Suvrat Kher

@bsky.app #FossilFriday Arborea arborea, one of many impressive enigmatic Ediacaran fossils from the Flinders Ranges on display at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide.

Utilizing traditional literature to triangulate the ecological history of a tropical savanna Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Cool paper documenting ecological insights about Indian tropical savannas in traditional literature between the 13th and 20th century. Grassland-scrubland biomes are often misconceived as deforested and/ or degraded wastelands. So, important paper.
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Wasn't aware of this, so new to me!

Origin of the Harappan Ernestites: Geochemical Insights into Provenance and Fabrication - npj Heritage Science npj Heritage Science - Origin of the Harappan Ernestites: Geochemical Insights into Provenance and Fabrication

Manufacture of synthetic Ernestite thr' high temp sintering of sand & laterite raw material.

Wonderful mineralogy and geochem study of origin of cylindrical drill bits used during the Bronze Age Harappan Civilization.

www.nature.com/articles/s40...

@johnhawks.net

Delhi Radioactive!

A nanometer thin coating of amorphous silica may be protecting phosphatized embryo-like microfossils from diagenetic changes in Ediacaran Doushanto Formation.

pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/...

figure from Woodcock (2004) Geology paper showing the life span of different types of sedimentary basins (organized into plate tectonic setting)

that's a fun thought experiment ... just last week we were discussing the 'life' span and fate of sedimentary basins in my class, this plot from a study a couple decades ago emphasizes the uniqueness of intracratonic basins in terms of longevity pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/...

Thanks. On my list.

The rise of lichens during the colonization of terrestrial environments Evidence reveals Spongiophyton as one of the earliest and most widespread lichens in Earth’s history.

This paper raises the possibility that lichens had evolved by the late Ordovician, contemporary with earliest vascular plants 🧪⚒️
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

How we discovered a giant geological sponge for carbon in rocks deep below the seafloor While drilling deep into the seafloor we recovered a thick sequence of carbonate-cemented rubble (breccia). The carbon content and estimated volume of the breccia suggests that slow-spread oceanic cru...

Submarine carbonate cemented talus as carbon sinks.

"Estimates.. suggests that uptake of CO2 by breccia offsets 20% of the CO2 outflux associated with volcanism during formation of the crust itself with major implications for carbon budgets".

communities.springernature.com/posts/how-we...

Sedimentary block containing fossil leaves from the Clarkia Lake. The central leaf is reddish-brown, boat-shaped, and almost intact, surrounded by fragments of darker, almost black leaves. Photo: Dr. Yige Zhang.

A laurel leaf, newly excavated in the field, exhibiting its original autumnal red hue. Photo: Margret Steinthorsdottir and Helen K Coxall.

In Idaho's Clarkia fossil beds, ~15-million-yr-old leaves are sandwiched between rock. When exposed, the leaves momentarily retain their original colors—red, copper, sometimes even a chlorophyllic hue—before oxidizing and fading.

A sedimentary scrapbook. Reverse polaroids from Earth's deep past.

Pic shows rounded linear ridges (red arrows) covered with dried grass hugging the base of a steep hillside. These are old lateral moraines of the Pindari Glacier in the Kumaon Himalaya, Uttarakhand.

Lateral moraines (red arrows). Sharp ridges, made up of light colored rock dust and debris near the Pindari Glacier, Kumaon Himalaya.

Lateral moraines, older and more recent, of the Pindari Glacier.

The older moraines, further from the glacier (~3 km), have eroded into gentler rounded linear ridges. The recent moraines retain a sharp edged relief.

Kumaon Himalaya. November 2025.

High-elevation Tibetan Plateau before India–Eurasia collision recorded by triple oxygen isotopes - Nature Geoscience The triple oxygen isotope composition of quartz veins indicates that the southern Tibetan Plateau was already around 3.5 km high by 60 million years ago, showing that substantial surface uplift starte...

The Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau are only the most *recent* of the big mountain systems to have formed in south-central Asia.

Well before India began to collide with Asia, the Gangdese Volcanic Arc had reached Andes-like proportions, standing ~3.5 km tall.

Billion year old shallow water stromatolitic carbonates contact metamorphosed. Green layers with diopside and occasional grossular garnet. Sedimentary layers are preserved, including ripples! Franklin Mountains, El Paso, Texas.

Pic is a light colored boulder of a high grade metamorphic gneiss, intruded by a quartz vein. The vein shows pytgmatic folding and a hint of a pinch and swell boudinage structure. From a stream in the Pindari Valley, Kumaon Himalaya. November 2025.

Ptygmatic folding, along with a slight pinch and swell structure, in a quartz vein intruding Greater Himalaya gneiss.

Pindari Valley, Kumaon Himalaya.

November 2025.

