Accretionary Wedges

"Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries, we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years."
- Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, 1957

Just wrote my mid-semester marine geology exam.

I tend to study the diagrams that I find pleasing to the eye... You know the ones. They're in focus, nicely photocopied, don't require microscopic vision and vast amounts of brain power to process... I successfully predicted 3/4 diagrams.. Needless to say, the one diagram I didn't count on being in there set me back a bit. And I am annoyed. Stupid deltas and their stupid deposition lobes and channels and stuff. And stupid me for not studying it.

I have come to the realisation that I am not a fan of marine geology. I do not care at what depth and pressure little bits of dead carbonate animals dissolve. I do not care about deltas. I find the idea of marine snow to be more than a little repulsive. I do not care about estuaries. I do not like turbidites (they remind me of the atrocities suffered at Rockhampton). I do not care about the Bouma sequence. I do not like underwater landslides... I most certainly don't care about Milankovitch cycles and first and second order thingies.

The only thing I like about Marine is accretionary wedges.. They sound ever so cool and are even cooler. I also like complaining about the stuff I don't like.

...And I guess some of these little guys are slightly awesome, too.. (Radiolarians and foraminifera. Microfossils and incidently these are some of the little dead bits of animals that fall to the ocean floor in clouds of {to quote my delightful lecturer} 'sea snot').

Ah... Geology.

Some days it's good. Most days it's awful. Other days you see the all-encompassing beauty in a piece of old skarn and think to yourself, 'Yeah..'

Reminds me of a quote I read a while ago:

"I have a Bachelor of Science degree in geology from the City College of New York, and my great contribution to the field of geology is that I never entered it upon graduation." - Colin Powell