Hard rock men and soft rock girls

Readers with short attention spans who waste too much time on social media may have noticed that Brian Romans has been complaining over on twitter about the hardrock/ softrock divide. This being a blog, I will whinge in more depth below:

For those of you who grew up on a carbonaceous chondrite, there is a historical cultural divide between hardrock- the study of high temperature processes as recorded in crystalline rocks, and softrock- the study of low temperature processes which can be recorded in sediments.

I’m not sure where in the fossil record this division first appeared, but my experience of it goes back to teachers who were trained in the Apollo era. Back in the 60’s and 70’s, the moon race injected lots of cash into the study of (dead, high temperature) moon rocks and associated meteorites. A generation later, from the 90’s on, there has been an increasing push to understand climate, presumably in hope that we can learn something about it before it kills us all. One result of this change in focus is an unnecessary cultural divide, premised on lazy assumptions that in some cases are decades out of date.

For example, one of the strengths of the 20th century hardrock push was the elevation of petrology beyond a simple descriptive science to a thermodynamically constrained, math-based quantitative science. The calculations done with thermocalc or MELTS or any of the other equilibrium simulators are of course trivial compared to what goes into climate models or organic geochemistry or genetics, but some of the older, out-of-touch hardrock evangelists haven’t quite caught on to these developments yet. Similarly, researchers who have used the surge in climatological research funding to tackle new fields of research have sometimes been labeled as too soft to make it in hard rock, while in many cases they feel that their former fields of study have either had the interesting questions answered, or degenerated into untestable speculating.

In reality, the advancement in modern analytical, conceptual, and computational techniques means that the separation between hardrock and softrock is largely a psychological or historical one. As you carbonaceous chondrite dwellers surely appreciate, we have moved on from isotopic anomalies in presolar grains to organic cosmochemistry, the origin of chirality and life, and other burning questions that require understanding the interaction between low and high temperature processes in active planets. Even bread-and-butter questions like continental crust formation are increasingly having to deal with the effects of weathering (and how it changes as the atmosphere evolves), in order to explain increasingly detailed analyses. As a community, we should have realized way back when subduction was discovered that it is futile to separate aqueous and thermal processes on a planet whose thermal engine is driven by downgoing oceanic slabs.

Having met a lot of scientists over the years, the ones who use their skills to address a variety of questions across outdated subdisciplinary boundaries seem to be happier and more productive than those who choose to wave an archaic banner from a lost tribe of geoscience. From the 21st century, the hardrock / softrock divide seems as old fashioned as the Billy Joel song parodied below:

Softrock Girl

Softrock girl,

She’s been living in her softrock world.

I bet she’s never had a mantle guy

I bet her momma never told her why.

I’m gonna try for a softrock girl

She’s been living in her climate world

As long as anyone with magma can

and now she’s looking for a hard rock man

And when she knows what she wants from deep ti-i-ime

And when she wakes up and makes up her mi-i-ind

She’ll see I’m not so tough

Just because

I’m in love

With a softrock girl.

You know I’ve seen her in her soft rock world,

She’s getting tired of her plankton toys

and her presents from her soft rock boys

She’s got a choice.

Softrock girl

You know I can’t abide to study pearls

But maybe someday when my ship comes in

Drilling MOHO through the MORB so thin

and then I’ll win.

And when she’s walking on sand grains so fi-i-ine.

And when she’s drilling, she yearns for a mi-i-ine.

She’ll say I’m not so tough

Just because

I’m in love with a softrock girl

She’s been living in her climate world

As long as anyone with magma can

and now she’s looking for a hard rock man

That’s what I am

Softrock girl

She’s my softrock girl.

You know I’m in love with a

Softrock girl

My softrock girl.

You know I’m in love with a

Softrock girl

My softrock girl.