#FridayFold

Today's haul. @mizoraman@biodiversity.social @rapiduplift.bsky.social @maitrey.bsky.social @mrajshekhar.bsky.social

But the sketch I have here attempted to give of its varied functions shows us that it is really a most complex structure, a wonderful piece of machinery, as[ 259] it were, which in its various component gases, its actions and reactions upon the water and the land, its production of electrical discharges, and its furnishing the elements from which the whole fabric of organic life is composed and perpetually renewed, may be truly considered to be the very source and foundation of life itself. This is seen, not only in the fact of our absolute dependence upon it every minute of our lives, but in the terrible effects produced by even a slight degree of impurity in this vital element. Yet it is among those nations that claim to be the most civilised, those that profess to be guided by a knowledge of the laws of nature, those that most glory in the advance of science, that we find the greatest apathy, the greatest recklessness, in continually rendering impure this all-important necessary of life, to such a degree that the health of the larger portion of their populations is injured and their vitality lowered, by conditions which compel them to breathe more or less foul and impure air for the greater part of their lives. The huge and ever-increasing cities, the vast manufacturing towns belching forth smoke and poisonous gases, with the crowded dwellings, where millions are forced to live under the most terrible insanitary conditions, are the witnesses to this criminal apathy, this incredible recklessness and inhumanity.

Wow. I did not know that Alfred Russell Wallace (co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection) wrote a book in 1904 about the biological potential for life on other planets, and I've just found this extraordinary paragraph setting out the insanity of atmospheric pollution [1/3]. In 1904!

The one on Sir John Mortimer remains my favorite.

@dlknowles.bsky.social

www.economist.com/obituary/200...

Deccan Traps: Thickness And Elevation The total thickness of the Deccan Volcanics is more than 10,000 feet. But the highest elevation is 5400 feet. Why?

New Blog Post- There is a large difference between stratigraphic thickness and elevation in the Deccan Volcanic Province.

A quick look at lava stratigraphy and regional structure.

@peterbrannen.bsky.social

rapiduplift.substack.com/p/deccan-tra...

Deccan Traps: Thickness And Elevation The total thickness of the Deccan Volcanics is more than 10,000 feet. But the highest elevation is 5400 feet. Why?

Latest Newsletter- The total thickness of the Deccan Volcanics is more than 10,000 feet. But the highest elevation is 5400 feet. Why?

A quick look at lava stratigraphy and regional structure.

rapiduplift.substack.com/p/deccan-tra...

Imagine having the Cambro-Ordovician carbonate section to study in that scenario!

As someone who battled kudzu covered slopes in the southern Appalacians, this one is practically a type section 🙂

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

"Oil companies don’t care about the first 40 meters of the core"

But archaeologists do.

Sumerian civilization may have been jump-started by the rise and fall of tides.

www.science.org/content/arti...

“I kept asking all these questions like, How do we know that? The other scientists [would respond] - Yeah, how do we know that?” Virginia Tech sedimentologist Brian Romans knows how scientific ocean drilling can be a particularly good mechanism or vehicle for pivoting in a career – that’s because he has many examples to share a...

I was recently interviewed by @drlauraguertin.bsky.social as part of her 'Tales from the Deep' series focused on the people involved in scientific ocean drilling ⚒️🧪⛴️ –– lots of great stories from many others there to check out
archive.storycorps.org/interviews/i...

Such hyperbole reg enhanced rock weathering for CO2 removal.

Weathering of entire planet's surface rock removes < 1 Gt of CO2/yr

But < 1% of Deccan Basalt, which is a tiny fraction of Earth's surface, will remove all human generated CO2 (40 Gt yr! ) 🙄

Times of India, Oct 19.

4,300 cubic kilometres! The scale of this ancient submarine landslide is hard to comprehend. Imagine a pile of rock 1 km wide and 1 km tall, extending from New York to Los Angeles. That would be a little smaller than this landslide.

My understanding is that multicellularity evolved independently several times in eukaryotes. But symbiogenesis and the origin of eukaryote cell was a singular event.

Photograph of a human hand holding two long pieces of rock. The left rock has alternating layers of red, dark grey and light grey. The right rock has many fine undulating layers of alternating grey, green, and black.

Oxidised (left) and unoxidised 3.2 billion year old banded iron formation. These samples are from drill core and were only a couple of meters apart. #geology #paleontology

Also, eukaryotes evolved during the Proterozoic.

How can that be boring?

The Geology Of Mumbai Deccan Volcanism, West Coast Tectonics, and Holocene sea level change all make for a great story.

The Geology of Mumbai- Megapolis Mumbai is firmly situated within the Deccan Volcanic Province. Yet, it has a distinctive geology due to differences in lava composition and tectonic setting. Add to that is a coastline shaped by Holocene sea level changes.

rapiduplift.substack.com/p/the-geolog...