iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I digitized Ralph Bagnold's barchan dune diagram. Somebody had to.

Figure 73 from Bagnold's 1941 book "The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes", illustrating the plan-view and cross-sectional shapes of a typical barchan dune

Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

John Anderson's recent talk at the UT Institute for Geophysics on how rapidly melting ice in Antarctica is bad news for the Gulf Coast: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlOD...

youtube.com

Spring 2026 UTIG Seminar Series: John Anderson

YouTube video by University of Texas Institute for Geophysics

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Flying through Death Valley, from south to north, to illustrate the differences between the alluvial fans on the eastern and western sides. Flow accumulation maps draped over a digital elevation model. Data: USGS 3DEP (download it from @opentopography.org); processing with @whiteboxgeo.bsky.social

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I just finished reading this and I’m very tempted to start from the beginning again. @peterbrannen.bsky.social’s ability to see, understand, and write about the big picture is outstanding. ‘The Story of CO2’ should be required reading in geoscience departments, and not just for the students

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

A web app for visualizing stratigraphic datasets (based on the ‘stratigraph’ package and our “Stratigraphy in space an time” paper): zsylvester.github.io/stratigraph-... 🧪 ⚒️

zsylvester.github.io

Stratigraph — stratigraphy in space and time

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 04/07/2026

This is my first Fourth of July as a US citizen. It's hard to feel pride in this country right now. The spirit of hope and optimism that permeates US culture is dimmed. But it's not extinguished. This dark moment will pass. There are better days ahead, if we work for them.

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

I am giving a talk tomorrow, one that I have not given before. In the best case, it is going to be like an Ig-Nobel-prize-winning study: first it makes you laugh, and then it makes you think lnkd.in/g6QZHx5h

Title slide of the talk; the title is "The strange ordinariness of high-frequency signal preservation in the stratigraphic record".

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

This paper on the morphology of the Indus Fan shows nicely that meandering channels exist in the deep sea as well and they are as beautiful as the subaerial ones agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

High‐resolutionmulti‐beambathymetrydataoftheupperIndusFan -- Figure 2 from Kunnummal et al., 2026, JGR Earth Surface

Part of the active channel-levee system, with many terraces that correspond to cutoffs. Figure 3A from Kunnummal et al., 2026, JGR Earth Surface.

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

I'm just a small-town political scientist, frightened & confused by the ongoing casual media normalization of the lawless authoritarianism, but it seems that the wild illegality & unconstitutionality of this should be mentioned somewhere in the hed, dek, lede, or main text of this very long article.

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Callan Bentley @callanbentley.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Really interesting footage from Galfa, southern Trinidad, after the Venezuelan earthquake doublet: youtu.be/4M8UpZYz4ss?... ⚒️ 1) significant uplift of a section of coast with lots of small faults 2) fascinating zone where boulders trapped sea life, now elevated

youtu.be

Venezuelan Earthquake devastated Galfa Shoreline

YouTube video by South West Adventures

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I went to a different conference recently and had very similar thoughts. You cannot attract young people to geoscience by ignoring climate change, repeatedly pointing out how much fossil fuels we still need, and downplaying the success and potential of renewable energy.

"Can Al discover a new oil field?" was the keynote talk at The Geological Society of London's Al in the Geosciences conference yesterday. "Leaving hydrocarbons in the ground is suboptimal" is a literal quote from the talk. I attended the conference as both a speaker and a panelist.

I was surprised to find that I was the only person in the (quite large) audience willing to speak up on the issue of climate change in response. As the UK's learned society for Earth Science, the Geological Society surely has a real responsibility to raise awareness of climate change, and to act.

Geological knowledge supports society in so many ways, and so many of those are compatible and necessary for achieving global sustainability goals. We have a responsibility to celebrate endeavours that bring us closer to a sustainable future, rather than those that push such a future further from our reach.

This post might look like a lot of virtue signalling but I feel it needs to be said. And yes, I do put petrol in my car. We have to work together to achieve a future that works for everyone. An unsustainable energy source that temporarily satisfies demand at the expense of the entire planet's future is surely not something to be celebrated, however dependent we may currently be on it. If future generations look back on us in disbelief at how we left things for them, I will feel ashamed. However, the rapid rise and global adoption of renewables does make me hopeful.

It was a very interesting conference to be at and I am grateful to the organisers for organising it and for having me to speak. A conference where not everyone in the room has the same view is perhaps the most important conference of all, especially in the age of polarising social media (like this!). Next time, let's give a keynote to climate science too and consider the options.

