Geoscience Reference
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Paul was entranced. Such geological riches, yet scarcely any of them had been studied. Surely
among all these outcrops he would find something important, some intriguing new insight into the his-
tory of the Earth.
He intended to continue studying the bump and grind of continental motions, just as he had in
Canada. He was used to working alone or with just a few students in tow, but for his first field season
in Namibia he brought along another Precambrian expert, Tony Prave, a researcher from New York.
Tony is a wisecracking Italian American, a jobbing geologist in his late thirties who works hard and
stays out of the limelight (and hence, broadly speaking, out of trouble). With his thick, dark, shoulder-
length hair and bronzed face he could easily be mistaken for a Native American. His accent, though,
is pure Hollywood mafioso. He has a wide, charming smile and slightly wary eyes.
Tony had spent most of his career working in Death Valley in California. He got to know the Pre-
cambrian rocks there by heart. But though he loved Death Valley, he jumped at the chance to go to
Namibia with Paul. Paul was a famous field geologist. This was, Tony felt, the opportunity of a pro-
fessional lifetime. Throughout that season, Paul, Tony and two graduate students moved from camp to
camp and outcrop to outcrop in the remote Namib Desert. They mapped, climbed, hiked and studied,
walking up gullies and down valleys, musing, interpreting and learning to understand Namibia's deep-
est history.
Paul affectionately called Tony “Pravey”. The two of them got along brilliantly. They were both
opinionated, both robust in their arguments, both fascinated by the rocks. Tony found Paul's methods
exhilarating. Out on the outcrops, Paul's mind was like a steel trap. “Why?
Why?
What's it mean?”
Paul would ask, rapidfire, when Tony reported an observation. And then, as they headed to a new out-
crop: “What would you predict? We're going over there now. What would you predict, Pravey?” Back
at the camp, the two of them would stay up talking until eleven or twelve o'clock at night. Unlike the
Arctic, where you could do geology at any hour, Namibia had long nights of enforced absence from
the rocks. These were times to sit around the campfire and drink whisky and bandy opinions back and
forth. It didn't seem to matter that they sometimes disagreed, that Paul adored baseball, for instance,
while Tony hated it. They delighted in each other's company, and Tony basked in Paul's warm approv-
al.
Eventually, inevitably, trouble started. Paul has never found friendship easy. He's charismatic, but
also self-focused and intense. As a child, his relations with his fellow mineral collectors were civil
rather than warm. In athletics, even when he was part of a team, he raced alone. And many of the geo-
logists with whom he once worked closely are now scarcely on speaking terms with him. People like
Tony. Tony and Paul no longer collaborate, or go on field trips together. They are no longer friends.
The problem arose towards the end of the field season, when Tony began to disagree with Paul's
interpretation of the Namibian rocks. The issue was an arcane geological one, involving the details of
exactly when Africa collided with South America. During the Precambrian, a narrow ocean separated
these continental behemoths—they wouldn't actually hit until sometime in the Cambrian. But Tony
became convinced that Africa was nonetheless beginning to sense the coming collision, and that its
rocks had begun to buckle and bend in response. Paul, on the other hand, maintained that there was no
sign in Namibia's Precambrian outcrops of the impending pile-up.
This disagreement started to sour their relationship, and by the time they returned to Namibia next
season, the early warmth between them had ebbed away. Now, in the talk around the campfire, Paul
was sarcastic about what he called “the Pravey hypothesis”. “Oh, so what does the great Pravey say is
going to happen tomorrow?” Tony remembers him asking. “What does the great hypothesis predict?”
