Mike Sowden

Hot dog spill shuts down highway in Pennsylvania commuters' wurst nightmare By Associated Press UPDATED: August 1, 2025 at 5:16 PM ET SHREWSBURY, Pa. (AP) - A truckload of hot dogs spilled across a Pennsylvania interstate Friday after a crash that briefly clogged the heavily traveled artery in both directions.

A writer waits a lifetime for a moment like this.

A faked video of bunnies jumping on a trampoline is depressing a lot of folk right now because it turned out to be just more AI slop, so here's a reminder that in real life, it seems animals *do* want to have fun for the sheer joyous hell of it, even if we don't often see it happening. 👇

Abstract image of swirling red and orange, looking a little like an explosion of lava thrown up from an eruption: Solen Feyissa on Unsplash.

So here's a thoroughly startling science story - and I promise that despite the next thing I'm about to say, it's not conspiracy-theory clickbait:

It turns out there’s a vast blob of *something* in the depths of our planet, and parts of it look a bit like a tree - and it might be ALIEN?

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A faked video of bunnies jumping on a trampoline is depressing a lot of folk right now because it turned out to be just more AI slop, so here's a reminder that in real life, it seems animals *do* want to have fun for the sheer joyous hell of it, even if we don't often see it happening. 👇

I'm happy to confirm that the study below is real, and that animals seem to love having as much fun as the fake-AI people want us to believe: bsky.app/profile/mike...

The renewable energy revolution is a feat of technology | Rebecca Solnit An energy revolution is underway in this century, though most people have not noticed it

An energy revolution is underway in this century, though it’s unfolded in ways slow enough and technical enough for most people not to notice (and I assume it’s nowhere near finished). It is astonishing – a powerful solution to the climate crisis... [Wrote it a while ago; came out yesterday.]

🙏Thank you for reading!

Oh wow. Thank you! Checking out now...

Thank you. *bends like a tree in the wind to form a polite bow*

Hawai’i - the islands of ‘feisty’ volcanoes and a ‘blob’ that lurks beneath. I’ve not heard of Pele being called a blob before and she might object. A tree though, yes. Reaching out with her otherworldly magma arms to wreak havoc and then bring fertility w/ volcanic soils

Cool (or hot???) thread 🧪

All this said - if anyone wanted to subscribe and read my newsletter totally for free, and never commit to giving me a single penny until I was elsewhere, I can respect that too. 😁

The other thing about sticking around on a platform with anti-science (and anti-democratic) voices so active on it is you can push back against them from within that system. There are folk on Substack with big followings doing that and I respect it very much. (I'm not really one - I'm small-scale.)

can confirm, not clickbait, actually very cool and mindbogglingly interesting

Thank you. :)

As for myself, I'm not yet ready to make the decision to make the leap elsewhere, which I'd hopefully do also for practical reasons (better functionality elsewhere) - but I respect the folk in science (some who are friends) who consider the whole platform a total no-no and act accordingly.

Thank you! Appreciate you saying this - I've had other folk "suggesting" the same thing, nowhere near as politely. 😄

It's tricky, yes: there are science comms I really admire on the platform, & others that have left because of past controversies & some truly awful people with publications there...

Everything Is Amazing | Mike Sowden | Substack A newsletter about asking better questions & a romp through science in search of a good "wow!" you can feel down to your boots. Click to read Everything Is Amazing, by Mike Sowden, a Substack publicat...

Anyway. I would just like to underline the hopefully-now- obvious fact that GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE IS NOT BORING.

And if you enjoy have your sanity pummelled by stuff like this (yay science!), maybe you'd enjoy other stories from my science newsletter:

everythingisamazing.substack.com

Ta!

An artistic depiction of the impact of the proposed planet Theia hitting the Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.

So why are these blobs behaving so differently to the surrounding rock?

One bewitching if highly speculative theory: they’re ALIEN.

They're chunks of the corpse of Theia, a Mars-sized protoplanet proposed to have hit Earth some 4.5 billion years ago on our planet’s undisputed Worst Day Ever!

