Mathijs Boom

Keeping a draughty Dutch home warm by burning turf, while peatlands throughout the Republic were transformed. In your backyard mining indeed. A 1711 engraving by Jan Luyken. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

In the 17th-century, peat (or turf really) was so commonplace that tiny pieces were used for a collection of dollhouse attributes. Fascinating pieces of fossil fuel history. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Another flood: from Leonardo da Vinci's 'deluges'. In early 16th-century Italy, deluges were often understood as recurring events, rejuvenating parts of the Earth and disappearing entire civilizations without a trace. Only later did Noah flood come to dominate Earth histories. (Royal Collection, UK)

A 1525 watercolor by Albrecht Dürer depicts a nightmare of a great deluge, raining down in great pillars of water. Underneath, he wrote: "When I awoke my whole body trembled and I could not recover for a long time." (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

Historische kaart van Nederland met de gebieden van de Bataven en Friezen Kaart van de Friese en Bataafse gebieden in Nederland in de Romeinse tijd. Linksboven cartouche met titel, omringd door Neptunus en een aantal tritons. Linksonder cartouche met schaalstok: Milliaria G...

Uit de Rijksmuseum-collectie. www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie...

Mooie verzameling kaarten! Beetje een zijpad, maar deze fraaie kaart van Bernardus Schotanus à Sterringa uit de late 17de-eeuw is ook erg interessant als historische verbeelding van hoe hij dacht dat het gebied er in de Romeinse tijd—voor de afgravingen en overstromingen—bij had gelegen.

Nice California-centered thread on what sparked Earth Day in 1970. (Though these events by themselves don’t offer a sufficient explanation.)

Hello everyone! Living With Water: Agency, Materiality, Narratives is a series of online conversations from scholars, artists and thinkers across the world and beyond disciplinary boundaries, coming in May 2025. We look forward to sharing more details soon!

Good practice to emulate!

Dit is onbegrijpelijk in een tijd waarin de Aardwetenschappen cruciaal zijn voor ons begrip van de klimaatcrisis.

Het essay van Tooze is een interessante historisering van precies dit zinnetje en de geschiedfilosofische bagage die er aan hangt. 'Hoop' op een interregnum is precies waar hij een probleem mee heeft.

Chartbook 298 Built not Born - against "interregnum"-talk (Hegemony Notes #2) "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Maar het suggereert ook, misschien onterecht, dat onze tijd een 'interregnum' is dat voorbij gaat. Aanrader: adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

Precies in jouw straatje, dacht ik al.

Ik schreef een stukje over één van de leukste bronnen uit mijn proefschrift en waarom het Nederlandse laagland een plek in de geschiedenis van geologie verdient. Het verschijnt in Geo.brief, het blad van het Koninklijk Nederlands Geologisch en Mijnbouwkundige Genootschap, maar is gratis te lezen.

Eén cruciale afbeelding is helaas niet in de druk-versie terechtgekomen: de weergave van de putboring als tabel, waarschijnlijk ook uit de vroege 17de eeuw. Hierbij!

Ik schreef een stukje over één van de leukste bronnen uit mijn proefschrift en waarom het Nederlandse laagland een plek in de geschiedenis van geologie verdient. Het verschijnt in Geo.brief, het blad van het Koninklijk Nederlands Geologisch en Mijnbouwkundige Genootschap, maar is gratis te lezen.

For the word nerds, the original Akkadian for “deathly hush” before the Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh almost sounds like the calm before the storm.

The word is shuharratu.

It’s related to the verb shuharruru “to be deathly still”, said of deities, people, storms, faces, and places.

Photo of several clay tablet fragments pieced back together with several gaps throughout. The tablet is covered in cuneiform signs and is on a green table or other background. At the bottom of the image is a rule with British Museum written on it and one tablet identifier K 3321+. It shows the tablet is about 20cm wide

The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of king Gilgamesh’s quest for eternal life, but tucked within his epic story is another tale told by the oldest man in the world, Uta-napishti.

It’s a story of the Flood and how Uta-napishti survived.

The description of the storm itself is really something.

Yes!

This looks amazing!

It's a testament to the religious import of the Deluge that theories of the earth (Woodward!) keep rehashing the idea of fossils as diluvial evidence for the next two hundred years. 5/5

Verstegan argues, in 1605, that beds of fossil shells are far too regular to have been caused by the deluge. They have "setled together, by little, & little, before it grew to the nature of hard, and dry land, the which having bin sea before the floud." 4/

The 1634 copy in Stephen Jay Gould's collection (at Stanford) even has these fine marginalia, dated to 10 Nov 1742, emphasizing that fossil fish in chalk hills are "proof of the universall Deluge". Who were the resident diluvialists in Cambridge in 1742? It's not William Whiston's handwriting 3/

His popular book was one of the sources for later authors referring to trees dug up from bogs, but he also tries to date the separation of Britain from the continent and the emergence of Holland, Zeeland and low-lying Flanders from the North Sea. Both happened after Noah's flood 2/

Surprised by the detail of Richard Verstegan's 1605 discussion of fossils (although he doesn't use that word) and earth layers in the Low Countries in his "A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence: In Antiquities". 1/

Aan deze minister van Onderwijs heb je werkelijk niets. De academische vrijheid verdedigen - the bare minimum - lukt hem niet eens. Waardeloos.

Today is a great day to read Spencer Weart's paper on funding at Mauna Loa Observatory: doi.org/10.1525/hsps... From the #vault, it begins "Funding is obviously a necessity for scientific research, but the details of the funding of a given program have rarely been studied in detail."

This looks really interesting! Looking forward to reading it.

If a mine yields (far, far) more water than silver, should we call it a silver mine? Or a water mine? I had some fun thinking about this and other questions of #waterhistory and #mininghistory in "Mining for water", my new article just out in Early Science & Medicine: doi.org/10.1163/1573... 💧⛏️

Bog wood—trees preserved, sometimes for millennia, in acidic peat—is fascinating in its own right. It's found in peatlands around the world. It's, apparently, also a luxury product.