Aaron Putnam

I volunteered at the Musk Ox Farm in Palmer when I was a kid, shadowing the farm hand. This was when my dad was Director for a few years in the early 90s. Tremendous experience. I love those animals.

Cool!!

❤️ Is this the Musk Ox Farm in Palmer, AK?

Agreed. I think that is the best path toward rapid upscaling, also much like the (then) unprecedented upscaling of aviation technology during WWII.

Assistant Professor position in Traditional Ecological Knowledge at Stanford University. Applications due Sept 30, 2025

facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/49...

TOON TUESDAY
#ToonTuesday

Recorded by seismometers worldwide.

Oppressive. Good reminder that when it comes to the atmospheric circulation, international and state boundaries are fiction.

My guess is that it has something to do with a shift in the westerlies, but defer to @climatologist49.bsky.social.

Quite the temp-diff gradient from Kotzebue to NWT…

I would encourage our tech overlords to try all of this out, all at once, because I’m sure it will go down well with customers.

🤙 They’re tough!

Patch of preserved, incredible smooth (glassy!), glacially polished surface on granitic bedrock of Acadia Mountain, Acadia National Park.

Four crescentic gouges (7-yr old pointing at three, and one in the far-right edge of image), which are moon-shaped chips removed from rock by subglacial erosion, preserved near the summit of Acadia Mountain, Acadia National Park, Maine. These gouges, which are types of chatter marks, point in the direction of the former glacial flow direction.

Glacially molded island (one of the Porcupine Islands off of Bar Harbor). This ‘Roche Moutonée’ is a ‘ramp-and-pluck’ landform, with ice flow in the direction of the gently ramping side to the steeply ‘plucked’ side.

The scales of glacial erosion, as exemplified by a few #geological observations at Acadia Nat’l Park over the last couple of days:

1. Glacial polish (micron-scale).
2. Crescentic Gouges (cm- to m-scale).
3. Roche moutonnée (km-scale, in this case).

🧪🌊🥼❄️
#earthscience

Yesterday’s smoke report from the NWS Caribou office was fascinating in the context of #srm and aerosol power.

Smoky haze in Maine today. Image of one of the Porcupine Islands, with Mount Desert Island in the background.

A bit of a hybrid over-easy method: Frying at first and then adding some water and steaming for 1-2 minutes rather than flipping. After covering the skillet, I got distracted by Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me on npr, and left the eggs steaming for too long. Edible, but def not over easy!

I remember that fondly!

No. I accidentally overcooked some eggs and ate them anyway over buttered toast.

Sarracenia hybrid (‘conversation piece’, I think) with vermillion top and green base.

Another Sarracenia hybrid. Deep red (almost brick red) pitchers with strong veining on the lids.

Young Sarracenia minor (‘hooded pitcher plant’).

Venus Flytrap flowers (white) interspersed with Drosera filiformis (‘thread-leaved sundew’) flowers (pink). Some of the flytrap leaves are visible in the lower center part of the image.

More Carnivorous Garden photos… 2/

Close-up of the mouth of a Sarracenia flava pitcher.

Sarracenia flava pitchers.

Top of a Sarracenia flava ‘cuprea’ (‘copper-top’) pitcher. The pitcher is mostly green, but with a bronze lid.

Sarracenia oreophila. This plant is critically endangered in the wild. I’m glad it seems to be happy here. (This plant was sourced sustainably from a cultivated population cared for by California Carnivores).

The Carnivorous Garden is at its peak here in central Maine… 1/

#carnivorousplants

Happy Anniversary!

DOE climate report response form We are collecting names to assemble a writing team to respond to the DOE climate working group report. If you'd like to contribute, enter your info below. At this point, there is no guarantee what we'll do (if anything), but we want to keep our options open by collecting names. If you have any further questions, feel free to email me. We are primarily looking for Ph.D. scientists at universities or government labs in appropriate fields. I realize that this will exclude some qualified people and I apologize, but we felt this was necessary for a variety of reasons.

🚨 If you're interested in working on a coordinated response to the DOE climate report, please enter your info on this google form 🚨

Please RT this so as many people see it as possible.

forms.gle/BL9xUAfRxA...

Well done! 👍

The report is "tedious" and at times "truly wearisome", according to Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. Kopp recently worked on a paper showing how rising temperatures and drought will worsen crop yields, counter to the report's claims that crops will flourish with extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. "Carbon dioxide fertilization is largely irrelevant to how increasingly extreme heat and intense drought will impact crop yields," Kopp said. "As a former department of energy fellow, I'm embarrassed by this report."

I’m tired and no longer capable of being measured when speaking to reporters…

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

(...this is not meant to overlook the much more bizarre claim that, because early life evolved in a more acidic ocean a few billion years ago, that it should be resilient to (rapid!) acidification now.)

Moreover, the Rae et al. (2018) coral data were from two depths of the Southern Ocean, not representing the ocean as a whole, as the DOE authors imply...

Excerpt from the DOE report (section 2.2.1): "While this process is often called “ocean acidification”, that is a misnomer because the oceans are not expected to become acidic; “ocean neutralization” would be more accurate. Even if the water were to turn acidic, it is believed that life in the oceans evolved when the oceans were mildly acidic with pH 6.5 to 7.0 (Krissansen-Totton et al., 2018). On the time scale of thousands of years, boron isotope proxy measurements show that ocean pH was around 7.4 or 7.5 during the last glaciation (up to about 20,000 years ago) increasing to present-day values as the world warmed during deglaciation (Rae et al., 2018). Thus, ocean biota appear to be resilient to natural long-term changes in ocean pH since marine organisms were exposed to wide ranges in pH."

From Rae et al. (2018): "Note that as our δ11B record extends beyond the pH calibration possible in modern Desmophyllum dianthus (see Methods), we focus our discussion on relative changes in pH as traced by coral δ11B, and provide absolute pH estimates in Extended Data Fig. 1 for reference."

FWIW, section 2.2.1, in my opinion, misrepresents the Rae et al. (2018) data. @mudwaterclimate.bsky.social stated that their δ¹¹B data extended beyond the modern calibration of the modern corals. They were not confident about absolute values...

a group of people are standing on a set of stairs in a room . ALT: a group of people are standing on a set of stairs in a room .

…getting the pick out of the guitar

I hope so - would be fitting.

Approve.