This work was funded by a @gfz.bsky.social Discovery Fellowship, a @fgse-unil.bsky.social Equality grant, @dfg.de support, the chinascholarship programme, and @epos-es.bsky.social.

Thanks also to Frank Neumann, Thomas Ziegenhagen, Uwe Lemgo and Kirsten Elger for technical support, Laetitia Le Pourhiet and @anungsamsu.bsky.social for valuable reviews, Janine Kavanagh and @gduclaux.bsky.social for managing the review process, and @moh-geo.bsky.social for technical editing.

A big thank you to my co-authors Ameha Atnafu Muluneh, Jun Liu, Ehsan Kosari, Matthias Rosenau, Giacomo Corti and Federico Sani.

This strain reorientation concept may be of interest to the interpretation of (the history of) tectonic deformation in other rift systems with such lineaments.

Based on analogue tectonic experiments, we propose that local strain reorientation (made possible by the oblique orientation of the Main Ethiopian Rift itself) can enable the deformation along these lineaments that is observed in nature.

The question is how lineaments that are highly oblique to the Main Ethiopian Rift are still able to localize deformation, despite being oriented rather unfavorably with respect to regional plate motion directions (they should not be active!?).

⚒️ Want to know more about our natural H2? Join us tomorrow (13 March, 16:00 CET) for the ENERGY NEW webinar where I will present about this recently published research (and more) 😃

Details on the webinar here: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Moreover (for the hashtag #Dutch crowd) I did a short interview for BNR Nieuwsradio a bit more than a week ago. You can access the recording here (from ca. 11:30 min on is the good stuff) 😃 ⚒️: www.bnr.nl/gemist?date=...

This weekend, I contributed to a short @cnn.com
podcast called "Five Good Things", with some information on the research in our recently published paper with @aaas.org's #ScienceAdvances. You can find it here (from ca. min 7 on it's all about white H2) 😃: edition.cnn.com/audio/podcas...

p.s. some cool media coverage of our paper (by @cnn.com) can be found here: edition.cnn.com/2025/02/19/c...

I was also a visiting scientist at @unifr.bsky.social during part of the work done for this publication, and will continue my research in Switzerland, funded through a @fgse-unil.bsky.social grant (stay tuned) 😃

This research was principally funded through a @gfz.bsky.social Discovery Fellowship, with additional (financial) support from @erc.europa.eu, @www.helmholtz.de, @unistra.fr, @cnrs.fr, Lavoisier H2 Geoconsult, and the Alliance for National High Performance Computing in Germany.

A big thank you to my co-authors @sasbrune.bsky.social, Anne Glerum, Dylan Vasey, John Naliboff, Giantero Manatschal & Eric C. Gaucher for their help and support during this exciting research😃

Many thanks also to @gfz.bsky.social colleagues, reviewers, the paper editor, and the CIG.

Our work shows the importance of understanding the geodynamic factors that control the distribution of natural resources (and the use of modelling work).

Such insights are of particular importance for the energy transition, given the vast amounts of resources we will need.

We propose an orogenic natural H2 system concept, which shows the key ingredients for the successful development of natural H2 accumulations that can be drilled and explored. Alternatively, we may also consider directly drilling into the serpentinizing mantle rocks themselves.