Brian Romans

I sometimes think about how much and how hard I worked to deliver good instruction during that time ... and *everyone* I knew was doing that with their classes

Deglaciation of the Prudhoe Dome in northwestern Greenland in response to Holocene warming - Nature Geoscience The ~500-metre-thick Prudhoe Dome in northwestern Greenland completely deglaciated 7,000 years ago, highlighting the sensitivity of the ice sheet to mid-Holocene warming, according to luminescence and...

Prudhoe Dome, a 2,500 km^2 by 500 m thick ice cap in NW, Greenland, completely melted away and then regrew all within the Holocene 🤯 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Please reach out if you have any questions or need help"

the small % of students that do end up engaging with me end up saying 'Thanks, this was very helpful, I understand this better now!' –– yes, this is in fact my job, I'm not here to trick you

Poster showing our profile picture (stylized logo of Scientific Ocean Drilling) over a set of five photos: a thin section, a row of cores, a microbiology lab, an ice sheet, and the derrick of the ship at sunrise.

Hello BlueSky! We’re here to bring you the latest opportunities and news in U.S. scientific ocean drilling and amplify the work of our community and partners. This account is managed by the U.S. Scientific Ocean Drilling Coordination Office (SODCO).

My perspective on this (if anyone cares):

Just get it done. If a tool/app is used to help, fine (and your advice). If it's done manually, that's fine too. It doesn't matter. Get it done, declare victory, and move on.

I see students spend sooo much time/energy messing around, just do the thing!

or, the plan was to destroy it ... the billionaires who want to run the world know that they need to either control information, or at least make it inaccessible/unreliable ... maybe a cynical take, but I think these megalomaniacs are truly the worst of humanity

I'll write a blog post about this study when I get a chance. It was several years in the making and we learned a lot working on it.

Many thanks to co-authors, including @zzsylvester.bsky.social, as well as the reviewers and the associate editor for their contributions and ideas.

Photograph of a sediment core highlighting thin (<0.5 cm) silt to very fine sand beds. Tick marks on left side are each one millimeter. From Figure 3 of Varela et al. (2026).

Excited that this paper, led by former PhD student Natalia Varela (based on her dissertation), is now out!

We use the occurrence & characteristics of thin, silty turbidites from the Ross Sea to interpret Antarctic Bottom Water outflow since ~3.3 Ma.

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Many programs (like ours) allow students to transition from MS to PhD after a year if everything is going well. This provides the student an opportunity to really "feel" the various aspects of grad school, to come to an informed decision. Ask prospective advisors if their program does that. 2/2

My advice to undergraduates:

Do *not* sign on to a PhD just because it's a 'next step' and you don't know what else to do. A master's program is a much better option in that scenario. You can find out if you genuinely enjoy the endeavor and, if not, it's only 2 years and you get a great degree! 1/2

omg perfect, lol

I suppose it's a good moment to mention that the most neglected subdivision of sand is 'very fine' (63-125 µm)

so many people, including some sedimentologists, will just completely skip over 'very fine' and go from silt to 'fine' sand (125-250 µm)

don't forget about 'very fine' sand! 😁

excellent ... we need so much more of this, across generations, and from many genres/styles ... and if those songs already exist and I'm ignorant, I need to know about it!

same for us ... so thankful that the precip stayed more as sleet (bouncing off the tree branches) instead of the glazing rain

at least ... whatever personalized feed they are seeing based on algorithms keeps them in the dark ... but, honestly, it's still on them to participate and be proactive, they don't get to later say 'Oh I wasn't paying attention back then, it's not my fault'

each day is another 'This must be the line where people have had enough!' and, no, I don't think we are close to that line –– it's quite clear that 10s of millions of Americans are willing to support much worse –– and later, many years from now, these same people will claim they never supported it

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more."

took a few sittings to get through, but an insightful article

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

I noticed that the forecasts are very different ... Weather Underground is forecasting up to 20" of snow for us, but others are just a few inches ... different models? It's strange that there's so much divergence just a few days out

They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted. Inside the civil war at the anti-woke university backed by Bari Weiss.

my gosh, these people are ridiculous, a bunch of wannabe-iconoclasts making it all about themselves and their agenda (and, of course, grifting each other) www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Spatially variable response of Antarctica’s ice sheets to orbital forcing during the Pliocene - Nature Geoscience The West Antarctic Ice Sheet responded to different natural forcing mechanisms than the East Antarctic Ice Sheet through the mid-Pliocene due to a greater sensitivity to oceanic feedbacks, according t...

new publication out, led by Dr. Molly Patterson, from the IODP Exp 374 team showing obliquity pacing of iceberg calving events in the Ross Sea (based on ice-rafted debris records) during the late Pliocene to early Pleistocene (~3.3-2.3 Ma)

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

last day of classes here –– had the final-project team presentations in the final session of my Sedimentary Basins course, which went very well and it was fun to see commonalities (and some differences) in the interpretations

at some point I need to stop playing w/ data and make my AGU talk –– but this pre-AGU push is *exactly* the reason I submitted an abstract, to force myself to spend the hours crunching numbers, making plots, and thinking –– I'm having a wonderful time, don't get to dive into one thing like this much

When I teach my intro climate course in the spring I'll be using resources and links from other countries, published science that is not under U.S. govt control, etc. There's plenty out there, this regime would have to put up a robust firewall to shield students from available information.

screenshot of the bubble that pops up when hovering cursor over a data point in an R plot made with the 'plotly' package

recently discovered that with the 'plotly' package in R I can generate an interactive visualization where I can hover over a data point to see some basic info –– very useful for initial stages of data exploration (e.g., quickly/easily learning which data points are outliers) #rstats

campus closed today (due to winter weather 🌨️) –– I spent a good chunk of my weekend preparing for a guest lecture + activity in a colleague's class that is now canceled –– oh well, on the upside, I can now make some progress on paper revisions and, oh yea, I have a talk at #AGU25 next week

I haven't been following every twist and turn of this (and I don't know all the context/history), but I can't help but wonder if this outcome is a harbinger of things to come.

every now and again, everything seems to converge –– the usual end-of-semester chaos colliding with AGU prep (anticipated) is compounded by a handful of other things (not anticipated)

you know convergence is upon you when it takes a significant amount of time just to make the to-do list 🫠

fun mash-up of sedimentology and baseball –– these 'muds' have more sand in them than I would've predicted thesedimentaryrecord.scholasticahq.com/article/1448...

I think they got drunk one night and someone said "We need to monetize the crust!"

university football programs should be financed 100% by alumni, not a dime should come from student fees or cleverly siphoned off from a pot of $$

some very wealthy alumni care deeply about academics and student programs (and donate accordingly), but many others are mainly football fans, pony up