We’re Back, Baby, Yeah!
Welcome to the temporary worldwide headquarters of Rosetta Stones! This lovely little summer cottage will be our base of operations while our new permanent HQ is built.
We had a good run at Scientific American, and I’ll always be proud to have been a part of their network. Alas, all good things have a lifespan, and when it comes to digital media that lifespan is pretty short. Independent blogging, however, can last pretty much indefinitely, so Rosetta Stones will continue on in one form or another for as long as I can put one word coherently in front of another. Expect that to be a fair bit, because I suspect I’ll still be talking rocks when I’m stuffed in a nursing home. (Don’t be surprised if I pop up from my coffin shouting about the amazing strata in the graveyard.)
If you’re new to Rosetta Stones, you can pop on over to the Scientific American Blog Network to have a look at her previous incarnation. If you’re a long-time reader, settle in, and let me show you some of the plans!
We’ll be picking up basically from where we left off, tying off some loose ends. I’ve promised you a post about the fault zone causing Puerto Rico’s ongoing seismic swarm, and you shall have it, probably by the end of this month even. We’ll of course be continuing with our Pioneering Women in the Geosciences – I promised to introduce you to Betty Bunce, after all, and I’ve got so many amazing women lined up it’ll take me the next few lifetimes to introduce them all. I’ll still occasionally delve into earth science breaking events, and deep dive into some of the really interesting or terrifying stuff.
But now that we’re on our own, I’m going to shift focus to things a lot of my readers enjoyed and that I know best. That means a return to Mount St. Helens! Yes, we are going to pick up The Cataclysm where we left off. You can catch up on all of the previous posts here, subscription free! And as I go through the USGS photographic database, you’ll be getting treated to some of the delicious eruption images I’m finding. That won’t be just for my Facebook followers anymore, although I’ll have some exclusive stuff there, so you should probably pop over there and click follow if you haven’t yet.
“Scenic view of snow-covered Mount St. Helens. Skamania County, Washington. April 10, 1980.” Credit: USGS/Gordon A. Coyier
We’ll also be doing a lot more Pacific Northwest geology in general. I have so, so much I want to show you! And some of you have been begging for Missoula Floods and Columbia River Flood Basalt posts forever, so it’ll be extra nice to deliver at last.
Now that I don’t have to fight Mura to upload every image, you’ll notice a lot more photos and illustrations. You have no idea how excited I am about that.
I’ve been meaning to sanitize swears from my Adventures in Christianist Earth Science series and post versions you can take home to Mom and Dad, and this is the absolute perfect place to do it. If you want to see the unfiltered versions, check them out on my dearly retired ETEV. Going forward, unfiltered versions will appear on The Unconformity, and f-bomb free editions will appear here.
Speaking of The Unconformity, you’ll see more cross-fertilization between here and there. Back when Rosetta Stones was part of the SciAm Blogs Network, I liked to keep those gardens nice and separate, to avoid the appearance of shameless self promotion. But that’s no longer necessary. So you’ll see book reviews cross-posted, and links between the two on the regular. Things I can’t talk about without multiple swears will be over there, as I’m trying to keep this place somewhat PG-13 so the kiddos can enjoy it, too. Politics and social justice stuff will mostly reside over there, but things that concern the earth science community will go here, just as they did when Rosetta Stones was at SciAm.
We’ll be able to do in-depth book reviews, too! I love doing chapter-by-chapter reviews on books, which is something I never really felt fit over at SciAm. We’re going to be starting with Victoria Bruce’s absolutely essential No Apparent Danger: The True Story of Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado Del Ruiz. If you’d like to follow along, pick up a copy of your own. (If you purchase at the link, Amazon will give me a wee bit of credit so I can continue purchasing books to review for you all.)
No Apparent Danger by Victoria Bruce
We’ll be able to do a lot more small, fun things here. We’ll be doing Geokittehs (this time without having photo editors come along years later stripping the photos out)! There will be more GeoBits. There will even be reader submissions! If you’ve got a tasty bit of geology or a Geokitteh candidate you’d like to see featured here, hit me up via this nifty contact form.
There’s one major difference that directly concerns you, dear reader: we can haz comments! The commenting system over at SciAm was borked for so long that I just got in the habit of letting it default to no comments, but WordPress usually behaves quite well, so let’s give it a try. You can find the comment policy here.
Eventually, Rosetta Stones will be nestled on its very own website, with many shiny bells and whistles, probably videos, and perhaps even an infant blog network of its own. I’m hoping to have it up and running by the fall, so we’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, I think we’ll be having a very fun summer here. So grab your rock hammer, pull up an interesting outcrop, and make yourself at home!
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Welcome to your new home! No longer Midcentury Modern Needing Work. Thanks for your output at SciAm and hope to see more soon. Bookmarking the new place…