High points

It's morph-the-meme time! Callan started it by asking people to tell which of the US state high points they had visited. ReBecca, Geology Happens, and Silver Fox responded. Hypocentre adapted it to the UK. And then Geotripper changed it into a story about one peak experience.

I've only climbed three state high points: Mauna Kea (by car), Elbert (Colorado), and Katahdin (Maine). I've been to more 2nd highest peaks, actually - Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. (I climbed everything in Vermont higher than 4000 feet... except for Mt. Mansfield. Don't know why.) And I circumnavigated the high point of Massachusetts last year, after finding that the roads to the top were closed. My husband has done more - Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. But I've been to the top of Katahdin several times, and I've got an old essay about climbing it that I can dust off and post here...



It was more than thirty years ago, my first time climbing Katahdin. 1978. The photos of me at the top show a rather dorky-looking girl, with a Dorothy Hamill haircut that needed a trim, thick glasses, wide-legged jeans, and a bright orange backpack with the shoulder straps tied together in front because they couldn't be adjusted down to my size.

Climbing the mountain wasn't my idea. It wasn't even my father's idea. A family friend had a long tradition of climbing the mountain regularly, and was planning to take his 11-year-old daughter along, and asked my father and I if we wanted to go as well. We said yes.

We climbed the mountain from the southwest side, along the Appalachian Trail. The trail started gently enough, climbing slowly through the mixed hardwood and evergreen forest typical of once-logged places in that part of the state. There is a spectacular waterfall about a mile after the trailhead. After the waterfall, fewer people followed the trail, and it continued to climb. And it climbed. And climbed. Still in the woods, still climbing. Two miles, three miles. An Appalachian Trail through-hiker wearing a frame pack passed us as if we were standing still. Finally, the trees started to get smaller, turning into the twisted little evergreens that grow near treeline all over New England. And then, at about 4000 feet, we came out into the open. I hadn't realized how high we had come with all that climbing. The view made me dizzy. And there ahead of us, the white blazes continued up, painted on rocks now. The trail followed a broad ridge -- I can tell that now looking at a topo map, but I wasn't aware of it then. All I was aware of was the immensity of space below me, and the size and exposure of the rocks I had to crawl over to get to the next white blaze. Our friends led the way up, and I, terrified, followed them. I don't know how I made it over those rocks. I think I may have stopped and cried and told my dad that I couldn't do it, but I don't remember. If I didn't say "I can't," I certainly thought it. At one point we reached a wall of granite, and the blazes on it said that the way to go was up. There was an iron handhold drilled into the rock. My dad helped lift me up, and our friend pulled me up from the top, and I was past it. From that handhold, there was no turning back. I couldn't quit -- not without having to face that handhold a second time. So I kept going.



Finally, after what seemed an eternity of scrambling (though it was no further than a mile), we reached the Tableland. Katahdin is flat on top -- at least on the southwest side. Flat, and covered with a jumble of lichen-covered rocks and little alpine flowers and signs warning that the vegetation is fragile, so stay on the marked trail. The marked trail went across the Tableland and to a second, much gentler ridge that let to Baxter Peak.

When you're on Baxter Peak, you know you're at the highest point in Maine -- 13 feet short of a mile high, with a large cairn that tries to make up the difference, as if those 13 feet are the source of all the state's insecurities. The north woods stretch around you in all directions like a dark green shag carpet. The other mountains look tiny. The lakes are the only thing that breaks up the forest -- well, the lakes and the clearcuts. And to the south, that year, we could see the scars of a forest fire that had burned a few years before. On a clear day, they say you can see the coast, but I must never have climbed Katahdin on a truly clear day. Certainly the top of Katahdin tells how great the trees-to-people ratio of northern Maine is.

It is the nearby topography that is the most spectacular, though. The climb to the peak is gentle from the west, but the eastern side of the peak is a near-vertical drop, down a cirque filled with the blue (or gray on a cloudy day) waters of Chimney Pond. From the peak, it felt like you could easily fall and land in the pond's middle. Technical climbers scale that wall. To the south of the peak, there is an arrete called the Knife Edge. And a knife-edge is what it looks like -- a ridge that is no wider than a yard in places, with 1000 foot drops on either side. A popular route to the top follows the Knife Edge. I looked at that ridge, and the people on it heading for the peak, in horror. It is still the only trail to the top of Katahdin that I have never hiked.

We descended by a different trail, the Abol Trail, which ends at another campground on the southwest side of the mountain. The Abol Trail is a much more direct route to the top than the Hunt Trail... which means it goes straight up. Or in our case, straight down. It follows an old rock slide, which means that a hiker descending the trail frequently feels like she is at the angle of repose herself, ready to tumble down the mountain in the middle of an avalanche. I did as much of my descent as possible on my rear end. After a painfully slow, too-exposed-for-my-tastes descent, we finally reached woods again. My dad couldn't believe how fast I hiked once I was on level ground again -- it was as if I wasn't at all tired.

