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.I'm just about settled in in my new office at The University of Edinburgh, so hopefully regular blogging should resume soon. In the meantimes, perhaps more interesting than my geographical shift is my temporal one; starting a new project means that I'm also going to be focussing on an entirely different portion of geological time:
When I moved to South Africa, I shifted from the very young to the very old; now I get to poke around somewhere in the middle. The Neoproterozoic, between about 550 and 1000 million years ago, is the final chapter of Earth's evolution prior to the Cambrian explosion, and in fact many of the biological and environmental seeds that finally led to the rise of large critters and complex ecosystems may have been sown in this era.
Anyone want to guess exactly what I'm going to be looking at?
Physical Science
Comments
I had to do it too!
Posted by: Martin R | November 26, 2008 1:28 PM
I am not good at ages, and my first thought was the Dalradians that I have seen on a few field trips. I suppose however that Moine would be a better guess.
I wish you much success anyway - and Scotland, not least Edinburgh, is a nice place.
Good luck.
Posted by: Ole | November 26, 2008 1:53 PM
Do please, now and then, report on the glories of Edinburgh, the city where my wife earned her first degrees, and which is so important in the history of your science, and other sciences.
"The Bicentenary in 1997 of the death of James Hutton (1726-1797) and the birth of Charles Lyell (1797-1875) gave a unique opportunity for the earth science community generally and the Edinburgh Geological Society articularly to mark this important event in the history and development of geology. The links between Hutton, the founder of modern geology, Lyell, the great Victorian populariser of science, and the Society are worth a brief explanation.
As is well known, the Society was founded in 1834 and is in fact the fourth oldest geological society in the British isles. Its origins can be precisely dated to a meeting on Thursday 4 December in that year in Robertson's Tavern in Milne's Close off the Lawnmarket of eleven members of a class in mineralogy...."
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | November 26, 2008 2:37 PM
My guess:
Getting paleomag off of Fe3S4 in cryogenean black shales dated by Re/Os.
Posted by: Lab Lemming | November 26, 2008 7:04 PM
Testing paleolatitude of "snowball earth" deposits?
Posted by: Kim | November 26, 2008 7:19 PM
Kim wins the prize.
If there's any greigite, I may well kill myself. Although it will probably have all recrystallised to pyrite after 700 million years...
Posted by: Chris Rowan | November 27, 2008 7:04 AM
That sounds like very cool research (interesting, cutting edge, and in need of some good paleomag to test models). Yay.
Which deposits (and which cold periods)? Will you get to roam the world, drilling anything that looks cool? (Or cold, more like?)
Posted by: Kim | November 27, 2008 10:17 AM
Ye'll have had yer tea.
Speaking as a glaswegian, this is the famous, traditional edinburgh welcome.
Looking at what embra uni has done on the proterozoic, I think you might enjoy exciting field trips to greenland, or siberia. Whaterver it's called now, it was probly gondwanaland then.
Posted by: eddie | November 27, 2008 2:38 PM
Rambling, only tangentially related story:
You may remember James Gleick's book Chaos, a popular history of the early history of chaos theory from Edward Lorenz' work on weather sims up through the 1980s work of the rather eccentric Mitchell Feigenbaum. Somewhere in there, I forget who, someone realized that climate simulations based roughly on Earth parameters (necessarily simplified of course) always seemed to degenerate into a "white Earth" scenario where runaway cooling took over and froze the surface of the sim planet. At the time this seemed like a curious degenerate case and no one knew whether this could eventually happen. I had always found this a fascinating outcome, so you can imagine I thought it was pretty cool when I realized that geologists and paleontologists had come to the same hypothesis independently.
Long story short, that's got to be one of the most interesting possible periods of geology to study...
Posted by: Brian X | November 28, 2008 1:16 AM
Now that sounds like fun. In the '70s, I was a student and then a graduate TA on 4 summer field course trips to Britain, mostly Scotland and North Wales. One of my favorite stops was to look at the mixites on the Garvellach Islands.
Since you are young and dynamic, maybe you can find your way into some of the television shows on geology that pop up now and then. Iain Stewart is pretty good but some new blood would be nice.
Good luck with the new project.
Posted by: cope | November 28, 2008 8:27 AM
cool ... look forward to reading about your new project(s)!
Posted by: BrianR | November 30, 2008 7:57 AM