The topic of complexity is similar.

I've spent a big chunck of my career kicking around very complex rocks. Old rocks. FUBAR rocks.

In Arizona, there is a suite of rocks known as the Yavapai Suite, 1.75 billion year old volcanics and sediments that formed in an ocean basin, then got smeared into the early formation of North America.

At first glance, at a regional scale, it looks pretty simple: layers of sediments and felsic volcanics, tilted to vertical and cooked to a moderate temperature. Just enough to create a foliation of new minerals, all aligned like the pages of a book.

But when you start spending time on the outcrops, surrounded by cacti and rattlesnakes, a new complexity is apparent. Things don't line up quite right. When you can map out the original contact between what was a siltstone and a chert layer; and, compare that to the new layering (the afore mentioned foliation)you'll find they are not the same, differing by just a few degrees. That's close enough to confuse the two, but enough to throw you off at the end of a long traverse, when the two are now yards apart.

Recognizing this allow the recognition that the entire rock package is folded so tightly, that the folds don't look like folds anymore.

When I finally understood this concept, known in the literature as "Transposed Bedding," it was a revelation. I even came to understand the fractal nature of the structural geometry, resulting in a growing level of predictabilty to my traverse. I could follow an important mineralized horizon and when it vanished, I knew where to find it again.

But there were those in the company I worked for, far more experienced and higher up in the corporate structure that just couldn't see what I was seeing. I provided articles from the literature, extensive data from the field, analysis of that data, visual aids, 3-d models...Once I attemted to illustrate the geometry using hotel sheets, blankets, and dirty socks. But to no avail. To them everything was simple, "layer cake" it is called, and my pleas to see the complexity went unheaded. Their drilling plan ultimately failed, as I predicted.

In Colorado,similar rocks - same age, same depositional enviroment, perhaps even the same regional basin, are found. But while those in Arizona were FUBAR, those in Colorado have been FU'd a couple of more times. More heat, more recrystalliztion, folded two, maybe three more times, intruded with new igneous rocks, faulted in various ways as the Rockies moved up, were erroded, and moved up again.

These are High-Grade Gneisses,metamorphic rocks that got really close to melting entirely, but didn't. Everything has changed: mineralogy, textures, structures... Here and there vestiges remain, a hint of bedding,the geochemistry of immobile Rare Earth Elements, all the clues we try to use to understand the geology of metamorphic rocks.

Geologists argue all the time. My introductory professor, a brilliant,crusty, irreverant geologist, introduced me to the idea that there are lumpers and splitters, and the best thing to do is pursue the middle ground. The Lumpers will over-simplify everything and miss the complexity. The Splitters risk getting lost in the details.

I try to remember that when I stare dumb founded at drill results or at the night sky. While this can frustrate curiosity and the effort of discovery, I cannot help but shake my head in awe at the delightful fractal patterns of our universe, both micro and macro.

And sigh.