That day on Katahdin wasn't the first time I realized I was afraid of heights, but it was the most memorable. I've been consciously fighting that fear ever since. I've been to the top of Katahdin at least four times since then, and I've climbed the steep part of other trails a few other times but abandoned the hike short of the top due to bad weather. I coaxed a college friend without a sense of balance up one trail, while hiding my own terror. I climbed a particularly steep, exposed trail called the Cathedral Trail with another geo-woman -- she was impressed by its difficulty, though she had spent time climbing mountains in Colorado.

Since my days climbing Katahdin, I have faced scarier climbs. I spent a summer in Colorado, working for the USGS and climbing 14,000 foot mountains on my weekends off -- there, I learned to scree ski and how to get down a too-steep slope without falling or losing my balance. I spent two summers mapping in a treeless mountain range in northern Alaska, trying to keep up with large men with no patience for young women who were afraid of heights. The Kigluaiks ("sawteeth" in Inupiak) were a mountain range made almost entirely of Knife Edge-like arretes. In Alaska, I not only had to walk the Knife Edges -- I had to scramble down their sides with a pack full of rocks and very little food to eat. Katahdin might seem easy to me now. But it still looms very large in my mind.

My five-year-old is losing his apatite

My five-year-old has cavities. Four cavities. Two on his lower left, where his back teeth rub together, and two little ones in the same spot on his lower right and upper left. I've never had any cavities myself, so I may be more worried about the next dental visit than he is.

"Does he drink a lot of juice?" the hygienist asked me.

"No..." I frowned. "But I've been letting him brush his teeth himself. He might not be doing a very good job."

"The chewing surfaces look fine," the hygienist said. "He's got to get the sugar between his teeth to get his cavities. Usually it's fruit juice that does it."

"He drinks mostly milk and water," I said. "What else could it be? We don't do very good job flossing his teeth, I know. And... we were on well water until this summer. I never got the water tested for fluoride, and the dentist didn't want to give him extra fluoride, because the groundwater around here varies alot." I didn't go into detail about the diverse bedrock geology that contributes to the variability in water chemistry. I was busy feeling guilty because I had treated the problem as something to solve by knowing more about the bedrock, when I should have just sent the water to the local health department for a fluoride test.

See, I don't know much about teeth, except that brushing and flossing every day is good, eating lots of sugar is bad, and the enamel coating consists mostly of the mineral hydroxyapatite. And that tooth decay happens because sugar-eating bacteria excrete weak acids, which slowly etch the hydroxyapatite and destroy the enamel.

Apatite is a mineral that all geologists learn at least in passing – it defines “5” on Moh’s hardness scale, it’s the most common of the phosphate minerals, and it’s got a funny name. And it’s present in a lot of different types of rocks, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. I usually miss it when glancing at a thin section, but find it on a microprobe, when I’m actually looking for tiny grains of plagioclase feldspar. But most of what I know about apatite comes secondhand, from collaborating with thermochronologists, who use apatite to figure out when rocks cooled to near-surface temperatures. (Well, that’s near-surface to someone who likes to work on metamorphic rocks.)

When I was in grad school, apatite was mostly used for apatite fission-track dating*. Apatite is mostly a calcium phosphate mineral, but it can contain tiny amounts of uranium. When the uranium decays by nuclear fission, it damages the crystal lattice of its host apatite grain. If the temperatures are high enough, the lattice is able to heal, but at low temperatures, the apatite grain collects these damage zones called fission tracks. You can’t see the fission tracks in a normal thin section – you need to separate the apatite grains, mount them in epoxy, polish them, and etch the surface with an acid. Then the heroic (and very patient) thermochronologist counts and measures all the little etched tracks. But there are complications. And one of those complications has to do with the amount of fluorine that substitutes for the hydroxy (OH-) ions in the structure.

I don’t remember exactly what the complication was. But I’m willing to bet that fluorapatite isn’t just harder than hydroxyapatite. I’m not sure, but I think that fluoroapatite doesn’t dissolve as easily in acid.

My son's cavitities are in baby teeth, which is a good thing. They will fall out before enough fission tracks can accumulate in them to be countable. They will fall out and be replaced by adult teeth. Which are currently growing. Which is why the dentist prescribed supplementary fluoride tablets, for a little while, at least.

In the meantime, the hygienist and I came up with another hypothesis for the source of the sugar.

“Ummm,” I said. “When he started kindergarten, he was able to choose from white milk or chocolate milk. I think he drinks chocolate milk a lot.”

“Chocolate milk has sugar in it,” she nodded.

In fact, I think he’s been drinking chocolate milk nearly every day since starting kindergarten. I had encouraged him to try the white milk, and to save the chocolate milk for special occasions. But, well, he’s five. There are a lot of special occasions.

But now, maybe he’ll listen to me when I tell him that chocolate milk will destroy his apatite.

* Since I left grad school, a new method, (U-Th)/He dating, has been developed and become an incredibly powerful tool for thermochronology.

