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Chris Rowan

@allochthonous.bsky.social
2.6K followers 585 following 2.1K posts

I like rocks. I think and talk about plate tectonics, geological hazards like earthquakes, the history of the Earth system, and how we silly humans can live sustainably on our amazing planet.

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Reposted by Chris Rowan
San Francisco Chronicle @sfchronicle.com · 12h
Motorists who cross the Golden Gate Bridge at night next week will drive through a landscape of work trucks, the most visible sign yet of a $1.8 billion effort to prepare for a major earthquake.
bit.ly
The Golden Gate Bridge is getting a $1.8 billion retrofit to prepare for the Big One
Motorists who cross the Golden Gate Bridge at night next week will drive through a landscape of work trucks, the most visible sign yet of a $1.8 billion effort to prepare for a major earthquake.
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Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 20h
This is a better epilogue to my January story about the private equity firm profiting off of ICE's cruelest flights than I could have ever possibly hoped for. CHICAGO: You went to the mat and protected (at a minimum!) thousands of immigrants from torture. Take a bow. prospect.org/2026/10/02/i...
prospect.org
The City That Brought Down an ICE Airline - The American Prospect
In Chicago, progressive alderpeople held up a contract until a private equity firm was forced to dispatch Omni Air International, protecting thousands of immigrants from deportation.
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David Grimm @david-grimm.bsky.social · 22h
"The safety officer had recovered the cube of Nazi uranium from the drawer of a deceased geology faculty member. The unexpected gift would overturn our understanding of Germany’s nuclear effort during World War II." Fascinating story by @richardastone.bsky.social for @science.org
science.org
Nazi Germany had no hope of making an atomic bomb, uranium cubes reveal
Experimental reactor needed much more uranium and heavy water than the country could muster
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
⚒️ Sigh. Apparently we're relitigating the ICS vote to reject establishing the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch. I'm not sure what is actually going to be achieved here except to keep everyone mad at each other and muddy public understanding. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Battle of the Anthropocene: allegations re-ignite row over proposed geological epoch
Researchers say that a vote to reject the epoch violated procedure and call for transparency.
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Gavin Schmidt @climateofgavin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Not only are the flat earthers wrong, they are getting wronger by the day.
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Funranium (AKA Phil Broughton) @funranium.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Well, I'm 20 years late to the party on this one but this is why it pays to hangout with the Earth Sciences people when you're near their building. TL;DR - Geology is complicated. It's good to ask geologists before you dig deep holes or you will learn SURPRISE GEOLOGY.
en.wikipedia.org
Staufen im Breisgau - Wikipedia
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
For some strange reason, I continue to have concerns about the “move fast and break things” crowd being anywhere near nuclear power.
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sirosenbaum.bsky.social @sirosenbaum.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
thinking about Shakespeare's sonnets about immortality and realizing how weird it is that the AI cult believes in the idea of preserving human consciousnesses while actively destroying the only technology we currently have to do that: Art
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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Dynamical [chemical] systems view on the emergence of heredity in evolution: "This paper proposes that early chemical systems could preserve and pass on differences through stable chemical states rather than through stored sequences like DNA or RNA" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧪 #Complexity #EvoBio
Behavior of compartments in environments selecting for different autocatalyst composition.
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
An examination of the rapid deployment of behind the meter solar in countries like Pakistan and Nigeria - which in the absence of feed in tariffs is really mostly “instead of the meter”, which is causing problems for utilities and their remaining (poorer) customers.
e360.yale.edu
The Solar Boom in Developing Nations: Fast, Chaotic, and Unequal
Soaring energy costs are driving a solar rush in developing countries, but as households unplug from the grid, those who remain face higher electricity bills. If governments fail to manage the buildout, the growth of solar could destabilize power systems and deepen economic inequality.
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John Hawks @johnhawks.net · 27/09/2026
Vanguard Cave, Gibraltar, is known today for Neanderthal behavioral evidence, including a remarkable controlled hearth for production of pitch from gum rockrose. In 2021, the team discovered a chamber sealed for more than 40,000 years, results to come! www.johnhawks.net/p/a-visit-to...
johnhawks.net
A visit to Vanguard Cave, a Neanderthal workshop
The site has seen remarkable discoveries over 30 years, and excavations have opened a new unexplored chamber.
