Not that anyone asked but looking at a.) the fact that Carpenter says that it’s clay being torn from the riverbank by the floodwaters of the White Gull and b.) The Hjulström Curve:

We can determine that the flow velocity of the White Gull River in TSV45 was approximately 150-300 cm/s.

What does this mean? Absolutely nothing, I’m going to be so honest. I just find this amusing

@xenoliith thank you for asking and giving me an excuse to ramble more about this topic! Fair warning that this will probably go on several tangents

Also disclaimer that I am approaching this from a geology standpoint, as opposed to a hydrology or biology or any other standpoint, but also that all scientific fields are interconnected and to understand one you must have a grasp on all others! And also I am not yet an expert on this. We’re working on it though

Under the cut because this got. long.

when i die i hope i come back as a beautiful microscopic granule of sand

these are all me in my next life btw

#these are mostly Foraminifera and I once spent a month sorting through thousands of these on a microscope slide#I did resent them terribly for a while but I respect them too much for any of it to stick#they were 40 million years old#their shells hold chemical memories of the water temperature and salinity#so we can use them to reconstruct past sea levels#we can read the shapes of dead continents through the bodies of these creatures#we can track cycles of earth’s orbital precession in space#so I guess even if you don’t get to come back as a beautiful microscopic grain of sand something will (@catadromously )

Official nature post

@3584-tropical-fish

my texture analysis is complete and i have concluded that the silt verses are actually 30% clay meaning that they should really be called the silty clay loam verses. i expect jon and muna to fix this error at their earliest convenience

The Ever-Changing Oregon River: Its Path Over 15,000 Years

Isn’t this beautiful? Nature is beautiful.

Everybody give it up for columnar jointing

Woo! Yeah! Woohoo! Yippee! Hell yeah! Woo!

As a geologist, I can confirn.

doing research on white wine for a thing and can we back up for a second on that last one???

tags via @lastoneout

peer reviewing your tags right back because I feel like if you ordered wine with ice in it the bartender might actually do something like that in retaliation

You get an Atlantic Sturgeon

limonite mud and stalactites

-J.F.

geology students will literally say shit like “my dirt class was cancelled today” or “the professor for my class on sand gave us homework about worms” like we’re 8 year olds on the playground inventing new terms for playing in the grass during recess