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chrislowery.bsky.social
Chris Lowery
@chrislowery.bsky.social
530 followers 400 following 240 posts
Micropaleontologist
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chrislowery.bsky.social
Yup
An orange and black Monarch butterfly on a purple flower with a backdrop of green leaves and blue sky with more monarchs flying in the background
October 28, 2025 at 2:54 AM
chrislowery.bsky.social
this paper was a direct product of former UT undergraduate Anna Barrera's senior thesis. What's interesting about it, to me, is that assemblages in Aransas Bay are so different in 2023-24 than they were 70 years ago (the only other time anybody looked at modern assemblages here).
two maps showing the distribution of dominant genera in Aransas Bay and Copano Bay on the Texas Gulf coast in 1953 and 2023-24. In 1953 Aransas Bay was dominated by a mixture of Ammonia and Elphidium, and in 2024 Elphidium was nearly absent, expect for the southwestern part of Aransas Bay.
July 30, 2025 at 6:41 PM
chrislowery.bsky.social
This commentary is the first (but not the last) product of a great workshop up on Lake Erie last fall. Very excited about all the work there is to do!
A bunch of paleoceanographers sitting around a fire on the beach on an island on Lake Erie, discussing the treasure trove of past warm climate archives that can be found on Pacific Highs
June 6, 2025 at 2:03 PM
chrislowery.bsky.social
If the water is low we can walk across the riverbed and see the boundary deposit in amazing detail (if the water is not low we’ll visit some equally cool, but less extensive, outcrops in nearby creeks)
A rock hammer resting on the hummocky cross-stratified sandstone unit of the K/Pg event deposit in the Brazos River. The dark grey, spherule-rich coarse sand layer is sandwiched between two layers of tan, cemented, cross-bedded sandstone
June 5, 2025 at 5:34 PM
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Don’t ask me where that photo is from, the Brazos doesn’t look like that where we’re going. More like this:
A picture of a shallow brown river with rocks (sandstone deposited by the tsunami triggered by the Chicxulub impact) scattered across the middle. In the distance there’s a road bridge, dark green trees line the banks, and puffy white clouds fill a bright blue sky.
June 5, 2025 at 5:29 PM
chrislowery.bsky.social
Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep, with the caption “(LAUGHING NERVOUSLY) what the fuck?”
June 3, 2025 at 1:54 AM
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In which we leverage the Triton database to understand in detail how Pliocene and E. Pleistocene macroperforate planktic foram assemblages varied during warm and cold climate states across different ocean basins.
Planktic foraminiferal ecogroup distributions during warm and coldclimate states. Conceptual representation of ecogroup distributions during war-mer (mPWP the mid- Pliocene Warm Period) (a) and colder (iNHG the intensifica-tion of the Northern Hemisphere Glaciation) (b) climate regimes across oceanbasins. Warmer climates (mPWP) (a) are characterized by a greater equatorialdominance of symbiotic mixed-layer species (ecogroup 1), while colder climates(iNHG) (b) exhibit increased latitudinal stratification and an expansion of high-latitude species (ecogroup 5) in the Atlantic and North Pacific. In the Indian Ocean,the transition from warmer to colder climates is primarily marked by a decrease inecogroup 1 and an increase in ecogroup 4. Ecogroup 2 and ecogroup 3 taxa(asymbiotic mixed-layer and thermocline dwellers, respectively) are the leastimpacted by climate variations. Ecogroup 4 increased its abundance acrossSouthern Hemisphere basins during the iNHG.
June 2, 2025 at 1:41 PM
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Behold: the master at work
A man, deep in thought, focused liked you’ve never seen, looking at a MacBook and composing the skeet quoted below.
May 31, 2025 at 12:20 AM
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Shout out mammatus clouds
A picture looking up at some awesome mammatus clouds in between my chimney and a big tree.
May 23, 2025 at 1:11 AM
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My main contribution was sketching out a rough initial version of this figure with Masako, which more talented people turned into this work of art:
caption: A schematic diagram showing desirable seafloor/sub-seafloor sampling technologies, some of which are presently not readily available within current ARF sampling capabilities (denoted by “*,” including 50-m piston coring, lander drill, scientific drill ship, liftboat, and geotechnical vessel). Diagram not to scale. (Chris Lowery and Masako Tominaga, illustrated by Charin Park. ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution).
