like it. Where are the orcs??
We happened on a marmot today that was COMPLETELY asleep on a boulder of granodiorite near Deadman’s Curve (Blue Canyon) of Sonora Pass. It’s eyes were closed and it was just zonked. I got to within 5’ making sure it was OK, before it woke up and groomed itself.
A power outage at one plant caused the entire city water system to be placed under a Boil Water Notice? How are there no backup generators or redundancies? How did they even lose power in the first place???
A boil water notice has been issued for the City of Houston ‼️ Everyone should boil the water before drinking, cooking, bathing, and brushing their teeth.
More Information Below
Here’s Lassen
#1
. Might put a few extra supports on lettering, but otherwise, looks great in this Pyrite color! Keep an eye out for my Etsy shop (pinned tweet) as I’ll likely be selling another 20 or so boxes of Mt St Helens (Lawetlat’la) before I shift Lassen/Olympus Mons.
I here’s a sneak peak at a new peak for my ongoing tissue box cover designs spree.. I think
@eruptionsblog
might be interested in this one :-) coming to my Etsy store soon!
This was the most beautiful place on Earth that I’ve visited in the last year: Lyell Fork or the Tuolumne River. Its waters sustains my community... and San Francisco. We must continue to protect our natural capital & the ecosystem services it provides.
#EarthDay2021
Daily Moment of Zen: hit a nice methane pocket in this northern pecan tree along the Upper Mississippi River. If you're coring trees in a bottomland forest, carry a lighter!
To the 80% of folks wearing masks in Costco today, thank you for the bottom of my heart. To the other 20%, including several employees, a former school board president, and a former colleague/science teacher that decided community safety means nothing, it’s hard to like you.
Let me share one of the 3D scans I made yesterday since I have a short blip of cell service.
Ventifact on the hike to the contact between Kingston Peak drop stones and Beck Springs Dolomite.
Normally, when we hike up McGee Canyon I’d wax poetic in my threads about the metamorphic roof pendants, glacial sculpting of the canyon, awesome faults and fall colors. Not today. Today is about flowers and snow.
Hey everyone, please help me wish
@Xeno_lith
a very happy birthday!! We still don’t want to have parties due to covid, but let’s make her milestone 50th bday twitter-awesome. She’s such a great person, mom, partner and teacher. We love her to pieces!
On this day *checks notes* fourteen years ago (?!), a certain
@Xeno_lith
and I figured we should be lifetime partners in love and sciencing. It was a great day. A very hot day, but a great day. Love ya! She still puts up with me :-).
Please enjoy this 35 seconds of autumn peace this morning along Rush Creek near Grant Lake, CA. It was a spectacular day even though many mountain passes were closed due to yesterday’s snow.
The
#cdcrecommends
hashtag makes me sad b/c so much credibility has (deservedly) been lost. I feel so bad for career scientists/ public health /scicom folks that must be screaming into the void knowing it’s going to be years (decades?) before trust is restored.
I just had an intense & interesting thing happen. And it hit hard. Just around a month ago
@Xeno_lith
& I hung this 3x5 flag in our large front window. It expresses our ideology well. We hoped that others that felt this way would know they have friends in our neighborhood. 1/
Ok, so this is a bunk prototype that I’m using to test out different wiring configurations and lighting angles. Waiting on motion sensor, but I think this angle will work! I promise once I’m happy w/it I’ll look into ways to sell it.
Hard to believe that 33yrs ago today (at a bit past 5pm) Hank Greenwald’s voice suddenly cut-out on the radio as I finished 6th grade math HW. ~30sec later I watched my mom’s spaghetti sauce fly off the stove. Ran outside and watched waves undulate down our street. Loma Prieta 🤯
Cherry sap soaking up the sun. This is a 60yr+ bing tree in my parents’ back yard. Nearing its last legs, I think. But what a cool moment to have with it this afternoon.
Well… quite a family party. Confronted a racist piece of shit for saying a racist piece of shit thing and then had a 2hr conversation with someone skeptical of climate science and perhaps started to reshape her thinking, but totally hooked her adult son who asked great Q’s.
25yrs ago tonight I graduated from Turlock High. I’ve since spent 14yrs teaching science at Turlock High & 3yrs as
@TurlockUSD
science coach. Today I said goodbye to my heart & soul. Moving on to “full time” uni adjunct roles and consulting. The ginkgo will always be “my” tree.
It’s pretty cool that California has a huge fertile valley nestled away between the inhospitable, dry mountains
I imagine that this oasis must be the most desirable place to live in the state
Last week I had 2nd graders explore how volcanoes can change landscapes. I recreated the famous
@usgs
flour and balloon caldera model By letting air out, but Z wanted to experiment with an exploding magma chamber today:
Roads will be impassible. There is no cell service. There is no food. Please don't go unless you are a professional that HAS to be in the area. This will definitely be unprecedented. But don't strain the already limited resources out there by being in the area.
In my intro ES classes, I *always* use my own igneous rocks for ID practice. Now that we’re in person, I put each sample on a placemat with a pic of where it came from & QR codes to open a 360 street view of the area. Can’t interpret a *story* w/o context IMO.