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
⚒️ Glacial striations with a view! Crown Point, Lake Champlain, NY. Two snapshots of the past are recorded here: the warm marine climate when the limestone was deposited, almost 500 million years ago; and a time when this view was buried under a thick ice sheet, 20,000 years ago. #SilentSunday
View focussing on a ledge of grey rock in the foreground. The rock - a limestone - is etched with dark lines that mostly align with the direction of view. The rock ledge is looking out over a rocky lakeshore beach. A train of waves is moving obliquely towards the beach, and mountains can be seen on the horizon.
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 24/09/2026
Every line of this article is just completely stunning
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
🧪⚒️ Interesting: modelling of length of day changes suggests that primary coupling between core and mantle is mainly a gravitational torque (dense bits of core and mantle attracting each other) rather than mechanical drag at core-mantle boundary or interaction with geomagnetic field.
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The first 20 mins or so of this podcast is a fantastic reframing of the ‘AI may kill us all’ pronouncements by asking “how, exactly? Give details of how your actual current technology could produce this outcome,” and demonstrating there is no actual scenario more detailed than “somehow, AGI/RSI.”
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I can’t think of a bigger red flashing warning light on the dashboard of the nation than the regressive, 19th century mutterings of Jacob Reese-Mogg - Jacob Reese-Mogg! - now being located in the saner wing of the Tory party.
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Even before it started accelerating over the AI madness horizon, the basic logic of EA was entirely solipsist. “Super-rational me is the person best equipped to decide how aid should be spent. Elected governments? Of course not. Actual communities in need? Pshaw.”
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Claire G. Griffin @polargriffin.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Local stream restoration projects and all the people working on them are what give me hope in this day and age. Locally, we have people doing dam removals, large wood installations, culvert replacements. There are a lot of people, from all walks of life, who are working to help streams and rivers!
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Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The person who thinks that he has the ability to decide which science to fund out of hundreds of subfields is exactly the person who should not make that decision. There is a reason that expert committees of scientists review and give recommendations for funding. No one person can know all of it.
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Cian 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ (he/him) @cbdawson.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Okay, trying to calm down after a stressful neighborhood incident by reviewing some of my video from last week. Thought that you, too, might enjoy a moment of Mono Lake tufa! Recommend sound OFF -- lots of wind.
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Given this is one of the major levers they’ve been using to keep pump prices down…yikes.
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Conflicts of interest don’t necessarily mean corruption, but *declaring a conflict also doesn’t resolve it*. A toothless, pro forma process like this can seriously undermine confidence in the impartiality of the IPCC’s conclusions and projections…
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I guess I should thank Amazon for fully validating our current plan not to renew Prime.
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Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans @astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
NASA picture of the day today is a real 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿beauty! This is a composite image of the ~5000yo Callanish Stones on the Isle of Lewis. The amazing Giuseppe Petricca has only gone and photographed the Sun at noon there, every few days, for a whole year. #Dedication 🔭🧪👌 ℹ️: science.nasa.gov/image-articl...
The imposing Callanish Stones stand talk with their shadows spanning out across the glass.  It's a super clear sky, but looks cold. Above the central stone is a strange figure-of-8 shape of dots.  This is the location of the Sun, at noon, on various different days across the year.
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Coconino from 🌶️ New Mexico @coconinoite.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
A view of the San Andreas Fault trace for y’all.
Looking southeast along the trace of the San Andreas fault from the Jeep driver seat. There are rolling hills covered with brown grasses. A geologic map view of my location right next to the San Andreas Fault 
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
⚒️ lt is clear that a lot of people touring Yellowstone forget to hold onto their hats - amongst other things: "Yellowstone's Geology team has removed more than 20,100 pieces of trash, 5,600 rocks and sticks, and over 280 hats from hydrothermal areas around the park--a record-setting year so far!"
usgs.gov
Caps, trash, and other hydrothermal funky finds: 2026 edition
Hold onto your hats and sunglasses—and your trash! Yellowstone National Park’s Geology team collects anything lost or left behind by visitors in the park’s hydrothermal areas, leading to some pretty i...