Field work: this might be heaven or this might be hell

I love field work. No, really, I do. But when I tell stories about it, they always end up being about running out of food or wrecking vans or collecting samples of giant mosquitoes by slamming a field notebook shut or not being able to find a single sample of high-pressure metamorphic minerals except trapped as inclusions in a garnet. (And that was just my PhD area.) I've thrashed through ice-storm-damaged woods, taking an hour to walk a mile, in search of non-existent staurolites. I've fallen into streams. I've broken a canoe paddle while trying to cross a melt-swollen river. I've post-holed through snow banks. I come back from the field covered in mud, sweat, scratches, bruises, and occasionally blood from where my hammer missed the chisel and slammed the back of my hand.

Which makes me wonder, while lying in a tent with an aching back and wondering whether that sound outside is a hungry bear or just a vole with insomnia, whether it's worth it.

Then I come back to the human world, where people care about things like other people's shoes*, and I think: worth it? Are you kidding?



Photo: me, someplace where the temperatures are cold and the rocks are hot. In other words: someplace close to heaven.

(For the November Accretionary Wedge.)

* Edit: a story, in explanation. In my second or third year in my previous job, I was a junior faculty member on one of those campus-wide committees. Before one snowy winter meeting, I found myself outside the meeting building with the committee chair, a faculty member in another department on campus. She said to me: "Isn't the etiquette of Vermont winters funny? It's inappropriate to look at other people's shoes until they've had a chance to change them." I was flustered and had no idea what to say; I generally changed into indoor shoes because my winter boots were snow-covered, muddy, and made my feet sweat. It had never occurred to me that I was being judged by my footwear.

I failed to successfully negotiate the social boundaries between effective teaching, interesting research, and the expected image of a female faculty member. My favorite field area was in northeastern Vermont - although it was in dense, bug-filled woods, it was the first place where I found surprising results and struggled through to models that were my own, not my advisor's or another mentor's. And I haven't been back there since I was denied tenure.

I've found a new, beautiful place to work. I haven't had the thrill of finding things that are unexpected yet. But there are beautiful views, and in Durango, nobody cares what I wear.

Field nightmare

I dreamed about teaching field camp last night.

I've taught field camp in several places, but one of my favorites is near Hoback Junction, Wyoming. We camp in this Forest Service campground with views of the Wind Rivers and a hot spring just up the road. The road up to it was in bad shape last time I stayed there, but it's still a gorgeous spot.

The problem with the campground, at least the last time I stayed there, was that you can't make reservations ahead of time, and there's no group site, so it's possible that we won't find a good spot for all the students to camp near one another.

And that's how my dream started. We got to the campground fairly late, only to find that three-quarters of it was closed off with deep piles of snow still on the ground, and all the remaining sites already filled. We drove around looking for a spot, and ended up trying to turn around somewhere down at the end of one of the campground loops.

And that's where we met the RV. It wasn't just any old RV. It was... well, it was immense. Bigger than an 18-wheeler. Tougher than a tank. And driven by someone who didn't look where he or she was going.

The RV was headed straight for my Subaru*. And it didn't stop.

In the end, my Subaru was crunched to half its original length. (I woke up before considering the possible analogy between shortened Subarus and regional strain analysis of collisional tectonic belts.)

So: academic nightmares by geology professors. (At least I didn't dream that I showed up for field work a day late, with no clothes, and sat on a cactus.)

*Don't ask me why I was driving my Subaru at field camp. Normally I drive a 15 10-passenger van loaded with students and gear. And, yes, I have a complicated history with vans, which many people can tell stories about. But there wasn't a van in this dream.

Analogies, analog modeling, and squashed chocolate

While I was away, Callan asked about geobloggers' favorite analogies. Several other people responded. I'm a week late to the party, but I want to play, anyway.

A few weeks ago, I bought a chocolate cookie from one of my former intro students at the local farmers' market.

"You like chocolate, don't you?" she asked.

"Ummm. Yeah." (I didn't have the cookie in my mouth quite yet, but I may have been drooling.)

"I remember you talking about it all the time in our class. Especially about leaving chocolate in a hot car or putting it in the freezer."

So when I came back from GSA, it was time to give my (one, tragically brief) lecture about rock deformation. (That's the sad thing about teaching Earth Systems Science. I can't spend weeks talking about my favorite things.) It's maybe a bad idea to try to explain one's entire specialty in a single lecture after spending week listening to experts talk about the newest, coolest stuff in one's field. In any case, I was having a harder time than usual distilling the subject into its most basic essences.

When I've only got one lecture to do all of structural geology, I spend most of my time talking about faults. Faults can have earthquakes; earthquakes can kill (or at least make life very unpleasant). But I try to explain that ductile deformation exists, and the whole bottom half of the continental crust (not to mention the mantle) deforms that way.

I don't try to explain ductile deformation with rocks. It's hard to imagine something as hard as a rock squishing, even when the rock looks like this:


Photo: disharmonic folds in marble below the Snake Range decollement

So I resort to describing other materials. Silly Putty is great for describing ductile behavior, but it doesn't explain how cold materials behave differently from hot materials. (Well, I don't think it does. I've never put my Silly Putty in the freezer.)

