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Alex Robel

@iceclimate.bsky.social
1.5K followers 378 following 333 posts

Ice sheets, climate, math, coasts, community resilience. Associate Professor Georgia Tech EAS. he/him. iccl.eas.gatech.edu

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Reposted by Alex Robel
Steven J. Gibbons @stevenjgibbons.bsky.social · 23h
Last month we published a Comment in Nature Reviews: Earth and Environment entitled "Ethical considerations for #geohazard digital twins". The full article is on doi.org/10.1038/s430... There is a read-only link on rdcu.be/fw1xz Full text after embargo period and I can provide pdfs to individuals.
Screenshot of parts of the comment article "Ethical considerations for geohazard digital twins" published in Nature Reviews: Earth and Environment.
The full article is on https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-026-00811-0
There is a read-only link on https://rdcu.be/fw1xz

A full text will be made available after the embargo period but the read-only link is valid from now.
pdf-files of the final document can be provided in response to personal requests to steven.gibbons@ngi.no
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Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science (ACEAS) @antarcticsciaus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
⛏️ OUT TODAY: new research led by ACEAS CI Prof Matt King @deformedearth.bsky.social and co-authors from 14 countries calls for an urgent, globally coordinated campaign to the Wilkes Subglacial Basin – arguably the last great unexplored frontier of #Antarctica ⬇️
nature.com
Dynamic instability of the Wilkes Subglacial Basin Ice Sheet, East Antarctica - Nature Reviews Earth & Environment
The Wilkes Subglacial Basin is a marine-based sector of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet that is vulnerable to ocean-forced melting and climate warming. This Review assesses changes in ice-sheet extent in...
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Kelly Hereid @kellyhereid.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Tapio Schneider is one of the scientists I look to most to distinguish AI-useful from AI-hype in climate science world. His thoughtful post on the Navier-Stokes blowup is a great example - AI is useful when experimental verification and data density can substitute for physical understanding... 1/2
clima.caltech.edu
Headlines and inside stories: understanding and trust in AI for mathematics, science, and engineering - CliMA
[This post was prompted by the recent discussions about the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem and is cross-posted from Terry Tao’s blog. It lays out the reasoning behind how we use AI at CliMA.] ...
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Luke Zoet @lzoet.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
New work on various physical properties of Antarctic tills we obtained from the Byrd Polar Rock Repository. Proves some useful baseline values for modeling. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
The mechanical, hydrological and mineralogic properties of 11 Antarctic tills | Journal of Glaciology | Cambridge Core
The mechanical, hydrological and mineralogic properties of 11 Antarctic tills - Volume 72
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Congrats on well deserved @agucryo.bsky.social honors for @chingyaolai.bsky.social @gbinny.bsky.social and Sophie Nowicki! www.agu.org/honors/annou...
agu.org
2026 Honorees Announcement | AGU
We applaud the 2026 Honoree’s achievements and thank all volunteers, nominators and supporters for their commitment to this program.
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Emily Atkin @emorwee.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
A few weekends ago I went to Miami and attended 9 open houses in extremely high-risk flood areas to see what agents are telling prospective buyers about them. Here is my journey
heated.world
The open houses at the edge of disaster
What are buyers being told about climate risk in Miami? I posed as one to find out.
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Shiva Muruganandham @murushiv.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Had a blast working with @iceclimate.bsky.social in the ICCL group over the last few years! Many thanks to my committee and everyone else in the GT EAS crew for a truly memorable ride.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Congrats to our newest Dr., Shiva Muruganandham! He blew us away with his dissertation "Exploring Sea Level Futures: From Antarctic Ice Loss to Coastal Flood Adaptation"
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Alex Barron @alexrbarron.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Fourth, collaborate with faculty and staff doing work related to ES, community engagement, and faculty diversity and equity initiatives to develop a shared institutional vision for rewarding and/or supporting engaged scholarship.
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Alex Barron @alexrbarron.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
It’s Fall 🍎🍁which means new classes, new textbooks and…tenure packet submissions. My own experience with the tenure process led me to get very curious how institutions do and don’t reward engaged scholarship in the tenure process. 🧵
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences @pnas.org · 12/09/2026
Year-to-year variability in the melting of the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet may not be a harbinger of ice sheet destabilization, according to a study. Variability in the surface mass balance is an expected response to climate warming. In PNAS: ow.ly/2qq250ZMEvb
Meltwater in Greenland, July 2015.
CREDIT: NASA
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Georgia Tech College of Sciences @gtsciences.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
The new CHORUS research project led by @iceclimate.bsky.social will combine flood modeling, AI, and community partnerships to help coastal residents in GA and NY evaluate flooding solutions and shape resilience planning.https://sciences.gatech.edu/news/supporting-community-led-flood-resilience
sciences.gatech.edu
Supporting Community-Led Flood Resilience
The CHORUS research project will combine advanced flood modeling, artificial intelligence, and community partnerships to help coastal residents in Georgia and New York evaluate flooding solutions and ...
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Excited that our new paper is out @pnas.org! We show that the observed increase in variability of yearly Greenland ice melt over recent decades is not evidence of ice sheet destabilization. Story in 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
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Lily Dove @solilyquy.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Walked through the OpenAI Navier Stokes breakthrough in my graduate-level Ocean Dynamics class today and ended on this slide. We had a super thought-provoking and respectful conversation with a huge range of opinions. Georgia Tech students rock! 🐝
Three quotes: 

