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Quoting Daniel Swain

Inkstain (John Fleck) | 30 October, 2026
Daniel Swain on the next wave of Four Corners storms expected this weekend (Halloween 2026): The fact that this pair of back-to-back extreme-to-record shattering rain events across the interior Southwest have occurred during the autumn during (on...
Categories: climate change; climate variability; New Mexico; water;

Halloween special XIV: The fossils that haunted Lovecraft

Letters from Gondwana | 30 October, 2026
In November 1923, newspapers such as The New York Times reported on a desert whose name was unfamiliar to most Westerners: the Gobi. The Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), led by Roy Chapman Andrews, had returned with tons of fossils and what the press hailed as the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered, preserved in the sandstone of the Flaming Cliffs. The museum took them for the eggs of Protoceratops. Some papers gave their age as ten million years, about seven times too young. The eggs were shipped to New York, where they caused a sensation. The nests had remained intact for seventy million years. Next to them lay the skeleton of a small, toothless, beaked dinosaur, with its skull just four inches (about 10 cm) above the eggs. Henry Fairfield Osborn named Oviraptor, the 'egg-seizer', combining the Latin 'ovum' (egg) with 'raptor' (robber, plunderer). The species name, philoceratops, "lover of ceratopsians," completed the verdict: that beak seemed made for cracking the eggs of Protoceratops. Osborn later recognised that this might mislead us as to its feeding habits. He was right. In 1993, a team from the AMNH and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences found an embryo inside an egg of the same type, showing that these eggs were oviraptorid, not Protoceratops (Norell et al., 1994). In the following years, oviraptorids such as Citipati were found fossilized sitting on their nests with their arms spread over the clutch (Norell et al., 1995; Clark et al., 1999). The supposed thief had been a devoted parent, and one of the researchers, James Clark, even titled a 1995 article "An egg thief exonerated."
Categories: Earth Science; dinosaur evolution; H. P. Lovecraft; Halloween; History of Science; Oviraptor;

Join AGU Science Policy at AGU26 in San Francisco

AGU is thrilled to be back in San Francisco and bring you some exciting and informative science policy programming at this year's annual meeting. Whether you're new to science policy or are looking to start a policy career, we have a session for you. This year, all our core programming will take place in AGU Central's theater space, located in the exhibit hall. Sessions will be 45 minutes...
Categories: Fall Meeting;

Job opening: Community Organizer

Planetary Society Weblog | 30 October, 2026
The Planetary Society is seeking a Community Organizer to establish and scale the Society's grassroots advocacy program....
Categories: None

GeoTalk: Geoscience and Society special – meet the interim presidents of EGU’s new scientific division!

EGU Geolog | 30 October, 2026
John Hillier (Interim Division President): I have a very mixed research background. I started off in marine geophysics and then I moved to glacial geomorphology. At the end of that I worked for an insurance company as a catastrophe modeller, and then returned to the academic space looking at multi-hazard risk. I've been working with the insurance companies, to look at when risks co-occur, identify the natural hazards and their impact on regulations. So I've chased my research all the way from science to communication.
Categories: Education; Geoscience & Society; GeoTalk; Outreach; Policy; Science Communication; Science for Policy; Geoscience and Society; outreach; policy; science communication; Science for policy; science policy;

Gravity – The Invisible Force Shaping Our Earth | New educational short film

EGU Geodesy Division | 30 October, 2026
How do geodesists measure gravity? And what does it reveal about our planet? Gravitation is one of the most familiar forces in everyday life, yet almost no one can explain how geodesists use it to monitor a changing Earth. A new short film from IAG's Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS), "Gravity - The Invisible Force Shaping Our Earth" sets out to change that translating decades of geodetic gravity research into eight minutes that anyone can follow.
Categories: Earth observation; Guest post; climate change; geodesy; ggos; GRACE; gravity; science communication;

An AI jobs apocalypse in coming. Is it coming for your colleagues? Is it coming for you?