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A fiery coastline where erupting lava is meeting the sea surrounded by plumes of steam.

...seem to be - and I swear this is the phrase being used in the literature - TWO ENORMOUS BLOBS.

There’s one 2,900km under Africa, and another far beneath the Pacific.

Their tree-like mantle plumes reach the surface at "hot-spots" like Hawai’i:
www.quantamagazine.org/a-massive-su...

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‘Mind-blowing’ network of magma chambers found under Hawaii’s volcanoes A new map of the island’s underworld provides a valuable window into the behavior of some of the most capricious, and hazardous, volcanoes on Earth

These miles-wide horizonal chambers seem to respond to volcanic cycles by either filling up or emptying of magma, analogous to blood pumping through the chambers of a heart:

www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022...

And far below these chambers....

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The Pāhala swarm of earthquakes in Hawai‘i A magma network may feed into different volcanoes, including Mauna Loa and Kīlauea

Between November 2018 and April 2022, the motherlode of earthquake-storms struck far below the Hawai’ian town of Pāhala. Over 192,000 of them!

By feeding the resulting seismic data into their models, CalTech researchers could "see" these vast magma structures:

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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The craggy volcanic landscape of Hawaii - a photo by Peter Thomas on Unsplash.

...but all the while, the Pacific plate has moved along while the plume has stayed put, blasting its heat upwards like a blowtorch.

The result can be seen on the surface today - the 6,000-km-long chain of ancient volcanoes, with the islands of modern Hawai’i at the most recently active end.

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Illustration of what's believe to be powering the colcanoes of Hawai'i - a huge upwelling of hot rock, a "mantle plume", creating the volcanic "hot spot" that is dumping energy into all the volcanoes in the area.

It's probably much more complicated down there. And nothing illustrates this better than MANTLE PLUMES.

This is what’s believed to be going on under Hawai’i: a vast tree-like upwelling of hot material cooking the crust from below, feeding all those feisty volcanoes for millions of years...

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...we don't know this firsthand, because to date, humanity’s only drilled through around 12km of it, with the Kola borehole. That's 1/4 to 1/3rd the way through the crust - and a bit less than 0.2% of the entire distance to the core. Under one-five-hundredth.

Blimey.

bsky.app/profile/mike...

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The standard model of the interior of the Earth, like a gobstopper / round boiled sweet, with various layers: crust, upper mantle, lower mantle, outer core, inner core.

When I was growing up, the proposed structure of our planet looked like this - the famous 'gobstopper' model.

As a kid, I loved it: we live on the cool outer bit, & the inner bit is incredibly hot and we'd be squashed into a flaming dot in the blink of an eye. Hooray!

But in fact...

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Abstract image of swirling red and orange, looking a little like an explosion of lava thrown up from an eruption: Solen Feyissa on Unsplash.

So here's a thoroughly startling science story - and I promise that despite the next thing I'm about to say, it's not conspiracy-theory clickbait:

It turns out there’s a vast blob of *something* in the depths of our planet, and parts of it look a bit like a tree - and it might be ALIEN?

1/

Grey, concrete multi-storey building above the Kola Superdeep Borehole, surrounded by barren low hills.

SCIENCE FACT: the deepest that human beings have ever tunnelled is the Kola Superdeep Borehole near the Russian border with Norway, which plunges 12,262 metres into the Earth's crust, and that's still not deep enough for the best place we could put Nigel Farage.

Thanks for reading my science fact.

M8.8 earthquake strikes offshore Kamchatka A dangerous subduction megathrust ruptures once again

⚒️ 🧪

A M8.8 earthquake just ruptured the subduction zone offshore Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula. This is one of the world’s truly huge earthquakes, and a triggered tsunami is currently traveling across the Pacific ocean.

This same fault ruptured on July 20th in a M7.4, and last August in a M7.1.

Really comprehensive for you earthquake nerds

M8.8 earthquake strikes offshore Kamchatka A dangerous subduction megathrust ruptures once again

If you want an expert overview of the Kamchatka earthquake from two scientists who specialise in that branch of science, here you go: open.substack.com/pub/earthqua...