Mente non malleo
Ted Nield suffers another Daily Mail moment, this time over hammering...
Geoscientist 22.05 June 2012
You can’t tell me that it isn’t mostly about the gear; and for Earth scientists that traditionally meant the trusty hammer – our badge of office. Crossed hammers have long been our universal guild sign. IUGS indeed used to boast a hideous logo featuring our beloved planet apparently impaled on a hammer; while the tag Mente et malleo – ‘by thought and hammer’ - or variants, became enshrined in society, survey mottoes worldwide as well as a famous brand of confectionery*. Well, if you want to use a hammer these days you’d better watch out.
Way back in the late Miocene, when I was doing my PhD on Gotland, a product of which can be perused here incidentally as a special treat for Online readers, my colleague and I had special permission to use hammers on that hallowed ground; though this did not stop one importunate radio journalist from running news pieces about infidels conducting illegal raids on the patrimony, and putting the island on alert. Thirty years on, such refined sensibilities (as they seemed to us then) have spread to the most unlikely quarters.
Recently, a Bristol University undergraduate set off an avalanche of bad publicity when spied by climbers using a hammer to obtain a hand specimen of Hay Tor in Dartmoor, an SSSI. To quote an email sent by local climber George Coiley to the website rustypeg.co.uk: “we heard a rapping and turned round to witness one of [the students] hacking at the top of Lowman with a pick (literally part of the actual tor!). ... Next followed a heated exchange .... The group informed me that it was acceptable because they were
geologists and had to take samples.” Oh dear oh dear – and thus we add special pleading and arrogance to our sins.
As a result of this unfortunate incident Bristol was engulfed in angry emails from climbers, as well as one from Natural England, asking them to account for themselves. The Committee of Heads of University Geoscience Departments has since circulated its hammer-use and core sampling guidelines to all its members. In addition to which, we might also recommend the recently refurbished Geologists’ Association coring guidelines, prepared in concert with CHUGD and the Geological Society.
Meanwhile we shall pass over in silence the erosion caused by climbers’ boots and crampons, chalk ‘gardening’, the hammering of pitons into crevices, the discarded belays and festoons of rope. We all have to live on the rockface together. Best stick to our guidelines, practise what we preach, and not dwell on what divides us.
References
*You mean you never knew that's what 'M&M' stands for?