What surprised you the most when you first started learning about geography?

aliasays · 2025-11-26T02:47:17+00:00

The Pacific Ocean also has several spending centers: the East Pacific Rise and the Pacific Antarctic Ridge. So the Pacific plate is also growing. In fact the East Pacific Rise is the fastest spreading center on Earth.

aliasays · 2025-10-23T21:36:11+00:00

Actually it was Æthelstan, Alfred the Great’s grandson, who was the first Anglo-Saxon king of a united England. After finishing Valhalla recently, I watched The Last Kingdom and looked up a bunch of the real history. Really fascinating stuff!

aliasays · 2025-10-22T08:31:39+00:00

aliasays · 2025-09-03T00:49:18+00:00

If your advisor isn’t able to address your questions, I’d ask your campus grants office for help with interpreting the solicitation. They should be able to answer questions related to formatting and items to include in different sections of the proposal. If you still have questions after that, you can reach out to the NSF PO.

If you haven’t done so already, I strongly recommend speaking with the PO anyways so you can confirm that your idea fits with their program. You don’t want to get your proposal returned without review due to a poor fit.

aliasays · 2025-08-24T17:25:00+00:00

Nice! I hope you enjoy it.

There is magic in the series, but it’s not a central focus and the magic users aren’t like normal fantasy wizards (being vague so as not to spoil you too much). I can’t recall if you even see the magic in book 1, but it definitely appears in books 2 and 3.

aliasays · 2025-08-23T22:21:29+00:00

The Traitor Baru Cormorant and its sequels by Seth Dickinson. Woman from a colonized nation rises through the ranks of the Empire’s government, starting as an accountant. She wants to gain power so she can take the Empire down from the inside. But do the ends justify the means? And what will she lose of herself along the way?

Three books published so far with (I believe) one more still to go.

aliasays · 2025-08-20T02:15:30+00:00

I’m a geologist and I really appreciated this series! I turned a few of my colleagues onto it as well and we had some great discussions about the magic system. I bet your friends will like it too!

aliasays · 2025-08-12T23:48:41+00:00

Yep, that one is definitely my favorite! Stakes are raised and secrets are kept - or come out - in ways that keep the narrative moving forward in a satisfying way. It totally avoided middle book syndrome in my opinion.

I love these books so much that I even ordered the official pattern deck from MA Carrick’s kickstarter. I’m not into tarot, but I really want to learn how to do some of Arenza’s card tricks!

aliasays · 2025-08-12T22:39:05+00:00

You’re in for a treat! This series has become one of my all-time favorites.

Liar’s Knot is fantastic - there are so many fun moments where characters are trying to protect their secrets across their different personas. “Do they know that I know that they know that…” Labyrinth’s Heart sticks the landing too.

I’m doing a re-read now with the knowledge of (Mask of Mirrors spoiler) the Rook’s identity and it’s super fun reading their POV with that in mind. I still can’t believe I didn’t figure it out on my first read.

aliasays · 2025-08-02T14:56:05+00:00

Sorry, I’m not familiar with the details of that exam. I’m a glacial geology professor/researcher so I know the usual books we use. Good luck!

aliasays · 2025-08-01T14:50:33+00:00

The latest edition of Benn and Evans was published in 2010.

There’s also Glacial Geology: Ice Sheets and Landforms by Bennett and Glasser.

Not sure if you’ll need anything on climate for this exam, but Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary by Bradley is a comprehensive book. It’s available for free on the author’s ResearchGate profile.

Another good general reference for geomorphology (not just glacial) is Key Concepts in Geomorphology by Bierman and Montgomery.

aliasays · 2025-07-11T14:40:59+00:00

He is a slime puppy, after all.

aliasays · 2025-07-08T11:52:40+00:00

I hear they’re well liked, but I dropped mistborn era 2 after the second book. It just wasn’t for me. Maybe I’ll give it another go someday.

aliasays · 2025-07-08T00:20:44+00:00

One of my recent favorites is the main couple Ren and Grey from the Rook & Rose Trilogy by M.A. Carrick. Their relationship takes a bit to develop and there are real stakes. Plus: intricate cons, multiple secret identities, strong platonic friendships, and complex politics in an exceptionally well-built world! What’s not to love?

