Volume 1, Issue 3 · March 2025

Spring 2025

Three pieces of earth science that each break a rule somebody teaches. Gold leaking out of a core that was supposed to be sealed, younger rock sitting underneath older rock across half a basin, and the first video anybody has taken of a fault tearing the ground apart.

9 articles, in the order the club meant them to be read.

1. 1

   MethodsSpring 2025

   Solving Seawater: A Carbonate Equilibrium Solver and What It Says About Acidification

   The carbonate system in seawater is four coupled equilibria and one conservation law, and substituting them into each other collapses the whole thing into a single quartic in the hydrogen ion concentration with exactly one positive root. We wrote a solver for it. No seawater was sampled at any point: the computation is the experiment. Using published temperature and salinity dependent constants on the total hydrogen

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2. 2

   MethodsSpring 2025

   Where the Textbook Titration Shortcuts Actually Fail

   Chemistry courses hand out four or five closed-form shortcuts for titration curves and then guard each one with a shrug. We wrote an exact solver instead, built from charge balance and mass balance with nothing thrown away, and used it to audit the shortcuts across a grid of 57 acid strengths and 41 concentrations. The solver was checked first: charge balance holds to a worst relative residual of 4.3510 15 , speciati

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3. 3

   Original ResearchSpring 2025

   What a Buffer Is Actually Resisting

   Buffer capacity is introduced as a formula and usually abandoned there. We computed it instead, as the exact derivative (eta = dC_b/dmathrm{pH}) of a full charge-balance solver, across dissociation constants from pKa 2 to pKa 12 and concentrations from 0.1 mM to 1 M. No solution was mixed at any point. The club has no laboratory, so the computation is the experiment. Three independent routes to (eta) agree:

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4. 4

   MethodsSpring 2025

   The Common Ion Effect Is Taught Backwards

   Every general chemistry course states the common ion effect as a rule with no stated exceptions: add an ion the precipitate already contains, and its solubility falls. We built an exact solver for precipitation equilibria, one that carries the solubility product, stepwise complex formation, the anion's own acid-base speciation, and the water equilibrium as a single coupled system with nothing approximated away, and s

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5. 5

   Original ResearchSpring 2025

   The Reaction That Gives You the Wrong Product Because You Were Impatient

   Two products, one shared starting material, two reversible one-step reactions, and no way for the products to talk to each other directly: this is the standard textbook picture of kinetic versus thermodynamic control, and the textbook almost never tells you how long the experiment takes. We wrote the rate equations, integrated them with a from-scratch fourth-order Runge-Kutta stepper, and separately solved the same l

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6. 6

   Original ResearchSpring 2025

   Why Small Fires Are Common and Big Fires Are Not Rare Enough

   Trees grow at random, lightning falls at random, and whatever connected patch the bolt lands in burns. Those two rules are the whole of the Drossel-Schwabl forest fire model, an object so economical that it is usually handed over as a finished fact to be memorised: self-organised criticality, power-law fire sizes, one exponent near 1.15. We preferred to test it, so the club wrote and ran the model on a laptop; no for

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7. 7

   Paper AnalysisGeochemistry

   The Core Is Leaking: Ruthenium-100, Hawaiian Lava, and Gold From the Center of the Earth

   Earth's metallic core is supposed to be a sealed room: whatever fell into it 4.5 billion years ago stays there. In May 2025 a Göttingen-led team reported that Hawaiian basalts carry an excess of the isotope ruthenium-100, about nine parts per million , a signature that matches core metal and matches nothing else on the planet. The same rocks carry the tungsten-182 deficit you would expect from that source, an indepen

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8. 8

   ExplainerGeology

   Younger Rock Beneath Older Rock: The North Sea Layers That Sank Through Time

   A 2025 study of basin-scale 3D seismic data from the northern North Sea reports hundreds of kilometre-wide sand bodies that appear to have liquefied, sunk through a 200–500 m interval of older microfossil ooze, and come to rest beneath it. Rafts of that older ooze went up instead. They built mounds. The authors call the sunken sand sinkites , the risen ooze floatites . Grant the interpretation and the law of superpos

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9. 9

   Paper AnalysisSeismology

   Caught on CCTV: The First Video of a Fault Tearing the Ground Apart

   On 28 March 2025 a security camera twenty metres from Myanmar's Sagaing Fault filmed the ground tearing open. One side slid past the other. Frame-by-frame pixel tracking gives 2.5 ± 0.5 m of slip in 1.3 ± 0.2 s , peaking at 3.2 ± 1.0 m/s . It throws in something nobody ordered. The slip path curves [1]. Nobody had ever filmed a fault rupturing. We rebuild the pulse from the three published numbers. They will not all

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