Kate Littler
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palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Kate Littler
@palaeoclimate.bsky.social
3K followers 1.7K following 600 posts
Senior Lecturer in Palaeoclimate | Department of Earth & Environmental Science, University of Exeter (Cornwall) | Marine geology | Micropalaeontology | Geochemistry | IODP | Birding | Parenting small humans
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palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Ah yes, now I remember why I don’t go up north very often.

The crosscountry train from Durham to Cornwall takes 9 hours at the best of times, and today it’s over an hour late… the toilet door is broken… and the rainwater is literally coming in from the ceiling and dripping onto my seat.

👍👍👍
The empty biscuit packet I am currently using to catch the rainwater that is coming is from the ceiling of this train onto my seat. Classy.
November 11, 2025 at 5:27 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Rounding off my ‘Northern Tour’ with a seminar in beautiful Durham.

Thanks for the joint hosting in Earth Sciences/Geography by @erinmcclimate.bsky.social and @grockesibl.bsky.social.

Lots of interesting discussions were had - I won’t leave it another decade next time!
Looking down the river wear from kingsgate bridge. Trees on either side. A beautiful yellow leaved tulip tree near the main library at Durham university. Blue sky behind. The frankly quite awe inspiring Durham cathedral. If there truly is a god, they must surely have been impressed with this one. A fancy brass door knocker on the front of Durham cathedral.
November 10, 2025 at 5:01 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Also squeezed in a lovely 2 hours on the coast path this morning, where I clocked 26 🐦 species…

Including: corn bunting, merlin, curlew, redshank, hooded crow, starling, shag, song thrush and about 80 pink footed geese overhead ❤️

(And of course a highland coo!)
A v shaped formation of about 80 pink footed geese, against an impossibly blue sky. I heard them honking long before I spotted them. A highland coo (cow) with shaggy fur and long pointy horns Low tide at the rocky coastline. Exposed dipping sandstones exposed on the foreshore with the sea in the far distance. Shags or cormorants drying their wings on a rock by the sea.
November 7, 2025 at 8:51 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Had a great visit to St Andrews this week to give a seminar on our Pliocene monsoon work. 🧪⚒️

So nice to sample #fifelife again!

Thanks to @mudwaterclimate.bsky.social @oceanicandrea.bsky.social
Sami Mikhail and Claire Cousins for hosting 😊

(Totally failed to get any photos together 🤦‍♀️).
Me on the Fife coastline near St Andrews. Smiley woman wearing a striped top and grey rucksack, and sporting borrowed binoculars, with a rocky and grassy coastline behind and blue skies.
November 7, 2025 at 8:42 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Having a very interesting time at the ECORD (scientific ocean drilling) week in Edinburgh.

Great to get updates on what’s going on with the programme and all the exciting developments with planned expeditions.

Lots of great stuff including open calls for exp participants!

iodp3.org

🧪⚒️
A view from the old town of Edinburgh up to castle rock with Edinburgh castle brooding on top. Houses in the foreground. Blue sky with clouds in the background.
November 4, 2025 at 6:46 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Cornwall has a few small but precious patches of ancient woodlands, in what is otherwise a very low tree cover county.

Clearly a mast year for the oaks with acorns everywhere!

Some really interesting galls on the oak leaves too, made by various species of gall wasp.
Oak apple galls on a brown oak leaf. Gall is round, smooth and speckled pink with a slightly spongy texture. About the size of my thumbnail. Tons of brown acorns on the forest floor. I think this is a mixture of two types of oak galls on a brown oak leaf. The flatter ones look like spangle galls and the donut shaped ones are silk button galls, both made by different species of gall wasp as part of their complex life cycle. A stream running through this patch of ancient woods. A fragment of Atlantic rainforest preserved in a coastal ravine that was evidently too steep to farm. Saved by geography, and latterly the Woodland Trust.
October 28, 2025 at 8:31 AM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
And here’s the classic chevron beds at Milook Haven.

If you don’t like folding you’re in the wroooong place 😍

⚒️🧪🌍
A view of cliffs at Milook Haven looking NE. Classic exposure of the tightly folded Carboniferous-aged turbidities at this location. Spectacular! Blue sky and clouds behind and rocky beach in the foreground. Close up of the tight chevron folding in the turbidities at Milook Haven.
October 27, 2025 at 4:31 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Antiform hat.
A windswept me (with full hat-hood combo and scarf) with a sharp chevron antiform behind me formed of Carboniferous turbidities.
October 26, 2025 at 7:06 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Thoroughly enjoying checking out the spectacular folded and overturned Carboniferous-aged turbidities near Millook Haven on the NE Cornish coast.

