@geomorphrachel
Professor of glaciers, geomorphology, & environmental science; living & biking in the Northwest; being depressed about climate change. Come for the pictures of rivers, stay for the cats and bikes
That's why I like working and. Being visible in the community normally. But with growing ice presence in the area and lots of international and immigrant students, I'm worried more for their safety than anything.
If you're looking for some Minneapolis/Minnesota-based mutual aid funds, here are some lists: linktr.ee/mplsmutualaid and www.standwithminnesota.com (there are definitely more, but this can get anyone started)
I'm trying to put together a faculty group at my school to try and figure out if having our students go out into the community for internships/field work/community work is still viable and safe in a growing ice presence. Any good advice?
Here's how things are going, by the way: www.idahopress.com/news/local/c... Any advice on shifting out of academia as a geomorphologist because I'm super tired?
Of all the impacts of government shutdowns, I know my classes are minor, but is anyone aware of links to energy infrastructure maps like the EIA Atlas, which apparently isn't accessible right now?
I just did my first in class exams in over 5 years (mainly for LLM reasons), and I really did not anticipate how much better and well thought-out their responses are then when I would run a similar test on our LMS.
A chart of "Major concerns of PhD candidates." The top text says, "Financial pressures top the list of concerns faced by PhD candidates, but concerns differ among the sexes. Those studying in the United States rank the political landscape as their main worry." The chart shows that in the full survey, political landscape is the biggest concern for about 20% of students (a bit higher for women than men) but there's an annotation saying "In US PhD students, this rose to 64%". Overall, the highest-rated concern was financial pressures at around 40%.
That's quite the chart annotation.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Submitting a microplastics proposal today. Hopefully some funders somewhere in the US still care about pollution.
🚨 NCA5 is now LIVE! 🚨
They took it down, but we've brought it back at: nca5.climate.us
Bookmark. 👏 this. 👏 page. 👏
This is just our first step in restoring trusted science information that Americans need to understand what's happening with the climate.
Three weeks into the fall semester with newly outsourced IT at my campus; its going as a lot of us expected. Will the GIS license problem be solved by the spring semester so I can actually teach my GIS class? We have the license! I just don't have access to change the location for the application.
I'm going to try interacting on here again, though, like probably everyone else, my ability to focus is completely shattered.
Got an ftir spectrometer and got it to successfully identify ldpe as ldpe. Am I a chemist now?
Collapse of the Vallunaraju Glacier front (~5060 m asl, Cordillera Blanca, PER) yesterday! 😱🌊
🎥 Jose Forero
www.instagram.com/p/DIaDPQmNuYF/
Who knows if it will go anywhere with all the federal grant chaos, but I'm excited to potentially do some preliminary glacial research again this summer. (Also I do still exist on this platform, I promise)
In some needed good news, I just got my tenure board-approved. (I had it at my old institution but academic is weird and you can't always get hired with it)
I think the only thing keeping me grounded and not completely devastated right now is interacting with idealistic college students all the time.
I'm taking all the little victories I can get right now, so hurray for all my GIS students successfully making maps on day 2 of class.
Tagging for the science/geo feeds since the war on science seems to only have just begun 🧪⚒️
Tell the AGU what all of Donald Trump's illegal executive orders are doing to science and to scientists, staff, and students.
NSF website describing appropriate examples of broader impacts for a grant
That NSF is combing through grants for keywords like gender, equity, scientific literacy, etc, in order to cancel those grants, is frustrating when you consider that Broader Impacts ARE A REQUIREMENT OF GETTING THE GRANT. In case you're not familiar, here are examples 🧪
new.nsf.gov/funding/lear...
Relentless and grim. It’s increasingly hard to see where any positives are going to arise in the next few months. Years, even.
One impact of the NSF freeze: They fund the small nonprofit, EarthScope, that manages seismic and GPS stations used worldwide to detect and warn of earthquakes and navigate autonomous vehicles.
EarthScope can maybe make payroll this week. A prolonged freeze could see stations fail.
a stick figure smiling with a small monster eating its head. Text says, 'people who don't worry about climate change' labeling the person and 'climate change' labeling the monster.
My 8-year-old's hand drawn 'meme' operating with more sense than we'll ever see in the next 4 years.
Schrödinger’s funding freeze.
Four charts from Our World in Data comparing the share of EV car sales around the world, in the EU, China and the US. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
The US just revoked an executive order aimed at making EV sales 50% by 2030. “The US will not sabotage our own industries while China pollutes with impunity,” Trump said.
But China is already stomping the US in EV sales. This decision will widen the gap.
Source: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
My new post on The Climate Brink: LA fire's toxic legacy: When wildfires turn cities into smoke. It talks about air pollution from wildfires, the connection to climate change, and Table 12.12 from the last IPCC report.
www.theclimatebrink....
It's definitely been helpful for us. The electric infrastructure in my state (Idaho) is severely lacking, for one.
I've had a leaf since 2016, and its range works for my commute and around town but not much else (newer EVs would have more range though). We've got a plug-in hybrid for longer trips, which is great because it can also do short in town trips fully on electric.
Bogus basin coach lift and ski runs lit up at night with a few people at the foot.
Went night skiing with my family and got ditched by the 8 year old so he could ski black diamonds and tree terrain while I hang on the greens.
