Once Upon A Time In Keyworth

Twelve years ago, when I was a mere slip of a 17-year-old girl, I won a Nuffield bursary to spend the summer working at the British Geological Survey in Keyworth. I worked in what was at the time called the Regional Geophysics Group, digitising radiometric data from the 1957 airborne survey of Cornwall.


Reproduced with the permission of the British Geological Survey ©NERC. All rights Reserved.
I started at the most westerly section and made it as far east as St Ives in the four weeks I spent in the Group.


Reproduced with the permission of the British Geological Survey ©NERC. All rights Reserved.
I came up with a 10-page report, "Digitisation Of Analogue Airborne Radiometric Data From South-West Cornwall And Its Interpretation", submitted it in triplicate, got a gorgeous colour printout of my map and never saw any of it again. A year later, my data made it into the BGS technical report "Digitisation of the 1957 Airborne Radiometric Survey of Cornwall" (ISBN: B0018TNG3A).


Reproduced with the permission of the British Geological Survey ©NERC. All rights Reserved.
The colours are different on my plot and the plot for the whole of Cornwall - the latter was an equal area plot, which shows up nicely the increased radioactivity associated with uranium-bearing granite.

Last month I finally got a chance to visit the area, on my holiday. Despite participating in a field trip to southwest England as an undergraduate, we never went further west than The Lizard, so a week in St Ives was a great opportunity to see the rocks. Here is the granite that makes up the vast majority of the Lands End peninsula (with my pudgy little hand for scale):


You'll see that it's quite a pale granite, chock full of feldspars (about the size of each of my pudgy little fingers). It erodes to form some of the most beautiful quartz and feldspar beaches:


And of course, where you find granite, you find metamorphic rocks. These were on the private beach at Trebah Gardens:


I do wonder sometimes if anyone has ever set eyes on my report since 1997. I suspect not, which is good because there are few things more embarrassing than a 17-year-old trying to write in academic style.

It's very likely that, over the next year or so, I will have to go back up to the BGS at Keyworth to look at some of their boreholes from my new field area. It'll be great to look around again!

Angry Dazed Bird Of The Day

Last week I posted photos of an adult European robin (Erithacus rubecula) taken on holiday. Well, at the weekend I had the chance to see a juvenile up close and personal, as the silly bugger flew in through our back door and straight into our bedroom window, terrifying the hell out of Paul, whose writing desk is in the window bay.

I was alerted to this by the "Aaagh! Whoaa! Jesus! There's a bird!!" from the bedroom, and ran in to see what sort of bird we were dealing with. I shut the doors so it couldn't wreak havoc through the house and identified it as a juvenile robin, almost certainly one of the fledged babies from our robin family's first batch. These chaps are now independent of their parents, so I was happy enough to handle it without gloves.


Despite its furious look in the photo above, it wasn't that angry. I could feel its little heart pumping, and assume it was absolutely terrified, but it was very good and didn't whiz on my hands. Dr Brazen Hussy has been doing a series on angry birds - I can only assume this little sweetie was trying not to push its luck.


You can see the juveniles are very spotty indeed - from last year's observations I reckon they'll start getting their adult plumage in a couple of months tops. I took it out to the garden and released it into the hedge behind our apple tree, where it could sit and take stock (and no doubt wait for its headache to wear off). I suspect I learned some avian swearwords as it flew off twittering loudly.

Yup, at Jurassic Towers we let all sorts of animals in. Two years ago we had a neighbour's cat that liked to just amble in as we were cooking dinner. We could have shut the back door, but it's so nice to have a cool breeze circulating in the summer!

Dropping The Hot Potato

Once upon a time there was a Department of Education and Science. This worked pretty well for over 30 years, but one day they decided that they didn't fancy the Science bit so they passed it on to the Department of Trade and Industry and became the Department for Education. Then the Department for Education merged with the Department of Employment to become the Department for Education and Employment. Six years later they decided they didn't like the Employment bit much either, so gave it to the newly set up Department for Work and Pensions and rebranded themselves the Department for Education and Skills.

