Palaeochronology Building Workshop

I think I came across too harsh in my last post about Mexico, there are many things I like about the place. It's a lot safer than all the kidnap and mugging statistics suggest (if you stick to the right neighbourhoods), and I never saw a hint of trouble. It was also a romantic place, young couples adorning park benches and statues staring into each other's eyes. It was pleasantly surprising also to find many of those couples were the same sex. Mexico: proving Jesus and freedom of sexuality can co-exist!

***

Anyway, on to the the workshop. A workshop is something different from a conference, where you go to learn and swap ideas about a certain topic. Often, new research and papers are formulated afterwards, as opposed to a conference where finished research is presented for discussion. They're usually smaller, at this session there were only around 27 people, a perfect group for discussions and individual problem solving.

The workshop I attended was for 'palaeochronology building', which in the broad sense is trying to find the most accurate methods to date events in the past. In practice, it involves mostly working with statistical age-depth models. Say I dig up a core of peat 3 metres long, and it has 5 tephra layers in it. I can't radiocarbon date the tephra directly, so I sample the core at various intervals for things to date (twigs, charcoal, seeds, etc.). When I get the dates back, I have to find some way to estimate, from lining up the dates with depth, the ages of the tephra layers between the dates. That involves taking into account the standard errors on the dates given, and any possible changes in the 'sedimentation rate' between the dates: that is the rate at which the peat was deposited, for example when each cm represents 10 years, or a faster rate of 20 years.

In the workshop we were introduced to some of the probability maths involved in making such age-depth models, but to be honest, I've never had a head for that stuff, so I'm happy to trust the mathematical skills of the folks that write the computer programs and learn how to use their tools! Manipulating models, problem solving, writing code... that is more fun for me, and by the end of 5 days of learning, meddling, and chatting, I had figured out how to solve all my tephra-age issues with the most up-to-date methods.

This makes me feel really good. Why? Because, for the first time since I arrived in Canada, I'm the expert at something in my lab. So far, everyone has been telling me what to do, what I've done wrong, how I should do things.... and now, I know how to do things, and why to do things, that no-one else does. Perhaps it sounds petty to want to be superior at something, but it's important to me that I'm doing something original; if I was just learning I might as well be an undergraduate again, but being able to create and work on something myself is real research. I'm looking forward to completing my Master's thesis now: I really feel like it will be worth something.