IN THE BEGINNING - Snowball Earth - page 34

first he was thrilled. The Svalbard rocks showed a horizontal field—just what you'd expect if they'd
formed near the equator.
But he couldn't really be sure. The weak magnetic field in the rocks might have been altered in the
hundreds of millions of years since they'd been created. In the 1960s, rock magnetism was still in its
infancy. There were no sophisticated techniques to rule this out. If the field had been altered after the
rocks formed, there was no way that Brian would be able to tell.
Then came a devastating blow. The university authorities built a car park outside the lab. Any fur-
ther magnetic experiments would be hopeless. Brian was already working at the limits of the available
technology. The rock magnets were so weak, and the instruments to measure them still so crude, that
any slight changes in the field around them would wreck the results. And now the magnetic field in
Brian's lab changed every time a car entered or left.
He published his findings, 15 but he always knew that he hadn't made his case. Nevertheless, he
continued to investigate the geology of Svalbard, organizing more than forty expeditions in all. Even-
tually he put his findings into a prize-winning topic, the definitive geological guide to the archipelago,
which contained 500,000 words and took him five years to write. 16
Brian has never stopped working—he's not the retiring type. Even in 1990, at seventy-three, he
was still studying Svalbard's rocks by day, and sleeping at night in a tent pitched on the shore. Thanks
to their newly protected status, polar bears had grown bold by then, so the camp was surrounded by
tripwire attached to a device that would fire blank cartridges to frighten off any marauders. But Brian
was characteristically unfazed about this danger. The wire, he felt, was just a damned nuisance—set
off many times by stumbling people, but never by bears. His final expedition was in 1992, but he has
not stopped working on the Svalbard rocks in his collection. Now, at eighty-five, he still goes into his
office in Cambridge every day.
Though Brian never succeeded in proving his Great Infra-Cambrian Glaciation, he was always ob-
stinately convinced it was right. To bring the idea out of the cold, however, would require much more
evidence. The next step would be to demonstrate without question that ice had been present at the
equator. That would take an unusual scientist, someone with an eye for problems that were a long way
out of the ordinary. Someone who was also a world expert in magnetism.