Chocolate, on the other hand, is perfect. Put a chocolate bar in the freezer overnight. When you take it out, you need a rock hammer (or some other implement of destruction) to break off pieces. Cold chocolate is brittle.

Leave the same chocolate bar in your car, though - not tonight, because it's cold out tonight, but maybe during the day tomorrow. Take it out. If it's still solid, it will probably bend in your hands without breaking. (It might have melted, in which case it's now igneous chocolate, which has its own appeal, but which messes up the analogy.) Warm chocolate bars are ductile.

I've used this explanation for years, and normally I get exactly the responses I want. And this year, the students described the cold chocolate just fine, but when we got to the warm chocolate bar...

"What kind of chocolate?" they asked.

I shrugged. "What kind of chocolate do you want?" I generally prefer dark chocolate, but milk chocolate will do, as well.

"How about a Snickers bar?"

I frowned. "You know, a Snickers bar is great in the field, especially if the bears don't eat it, but I think its behavior is a bit too complicated for this analogy."

"Ok, then, what about a Milky Way?"

The point was not getting across. "No, a Milky Way is still made of too many different things, with different behavior. I think we should make our model as simple as possible to begin with. Because, umm, we want to avoid edge effects or something." I am not a modeler myself, but I had just gotten back from GSA.

"Oh. You mean just a Hershey's bar?"

"Yes. Yes, a Hershey's bar will do."

"How about if it has almonds in it?"

"NO! Just a Hershey's bar."

I have a horrible feeling that the other students in the class will write very confusing essays about caramel, nougat, and almonds. Or at least that they will threaten to unless I feed them.

Edit: I almost forgot that I've seen an example of class experiments deforming candy: the deformation of Charleston Chews, used in Structural Geology classes by Arlo Weil from Bryn Mawr. It's a great experiment/demo/in-class exercise... but I'm told that the smell of the candy makes people feel sick. And I'm trying to get students to make positive associations with rock deformation. So maybe pure chocolate is better for the thought experiment.

For geologists, anything can be an adventure

It was raining at 7:50 am this morning in Houston.

That wouldn't have been a big deal, I guess, except that I'm at the Geological Society of America meeting, staying in a hotel that's a ten-minute walk from the convention center, and everyone else in the hotel was trying to get to the convention center at the same time.

Now, I'm a geologist. I'm not made of halite; I don't dissolve in water. And besides, for my PhD I had to walk uphill both ways through the snow rain for months, braving giant geologist-eating mosquitoes and reindeer that hid behind rocks and pretended to be bears. A little warm fall rain isn't going to stop me.

Except that I had my computer with me, and I didn't want to fry it. So I needed an alternate route.

I suppose I could have called a cab. But I'm a geologist. Cabs are for econ majors. And one of the other geologists mentioned that there was a tunnel system beneath Houston. So I (along with many other intrepid geologists) decided to check it out.

The tunnels connect buildings, and don't follow the streets in any obvious way. But there were maps, and it was fairly easy to see which end of the system was closest to the convention center. So off I went.

It all went pretty well until an intersection near the middle of the system, where there were three different routes that could possibly have worked. I followed some other geologists... and ended up out of the tunnel system. And the escalators that took me back down weren't working. After several tries (and some very nice help from Houstonians), I found the tunnel again. But by this time, I had lost my sense of direction, and took several wrong turns before I finally ended up at a mall about three blocks from the convention center. It took several tries to get out of the mall going in the correct direction (and it was still raining). But after half an hour of being lost underground, I'm finally here.

I wonder if I would have been better off if I had had my Brunton?

This one's a fossil of an extraterrestrial...

Julia posted about an e-mail she recently received, in which her correspondent described finding a fossilized head of a sea horse and a fossil heart. And it reminded me that my other half wanted me to tell a story about a tag that I've used before. So, Jay, this post is for you. (Correct the story if I blow it.)

Back in the early 90's, there used to be a funky art festival in northeastern Vermont called the Bread and Puppet Circus. The group apparently still tours with their giant puppets and political theater, but in the 90's, they held a big weekend gathering at a farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, with various skits and lots of bread (cooked in outdoor ovens). The festival grew to something that involved camping, vendors, and all the trappings of a Phish show except the music.

We went up there in one of its last years as a summer festival. I had just started doing fieldwork a bit south of there, so I combined a geology scouting trip with a cultural event, and Jay and I headed out to check out the scene.

The parking lots were a bit like those at a Grateful Dead show - veggie burritos, drum circles, jewelry, bumper stickers, twirly skirts and bare feet. But there was one guy with a lot of rocks sitting on the ground. I would have avoided him - I have had enough experiences with people wanting to talk about the coming Earth Changes as it was - but Jay likes talking to unusual characters. So we went over to talk to him.

Oh, yes, he had interesting rocks.

"This one is a dinosaur!" (I squinted. It looked like a moss-covered calcareous schist, and no, I don't mean it was a coprolite.)

"This one is a dinosaur egg!" (Well, maybe it was kind of oval-shaped...)

"And this one is the fossil of an extraterrestrial!" (Waits River Formation. Not even a single darned garnet.)

