John Andrew Higgins

I was wondering where weathering of the oceanic crust fit into the story of everything!

Would anybody like to read one of my long threads about a 2.5bn year old rock, bacteria that could produce oxygen but not consume it, and tank production in wwii

Quantifying changes in central Vietnam rainfall amount since the Late Pleistocene Paleorecords of the Southeast Asian autumn monsoon indicate that global sea-level change drove abrupt shifts in rainfall, yet the magnitude of these c…

🚨 New manuscript! 🚨

We use speleothem calcium isotopes and Mg/Ca to reconstruct rainfall amount. Turns out central Vietnam was 50 % drier during the LGM 🤯. Climate models agree but most underestimate rainfall change.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New Lessons from Old Ice: How We Understand Past (and Future) Heating - Eos Fragments of blue ice up to 6 million years old—the oldest ever found—offer key insights into Earth’s warming cycles. Researchers are using these ancient data to refine models of our future climate.

What’s it like doing fieldwork in Antarctica? 🥶 Sarah Shackleton and @blueicedude.bsky.social from @princeton.edu can answer that.

They just found a 6-million-year-old ice core—a key piece to improve our current climate models!

My story for @eos.org

eos.org/articles/new...

New research from John Higgins @blueicedude.bsky.social & Sarah Shackleton @princeton.edu, comments from Lidia Ferri, story by Mariana Mastache @deerenoir.bsky.social.

⛺️ up! Drill down! Just another day in paradise looking for Earth’s oldest ice.

Scientists discover oldest air on record trapped in 6-million-year-old Antarctic ice Scientists discover oldest air on record trapped in 6-million-year-old Antarctic ice

We've got a new record for the oldest air ever discovered. 💨

Scientists led by Princeton's @blueicedude.bsky.social and Sarah Shackleton uncovered air trapped in ice that is 6 million years old.

Six-million-year-old ice discovered in Antarctica offers unprecedented window into a warmer Earth A team of U.S. scientists has discovered the oldest directly dated ice and air on the planet in the Allan Hills region of East Antarctica.

🥶 Led by Princeton's @blueicedude.bsky.social and Sarah Shackleton, a team of scientists has discovered the "oldest directly dated ice and air" on the entire planet in Antarctica.

How spreading rocks on fields could combat climate change ‘Enhanced rock weathering’ is a simple, but also hard to measure, way of capturing carbon

The natural weathering of ALL THE ROCKS in the world removes almost 1 billion tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year. Enhanced rock weathering is an attempt to use a minuscule fraction of ALL THE ROCKS to remove many times more CO₂.

Yay I made it back to Bluesky! Ready to complain and argue! 🫡

To be fair trilobites were around a lot longer than humans (250 million years give or take) and were wiped out in the by a great global catastrophe than has some parallels to anthropogenic climate change. They also preserve 😍 fossils. Not so niche to me!

MESSAGE to the NSF PI Community, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Memorandum M-25-13, issued on January 27, 2025, directs all Federal agencies to conduct a comprehensive review of their financial assistance programs to determine programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by the recent Executive Orders. Therefore, all review panels, new awards, and all payments of funds under open awards will be paused as the agency conducts the required reviews and analysis. NSF has created an Executive Order Implementation webpage to ensure the widest dissemination of information and updates. We will continue to communicate with you as we receive additional guidance. All NSF grantees must comply with these Executive Orders, and any other relevant Executive Orders issued, by ceasing all non-compliant grant and award activities. Executive Orders are posted at https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/. In particular, this may include, but is not limited to conferences, trainings, workshops, considerations for staffing and participant selection, and any other grant activity that uses or promotes the use of DEIA principles and frameworks or violates Federal anti-discrimination laws. Please work with your institutional research office to assist you in complying with the Executive Orders. You can also direct your questions through the form on this NSF webpage. Thank you for your work advancing science, engineering, technology and innovation for our nation. Sethuraman Panchanathan Director

Today those of us funded by @NSF received this memo. Perhaps the most concerning statement: “Therefore, all review panels, new awards, and all payments of funds under open awards will be paused as the agency conducts the required reviews and analysis.”🧪

Had a great visit to the summit of Mount Washington in NH this week to meet with Observatory staff & discuss science & education efforts we are working on together. Not a bad day for some windy weather as well! Peak gusts hit 86 mph. Check out this worthy organization! 🧪 mountwashington.org

Oh you climate dynamics folks have an easy answer to this. Just bring the kids to class and make it a lecture about chaos! Some Strogatz math on fireflies, a roaming toddler (from a known initial condition), and you’re all set.

Could your next job be in Antarctica?

