{"id":3159,"date":"2007-08-02T11:43:45","date_gmt":"2007-08-02T11:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/2007\/08\/its-menial-but-its-progress\/"},"modified":"2007-08-02T11:43:45","modified_gmt":"2007-08-02T11:43:45","slug":"its-menial-but-its-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/2007\/08\/its-menial-but-its-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s menial, but it’s progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think it’s safe to say that my week is never going to feature prominently in the annals of geological science. I’ve spent most of it standing in front of a rock saw, cutting up the cores that I collected from the White Mfolozi River<\/a>, and getting very muddy in the process. When I haven’t been doing that, I’ve been labelling the resultant samples, and checking that the all-important orientation marks<\/a> are still clear. Suffice to say, my brain has not been especially taxed by this activity, and the only discovery I have made is the stunningly obvious one that ultra-hard Archean metabasalts are much easier to chop up than friable and fractured Neogene mudstones. Not that this is a bad thing: not having to try and piece together every other sample from the tiny fragments it has exploded into on contact with the saw blade is a pleasant change from my previous experiences in the rock-cutting room.
\nHowever, whilst this may not be the most exciting thing that I’m ever going to do, it’s still important; it’s one more step on the long road to actually – hopefully- getting some decent paleomagnetic data to play with. In my lab there are now a whole array of samples laid out, ready to be measured, zapped and\/or heated, remeasured, rezapped and\/or reheated, remeasured… and after all that, I’ll be able to have my first look at whether these rocks do indeed record a 3 billion year-old magnetic signal, and start thinking about what it tells us. That’s the thing about experimental science; you have to put in a lot of grunt work before the ultimate pay-off.
\nThere is another plus, too: it may be menial, but when you’ve spent a day cutting and running samples, you’re rewarded with the feeling of making tangible progress, which you sometimes miss when you’re endlessly rewriting the same paragraphs for a paper, or fiddling about with the best plot for your data. I set out to do something, and it’s done. No rewrites, no second thoughts, no hazy feelings that it could\/should be better. Saying, ‘I prepared 100 samples today’ probably isn’t going to impress anyone else, but it feels good all the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think it’s safe to say that my week is never going to feature prominently in the annals of geological science. I’ve spent most of it standing in front of a rock saw, cutting up the cores that I collected … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}