May 22, 2025 at 9:47 PM
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Also got to try out our brand new Russian Peat Borer
A group of students in a marsh, posing with a muddy peat borer An image of a freshly recovered core of 50 cm of bay head delta mud. Probably would’ve been easier if there had been actual peat instead of firm clay but this is Texas.
May 22, 2025 at 9:42 PM
chrislowery.bsky.social
Spent the last week down on the Texas Coast teaching our Marine Geology and Geophysics Field Course
A student recovering a ponar grab sampler on a small aluminum boat in Corpus Christi Bay. A selfie of me, handsome af in hat and sunglasses and a bright orange life jacket, on a small boat in Aransas Bay, TX A screenshot of a single channel seismic cross section of the Corpus Christi ship channel, with black and white horizontal lines reflecting density changes below the seafloor and a big scooped out area labeled “ship channel, freshly dredged” in red. A group of students standing in ankle deep water holding a 10 foot aluminum pipe that represents a freshly taken vibracore under a tripod. They’re smiling and making the hook-em hand gesture
May 22, 2025 at 9:39 PM
chrislowery.bsky.social
Scene from Office Space where Samir says “why don’t you just go by Mike instead of Michael” and Michael Bolton replies “No Way. Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”
May 5, 2025 at 12:59 PM
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🧐🤔
A screen shot of the spreadsheet in the quoted post, with Find On Page showing zero results for “Texas”
April 25, 2025 at 8:06 PM
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AGU putting the session proposal guidelines on their website
The big warehouse in Indiana Jones
April 17, 2025 at 3:42 PM
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Interestingly, other than the major reduction in calcareous genera at the end of the Permian, changes in the relative diversity of calcareous and agglutinated tests were not closely tied to ocean chemistry changes. We didn't expect that!
Plot of the total diversity of organic, agglutinated, and calcareous genera over the last 550 million years. Organic genera are so few that you can't even see them on this graph. Agglutinated foraminifera slowly increase in diversity throughout the Paleozoic, and calcareous genera take off in a big way in the Carboniferous, drop off severely at the end of the Permian, and then increase throughout the Mesozoic. Agglutinated genera also increase in number throughout the Mesozoic, far exceeding their Paleozoic diversity before declining at bit at the Cretacoeus/Paleogene boundary. Calcareous diversity briefly dips then, too, but increases (noisily) throughout the Cenozoic, when they reach their maximum diversity.
April 11, 2025 at 8:15 PM
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Happy #ForamFriday, here's a fresh new paper from former UT undergrad Katherine Faulkner published this week in Proceedings B, about how the number of calcareous and agglutinated foram genera has changed over the Phanerozoic, and what that means: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Figure 1 from Faulkner et al., 2025, showing proportion of wall type from the Cambrian 500 million years ago to today. Agglutinated and organic-walled foraminifera were dominant in the Cambrian and Ordovician. Calcareous walled taxa appeared in the Ordovician and quickly increased in diversity, representing about 60% of all genera by the end of the Devonian. This remained constant until the end Permian Mass extinction, when many calcareous walled genera disappeared, and agglutinated foraminifera briefly dominated. In the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, agglutinated foraminifera made up about 55-60% of all foram genera, but slowly declined through the Late Cretaceous to today, as calcareous foraminifera became more diverse.
April 11, 2025 at 8:08 PM
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BONUS non-foram content from the same sample: calcareous nannoplankton, carbonate fragments, and clay particles.
Another scanning electron micrograph, this time at 3000x magnification, showing calcareous nannoplankton, tiny pelagic calcifying phytoplankton. There's a big star-shaped one in the middle, and then lots of ring-shaped liths around it. Also scattered around are some smooth, roughly rectangular clay particles, and then a mess of broken little carbonate fragments.
March 14, 2025 at 7:44 PM
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Happy #ForamFriday here's a bunch of Globigerinatheka and even more fragments from the late Eocene at ODP Site 1265 on Walvis Ridge in the eastern South Atlantic. A classic example of a sub-lysocline assemblage with lots of fragments and a few robust planktic forams.
