Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
ing the same thing with the Arctic. This time, as before, he responded the only way he knew how. If
he couldn't go back there and finish his work, he'd find something better. He'd find a new problem to
solve, a new route to glory. He'd find something new to be remembered for.
But where should he go? Harvard University offered him a haven for his academic base, and he
moved there gladly. But he needed a new field site, one with exposed rocks from the right time, the
Precambrian. The rocks had to be fairly easy to reach logistically, and yet it was important they hadn't
been excessively studied already; there was no point going somewhere that had already been picked
over by other geologists. Paul needed somewhere fresh, a place where a great story was just waiting
to be unearthed.
He toyed with one or two possibilities. Kashmir, perhaps, in northern India. Or maybe China would
work. Then he found the perfect candidate. South West Africa had just become Namibia, having won
its independence from South Africa two years earlier, with none of the presaged bloodshed. For dec-
ades before independence, scarcely any geology had been done there by outsiders, thanks to the milit-
ary occupation by the South African Defence Forces. But newly independent Namibia was beginning
to open up to the outside world. And most of the country was taken up with a vast, empty desert, full
of exposed Precambrian rocks. They were younger than the rocks Paul had worked on before. Rather
than 2 billion years old, they were more like 6 or 7 hundred million years old. That put them closer to
the end of the Precambrian, closer to that strange point in time when fossils suddenly appeared out of
nowhere. Perhaps they might even hold some clues about why life had suddenly lurched away from
the simple world of primordial slime into the complexity that we see around us today.
Paul had other reasons to feel pulled towards Namibia. His father's brother, “Izzy”, had lived and
worked there. A few times during Paul's childhood, Izzy had travelled to Toronto full of tales, and the
young Paul's eyes had shone. Namibia had been on Paul's list for decades. Africa, too. After geology,
Paul's other obsessions were jazz and athletics. Africa had consistently supplied the masters in both
departments. Namibia won on all sides.
P AUL HAD to start again from scratch in Namibia. He didn't even know where the best rocks would be,
or which places he should concentrate on. He pored over aerial photographs of the terrain, and tried to
pick out likely rock outcrops, looking for ones that he could drive to on bush tracks, or reach with a
short enough hike from a possible camping ground; ones, too, where the rocks seemed to be slightly
tilted, so he would be able to walk from layer to layer, up and down, back and forth in geological time,
without having to scale a vertical cliff face. The balance was delicate, though. If this tilting had been
accompanied by too much bucking and rippling of the Earth's crust, the rock layers would be too com-
plex to interpret.
In June 1993, armed with a list of outcrops to visit, Paul set off for Namibia. The contrast with
Canada was stark. There were, mercifully, no flies in the desert. But there were also no long, slanting
shadows. Sunlight in Namibia glared fiercely overhead. The dark rocks would soak up morning sun-
light, and for the rest of the day heat would pour relentlessly back out of them. At noon, when Paul
wanted to find some shade after hiking and measuring for hours, there were no shadows to be seen.
There was no midnight sun. Summer or winter, the days were frustratingly short, and an impenetrable
darkness would fall abruptly each afternoon at 5:45.
There were also more people than Paul had ever worked among. Even in the desert, driving along
a bush track, he would suddenly come upon a village of round mud huts clustered around a tall, rick-
ety windmill that pumped water from the local well. Paul quickly learned to take a “landing fee” with
Search WWH ::




Custom Search