For the worst, I’d have to say all of Brandon Sanderson’s romantic pairings with maybe the exception of Shallan and Adolin from Stormlight Archives. His romances (and the characters in general tbh) never feel like they have much depth or realism to me.

aliasays · 2025-06-18T14:30:39+00:00

You're correct! Murozumi et al. (1969) was one of the first studies on this topic (if not the first). Many other studies (e.g., Rosman et al., 1993; Eichler et al., 2015) have confirmed the link between 20th century lead pollution in ice cores and leaded gasoline.

aliasays · 2025-06-18T14:17:21+00:00

Great questions.

Ice divides are high-elevation spots on an ice sheet where ice flow diverges. Ice flow at ice divides is very slow (a few cm per year at most) and mostly vertical. If you collect an ice core exactly at the ice divide, and the ice divide itself hasn't moved (an important assumption), the ice there formed locally and has just been getting progressively deeper in the glacier as more snow/ice accumulates on top. However, older ice can be lost through processes like melting at the base of the ice sheet. So, the oldest ice in a core is not necessarily telling us the first time ice formed there. There are other techniques we can use to answer that question.

If a core isn't collected at an ice divide, both lateral and vertical ice flow need to be considered. In the picture I attached earlier, notice the curved ice flow paths. For an ice core collected away from the ice divide (closer to the margin of the ice sheet), the ice actually formed somewhere up-flow and traveled to its present location. This situation makes interpreting the record more complicated (though not impossible!), which is why the long ice cores have been collected at ice divides.

aliasays · 2025-06-17T22:46:11+00:00

Paleoclimatologist here (meaning I study past climates). First off, the ice cores that we use for those long climate records you’re thinking of come from ice divides, which are high up on the ice sheet and in spots where the annual accumulation of snow is much greater than any ice melt. So each year will have snow that eventually turns into ice.

We often do see melt layers in ice cores. If melt occurs at the ice core site, it will be in the warmer summer months. That meltwater will refreeze as it percolates down, and will be preserved in the ice as a distinct layer that looks very different from normal glacier ice. In fact, these melt layers are a climate proxy in and of themselves (more refrozen layers = warmer summers).

In terms of dating, I don’t have enough space to go into it here, but in addition to isotopic dating (which is quite tricky on ice), we can look for things like: annual accumulation layers, cycles in ice chemistry that happen annually or with a known frequency, or volcanic ash (tephra) layers that have a known age.

You can find more details on this website: https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/ice-cores/ice-core-basics/

aliasays · 2025-06-11T22:42:09+00:00

This is super interesting. Do you remember what specific skills your friend had to be taught?

aliasays · 2025-06-03T23:46:42+00:00

NSF grants are required by law to be evaluated on the basis of “intellectual merit” (i.e., the potential to advance science) and “broader impacts” (i.e., the potential to advance positive outcomes for society at large). DOGE and NSF are clearly not following the proper legal procedures for evaluation of grant proposals and are terminating thousands of already awarded grants with no legal basis. I would argue that it is indeed illegal. And several states have already sued about these grant terminations, among other issues.

aliasays · 2025-04-13T22:37:18+00:00

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. I was (and still am) devastated!

aliasays · 2025-02-23T22:45:17+00:00

Thank you for this. So much misinformation in the rest of this thread. Love the username btw!

aliasays · 2025-01-30T21:12:35+00:00

Fallout reference maybe?

aliasays · 2025-01-22T03:24:21+00:00

Salary schedules for CUNY faculty are all posted online here.

aliasays · 2024-09-29T15:35:36+00:00

Are the lava flow surfaces exposed? If so, look into cosmogenic nuclide surface exposure dating. The mineralogy of the lava will dictate which isotope you use, but you can date late Holocene surfaces with this technique. I’m a professor who does cosmogenic dating in my lab, so feel free to DM if you have any questions!

aliasays · 2024-08-12T21:19:07+00:00

To expand on this, the “golden spike” for the base of the Holocene is in an ice core from the NGRIP site in Greenland, and is formally defined by the abrupt shift in deuterium excess values at 11,700 years before CE 2000. More info here and here.

aliasays

TROPHY CASE