Lovely sedimentary structures - graded bedding, slumps, load casts, flutes, all subsequently squeezed into tight chevron folds ::chef’s kiss::

⚒️🧪🌍
Tight chevron folding in the cliffs near Millook Haven. Lighter beds are more competent sandstones while darker strata are mudstones. Pale sandstones and darker mudstones in alternating turbidite sequence. Beds are overturned with younging to the right. Lumpy texture on right-hand sandstone bed are load casts where the denser sand sunk down into the less dense mudstone underneath. Eroded flame structures visible. Red rucksack for scale. View from the cliff looking down onto the foreshore. Clear bedding is visible with a tight plunging synform on the left and a tight plunging antiform on the right. Grey skies and sea behind. Evidence of soft sediment deformation, with contorted slumped bedding. Darker discontinuous mudstone strata within the paler sandstone in the centre, and vice versa to the right.
October 26, 2025 at 7:01 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Harvested our precious minute crop of Chilean guava berries this weekend.

Little red balls that are somewhere between a strawberry and herbal tea in taste.

Apparently Queen Victoria’s favourite berry that she had shipped in from her private stash garden in Cornwall.
A bowl of red berries. Little red round ones are Chilean guava berries and the others are the last of the season’s raspberries. Red Chilean guava berries happily growing on the little shrubs at my allotment
October 19, 2025 at 5:45 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Nothing nicer than an early morning trip to Hayle estuary with a friend. So many amazing birds! 🐦

Various gulls, waders, ducks, and even a spoonbill 😍

Love huddling in the hide with a flask of tea and a biscuit. Bliss.
View out over Ryan’s field near the Hayle estuary on a quiet Sunday morning. Blue sky breaking through the cloud. A lone spoonbill (centre) foraging amidst a whole heap of gulls (mostly herring and greater black backed), and a few ducks. A beautiful lapwing (one of my favourite waders) on the water with ducks, gulls and a redshank in the background.
October 6, 2025 at 9:37 AM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
The Falmouth ‘basket shark’ has arrived on the campus, and is looking great on this sunny September day.

🦈🌊☀️

More info: www.falmouth.ac.uk/news/falmout...
A large basking shark sculpture made of thin wooden sticks, and hence called the ‘basket shark’. Sitting on green grass with a blue sky background at our Penryn campus that we share with Falmouth University. Close up of the head of the basket shark.
September 26, 2025 at 1:58 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Overcame my (frankly quite reasonable) fear of fast traffic and big roundabouts to do my first ever bike-to-work today.
Feeling like a badass 💪🚴‍♀️
September 25, 2025 at 8:21 AM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
After all the autumnal rain lately, it was nice to get out and enjoy some late afternoon sunshine by the reservoir.

Mushrooms, acorns, swallows, great crested grebes, and a big colony of mining bees. 🍂 🌳 🐝 🍄‍🟫
One of many mining bees that was buzzing around this bank of earth. I think it’s an Ivy bee. Stripy abdomen and cute ginger fuzzy back. Some jolly bright orange mushrooms growing out of an old rotten log. No idea what species. Two delicate white toadstools amidst a sea of moss and ferns, growing on an oak branch. Good times at the reservoir. It’s clearly been a dry year because the water level is low enough to expose the old stone hedges, some still with the bones of all drowned trees inside.
September 21, 2025 at 5:05 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Here, have a timeline cleanse of some wonky veg I harvested from the allotment this week.

Growing ‘supermarket-beautiful’ veg is hard - I take my hat off to professional farmers.
Oh wow these corn cobs look so delicious and plump. Wonder what they look like on the inside… Irregular but interesting corn cobs! Three de-stalked cobs laying on the table. They were very tasty with butter and black pepper :chef’s kiss: Two of the most wonky-ass, grotesque carrots you’ve ever seen. Still tasty!
September 14, 2025 at 7:13 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Lots of cloud here in Cornwall and moonrise was relatively late, but the partial eclipse was beautiful.

Looked like a segment of orange hanging over the ocean, and then just a nibble out of the full moon.

