Up-Goer Five Meme

It's been a while since I posted anything here. What can I say, I've been busy. I like the idea of keeping a blog, but finding the time is the tricky issue. Anyway, I saw AGU posting a couple of geoblog entries from the Up-Goer Five Meme (if I can remember how to link, these should be links to Magma Cum Laude's and Mountain Beltway's entries).

My recent work has been focused on placing shales within a sequence stratigraphic framework on the basis of chemostratigraphy. Which would look something like this in the ten-hundred most common words:

I look at very old rocks from the water. I match them with other very old rocks that are the same age. This is not easy because some very old rocks look the same as other very old rocks but they are different ages, so they do not match. If the rocks look the same, but are different ages, I try to use very very very very tiny pieces of the rocks to find places on the rock where no rock formed. These very very very very tiny pieces of rock can be used to match these places where no rock formed and can help match rocks up and down of these places because they would be closer to the same age.

I was surprised that "mud" (rock) and "ocean" (water) were not usable. I was less surprised about "surface" (places where no rock formed) and "correlate" (match). I wasn't surprised at all about "atoms" and "elements", though this proved a problem to convey (very very very very tiny pieces of the rock).