Rose Carlson

Closeup of dolomite surface featuring the fragment of a shell fossil.

Wide shot of ornamental dolomite specimen (white/grey rock), about the length of a toddler. Shoes for scale.

Burrow marks on the surface of an ornamental dolomite specimen. Burrows look like thin, indented lines.

My bike is temporarily out of commission, so I've been walking everywhere lately. This has become a serious problem because every five paces I have to stop and examine the ornamental specimens of dolomite that sporadically line Northwestern's paths. This one has a fossil! & burrow marks ⚒️

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume?

Me: Oh that’s my fault. It’s normal.

#GeologistProblems #geology

"Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have spe- cialized themselves to death." (4/4)

Wow.

"Geologists, dealing always with deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways. They see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s into the sky.... (3/4)

"On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information. (2/4)

I'm reading John McPhee's Basin & Range rn. This passage really struck me:
"People think in five generations-two ahead, two behind-with heavy concentration on the one in the middle. Possibly that is tragic, and possibly there is no choice....(1/4)
#geology #deeptime

Proxies for Justice The climate history of tropical regions has been chronically understudied. Correcting the record will require new methods and new mindsets.

I'm honored to see this essay move through geoscience and paleo-climatological circles. Thanks for reading and sharing.
www.sciencehistory.org/stories/maga...

An aerial view of a rincon. The ground is golden-orange, with its color enhanced by the setting Sun. In the center of the frame is a bowl-shaped erosional feature - carved in the past by the river on the right, and then abandoned - with a butte jetting up from its center. Layers of sedimentary rock are clear along the rincon's walls. Overhead are stormy blue skies with virga - rains that falls from the clouds, but evaporates before reaching the surface.

Roundabout. I came across this old oxbow (a rincon) via satellite Maps and thought it might look cool from my drone. Confirmed! Scenes like this always remind me of the incredible power of water, and the immense timescales at play.

That would be SO COOL

Closeup of whitish yellow, granular rock with worm-sized burrows in it.

View of outcrop from above, showing glacial polish (smoothed surface resulting from contact with rocks carried by a glacier), also with traces of burrows (marked by darker-colored rock) exposed via abrasion. Loose, small rocks of similar color also present.

#FossilFriday! Shrimp burrows (skolithos) in an outcrop of Oneata Dolomite (>400 million years old) near Rockford, IL. Top of the outcrop also glacially polished.

#fossils #dolomite #geology

Plagioclase peridotite from the Mariana Trench- a Rosetta Stone for decoding thermal history and oxygen fugacity conditions in the mantle. Photo by Dr Nick Dygert

This sample was taken at 6500m from the Mariana Trench using #ROVJason, owned by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

<2 YEARS??!!! That is crazy short on a geologic time scale

Light gray rock with a bunch of waves in it that indicate large-scale smushing in the geologic past.

#FridayFold: plastically-deformed phyllite at Point of Rocks, Baraboo, WI. Taken on the freshman year field trip that started it all. 🪨 #geology

With glaciers worldwide in retreat, you don't typically see moraine building. But at Yahtse Glacier, during my PhD project, we got a great look at the process responsible for so many critical reconstructions of glacier change and paleoclimate.

Enjoy! ⚒️🧪

Campus Highlight: The Petrified Stump - World Forestry Center A Tree Turned into a Rock If a tree falls in the woods, and is covered by a landslide, does anyone hear it?  Well, if no one hears…

More on petrified wood stumps from the World Forestry Center:
worldforestry.org/the-petrifie....

Something that looks like a tree stump but it's made out of rock!! Has a bunch of gray, brown, and orange streaks. The top looks like it's made out of light gray and brown rock. Moss on the side too.

A closeup of the top of the petrified wood stump. Wood grain can be seen in the rock, as well as some deep purple, gray, and reddish-brown colors.

It's a stump, it's a rock, it's... BOTH??? Super cool specimen of petrified wood we ran into today while dropping my sister off @ OSU school of forestry. #RocksAreCool #GoBeavs 🦫🧡 #Geology

Surround yourself with the kind of people who treat the Oxford comma like the wondrous beauty that it is.

YouTube video by Architectural Digest How ‘Wicked’ Built Immersive Real-Life Sets, From Shiz To Emerald City | Architectural Digest

Wicked filming location info via production designer Nathan Crowley in Architectural Digest:
youtu.be/4Qp4tLTrX6A?...

Seven Sisters (East Sussex) | Discovering Fossils Roy Shepherd and Robert Randell introduce the palaeontology of the Seven Sisters area.

More about fossils & the cliffs of Seven Sisters: www.discoveringfossils.co.uk/seven-sister...

(Of course, I can't speak to whether or not the depositional environment that created these cliffs on earth would have also existed in the land of Oz. If the place has flying broomsticks I doubt uniformitarianism would apply in a traditional sense).

Wicked witch of the west, a woman with green skin and a black dress, stands at the edge of a white chalk cliff, singing with arms outstretched. Shot from the movie Wicked, image Credit: Architectural Digest

Fun #LateCretaceous 🌊 cameo in #Wicked! Elphaba's probably standing on a bunch of fossils here - these chalk cliffs are largely made up of the compacted skeletons of small marine orgs (phytoplankton) that lived in a shallow sea here (Sussex) tens of millions of yrs ago.

Geology: putting the death of your civilization in perspective by inviting you to contemplate time marked by the slow dying of mullosks and Unspeakable Toothy Horrors* across half a billion years.

(*Conodonts)

A graph depicting the global monthly mean carbon dioxide (CO2) levels from 1980 to 2024, showing a steady increase in CO2 mole fraction measured in parts per million (ppm), with data points represented by red dots and a trend line.

Black Friday Deal Alert!

Enjoy our current atmospheric CO₂ because we'll never see it this low again!