Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
“Paul's very competitive,” Tony says now. “He's one of these people where if you take three steps,
he has to take four. If you've mapped ten square kilometres, he has to map eleven. He's always got
to be that little bit better, that little bit more intense.” Tony had started to see the sharp side of this
competitiveness, and he didn't like it.
The final straw came when Paul returned from a day's work mapping a narrow canyon. He arrived
in triumph. “The Pravey hypothesis is dead,” he declared when he re-entered camp. He had, he said,
gathered evidence that conclusively disproved Tony's interpretation. The next day Tony hurried to
the site, now dubbed by Paul “the Canyon of Contention”. And there, among the rocks that Paul had
mapped, Tony saw a whole jumble of fault lines. The rock layers had been mashed up beyond meas-
ure, long after they had formed. You couldn't use them to prove or disprove anything.
Tony saw red. He launched himself back to the camp, and confronted Paul head-on. They were
eyeball to eyeball. Tony swore at Paul. Paul swore back. They began to yell, spittle flying from their
mouths in their fury and making arcs in the air. The two students who were also on the trip looked
on in horror. Then one of them decided to intervene. She was diminutive but tough, and she wedged
herself between Paul and Tony. “You should be ashamed of yourselves!” she told them both. “Stop it!”
Her intervention worked. The shouting stopped, and Paul stalked off to his chair where he sat si-
lently, staring into the darkness. The camp was subdued that night, and shortly afterwards Tony left
Namibia.
Relationships among geologists are intense. By its nature, geology involves travelling with your
colleagues to remote places, working long, hard hours in sparse conditions, living on top of one anoth-
er and away from other people for weeks on end, having little contact with the outside world. Think
of submarine crews, or Antarctic explorers. Think of throwing obsessive, opinionated people together
in places that they can't easily leave. Their personalities become magnified. They bond or they break.
Paul in particular has had plenty of fights like the one he had with Tony. Stand-up, screaming fights.
He reacts furiously when confronted, and he holds nothing back. He will rage one moment, and ten
minutes later act as if nothing had happened. But those on the receiving end are slower to forget. His
reputation as a brilliant geologist has been tempered over the years with his reputation as a hugely
difficult character. The people who still work with him are the few who know how to handle him. He
can be rude, sarcastic and unpleasant. He's dismissive. He often makes people feel small. He knows
this. He even makes a joke of it sometimes. “Everyone's entitled to my opinion,” he'll say. And then,
“Gosh, I'm awful. I don't know how I'd react to me.”
And yet, when he compliments people, they feel good. They feel special. There is something about
Paul that makes you want his approval. I have met former students of his who are now established
geologists, tenured professors with great careers in top universities. They have all this, but they
still
care desperately what Paul thinks and says. If you ask them why, they shrug helplessly. “I don't know,”
they say. Tony talks about the time before his fight with Paul as their “honeymoon”, and the time after
as their “divorce”. Even now, years later, he gets a look of frustrated pain when he talks about their
fight. Even now, he says this about Paul: “That man is so charismatic, if he'd been born two thousand
years ago, he could have been Jesus.”
P
AUL SHRUGGED
off his fight with Tony. He returned to Namibia the next season and the next, with
a fresh batch of students to help map and measure and interpret. After that first flush of excitement,
though, the outcrops were beginning to look disappointing. He had wanted to measure the timing of
the continental shifts, but the rocks in Namibia turned out to be useless for accurate dating. Still, Paul
