Ben Esse

🚨 Fully Funded #PhD Opportunity 🚨 Join us to investigate #lava ignited wildfires on Reykjanes Peninsula in #Iceland using #EarthObservation. Your work will help develop #wildfire forecasting methods for the #Arctic! www.findaphd.com/phds/project... @htuffen.bsky.social @envleeds.bsky.social

This is the saddest day of my professional life. Today is not only the final recording of the latest series of The Infinite Monkey Cage, it is my last ever Monkey Cage. I never thought that I would have to leave the show. I always imagined going on until | dropped dead under the studio lights due to a brain aneurysm caused by my final attempt to understand notions of quantum gravity or the shock of being told about fly maggot infestations in the sacks of macaque monkeys. I resigned in September, after sixteen years of dedication to the show, A show that I named and helped develop over all those years. Unfortunately, my opinions outside the BBC have been considered problematic for sometime, whether it has been voicing support for the trans community, criticism of Donald Trump, numerous other outlandish opinions, including once gently criticising Stephen Fry. These things were considered to conflict with being a freelance BBC science presenter

In a recent meeting where BBC Studio executives again voiced problems with me, I realised my choices. Obedience and being quieter to remain making Monkey Cage, or 'Resign and have the freedom to speak out against what I believe are injustices'. • I chose the latter. It broke my heart. I love this show and I love the audience, and it is because of the audience in particular, that this decision was so difficult to make. I kept thinking about all the extremist voices promoting hate and division. They are being given so many platforms, while voices that represent kindness, open mindedness, empathy seem to be scarcer and scarcer. I felt I couldn't pamper myself with the luxury of silence. One of my many privileges is that I am able to resign and I can speak out even if it is to the detriment of my career.

I have thought a lot about my heroes, Sinead O Connor, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and so many more. I think of Sinead's words, "the job of an artist is to be themselves at any cost". James Baldwin said prejudice was really just a word for cowardice. Audre Lorde, viewing her life, wrote that her only regrets were her silences. I think of my father as I resign, he brought me up to believe in fairness , justice and kindness. Though my heart is broken, it is also full of fire. I apologise to our incredible listeners for my departure, your love of the show means a great deal. I am so sorry to let you down. I hope that you can understand my reasoning. I have to accept that I am not what the current BBC expects of their freelance presenters.

Despite this I should add that I have always worked far more than my contracted hours to try and ensure the show was always the best it could be, as well as making myself accessible and responsive to the audience wherever and whenever I met them. Every night, we have recorded, I have been filled with determination to make the best show possible. This was not "just a job" I hope that with my departure I can be a better ally to the LGBTQ community, to the neurodivergent community, to activists fighting against those who aim to brutalise society, to those currently in prison on hunger strike, and to all those who fight for a more inclusive world. From many conversations, I know there are many Monkey Cage listeners who support these communities and activists too. The strawberry is dead. Long live the strawberry. B

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

Kilauea is doing what Kilauea does.

Watch live:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiyt...

(h/t to @sophiecarr.bsky.social)

Met Office news release: 27 November 2025 - New Met Office service to cut aviation disruption from volcanic ash

Today, we're launching our advanced volcanic ash forecasting service to reduce aviation disruption. In 2010, Eyjafjallajökull closed much of Europe's airspace; our new service could halve such disruption and keep skies open during future eruptions.

Read more: www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/new...

First Copernicus Sentinel-5 images signal a new era in global air-quality monitoring Copernicus Sentinel-5’s first images reveal a new capability to track global air pollution.

Very excited to see these new images from Sentinel-5! Can't wait to get stuck into the data proper 🛰️

www.eumetsat.int/first-copern...

Event Response Reports - COMET 25th November 2025: COMET Event Response Report 2.4 – Erta Ale/Hayli Gubbi Purpose/Caveats: This event response report was produced to assist situational awarenessand rapid response efforts. It repres...

Our preliminary analysis of the satellite observations of the #hayligubbi #eruption is now available online: comet.nerc.ac.uk/event-respon.... Details of the eruption onset, SO2 emissions and precursory deformation.

Robin Williams' daughter has some quality thoughts on AI slop

Summary of what the PhD student will do. QR code in bottom LHS. Project part of our Leverhulme Trust funded project volcanic histories and the student will examine the cultural markers and response to to volcanic activity across the Eastern Caribbean. Understand local ways of knowing and remembering volcanic activity. Integrate scientific. And community knowledge for DRR - joining an interdisciplinary team from several universities.

We’re advertising a PhD studentship for folks with good knowledge of Caribbean culture and society, with background in geography, human geography, humanities or interdisciplinary geosciences as part of our @leverhulme.ac.uk funded ‘volcanic histories’ project

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

🌋 August Compilation of Bulletin of Volcanology! 🌋

3⃣ "Insights into eruption dynamics from TROPOMI/PlumeTraj-derived SO2 emissions during the 2022 eruption of Mauna Loa, Hawaiʻi" Esse et al.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

(4/13)

🌋 August Compilation of Bulletin of Volcanology! 🌋

We’re excited to share the latest research articles published in August 2025 on the Bulletin of Volcanology!