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Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 26/06/2026

What is the future of summers in England? Our choices matter. A high-emissions future will commit our children and grandchildren to live in a world where the summers of 1976 & 2025 are cold. A global net-zero emissions future means that we can stabilise the climate & those summers will be normal.

England average summer temperatures in a high emissions future

England average summer temperatures in a global net-zero emissions future

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Kevin M. Gill @kevinmgill.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

A wild workspace in front of the Mars Curiosity Rover following its Sol 4928 drive this week. Check out all those polygonal fractures! flic.kr/p/2sjzEfy

$Rocks covered with polygonal fractures that appear to have been filled in with mineral that's more weather resistant than the surrounding matrix. And sand. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill$

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Scott K. Johnson @sjon.earth · 10/06/2026

ICYMI If you're wondering what to make of new "AI models" for weather forecast or climate science, I've got you covered. I talked to a number of researchers and found that the story is pretty different between the two fields, but in both cases it's more complex than it looks on the surface.

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canyonbirds.bsky.social @canyonbirds.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

You know you're in the Moenkopi Formation when every bedding surface sports fossilized ripple marks. #RockinTuesday

Layers of reddish-brown rock displaying fossilized ripples.

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Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

An unapologetically angry post about what’s being done to US science:

science.org

The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America

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Thorsten Becker @thwbecker.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Y'all: If you're interested in #geodynamics, #earthquakes, or #tectonics, our Tectonic Geodynamics textbook is currently on sale for $65 @princetonupress.bsky.social and a new set of lecture slides along with PUP instructor resources are at www-udc.ig.utexas.edu/external/bec...

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Grain flow on the lee face of a dune, fed through breaching (Mesquite Dunes, Death Valley National Park) 🧪⚒️

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Yesterday morning at Mesquite Dunes, Death Valley National Park. Not a bad way to start the day

Interdune muddy pond deposits with desiccation cracks in early morning light, surrounded by dune sands with two scales of ripples that are nicely highlighted by the low-angle light

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

TFW years of hard work finally pay off

Screenshot from a course evaluation form in which a student wrote "I really loved his jokes"

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

We have been using one of these Impulse Labs stoves for a while and cooking has never been this much fun. In addition to the 10 kW power, it also has precise temperature control, so you never have to worry about, for example, overheating the oil.

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Katie Hinde @mammalssuck.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

"For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints in elite higher education." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wer...

mcsweeneys.net

We’re Diversifying the University by Hiring More Crackpots

“For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underreprese...

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

The post-Orbán Hungarian parliament members and the new prime minister Péter Magyar were sworn in today. Representatives of the winning Tisza Party were clearly enjoying the day 🇭🇺https://youtu.be/KAWVMJZgdHc?si=5WNQRiS8LAxtfSZp

youtu.be

Hegedűs Zsolt miniszter a Parlament lépcsőjén ismételte meg elhíresült táncát

YouTube video by Telex․hu

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Amanda Katz @katzish.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Yo, anyone want to be a Bird Identification Machine Learning Software Engineer for the wonderful Cornell Lab of Ornithology, home of the Merlin app?!? It’s remote! I do not have these skills but maybe you do! #jobs jobs.hr.cornell.edu/us/en/job/WD...

jobs.hr.cornell.edu

Machine Learning Software Engineer in Ithaca, New York, United States of America | Information Technology at Cornell University

Apply for Machine Learning Software Engineer job with Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, United States of America. Information Technology at Cornell University

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

One good thing that happened recently is that David Mohrig gave me one of Gary Kocurek’s original drawings that Gary made for his 1988 paper on bounding surfaces in eolian deposits

Formation of bounding surfaces with the migration of simple dunes (A) and the migration of draas (B). Illustration by Gary Kocurek; figure 1 in “First-order and super bounding surfaces in eolian sequences - Bounding surfaces revisited”, Sedimentary Geology, 56 (1988), 193-206.

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Colette Delawalla, PhD @cdelawalla.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

The past 15 months have marked a dark chapter in US science; one that will require significant effort to repair. But I'm not interested in duct tape and bandaid solutions. Our system had problems before Jan 20th, 2025. So, @standupforscience.net is doing what we do best: TAKING ACTION. 1/7

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terrawonderer.bsky.social @terrawonderer.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Congrats to Shang Tian and Dongfeng Li, our paper on Arctic river sediment it out today! We highlight how small Arctic rivers have increased sediment and changed disproportionally faster (over the satellite record). New machine-learning approach on landsat data. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Increasing river sediment concentration and flux across the pan-Arctic - Nature Geoscience

The total sediment flux from land to the ocean across the pan-Arctic has risen by 15% since 1980, driven by greater river discharge, intensified thermokarst disturbances and wildfire activity, accordi...