1) “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from [Buckmaster & Alpöge] usage of our products helped improve our models⁠.” 
OpenAI statement

2) “I am not happy about the presentation quality in [our] papers. Ideally, we would have preferred to spend weeks turning the LLM generated proofs into something readable from the very first page. This level of care is what these problems and the community devoted to these problems deserves.”
Prof. Tristan Buckmaster, NYU-Courant

3) “[This situation] extremely damaging to mathematics; it convinces decision makers that human mathematicians are obsolete, and it convinces young people that their passion for mathematics has no future.”
Prof. Michael Harris, Columbia University
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Ruth Mottram @ruthmottram.eurosky.social · 09/09/2026
Publication day! Our finalised paper on melange processes at Greenland glacier fronts is out now! I wrote about what we did, what we found and what it means for Greenland ice sheet retreat..
sternaparadisaea.net
A jumble of broken ice, and what it means for Greenland’s calving glaciers.
Ice mélange — sometimes known as sikussaq in Greenlandic — is that chaotic jumble of icebergs, bergy bits and sea water that sits in front of marine-terminating glaciers. It’s been described …
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
The California coast is about to be a time machine to what every day in 2060 will look like
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Dan Ohnemus @dohnemus.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Skidaway Institute of Oceanography is continuing our search for a Director! If you or your colleague(s) are interested, the position posting is open until Nov 1, 2026. www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/468...
ugajobsearch.com
Director of Skidaway Institute of Oceanography and Professor
The University of Georgia (UGA), a land-grant, sea-grant and space-grant university with statewide commitments and responsibilities, is Georgia's oldest, most comprehensive institution of higher educa...
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Felix Pfluger @felix-pfl.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
#cryohazard #landslide #glacier #Rasuwa #Nepal. The sudden detachment of a glacier-covered rock slope turned into a horrific disaster. Release mechanisms are likely associated with polythermal glacier shift, permafrost loss, and hydrostatic pressure build-up. cf esurf.copernicus.org/articles/13/...
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Henri F. Drake @henrifdrake.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
I am recruiting a PhD student to join my group at UC Irvine in Fall 2027 to work on the Coupled Tipping Dynamics of Ocean Circulation and Ice Sheets – details in the attachment below. Please share the position with your networks!
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ESA Earth Observation @esaearth.esa.int · 24/08/2026
Earlier this month, a 76 sq km section of Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland broke away. The newly formed tabular iceberg covers an area about the same size of Manhattan and is estimated to be up to 150 metres thick. This huge loss was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar vision ⬇️
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Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 25/08/2026
New paper led by @rowanuniversity.bsky.social’s Andra Garner looks at the history of sea level projections published from 1982-2025
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Evolution of Global Sea‐Level Rise Projections and Their Uncertainty
95% of all global-mean sea level projections have been produced in the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, or Australia Less than 25% of global mean sea-level projections exceed high-e...
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Presenting Dr. Aminat Ambelorun, who today successfully defended her dissertation "Modeling Iceberg Calving: Stochasticity and Local Sea Level Coupling"
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Jonathan Wille @jonathanwille.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
6/ Using climate models and ice core records, they find events like this happen once every decade, at varying intensities. Unfortunately, that means the pause in ice loss is temporary and Antarctica will soon return to losing ice and pushing sea levels higher www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Multiyear tropical warm pool warming drives slowdown in Antarctic mass loss - Nature
Recent Antarctic ice mass gain was linked to a recurrent atmospheric teleconnection, but this recurs about once per decade in observations and historical simulations so does not yet reflect a global-w...
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Julie Elliott @julieelliott.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Great opportunity for a postdoc position looking at Mendenhall Glacier outburst floods at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau. Preference is given to applications received by Sept. 1. careers.alaska.edu/jobs/postdoc... ❄️⚒️🧪
careers.alaska.edu
Postdoctoral Associate in Glaciology - Juneau, Alaska, United States
The University of Alaska Southeast invites applications for a postdoctoral associate in glaciology for a project aimed at constraining uncertainty in glacier outburst flood models. Mendenhall Glacier,...
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Georgia Tech Research @gtresearch.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
How do communities prepare for extreme weather? A @gatechengineers.bsky.social professor is connecting churches, community leaders, and researchers across the Southeast to strengthen resilience, improve food access, and support disaster response. b.gatech.edu/4zgsk69
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vincentholst.bsky.social @vincentholst.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵
The average CD_5 index per year for Web of Science. The original Park et al. decline (top curve) becomes essentially flat (bottom curve) when removing papers with CD_5=1. Those papers largely correspond to dataset artefacts.
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Zack Labe @zacklabe.com · 10/08/2026
We have very unfortunate news to share today... 😢 I've been an author for this report since 2020, and we just celebrated our 20th anniversary edition last year.
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Luke Zoet @lzoet.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Check out this new paper we have in @pnas.org ! It’s got some big findings about glacial erosion. Namely that quarrying is ~5x more efficient at eroding bedrock than abrasion and that power based erosion laws are the most appropriate for modeling erosion www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
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VAW Glaciology @vaw-glaciology.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
New preprint by our PhD student Sandra Wells introduces GlaDS-2, a subglacial drainage model capturing ice uplift and free-surface flow for the first time in 2D. Preprint: doi.org/10.5194/egus... Image: Laura A. Stevens (Western Greenland)
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Kate Marvel @drkatemarvel.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
It's not that climate change is "worse than expected". It just feels worse when it happens to *you*
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Aaron Sojourner @aaronsojourner.org · 25/07/2026
Admirable clarity @science.org
The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.