I smiled, nodded, and backed slowly away.

I don't think Jay has ever forgiven me for avoiding that long discussion of alien fossils.

(Jay is traveling for work, which is why I'm talking to him via my blog.)

Geologists who don't deny human-caused climate change: my experience

I’m still thinking about perceptions of how geologists think about climate change. But this time I’m not going to try to explain it. This time I’m going to tell a story.

Before I get started, let me get one thing straight. I’m not going to go through the arguments for anthropogenic global warming, because 1) I’m not a climate scientist, and 2) other people have done it. I’m going to talk about how I came to be convinced. Hold on, because it’s far more convoluted than simply reading a paper and realizing that the conclusions were sound. In fact, I’m going to go way back.

I had been fascinated by glaciers since childhood - I grew up in Maine, and my favorite place, Mount Katahdin, was eroded into cirques and arretes that made it a far more spectacular mountain than one might expect from its elevation (5267 feet). Plus my yard was full of random rocks – so random that I was skeptical about stratigraphy when I first heard of it – and from an early age, I learned to blame the glaciers for making the lawn somewhat dangerous to mow.

My childhood was in the 70’s. I don’t know if I saw that infamous Newsweek cover about global cooling – I was eight years old at the time – but I remember a rather vivid nightmare about running away from an advancing glacier. (Just in case a climate denialist wanders in here and is impressed by my youthful prescience, I was also worried that the Loch Ness Monster’s cousin lived in the shallow, algae-slimed lake in town. I mean, I was eight. I wasn’t reading the scientific literature at the time or anything.)

And then, in the mid 80’s, I went to college in Minnesota. So when I first heard scientific discussions of climate change, it was in the context of understanding the ice ages of the past million years. We talked about glacial landforms in my geomorphology class, but we didn't talk much about what drives climate change. When we did, it was mostly a bit of arm-waving about Milankovitch cycles and about not really knowing what caused climate to change.

I first heard of the greenhouse effect in a student presentation in my Advanced Environmental Geology class in 1988. I don’t remember most of the presentations, but that one struck me as something weird, almost out of the realm of science fiction, but also worth paying attention to.

I started grad school at Stanford in 1989. At the time, Stanford was strong in the solid earth sciences, but had little expertise in surface processes, oceanography, or climate. (There were a couple of hydrogeologists, a micropaleontologist, and an organic geochemist on the faculty, and one grad student was working on marine records of El Nino events. And that was pretty much it.) But the new Dean proposed a program in Earth Systems Science, and there was a seminar series to start it off. I don’t remember most of what was discussed in the talks, but I think that that’s where I began to get the sense that global warming was something that I might have to worry about in my lifetime.

A few years later, after I had started my first job, I heard a convincing talk by Stephen Schneider, as part of a big symposium at a small liberal arts college. I heard Schneider speak again in 1998, I think, while I was on sabbatical (back at Stanford for a few months). And in the meantime, I read science fiction, especially the Mars books by Kim Stanley Robinson*. (If you haven’t read them, one of the plot points involves collapse of an ice sheet in Antarctica, and political chaos that results from rising sea levels in an overpopulated world.) I also spent the mid-to-late 90’s in a small department with a physical oceanographer and a marine geologist whose research included studies of Arctic Ocean currents and young ocean sediments off the Antarctic Peninsula. They were the only people I knew working on climate-related work, and the possibility of anthropogenic climate change was something that they discussed as an underlying principle, not as a fringe idea.

So throughout the 90’s, I viewed global warming as a problem for the distant future, supported by science, but something that might affect my kids. Maybe. When the Kyoto negotiations happened in the late 90’s, I had spent ten years hearing the same big picture from scientists: more carbon dioxide increases temperature; we are increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; we’re going to cause climate to change.

In the early 2000’s, I was shocked to see the future already beginning to arrive, not science fiction any more, but real events. The Larson B ice shelf collapse in 2002 was especially disturbing. There were some other studies that came out at the same time that I can’t remember, but for a while, it seemed as though every week brought a new press release about yet another indication that climate change was already happening. AGU’s statement on climate change came out around the same time, I think. And I was teaching Earth Systems Science myself, so I felt obligated to try to understand climate, even if I had not been formally trained in it. And the papers that I’ve seen since 2002 haven’t shown any sign that the scientific understanding is changing. The science seems to have matured, to arguments over details of why glaciers behave in certain ways, and how various regions respond, and how sensitive is climate to carbon dioxide. But the basic concerns that drive the research don’t seem to have changed since I first heard about the greenhouse effect in the 80’s.

And in the meantime, the Northwest Passage opened.

I don’t study climate myself. I’ve specialized in rocks from the middle of the crust: old, hot, and deep. As far as research goes, I have nothing to add to the discussion. But geology is a related field, and in undergrad institutions, geology departments are the places where climate science is taught, if it is taught at all. And that means that, when climate scientists visit and speak, I pay more attention than I might to a talk by a geneticist or a string theorist.

