J. Brian Balta

Does anyone else get nonstop “Boimler watching Ferengi TV” vibes every time they watch one of these #worldseries gambling/trading ads? Especially the ones where they just repeat “win win win” at the end? youtu.be/7ppwWfWCjBA?...

new research out today suggests that manmade climate change was actually responsible for pulling us out of the early stages of the next ice age (!!) my latest for @wired.com

Gave a talk about glacier recession in the Andes yesterday and the title slide showing two decades of change turned some heads. Here's a better (worse?) one showing 47 years of ice loss in a small part of Patagonia.. 🧪❄️

Here is the Big Barn fault crossing the parking lot of The Woodlands High School in The Woodlands, Texas USA. It is a down-to-the-basin normal fault, a typical Gulf Coast growth fault. Faults like this are not seismogenic, but their continuous movement causes much damage to infrastructure and houses

The San Andreas fault crosses the highway near pinnacles National Park

Found the best rocks on the beach today 🪨💙🤍 These are actually beautiful examples of the famous Seapoint contact: granite intruding into shale producing spotted hornfels 😍👌🏽

For the second fiscal year in a row, NASA awarded ~20% fewer grants than the recent historical average. That's about 500 fewer grants going out to scientists around the country.

NASA has ignored recommended funding levels for planetary research & analysis for 15 years, according to a new investigative report by Mark Sykes (@coop.planetary-research.org). And for FY2025, it hasn’t even spent 50% of what it budgeted for R&A. 🧪🪐🔭 eos.org/research-and...

The "Paid for by the US Government" ad just ran during the Ohio State-Illinois football game.

Celebrating oceanographer Marie Tharp’s induction into the 2026 Women's Hall of Fame! 🥳🎉 Born in 1920, at a time when there were few options for women in science, Tharp revolutionized our understanding of the ocean floor. Learn more about this year’s inductees: go.whoi.edu/womens-hall-of-fame

RIP Gerrit Graham We lost Franklin Sherman and that sucks.

Pinning this story about how South Florida real estate agents deal with questions about sea level rise for the next time I’m told markets are effective at pricing in risk. Not if everyone ignores the risk instead! heated.world/p/the-open-hou…

Glaciologist @matthias-huss.bsky.social shows that the centre of the Great Aletsch glacier in Switzerland (the biggest in the Alps) lost 6 meters(!) of thickness just this summer. "No words...", he adds on LinkedIn.

Pro-tip: watch those lens caps #parkchat What was found among 20k pieces of trash removed from Yellowstone hydrothermal areas share.google/7iUF0JtzdfvW...

Chinook salmon have recolonised 88% of their historic range on the Klamath River, with more than 13,000 fish passing the old Iron Gate Dam site in 2025, up from 7,700 the year before. Two years after the dams’ removal, it’s going better than anyone predicted. buff.ly/pToC9gB #ShareGoodNewsToo

When you synthesize monazite with specific cations in a lab, you can make quite the rainbow. Here are La, Nd, Gd, and Yb monazites (technically xenotime for Yb, almost the same structure but different enough that it has its own name). Nd was always my favorite. #mincup26 #mincup #monazite

🔥 August 2026 not only beat the record for the warmest August on record, but it beat July 2023 for the warmest overall month on record for Planet Earth since 1940 - and likely the warmest during the entire Holocene. 😢

Had to accelerate this story, which means I got to dwell on far less termination shock science than I would have liked.

This is a very excellent explainer of the scientific reconstruction of the Nepal debris flow. Lots of interactive data and visuals in the report. 23 minutes between the glacial collapse/landslide before it reached the border station.⚒️

10:23 pm in Houston, eclipse on iPhone. Some clouds rolled in just after this. I have an earth and space science intro class this year and said I’d give a few points for a photo of the August 27 eclipse. One student submitted a photo last weekend.

You don't realize the power of water until you watch it casually roll a boulder the size of a house down a valley in Nepal.

An incredibly well-timed Landsat 9 pass captured the effects of yesterday’s catastrophic glacier collapse near the Nepal–Tibet border. The event was so massive that it was detected by seismometers around the world.

