Howard Lee

@hlee.bsky.social

3582 Followers 1488 Following

Geologist and Science Writer: If you want to see what climate change can do to the planet just look at Earth's past! https://h-lee.com/

Photo of a hardware store, parking lot foreground, under a yellowish gray sky. The store is lit as if it's night time.
A red sun in a gray sky, trees in foreground
Boston Harbor shore reflected in building windows
A 4-masted tall ship flying the red-and-white flag of Peru being nudged into dock by 2 tugboats
An embossed metal sign reading: "Ride the planet while it still spins true and shout predictions." By artist Jenny Holzer, American, born in 1950 MFA Boston. Selections from the Survival Series (Ride the planet while it still spins true and shout predictions), 1983-85 Cast aluminum, black paint
2 graphs from a seismometer. Top graph records acceleration and shows much spikier pattern as earthquake waves arrive. Bottom graph is frequency, showing yellow and orange for the low frequency earthquake waves
Photo of a sticker saying: I voted
Photo of a headline in The Guardian 26 May that read "Farage's Russian hack claim 'without any merit', says cybersecurity expert" . The photo has red lines deleting words so the resulting headline reads: "Farage without any merit"
Photo of an outdoor thermometer reading 36C
A photo of a small section of asphalt (tarmac) with a boot print where tar melted from the road stuck to a boot in the heat
Photo of a gate framed by trees. A path leads past the gate into a field, under a patchwork of fluffy clouds in a pale blue sky. The sign on the left reads: Footpath
A close-up of cooked chopped rhubarb
2 graphs from a Raspberry Shake seismometer. Top graph shows acceleration, with the amplitude of spikes increasing a little after 08:06 UTC as the earthquake seismic waves arrive. Lower graph shows frequency, with low frequency vibrations in yellows and oranges showing up with the seismic waves.
Screenshot of Hakeem Jeffries' BlueSky feed. Snapshot taken 4:56PM Eastern, April 7, showing the last post was 5 days prior
2 graphs from a Raspberry Shake seismometer. Top graph shows acceleration, where amplitude of wiggles increases suddenly at ~23:08 UTC. Lower graph shows corresponding onset of low frequency vibrations in yellow and orange on a speckled purple background.
A very large crowd of people on Boston common facing a stage in the distance
Figure 4 from "An evaluation of Deccan Traps eruption rates using geochronologic data" by Blair Schoene, Michael P. Eddy, C. Brenhin Keller, and Kyle M. Samperton, 2021. The probability of the stratigraphic position of the Chicxulub impact as calculated during the MCMC age modeling by querying where an accepted age model intersects an age for the KPB. The U−Pb age model is compared to the U−Pb KPB date from Clyde et al. (2016); the age model is compared to the KPg date from Sprain et al. (2018).
Ancient Persian glazed tiles depicting a lion. From Susa, displayed in the Louvre
A crowd of people on Boston Common holding signs, standing on snow
A map of the world in vibrant colors. A big blue splotch over South Africa is labeled "Antarctica"
Image says: MARCH 28 NO THRONES NO CROWNS NO KINGS
Photo of snow that has slid off some ground-mounted solar panels. Some slabs of snow have ridden over the snow slabs in front of them.
Earthquake recorded on a raspberry shake seismometer
Trace of February 22 2026 magnitude 7.1 earthquake in Borneo 2026-02-22 16:57:46 Location 6.8° N 116.3° E. Top graph is acceleration, bottom graph is frequency. Earthquake is the low frequency yellow and orange at the bottom of the graph. Red lines higher up the graph are HVAC noise.
Photo of the front page of NY Times Saturday February 14 above the fold. 2 articles circled in red and joined with a red line. First article: Digital dragnet helps Iran Round Up Dissenters. Second article: DHS expanding push to identify opponents of ICE on social media sites.
Photo of the cover of a textbook "The Archean Earth, second edition."
A screenshot of an image fronting an article headlined: Scientists map the invisible fault that could trigger the next major earthquake. Image is ridiculous AI slop with a glowing chasm surrounded by something like dry clay with random stringers of molten metal.
An image of Mars topography representing a YouTube video from provider "Bright Side" captioned: Mars was a rainy jungle planet - NASA finds evidence. Note that NASA found no such thing, only evidence for a wet crater
Screenshot from a Google News feed on February 2 2026 with caption: Mars rover finds ancient beach & rain NASA's Perseverance rover found evidence of an ancient beach with wave-shaped rocks in Mars' Jezero crater, suggesting long-lasting liquid water. Separate findings reveal white rocks indicating millions of years of rainfall, further supporting a potentially habitable past for the red planet. Generated with Al, which can make mistakes 2d
Figure 1. From: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu6248 Caption: Digital fossil-mining of squid beaks. (A) A studied carbonate concretion (sample no. 6). (B) Conventional fossil-extraction techniques, physical preparation, and chemical dissolution. Thin, tiny, and complex fossil beaks cannot be discovered or extracted. (C) Digital fossil-mining applied in this study. (Top left) Concretions are converted into full-color digital volume data by automated grinding tomography. (Middle) Beak fossils are discovered in the digitized concretions that can be freely sliced and magnified. (Right) Discovered fossils are completely separated from host rocks as label data and extracted as a 3D model.
David Mitchell from the classic British comedy show "That Mitchell And Webb Look" in WW2 German military uniform, asking "...are WE the baddies?"
a grain size chart showing the grain sizes between definitions of silt/clay, through sand, to pebble: 64 mm- pebble source: https://geologyistheway.com/sedimentary/grain-size/ 4 mm granule 2 mm very coarse sand 1 mm coarse sand 0.5 mm- medium sand 0.25 mm- fine sand 0.125 mm- very fine sand 0.063 mm- silt/clay (mud)
Photo of ground-mounted solar panels covered in snow.
Side view of The Vasa ship, Stockholm
2 graphs from Raspberry Pi seismometer. X-axis is time. Top graph is amplitude of vibration showing vertical spikes up and down interrupting a slightly wiggly horizontal line. Bottom graph is frequency showing orange streaks at higher frequency. Each "event" is the vibration of a snow plow.
David Mitchell from the classic British comedy show "That Mitchell And Webb Look" in WW2 German military uniform, asking "...are WE the baddies?"
Sunrise over the ocean with a reef in the foreground
Frequency graph from a seismometer, x-axis is time, y-axis is frequency. Arrival of earthquake waves indicated by yellow and orange along the bottom of the graph. Lines near the top of the graph are higher frequency noise probably from a heat pump
Frequency graph time on x-axis, frequency on y-axis. Yellow & orange colors show the arrival of kow-frequency seismic waves
Poster in a window at Walden Pond, late fall sunlight reflected in the glass reads: "I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence." -Henry David Thoreau 1856 letter to H.G.O. Blake
A wet country lane stretches away to the horizon up a low hill, flanked by trees in the foreground, bright green crops in the distance. A blue sky is streaked by bright clouds.
4 male turkeys on a lawn with tails raised, pointing their rear ends towards the camera.
A shiny glassy skin on a rope of solidified pahoehoe basalt lava glistening blues and rust hues, silvery and dark brown.
Photo of the cover of a booklet titled "Geological HOWLERS Boners & Bloomers" Edited by W. D. Ian Rolfe, GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF GLASGOW
A grassy path with som leaf litter stretches ahead beneath branches of old English oak trees. Sunlight makes the grass glow bright green in the distance.
A red brick chimney joins into weathered red clay roof tiles backed by blue sky
Photo of a sign outside Two Friends Chocolates, Boxborough Massachusetts. Sign reads "Chocolate is vital for our survival. Dinosaurs didn't have chocolate and look what happened to them...
Screenshot showing "search all items" "all (0)"
Tidal flats, Cape Cod. Flattish ripples run parallel away from the camera, converging into the distance. Water lies between them reflecting a light blue cloudy sky.
Photo of newsprint: "If you had forced me to choose, I would have said Schumer was probably right. It wasn’t the time for a shutdown — in part because Democrats weren’t prepared to win one."
A crowd of protesters seated & standing in front of the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Arlington, MA
A woman pastor reading a prayer. She stands under "The Embrace" bronze sculpture. An icon decorated with flowers is in the foreground.
A crowd of protesters gathered around "The Embrace" bronze statue on Boston Common
A yard sign in a flower bed with a brick wall behind. Sign reads: "Canada Proud"
Photo of a steeply pitched roof with herring-bone dark faux timbers. The last evening sun catches the roof against a pale blue sky. A jet flies in the distance.
Quilt hanging with stuffed multicolored letters saying: "reason over passion" by Joyce Wieland, Art Gallery of Ontario
Photo of an art installation with the ❤️ symbol followed by "LOVE." The heart & each letter is made up of hundreds of multicolored padlocks. The installation is mounted on a wood frame in front of a brick wall which has 6 small arches windows in a row.
Photo of 2 women sitting on a bench surrounded by trees and plant beds. A sign reads "place of sitting." Bagh-e-Eram, Shiraz. Photo by me
Fig. 10. From Williams et al: Schematic diagram showing the evolution of the system from initial magma propagation (a), magma finger inflation (b) and the formation of cooling joints (c). (ai, bi, ci) Schematics of the evolving microstructures observed during each process. The dashed box indicates the location in a magma finger where the microstructures were observed.