A scanning electron micrograph of a bunch of sedimentary particles scattered on carbon tape. Most of the intact foraminifera are from the genus Globigerinatheka, which are large, round, and have multiple supplementary apertures around their test. Their surface is rough and porous. A few other planktic foraminifera from other genera can be seen (Subbotina, Parasubbotina), but most of the particles in this image are fragments, broken pieces of foraminiferal tests, that indicate partial, but not complete, dissolution of the shells. Everything that we can see in this image is large and robust.
March 14, 2025 at 7:41 PM
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Starting the year with some good luck
A bowl of black eyed peas with collard greens and ham, with a big wedge of fresh cornbread to the top left of the bowl. It all looks so delicious, you can practically smell it
January 2, 2025 at 1:15 AM
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Here’s some more volcanic deposits inside Big Bend NP. This is called Burro Mesa Pouroff. It’s a sequence of alluvial(?) conglomerate overlain by ash flow tuff and then rhyolite lavas.
A big outcrop showing the full sequence of rocks: dark red conglomerate at the base, then buff-colored ash flow tuff, then dark rhyolite lavas. There’s an erosional feature in the top of the tuff on the right of this image that was filled in by the lavas. Here’s the box canyon at the end, the titular pour-off (a water fall when it rains). Planar bedded (and sometimes cross bedded) ash flow tuff with large cobble sized clasts, overlain by dark grey rhyolite. A closer view of the ash flow tuff. You can see clasts of various sizes from sand to cobble Here’s a picture of a boulder of the conglomerate that forms the base of the section, multicolored clasts of well-rounded volcanic rock in a light grey matrix.
December 31, 2024 at 8:13 PM
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Here’s a cool road cut of a lava flow near Big Bend Ranch State Park, with red (Tuff?? Idk) rock at the base, a very prominent contact, and a dark (rhyolite???) lava flow over the top of it. Here’s a boulder on the other side of the road showing a close up of the contact, upside down.
A road cut, with an asphalt road in the foreground and a low cliff with a light red, weathering rock overlain by a dark grey, blocky, resistant rock above. Here’s a cool boulder, it’s red at the top, a band of something light through the red, overlying a dark grey breccia, with larger and larger clasts toward the bottom. This boulder is upside down compared to the outcrop it came from, and the red should be at the bottom.
December 31, 2024 at 8:04 PM
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Our place in Terlingua was on the Boquillas Limestone (equivalent to the Eagle Ford, on which I wrote part of my PhD). Here’s a biostratigraphically significant ammonite in the main store, and also a painting of old mine when it was active. They mined cinnabar (mercury ore) from the limestone
A flagstone sized chunk of Boquillas limestone with an ammonite called Allocrioceras hazzardi weathering out of the top. It’s a small ammonite, loosely coiled (the whorls aren’t touching) with small spines down the outside. It marks the middle of the Boquillas near the Cenomanian-Turonian Boundary. A painting of the old cinnabar mines in Terlingua. It’s an aerial view of a small town on the desert with rust colored factory-looking buildings for processing the ore and, in the foreground dominating the painting, big light gray tailing piles. These are still clearly visible today.
December 31, 2024 at 7:47 PM
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Here’s another from the same outcrop, a lag deposit of mostly oysters (the forams are a lag deposit, too, it seems like there’s one bed in the outcrop where they’re concentrated like that)
Another hand sample covered in curving Early Cretaceous oysters about 2” long.
December 31, 2024 at 7:35 PM
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Here’s a thread of cool rocks I saw in/around Big Bend last week, starting with the coolest, from a road cut of the Del Rio Clay on Hwy 90 just west of Comstock, TX: large agglutinated benthic forams! There are two genera here, and if I can dig up the field trip guide I co-authored I’ll name them
A hand-sized rock covered in little brown chambered uniserial benthic foraminifera A close up of a couple weathered forams that are in cross section showing the arrangement of chambers (again, uniserial, i.e., in a straight line)
December 31, 2024 at 7:33 PM