Category Archives: Science

Random Science Poems Written on the Spot

Tonight, I was at a loss for what to blog about. The prompts I have available are not as inspiring as usual. So I asked the hive mind for suggestions:

Continue reading “Random Science Poems Written on the Spot”

What Can A Clam Teach Us About Climate Change?

One of the many projects I work on involves the study of climate change in the fossil record. I’ve put a bit of it on-line here. What I’ve published thus far deals mostly with interpreting general climatic and environmental factors using bulk geochemistry (all isotopes) from rocks and the fossil contained therein. That is to say, I take a big rock or fossil and grind it (or part of it) down into a single sample. I analyze that and call that a ‘average’ for that entire rock layer.

It turns out that clams (and mollusks in general) do a good job of recording environmental signals not just in bulk, but on a fine scale, such that we can see yearly, monthly, even daily records of weather.Continue reading “What Can A Clam Teach Us About Climate Change?”

What Was Your First Tweet?

So today is Twitter’s seventh anniversary. Woo-hoo, Twitter!

You might not use Twitter, or ever want to, but surely you understand that Twitter has had a tremendous impact on the world, especially for journalism.

To celebrate, I downloaded my Twitter archive (and you can too!) and found my very first Tweet. I’m a constant Twitterer now, but I wasn’t always…Continue reading “What Was Your First Tweet?”

Blogging from A to Z

Blogging from A to Z is an April challenge in which bloggers use the letters of the alphabet as the driving theme for 26 of the 30 days of the month. Some may just write daily on any old thing, just so long as it begins with the proper letter. Others choose a theme and use that for determining what the daily topics will be.Continue reading “Blogging from A to Z”

The Breaks local fauna and North American Land Mammal “ages”

Many years ago, I wrote a dissertation. That was the final step toward my ultimate goal of becoming a ‘real’ paleontologist. My research was strictly biostratigraphy: putting rocks and fossils in order by age from oldest to youngest. Specifically, I was looking at mammal fossils from the middle of the Paleocene, about 60 million years ago.Continue reading “The Breaks local fauna and North American Land Mammal “ages””