I'm very excited to share my latest paper about why Venus has no moon. In almost every scenario, a hypothetical Venus moon spirals inward and is destroyed at the Roche limit. Venus' lack of moon may thus be a natural consequence of its slow spin. arxiv.org/abs/2608.25036

Mineral Monday: Memorial: Dr. George Rossman By Dr. George Harlow His research focused on color in minerals, the effect of high-energy radiation on color, and the role of “water” (H2O, that is) in minerals, esp. when not part of the chemical formula. #MineralMonday #spectroscopy

Volcanoes are fascinating. Pictures, videos and articles of eruptions fill our social media feeds and newspapers. But can you believe what you read? Misinformation and rumours spread just as easily as facts. Misconceptions are easily created and hard to correct. @heatherkhandley.bsky.social

Nice graphic from NASA (science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-...) showing a smoke-infused pyrocumulus cloud from Utah's Widemouth 2 fire as seen Aug. 3 from an INSPYRE aircraft during a sampling flight (Bernadett Weinzierl/University of Vienna). The fire is big: currently 130,000 acres, 91% contained.

🧵🧪More than 40 polar science experts and people working at the science-policy interface carefully assessed several of the geoengineering concepts mentioned against a range of criteria. None of these concepts survive scrutiny. Read our assessment here doi.org/10.3389/fsci...

Pretty good rocks. Although the sodalite is not from the UP - it comes from the north side of Lake Superior, so samples are nicely tumbled by the time they get halfway around the basin.

Wait, did Charles Darwin actually sketch a full thrust sheet?

Our colleagues at the Cascades Volcano Observatory captured the arrival of a bolide (large meteor) over western WA on their infrasound instruments! Check out the post from USGS Volcanoes here: www.facebook.com/share/p/19Bb...

#Etna, 13 August 2026. Lava is some strange stuff. When advancing after having traveled a few kilometers, it will rather crumble forward, but if you record it in timelapse you do see a kind of flowage. All except the first few seconds of this video are 10-20 times normal speed.

I am trying to figure out whether I like the waning banking moon or the fact that Earth has apparently received a Sith title.

Etendeka flood basalts, Doro!Nawas, Damaraland, Namibia.

I looped the video so you can see just the surface rupture happening. ⚒️🧪

Impressive! I wonder how common these kinds of videos will become - we are also seeing a remarkable (and horrifying) influx of videos showing buildings shaking and then collapsing. (And of course, figuring out what's real and what is fake is an increasing problem.)

226 Ansel Adams Photographs of Great American National Parks Are Now Online www.openculture.com/2026/08/anse...

Just in case y’all needed a thrust fault 😘

1/x From the archive: “Dawn on the Panamint Range” — Zabriskie point and dawn on the Panamint Range. gdanmitchell.com/2006/05/22/d... #deathvalley #deva #photo #photography #photoOfTheDay #lensCulture #landscapePhotography #photographyLovers #naturePhotography #fineArtPhotography #nature Photo

I've been to all 254 TX counties, and Big Bend is the very best of Texas. The stunning, expansive desert landscape still feels untouched. It deserves to stay that way. It breaks my heart thinking about it being needlessly ruined for a f***ing wall. Here's some photos I've taken there. 🧵4/4

Mount Rainier, Mount St Helens and Mount Adams poke above a smoky Washington sky on Wednesday morning. #WAwx

Ralph Lorenz—Huygens showed that Titan can be wet, even at low latitudes. As Dragonfly flies across Titan, the odds it’ll land in mud are low (<1%), and if so, the stickiness will be again to sticky wheat dough (and Dragonfly could still takeoff). #AOGS2026

Absolutely insane footage of rock avalanches currently sweeping across the entire south face of the Matterhorn, as filmed from Cervinia! 🔥😱 📽️ Via @meteovalledosta

Did everyone see @janinekrippner.bsky.social explaining volcanoes for Encylopedia Britannica? www.britannica.com/video/what-a...

Take that, #mincup

Google has also decided to effectively kill the desktop version of Google Earth Pro - which has been a genuinely useful mapping tool for many years. They’ve apparently decided those resources are better spent allowing users to burn AI credits on creating satellite imagery disinformation.