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Asked by Faye to Joe, Jos, Kate, Lisa, Pierre on 11 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by issi xxx, xlilyx ._., Sarah.
Question: What is the most fascinating thing that you have ever discovered?
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Pierre Lasorak answered on 11 Nov 2014:
Hi
To be honest up to now I haven’t discovered anything fascinating that other haven’t! Science is still quite exciting though because some people already discovered some really weird things…
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Lisa Simmons answered on 11 Nov 2014:
I haven’t made any new discoveries just yet. The work I do is generally a progression of work others have done or things that I have been working on for a long time. When we do a work we are finding out little discoveries which hopefully work towards finding out something bigger
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Kate Dobson answered on 12 Nov 2014:
Like the others most of what we do is the next step on what other people have already done. But…. I have two things that I have found out that I think are fascinating….
I found out that although the ancient volcanoes in Scotland went extinct about 55 million years ago, there was some magmatic activity deep in the crust that caused a lot of hot water, and reheated some of the rocks to 100-200C about 10 million years later. We are still not sure why, but I think it has something to do with the opening of the ocean between Greenland and Scotland and the formation of Iceland.
Working with a friend of mine, I also managed to date an ancient earthquake. Some earthquakes are so strong that deep under ground the friction between the two sides of the fracture causes some of the rock to melt. After millions of years of erosion we can see those rocks on the surface today and know that an earthquake once happened. What we did was to measure certain elements in the rocks and calculate both when the earthquake happened, and how deep in the earth it was when the melting happened, and how big an earthquake it was.
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