kareina

An e-mail went around the university today, looking for science graduate students to present their research in a silly manner in a "90 seconds of fame" contest, with props encouraged, but no PowerPoint slides--it isn't meant to be your typical science presentation. I'm not certain if I will commit to entering the contest or not (it is on this Friday), but I was inspired to write up the following draft of what I'd say if I do:

Tasmania has a reputation as a casual, laid-back, no stress, no worries kind of place, which has caused any number of folks from the mainland to drive up our property values in search of the good life. But it hasn’t always been like this. Once, a long time ago, (about 510 million years ago—or just yesterday to us geologists) what is now the beautiful western mountains of Tasmania was naught more than a bunch of mud on an ocean floor, driven under Tasmania by the collision of another block of land, experiencing more stress than even a PhD student can imagine undergoing. But just as we, when faced with impossible deadlines and numerous equipment failures somehow manage to knuckle under and produce brilliant papers for publication, so that old mud managed to pull itself together to grow garnets of unusual size and great beauty before springing resiliently back to the surface. So the next time you think “I just can’t take the stress any more”, remember Tasmania’s mountains, which underwent pressures of 14 thousand bars and 700 degrees C to create such beauty.