That’s it. That’s the story
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Benjamin Cook @dustybowl.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship applications are now open! cpaess.ucar.edu/cgc/annual-r... I was one about 350 years ago, and cannot not speakly highly enough of this program. Applications due October 16, 2026
cpaess.ucar.edu
Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Program Recruitment Announcement | Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science (CPAESS)Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Program Recruitmen...
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Rick Thoman @alaskawx.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
The late, great Carl Benson's final paper, "Revisiting the July 1954 melt event in Northwest Greenland" is now published. It's apt that his last paper is about his first science love: #Greenland #glaciology. @ruthmottram.eurosky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
Revisiting the July 1954 melt event in Northwest Greenland: What it tells us about the historical record of melt events on the Greenland ice sheet | Journal of Glaciology | Cambridge Core
Revisiting the July 1954 melt event in Northwest Greenland: What it tells us about the historical record of melt events on the Greenland ice sheet - Volume 72
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Capital B @capitalb.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Critics of a new Pearl River flood-control plan fear it prioritizes development over real flood relief, potentially leaving majority-Black neighborhoods at risk. bit.ly/4ynRa3l
bit.ly
Jackson Residents Warn New Pearl River Plan Won't Stop the Next Flood
With a federal plan to dam the Pearl River nearly set, Mississippi residents fear the effects downstream.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Today is our 8th annual Summer Undergraduate Research Showcase in GT Polar. Stick around to read about some exciting early career scientists! 🐝 🧊 🐝 🧊
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Ken Johnson @montereyken.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
@soccomproject.bsky.social @bgc-argo.bsky.social @globaloceanbgc.bsky.social 🌊The commentary by Dove et al (bit.ly/4fd2whZ) on the future of Argo comes at a critical moment for US Argo. GO-BGC, the major US BGC-Argo project funded by NSF completes all float deployments in 3 months. 1/3
A map of latest location of all 580 BGC-Argo floats with 5 or 6 BGC sensors (O2, nitrate, pH, chlorophyll, backscatter, irradiance) that have reported in the last 30 days. 481 of these sensors were deployed by US programs.
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Quanta Magazine @quantamagazine.org · 13/07/2026
It turns out that under just the right conditions some liquids don’t flow — they fracture. www.quantamagazine.org/we-know-simp...
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Paul Voosen @voosen.me · 01/07/2026
One of the climate modeling preprints that I cited in my feature, finding that AMOC was resilient and reversible to realistic Greenland melt, is out now in Science Advances. Not shockingly, it hasn't gotten broad coverage.
science.org
Limited impact of Greenland meltwater on abruptness and reversibility of future Atlantic overturning changes
Climate model simulations show the Atlantic overturning circulation can recover even from strong future Greenland ice sheet melt.
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Melaine Le Roy @subfossilguy.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Robust attribution of global industrial-era glacier mass loss to anthropogenic climate change 🧊🔥 'Our central estimates are that the magnitude of the anthropogenic warming over the industrial era ranges from 91–98 % of the observed, depending on region' egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/20...
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Shiva Muruganandham @murushiv.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
"The next breakthrough in flood risk management will not come from a satellite with a higher resolution sensor, or a neural network with a lower RMSE, or a simulation that runs ten times faster. It..." a good reminder from @niklasjordan.com: risk-and-haz.offprint.app/a/3mozncdvl7...
risk-and-haz.offprint.app
