If you can afford £30/$40 or more, you have a chance to snag a copy of one of the very pretty sketches prepared to illustrate Hutton's "Theory of the Earth", but never published. I especially like the one of Arran (number 18), but plenty of other temptations!

It looks like access has already been improved since I last visited (when you parked by a vegetable farm and clambered over fences), but some proper interpretative signage would be a real boon.

It has gotten measurably worse over the last 2 or 3 months.

I stopped using Google very much because of the deterioration in its basic usefulness, but personally I don’t want to spend time worrying over what AI may or may not be doing.

I haven’t used Google as my default search engine for at least two years.

"Do you want hallucinated papers and made up DOIs randomly interspersed with your next literature review results to liven up your day and interject a little extra error and chaos into your life? Try searching with Scholar Labs!"

Not to mention “at least a 50% chance that any valid citation will actually support your point!”

There is certainly a lot of hypothesising about faster average spreading rates in the Mesozoic, but the inconvenient subduction of oceanic crust means that it’s hard to actually say if that was actually the case.

Unfortunately, it seems the “adversarial poetry” paper itself may have some serious issues.

pivot-to-ai.com/2025/11/24/d...

(likewise a reduction in global spreading rates would decrease net ridge CO2 emissions and increase drawdown by carbonate formation)

Even modest changes in global tectonic activity could have a much bigger effect than we thought…

Also my reaction!