Enjoyed giving a presentation today 'AI Ethics for Geoscientists and Engineers' on the University of Witwatersrand short course on Compliance & Reporting Rules in the Mineral Industry attended by students from all over Africa. Some great questions, thanks to the course leader Tania MarshallAboutThe School of Mining Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand is... Continue Reading →

Open-source: A user-friendly online tool for paleocoordinate calculation and 3D visualization.Interesting paper from Scholz-Mercia et al (2026) from the University of Barcelona.AbstractTo understand the distribution of continents throughout geological history, researchers rely on Global Plate Models (GPMs), which describe the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates over time.However, the complexity and variability of these models may... Continue Reading →

Open-source WorldTensor: A harmonised global dataset aligning hundreds of environmental and socio-economic indicators. Most existing Earth-system AI foundation models are trained on physical climate/weather data, ignoring the human systems that both drive and respond to environmental change. From Rodriguez-Carlo and Tavoni (2026).It covers: Climate, extremes, air quality, emissions, land use, agriculture, vegetation, hydrology, cryosphere, oceans,... Continue Reading →

Enjoyed participating in a panel on AI at the Science Council event in London today.Lots of interesting talks and panels - building an ethical framework for the UK to support a number of possible futures.AI ethics, cultural AI, critical thinking, safety, retaining and developing new competencies, the future workforce, use of AI, training and assessment... Continue Reading →

Looking forward to participating in the Association of Environmental and Engineering Geologists (AEG) 'Responsible AI for real-world geoscience' on the 26th August.Artificial intelligence is rapidly entering applied geoscience practice, but its value depends on how well it is grounded in geologic understanding, field observations, and professional judgment. This half-day virtual symposium will explore how AI-enabled tools,... Continue Reading →

Thoroughly enjoyed the ‘vibe-coding for geoscientists’ event yesterday. We had six teams most of whom had never used large language models before to build an application. People joined from diverse backgrounds, including students and seasoned practitioners.The task revolved around extracting geological outcrop polygons for a mica-rich metamorphic layer from a map image, so it could... Continue Reading →

OLMoEarth - open-source (training data, code, models) Earth Observation V1.1 released. OlmoEarth is an Earth-observation AI system built by Ai2 (the Allen Institute for AI), the earth image counterpart to Ai2's OLMo open language models.There is a family of foundation models trained on roughly 10 terabytes of global satellite and sensor data, designed to turn... Continue Reading →

Taking part in an AI Ethics panel at the Science Council in London next month with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and many other esteemed scholars and practitioners.“As AI rapidly reshapes how science is conducted, taught, and applied, there is a clear need for authoritative leadership to help frame the conversation about the... Continue Reading →

Delighted to serve as an associate editor of Earth Science, Systems and Society.Look forward to working with the editorial team and reconnect with my good friend Gene Rankey the Editor in Chief.