In the instructions Joseph Gaimard copied into the diary before he left Toulon, there is a long section on field geology. Despite being written in 1817, it could very usefully be given as a guide to first-year geology students in our universities. Amongst other things, it has some very nice sketches and some wise words on the importance of context, but it also has comments on the importance of rocks that are not in situ
On 14 February 1820, the French corvette Uranie, in the last stages of what was planned to be a science-based circumnavigation of the globe, was entering Berkeley Sound in East Falkland when it struck a rock and began to sink. Four of the people aboard the corvette left written records of the event that survive to this day.
Ayn Rand hated communism, which had deprived her of what would have been a very sheltered and privileged life, and socialism, which she regarded as synonymous with it. However, the government she described with such scorn in Atlas Shrugged had far more in common with the right-wing, military-backed populist governments of the 1930s. Or indeed, with the UK’s increasingly right-wing, Conservative Party.
It took a few years for the significance of the linear magnetic anomalies discovered by Ron Mason and Arthur Raff to be realised, but they were key factors in the development of Plate Tectonics. This development might have been considerably delayed if their work, arguably the first systematic magnetic survey of a large area of oceanic crust, had instead been carried out over the seas east of Queensland. Even today the uniform data set that provides the best approach to study of this region is gravitational, not magnetic.
Joseph-Paul Gaimard’s life was a complicated one. In1832 he transitioned from being an explorer of the Pacific tropics to becoming an explorer of the sub-Arctic. Tracking his lif in contemporary documnts is a large project, and far from complete.
Our modern society relies not just on roads but on a road network. That connectivity has to be countrywide. How can that work without taxation? This was a question that Ayn Rand avoided, although in her books, although she assumed that road networks existed. Modern libertarians have addressed that question, but have they provided satisfactory answers?