I'll be very blunt about it, all countries with a coast should be openly sharing oceanographic (physical, chemical, and biological) information. Water recognizes no borders, and eventually, others are affected.
#Sea #MarineMonitoring
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Dr. Or M. Bialik
@ombialik@mastodon.world
mastodon 4.7.3Geology, climate change researcher, and too many other things | Posting about the writing experience, science, SFF and academia. Opinions are my own or of the characters in my head.
869 Followers
48 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 28, 2022
Website (Science!):
Other Website (Writing):
After about twenty odd years in the field (and now working mostly at sea), my family decided it was time I finally started dressing like a geologist
(I'll probably still show up to conferences in a waistcoat and a buttoned-up shirt or a Hawaiian shirt, season-dependent, but these are nice for casual days in the office)
#Geology #RockPeople
Science should be accessible.
Do earthquakes repeat? No one can really agree on that, one way or another. Some of them seem to, we call them repeaters. How those are generated might very well depend on specific organization of rupture points on a fault.
link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb3563
#earthquakes #geology
With how much I post about marine science 🌊, people sometimes forget that I'm actually a geologist ⚒️ by training. But I am, and I do get excited when I get some mud to play with (and to do interesting science with).
#MarineGeology #Mud
I could really have done much better without dealing with a pompous, mildly anglophone chauvinist reviewer this week and their supposedly helpful but contempt-dripping, passive-aggressive report.
#Reviewer2 #AcademicChatter
#WeekendReading: Yan et al. on the bad, terrible, not-good-at-all future projections for reef dissolution into the rest of the 21st century.
(Have I mentioned it's not looking good?)
Link: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026GL125720
#Reef #Ocean #ClimateChange
Burnout is far from being one thing, and there is no cure-all for it. It's something we really need to talk more about; normalize as an issue people could be dealing with, and that modern work environment (notably for research and creative work) might be inducing.
(I'm fine so far. Work and life are taxing, but I'm handling and keeping an eye on my mental health. The same could not be said for some people around me)
#MentalHealth #Burnout
A friend told me they like the work I do on social media and that it's mostly good stuff. I asked her why she never liked or reposted or commented on anything I put up. She shruged as said she usually doesn't do those things.
Which I get, ok, but how am I supposed to know if what I post is interesting to anyone without some feedback?
I had a long thought about what I'm trying to achieve with my students and why I have issues with certain ways of doing things.
It took me back to Asimov's work, Profession.
I'm trying to raise the sort of people who write the programs for the taping.
(If you never read Profession, the summary on Wikipedia [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella) ] is rather extensive, or you could look for a copy of Nine Tomorrows)
Sea level change doesn't just flood cities, it can also move the ground under them. up and down. Rapid sea-level rise drives increased faulting, and when we look at it relative to glacial sea-level change, one can also see it.
Link: https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/26/4053/2026/
#SeaLevel #Geohazard #Science
What if a rocky planet didn't have a core? That can't happen, can it? It should differentiate... well, there might be a set of circumstances under which that might happen. If it does, they're going to be a bit strange.
As to how they might be weird. They might deform more due to rotation and gravitational distribution; they might have an unstable or no magnetic field, and the minerals on their surface would definitely be exotic.
Link: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2615884123
#Exoplanets #Worldbuilding
In a brilliant and unexpected find, it turns out that being repeatedly exposed to homophobic hate speech puts the target of it in a bad mental state and desensitizes everyone else to it.
This is why you shut that shit down immediately!
Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.70056
#Queer #LGBTQ #Homophobia #Intolerance
Something I didn't know until recently about mitochondria is that different cells have different types of them, and there are multiple types of them. That makes me think of cellular evolution a bit differently.
Link: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10427836/pdf/nihms-1921885.pdf
#mitochondria #metabolics
In the Bronze Age, what we call a small town would be a big city, and what we call a major city would be unimaginable. It isn't simple to grasp just how cities have grown through time.
So I used a log scale to visualize.
Refs & Data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_urban_community_sizes
#Cities #History
How much of fixing climate needs to be your own personal responsibility, and how much has to do with society as a whole? The answer, unsurprisingly, is that we need both, and that one reinforces the other.
