Joe Levy
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colddirt.bsky.social
Joe Levy
@colddirt.bsky.social
permafrost & planetary geomorphologist, assoc. prof of Earth & Env. Geosciences @colgateuniv, linker of climate change to landscape evolution, ice storyteller
The Dagobah University graduate admissions committee would like to know, on a scale of 1 to 5:

Does this candidate have have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind?

Will they finish what they start?

Do they have their mind on where they are? Hrm? What they are doing?
November 25, 2025 at 8:11 PM
Great quotes from you two! And good that Science is covering this fiasco. If LPI is even scrubbing mentions of where human beings can go to pee in peace while at the conference, it's really time to get LPSC out of Texas and out of LPI. Time for Mars spring break some place else!
November 20, 2025 at 8:31 PM
That's just our front yard sheet-metal dinosaur statue. Pretty standard issue for geoscience folks, and a handy snow gauge once winter really begins.
November 17, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Students selected 2 real cobbles, & then learned sculpture & painting techniques to produce (very!) convincing fakes. In the group photo, all those cobbles are fakes. A colleague & I judged 3 rounds of “best rock” & then a best-in-show round. The long image is the top contender pairs, real and fake
October 1, 2025 at 1:05 PM
Clawligarchy?
September 14, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Adding a bunch of good stuff (cation rich octahedral layers in the form of Chips Ahoy) in between the TOT Oreos gives you chlorites.
September 4, 2025 at 7:30 PM
It's a favorite! Oreo cookie crust is tetrahedral layers, creme is octahedral. So, kaolinite is open-faced oreos stacked up, while 2:1 clays like smectites are stacked whole cookies. They're expandable! But if you add frosting (interlayer cations) btw cookies, they become unexpandable like illite.
September 4, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Writing a good paragraph is a solid cobble of effort! It’s more than the pebble of finding a citation or making tweaks to a plot, but definitely less than the boulder of outlining or writing a full section of a paper. I think I knocked out two pebbles today between classes. I’ll take it.
September 3, 2025 at 12:12 AM
One concept that @akoleszar.bsky.social brought into our Senior Thesis workshop at Colgate has been breaking down writing into pebbles, cobbles, & boulders (see UW link). I use it for my projects, too! Got 5 minutes? Knock a pebble off your to-do

advance-resource-admin.engr.uw.edu/file/EKQe1pZ...
advance-resource-admin.engr.uw.edu
September 2, 2025 at 4:08 PM
I mean, most patients are probably proficient at reading an unspecified, vaguely log-scale axis.
August 13, 2025 at 2:28 PM
I couldn’t resist looking at the gage data. The Vance family bump is a small plateau on Aug 2. So it’s smaller than rainstorm related pulses on the river. But still a classic example of ruling class humans who are used to exerting their will over people trying to also rule nature. Earth dissents.
August 9, 2025 at 3:42 PM
They're very cool! Fully lacustrine in origin? Or is there a glacial process involved (not just as a till source)?
July 29, 2025 at 2:30 AM
This is a very rough cut. Next steps are reflectance processing with the calibration tarp and incorporation of concurrent hyperspectral data. Very high cadence imagery like this helps us figure out the water budget of these wetlands which are the incubators in which Antarctic soil is being born.
July 21, 2025 at 3:13 PM
I sometimes think I did much of my best research in grad school and as a postdoc, which is also when I had the greatest commitment to post-lunch naps in a hammock strung across my cubicle. There may be other confounding factors, but I think the 20 minute power naps were key.
July 1, 2025 at 5:14 PM