@stardusttostarfish
Conservation paleobiologist, marine ecologist, geologist Research: extinction survivorship, refugia Dancer, cat rescuer, author, armchair linguist. Sermon on the Mount. Permanent optimist. Make an impact. Be excellent to others. Use the fancy dishes.
Not published yet, but we are finding the same punchline to our long-term monitoring of rocky intertidal ecosystems in the northeast Pacific.
#SixthExtinction #Conservation #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #Heatwave #Ocean 🧪🌎🦤
Lichens Are Beautiful!
There are two examples of lichen in the much younger Oligocene Baltic amber. The oldest fossil lichen is about 400 million years old (Devonian) from the Rynie Chert in Scotland. (Source: UCMP + refs therein).
Lichens are probably even older!
#FossilFriday #Fungi 🧪🌎🦖
Hooray for a conservation win!
#Reef #SixthExtinction #Conservation🧪🌎
Extinction isn’t random.
Range size matters. Temperature tolerance matters. Climate change matters.
But there’s another piece we’ve long suspected: geography.
For 500 million years, the shape of continents helped shape survival.
🧪 #SciComm
buff.ly/rPvvUEM
Caption from NASA: "NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image during its descent to Mars, using its Descent Stage Down-Look Camera. This camera is mounted on the bottom of the descent stage and looks at the rover. This image was acquired on Feb. 22, 2021 (Sol 0) at the local mean solar time of 19:20:29. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech"
Caption from NASA: "NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image of the area in front of it using its onboard Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera A. This image was acquired on Feb. 18, 2021 (Sol 0) at the local mean solar time of 15:54:04. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech"
HAPPY 5-(🌎)YR LANDIVERSARY to our Perseverance Rover 🍰
As a Jezero mapper, seeing the *image* from SkyCrane of M2020 being lowered to the crater surface, will forever be a highlight of my career.
CONGRATS to the entire M2020 Team (extra special shoutout to the EDL engineers!) 🧪🔭 #PlanetarySci
science is alive on bluesky, the official app of science 🧪
The Trump Admin's repeal of the Endangerment Finding is brazen denial of climate science that puts polluters before people. We will continue to fight this in every way we can.
A shield-shaped, globose, ribbed brachiopod is partly covered by a branching coral chain, the chambers of the corallites filled by limestone.
Pseudatrypa sp. brachiopod encrusted by Aulopora sp. tabulate coral, Givetian, central Iowa.
#FossilFriday 🧪🦖🦕⚒️
If all Earth’s ice sheets melted, sea level would rise ~65m over millennia
But just 1–2% of that (~65–130 cm) would force chronic flooding & retreat in many coastal cities
~1 billion people live within 10m of sea level (~15% of total)
The risk isn’t the end state, it’s how little change it takes!
The US immigration and customs enforcement agency is expanding drastically and rapidly, acc to Wired magazine today
Arctic sea ice extent is trending at record lows this year - making a positive contribution to ocean/global warming by reducing reflectivity in the polar region
The irony of ICE expanding and polar ice contracting is not lost on me. Naked fascism in an effort to control climate-driven migration in the US just wasn’t what I expected.
Webinar poster for Climate Central's Monthly Climate Brief. Image shows a frozen outdoor faucet
It's been hot across the West and cold across the East. Why? Join us for the next Monthly Climate Brief as we dig in. And stay for a live demo of a new Climate Central tool designed to help you understand and tell local climate stories.
📆 February 17, Noon EST
Register: bit.ly/3OrhGGw
I just think this is cool: the re-colonization by marine life at the site of the Gardnos meteor crater - except this is Neoproterozoic in age, before complex life.
#PaleoSky #Geology 🧪🦕🦖⚒️
From "P3":
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
In the limestone surface of a step is a lighter coloured coiled shell of a gastropod, three times the diameter of the nearby tip of a cane.
Gastropod shell in the steps outside of the Rijksmuseum, Netherlands
#FossilFriday 🧪🦖 #PaleoSky
eos.org/articles/cor...
#ClimateChange #Biodiversity #Reef #Conservation #Oceans 🧪🌎🦤
#ClimateChange 🧪🌎
What helps maintain my optimism:
Deep-sea mining efforts shut down
New or stricter protected areas
Increases in science-based restrictions or pauses in fishing
Reports of Pisaster wasting-disease rebounds
Adaptations of invertebrates to OA
Workable solutions from conservation paleobiology
#ClimateChange #CPB #ConservationPaleobiology #6thExtinction #SixthExtinction 🧪🌎
Worthwhile newsletter when you have to carefully curate what's in your already-full inbox.
Today I learned about "climate-hushing."
Thanks @katharinehayhoe.com !
#ClimateChange #6thExtinction #SixthExtinction #ConservationPaleobiology #CPB #Conservation 🧪🌎🦤
Anthropogenically-accelerated climate change is ultimately leading to a warmer Earth faster than is natural, but the process is one of chaos and instability, like our recent deep-freeze and snowfall in the U.S. and Canada.
#ClimateChange🧪🌎
I'm in a totally different field, but a parallel: in the last 5 years I've noticed a marked change in undergrad-grad students from apathy to a drive to fix what's wrong, no matter the cause or who's to blame. It gives me great hope to continue solution-driven research no matter the times we live in.
Man-made refugium
Heat map-style graphic showing monthly mean global surface air temperature anomalies from January 1850 to December 2025. There is a long-term warming trend evident in each month. Blue shading is shown for colder months, and red shading is shown for warmer months. Annotations are shown for the year of each warmest respective month. All of these records have occurred within the 2023 to 2025 period in this dataset. Anomalies here are calculated relative to a 1850-1900 baseline. Data is from NOAA/NESDIS/NCEI NOAAGlobalTemp 6.0.0.
A data-driven mosaic of our warming planet - now updated through 2025 🥵
Download graphic at zacklabe.com/climate-chan...
There’s no tipping point beyond which ocean acidification kills corals, new research shows. With every creeping bit of acidification, corals just continue to die off. 🧪🌊 eos.org/articles/cor...
Happy Groundhog Day! Groundhogs are terrible weather forecasters, but excellent archaeologists, it turns out
Yes, I have studied this; I taught this in the California State system. My numbers are out of date by two decades, but land use is an immediate issue where I live. Meanwhile I've moved on to solution-based science, discovering how species survived mass extinctions to make successful protected areas.
There's no perfect answer yet. A mix of energy sources is good. What we put into the atmosphere today won't be felt for decades, but we still need oil and industry won't control emissions. We still have more work to do with renewables. Nuclear waste is a real problem that we have no solution for.
And except for solar, which has its major efficiency limitations, we are stuck in the same old "boil the water/provide the current - turn the turbine - produce the energy" technology.
I used to teach uni on this topic. We aren't there yet, technologically, for wind and especially solar producing high amounts of power per unit area. The down side is that we haven't had the level of funding to find a safer and highly productive means of producing power from wind and solar.