Until there were signs that we might do something about carbon dioxide, I didn’t hear about people who were skeptical about anthropogenic climate change. And when I encountered them, I had already been convinced by fifteen years of talks by people who were trying to explain their research. I haven’t heard anything from the skeptics that makes me distrust Schneider or my oceanographer colleagues.

And I don’t have nightmares about glacial advance any more. (Now the Loch Ness Monster, on the other hand...)

*I know that being influenced by fiction isn't a good scientific argument. But that doesn't mean that fiction makes no impression on people.

Yes, Virginia, there is life after tenure denial

Over at ScienceBlogs, DrugMonkey has a post about a former ScienceBlogger who left academia when it was clear that he wouldn't receive tenure. The blogger has moved to a non-academic job, and both misses and doesn't miss academia.

But that's not what I want to respond to. One of the commenters asked about other possible outcomes beyond leaving academia or being hired with tenure someplace else:

Can someone start over at the Assistant Professor level somewhere else?

Yes, it is possible. I did it.

When I was coming up for tenure, I figured that the world just ends if you're denied tenure. When it happened to me, I thought about switching to a more lucrative version of geology, or maybe getting pregnant and becoming a stay-at-home mom. But I also read job ads and saw three jobs that fit my interests (teaching-oriented institutions, looking for my specialty, in places where I wouldn't mind living). I applied for them and headed to the west coast for a week for a family vacation and exploration of other career ideas.

When I got back, two of the three places wanted to interview me. I flew out to Durango, interviewed, and was offered the job. I cancelled the other interview (because, really, what place can compete with Durango?) and, six months later, started a new job as an assistant professor. Again.

Why would anyone in her right mind start over as an assistant professor? Ummmm... well, there were a lot of reasons.

1) I loved teaching. The worst thing about leaving my first job was leaving my students. (I mean, they were writing letters to the school paper and crying in class and crying in my office... and those were the male students.) And I had a chance to do it again, in a school that had values similar to mine.

2) During the interview, the provost looked at my C.V. and said he couldn't believe that I hadn't gotten tenure. So I knew that I was capable of meeting the expectations here. To be pre-tenure without the fear deep in my gut... you know, working hard isn't bad. It's being afraid, worried that I would never be good enough... that's what was bad in the first job.

3) I got a job here. I still have people come up to me at conferences and tell me that they want my job. (I smile nicely and say: "NO.")

4) Did I mention that there are hot springs in this town? I had always wanted to live someplace with hot springs.

So... here I am. And I'm not the only person who has come out of tenure denial and walked into another academic job. (I can think of at least five other women geoscientists, some from research universities, some from liberal arts colleges... but all who were denied tenure and went on to have great careers at another institution.) It is definitely possible.

In my case, I was able to get interviews because 1) a lot of people thought that my first institution had made a major mistake, and 2) I applied to schools that valued my skills (and which were public, rather than private, so they didn't see hiring a reject as a mark against their reputations). And I made use of my outraged colleagues. I had something like nine people write recommendation letters for me. (My colleagues from the old institution, members of my dissertation committee, research collaborators, and... ummm... former undergraduate students. I don't generally think it's appropriate to ask students to write letters for me, but they were already in grad school and beyond my ability to help or hurt their careers.) If you've been denied tenure, it helps to have potential employers read glowing letters that talk about how stupid the administration of your previous institution was to let you go.

And I got the job offer because I was comfortable lecturing, and I was enthusiastic about the place. (And because they needed to hire a woman, but half the interviewees were women, so it wasn't as if I was the last female geologist in the universe and they were stuck with me.)

And now I'm tenured.

And did I mention that I live in Durango?

Sunday stroll: UFOs and alcoves

Just across the New Mexico border, near the town of Aztec, New Mexico, it is rumored that a UFO crashed on a sandstone cliff in 1948. The Aztec town library will be holding a UFO symposium next weekend, as it does every year. We headed out to the crash site - or at least to a trail near it - this weekend, so we could explore without being abducted.

We didn't see anything resembling alien spacecraft (though it's possible that the mountain bikers were in disguise). But if the aliens wanted to hide, we found some nice sapping alcoves for them.

If you look up at the cliffs of the canyon country of the American Southwest, you might see near-caves, overhanging sandstone that shades little alcoves. The Ancestral Puebloans (aka the Anasazi) made use of them to build cliff dwellings in places like Mesa Verde. There aren't any cliff dwellings in the sandstone above Aztec (although there are some other Ancestral Puebloan ruins nearby), but there are alcoves.

Alcoves are excavated by groundwater.* Water seeps into the sandstone at the surface, and then, somewhere below, it hits a less permeable layer and flows to the nearest open surface - in my part of the world, that would probably be a canyon wall. As the groundwater leaks out, it loosens the sands grains, and gradually removes rock beneath an overhang. (If the process continues, it can create arches like those in the parks to our west in Utah.)

I've seen more spectacular alcoves than those along the Aztec UFO trail - Mesa Verde, of course, but also in the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. But I've never seen water leaking out of them before.

I don't know what caused the permeability of the rock to change. There was sandstone above, and sandstone below. But there was water trickling out of the rock - it has been a wet winter, after all - and it was carrying sand with it.

