Paleomagnetician

I would have expected that there would be more very bright spots," says paleomagnetician Gary Acton of Texas A&M University.

Still, the study, reported on page 1642 by paleontologist Peter Ward of the University of Washington in Seattle, paleomagnetician Joseph Kirschvink of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and their colleagues, "could influence the fence sitters," says geologist Darrel Cowan of the University of Washington, who has written on possible geologic tests of the so-called Baja-British Columbia hypothesis.

Virtually every test we've done in the past 5 years suggests true polar wander has been overestimated," says paleomagnetician John Tarduno of the University of Rochester, New York.

In last August's Geological Society of America Bulletin, geologists Linda Sohl and Nicholas Christie-Blick (a snowball critic) of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and paleomagnetician Dennis Kent of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, published a paper on the Neoproterozoic Elatina Formation glacial deposit in Australia.