The Nature of Cities | 30 October, 2026
    Lucie Lederhendler When I first received this prompt, I was so smug! My sector, I have said before, despite its flaws and its snobbery, is the one most equipped to locate the work of the soul in creation. I thought back to a roundtable presenta...
Categories: Europe; North America; RoundTable; Science & Tools; Awareness; Education/Knowledge/Learning; Tools;

Top-Down and Bottom-Up

GEOExPro | 30 October, 2026
As exploration challenges become increasingly complex, two complementary workflows have emerged as the foundation of effective petroleum systems studies: bottom-up basin modelling and top-down fluid systems analysis. The traditional bottom-up approach reconstructs the geological evolution of a sedimentary basin through time. The principal strength of bottom-up modelling lies in its ability to quantify geological processes...
Categories: Geology & Geophysics; Petroleum systems;

Halloween nightmares: haunting tales of data gone missing

One major pillar of science are datasets. Collecting, analysing and understanding data is basically what research is all about. In this blogpost, Claire Treat tells a story about haunting data experiences that researchers from other fields can relate to for sure.
Categories: Cryoscientist life stories; data management; FAIR standards; Halloween; missing data;

Songbird Males Incubating Eggs: It's Not A Simple Situation

I was sent a photograph of a bluebird sitting on a nest of eggs in a bird box.  The sitter was definitely a male; it's fairly easy to distinguish the genders with this songbird species.  The sender had been monitoring the bird box and knew there we...
Categories: Birds of the World; bluebirds; brood patch; gender differenes; incubation; nesting season; songbirds;

Stone Age Art and Animals in Southern Africa

Dr Roseanne Chambers | 29 October, 2026
Lions, leopards, hyenas and rhinoceroses once roamed the European landscape with ancient humans, and deep in a limestone cave, artists painted these animals with exquisite detail and beauty. On my recent visit to safari camps in South Africa, I saw t...
Categories: Art & Artifacts; Fabulous Fossils & More; age dating; Chauvet Cave; France; Pleistocene; rock art; South Africa; Upper Paleolithic;

KUMIMANU: THE GIANT PENGUIN THAT TIPPED THE SCALES

Fossil Huntress | 29 October, 2026
Kumimanu adapted from Nobu TamuraSome penguins belong on postcards. This one deserves its own weigh station.Around 57 million years ago, an enormous penguin swam through the seas of what is now Aotearoa New Zealand. Known from fossils described in 20...
Categories: fossil; kumimanu; new; penguin; zealand;

Event Recap: “The Rise of Agentic AI: What It Means for Climate Innovation”

State of the Planet | 29 October, 2026
Panelists discussed how agentic AI is beginning to reshape Earth systems modeling, improve climate predictions and support adaptive decision-making....
Categories: Earth Sciences; artificial intelligence; climate science; engineering; Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; LEAP; Pierre Gentine;

New research demonstrates stability of phosphate oxygen isotope in lake sediments

Chris Bengt and PhD mentor Dr Savannah Worne of Loughborough University collecting lake sediment core. BGS © UKRI.
Categories: BGS news; biogeochemistry; climate change; isotopes; palaeoenvironment;

Which rain and temperature should drive your model? A guide to select daily forcing datasets , with application to northern Italy

If you want to run a hydrological model  anywhere, the first question is which meteorological forcing to use. For the Po basin, or anywhere in northern Italy,  there are today at least a dozen gridded products, regional and European, built from different meteorological networks, with different methods and for different purposes. I reviewed them from one point of view: that of a hydrologist who needs daily forcing to close water budgets with a distributed model. The full review, with tables, station counts and references, is in my blog: Daily forcings datasets: rainfall and temperature in the Po River District. Here, I provide a summary.
Categories: Catchment hydrology; Hydrological data; datasets; hydrological data; hydrological modelling; water resources;

Worth a try: thank your dog for barking

This probably sounds insane. Let me explain.
Categories: dogs; Eleanor; Franklin; stinkin' mammals; stinkin' SV-POW!sketeers;

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Jurassic Park Institute – Part 3

We're back for one last look at Tim Bradley's JP Institute dinosaurs. If you missed the last parts, go check them out (here and here) before you read this one! Today, we'll be taking a look at some of the ornithischians featured on the site. Th...
Categories: Vintage Dinosaur Art; 2000s; Abrictosaurus; Anchiceratops; Ankylosaurs; Callovosaurus; ceratopsians; Chasmosaurus; corythosaurus; Dravidosaurus; dryosaurus; hadrosaurs; jurassic park; jurassic park institute; Jurassic World; leptoceratops; Muttaburrasaurus; pachycephalosaurus; Pachyrhinosaurus; Parasaurolophus; Polacanthus; Shantungosaurus; timothy bradley; timothy j bradley; Tuojiangosaurus;

