Liviu Giosan

If so many past societies were able to forge equitable and sustainable economies, then we can too.

Let's stop thinking about inequality as an economic necessity and start learning from the past.

@uoyarchaeology.bsky.social @uoyenvironment.bsky.social

3. happy to see the long process of peer-review over (pheww!) for a ground-breaking paper on the role of monsoon in the productivity of Bay of Bengal led by Kau Thirumalai

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

2. our work led by Reed at Lagash, a principal Sumerian city, brought rigor to interpreting remote sensing data and argued for the first use of water in war

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

WHOI’s Best of 2025 - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution This year, our research has fueled solutions that sustain lives, protect communities, and power innovation for a thriving future.

2025 motto:

"There is life/science after "retirement" 🙂👍🥂

1. My paper with the brilliant young archaeologist Reed Goodman redefining the rise of Sumer in Mesopotamia made top 5 news releases at WHOI - links below

whoi.edu/best-of-2025/

@mesopotamia

Half way thru 🙂

In a study led by my colleague Hugo Ulloa, we reveal a surprising new mechanism for erosion by raindrops. Sandballs form when rolling drops mop up sand, even reaching a jammed state! #SoftEarthGeophysics

“The Delta Top” 2025 (2) Now that the AGU meeting is over—missed you all this year!—let’s continue. Thanks to everyone who reached back and to those who sent suggestions; I’ve added a bonus at the end of this text: an extende...

Santa brings part 2 of The Delta Top!

www.linkedin.com/pulse/delta-...

In the season's spirit, I put together a "top" for delta papers published in 2025 that seemed important to me.

www.linkedin.com/posts/liviu-...

Definitely the earlier 🧟‍♀️

We can reconstruct the environment but humans are truly unpredictable...

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...