And I forgot to get out the camera, because my son thought the cave was a little scary.

We probably shouldn't have mentioned the UFO story to him.

Even though I didn't bring my camera, there are pictures of many of alcoves with ruins in them around. Here's one:



Sand Canyon, west of Cortez, Colorado. Source (with lots of other nice pictures and descriptions).

Different sandstone unit. Same hydrologic process.

* Edit: Or maybe not. See the comments for references to other explanations.

That geologic death wish...

So Chris Rowan wants to hear stories about hazardous field work, huh?

I've been afraid of heights, or at least of exposure, since I was ten. I've learned to manage it (mostly; my former field partners may disagree), because sometimes the interesting rocks are hard to get to.

I'm not particularly afraid of water, though. I grew up in New England, I worked as a lifeguard, and I've waded across countless streams with my boots tied to my pack. This past summer, however, I decided that maybe I need to re-think my cavalier attitude towards liquid hazards.

This is where I'm working these days:



Unfortunately, to get to part of our field area last summer, we had to cross this:



That's a small river in the wilderness. No bridges across it. And in June, there was still snow melting in the high country. We tried to wade the river, but it was up to our mid-thighs before we got six feet into the current. It didn't seem very safe, especially with backpacking equipment.

So we left, and came back the next day with this:



I've done a lot of flat water canoing, but I don't have much experience with strong currents. My dad, however, had, so he tried to teach me.

If you look closely at that photo, you'll see the result: we broke a paddle.

We ended up doing some reconnaissance work on a low-elevation (by my current standards) shear zone, and went back to this area in late July.

(Maybe later I'll tell Alaska stories.)

The wild turkey and the breccia

If it hadn’t been for the wild turkey, we would never have found the breccia.

We were working our way toward a section of a fault zone where two entirely different senses of movement had been described. We had already taken an interesting but physically challenging route to the area, and as a result, we were hurrying to the spot where we expected to find the interesting rocks. And then we saw the turkey.

She – well, at least we thought it was a she – was moving rather slowly across an open area, dragging a wing. I had seen that kind of trick before, when I worked beyond treeline in Alaska, so I figured that she probably had chicks that she wanted us to avoid. So, polite geologists that we were, we decided to follow her.

She led us in a wide circle, back up the hill we had been coming down. No matter, we thought. We could always take a longer route once she was satisfied that her babies were safe.

And then we saw the outcrop. A great wall of rock, on the west side of the saddle. We went and looked at it... and there it was. The fault zone we had been chasing.

We followed it up the hill, found patches of deformed granite caught in the fault zone, and took samples. We haven’t analyzed them yet. Maybe they’re significant. Maybe not.

But we wouldn’t have seen them at all, if it hadn’t been for the wild turkey.

(Image source: Utah's Hogle Zoo. I forgot my camera that day. Oops.)


Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US, and happy Nov. 22 to everyone else.

there's no place like...?

Sheril at The Intersection wrote today about all that moving that academics do:

While whisking off to the next exotic (or not so glamorous) locale is quite a romantic notion -- the thing is, somewhere along the way all this traveling makes home a confusing concept.

The post struck a chord with me. Like Sheril, I've lived in five different states (and all four time zones in the lower 48) - and that doesn't count the summers I spent doing field work in Alaska. I've thought, many times, that this sort of rootlessness is particularly odd for me. I was attracted to geology, at least in part, because it is rooted in a sense of place.

Modern geology is both local and global. Mapping is slow, dirty, work, and after long days working the same quadrangle, you develop a certain intimacy with the place. Not just with the particular question that brought you there – the best field geologists that I have known see much more than the information that they publish or record on their maps. They know the plants (and which ones hurt to sit on), and the behavior of the animals, and which direction the big storms come from. Great field geologists know how to read their rocks, too, and it’s worth considering their models – they usually have made observations beyond the obvious.

But at the same time, geology is global. Plate tectonics. The rocks that are beside one another were not always where they are now; they may have been on entirely different plates when they formed. How quickly they were brought to the surface may be the result of changing conditions at a plate boundary, or may have been caused by changing climate, caused perhaps by the orientation of a mountain chain hundreds of miles away.

And travel, and field work in many different environments, make it easier to see the many possible explanations for a single outcrop. Sometimes it takes a different perspective to turn the interpretation of an area on its head. (A jumble of rock in Vermont might look like a submarine landslide deposit... unless you’ve seen the mess of California’s Franciscan Formation. Then, suddenly, you see the place as the remnants of an old subduction zone, and old New England feels like a place where things happened once.)

When I headed out for my PhD, I wanted to travel as much as possible, but when I finished, I wanted roots. I wanted to be one of those geologists who knows every burrow under every rock in the field area, a little eccentric, perhaps, but fully at home. But I haven’t managed it. I’ve lived in too many places, moving from one academic job to another. Every place there’s a new stratigraphy to learn, new landforms, new rainfall patterns, new ecology. I’m not the guru of the landscape that I want to be. Even after seven years here, I still don’t know the name of the cactus that I accidentally sat on while explaining how to take strike and dip. I still don’t know which human stories are true, and which were made up by locals to make fun of tourists.