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Shecky @shecky.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
It's a good world where we have glorious dipshits like Sherman.
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
This juxtaposition of headlines is really something. (in fairness, the air traffic control thing seems to be about non-generative systems, and for forecasting future traffic and congestion points rather than sticking them in a control tower - thank goodness)
Screenshot of the website Ars Technica, showing two stories: on top, the headline is “AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US military attack”. Below, the headline is “FAA tees up $875 AI tool to help manage air traffic congestion.”
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Prof Col Macpherson @colinmacpherson.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Lucky enough earlier this week to get excellent view of the 2023-25 lava flows around the town of Grindavík (middle on coast), Blue Lagoon Resort and neighbouring geothermal plant (inland, middle-left) on the Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland. 🌋⚒️🧪
View of Reykjanes Peninsula from aircraft showing the town of Grindavík surrounded by tongues of black lava flows
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Doctora Malka Older @older.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
reactormag.com/misunderstan...
reactormag.com
Misunderstanding the Genius of Jules Verne — And Why It Matters to Science Fiction - Reactor
Our cultural obsession with Verne's predictive abilities ignores the real critical nuance and power of his writing, to everyone's detriment.
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Matthew R Francis @bowlerhatscience.org · 17/09/2026
speaking as a science journalist who is also a trained physicist, this is the FUCKING WORST POSSIBLE THING. This is the opposite of trustworthy. You can't trust a damn thing an "AI agent" tells you. An article needs to be unchanged between queries, or any change needs to be documented clearly.
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Pinning this story about how South Florida real estate agents deal with questions about sea level rise for the next time I’m told markets are effective at pricing in risk. Not if everyone ignores the risk instead! heated.world/p/the-open-hou…
Text Shot: Take the ground-floor condo I visited in the Bay Harbor Islands. “This is not a flood zone area,” the realtor said. “You don’t have to worry about it.”

Or the beachfront high-rise in South Beach. I mentioned that being so close to a rising ocean made me nervous. But the realtor said only the street would ever flood. “It won’t get into the building,” she said.

At a gorgeous single-family home in La Gorce, the agent told me flooding was only a problem in other neighborhoods. The grass might get some puddles during storms, but no more. “It doesn’t really get any flooding at all,” he said. “You’re kind of in the safe zone.”

The safe zone, it seemed, was whichever property I happened to be standing in.
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Coal ramping up is not great, although predictable. But the real question is how much future demand destruction is being locked in by accelerated renewable installation and electrification of transportation.
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Remco de Kok @planetremco.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
First radio emission detection for an exoplanet? Interpreted as aurora (and hence a magnetic field for the planet). Ortiz Ceballos+ arxiv.org/abs/2609.16720 🧪🔭 #exoplanets
arxiv.org
Discovery of radio emission from the exoplanet $β$ Pictoris b
Planetary magnetic fields shape atmospheric escape, mediate interactions with stellar winds, and encode information about planetary interiors, yet they have not been directly measured for planets beyo...
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Leah Stokes @leahstokes.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
A new existential threat, created by a small group of people in an industry that knew the risks, all while we are still busy dealing with another existential threat, created by the fossil fuel industry, which knew the risks. Check out my latest Substack here: open.substack.com/pub/electric...
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
A succinct and eloquent statement on why turning problems into LLM benchmarks is so corrosive. “In many fields…years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas.”
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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Dr Elisabeth Kosters @elisabethkosters.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
This is AMAZING!
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Jessica Tierney @leafwax.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I rarely post on here (apologies) but: @danibarra.bsky.social and I have some thoughts about CO2 in blue ice 🧊 🧐 Preprint is up... essopenarchive.org/doi/full/10....
essopenarchive.org
A reassessment of proxy signal preservation in Antarctic blue ice: Implications for Plio-Pleistocene CO2 | ESS Open Archive
Marks-Peterson et al. (2026) measured greenhouse gas concentrations in “blue” ice from the Allan Hills, Antarctica and concluded that atmospheric CO2 was broadly stable over the past ~3 million years....
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
A valuable if depressing account of the new Potemkin NSF: “we have a shell of a process so we can pretend we’re following Congressional statute whilst sending all the money elsewhere, please submit lots of proposals we won’t fund to make it look more real.”
