Last week I attended the Meeting of Young Researchers in Paleontology ( EJIP ) in Torres Vedras. It was a different experience than I usually live in my day to day ... With the vision of being a mole in a world of geologists and biologists in the study of geological strata and the life of the past, I traveled the most beautiful Portuguese coast. In Geology layer is called each of the layers in which sediments are divided. In school often get funny everyday examples to illustrate sedimentation and thus give some kind of explanation to those layers. Sure you have heard several comparisons: the chair in your room and mountains of dirty clothes pile up there with a cup that we put in layers of sugar, coffee powder ... etc. I imagine that these analogies are not entirely misguided ... Guess not.
rummaging through our mountain of laundry we know what pants we put shirts on Tuesday or what we had on Thursday ... Likewise, the presence of sedimentary rocks helps us understand the landscape of the past. But there is something even more amazing writing on the rocks ... Provide clues not only silicon, carbon or iron ... The vacuum has a lot to tell. In fact, Nuno, the teacher told us our first excursion: "Strata is an empty sequence interrupted by sedimentary material."
It's incredible! We spend our lives trying to fill and saturate ... when the greatest mystery, charm more sublime, it is the vacuum. For training, my mind has always felt more comfortable in environments holes. If we think of atoms, for example, the nucleus of an atom is about 100,000 times smaller than the atom itself. So just be a bunch of empty. Last Saturday, thanks to a group of young paleontologists, I rediscovered the importance of nowhere. Being i are not being around for knowledge.
Sunday also witnessed another initiative of great expectations. We made a geological tour in Lisbon. It seemed like a great idea and a very wise madness. And, does anyone would have thought that a professor would get several dozen people look the pavement the floor of his city, with high attention for more than twenty minutes?
said than done! The paving of Lisbon is made of different rock types: limestone, magma ... Even we could see their reactions to the acid and ease or resistance to being cut.
And if you look at the ground were not entertaining enough, we managed to find many fossils embedded in rocks that built the buildings so beautiful city.
You know it, do not mask the science, not to be found in strange places ... If dance is physical and paleontology in Lisbon, could it be that science is part of our lives?
Once back in my beloved city and county libraries walking looking for something interesting to read, I found a title, a minimum, caught my attention: How fossilize your hamster and other amazing experiments for armchair scientists . As of now, my travel schedule makes a break, I could not let the opportunity to read the book sitting in an armchair, chair or couch. The truth is that I have wanted to implement some of the proposals in a single tone, Mick O'Hare described in this book. Who does not want to fry an egg and leave it green? o Who would not want to weigh your head?!
Of course, those like me, optéis to fill your homes domestic experiments, remember that to fossilize your hamster need that the poor animal dies of natural causes (not trying to do an extermination of hamsters) and a range of environmental conditions . Surely, we can not see the result, and that fossils take tens of thousands of years to form, but will work with future paleontologists ...
As Sinister sang, " Smile when you go to fossilize, do not think after you've had a bad ." Well that, and embarrassed not to stay alive one more season, the vacuum still has much to teach us.
0 comments:
Post a Comment