I still feel like a tourist myself – like I’ve been a tourist in every field area where I’ve worked. It’s got its advantages – there’s something to be said for being able to tell stories about different landscapes, different tectonic settings, different climates. But it would be nice to have a sense of home, as well.

of lakes and rocks (or why I do what I do)

I grew up on the second-most-polluted lake in the state of Maine. It was nasty – it looked like pea soup, and it smelled like rotting vegetables. But it was also beautiful – blue reflections from the sky, green trees hiding the houses on the other side, eerie cries of invisible loons in the evening and morning. There was a big rock, just right for sitting on, out where the water was about four feet deep. On the beach, there were shiny flat pebbles just right for skipping, and little sand grains that stayed stuck to my feet, even when they were dry.

The lake’s problem stemmed from years of being over-fertilized – sewage from two upstream towns was poorly treated, houses around the lake had leaky septic tanks, and rumor has it that there used to be a potato chip factory that dumped peels into the lake. By the 1970’s, it was a prime example of a eutrophic lake, a lake that had gone scummy and bog-like before its time because of too many nutrients and too much algae.

My dad started working on the lake’s problems in the early 1970’s. He’s a mathematician, and he worked with a geology grad student to develop a computer model of phosphorus cycling in the lake. I didn’t experience the modeling (well, other than scribbling on used punch cards), but I did get to help with the water sampling a few times. Mostly I sat in the boat and watched them collect bottles of water and lower a secchi disk until they couldn’t see it any more. But it made an impression on me. I remember bringing a little bottle of water and zooplankton for show-and-tell in 2nd grade. And by the time I was in high school, the research had turned into an experiment in cleaning up the lake. There were some new sewage treatment plants built (eventually – one town finally built its new one just a couple years ago), but the big experiment was the new dam. The town excavated the lake’s outlet and, every fall, lowered the lake by more than 10 feet, in hopes of flushing the phosphorus downstream.

I was impressed (though I didn’t think through the implications of sending the problem down to the Kennebec River and the Atlantic Ocean). I was impressed enough to have megalomaniac 10-year-old dreams of becoming a scientist and figuring out how to make chemical reactions run backward and solve the world’s pollution problems. (I hadn’t studied the 2nd law of thermodynamics then, obviously.)

When I went to college, I wanted to study environmental chemistry. But there was a freshman seminar offered on environmental geology, and intro chemistry wasn’t offered until winter term, so I took geology to have some fun and kill off my writing requirement.

And I got hooked.

Field trips. We walked along the river and talked about currents and sediment and erosion and floods. We went down to a park and made geologic maps of flat-lying sedimentary rock by coloring along contour lines. (Did I happen to mention that I went to college in the Midwest?) The horizontal bedding, actually was a huge revelation. I had grown up in a world full of glacial erratics and widely spaced outcrops that had no obvious relationship with one another. The idea that rocks could be correlated from one outcrop to another astounded me. And beyond that, rocks were laid down flat. I can hear the people laughing already when I say this, but the priniciple of original horizontality was probably the single biggest revelation of my introductory geology class. (Well, that and plate tectonics – I had taken an earth science class in high school, but the textbook was outdated, and even in 1981 I got the impression that continental drift was some wacko idea that had been mostly discredited.)

Our final project for the class was to write about the geology and landscape of my hometown. That was the first time I ever looked at the geologic map of Maine. I didn’t understand it, and wrote about the location of my hometown on a drainage divide between two major river systems. But when I went home for winter break, I started noticing the rocks. In particular, I noticed one road cut on I-95, just outside Bangor. It was made of phyllite, and it glistened even when it was dry. And the layering was vertical.

If rocks started with horizontal layering, and the rocks around Bangor had vertical layering, then... something really cool had happened there, practically in my backyard. And I wanted to know more about it.

Chemistry was pretty much doomed as far as I was concerned. I held on to dreams of being an environmental geochemist for years – I monitored water quality as part of a campus job, I applied to grad schools with low-temperature geochemistry programs, and I worked for the USGS on a project dealing with mitigation of acid mine drainage. (And I kept taking chemistry classes, though physical chemistry.) But the rocks kept calling. Not just any rocks. Rocks that had been through a lot and had stories to tell. Rocks that had been buried, contorted, heated, transformed. Rocks that were once under the equivalent of the Himalayas (120 million years ago, or 380 million years ago, or 1.7 billion years ago). Down a subduction zone. Stretched and thinned in a metamorphic core complex. Baked in the aureole of a pluton. Metamorphic rocks are the survivors of geology. They have been through it all, and it has changed them, but they haven’t melted or broken apart.

And I like to know their stories.

Oh, and the rocks on the beach where I grew up? The sand grains and skipping stones were phyllites, and the big rock in four feet of water was a granite boulder. There were pebbles with andalusite in them, too, probably from the aureole of one of the granites or another. So I may not be studying lake water, but my rocks still remind me of home.