Sedimentary archive

As a micropalaeontologist you spend most of your time reconstructing the past from its waste products. In a way. In any given time, whatever glorious happens, there will also be small organisms with resistant parts dying. And we go look for them and try to make them tell a story, of whatever grand or modest it is we are interested in.

It was a bank holiday here in the UK. No idea why. I used it for work on a manuscript that deals with work I did in Norway. There's all sorts of things going on in the Barents Sea, and we try to find out how that is documented in the sedimentary archive. And while I was working on it I suddenly realised I am creating my own sedimentary archive in my own little office-world. When I go home tonight there will still be information in the waste products of my activity that tell a tale of what has been going on! In my garbage bin. And the time scales of my office are smaller than these of the Barents Sea; tomorrow the cleaners will come and destroy my sedimentary archive, but for the time being it tells the tale of what keeps a micropalaeontologist going over a long weekend of working while outside the sun shines...