Stop Building Better Flood Models: Why the Last Mile Matters More Than the Last Decimal
Europe's flood data is good enough. Getting it to the right people isn't.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Our newest Dr from ICCL, Dr. Danielle Grau! 🎉🧊❄️🐝
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Our last Ice-T talk from postdoc Dr. Paul Summers 🥲 where he imparted sage wisdom to students and summarized his very successful two years of work with myself and Becca Jackson at Tufts. He is off to a position @sandialabs.bsky.social!
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International Glaciological Society @igsoc.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
First talk by @donglaiyang.bsky.social: calibrating remote sensing observations in a probability space using an ensemble composite. Then discovering anomalies in radar attenuation rate & thus ice temperature. Finding (hypothesized) ~10-100m of temperature ice under parts of Thwaites Glacier. #igsoc
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Our new perspective @nature.com led by @fsmccormack.bsky.social with @fpattyn.bsky.social @mathieu-ice.bsky.social Helene Seroussi 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Emergent decadal predictability in Antarctic contribution to sea-level rise - Nature
Although Antarctic ice loss projections diverge widely by 2100, this Perspective shows that present-day rates robustly predict mid-century sea level rise, providing a firm basis for near-term planning...
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Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 10/06/2026
Now all done but the synthesis! Thanks to the ~110 scientists and practitioners, not to mention @agu.org and our local volunteers, for a great three days in Montreal!
Attendees of the AGU Chapman conference on updating usable projections of future sea level, on the steps of the Musee Redpath, McGill University.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
New paper @igsoc-pubs.bsky.social led by former BS/MS Ella Stewart finds evidence from NASA ICESat-2 that basal friction is low many km upstream of grounding lines over most of Antarctica! Important implications for how quickly glaciers respond to ice shelf thinning.
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Luke Zoet @lzoet.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
New paper on how waves erode ice from both theory and experiments with a new parametrization for use in larger scale models www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
Wave erosion of ice cliffs: melt rate due to reflection of non-breaking surface waves | Journal of Fluid Mechanics | Cambridge Core
Wave erosion of ice cliffs: melt rate due to reflection of non-breaking surface waves - Volume 1036
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Andra Garner @andrajgarner.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
When we cut critical Federal funds for science, we all pay the price. The impacts of this loss of scientific innovation will be felt especially acutely in our coastal communities. Check out my latest op-ed, published today in The Philadelphia Inquirer, to learn more! share.inquirer.com/iC6tHv
share.inquirer.com
Cuts to science funding will create a flood of challenges in our coastal communities | Opinion
Progress toward supporting safer, more affordable coastal communities in the face of climate change is at risk from a storm of cuts to U.S. scientific funding.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
“…vertical land motion projections based on linear extrapolations introduce systematic median sea-level projection errors of typically up to 7.6 mm yr−1 at sites influenced by seismic or volcanic activity and 5.6 mm yr−1 at the other sites”
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Adam Sobel @adamsobel.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
I wrote something about creativity in science. Why would one write such a thing? That's the first question the piece addresses. There's general reasons, and then there's my current weird personal quest... deepconvection.substack.com/p/creativity...
deepconvection.substack.com
Creativity in science: why talk about it?
Because we usually don't, and we aren't good at teaching it either.
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