Then one day Gordon Brown became prime minister, and he decided to abolish the Department for Education and Skills, and instead split Education two ways between the new Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS). He also made the Department of Trade and Industry into the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) and decided that DIUS could bloody well have Science back.

Non-European readers may be unaware that we've had elections to elect MEPs, or Members of the European Parliament. Just before the elections (which were combined with a lot of local council elections in the UK), a lot of senior government ministers jumped ship, leaving Gordon Brown with a much larger Cabinet reshuffle than he'd obviously planned. Today is the first time since Barack Obama was elected that I have watched a streaming news channel, because there's rather a big movement afoot.

John Denham has been transferred to the Department for Communities and Local Government, but no successor has been announced. There have been rumours all morning on Twitter that DIUS (yup, still sounds like a contraceptive) is being abolished, with the Innovation going to the care of Sir Alan Sugar (yes folks, he's our Donald Trump...), Science going to BERR, and who knows where Universities are going (probably absorbed into DCSF).

So science policy will be decided by a load of businessmen. I've already said why I think that it would be bad to try to run science as a business, that it just is not possible to just fund "economically viable" research. The research councils will almost certainly be part of BERR too. The research councils are our equivalents of NSF (we have arts and humanities, economic and social sciences and medical research councils as well as four science research councils).

I'm awaiting the statement that will apparently be released this afternoon stating the full reshuffle, but in the meantime I am shitting bricks at the thought that the awful Lord Mandelson is going to be in charge of NERC funding. NERC supports, among other institutions, the British Geological Survey and British Antarctic Survey. We'll get no more penguin poo research with him running the show.

16:14: Dr Ian Gibson MP has resigned as an MP with immediate effect. Given his extensive experience with science on parliamentary committees, it's difficult not to read more into his resignation than is being divulged at the moment. Still waiting on a statement from the PM.

17:12: Shit. Yes, BERR and DIUS are to be merged to form the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS?). The whole sorry situation is up on the Downing Street website. As I feared, it's going to be all about economically viable science:

Continue to invest in the UK's world class science base and develop strategies for commercialising more of that science.

Some science just isn't open to commercialisation. And I have a horrible, sickening feeling that these topics are going to suffer badly in the next few years.

The Red Red Robin

There is a common misconception among my American friends that the ugly big native blackbird with the token bit of red on its throat is a robin. Any self-respecting British twitcher will scoff, say "That's just an ugly blackbird with a paint job" and direct you to a real robin (Erithacus rubecula):


Note the smallness, cuteness and redness. I accept we're not talking cardinal red (a bird that, every time I see it, causes me to say "Wow, that's really quite red"), but it's red nonetheless.


This one was hanging out at the Lost Gardens of Heligan a couple of weeks ago, and it was absolutely as bold as brass.

And if you've never heard the British Dawn Chorus, have a look at this video by my dear pater:


I've been chuckling about what the ranger said about bird song being all about sex. A few years ago, on the way home from university, Paul and I discussed how bird song comes down to one of three things:

1. Fancy a shag?
2. Get off my land!
3. There's a CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!!!!

It would appear that we weren't far from the truth.

Silence Is The Enemy

I am one of the lucky ones. On the grand scheme of things, considering I lived in a society where one in three women are raped (I don't have UK references but I can't imagine they're too much lower), I did quite well to escape with "just" being sexually assaulted^[*]. But I know another American academic who wept when I told her why I was leaving my PhD programme, because she had done exactly the same after being raped on fieldwork by her advisor, and she saw just another generation of professors behaving the way her advisor had done ten years previously.

Women in the UK and US are used to being leered at by tradeys in their vans, cat-called at by builders, groped in pubs and bars and followed home at night. It's part of the daily grind. More women than the casual reader might think are used to highly inappropriate behaviour on the part of other students and faculty, and fieldwork has a whole set of perils that the average male academic will never have to worry about. And this is in White-Middle-Class-Ivory-Tower Land.

