Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Some
of the boulders didn't come from ice. But even Nick accepted that many of them did. In other
words, this was a pointless criticism. Pip's rock had been created in the presence of ice. Even if a few
of the boulders it contained were not dropstones, the rest of them clearly were. Nick wasn't claiming
that there had been no ice when the rocks were formed. He was simply pointing out a slightly different
interpretation for a few patches of the cliff.
Didn't Nick realize that if he criticized so pointlessly, it would drive Paul mad? “Yes,” Nick told
me later. “But that's too bad. The point of the field trip was to have people come and take a look. He
knew what he was getting.”
By the end of the trip, the battle lines were drawn. On the long flight home from Johannesburg to
New York, Nick wrote Paul an eight-page, single-spaced e-mail detailing all the arguments and cri-
ticisms that he felt hadn't had a proper hearing on the outcrops. In the opening, he was the soul of
politeness:
Once again many thanks to you and all those involved in the excellent excursion. . . . I very
much appreciate the opportunity to see these fascinating strata first hand, and also the ef-
fort you made to obtain financial support for the trip.
But it didn't take long before Nick was launching into detailed criticisms that seemed almost cal-
culated to enrage. He sent the message to Dan, Paul and everyone else who'd been on the trip, and
quite a few people who hadn't been—something that Paul later claimed had been done purely to black-
en the Snowball's name among people who hadn't seen the rocks for themselves. To Nick's chagrin,
although a few of the recipients wrote back to say thanks for the insights, nobody took up his invita-
tion to engage in further discussion. Paul outwardly ignored the e-mail, and inwardly seethed.
The following spring, Nick taught a graduate class at Lamont about the Snowball, and followed
up with an e-mail to all the students outlining his criticisms, and warning them that Paul was “a great
salesman”. Inevitably enough, the e-mail found its way to Paul, who was seriously stung. What he ob-
jected to most of all, he said in a heated message to the course's organizer, was the way Nick seemed
to want to pass him off as an ideas person who paid no attention to detail. This, he declared, was pat-
ently untrue:
Anyone who doubts I have the ability and the will to walk the extra mile at the end of a
long day to get the facts right should try me out in the Boston marathon some year.
Nick had no intention of running against Paul in a marathon. But he did decide to take the battle
to enemy territory. In September 2000, Nick went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just
down the road from Harvard. He had chosen a deliberately provocative title for his seminar: “The
Snowball Earth Hypothesis: A Neoproterozoic Snow Job?” The convener insisted on the question
mark. Nick hadn't wanted it in. During the lecture, Nick's main criticisms centred around how Paul
and Dan were presenting the Snowball idea. It was a cottage industry, he said. A bandwagon. Paul and
Dan were in the audience, and both were furious.
Nick and his fellow contrarians are as important for scientific progress as the people whose new
ideas they challenge. This process of putting up and knocking down can be one of the best ways to
find out whether a theory really holds, whether parts of it need to be massaged, or whether the whole
idea should be dropped.
Still, the heat of the Snowball interchanges had its inevitable effect. The aftermath of the “Snow
Job” seminar was exactly what Nick must have predicted. There was no more talking with Paul. Nick
