SNOWBRAWLS - Snowball Earth - page 77

it. Now he was allowing for some glaciers to form and move even while the oceans were still frozen.
He had realized that the wind could erode ice from the sea surface, transport it to land, and deposit it
there. Though the process of creating glaciers would be painstakingly slow, during the Snowball there
was no shortage of time. When you have millions of years to play with, it's not so hard to create a river
of ice, inch by inch.
Martin knew about this argument, but he wasn't impressed. He switched to another complaint.
“What about the cap carbonates?” he demanded. “To make them in the short time that Paul and Dan
want, you'd have to have weathering rates a thousand times faster than today's. It's impossible!”
Then, unexpectedly, he grinned. “I feel like I'm getting riled here, and I shouldn't be,” he said.
“Look, to be honest, I hope the Snowball's right. It's a beautiful idea. But I just don't like the way
they're ramming it down our throats. I feel . . .” He hesitated, searching for the right word. “I feel
violated.”
Martin had first met Nick Christie-Blick, the Chief Unbeliever, back in 1993 on a field trip in cent-
ral Australia, which had been organized by several senior Australian geologists. Martin was in a foul
mood. Even though the group had travelled to his field site, the place he had spent his Ph.D. mapping,
Martin had been the last to hear about it.
Geologists can be very protective of their field sites. They spend months there, often alone or with
only a few others for company. They leave their bootprints on the soil, and the marks of their hammers
on the outcrops. Day after day they climb cliffs and hike through gullies, walking out the contacts
between rock types. They learn how every rock and stone is related. In their heads and their field note-
books they gradually assemble the complex, four-dimensional jigsaw that tells them the area's ancient
history. And they don't just become experts in the rocks; they often also develop a physical, almost
proprietary connection to the landscape. If you plan to visit someone else's field site, the first thing
you'd better do is call them.
Martin was no exception. He had grown to love the austerity of his research site, a day's drive east
of the remote central Australian town of Alice Springs. He loved the vivid red colours and the vast,
empty proportions of the landscape. He loved jumping into his beat-up old Land-Rover and bumping
along the aboriginal trails that took him into the heart of the bush. He mapped alone. And he knew
those rocks better than anyone else on the planet did.
But on the field trip in 1993, nobody had called Martin. He was still only a student, and the
status-obsessed organizers had arranged everything without involving him at all. It was as if someone
brought a field party tramping through your backyard without warning or explanation. Martin was
furious. As the trip progressed, he made himself more and more obnoxious. He challenged everything,
did his best to humiliate the leaders by pointing out their errors, and one night over dinner he brought
one of them close to tears. (Eight years later this highly eminent geologist can still barely bring him-
self to mention Martin's name.) The more people tried to slap Martin down, the more belligerent he
became. Nick was intrigued. Here was someone else who constantly challenged and harried. What's
more, he was often right. When Martin argued about the rocks, he did so with little tact but plenty of
intelligence. As soon as the trip ended, Nick started talking to Martin about how the two of them could
collaborate.
Shortly afterwards, Martin took Nick out to see some other Australian rocks that he'd been work-
ing on, just outside Adelaide. Now Nick was the abrasive one. Throughout the trip, he was incessantly
challenging and infuriating. He argued every point. “How do you know this rock isn't the same as
that rock there?” By the end of the trip, Martin felt as if he'd been put through a wringer. But he also
realized that his mapping had been tested as fully as it could ever be. When Nick is finally satisfied