Yesterday, Sheril Kirshenbaum launched Silence Is The Enemy. Because what happens in White-Middle-Class-Ivory-Tower Land is extrapolated, enhanced and meted out on thousands if not millions of women and children all over the world on a daily basis. If this isn't okay with you (it certainly isn't okay with me), then there are a number of things you can do. The simplest thing is to click on the blogs who have pledged to donate their blogging revenue to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. I get no revenue from this blog, but these people get it on theirs:

• On Becoming A Domestic And Laboratory Goddess
• Aetiology
• Neurotopia
• Bioephemera
• The Questionable Authority
• Adventures in Ethics and Science
• DrugMonkey
• Blog Of The Moderate Left
• Seattle Grassroots Examiner

The next simplest thing is to donate money yourself, and/or to write your own blog post to highlight the campaign and keep the momentum going within the blogosphere. And if you can write a blog post you can write to your friendly government representative.

Which would all be a start.

^[*]I have become increasingly reluctant to talk about all of this. Unfortunately it is an essential part of my narrative, and ultimately less damaging than any fabrication I could come up with for failing to complete a PhD. What I overwhelmingly feel after talking about it is a sort of emotional uncleanliness, as I tell the story on autopilot while a voice inside my head screams at me to shut up. This is an occasion where I didn't need to say anything if I didn't want to. However, isn't it rather the point of the campaign, to stand up, say something that is uncomfortable to say, put some weight behind it and get others to do the same?

Lost In Spain #3: Geologist In Da Field

The Lost Geologist started it, and Johannes Lochmann, Silver Fox, Kim, Hypocentre and of course Geotripper have all obliged. So, now that I have an up-to-date photo of me in the field, here goes:


Now, because I was a staff member on this trip (and not being assessed on the quality of my notebook and observations) I left the hammer and hard hat at home, and I have a horrible feeling my hand lens went walkabout in a saltmarsh in Norfolk as I can't find it.

Hair: Sometimes in a ponytail, but that interferes with my favourite field hat, so recently I've started putting just the fringe (bangs) back in a clip. It lowers the chances of me getting a sunburnt scalp, and if I have hair over my ears they avoid a good roasting too. My field hat is a proper brown felt cowboy hat bought at the Central States Fair in Rapid City, SD, in 2002.

Sunburned peeling nose: Rarely happens. I use SPF15 every day and usually have the field hat on, so my face usually goes a bit browner and freckly. REALLY freckly.

Beard: Not yet.

T-shirt and Logo: Many of them. The one I'm wearing in this photo is from SciBlog 2008, but I have a great collection of Sedgwick Club t-shirts, plus some of my own and ReBecca's t-shirts from CafePress.

Vest: I wear a fleece mostly. The thickness of the fleece (or even the number of fleeces!) depends greatly on the weather. It was probably about 15°C when this was taken, and shortly after finishing the climb I had to remove the fleece.

Things in the Vest: I'm a backpack girl. It has pretty much everything in it - survival bag, first aid kit, waterproof jacket and trousers, lunch, a Platypus bag of water, wallet, notebook, pen and (if it isn't round my neck) my compass-clinometer.

Belt and Buckle: Not really a weight-bearing belt, so the hammer goes in my backpack or on the back in the netting. I do put my camera on my belt though, and my knife.

Pockets: Mobile in the left hand pocket, handkerchief in the right hand pocket. I had two further pockets down the legs, so I was able to put my little tin of Nivea moisturiser (I get such dried lips in the field, this is a life-saver) and the car-keys in each.

Rock Hammer: I have a 2lb masonry hammer. It's 12 years old and my father nearly wept with pride when he took me to B&Q to buy it. I use it more for DIY now than hammering at stuff, and on a day-to-day basis it stays by the side of the bed in case we get burgled (while I'd never try to fight off a burglar with a gun I do rather fancy my chances swinging a hammer at a knife-wielding thung).

