THE EARTH’S MAGNETIC FIELD HAS REVERSED MANY TIMES OVER ITS HISTORY, SO BY DETERMINING THE ORIENTATION OF THIS LAYER OF ROCK, MACFADDEN AND HIS TEAM CAN ACCURATELY DATE THE FOSSILS THEY FIND HERE.
He gingerly pries the chunk from the hillside, hoping it won’t crumble in his hands. He assigns it a sample number, records it in his field notebook and hands it to a student to wrap for shipment back to Gainesville for testing. One down, 24 to go. Some samples require a heavy pickaxe to tease them out, MacFadden’s breathing becoming more labored with each swing. The sweat beads on the paleontologist’s forehead beneath his hardhat and a safari shirt sticks to his skin. Here in Panama, just 9 degrees north of the Equator, the July sun is merciless, even at 9 a.m. As the principal investigator on numerous projects and with a host of graduate students to mentor, MacFadden has to maximize his opportunities to get into the field because he still has many scientific questions to answer, and time is running out.
You wouldn’t think a couple of months would make much difference to scientists who study fossils that are 20 million years old. But while geologic time is slow, the jungle is unrelenting. For 100 years, the Panama Canal has served as the gateway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but as international sea trade has boomed, ships have grown ever larger, with many now exceeding the capacity of the canal’s locks. So, in 2007 Panama initiated a $7-billion project to expand the canal, adding two new, larger locks on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides and widening and deepening the canal at numerous locations. The expansion will
Bruce MacFadden has traveled the world searching for fossils, recording each location on the cover of his field notebook. Inside, he keeps meticulous notes about his observations, including the readings from his Brunton compass, a favorite of geologists.
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