Mars rover samples what could be one of the oldest rocks on the Martian surface

Planetary Society Weblog | 28 October, 2026
The Perseverance rover's "Singita" sample may be more than 3.9 billion years old....
Categories: None

REPORT: The Trump Administration’s War in Iran Is Harming Fishermen in Hawaii and Across the Country

Southern Fried Science | 28 October, 2026
The ocean is not exempt from the Trump administration's reverse Midas touch. While the administration's fisheries policies undermine protections for endangered species and iconic habitats, the war in Iran drives up the price of diesel, leaving fi...
Categories: Conservation; Policy;

Reenvisioning How Research Moves to Practice — AGU Launches the Initiative for Science Assessments

From The Prow | 28 October, 2026
Like many of you, I have dedicated myself to AGU because I want to ask a bigger question than, "How do we protect what we have?" I believe we should be asking, "If we were building the scientific enterprise today, what would we create?" The scientific community is in the midst of severe challenges. We can react to each of them, or we can seize the opportunity in front of us--to reenvision the...
Categories: Fellowships, grants and scholarships; Open Science; AGU Initiative for Science Assessments; US Climate Collection;

Rio Puerco in full glory

Inkstain (John Fleck) | 28 October, 2026
The Rio Puerco (the eastern one, there's two, this is the one that flows into the Rio Grande south of Belen, New Mexico) took its turn yesterday, with historic flows from the tropical storm remnants that have been drenching the Four Corners states....
Categories: mud; water;

Cooling glaciers in a warming world?

Small glaciers are often written off: too small to matter, and soon gone anyway. Yet recent disasters in the Alps show that they can still pose a threat. And some are doing something rather unexpected: while the climate warms, the ice inside them has turned cold. We drilled into six small Swiss glaciers to find out why, and why it matters.
Categories: Highlighted Paper; boreholes; Fieldwork; firn; glacier hazards; glacier temperature; glaciers; Ground Penetrating Radar; polythermal glaciers; Swiss Alps;

The Breathing Ice Sheet: How Antarctica’s Changing Ice Moves the Ground Beneath It

EGU Geodynamics Division | 28 October, 2026
In this week's blog, Dwijendra Pandey, a PhD student in the Tectonic Geodesy Group at CSIR-NGRI, Hyderabad, India, takes us beneath Antarctica's ice to explore how changes in ice and snow move the solid Earth, and how scientists track this subtle motion from space and on the ground.
Categories: News & Views; Antarctica; Crustal Deformation; Cryosphere; Geodesy; Glacial Isostatic Adjustment;

Two Lamont Scientists Celebrate Marie Tharp’s Hall of Fame Induction—and Carry Her Legacy Forward

State of the Planet | 27 October, 2026
Robin Bell and Vicki Ferrini reflect on Tharp's induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame and how her groundbreaking ocean-floor maps helped establish the theory of plate tectonics....
Categories: Earth Sciences; Gender Equality; awards; cs highlights; Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; Marie Tharp; Robin E. Bell; Vicki Ferrini;

Columbia Climate School Career Reception Connects Students With Climate and Sustainability Professionals

State of the Planet | 27 October, 2026
Climate and sustainability students met with professionals in finance, clean energy, real estate, public policy and communications at the 11th annual career reception....
Categories: Climate; Education; Sustainability; cs impacts; education news; events; Industry Partnerships; professional development; Sustainability Careers Reception;

Latest: Are “steady-state” systems ahistorical?

Latest: Sabrina Koetter is defending her MS thesis: “Clarity for Lakes and Communities: Understanding the Communication Practices and Role Perceptions of Volunteer Lake Monitors”

Latest: New Paper: an innovative cycle-based learning approach to teaching with analog sandbox models

Latest: Why I went on strike over civil servant pay

Latest: Going underground #1 – flint and brick

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