We're looking for carpenters, chefs, electricians, plumbers, plant operators and more to work at our research stations.

These are jobs like no other, in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

✅ Vacancies bas.ac.uk/vacancies
💡 Job alerts ow.ly/fWsu50UJHBP

Oldest Unbroken Record of Earth's Climate Pulled From Antarctic Ice Sheet A colossal ice core sample drilled in Antarctica may contain the oldest, unbroken timeline of Earth's climate, stretching back more than a million years.

An ice and rock core drilled 2.8 km deep on the antarctic ice sheet may tell us about the climate record for 1.2 million years - and perhaps even info on the planet going back 2.8 million years.
www.sciencealert.com/oldest-unbro...

Agree!

Rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 marked the end of the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age - Nature Geoscience A pronounced increase in atmospheric CO2 coincided with warming at the end of the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age, according to an 80-million-year-long boron isotope CO2 proxy record.

Super excited to share our latest on CO2’s role in geological climate change! Using boron isotopes in ~300 million year old brachiopod shells, we show that rising CO2 from volcanic emissions drove a profound change in climate that ended the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age ⚒️🧪🌊 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An ice core resting on a core tray with Dr. Brent Goehring working nearby and the sun just barely rising over the mountains in the background.

Incredible tear-drop melt-refreeze spirals within an ice core sample. I had never seen anything like this in a previous core from Alaska, Canada, Antarctica, or Greenland, but we were in an area that experiences some melt and refreeze unlike most of the ice core sites I've worked at. Really beautiful structures!

Elliot (who happens to be working with our UMaine and New Mexico Tech team currently at Mount Waesche in West Antarctica currently to again collect subglacial bedrock samples) holding the bottom of an ice core sample from Thwaites Glacier. You can see the core has a ton of sediment in it where it contacted the bedrock. This sediment suggests that there is significant freeze, thaw, grinding up of bedrock at the bed, and sediment getting entrained in the ice as the glacier ice slides along the bed. You can also see lots of ice layers in this core.

This ice crystal was a very "small" piece of a 2-3 meter chandelier of ice crystals hanging from the ceiling of a giant crevasse I rappelled into at Thwaites Glacier. My goal of rappelling into this crevasse was to see if it reached bedrock so I could collect a sample of it for cosmogenic nuclide dating. Instead of finding bedrock, I found these incredible ice crystals. You can see my hand for scale, so this chunk of angular ice crystals is probably about 25 cm or 10 inches in size.

ICE-DAY! Cool layers & melt/refreeze features in ice cores extracted from Thwaites Glacier, Antarctica. We drilled thru ice to collect subglacial bedrock to determine the last time the bedrock was exposed to the sun using cosmogenic nuclide exposure dating. Also, a beautiful ice crystal! 🧪❄️

Professor Rosalind Rickaby OBE FRS -Research Committee | Marine Biological Association Ros is Professor of Biogeochemistry, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, having received her PhD from Cambridge University in 1995 and studied

Delighted to see that MBA Trustee Professor Rosalind Rickaby OBE FRS has been recognised with an OBE in the New Year's Honours List!

Ros has been honoured with this high accolade for her services to Biogeochemistry.

The 1831 CE mystery eruption identified as Zavaritskii caldera, Simushir Island (Kurils) | PNAS Polar ice cores and historical records evidence a large-magnitude volcanic eruption in 1831 CE. This event was estimated to have injected ~13 Tg of...

🧪🌋
Apparent mystery resolved : early 1800's global cooling was suspected to be cause by an unknown eruption. But it appears that such eruption has been identified.
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Do this especially if you’re at a place that can nominally afford to invest in creative folks with big ideas. Most academic institutions have a balancing act that doesn’t give a ton of flexibility on hiring (ie we have classes to teach), but some do! They should do better!

Stockholm syndrome - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockho...

To all your ECRs out there….those who don’t do write reviews! Be a doer. 🧪!

Does talking about climate ‘tipping points’ inspire action — or defeat? The phrase brings attention to the irreversible changes global warming might bring, but some scientists argue it's doing more harm than good.

Tim Lenton is a friend, and it saddens me that he found our perspective saddening rather than constructively critical.

But: despite his and colleagues efforts to “clarify what they meant by tipping points”, those efforts *have not worked* over the last 20 years, and we need to deal with that.

Oh we want to keep the 🧊 🥶! Too warm and the gases leak 😢

⛺ up, 🕳️ down! This 🧊 🏰 should be featured on MTV cribs! #COLDEX.

⛺ up, 🕳️ down! This 🧊 🏰 should be featured on MTV cribs! #COLDEX.

🤚