Valentine’s Day Massacre

Other people may have received cards telling them how wonderful they were yesterday – but not me. Instead, I got a nice long e-mail from JGR regarding two papers I submitted way back in June (which I have alluded to previously) which was about as far from ‘roses are red…’ territory as you could get.

I haven’t really talked about the research behind these papers on this blog (I guess I didn’t want to pre-empt publication, somewhat ironically), but they were basically presenting the major conclusions of my PhD project – a study of the tectonic evolution of New Zealand in the last 20 million years, using paleomagnetic measurements to look at crustal rotations. My first paper presented my dataset, which took a lot of work to amass, and the second was my attempt to construct a model of deformation to explain these data.

I’m still chewing over the reviews (they’ve hardly arrived at a convenient time!), but the basic gist seems to be that they don’t like my data - although they couldn’t really find much wrong with it – and they really don’t like my model. They were very keen to point out to me that accommodating the large and fast crustal rotations my data seem to indicate (much larger and faster than has previously been suggested) is not easy, and my suggestions for how it has happened are a little bit at odds with the well-established picture. Never… anyway, there’s a lot to filter and think about, which obviously I don’t have time to do at the moment, so for now I’m just going to have to go:

AAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

instead.