My photo through binoculars sort of looks like the cover of a sci-fi novel though…
Photo of the night sky showing the full moon during the end phase of the lunar eclipse. Just a small shadowy nibble out of the top right corner. Reflections on the glass and ghostly clouds make it look kinda surreal. Partial lunar eclipse over Falmouth Bay. Moon looks like an orange segment. Falmouth port, complete with our resident navel support ship, visible in the foreground, with the hills of The Roseland in the distance.
September 7, 2025 at 8:12 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Spectacular ripple clouds over the Lizard today. 😍☁️

Don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it.
Amazing ripple clouds (asperitas?) over the west side of the Lizard today. View looking east over the fields. Amazing ripple clouds (asperitas?) over the west side of the Lizard today. View looking east over the beach at Church Cove.
September 6, 2025 at 9:28 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
As a kid, I loved scampering along the strand-line at the beach looking for shells and treasures.

Now it’s always a dispiriting parade of plastic crap - discarded fishing rope, bottles, shoes, and a million smaller fragments.

I’m only 40 - how did we let it get so bad so fast?!
The product of an impromptu ~25 min beach clean at Playa de Canallave in northern Spain. Two large plastic bottles and some old plastic sacking filled with fishing rope, polystyrene, condoms, and hundreds of miscellaneous plastic fragments. Incredibly dispiriting, but I can’t visit a beach without trying to remove at least a tiny bit of it. The gorgeous Playa de Canallave (with great geology, see other post!). Looks unspoilt from a distance, but a casual stroll along the tidelines reveals a plague of plastic. And there’s nothing particularly unusual about this beach - every beach I go to, no matter how quiet and remote it seems, is full of plastic. It’s horrible.
September 6, 2025 at 10:01 AM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Further along the coast to the east there’s some nice Albian sandstone and marl, sandwiched between Cenomanian and Aptian strata as part of a big syncline.

Lovely sedimentary structures and some cute trace fossils - mostly Thalassinoides.

#fossilfriday
Geological map of the area showing the Albian sediment cropping out at Playa de Canallave and broader regional context Dark grey mudstone and marl strata, sandwiched between sandy beds. Crossbedded golden sandstone Highly burrowed sandstone surface, showing burrows with diameters of up to 2cm. Mixture of Thalassinoides and skolithos ichnogenera.
September 5, 2025 at 4:29 PM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
The local museo de Jurasico de Asturias (MUJA) is excellent.

The whole building is in the shape of a 3-toed theropod footprint, with great displays of original local fossils and some replicas of classics like T-Rex and Archaeopteryx.

#fossilfriday
Map showing the unique footprint shape of the museum A detailed cast of a 3-toed dinosaur footprint found locally in the Jurassic strata. Huge model sauropods outside the museum next to the kids’s playground. A grey rock with pterosaurs footprints.
September 5, 2025 at 4:17 PM
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Enjoyed checking out a late Jurassic sauropod trackway in Asturias last week. The footprints were huge!

Little slivers of Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks crop out on the northern Spain coast, which is otherwise mostly Carboniferous limestone or older Ordovician quartzite.

#fossilfriday
A large depression in grey limestone about 1.25m in diameter, which is a sauropod footprint from northern Spain of Kimmeridgian (late Jurassic) age. Small boy for scale. Location of the trackway next to a beautiful beach at Playa de la Griega. Blue skies and golden sands, with grey cliffs to the right.
September 5, 2025 at 4:03 PM
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Cooler conditions in the Palentina mountains the last two days, and the wind direction has taken the smoke elsewhere. Very thankful for the relief 🙏

But apparently still very hot and wildfires 🔥 still raging further SW.

When it’s not on fire this place is beautiful!
First clear skies we’ve seen for days over the Palentina mountains. Reservoir and trees in the foreground.
August 19, 2025 at 6:11 PM
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Feeling very much on the front line of climate change this week, as wildfires rage all around us in the mountains.

It’s relentlessly hot and dry 🥵

A little clearer this morning but the sky has been dark with smoke and the sun blood red. Smell of burning everywhere. 😣
Dark grey smoke blotting out the sun as we look west towards the Palentina Mountains and the Picos de Europa. Dark grey smoke blotting out the sun as we look west towards the Palentina Mountains and the Picos de Europa. View over the nearby reservoir where helicopters with hurricane buckets have been refilling.
August 17, 2025 at 9:58 AM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Enjoying the heavenly scent of fresh sweet peas from the allotment over lunch today 😊

💐
A brown vase of pink sweet peas on a wooden table. Sad for you that you can’t smell them!
August 8, 2025 at 11:04 AM
palaeoclimate.bsky.social
Thought it would be fun to get my kids to make a vegetable animal.

Didn’t realise they were going to summon Cthulhu.
A green ‘octopus’ made of celery sticks, cucumber, grapes and other vegetable odds and ends, sitting on a green plate on a wooden table. Sinister gaze hard to put into words…
August 1, 2025 at 8:46 PM