Credit: Pixabay
The third day of NetherMod promised to be a great day full of science, until it turned into a great day full of fun activities, such as windsurfing, wine tasting, and karaoke, thanks to the Dutch weather. This meant that only the morning was filled with science, which has already been summarised expertly in our previous post.
What then, can this post add, I hear you thinking..? Well, let’s start with saying that the cooking theme is still going strong here on NetherMod 2017: John Herlund discussed the BEAMS (bridgmanite enriched ancient mantle structures) hypothesis from Ballmer et al., 2017 and ended up referring to the bridgmanite blobs as ~10,000 km sausages during the student discussion. Just let that sink in for a moment… So, now in addition to the delicious potatoes we discussed earlier, we have a nice plate of sausages. We still have two days to go, so maybe we will have a full (Dutch?) meal by the end of the conference. Who knows?
Besides that, we can report a scoop from one of our very anonymous reporters (Laetitia Le Pourhiet): the reason Wim Spakman did not attend the Monday morning talks on rifting processes was not because he was sick, but actually because he was ‘sick’ of rifting processes, as he is a subduction man through and through! However, no definite proof has been provided so far, so be aware that this might be fake news.
To conclude, your faithful NetherMod reporter has gathered for you the most memorable quotes of the day by René de Borst during his keynote lecture on plasticity and fracture in porous media. He stated that one of the most obvious solutions for dealing with the mesh dependence problem is to just accept it (I mean, he has got a point) and he noted that the devil is in the boundary conditions. However, his most beautiful quote related to the concept of continuity:
The world is neither continuous nor discontinuous. The perception of continuity or discontinuity depends on the level of observation.
With that inspirational quote in mind, I hope you are ready for yet another science day!
PS: Of course, we can’t forget Thorsten Becker’s excellent talk on subduction dynamics, but he didn’t make any obvious food references, so how am I supposed to include his talk in these secret summaries?
PPS: Martin Ruess is online
