Kate Littler

Yes this is very much still wood (just old dead wood), so not petrified wood as much older ‘fossil forests’ contain elsewhere.

That’s a good point. I suppose ‘ancient’ wood could work, but then there are ancient alive trees.
It’s often called the ‘submerged forest’ here, as it was drowned by the rising sea.

Trunk!
Sorry, post-lunch brain slump.

Wow these are beautiful!

This is a nice paper on the topic if you’re interested:

ussher.org.uk/wp-content/u...

Cornish Geology! It’s not all granite you know 😉

⚒️🌍🧪

A fossil tree trunk exposed on the beach at Portreath. Me for scale crouching on the sands. Whole trunk is several metres long.

Close up of the fossil tree trunk exposed on the beach at Portreath. Grain of the wood clearly visible. My finger is pointing to the underlying clayey paleosol, filled with organic matter, sticks, seeds etc.

Close up of the clayey paleosol containing sticks and seeds. Modern beach sand all around.

Close up of the fossil tree trunk exposed on the beach at Portreath. Wood grain visible. Modern beach sand and gravel all around.

Saw a fragment of the mid Holocene fossil forest at Portreath yesterday, revealed by winter storms and low tide.

Impressive piece of truck on organic-rich clay filled with sticks and seeds. Probably 4000-6000 years old. Drowned when sea level rose following the end of the last glaciation.

My local MP posted about efforts to cushion the blow for rural folks using heating oil (price has doubled in a week 😱), and her comments were flooded as usual with rabid replies:

“Why aren’t we drilling our oil from the North Sea??”
“Why didn’t Starmer defend Straight of Hormous??”

I despair 🤦‍♀️

Crude oil prices, showing a very sharp increase in the last day, from around 65 to 101 dollars per barrel..

Oil prices wouldn't be all over the news today if more of our economy was powered by local, secure renewable energy.

This isn't an "energy crisis". It's a fossil fuel crisis.

44% of UK electricity came from renewables in 2025. More of that plus an electrified economy => no more oil shocks.

Job losses at research-intensive universities double in two years - Research Professional News Exclusive: Scale of redundancies revealed branded a “disaster” for UK research capacity

Job losses at UK research-intensive universities double in two years.

Exclusive: Scale of redundancies branded a “disaster”.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

Wind ripples on the foreshore, on the higher elevation more exposed part of the beach. A stiff south-westerly wind was whipping across the beach (from left to right in this image) visibly moving grains into these fairly straight but often bifurcating asymmetrical ripples.

A view looking west towards the hayle river from the foreshore. Large megaripples are visible showing dominant flow to the north towards the sea (to the right), with superimposed smaller ripples on their stoss sides with variable orientations. Students taking observations in the background.

A small stream on the beach draining a mini lake in a depression back towards the river. Rippled sand in the foreground and a chunk of blue sky behind.

Megaripples in the sand with a wavelength of about 2 m, with superimposed smaller ripples on their stoss sides. River visible in the background.

Had a great day out with the Geology first years today, checking out recent sediments at Marazion and Hayle beaches.

Lots of lovely ripples and dunes on the beaches, and beautiful reeds and squishy mud at the marshes.

(And even a tiny bit of sun 😲)

⚒️🌍🧪

And of course with heavy rain comes our old friend, raw sewage.

www.sewagemap.co.uk

Flooding may worsen before it improves as more rain forecast for UK With wet and unsettled weather expected to continue flood affected areas will have to wait longer for any respite as Sarah Keith-Lucas explains.

Living in the ‘very dark blue’ part of this map checks out.

www.bbc.co.uk/weather/arti...

A wet window looking out onto a wet garden in a wet county during the wettest winter on record.

Day 49: still raining ☔️

Can safely say that the water butts are full!

Wow, I knew the swais2c team had bagged >200m of sediment, but hadn’t realised it spanned back to early Miocene. Super exciting!

So Control. Much Taking. Very Back #Brexit

Absolutely. It all feels rather… ungrateful?

And UK universities are on their knees at the moment - hiring freezes, redundancies, whole depts closing or merging.

If we have to find millions to pay off disgruntled Covid students it will massively impact current students and staff. 🤷‍♀️

Yup. This hurts.

We worked ourselves to the bone during Covid to keep the show on the road.

I ran virtual fieldtrips & recorded endless bite-size lectures, with a 2-year old balanced on my lap while the nursery was closed for 6 months.

Our students were MAGNIFICENTLY patient and gracious 🙏

Mapping tipping risks from Antarctic ice basins under global warming - Nature Climate Change Climate change threatens the future of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Here the authors show that individual drainage basins have different thresholds and loss patterns, suggesting the need to consider the d...

Antarctica isn’t one big tipping point.

New research maps 18 separate ice basins, each with its own threshold. Some in West Antarctica may tip at just ~1–2C warming (i.e close to today’s levels).

Cross the line, and you commit to m’s of sea-level rise over centuries

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

I’m still so rubbish at hashtags #wildflowerhour

A lovely old Cornish hedge, which is stone wall at the bottom, and trees and shrubs at the top. This one is covered in lush Atlantic rainforest flora - mosses, wall pennyworts (also called navelworts), ferns, ivy, primroses etc etc. A vision in green.

A soggy pale yellow primrose flower, surrounded by greenery.

A soggy yellow celendine flower, with bramble and ivy leaves behind.

A clump of soggy snowdrops, with delicate white petals. Greenery around including ivy, lords and ladies, and Herb Robert.

Primroses, celandines, snowdrops and a multitude of pennyworts, ferns and mosses growing out of this ancient wall on campus today.

@wildflowerhour.bsky.social

(Day 46, still raining ☔️)

Could Manchester be a model for the UK to kickstart growth? With an annual growth rate of 3.1%, Manchester's economy has performed twice as well as that of the UK as a whole.

In this article about Manchester as an economic success story, the word ‘university’ comes up 5 times.

So many people don’t understand what an important industry the UK university sector is.
Contributing £265 billion a year 😮(www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/what-we-do/p...)

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Our old HPLC was ‘Elsie’

Yeah, here it’s the endless corporatisation of HE (forced on unis by govt policy).

Teaching = tuition fee income 💰(except for home students who make a loss)

Research = even when funded apparently makes a loss.. but also brings in QR money indirectly + prestige.

Yeah, and don’t get me started on how promotion is directly and explicitly tied to securing substantial external funding.

Doesn’t really matter what you publish, or if your PhD students finish on time, with cool science papers, and their mental health intact.
Show me the 💰!

A black oil beetle (I think!) on some wood chip. She’s a black beetle about 3 long, with bluish antennae and legs and a jaunty spring in her step.

My first oil beetle!

Encountered today on my lunch break in Falmouth, trundling up the road like she owned it.

I moved her to safety and she was kind enough not to oil me. 🪲

Forgive me. I’m having a “screaming into the void” kind of week.

I will go back to posting about nature.

And if you look too “light” on your workload (e.g., not enough funded grants), you’ll just get loaded up with teaching to make you look busier on the spreadsheet.

But all that stuff^ is the grease in the wheels of academia. If no one has time/ incentive to do it, then it all just…stops.

Not really, no.

We get a few 100 hours for “scholarship” a year, which needs to cover any research activity that isn’t directly covered by an externally funded grant (so supervising external PhD students, reviewing, panels, prep for future grant applications etc…).

Doesn’t really touch the sides!