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Punctuated Equilibrium and the New Academic World That We Live In (along with...
CatastropheThree weeks ago I was lecturing and running labs like a regular professor. I had never gotten around to learning Canvas or Blackboard, because my Excel program was working just fine for...
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A Day on the California Prairie: Finding the Precious Places Near Home
Yosemite National Park is closed. The coastline is closed. The state parks are closed. Am I complaining? Not in the least. We are facing an unprecedented threat, so we must curtail our freedoms a bit...
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Can You Find the Nest? A Near-future Killdeer Family on the Tuolumne River
The Killdeer (Charadrius vociferous) is a sneaky little bird that hides in plain sight. That sounds like some kind of negative judgment, but really I admire these little Plovers. I wonder sometimes how...
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A Bit of Drama on the Tuolumne River...
Every visit to the wilds holds the possibility of the unexpected surprise. There is the "usual" sense of discovery when one finds a new bird species, or some otters playing in the water, and then there...
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A Tuolumne River Mystery for the Fish Experts
Paging my fish expert friends...what are these fish? I realize the pictures aren't great, since they were across the river from me and I couldn't get much of an angle on them. They were rather big,...
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The Eruption of Mt. St. Helens at 40 years: Why it Still Matters and Why...
It is the 40th anniversary of the eruption of the St. Helens volcano and as I think of those days, I realize that even though a majority of the population wasn't even alive at the time, the volcano...
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When Treasures are Discovered, for Better or Worse: A Tale of Two Tuolumne...
Today on "my" river.It looks like I'm about to complain bitterly, but it is more nuanced than that.The river is not mine of course, I just inhabit it almost every day. It belongs to our community. But...
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Last Light on the Longest Day: Green Flash on the Summer Solstice
It isn't really a time for traveling, but a funeral had us traveling up the California Coast yesterday evening. We stopped at Clam Beach north of Arcata to watch the sun set. It was almost 9:00PM and...
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Hopes for the Healing of a River: Northern River Otters on the Tuolumne
I had the delightful privilege of watching a River Otter family hanging out along the Tuolumne River the other day. There were three of them, two adults and a juvenile. It's the most time I've ever...
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You CAN see it! Comet Neowise Now Visible After Sunset
First, the disclaimer: The comet Neowise does NOT look like the glorious and incredibly beautiful pictures that have been posted on social media. Those pictures aren't fakes at all, but they ARE time...
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The Way it Was: Yosemite in the Times of a Pandemic
Tunnel View, close to the spot where the valley was first "discovered" by European colonizersThe pandemic rages on, and our lives have been upended in so many ways we could never have foreseen. My...
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A Life Full of Zeros: A Perspective on Human and Geologic Time
Some perspective on time. It's one of the more difficult concepts to get across in a geology education simply because the numbers lie at the very edge of comprehension. So here is a brief...
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The Equinox of the Fall
I haven't been blogging much lately. It's probably not hard to guess why: I've been working harder than at any time aside from those crazy first semesters back in 1988 and 1989. From the sudden...
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Have You Seen This Movie Before? The Disaster of 2020
Scene 1:A monkey dies an ugly death in a rainforest...A woman swimming hears a crunching sound and disappears beneath the waves...A menacing shadow crosses over the lunar surface...People are enjoying...
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The Islands of Interior California (and Nevada): The Endemics of Ash Meadows
Many months ago I was working on a mini-series of blogs about the Islands of Interior California when I was rudely interrupted by a COVID pandemic, and almost all blog writing ceased while I struggled...
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The Coming Crater in Arizona: The Lame Duck Administration Fast-Tracks...
Sometimes issues keep coming up. I hadn't heard of updates of the Oak Flat Controversy in a couple of years, but with the waning days of the current lame duck administration, the issue has arisen again...
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The Conjunction Station in the Red HIlls: A Report, and a Santa Claus Sighting
The view with my handheld cameraThe weather gods decided to make things difficult for us in regards to the rare celestial event that took place tonight. We finally got rain last week, and when the rain...
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A Reminder of What Once Was: An Evening at the San Joaquin River National...
What is it like to see ten thousand birds take to the sky all at once? Do you have to live on the African Savanna to find out? Sometimes one has to merely look in one's backyard (so to speak) to...
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A Beautiful Scene for a Horrific Day
There aren't many days like this. That can be both a good thing and a bad thing. My country was rocked by a coup attempt and the Capitol Building was invaded and vandalized for the first time in...
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You Can See Yosemite Valley from the Tuolumne River! In a Manner of Speaking...
Those of you who know the layout of Yosemite National Park will also know that the title of today's post must come with some kind of caveat because any hiker or cartographer knows that the Tuolumne...
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