Reading #5--More on reading the literature
I just had an experience of a type I mentioned in Reading #2. I am working on the Navajo Sandstone, which is the deposit of an ancient desert (actually, the largest sand desert in Earth history--if you've been to Zion National Park, you've seen the Navajo Sandstone). I recently got interested in what I thought was a rather small problem, a curiosity, really. I thought it might make a neat little paper of interest but no huge significance. Turns out it is not a small problem at all and has turned out to be potentially way more important than I had guessed. In geology, we spend a lot of time scouring the literature for other examples of what we observe in an effort to learn more about how to interpret what we're seeing. So far, I haven't found any other examples. That, in itself, is pretty exciting because it means that figuring out why we're seeing what we're seeing is turning out to be a lot more challenging than I anticipated. But that i...