The Needle of the Compass

… and by Compass, I mean Brunton Compass.

For you non-native geology speakers in the audience, the Brunton Compass is one of several tools fundamental to a Geologist, augmenting the ever reliable (and delightfully nerdy) geologist’s handlens, field backpack, acid bottle, Rite-in-the-Rain notebook, and the Excalibur of excaliburs—the rock hammer. Brunton Compasses aren’t your traditional, everyday, run-o’-the-mill northseekers. Not at all. If you use them just so, they reveal secrets about the tilts of strata, the bends of folds, and the orientations of mineral grains. They are guides and translators. They allow rocks to talk, and you’d be surprised to hear just how much even the tiniest grain of sand or alpha particle from the radioactive decay of Uranium-238 to Lead-206 has to say. It just takes listening really closely. Really, really closely.

Earth is beautiful, and ever so awesome. What a great thing to listen closely to, what a great thing to be thankful for, a place where I can “wonder as I wander,” as Robert Frost so eloquently put it. The world is my first love, my healthy and endless obsession. It and everything in it: science and people, pictures and words.

This blog will be an outlet for my obsession with the Earth and all that it has to offer us, and an outlet for sharing with others the wonders I encounter during my wanderings. It is about time I started blogging (thanks, Ceec), and isn’t time fundamentally what Geology is about, too?

Afterall, what are men compared to rocks and mountains?