Okay, I am having Elementary feelings
Jan. 31st, 2014 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Spoilers for 2x14!
- QUEER. GEOLOGIST. QUEER. FUCKING. GEOLOGIST. QUEER FEMALE GEOLOGIST.
- ... oh dear sweet Ike
- ... no
- ... what are you doing
- "the Cretaceous" is not "really old"
- fuck off the K-T boundary has loads of surface exposures how the fuck ELSE do you think we'd know about it (seriously, some of it is exposed on my mate's farm, you can actually touch it, it's pretty cool)
- ... no it's actually nothing to do with comet-rock it's because of IRIDIUM. IRIDIUM.
- also, no-one seriously believes that the end-Cretaceous mass extinction was entirely down to the comet any more; the Deccan Trap flood basalts were also coincident, and we've actually found fossils in the sediment layers between flows (looking increasingly unhappy); volcanism that massive has an enormous impact on global climate
- I mean, for fuck's sake, I'm a volcanologist and have never studied vertebrate palaeo and I know this
- and for that matter, Dead Clade Walking is not a phrase I had ever heard before and Cambridge likes its ludicrous academic rivalries (ask me about the ways in which the USA is even more wrong than Oxford - that's a direct quotation - or Simon's highly controversial assertions about evolution, or Marion's delight in her ongoing feud with one of the grand old men of the subject on the topic of Skaergaard, or...)
- also mussels are not like terrestrial vertebrates in lots of really important ways
- ... YOU CANNOT STUDY LIMESTONE'S COMPOSITION IN ANY MEANINGFUL WAY UNDER A MICROSCOPE
- YOU JUST CAN'T
- THE ONLY FOSSIL WE KNOW ABOUT IT CONTAINING WAS ONE THAT GOT SMASHED TO PIECES
- NO SERIOUSLY YOU NEED A MASS SPECTROMETER AND A CLEAN LAB FOR THIS SHIT
- WHAT DID YOU THINK MY PHD WAS ON
- basically, there are much more hilarious vicious controversies in the geosciences than this (THE GREAT PLUME DEBATE no seriously that one is stringent enough that Wikipedia won't accept scientific consensus because the refuseniks keep editing it away because CONTROVERSY!!!! and NOT PROVEN!!! it's genuinely astonishingly funny)
- so I am delighted forever by the queer geologist but facepalming pretty hard over the geology
- ... got more questions about the geology? FEEL FREE TO ASK 'EM
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-31 10:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-01 12:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-01 01:11 am (UTC)How do you tell if a fossil is unhappy?
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-12 06:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-12 07:45 am (UTC)