This is a really good point for those of you writing comments to OMB on the harm of the proposed funding rules changes. Make it specific, make it count! Avoid form letters, which can be batched.

TK (Takashi DY) Kozai@bioniclab.bsky.social · 2mo ago

OMB must answer substantive comments. It can batch and dismiss form letters. So make yours impossible to average away: "[200.340] I'm in year 3 of a 5-year PhD funded by an R01. This rule means my advisor's grant can end before I defend." One section. One fact. One consequence.

This seems like a great thread and links to a useful primer on how to comment on the proposed changes to grant funding.

Mark Peifer (He, him)@peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Russell Vought, Director of the OMB, has issued a set of proposed changes that would dramatically alter federal grant funding. However, we can each take action to prevent these from taking effect. Here's how, a 🧵 🧪 1/n www.science.org/content/arti...

Not to be crassly opportunistic, but if you’re genuinely curious about how there came to be an ocean of fossil fuels in the crust, why humans now emit 100x more CO2 than all volcanoes on earth, and want to begin that story 4 billion years ago, might I recommend www.harpercollins.com/products/the...

The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything

"Ambitious, absorbing… Brannen is an effusive, maximalist writer, a mind vividly alive on the page… and his arguments, like his writing, are hugely com...

harpercollins.com

At lab group today we took the lab sled out for a spin. We pioneered a new never-before-attempted sled run beyond the air handlers …

Um, there was some really big hail during this most recent blizzard… This one hatched

Columnar basalts deserve their own footnote in art history… they crop out often (or maybe I am just attuned to them). Eg 1) Isamu Noguchi’s Unidentified Object @metmuseum.org 2) part of Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks on 22nd street, with some recent snow

@agu.org has a tool to help you submit a comment to NSF on the importance of NCAR: agu.quorum.us/campaign/154... #SaveNCAR

Share your comments on NCAR with NSF

Tell NSF the future that you want for NCAR by 13 March

agu.quorum.us

NCAR is an amazing place that demonstrates what can be accomplished—from the climate of the past to forecasting—with depth of expertise and long term, coordinated effort. I called my representatives. You should too—AGU makes it easy! agu.quorum.us/campaign/151...

Save NCAR from being dismantled today!

The Trump Administration has vowed to dissolve the center that provides critical extreme weather and climate data for our nation.

agu.quorum.us

Cowboy and sidekick herding cattle off the road and into the frenchglen corral. Mooo

Pre-Steens rhyolites with the Alvord Desert in the background Just for your eyes to feel better

What is better than pet photos? You know the answer is a praying mantis on a rock hammer Columbia River Basalts in the background

Highly recommend this essay, which underscores the risks posed by under-the-radar volcanoes

Mike Cassidy@mikevolc.bsky.social · 11mo ago

🌋 Excited to share my new essay in Aeon: one of the most underappreciated global risks isn’t an asteroid or supervolcano—it’s the eruptions we don’t see coming:

The world has so much to learn from Norwegians about the critical importance of saunas. (did you guess that I would end the sentence with that word?) Here is a nice sauna overlooking the harbor in Storekorsnes. Spotted while waiting for a ferry transfer back to Alta.

These are cloudberries (with a gabbro intrusion cutting metasedimentary rocks in the background). Cloudberries have a short Arctic growing season and have twice as much vitamin C as an orange by weight.

I will just put these photos here without much comment beyond wow this is a nice place

One way to judge how fresh a rock is: the sound it makes when the 4.5 kilo sledge lands on it (Wielding the hammer: Ben Klein)

There were a lot of mosquitoes and biting flies in Siberia. But Norway may have Siberia beat for the sheer diversity of biters… a very heterogeneous mix of small biting flies, giant biting flies, and mosquitoes. All living their best lives

We climbed through a remote Norwegian valley on a reindeer path, and you’ll never guess what we saw next… It was a cliff of hornblendite and carbonatite!

Yesterday we were working near a mine. We thought maybe mining the carbonatites because they are one of the major sources of rare earth elements. But actually they were mining the nephrite syenite to make porcelain! Just a reminder that we use rocks for all kinds of things. Rocks->teacups

Tomorrow we will try a new way to reach the interior of the island and then meet the boat on the other side. There are some bugs… but the geology is very exciting!

First cell reception after two great field days! We are looking at an enormous magmatic system at 5-10 kbar pressure (mid to lower crust). Very volatile rich, including carbonatites (inaccesible today due to snow). Big thank you to @fredrhog.bsky.social for sharing some nice NGU maps of the area.

Quick run around Alta in the morning. Tons of wildflowers on the streets. Some old classic wooden houses…. Plus lots of buildings that feel like bunkers against the winter months

Made it to Alta! Some photos from the flight in. It is 11 PM and the sunlight is golden. Tomorrow we meet up with colleagues from Uni of Lausanne to take a boat out to the rocks

The compare/contrast between Denmark and Norway—photos taken just a few minutes apart across the Skagerrak strait—is stark. Sand vs rock. Next: the journey 1500 km north, to the Arctic

How do others feel about packing for field work? I don’t especially enjoy normal packing, but there is a pleasure in trying to imagine a future moment on an unknown mountain, and what you might wish for in that moment—and then later, with luck, being on the mountain and having just what you need

Leaving for field work tomorrow with a team heading to northern Norway to explore the exhumed remnants of a very large mafic magmatic system—possibly the lower crustal roots of an Ediacaran large igneous province! I don’t know if I will have any internet, but if so I will try to tweet along the way…

I see we are talking about ROSES-2025 and Mike Wong’s analysis (which implies a dismal 5% funding rate for solar system science). I will say, as depressing as the NASA funding outlook is, I appreciate these nice visualizations of that depressing funding. research.ssl.berkeley.edu/~mikewong/bl...

Hi Goldschmidt! Catch my Berner Lecture at 2.30 today!

Some nice fresh looking tephra from Laki. Imagine these fragments quenching in fire fountains a kilometer high

Kenny Befus /“\@kennethbefus.bsky.social · last yr.

Iridescent Strombolian fall, reticulite, and the crew.

Great to see this finally out today! We show that the collapse of tropical vegetation during the Permo-Triassic extinction is a key driver of the long-term super-greenhouse climate that followed it. Read more at www.nature.com/articles/s41...