Erik Gulbranson
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erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Erik Gulbranson
@erikgulbranson.bsky.social
270 followers 330 following 670 posts
Scientist, educator, studying Earth’s climate ⛈️ and ecologic history through the lens of soils⛰️and tree-rings🌳🪵.

Courage, Sacrifice, Devotion.

Gustavus Adolphus College. Ed. Board Mbr., Scientific Reports. Posts, re-posts, views and opinions are my own.
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erikgulbranson.bsky.social
And Kaisa graduated this year! She’s off to pursue her graduate work at UMass Amherst in the fall. Incredibly proud of her, and so happy that she found a match for grad school in these immensely hard times.
A photograph of two people, smiling, at a college graduation. One person is wearing their black graduation robes and ceremonial cords. The other person is wearing a blue blazer and pants. A photograph of three smiling people reenacting a spiderman meme, standing opposite each other and pointing fingers accusingly at each other with both of their hands. Two of the people are wearing black college graduation robes and the third is wearing a blu blazer and pants.
June 24, 2025 at 1:45 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
The news is downright bad, and weird, lately. But my research team arrived back home from an excellent field season in Central Europe. With some surprises: iron accumulations (tech term=plinthite) in buried soils! Usually found in much warmer/humid areas. We’re excited to see what the IRSL ages say!
Photograph of two people smiling, both are wearing rain coats and holding soil excavation equipment and field notebooks. The background is a recently excavated soil and sediment profile on the banks of a river. Kaisa Whittaker and Kendall Wiggins enjoying a cumulate soil profile in France with loads of illuviated clay. They earned the right to use a trowel this year! Photograph of a bridge rail in the foreground, a river, a forested island with a massive dead tree trunk, and views of a small French town and chateau in the background. The vegetation presents lush green hues of a mid-spring day in Central Europe. Our office for the day along the Sarre (aka Saar in Deutschland). Wonderfully thick fluvial terraces, buried soils, soil-formed iron, paleo-channels on the island. Just south of the expansive Sarre terrace system near Keskastel. I was enthralled with the massive tree trunk on that island, amidst the bustling goings on in this charming town.
June 24, 2025 at 1:40 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Meme of a golden retriever with a pleasant affect wearing personal protective equipment, pouring contents from an Erlenmeyer flask into a coffee cup. The dog is surrounded by a chemistry setup with flasks containing blue and red liquid, against a colorful red-orange-purple background. Text reads “I have no idea what I’m doing”.
March 14, 2025 at 2:06 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Here’s a favorite, one sample of many from the UW Madison Arboretum for a study I published back in 2017. Scale bar is 1cm.
Photograph of an alder root nodule against a white background. A 1 centimeter scale bar is shown as a black bar. Some bright green moss covers portions of the root nodule.
March 4, 2025 at 10:01 PM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Yours truly, eating peanut butter out of the jar and regarding some paleosols ca. 2007 (Fig. 7A)

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Screenshot of a photograph depicting a very young and goofy graduate student eating peanut butter out of a jar while sitting on an outcropping of limestone and siliciclastic sedimentary rocks. The photograph was used as a figure in a scientific journal and has overlays of arrows indicating important features of the outcrop and indicating the vertical scale of 1.5m.
February 27, 2025 at 2:39 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Image of a white man in reference to the meme “heartbreaking, the worst person you know just made a great point.”
February 17, 2025 at 4:09 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
It took two days to issue this public-facing message.

But still nothing regarding the quiet deletion (and then reinstatement) of the word “diversity” from their Diversity and Inclusion webpage?

Also
Screenshot of a webpage https://dame.is/ratingalttext, showing an alt text rating tool for Bluesky. The account agu.org is entered into the search bar, and the results of their alt text usage are shown below. 113 posts analyzed, 42 contain images, 4 are replies, 8 posts have alt text. Score 19.05% with a frown face emoji. A dial is shown below with red, orange, yellow, and green fields with the dial landing in the red field indicating minimal alt text being added.
February 16, 2025 at 6:32 PM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Spilhaus forever
Spilhaus map projection showing the world’s oceans where land is depicted at the periphery of the map.
February 14, 2025 at 2:10 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
😲
Screenshot of text that reads “confirmed: National nuclear security administration” which refers to a government organization that has been confirmed to have seen mass layoffs.
February 14, 2025 at 1:51 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Image of a person looking earnestly at the camera. Part of the “worst person you know makes a great point” meme.
February 2, 2025 at 1:05 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
I’m reminded of one of the parting lines from Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None: “No geology is neutral”.

