Maria Box

"When the first of August came round, the Professor realized he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week."

--Willa Cather, 1925 and timeless

A sandstone megalith with deep vertical erosion grooves

Five sandstone megaliths standing in a circle

Duddo Five Stones, first stone circle I've ever visited! They're made of soft sandstone and the deep vertical erosion rills betray the >4,000 years they've been standing

Comic. [3-column table with headers Period, My Favorite Part, and My Biggest Complaint] [Row 1] P: *Precambrian*, MFP: Life develops, MBC: Snowball Earth episodes [Row 2] P: Cambrian, MFP: Trilobites!, MBC: Evolution could stand to calm down a little [Row 3] P: Ordovician, MFP: Earth might have had rings, MBC: Scary volcanic eruption in North America [Row 4] P: Silurian, MFP: First land animals, MBC: Earth’s newfound mold problem [Row 5] P: Devonian, MFP: Big mountains in Boston, MBC: Yeah, sure, what those giant killer fish needed was *armor* [Row 6] P: Carboniferous, MFP: Cool forests, MBC: Bugs too big [Row 7] P: Permian, MFP: Pangea, MBC: Google “The Great Dying” [Row 8] P: Triassic, MFP: Tanystropheus [dinosaur with extremely long neck next to tiny person for scale], MBC: Damage to Canada still visible from space at Manicouagan [Row 9] P: Jurassic, MFP: Birds, MBC: Parasitoid wasps [Row 10] P: Cretaceous, MFP: Raptors, MBC: Raptors [Row 11] P: Paleogene, MFP: Pretty horseys!!!, MBC: Paleocene-eocene thermal maximum [Row 12] P: Neogene, MFP: Forests of *Dracaena* Dragonblood Trees, MBC: Zanclean Flood [Row 13] P: Quaternary, MFP: Burrito invented, MBC: Whoever picked this name for the third period of the Cenozoic

Geologic Periods

xkcd.com/3120/

Newcastle central station, photo by Sally Ann Norman.

E-see you all the paleoclimate enthusiasts at our ICCP speleothem lecture series-July episode with @mariabox.bsky.social
Date & Time: 18th July, 16:00 KST
Zoom link: pusan.zoom.us/j/8213003163...

Unfortunately the sample was found broken (it's from Mongolia, so ice-shattering is common). However, here's a best guess! (Plus, pic of the outside-- its not uncommon to see rippled speleothems in caves, but I never wondered how they'd look in cross-section).

I always knew in theory that a speleothem is a sedimentary rock, but I've never seen a cross-bedded stalactite before 😂

WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for.

Stop using WeTransfer.

this website is wild... I'd say it's like the astrology of climate 'science', but astrology has more coherent terminology 🤦‍♀️ oh lord

Read the latest on how ancient cave deposits warn of future permafrost loss! Kudos to a fantastic international team🦣 💪 @olakwiecien3.bsky.social @thomasopel.bsky.social @mariabox.bsky.social @pucicu.de @katharinehayhoe.com @northumbriauni.bsky.social

Inside a cave, a caver uses ropes to climb a steep rock face between ice waterfalls.

Beds of large hexagonal ice crystals inside of a cave.

Last year, funds from @quaternaryra.bsky.social helped us reach Khuit agui, a spectactular cave deep within Mongolia's continuous permafrost zone. You can now read about the incredible things we found there in the latest edition of the Quaternary Newsletter: www.qra.org.uk/quaternary-n...

A δ-value of isotope geochemists? 🤔

And this is why models suggest up to 99% of Mongolian permafrost loss by the end of the century 😢

Wonder whether such heatwaves happened in previous interglacials... with such a tight relationship btwn aridity and land temp in these climates, I'm sure our caves could offer some clues.

@speleoseb.bsky.social turns out there's a great term for what we were talking about this week

Spent this gorgeous sunny weekend at an SRT training course in the Yorkshire Dales. SRT is how we access deep caves, such as those in northern Mongolia. Have to say the Yorkshire caves are a bit warmer!

The Arctic is on Fire Raven, a young Gwich’in woman and firefighter from Inuvik, remembers preparing the local community center to welcoming fire evacuees from Old Crow, a fly-in community some 150 kilometers West of Inuvi...

"The risks Arctic fires pose on local ecosystems and the communities that depend on them, as well as the destabilizing effect they can have on the global climate, require a rethinking of how fires will be managed in the future."
Powerful StoryMap from @gwandaii.bsky.social @gridarendal.bsky.social

May the 4th be with you and the Δ49 signal be acceptably low!

Used this gorgeous Sunday weather to go fossicking around Whitley Bay

the tunnel in question. incongruous urban speleothems have to be one of my favourite things about the UK!

found some delightful little stalactites and flowstone (tunnel bacon?) beneath a railway bridge this morning :)

Because.. the front fell off! 🤣🤣🤣🤣 @mariabox.bsky.social @olakwiecien3.bsky.social @pucicu.de

A stalactite with small bones embedded in its side

As a speleothem researcher, I don't usually have much to contribute to #FossilFriday. However, I've become quite fond of this fallen stalactite with bat(?) bones embedded in its side. Does this count? 😅

I came up with that as well. Maybe a degree or two higher still depending on where you live.

x.com/DavidUllrich...

A Warming Climate Is Shifting Eurasian Drought Conditions - Eos Researchers use tree ring records to help reconstruct hydroclimate patterns and isolate drivers of drought.

Past climate conditions are preserved in tree rings. Researchers, including @dustybowl.bsky.social and @drkatemarvel.bsky.social, are using these records to understand the drivers of 21st century droughts in Eurasia. eos.org/research-spo...

Two halves of a small stalagmite that's been cut open. The top of the stalagmite is broken.

A small stalagmite on a wiresaw in a laboratory.

The first step to analysing stalagmites is to cut them open with a wiresaw. You never know what you might get, they're like ancient easter eggs! Here's a little stalagmite I opened yesterday (note the broken top; this cave fills with ice during glacial periods, breaking the speleothems inside)

S4 Speleothem Summer School The summer school on speleothem science (S4) organizes events for those new to speleothem science.

Applications are now OPEN for the 2025- Summer School on Speleothem Science (S4)!

📅 When: 21-26 October 2025
📍 Where: Morocco

Early bird applications are open until *May 15, 2025*!

👉 Learn more and apply here: www.speleothemschool.com

🧊🔥 New paper @natclimchange.bsky.social: After millennia as a carbon deep-freezer for the planet, a third of the Arctic-boreal zone is now a CO2 source to the atmosphere. The int’l research team was led by @annvirkk.bsky.social
⬇️ Learn more:
permafrost.woodwellclimate.org/after-millen...

Very excited to share this, as this is the first publication of my PhD and my first-ever first author paper! Big thanks to @speleoseb.bsky.social @olakwiecien3.bsky.social and the whole team for their hard work.

(And check out the back cover for some bonus fieldwork photos!)

Cave and Karst Science Issue 51(3). Now available online and on paper.

New paper alert!: Two years of cave monitoring in northern Mongolia reveals seasonally changing ventilation regimes that control proxy transfer to speleothems. Available open-access here: bcra.org.uk/pub/candks/i...

#speleology #caves #mongolia #IsoPerm

Climate Change, Overshoot and the Demise of Large Cities Why large cities will need to contract or be abandoned altogether

Your 'bonus moment of doom' for today: overshoot!

"The world is in a genuine predicament, trapped between the toughest of rocks and most unyielding of hard places—decisive action would destroy the world as we know it; inaction could destroy the world as we know it. "