The world of scientific publishing is coming in for a lot of criticism these days, and rightly so in many cases. But are scientists not in some respects their own worst enemies, making rods for their own backs by custom and convention rather direct outright instruction?
In the late 1990s the European Science Foundation, taking advantage of the new possibilities for scientific interchange and fieldwork in a Europe no longer divided by an Iron Curtain, sponsored an international programme known as PANCARDI within which geologists and geophysicists from the countries of the Carpathian and Dinaric orogens and the Pannonian Basin came together to exchange information and reach a better understanding of the evolution through time of that very complex region. Is it not time for a second such programme?
Most of Myanmar considered prospective for hydrocarbons was covered by gravity surveys between 1964 and 1975. The results have been published as small-scale contour maps, but with gravity values referred to an arbitrary datum; there are also significant errors and ambiguities in the contouring. An approximate transfer to the current international IGSN71 system has proved possible, but correction of the contouring errors will not be possible without access to the underlying data.
The presence of ultramafic rocks on the eastern Indonesian islands of Ambon and Seram has been known since the work of the early Dutch geologists in the East Indies. Have geophysical potential-field data anything to contribute to understanding their distribution and emplacement history?
In her best-selling book Longitude, Dava Sobell told the story of the ultimately successful efforts made in the England of the first half of the Eighteenth Century to measure longitude at sea using very accurate clocks, and also mentioned that attempts had been made in the second half of the Seventeenth Century to do the same thing. Christiaan Huygens figured prominently in the account but there is much more to that part of the story than appeared in the book. It began with an obscure Scottish nobleman.
LinkedIn is full of people claiming that just because their opinions conflict with the those of the majority, that does not mean they are wrong. No quarrel with that, but problems arise when they reverse the argument and claim that it somehow proves they are right. When, in doing so, they wander into areas about which I think I know something, I have to protest. And increasingly I see that happening when gravity is being used to investigate geology.