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44168-026-00405-y
#ClimateChange
At this point, I was involved, directly or indirectly, in the mentorship of students and postdocs from 12 countries (🇳🇱🇮🇹🇩🇪🇬🇷🇮🇱🇮🇷🇷🇺🇨🇳🇮🇳🇰🇪🇳🇬🇺🇸). Each of them was their own person, but there were some common communication issues, some of which cultural.
They are what this thread is about. 1/ 🧵
#AcademicChatter #Mentoring
I couldn't help myself once the idea came into my head following the post from this morning (@ombialik@mastodon.world)
...also, popping in again to a news website.
Reading the news, sometimes, I feel like Lex Luthor would have kicked out these wannabe super-villains out of the Legion of Doom (with no refund of their admission fee) for giving the profession a bad name.
There is a lot of carbon being transferred from the land to the ocean, that has a big effect on how much carbon is stores where (if any). But over the last few decades, that flux has been increasing, often due to anthropogenic activity.
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-026-02034-w
#Carbon #ClimateChange
Interesting new work showing plankton being the primary producers of organic matter in the marine realm throughout the Phanerozoic.
Link: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-9940488/v1
#Plankton #CarbonCycle #PrimaryProductivity #Ocean
#WeekendReading: Zhang and Huang on the role of weathering and reverse weathering on the Cenozoic cooling.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1130/G54403.1
#Weathering #Lithium #ClimateChange #EarthsHistory #Geology
We need more colloquialisms and common-use words in scientific writing; it is becoming too stiff and stifled (and also less legible and accessible).
#AcademicChatter #AcademicWriting
Can 22 more studies cite any of my work (take your pick, there's no shortage https://scholar.google.co.il/citations?user=pXFDRUgAAAAJ&hl=en) in like... the next few days? It really doesn't mean anything, but I sort of want to hit the 3000 citation milestone around when my 100th paper drops.
I could use the moral boost with everything I need to deal with in the next few weeks.
Two things I try to avoid are jellyfish🪼 parasite 🪱. Naturally, jellyfish have their own parasites (for maximum creepiness). But the thing is, those parasites don't stay in the jellyfish; they are just a step in their life cycle. 🧪🌊
Link: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.29.741456v1#Ocean #Jellyfish #Parasites
Just FYI, the call for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowships is now open.
As a reminder, if you plan to apply or know someone who is about to, Noam Vogt-Vincent and Rita García Seoane wrote a great (unofficial) application guide.
https://zenodo.org/records/15377569
#AcademicChatter
How many people do we need on a spaceship if we want an extrasolar colony to be viable (genetically)? Someone actually looked at that, and the answer is 1,400-6,800 (but might still require some population control).
Link: https://bis-space.com/shop/product/jbis-076-08-0288/
#SciFiScience #SpaceColonization #GenerationShip #Population
LLMs have been with us for a few years now, and in that time have generated both behavioral changes and a lot of... stuff, including what this study calls "LLM Pollution", which presents a possible issue in trying to understand humans as the data source contains more non-human inputs and people themselves change behaviors.
How to deal with this calls for some new thinking.
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74621-9
#DataPoisoning #LLM
I think that people don't have a full appritiation on the fact that many scientists can't publish wherever they want.
So I'll try for the first time here to post a thread (1/n 🧵) explaining this aspect of research space, or at least how it looks for where I was so far.
#AcademicChatter #ResearchLife #Publication
I'm coming to the conclusion that I really hate the trope of Evil Opposes Beauty, esp. with architecture. There is something interesting to play with around cultural antagonism and the defacing of buildings, but the Bad People should be allowed to have some nice-looking, and pleasant to inhabit stractures.
Sometimes it's nice to have a deadline.
This one is a housewarming gift, and the party is coming up, so what's done is done.
Also, painting busts is fun. Might do that again.
Replying to
@DrSuzanne@ohai.social It's a whole discussion that's been raging even before GenAI about "jumping to the end". A lot of base operations are done in software (in statistics, failure mechanics, runoff management... the list goes on), and there is the argument by some that it's possible to skip all the equations and pen-and-paper exercises, as most people don't "need" to understand what's going on under the hood to work.