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Elizabeth V @geolizzy.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Fuck all these people, but Lee Zeldin in particular www.epa.gov/newsreleases...
epa.gov
EPA Finalizes Repeal of 2024 Power Plant Regulations, Delivering $300+ Billion in Savings, Proposes Repeal of All Remaining Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards for Power Plants | US EPA
Today, U.S. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the repeal of the majority of the Biden administration's greenhouse gas requirements for U.S. power plants and proposed rescinding every remaining gr...
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Kamil Ustaszewski @wukaimi.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I'm seeking to fill a #PhD position in my #structuralgeology group @uni-jena.de on deep #geothermal resources in central Germany. The post is ideal for #geoscience students with interest in brittle deformation, #tectonic stress analysis and #fieldwork. www.chemgeo.uni-jena.de/en/72369/ope...
chemgeo.uni-jena.de
Open PhD position in structural geology
Open PhD position in the project:
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Calling it a “tax” when it is transparently not intended to raise any revenue is some kind of bullshit. There are functionally zero people looking to stay for OPT who could afford to pay this fee - it’s multiples of their salary. (as quoted thread explains, universities will not pay it either)
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
As a paleomagnetic mineral, #Pyrrhotite has my vote. Even if I can’t reliably spell it. Even when it usually shows up as a late diagenetic remagnetization which complicates your interpretations. #MinCup26
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Dr. Samantha Montano @samlmontano.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
(This is all an excerpt from my book Disasterology: Dispatches From The Frontlines of The Climate Crisis)
These dramatic changes were implemented in complete disregard of disaster research. Disaster scholars immediately spoke out about the harm these reckless changes would bring 412 Dr.
William Waugh and Dr. Richard Sylves, leading disaster policy experts, warned in 2002, "If the war on terrorism inadvertently undercuts or distorts an emergency system designed to deal with so-called routine disasters, it may well weaken current capabilities to manage conventional hazards and the hazards posed by terrorism. 413 The concerns of researchers were echoed by leading emergency management experts including former FEMA director James Lee Witt, who testified before Congress in 2004, saying, "I assure you that we could not have been as responsive and effective during disasters as we were during my tenure as FEMA director, had there been layers of federal bureaucracy between myself and the White House. 414
The White House and Congress did not address these con-cerns, nor did they wait for the findings of either the Commission or disaster researchers before reshaping emergency management. Instead, they had taken advantage of a momentwhen Americans were scared and Congress would not say no to implement their pre-9/11 homeland security agenda at the expense of emergency management. The changes were based on a regressive understanding of the country's day-to-day risk and have, as the experts warned, made us less safe. Politicians saw a window of opportunity and jumped through it.
It was this beaten, demoted, shell of an emergency management system that collided with centuries of bad policy deci-sions, a twenty-foot storm surge, and shattered levees in New Orleans. In fact, the government response to Katrina affirmed the very concerns that had been raised by emergency management experts about the post-9/11 changes. 415 Once I learned this history, everything I had seen in New Orleans began to make a lot more sense.
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Dr. Samantha Montano @samlmontano.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
We have lived under the profound consequences for over 20 years from the failed Katrina response to today as DHS takes FEMA’s already limited resources to implement deeply cruel (and often illegal) immigration enforcement.
wounds. As every bridge, tunnel, and train in and out of the city was shut down, every boat in the Hudson descended on Manhattan. Their efforts resulted in the spontaneous evacuation of half a million people in just over nine hours, making it the largest waterborne evacuation since Dunkirk in World War II. 407
Despite the loss of the city's state-of-the-art emergency operations center (EOC), located next to one of the towers, New York City's emergency management agency did not falter. Dr.
Kathleen Tierney wrote, "both the management and the conduct of emergency response activities continued uninterrupted" and that the "response organizations in New York City were highly resilient, showing great capacity to mobilize and coordinate resources. "408 Formal response operations, many of which were improvised, were run from alternative locations. As outside agencies arrived, they were largely integrated into the already established work being done.Existing plans and procedures were not perfect, and communication did break down at various points, but considering the scope of the situation, the response itself was remarkably effec-tive. Nearly everyone who physically could have escaped the towers got out. First responders did not abandon their jobs— instead, many sacrificed themselves to save others. The city did not descend into panic or chaos. New Yorkers made spontaneous but rational decisions to help themselves and one another. Given the physical limitations, search and rescue went well, and the immediate needs of survivors were largely met. By these mea-sures, disaster researchers argued the response itself was adaptive and effective.'