So reading this from the prez of NAS, is just unfortunate and speaks to the privileged views of an era that should be bygone, but isn’t yet.

1/2
A snippet of text that reads “that science, at its most basic, is apolitical.”
February 1, 2025 at 6:08 PM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
How you, or your email, found me.

#academicsky
#NSF
#CHIPS
Still image of a woman making quotation gestures with her hands and the caption that reads How “am” I?
January 31, 2025 at 6:50 PM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
I missed Toyota-thon, damn you DEI!!!!!!
January 30, 2025 at 5:46 PM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
The OMB memo was rescinded!

thehill.com/homenews/511...
Screenshot of text describing how community leaders persuaded GOP senators to push the executive branch to rescind their memo that paused all federal grant disbursements.
January 29, 2025 at 6:54 PM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
And here’s a subset at #AGU2024
A group of scientists sit around smiling at a dinner table for a lab reunion dinner.
January 29, 2025 at 3:01 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Me for the next four years.

#academicsky
Ben Affleck looking dejected and holding a cigarette next to a lovely green plant that is sadly located in a bucket.
January 29, 2025 at 12:27 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Angiosperm stuff.
January 28, 2025 at 5:01 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
And here it is, a plug-in hybrid. Fully EV driving in the city for commutes/errands. EV+hybrid for my longer commute.

Ideally we’d have gone fully EV but we had to find a vehicle on very short notice, and the logistics weren’t within our capacity to figure out that quickly.

#EV #hybrid
Photograph of a grey Toyota Prius Prime on a snowy city street, with houses and trees in the background.
January 25, 2025 at 8:14 PM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
I see your spilhaus, and raise you a Dymaxion
Dymaxion projection of the Earth with a 15 degree graticule.
January 24, 2025 at 10:00 PM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Here is more evidence of the crimes committed by this government.

If your organization doesn’t have text to defend against ICE raids here is a guide (ca. 2017) immigrantjustice.org/sites/defaul...

#ICE
Text describing how ICE agents in plainclothes are harassing patients at a hospital. The potential that racial profiling motivates this harassment is indicated by the fact that the patient is a U.S. citizen.
January 24, 2025 at 4:22 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Via my wife. So if you’re still on Facebook (or Meta in general) you might want to bail. Its getting a little 1984-creepy in there.

#Meta #Facebook #Autocracy #Oligarchy
Screenshot of a facebook account list showing followed accounts. The list includes accounts such as Donald Trump and JD Vance the author never chose to follow, and cannot unfollow, accompanied by a text description of this. A screenshot of an accounts lost from Facebook with an automated message from Meta notifying the author that their caption complaining about the forced follows of Donald Trump and JD Vance has been flagged.
January 22, 2025 at 4:01 AM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Rossby wave trying to start some s***
Map of the Earth depicting the 500 hPa jet stream. Annotated with a red box showing the general location of a person.
January 6, 2025 at 2:57 PM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Throwback to an uncommonly sunny day in 2016 in the #Shackleton Glacier region. In our downtime I crafted a couple of bamboo and wood ice axes for Christmas for my two littles, and discovered that snow penguins had taken up shop by my tent!

#Antarctica #Geology
Two handmade wooden ice axes in the foreground, in front of an “Arctic Oven” tent, mountains and glaciers in the background. Two sculptures of penguins made from snow, with a sign that reads “Merry X-mass!! Anders and Greta”.
December 23, 2024 at 3:07 PM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Gulbranson Lab group dinner at #AGU24
It is immeasurably fulfilling to be in a position to mentor the next generation of earth scientists!Seated to my right is graduate Morgan Mellum, currently a UT Austin PhD student and NSF GRFP awardee, and to my left is graduate Emily Meyer, a UWY MS student.
December 14, 2024 at 11:41 PM
erikgulbranson.bsky.social
Here, students Kaisa Whittaker and Kendall Wiggins present the results of their analysis of #soil and #tree-rings to address questions about how human conflict can affect landscapes and climate.

We also found evidence for how such impacts scale with military tech.

agu.confex.com/agu/agu24/me...
An AGU Poster describing the research topic, methods, results, and conclusions.
December 14, 2024 at 11:25 PM