I have issues with that from several perspectives, but one can see the temptation there.
I was looking at a new paper that came out. It had a map in the discussion showing some things. I'm looking at it, and I can spot some glaring omissions in the Indian Ocean.
The thing is, I know for sure one of the authors should know about them - we co-authored several papers on them.
#AcademicChatter
#WeekendReading: Chen et al. on how marine anoxia develops under high atmospheric O2 and icehouse conditions (as you guessed, it has something to do with rapid rises in CO2).
"There is a long-standing concern that land degradation reduces agricultural productivity, particularly in the long run."
Empirically, this translates to a drop in agricultural productivity on the scale of hundreds of thousands of tonnes per year.
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-026-01382-5
#Soil #Environment
OK, hear me out - tentacle hentai sort of makes sense... at least as far as that suckers and tentacles are likely appendages aliens species might have. They show up often enough across many groups here on Earth.
Link: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202203.0324
#Evolution #Worldbuilding
I want to create.
I want to consume.
I want to rest.
I want to run.
I want to paint.
I want to edit.
I want to clean.
I want to make a mess.
Can someone please get around to creating the tech from @davidbrin@mastodon.social 's KILN PEOPLE (or equivalent) so I could do all of that at the same time?
"... participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think... many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts."
Link: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1250830
#Cognition #Boredom #Psychology
"... Many forms of foundational and integrative labour essential to infrastructure-scale science remain inconsistently recognised within conventional attribution systems."
Link: https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/14096/
#Geology #AcademicChatter #Recognition #ValuingLabor
Just a gentle reminder for politicians and anyone else in charge of stuff out there: one (person, group, society) doesn't get good at anything, let alone excellent, without some resources, effort, and incentives allocated to the effort.
Support is also rather helpful. Both material and just knowing it's there if needed.
Somewhere in the US in the late 1940s.
Military transport planner: We need something all-terrain that could also get to a ship on its own.
LeTourneau Technologies: We were thinking, two-story-tall boat with wheels the size of a buggy, would that work for you?
Climate change, even natural climate change, has been the bane of civilizations before. The Bronze Age collapse was one of the dramatic ones, and extreme drought events might have been at the center of it all.
Link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed5439
#ClimateChange #History #BronzeAgeCollapse
In retrospect, it makes sense, but I really didn't expect the difference in the ratio of ATP to carbon to be multiple orders of magnitude between plants and animals.
(Mobility is energy-intensive)
Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004226022273
#Worldbuilding #Metabolism #Energy
Meine alte Gruppe in Münster sucht einen Akademischen Rätin. Geowissenschaftlicher Hintergrund; muss in der Lage sein, auf Deutsch zu unterrichten.
https://stellen.uni-muenster.de/jobposting/d2df052109684840babd55c84eb828bf376a65c20?ref=homepage
Good new tech needs a cool name, and I think Carbothermal Shock hits that. Although at the end of the day, it just comes down to pumping a lot of current through a piece of carbon to generate heat.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.4c12350
#CTS #HeatingElements
Venus doesn't have tectonic plates, or at least not the same way Earth does. But it does have rifting, because tectonic processes work on multiple scales.
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-026-02044-8
#Venus #Tectonics
Replying to
@rrb@infosec.exchange They probably still lament that we aren't publishing in Latin anymore.
I do think that making the things coming out of academia less legible is a contributing factor to the decline in trust and why people prefer to trust some rando on TikTok who at least speaks to them in terms they can understand.
In Frederik Pohl's Gateway, he describes the "food mines". Growing fungi on organic-rich rocks to feed the masses. IRL, there are entire natural ecosystems that are organized around such a base.
Link: https://academic.oup.com/ismej/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ismejo/wrag184/8744037
#SciFiScience #fungi #ecology
Replying to
@hareldan@mapstodon.space That data, although a mess (we've got someone trying to standardize it now), at least exists and is available if you're willing to jump through the necessary hoops. The same can't be said for all countries (notably around the Mediterranean, Middle Eastern Gulf, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean)