Kate Littler

@palaeoclimate.bsky.social

3247 Followers 2017 Following

Senior Lecturer in Palaeoclimate | Department of Earth & Environmental Science, University of Exeter (Cornwall) | Marine geology | Micropalaeontology | Geochemistry | IODP | Birding | Parenting small humans

A not particularly good photo of the solar eclipse yesterday, showing the sun with a bite taken out of the left hand side by the moon. Is about 10 minutes away from being over and I finally figured out how to take a photo with the eclipse glasses and my iPhone.
A view of the northern Italian countryside near Urbino. The sky is blue and there are green trees and rolling fields and a few buildings in shot.
Common restharrow. A lovely low growing pea family plant with delicate pink and white flowers, that likes coastal areas. Never seen it in Cornwall before.
A google map from August 2025 showing the northern Spain region with an overlay of active wildfires in red. Trying to plan our route through and stay out of danger from fire and smoke.
The beautiful area around Bedar in SE Spain in May 2026. Steep topography and lots of green undergrowth. A view looking out towards the village with a curving road leading off into the distance. The sky is blue.
The pond and wildlife area in July 2026. Pond barely visible amid a sea of flowering native grasses.
Ripe red strawberries in my garden growing out of a strawberry pot. Other flowers and pots are visible behind.
People on a stage with a banner protesting against climate change and howden sponsorship at the Exeter climate forum. The Vice chancellor is visible to the left of the stage looking unimpressed.
My wildflower patch at the allotment, which looks like untidy chaos (if you are an allotment committee member..) but is actually a carefully planned meadow. It’s dominated by wild carrot at the moment with big white composite flower heads, but there is also knapweed in there and earlier in the year red campion and a cheeky poppy.
White Stonecrop flowers on the heath at Helman Tor.
Two large shiny black beetles in the business of making baby beetles. I think they are bloody nosed beetles but not sure! Sitting on a green bracken frond.
Heath spotted orchid at Goonhilly downs. A pink and purple flower spike with spotted petals, emerging from a sea of green leaves. Soft evening light.
Some mighty fine pigeons hanging out on a rooftop over Falmouth. The cranes of Falmouth docks and wooded hills in the background.
The wonderful wildflowers around campus. Ox eyed daisies and red clover and a bunch of grasses.
Little herring gull chick (maybe a week old?) camouflaged against the red roof tiles and grey lichen on a nearby roof. So cute!
An orangey butterfly with black and white markings feeding on a purple flower spike, with a bumble bee flying to the left.
A lovely patch of wildflowers near the car parks on campus. A sea of green with at least 13 purple orchids visible, mixed in with ox eye daisies and buttercups etc.
A pot of plants in a garden, with some flowering ribwort plantain in the middle, along with chives and some other bits and bobs.
Close up of a wild foxglove flowering in my garden, with dozens of individual purple pink flowers on the tall flowering spike. Each flower has lots of little dark dots inside to guide the pollinators (mostly bumble bees) to the nectar. It is a sunny day and there is a rowan tree and some other foliage in the background.
A dark blue grey sky, with two swifts silhouetted.
A short video of my allotment one recent May evening. It is green and pleasant and there is a light breeze moving the plants. Lots of birdsong can be heard, including crows, robin, blackbird, song thrush, nuthatch, and a very loud green woodpecker that has taken up residence in the trees at the end.
I think this is heath dog violet with its pale purple petals. Forms low clumps with lots of flowers in the heathland.
Leaden skies over Falmouth, which in no way convey my excitement at seeing and hearing the first swifts of the year this morning. If you can see some tiny black pixels… take my word for it, they’re swifts!
A purple and yellow iris flower blooming in the maquis. A red bug with black spots is visible on one petal looking like an elongate chunky labybird
Hiking through the maquis in the area near sopalmo. I definitely didn’t get the students lost once or twice with my expert navigating…
View from los frailes looking out to sea.
The ever beautiful Los Escullos section. Lovely volcanic and sedimentary features… that I won’t elaborate on as it’s assessed!
A brightly coloured day-flying moth sitting on some gravel. Iridescent greenish wings with 5 red spots, each with a black ring around them and a white collar at the back of the head. Magic.
A lovely frothy pink flowered plant in the desert.
Handfuls of garnets collected by the students at el Hoyazo. It was difficult to get them to concentrate on anything else so I gave in and we had a ‘who can find the most / biggest garnet?’ competition for 15 mins.
The cave roof showing gypsum cones from underneath. Very cool
Ancient raindrop impressions in the muddy bedding plane, looking like tiny moon craters. Finger for scale. I love that such an ephemeral moment in time is written into the rocks.
Students in high visibility jackets looking at the lovely sediments of the Sorbas member.
An outcrop in a rambla near Sorbas showing thick gypsum beds alternating with laminated marls, pa ed by precession. The local expression of (part of) the messinian salinity crisis. Students in the foreground in high visibility jackets taking notes.
Some lovely faults offsetting the Miocene sediments.
Two megabalanus fossils, one at the top with about 10 individual shells (chambers? What’s right word?) in plan view, and the fossil below with 3 in cross section. Fov about 35cm
Cowboys riding along the rambla! Lovely Miocene deep sea fan turbidities of the Tabernas basin in the background.
Gneiss with feldspar porphyroblasts, and associated tourmaline, mica and quartz. Finger for scale.
Purple flower of liverwort or Hepatica nobilis in a Norwegian forest.
A gorgeous Little Egret, which is a white bird with a sharp black beak, built like a slender heron, standing on the water with a muddy bank behind.
Spring flowers giving it beans in the March sunshine. From top left: wild garlic, green alkanet, dog violets, gorse, red campion, stitchwort, celendine, primrose.
A carpet of wild daffodil flowers at the edge of the woods. Everything is soaking wet.
A fossil tree trunk exposed on the beach at Portreath. Me for scale crouching on the sands. Whole trunk is several metres long.
Wind ripples on the foreshore, on the higher elevation more exposed part of the beach. A stiff south-westerly wind was whipping across the beach (from left to right in this image) visibly moving grains into these fairly straight but often bifurcating asymmetrical ripples.
A wet window looking out onto a wet garden in a wet county during the wettest winter on record.
A lovely old Cornish hedge, which is stone wall at the bottom, and trees and shrubs at the top. This one is covered in lush Atlantic rainforest flora - mosses, wall pennyworts (also called navelworts), ferns, ivy, primroses etc etc. A vision in green.
A black oil beetle (I think!) on some wood chip. She’s a black beetle about 3 long, with bluish antennae and legs and a jaunty spring in her step.
A colourful AI-generated image showing 4 children apparently playing board games and looking very happy. But the more you look, the more it unravels.. blank creepy eyes… melting faces…disconnected limbs… incomprehensible games including one involving a hairbrush, giant counters and flecks of blood? Heaven help us!
A road closed near Falmouth, where a collapsed tree brought down half the bank onto the roadway.
A photo montage showing 9 different flowering plants. From top left: alexanders, bramble, snowdrops, dandelion, celendine, daisy, violet, daffodil, red campion. Also saw gorse, groundsel, and chickweed (not pictured).
Me looking far too happy holding a replica of odp site 1262 that spans the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). My finger is pointing to the dissolution level where you lose the calcium carbonate due to addition of excess carbon into the ocean atmosphere and subsequent shoaling of the calcite compensation depth, some 56 million years ago. I’m standing in front of a projected image showing geochemical data from the same core.
Sandstones with subordinate siltstone, showing fine laminations and lovely little flame structures.
The aurora borealis shimmering over gardens in Falmouth, Cornwall. Trees including a big palm tree is silhouetted in front of the red and green glow.
A small patch of snowdrops in flower amidst the grass.
The calm after the storm this morning. Blue skies and light winds. The view from beacon hill out over Falmouth estuary.
A big magnolia tree with many large pink flowers, against a blue sky.
The Monument in London. Blue skies behind.