Hands: I have practically NO coordination whatsoever, so I like to keep my hands free to grab hold of rocks, vegetation, and the odd unfortunate colleague if I lose my balance. I always wear my watch, and my three rings - engagement ring, wedding ring and a simple Black Hills Gold band. Paul bought my engagement ring with the specific intention that it should be able to deal with the field, and as such the stone sits completely flush - no danger of snagging.

Legs: I wore shorts once on this fieldtrip and was so appalled by how large, wobbly and pallid they were that I put trousers back on and never dared bare them again. However, courtesy of a "short cut" that the Great White Leader took us on, when the staff were out on an afternoon hike, my legs managed to get scratched, bitten, bloodied and bruised.

Pants: Ah, two nations divided by a common language... I always wear pants in the field, and a quick survey of the staff revealed that not many of the male staff changed their underwear every day. On the trousers front (versus underpants) it's multi-pocketed combats all the way. I was appalled at the number of students that turned up in jeans, and more so at the hotpants-plus-leggings crew!

Shoelaces: Mine are still in perfect nick.

Socks: Bridgedale socks with arch supports for my flat feet.

Boots: I bought a pair of North Face boots in SD in 2002, and I am amazed and delighted that they have lasted this long with no damage. Having said that, this was after I did my long geological mapping stint, so I've probably only done the equivalent of one field season in them since I bought them.

Ironclad bladders: (((Billy))) commented about the British climate and our lack of rock exposure in response to an earlier post. Well, one advantage of having vegetation cover is that there's always somewhere to have a field piss. The basic rules are to make sure you can't see any of your party, be sure to face down a slope, and try not to piss on your trousers. Having said that, I'm pretty good at lasting a day in the field, and only needed one field piss on the most recent trip.

Brunton compass: I have a Sunnto compass-clino. Bruntons scare me. I've only seen these enormous cast-iron monstrosities. I suspect they're more accurate, but have never found this to be a problem.

Eyes: Always shielded with my trusty wraparound sunglasses, to delay the appearance of those tasty crows-feet wrinkles (with added tan lines).

Brain: Mine was well pickled by the end of the visit, and my blood was probably chemically indistinguishable from San Miguel.

Lost In Spain #2 (suppl.): Parlilofograptus gen. et sp. nov.

It occurred to me soon after my arrival in Spain that this was the first field trip I had been on over 1st April, and as such I had an unusual and exciting opportunity: to play an April Fool's Day joke on the students. I checked with the leaders of the trip, who were more than happy for a prank to be played. I asked on Twitter for a couple of suggestions, but in the end decided that sometimes the oldies are the best, and they don't get much older than this:


Yes folks, it was the old draw-the-graptolites-on-the-rock trick. Now, the legend of Cambridge University goes that a certain Respected Pillar Of The Scientific Community was sufficiently fooled by this prank to seriously consider a manuscript, so I was sure it would be bought wholeheartedly by the undergrads. This was reinforced when I showed it to the palaeontology staff members, who thought it was hilarious, and then showed it to the sedimentology staff member, who said "Oh cool, graptolites".

I handed it round, and frankly the moment the poor souls started sketching the rock in their notebooks I nearly lost it. There is no career for me in sitcoms - I was corpsing all over the outcrop. I didn't even need to outright lie to them: I just said "Here, what do you think of this?" and they all said "Oh cool, graptolites". It was like shooting fish in a barrel.


And they all took it in turns to note it - I even came up with a name, Parlilofograptus, which you would have thought might start to give the game away. Some of them were starting to second-guess themselves, muttering "I thought graptolites were extinct" or "It looks like someone's just drawn them on in pencil", but STILL THEY WROTE IT DOWN!

So I was not popular at midday when I confessed that it was all an April Fool. There were groans, shouts of "I knew it!" and one "Well, well, well - it's STILL going in the notebook so there!". It is quite possible that the students will never trust anything I say ever again (although some of them had a sufficiently short memory to ask me about a fossil leaf they found - don't worry kids, I wasn't pulling your leg about that; I do genuinely think it was a beech). However, it was, as well as being bloody hilarious, a useful exercise for them in learning how to trust their own judgment:

1. They knew that graptolites were extinct by 350Ma, the lower Carboniferous.
   
2. They knew we were looking at rocks of Eocene age, at 56-34Ma.
   
3. They knew that graptolites were most frequently found in black shales, from low-energy, low-oxygen environments.
   
4. They were standing in front of a turbidite (pretty much the complete opposite of a black shale in terms of energy!) on that rock face behind them.
   
