Investigating Nature's Experiments

I'm back from a month of traveling, which included spending a fair amount of time in the field looking at rocks in their natural habitat. I'm still sifting through the pile of things to do that accumulated while away, so it may take a few more days for me to get back into the swing of things here on the blog.

I was talking with some close colleagues about this trip and realized that it has been a while -- at least a few years --since I've had a somewhat relaxed field experience. I've been in the field a couple times in the last few years but it was when I was taking a lead role in organizing and/or teaching. As much as I love leading trips, every once in a while it is nice to simply be a participant and let others worry about the logistics.

This state of mind allowed me to reconnect with doing science in the field. Talk to almost any geologist for more than five minutes and you'll find out that where they really want to be is in the field. There is something very special about being out where the relationships of nature are on full display.

Robert Frodeman captures this in his fantastic book Geo-Logic: Breaking Ground Between Philosophy and the Earth Sciences, a must-read for any scientist who spends time in the field:

Science in the field proceeds at a different rhythm. Outside, in the open air, the scientist is subject to the elements. Rather than the controlled experience of the lab, the field scientist is immersed in a constantly changing sensorium that expresses wonder and serendipity of experience. The conceptual and physical walls that isolated the lab scientist are gone; the field scientist passes through a shifting, frameless flow of events. In the lab, nature is constrained so that it will show itself in a regular fashion; in the field, the scientist must adjust herself to nature's patterns, cultivating a disposition of alert repose and anticipating the moment whent he world reveals itself. The biologist may wait all day fo the chance appearance of a species, and the geologists devotes hours searching for the telling fossil, splitting bedding planes in a shale unit.

While the lab narrows and controls the flow of information, the field's perceptual and conceptual kaleidoscope exceeds our capacities to sort, test, and categorize it. Field scientists develop intuitive skills for parsing knowledge in implicit, nonpropositional ways. Walk an outcrop with a field geologist. Years in the field have taught him how to sift through the superabundance of information and identify the significant anomaly -- an odd dip in the strata, an unusual color along the bottom layer. Field scientists do not operate in objective geographical space conceptualized by Cartesian geometry. Rather, they move through the world of implied meaning constituted by the acting and perceiving body as it interacts with its environment.

Most of what I do in the field is aimed at reconstructing and understanding the processes and relationships of an ancient sedimentary system. My goal is to visualize the depositional landscape that once existed through the present-day erosional landscape within which the rocks are now displayed. In some cases, quirks of the geomorphology and how the landscape is weathered and eroded offer clues. In other cases, I need to 'look though' the complex history of nature's processes.

But that's just me -- other Earth scientists might go to the exact same outcrop and focus on the features that I essentially ignored. This is what I love about the field. There is a long and complex history of natural processes that are on display. The Earth is constantly conducting 'experiments' and when we go out in the field we are observing the results. Regardless of how sophisticated and (seemingly) realistic the results of numerical and physical experiments of Earth systems are we must continue to characterize the results of nature's experiments

I'm already looking forward to the next trip.

Images: (1) Swartberg Range, Cape Fold Belt; from my Flickr collection, (2) Tanqua Karoo; from my Flickr collection