Hammer For Scale

Hi, I'm a twenty-something geologist living in New England. I like garnets, hiking, and single malt whisky.

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Since finishing my PhD, I've been trying to remember what my hobbies were. Trying to become more than just a brain on a stick. I love climbing, it's been too long.

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I’ve just relocated from London to Boston. 

But all I can think about is Scotland. 

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Titrations. This wasn't supposed to be a still life, but whatever. Science is BEAUTIFUL.

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Went on a spontaneous backpacking/wild camping weekend to the Lake District last weekend. Was just the tonic this weary PhD soul needed. 

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The world according to geologists.

[theboutthatlifeyoda]

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This pretty much sums up my life (read PhD) for the last 2 months...

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Today has been a genuine pit of despair.

My first paper was accepted a few weeks ago, and is currently at the typesetters. It's been a long and troublesome journey to publication but I was proud of the final product and looking forward to finally seeing my name in print (as immodest as that seems). Today however, the biggest of all the curve balls has been delivered. As a geochronologist, my paper obviously related to the ages of various rocks from a part of Scotland. However, what I wasn't banking on was a change in the decay constant of the parent isotope my paper is based on. A paper was published this month that means all of the ages from my paper are c. 2% too young. I'm more than a little bit annoyed by this, and a few glasses whisky may have been consumed since the discovery of this news. It means that I'll have to re-write at least parts of my paper. Despite the fact it's literally weeks from being published! FUCK MY FUCKING LIFE. This PhD will be the end of me.

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Image credit

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BALTICA! (Where’s Laurentia, eh?)

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But that's the foreland, you traitor!

It's been a year since I posted! Well, that's what happens when you're in the lab for 10 months with nothing overly exciting happening! But I've been freed from the lab bench and allowed to venture...

I wrote a blog about a field trip to the Outer Hebrides I went on last month. Feel free to have a browse. It’s got some nice pictures! 

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Turns out, when you show a landscape to a group of geologists, they always congregate on the highest part. 

It’s a strange phenomenon. 

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Thor (Rob Strachan) doing the hard work during sample collection on field work in Shetland.

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Palaeogene dyke crosscutting Devonian columnar jointed basalts on the Island of Kerrera, near Oban, Scotland. 

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Now that’s an unconformity! 

Between Dalradian metasediments and the Old Red Sandstone sediments on the Island of Kerrera, near Oban, Scotland.

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The Standing Stones at Callanish. 

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Running cation columns on a sunny Saturday. Sometimes isotope geochemistry is brutal... But I need the dates of these garnets as soon as possible, so I’m currently separating the different Rare Earth Elements (REE)! Should be interesting to see what these garnets can tell us about the tectonics of the North Atlantic (but before it was the North Atlantic). 

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I’ve been in the lab all winter, but last weekend was a bank holiday. So I left the lab, and went blinking into the outdoors: to the mountains! 

A lovely weekend camping an scrambling in Snowdonia. Obviously I couldn’t resist looking at the rocks, much to the dismay of my friends!  

[earthstory]

Fieldwork: Not just a geology holiday

As a geologist I often come across people who think my fieldwork is just an excuse to go relax in the sun while looking at the occasional rock. I can understand the confusion, why fly out to a different continent to study rocks when the department is already full of samples?

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