Lynn Soreghan

On Today's Date: The First Dust Storm Of The Dust Bowl Spread Into The East Strong winds and lowered visibilities spread from the Midwest and Plains into the Tennessee Valley and East

92 years ago today, the first big dust storm of the Dust Bowl happened:
www.aol.com/articles/tod...

At first glance through the interminable TOC of the latest Geophysical Research Letters I misread the title of this paper and was briefly buoyed by the thought of GRLs' foray into women's health.

Air pollution, even below EPA guidelines, increases breast cancer risk Women living in parts of the United States with lower air quality, especially neighborhoods with heavy emissions from motor vehicles, are more likely to develop breast cancer, according to a multiyear...

PM2.5 and NO2 air pollution, even below EPA guidelines, increases breast cancer risk
www.news-medical.net/news/2025102...

The perplexing (to me, anyway) phenomenon of laminated loess deposits (Bignell Hill, Nebraska)

Could this explain why students increasingly find it difficult to memorize the basic geologic time scale?

I love finding tiny asters that manage to elude the high blades of late summer mowers.

Little bits of beauty

A tiny but tangible example of how government dysfunction degrades educational opportunities. NP closures meant replacing hikes with road cuts. Still, no one can take away the beauty of NM sunsets

Another great day on the rocks, culminating in another New Mexican sunset.

Distracting ourselves from the news cycle with New Mexican geology

It's eolian time. How about some small-scale eolian sand stratification (grain flows, grain fall, and translatent; from the Miocene of Argentina) contrasted with the lack of any such features (other than conchoidal fracturing) in this massive loessite (Permian of Colorado).

Wow!

Bare trees surrounded by a carpet of their orange leaves in autumn, photographed in fog. Elora, Ontario. Photo credit: Nancy Forde. All rights reserved.

Daily photo. #AmWriting on bogs, Iron Age bog bodies, death and preservation (current MFA.)

To interrupt doomscrolling, a visual equivalent of a breath, a moment of calm. A 'foto balm' of light drawn.

Almost #autumn! (Sep 22.) I wrote about why #trees shed leaves: open.substack.com/pub/nancyfor...

A Chapel in the High Mountains, by Hugo Holdiener (1886-1945)

Root traces-- highlighted in part by the color changes

Took a walk along the lake and ran across this paleosol (Permian Garber Fm)...sporting some great root traces.

This one’s for you, Joe— from a Croatian terra rossa

Woodland Nymph, by John Collier (English)

My Lady’s Garden (1905)
Edmund Blair Leighton (English, 1853 - 1922)

Imagine how jiggly this sand must have been when newly deposited, as water escaped to form these dish structures. (A boulder from Cretaceous turbiditic strata, Southern California)

And now for more weather in a (deep-time) rock: inferred ice crystals from ca. 300 million years ago, a sort of lagerstätte, preserved in the Usclas Fm (France). For more details, see pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/...

New semester teaching paleoclimate, and depositional systems, so here is one of my favorite rocks, archiving both weather and climate: a dust (loess) deposit with raindrop imprints (largest ~5 mm diameter). Permian Maroon Fm (CO), recording a light (afternoon?) shower of some 300 million yrs ago.

A purchase that made my day; thank you USPS

In the bookshop this morning:

PARENTS: “Okay, we’re leaving now.”

CHILD: *pulls another book from the shelf and sits down *

CHILD: “Then I guess this is goodbye.”

Stormy landscape, by Penry Williams (1802-1885)

Okay, this is very basic, but...there is nothing unusual about rivers flowing north.

Contests & Winners! — Contests & Winners — CutBank Literary Magazine

Congratulations to Emily Rose Soreghan on winning the Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction for, “On Failed Rifts and Intrusive Bodies,” which will be published in the next issue of 'CutBank', literary journal of the University of Montana www.cutbankonline.org/contests-win...

Who else longs to live in a house of mud? Earth is such a superior building material.

Finally out... giant grains in eolian dust from Earth's deep-time record...
pubs.geoscienceworld.org/sepm/jsedres...

Paleoredox, iron cycling, and primary productivity in the late Devonian of southern Laurussia (Woodford Shale, Oklahoma, USA) Upper Devonian mudstones that accumulated in southern Laurussian epeiric seas, and correlatives across Laurussia sequestered globally significant volu…

Finally out-- part of my former PhD student Austin McGlannan's PhD--
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...