Benjamin Gill

Fifteen Years

i’m not crying you’re crying

xkcd: Fifteen Years

cross-bedded sandstone of the Pennsylvanian (late Carboniferous) New River Formation along Castle Rock trail (New River Gorge National River)

the New River Gorge at the Grandview overlook (West Virginia)

field trip this weekend for my Sedimentary Basins course –– we went from earliest Cambrian rift basin to Cambro-Ordovician passive margin to the three main foreland-basin phases of the rest of the Paleozoic (>240 Myr of history in two days 😅) ⚒️

Its a conference paper, so I don't know. If it has, it was by other creation "scientists".

I guess I'm lucky to have been sheltered enough to just notice this.

They are all self citations or other creationist refs... for better or worse.

Google Scholar entry for a young Earth creationist paper entitled "North American Precambrian Geology: A Proposed Young Earth Biblical Model"

Oh no! Google Scholar is indexing young Earth creationist references?!

I'm not a lawyer but this seems like its a violation of the Article I, Section 9, Clause 3 of the constitution. It would be an ex post facto law that retrospectively changes the legal consequences of action that happened before the enactment of the law.

constitution.congress.gov/browse/artic...

Well this would fuck me and my lab over- I wasn't entirely sure because, like many scientists, I collaborate widely and may not even know all of my coauthors (let alone their nationality) but I'm 99% sure it would make me ineligible for federal funding.

This has gotten surprisingly little attention — it's not even on the front page of @science.org right now — but it's really hard to describe what the SAFE Research Act would do to US science and scientists without sounding insane

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

a very large proportion of american scientists have worked with chinese scientists at some point in the last five years

Well if this actually happens, I'm hosed.

In the past five years papers I've co-authored at least 10 papers with Chinese collaborators and I've advised a Chinese Ph.D. student. I also currently have project that has a cooperative agreement between the Chinese science foundation and the NSF.

I counted 50.

They are really planning to go through with these cuts at Nebraska, despite recommendations not to. Unbelievable.

If you want to hire highly qualified, very successful earth and atmospheric sciences faculty in teaching and research, quite a few are probably looking for jobs for next year.

The vivid colours of the gemstone ammolite (Placenticeras meeki), perfectly preserved in its original form. Credit: Hiroaki Imai.

A paper in Scientific Reports presents the origins of vivid colours within the gemstone ammolite — a rare type of brightly coloured fossilised ammonite shell. go.nature.com/48OT5DX #Paleosky ⚒️ 🧪

i don’t know how to cross-post this from FB but this is absolutely heartbreaking. The age of scientific ocean discovery we were brought up in is gone & will never come back. I can’t.

I tend to think you are right based on the cross sections showing the septa... also not a coral expert.

I recant, based on the scale quote below they are probably too big to be Syringoporoids.

Close-up photo of many parallel cylindrical tubes, showing internal subdivisions of both radial septae and tube-orthogonal tabulae.

Paleontologists - are these tabulate corals? ⚒️

Yes, I believe its a Syringoporoid.

Doing research has to come with an epistemological humility that accepts you don't already know everything & understands that some things are going to be uncomfortably ambiguous. The 'mainstream' consensus on any issue won't be perfect, but you aren't going to overturn it with 5 min with ChatGPT.

⚒️ The Proterozoic Earth had radically different ocean and atmospheric chemistry, was ruled by bacterial mats, and was possibly being shaped by not-plate-tectonics, or at least different-plate-tectonics.

Calling it boring is such a depressing failure of the imagination.

“That name, man,” Riedman says of the boring billion. “We’ve got to kill it. Kill it with fire.”

Gave me a smile to see they interviewed you about your work too.

Trump Offers All Colleges Preferential Funding Plan Rejected by MIT The Trump administration is inviting all US colleges to participate in a compact — initially rejected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — that would grant preferential federal funding in re...

After getting zero firm commitments to this point from the first nine invitees, the Trump administration is extending its proposed compact to all colleges. Expect some red-state publics to say yes.

The Crinoid hat video is up on my channel!
youtu.be/ZdPTYamnqQA

Astrogeology and Astrochemistry: Apollo Samples From 1972 Reveal Exotic Sulfur Hidden In The Moon’s Mantle - Astrobiology When astronauts returned from NASA’s final Apollo Moon mission in 1972, some of the samples they collected were sealed and carefully stored away

Astrogeology and Astrochemistry: Apollo Samples From 1972 Reveal Exotic Sulfur Hidden In The Moon’s Mantle
astrobiology.com/2025/10/astr... #astrobiology #astrochemistry #Artemis #astrogeology

I'm part of an online truck form were members will rely parts across the country to get them to you... I think we should set something similar here.

Last week I was co-leading a field trip in Utah, to check out some fluvial and eolian rocks. It was exhausting but fun and forced me to think more carefully than before about complex bedforms. This is a 3D model of one of the many stunning exposures of the Navajo Sandstone near Escalante 🧪⚒️

Chemical characterization of C31 sterols from sponges and Neoproterozoic fossil sterane counterparts | PNAS Putative metazoan body fossils from the Precambrian are curiously lacking morphological characteristics that link them unambiguously to extant anim...

New co-author paper out today in @pnas.org led by the fantastic Dr. Lubna Shawar!

Lubna breathes new life into the sponge sterol hypothesis with her meticulous organic geochemistry, and the ID of two new sponge-derived C31 Steranes in ~600 Myr rocks. Check it out! 🧪⚒️

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...