Papers that I am reading

I'm reading plenty of papers these days about carbonate concretions, dolomite formation in terrestrial environments and paleosols. Here's of a collection of the papers that I personally find most interesting and informative. There is currently a lot of cool stuff happening regarding dolomite formation in low-temperature environments. These articles are on the cutting-edge in my opinion. Of course it is but a tiny collection...

• Precipitation of low-temperature dolomite from an anaerobic microbial consortium: the role of methanogenic Archaea (Kenward et al., 2009)
• Microbially mediated carbonates in the Holocene deposits from Sarlieve, a small ancient lake of the French Massif Central, testify to the evolution of a restricted environment (Breheret et al.; 2007)
• Pedogenic origin of dolomite in a basaltic weathering profile, Kohala peninsula, Hawaii (Capo et al., 2000)
• Microbial precipitation of dolomite in methanogenic groundwater (Robets et al., 2004)
• Presence of sulfate does not inhibit low-temperature dolomite precipitation (Sanchez-Roman et al., 2009)
• The role of biomineralization in the origin of sepiolite and dolomite (Leguey et al., 2010)
• Origin of magnesium in clays from the Amargosa desert, Nevada (Khoury et al., 1982)

The joy of research

The joy of research. During the last couple of weeks I have been compiling data from the literature into a big table in order to identify specific factors for mineral formation in the environments that I am investigating. It has been a cool task that was greatly advanced by my recent and on-going cold that has me stuck at home doing not much useful but reading papers and typing Mg/Ca ratios, pH, salinities and many other factor into that table. Today I read 3 whole papers which I included into the table and I have been reading 2...no 3 others for general understanding of the problem at hand. It hit me today while cross-reading through those other papers. It was just a single sentence but...there is no similiarity or single governing factor to solve what I am trying to do. A break-through of understanding the problem. There is more than one road to Rome. What a feeling to breach through and advance the personal knowledge of understanding, and what disappointment to realize that I can compile and analyze as many papers, data and experiments as I like, and yet - dispite it being  fun and informative  - will not solve the problem in the way we (my supervisor and I) thought. What a weird feeling to score such a victory and still notice that it will not help. Back to the start. I need a new idea. Still feels kind of cool.