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Government officials, though, measured response effectiveness differently. They were focused on how well coordinated formal agencies were and how well they abided by existing plans. As a result, the need for and presence of a spontaneous response was, to government officials, indicative of failure. They argued a more centralized approach to emergency management was needed. It just so happened that those changes nicely aligned with priorities of the Republican party's long-desired and newly created Department of Homeland Security.The Homeland Security Act of 2002 decimated FEMA's au-thority. 41º It was demoted to one agency among many within
DHS, and in the process lost the relationships that had been built with other leaders across the federal government, which facilitated interagency coordination and communication in times of crisis. They also no longer had a direct line to the president, instead having to go through the DHS secretary to approve the use of federal resources during ongoing disasters. FEMA's position within DHS also left the agency vulnerable to decisions made by the DHS secretary.
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Dr. Samantha Montano @samlmontano.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
You cannot understand emergency management today without understanding how the Bush administration & Congress took advantage of the post-9/11 shock to create the homeland security apparatus.
Just a few months later, two planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the window was opened for the largest reorganization of the federal government since the National Security Act of 1947. US emergency management was turned upside down, as reckless policy decisions that contradicted decades of disaster research and emergency management expertise were imple-mented. 402 The cataclysmic post-9/11 policy changes laid the groundwork for the failed response to Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure only a few years later, 403 and still contribute to slow and ineffective responses today.The most significant of these changes was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. A month after 9/11, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) cosponsored a bill that took inspiration from the concept of the National Homeland Security Agency, proposing the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As had happened when Representative Thornberry introduced nearly the same bill in the House months before, hearings were held, but no vote taken. The Bush administration, with support from the Hart-Rudman findings, presented a similar bill to Congress in June 2002. With pressure from the White House, the bill finally passed, and DHS was created. FEMA was subsumed by DHS along with other agencies, including the Coast Guard and Secret Service. In the reorganization, FEMA lost its status as anindependent, cabinet-level agency. Across the country, emergency management agencies got whiplash. 404
As this drastic reorganization and refocus of the federal government was underway, Congress wanted answers about the circumstances that led to the 9/11 attacks including an analysis of how intelligence agencies had failed to communicate with one another before the attack. Most relevant for emergency man-agement, Congress also wanted a better understanding of the effectiveness of the response at the Pentagon and in New York City. The answers to these questions were compiled into the 9/11 Commission Report released in 2004.405 The 9/11 Commission's findings concerned many emergency management ex-perts. 406 The Commission found that the immediate life-saving response measures conducted at the Pentagon had been success-ful. On the contrary, they criticized the response measures in New York City as uncoordinated.This conclusion ran counter to the findings of disaster researchers in important ways. Disaster scholars documented first responders running into the towers, despite knowing they might never run back out. Inside the towers, people banded together to help each other out of the buildings, carrying coworkers who were disabled down dozens of flights of stairs, resulting in upward of sixteen thousand people evacuating in just 102 minutes.
Those who died were largely located on the floors above where the planes collided, making evacuation impossible.
Those who escaped the towers found people outside ready to guide them out of the dust. Local businesses opened their doors to offer refuge, and others handed out water or bandaged
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Thread. We’d be in a much better place if more people realised that politicians doing what we want is downstream of voting. It’s not politicians do what we want -> we vote for them It’s we (reliably) vote for them -> politicians (are more likely to) do what we want.
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
We truly do live in the worst timeline.
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Dr. Wendy Panero @mineraltoplanet.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I just noticed that the number of recognized exoplanets [6360] recently surpassed the number of recognized minerals [6239]. It’s like noticing your car odometer at 100,003 miles. #mincup26
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Chris Rowan @allochthonous.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Interesting, although unsurprisingly a lot of variability: “Regions with abundant foreshocks may provide useful short-term warnings but also require proper management of false alarms, whereas low-productivity regions may produce larger events with little warning from real-time seismic monitoring.”
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