A pox on
all those proxies non-unique
Which
make interpretation hard to do.
Magnesium
to calcium we seek
Sea temp'rature,
and not pCO2.
So
lithium, uranium are used
to
disambiguate the Mg curve
O. umbonatus data's
not recused.
Antarctic
ice growth isotopes observe,
But
whence the melting in the Miocene?
Here isotopes
of carbon join our tale,
And
sedimentary burndown in marine
Organic
carbon makes the icecap fail.
Antarctic ice was thawed by CO2
Let's try repeating this effect anew.
Just Sixty-six million short years ago
(Though Deccan volcanism
coincides)
The Yucatan
was smote a cosmic blow
And the Gulf shelf collapsed in those fell tides
Late Cretaceous sediments were scoured,
Deposited as “boundary cocktail.”
Unsorted forams, lime mudstone, powered
By Chicxulub-induced collapse of shale
The wildcatters call the seismic line
“Middle Cretaceous Unconformity”
Not middle, end; deluvian, malign,
Complete destructive uniformity
The Mesozoic ended
with this splat
So Gerta Keller,
please hang up your hat
The Central Atlantic
Magmatic Province
Erupted tholiitic and potassic.
C O two upset atmospheric balance.
Eco-collapse ended the Triassic.
Green sulfur bacteria’s isotopes
Show photic zone euxinia prevailed.
Stomatal size decreased (show microscopes)
And carbon biomass was soon curtailed.
Compound-specific isotopes will tell
Which phytoplankton thrived in these tough times,
While wax from leaves and calcite from a shell
Record recovery in clastic slimes.
The Triassic ended
as it began
Can those
extinctions be surpassed by man?
No mountain range, no active slipping fault,
And yet this plain had lava seas erupt.
We call them Kalkarindji flood basalt.
It’s hard to know just when these rocks were formed.
The weathering and rock type complicates
Radiometric dates of dykes that swarmed
When seas contained the first protochordates.
For ten long years they searched the outback rocks
For grains unhurt since fossils first were formed.
In hopes the nucleii-related clocks
Survived half billion years, still undeformed.
510 MA, a date of
some distinction.
Flood basalts can
lead to mass extinction.
Enough with carbon, climate variation
Let’s look at rocks from a far older time,
Which lacked much copper mineralization,
And when anorthosites were at their prime.
Earth’s middle age- boring for a reason?
Tectonics were remarkably unchanged.
Ice and iron were both out of season.
A billion years of uniform exchange
Of isotopes, strontium, and S
The active margins ringed the continent.
Slow, steady mantle cooling caused the process
Strong lithosphere held melts incipient
It ended with
Rodinia dispersion
Which led to Earth’s
exciting, current version.
Nobody studies fucking iodine.
The halogen too rare for us to care,
But iodate to carbonate’s inclined
So we might have a useful proxy there.
This IO3 requires oxygen,
And thus does not exist in reduced seas.
Its presence in old carbonates means then
Ozone and oxygen were in the breeze.
Archean carbonates do not have I,
But it appears when O first graced the air.
And thus another tool is forged, whereby
Our planet’s past can be unearthed to share.
This gas we breathe
controls the biosphere.
We’d like to know
what made it first appear.
The Schrödinger bacteria’s Barsoom,
Where robots scan the wadi of the Styx .
There died, or never lived a microbe bloom
When déjà vu and Dejah Thoris mix,
Her hungry eyes fixed on Hadean seas,
The playa droid with X-ray vision sees;
Areocalcrete Earthings soon infer.
With carbonate and opal intergrown,
As vengeful Ares, orbited by drone
Blends nukes and life within his cranium
Thus Opportunity grinds sands of time
Which mortals fancy
Ceres made of lime.
Thus ends what is possibly the least effective science
awareness effort ever. I made it. A
sonnet a day, pulled from the pages of Geology, for the last 6 days of Science Week. And a bonus one earlier today, to try out some ideas I had while thinking up this post. If I wanted to kid myself, I would say that my failure was that I
picked something too popular, and that the sonnets got lost in the celebrity
gossip and other pop culture frivolity that haunts this form on the
internet. If only I had gone for
American Mineralogist Villanelles.
This is not an entirely honest assessment. It was a tricky
brief. For the first few sonnets (1, 2,
4), I was basically seeing how well or badly I could jam technical terms and concepts into
the structure without irreparably breaking the sonnet form, and still
extracting the basic gist of the paper.
With 3 and 6, I was trying to show what it was about the study that was
really clever- trying to channel the scientific genius in verse, with less of
an emphasis on the story or terminology. And with 5, I
was aiming to show the difficulty in getting any data at all for that system, and emphasizing the blood, sweat, and tear aspect of research.
Still, there are some core issues relating to good poetry and science writing which
remain unresolved.
Others have written at length on the place of metaphor in
science writing. Personally, I think
that it can be dangerous, and easily done misleadingly. Science is more like a
murder mystery than an allegory. The particulars of who knows what when and how
they determine it are generally more important than the anthropomorphisation of
the interpretation of the day, but that isn’t always easy to put in verse.
On the other hand, poetry without metaphor ain’t all that.
It is worth at least linking Poe’s Sonnet to Science, which kind of set the mold
of science as imagination-killing dreariness.
But the thing that he never realized, is that the universe is stranger
and more bizarre than our imaginations.
So it is worth at least trying to convey the breadth and depth of a
natural world which is stranger and more wonderful than anything we can possibly imagine without studying it, and
then let our feeble human brains decorate those secrets which our scientific
labour finally pries from the Earth. Furthermore, most poetry these days
doesn’t really aim for accessibility or exposition. So for 7, I maxxed the metaphor and theme,
and didn’t even try to explain.
Overall, it was a fun exercise, and the overwhelming density
of explanatory prose evident in the 3QD metrics makes me glad I tried, even if
it was too obtuse and catless to interest much of the internet.
Applause! I love it. What a lovely way to engage with articles. It makes me want assign students to do this. They would HATE it so much, but perhaps learn something.
ReplyDeleteAlternatively, the next manuscript I get to review...
ReplyDeleteWith science, we can study nature's ways;
ReplyDeleteTechnology contributes divers tools.
A plethora of scientists, of days
Are spent to be, collectively, less fools.
We learn the sequalae of pollution,
Historical, though possibly germane.
Extinctions are impressive; the solution
Evades our grasp, yet still our hopes remain.
By studying the past, we hope to learn
Some lessons that, applied to present time
May help us incrementally discern
Wise choices to avoid both fire and rime.
Humanity is powerful, yet stumbling;
With science, we may yet survive our bumbling.