Liviu Giosan

Sumerian civilization may have been jump-started by the rise and fall of tides Millennia before the first cities, early Mesopotamians probably harnessed tides to irrigate crops

The origins of civilization contain a chicken and egg problem: If large scale irrigation projects made complex Mesopotamian states possible, who organized and built all those canals? A new study by @whoi.edu's @geosan.bsky.social and co-author Reed Goodman may have solved the riddle: @science.org

Beautiful!!!

It's surprising that first 40m cores took so long to be obtained and studied.

This explanation, though the cycle would be every 12h instead of yearly, would be analogous to the Nile phenomenon and the rise of Egyptian civilization, which it predated.

The Flooding of Lagash (Iraq): Evidence for Urban Destruction Under Lugalzagesi, the King of Uruk and Umma High-resolution remote sensing, magnetometry, and trench stratigraphy identify a significant flood event at Lagash (modern Tell al-Hiba) during the late Early Dynastic period (ca. 2400–2350 BC). Sate...

Hot off the presses! Here’s a new article that I co-authored with my Lagash Archaeological Project colleagues on a geoarchaeological study of what we believe to be evidence of hydrological warfare in the Third Millennium BCE.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I wonder if AGU has renounced such sponsorship.

Far from being impossible, or a violation of academic freedom (Stanford!), academic institutions can, in fact, reject sponsorship from fossil fuel companies who are using them to greenwash their appalling environmental record.

It is unfortunate for all of us when one community has not gained enough appreciation for the time dimension, which is fundamental for the goal at hand. Spatial patterns are limited for paleo by collection of data. Understanding time is not...