5. They reckoned it looked as though someone had drawn the "fossils" on in pencil.

Some of the students are still a bit pissed off with me, but they needn't worry as the overall trip leaders were in on the joke and thought it was hilarious - no notebooks will be marked down for the presence of graptolites (although they might win some gullibility points). And if it makes them stop and critically analyse what they're being told rather than blindly writing everything down, then there has been a useful lesson in and around the pranking.

I have absolutely zero authority as far as they're concerned, but it was a sacrifice worth making, and I can't wait to go back and victimise another year group of students.

Lost In Spain #2: Fossils

For a sedimentology and structural geology trip, there was a fair bit to interest the palaeontologist. By far the most common organisms we saw were Eocene Nummulites, planktonic forama:


You can see one in cross-section in the middle of the photograph above - that's under 10mm wide. The other bits and pieces are Nummulites stacked at 90° to the rock surface.

There was much harvesting of micropalaeontology samples, and several people will have looked sheepish at Barcelona Airport when asked "Has anyone asked you to carry anything onto the flight for them today?" as the weight had to be distributed...


And there was even something to interest even the most diehard dinosaurologist, in the form of a Cretaceous ornithopod trackway:


I clocked two different animals - an adult and a sub-adult or juvenile. All the notices were written in Spanish (it's soooo inconsiderate when countries put their information panels in their native language... </snark>), but they seemed to have a pretty good explanation of the formation of the footprints in the sediment.

And you will no doubt be relieved to see that the residents of Aren have in no way cashed in on the presence of dinosaurs:


Nor indeed have any of the coffee shops embarked on an ambitious mural of life in the Cretaceous of northern Spain:


It was just a bit of a shame this was the last stop of the day on a rather damp afternoon, otherwise I suspect the students would have been fascinated looking at the footprints. I'd certainly have loved to have chatted more to them about what they were looking at.

Lost In Spain #1

The laundry is done (thanks Paul). The sleep deficit is restored (thanks bed). The blood alcohol level is normalised (thanks tea). And after suffering some serious fieldtrip withdrawal (isn't it a bitch?!) I'm on the even keel and will try to blog a bit about what the point of the trip was. I'm hoping that some of my students will click through from Facebook and correct me on any inaccuracies (not least because they had to listen and make notes, whereas I could stare slack-jawed into space if I wished).

The base for the trip was Ainsa, northern Spain. It's one of the many gateways to the Pyrenees, but this was as close as we got to the famous mountains themselves:


Monte Perdido is on the very left, and in the middle are Tres Marias. This was essentially a sedimentology trip, with a bit of structural geology thrown in for good measure (and some bitchin' sequence stratigraphy). Most of the rocks were Eocene in age, corresponding to the collision of Iberia with France, and the foreland basins associated with the orogeny. The students got to see turbidites (including a megaturbidite):


They saw and logged turbidites and other marine sediments:


And they saw channels in the field:


Some of the more observant ones might have recognised some parallels between the rivers of the Eocene and the rather spiffy braided river flowing south through Ainsa:


They made stratigraphic logs (and unfortunately they are all too young to remember the Log Song), they mapped folds and they saw some pretty decent structure:


And the vertical fold at Broto was astounding, reminding me of a particular fold at Lulworth Cove on the south coast of the UK:


More on the fossils next time, for they were numerous and awesome.

Separated At Orogenesis

Pena Montanesa, north of Ainsa, northern Spain:


El Capitan, north of El Paso, Texas:


Of course, they're about 200 million years apart in age, but what's that between friends?

More on the fieldtrip later, but now there is a margarita calling my name in the garden.