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

And Orbán just congratulated his opponent and admitted that his party lost the elections 🎉. To be fair, that is something that certain politicians on this side of the ocean are unable and unwilling to do

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Things are looking promising in early results from the Hungarian elections. I can’t believe that the Orbán regime is about to end.

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Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Today, Hungarians are voting. These elections loom large the world over. Viktor Orbán is a central figure in the international far right and his loss would be blow to familiar figures like JD Vance and Donald Trump, who are his pupils. snyder.substack.com/p/the-hungar...

snyder.substack.com

The Hungarian Candidate

Is Orbán's Decline Trump's Fall?

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Dr Fabian Wadsworth @fabianwadsworth.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Our new paper in Nature takes a critical look at what happens when you drill into a magma body. We find that by understanding that response properly, you can unwind the processes and get back to what the conditions of magma storage really were. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Disequilibrium response to tapping crustal magma reveals storage conditions - Nature

Magma drilling data from Krafla volcano, Iceland, are used to reconstruct in situ lithostatic magmatic conditions using disequilibrium simulations that provide a method for improving th...

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

What an amazing antidote to doomscrolling. Never thought that complex logarithms could be this interesting

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Frederik Kratzert @kratzert.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Excited to announce Groundsource - an open-source dataset of historic flood events! This has easily been one of the coolest projects I've worked on recently! Thread 🧵 for details and all relevant links. 1/n

A worldmap of the spatial distribution of extracted flood events in the Groundsource dataset. The map displays the total number of flood events extracted by the LLM-based pipeline aggregated per grid cell. The data are visualized using a Robinson projection, with event counts represented by a logarithmic color scale. Red points indicate the spatial centroids of reference flood events from the GDACS database.

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

Gorgeous thin section images of inversely graded grain flows in the Navajo Sandstone, by Jim Elder ⚒️🧪 smallpond.ca/jim/sand/sam...

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

"migration rates are a highly nonlinear function of channel curvature and they cannot be predicted" migration rates:

A plot showing measured curvatures and migration rates along a meandering river and correlated using dynamic time warping. The two curves are quite similar, although the migration rate curve is shifted downstream by about two channel widths.

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Did some vibracoring over the weekend on the barrier island between the Gulf of Mexico and East Matagorda Bay, to study how barrier islands are impacted by hurricanes

The rig is needed when you want to extract longer cores

Sometimes the vibration is not enough and a bit of pushing and twisting helps

A 4x4 vehicle is needed to drive on the beach

Sawing off the core barrel above the top of the sediment

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

3D-printable time: An evolving meandering river as a 3D model where time is the 3rd (vertical) dimension 🧪⚒️

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HydrologyNL @hydrology.nl · 01/03/2026

Here is a piece of the Yazoo River:

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

I know that there a ton of significant issues with AI and the companies that are behind the technology, but this is an excellent writeup of how thoughtful use of AI tools can speed up scientific work. I have been using Claude Code since January and it has been incredibly useful.

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Good to see 'segmenteverygrain' being used as the starting point for a model that reconstructs 3D grain shapes from 2D data onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... ⚒️🧪

The diffusion-assisted particle reconstruction model (DPRM) framework for 3D particle reconstruction from a single 2D image - Figure 1 from Zhu et al., 2025

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19thnews @19thnews.org · 23/02/2026

The trove of files released by the Department of Justice, illuminates Epstein’s deep interest and entrenchment in the scientific community. But the files also underscore how he used his power and money in ways that kept women out of places where they might succeed. bit.ly/4qWgPLz

bit.ly

The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM

In one email, an AI researcher suggested it’s “hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you.”

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

TFW you have to read a paper about sequence stratigraphy

Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the movie “One Battle After Another”, saying “I don’t remember any more of this code speak”

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John Schwartz @jswatz.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

I’m so confused. I thought it was the illiberal left that demanded safe spaces and used cancel culture to silence anyone who threatened to disturb their snowflake ideological purity. Can someone help me out here? www.texastribune.org/2026/02/19/t...

texastribune.org

University of Texas regents OK limits on controversial subjects

Opponents warned the policy’s vagueness could push professors to self-censor and leave students less prepared for the workplace.

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Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Among the many good friends of Jeffrey Epstein the one who infuriates me the most is Steven Pinker. I read “How the mind works” soon after it came out and I was impressed. I hate to think about how many years it took me to realize who this guy really was.

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