SNOWBRAWLS - Snowball Earth - page 81

But because Paul had never managed to find carbonates from the Snowball ocean itself, he had no
direct evidence for how much life there was then. If he was right, and the Snowball was an intensely
cold, barren time, there was scarcely any life around. In that case, carbonates formed chemically from
the Snowball ocean itself should have been light. If he was wrong, if the ocean was full of life, the
carbonates from the seawater of the time should be heavy.
All right, then, Martin thought to himself. There's a hypothesis. Let's test it. He set about measur-
ing the isotopes in all of these rock samples. And every time, he found the same thing.
They were all heavy.
Life in the Snowball ocean was apparently flourishing. There couldn't have been the extreme
freeze-over that Paul demanded. Hot news—the Snowball wasn't that cold after all. This looked like
the fatal flaw in Paul and Dan's hypothesis. Martin hastily wrote up the results and submitted them to
a journal called Geology .
Academic journals decide what to publish on the basis of “peer review”, where anonymous sci-
entists say what they think of the work. And one of the scientists to whom the editors at Geology sent
the paper was Paul Hoffman. Paul's review was savage. He waived his anonymity (“I always sign my
reviews”) and firmly recommended that the paper be rejected. It contained, he said, a basic geological
error.
According to Paul, Martin's samples had nothing to do with the Snowball ocean. They were, Paul
believed, simply broken-off pieces of older rock. That would destroy Martin's argument. If the car-
bonate cements were from a much older time, their isotopes would be perfectly acceptable. Of course
the ocean that existed long before the Snowball was full of life! The problems for life came only with
the ice. If Paul was right, Martin was embarrassingly wrong.
Paul's review was still in the post, on its way to Geology and thence to Martin, when the two of
them arrived in Edinburgh in June 2001 for a workshop about the Snowball. Paul was in pugnacious
mood. A few days earlier he had stabbed his finger on the offending picture in the draft of Martin's
Geology paper. “I'm hoping he'll show this photograph,” he'd told me. “I'd like it to be demonstrated
in public that this guy is incompetent in geology.”
But Dan Schrag, Paul's smoother of relationships, was also in Edinburgh, and had decided to try
bringing Martin on board. He took Martin to a pub with a crowd of other conference participants, and
soon they were chatting with great good humour. They were discussing science, Snowballs, Dan's re-
cent flight over Edinburgh in a friend's microlight aircraft. Martin was saying that he didn't want to
be part of an “anti-Snowball team”, that he didn't consider himself on anybody's “side”, and that Nick
should never have done the “snow job” talk, because it had just polarized everyone's opinions to little
effect. What Martin and Dan both wanted, they agreed, was to keep talking, test the waters, come to
the right answer.
Paul was in the pub too, struggling to keep quiet, doing his best not to spoil Dan's efforts. “This
business of Martin Kennedy trying to kill the Snowball with his cements,” he said to me later. “Half
of me wanted to expose him and discredit him, so that nobody will believe his 'facts'. But half of me
is appalled that I'd want to do that. It's not that I have any warm feelings for Martin. He's been a thorn
in many of our sides for years. But to try to humiliate him in public would be cruel. Honestly, I'm not
a malicious person. I'm certainly capable of being malicious, but it tends to be when I haven't thought
it through.”
Still, Paul couldn't quite contain himself. When Martin stood up to leave, Paul stood up too, de-
termined to assert his conviction that the contentious cements were from older rocks. “You showed