🖇 All IAVCEI members enjoy free access to the journal!

(1/13)

🚨 This morning we turned the street outside Labour Party Headquarters in London into Jabaliya camp in Gaza.

Listen to @ahmedmasoud02.bsky.social talking about what the Israeli army did to his neighourhood and family.

79 Gazans killed waiting for food after Israeli troops open fire, medics say The casualties Sunday among a crowd around an aid convoy came as the United Nations said Israeli authorities are starving civilians in Gaza.

Why? Why??

Absolutely dystopian juxtaposition from the Guardian front page. Difficult to understand how anyone of decency and conscience can defend this government at this point. Just sheer moral degeneracy to arm a state that does this and arrest people for objecting. Wtf are we doing as a country?

🚨 How far are volcanologists from volcanoes? 🌋🚨 Check out our new paper here: link.springer.com/article/10.1....
What started as a conversation about whether we at @exeter.ac.uk (in Cornwall, UK) are further from volcanoes than our global colleagues turned into an exploration of a fruitful data set!

We are thrilled to announce that the next IAVCEI Scientific Assembly will be held in Costa Rica! 🇨🇷

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined us in #IAVCEI2025 in Switzerland. We look forward to seeing you all again in #IAVCEI2029.

Welcome to Costa Rica!

Woman standing at the front of a lecture hall with her first slide projected on the wall, it reads "Advancing in-situ observations of magmatic processes: development of an X-ray Transparent Internally Heated Pressure Vessel for High-Pressure, High-Temperature synchrotron imaging"

And here is Barbara Bonechi showing us her fantastic decompression experiments!

#ECR #IAVCEI2025

Arrived in Geneva for the @iavcei.bsky.social Scientific Assembly. Already seen the Jet d'Eau and had two ice creams, I'm ready for the 🌋 science #IAVCEI2025

Model of the MTG-S satellite

Models of meteorological satellites hanging from the ceiling

A model of Meteosat Second Generation satellite

A koi in a pond

Had a great time visiting @eumetsat.int in Darmstadt for the first time (also my first proper visit to Germany!). There was a good density of satellite models around, and also fish in an inside pond? Why don't more buildings have inside ponds?!?

Sounds great! Just a quick check, is it 1st or 2nd July for the social? Post says 2nd but poster says 1st 🙂

Discworld QOTD, from Snuff

“Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.”

Royal Society prize winner returns award in protest over Elon Musk Andrea Sella is latest scientist to express dismay over UK science academy’s refusal to criticise tech billionaire

www.ft.com/content/8778...
Kudos to Andrea Sella for taking a stand against @royalsociety.org’s inaction over Elon Musk FRS

Each of us is here for a short time. It’s depressing that some choose to use their time grifting and generally making life worse for everyone else, instead of trying to improve the world for those who don’t have a voice, whether people, animals, or other life forms.

Inspired by @jtuttlekeane.bsky.social and @ohdearz.bsky.social, here's what the White House proposed budget cuts to NASA would do to the entirety of the agency's Science Mission Directorate.

Bloodbath is right.

Linking eruptive style with pore network geometry in tephritic/basanitic tephra from the 2021 Tajogaite eruption (Canary Islands, Spain) - Bulletin of Volcanology Investigating the textural properties and 3D geometry of the connected pore network in volcanic products provides insight into magma ascent processes, due to their influence on magma permeability, out...

🚨 New Paper Alert! 🧵
Excited to share our latest research on the 2021 Tajogaite eruption (La Palma, Spain) 🌋

We used 3D X-ray microtomography to unravel how vesicle textures and pore networks in volcanic clasts relate to eruption style and gas escape efficiency.

doi.org/10.1007/s004...

In the these last days of May I'm rapidly beginning to regret the three talks and a poster that I apparently signed up to present next month. Not sure why everyone has decided to organise their meetings in June 🥲 at least it gets all the travel over and done with...

All this on top of the plagiarism issues, the massive energy cost, the generating false information...

Musk’s AI bot Grok blames ‘programming error’ for its Holocaust denial Grok doubted 6 million death toll, days after peddling conspiracy theory of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa

This is one of the main reasons I'm really hesitant to use LLMs day to day. Tweaks to the prompts can suddenly (and silently) change outputs, which can spread dangerous misinformation fast. Is it really worth the few extra seconds to use a normal search engine?

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

TANK vs TESLA

"We've crushed fascism before and we'll crush it again"

- ⁠WW2 veteran Ken, 98, in the tank

April Compilation of Bulletin of Volcanology ! 🌋

We’re excited to share the latest research articles published in April 2025 on the Bulletin of Volcanology! 🔥

🖇 All IAVCEI members enjoy free access to the journal

Check out the full paper list of this month!
👇🏼