I think this is a Jack Black movie or am I mixing things up?
I don’t have readily available internet access to look things up, so what you
read in this blog is what I have stored in memory. Of course, that movie had
nothing to do with rocks, but the play on words is good enough for me, and who
doesn’t like Jack Black? We are drilling deep into the Earth (ok not really that deep), but we actually
don’t know where we are in geologic time. It is our task slash homework to
figure out the age of the rocks, which can be done, e.g., with fossils if they
were buried and preserved – but right now we are groping around a few hundred
meters deep beneath the seafloor, picking the rock record apart. It’s like
listening to 5 seconds of a song and trying to name that tune. But with just 5
seconds and a wild guess, you might be right because there are a limited number
of songs, especially if you narrow it down to genre. Geologic time, i.e., millions
even billions of years is vast, but not really meaningful in an everyday sense to
anyone not even geologist, so we often find events or processes to relate the
time to, catastrophic events are better because they occur quickly.

Now, seismic waves – the stuff I study in my regular life
are even more abstract. What do you mean the ground is constantly moving?
Almost every day at sea, I am thinking about the flexing of the seafloor caused
by ocean waves and how this “Earth hum” has a unique seismic signature.

Here is a view of the JR from the ferry to Lamma with buildings for scale.

“Oh! You Pretty Things” – Au Revoir Simone