Chris Rowan is a geologist specialising in the dark arts of paleomagnetism, and getting people to pay him to travel to exotic destinations for fieldwork. Having drilled up New Zealand during his PhD, and South Africa in his first post-doc, he now works at the University of Edinburgh.
Anne Jefferson has a love of all things water-related and blends hydrology, geomorphology, geology, and climate change in her work. She has a Ph.D. from Oregon State University and is now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.Brian's had the cool idea of summarising some of his pending scientific papers using tag clouds, and I'm joining Lab Lemming, ReBecca and Maria in jumping on the bandwagon. The following two clouds, which may or may not provide some insight into what I'm all about scientifically, are generated from the text of a couple of my papers, sans references and figure captions, using tagcrowd on its default settings (hence the appearance of 'et', 'al', and 'figure/fig'). I thought it also might be fun to compare the clouds to the list of keywords that you actually have to provide yourself. The first one is for my recent JGR publication about New Zealand tectonics (yes, the one I promised to write some posts about; something I will get around to once I've completed a couple of neccesary background posts).
My keywords: remagnetization, greigite, vertical axis rotation, New Zealand, Hikurangi margin.
Number two was submitted to Earth and Planetary Science Letters just before I went away, and is based on work I did between finishing my PhD and leaving Southampton, and focuses on diagenetic changes to the magnetic mineral assemblage within marine sediments, and their effects on the paleomagnetic signal they carry.
My keywords: sediment diagenesis, sulfate reduction, magnetite dissolution, greigite, superparamagnetism, hysteresis.
I'm apparently not too gratuitously self-citing, but it does seem that, since my PhD supervisor's name appears on both lists, I'm a bit of a suck-up. That'll surprise him - although since both papers concern the effects of evil greigite, and he's been heavily involved in its ascent up the heirarchy of Important Magnetic Minerals in recent years, I could hardly help citing him lots. Given that certain recent reviews have suggested that I seem to be rather good at upsetting people I'm rather surprised that more researcher names don't appear (the only other one on the JGR paper is retired).
There is also a reasonable degree of overlap between my chosen keywords and the ones that appear in the tag cloud. It's no surprise that they're not completely identical (as the most important concepts or themes in a paper are not neccesarily related to how frequently you mention them), but it does seem that you can potentially get a reasonable sense of what a paper might actually be discussing from this sort of thing. The question is whether it actually has any utility in finding papers and/or assessing whether you want to read them.
Comments
coercivity?
Posted by: BrianR | May 5, 2008 11:10 AM
...is a property of magnetic minerals related to how big a field you need to zap them with to completely de/remagnetize them.
Posted by: Chris Rowan | May 5, 2008 11:18 AM
ah ha ... thnx
Posted by: BrianR | May 5, 2008 11:37 AM
keywords is clever. I was going to check titles on the stuff I'm writing now, just to see if what I think I writing about ends up being what I actually spend the words on.
Posted by: Lab Lemming | May 5, 2008 7:46 PM
This is from the "evil greigite" post:
Because pyrite is not particularly stable in the presence of oxygen, all this pyrite is unlikely to have settled out of the water column; instead, it has grown within the sediments after deposition.
Water-column formation of a percentage of sedimentary framboidal pyrite has been reported in euxinic conditions. I'm not sure if this makes a difference, and I hate to be presumptuous, but as a fellow traveler in having had to differentiate mono- and polysulfide species in Middle Proterozoic shales I couldn't resist jumping in (or as they say in the movies, "you had me a greigite.")
Posted by: Jim | May 6, 2008 3:45 PM
This is true - another place you see pyrite forming directly in the water column is the Black Sea (which has anoxic bottom waters). But the sediments I've been working with (moderately deep-water marine environments) were deposited in oxygenated bottom waters, and the growth textures (multiple generations of growth) also support the hypothesis that we're dealing with pyrite that has grown within the sediments.
Posted by: Chris Rowan | May 7, 2008 6:22 AM
Chris - after I hit post and re-read my comment I realized that you were probably describing a specific environment and that maybe I'd jumped the gun a bit.
The first thing I thought of when I read your original post was the Black Sea - my MS thesis adviser was a geochemist that had worked there a fair bit. Consequently, I used to dream in terms of pyrite.
Posted by: Jim | May 7, 2008 12:57 PM