Geology Alumni in the News

Research in the fields of earth science, biology, archaeology, and anthropology requires significant amounts of travel in rugged, unpredictable, outdoor conditions. How do mothers manage the challenges of fieldwork and a baby?

We each had a baby last year, and we are trying to make motherhood a major, but not sole, focus of our energy. Maura is a Ph.D. candidate in ecology with a 1-year-old daughter, Evalyn. Joan is an assistant professor of geology with a 9-month-old daughter, Iona. We do our research “in the field.”

Joan drove to the Yukon Territory in northwestern Canada with her infant to do research on the evolving snowpack for two months.

Read The Whole Story

Among the events which might be documented in the collection of Carleton Geology field trip anecdotes are some which I will not write about. It may be that they are undignified, or that I don’t want to admit to them, or they are embarrassing to somebody else. Anyway I will not list them and I won’t tell about them.

I won’t tell, for example, about a batch of chili in the Badlands which contained the entire contents of the bag of chili powder…

It was cold, but not bitter, and the ground was wet because it was still in the process of thawing on May 7, 1984, when we stopped at the roadcut near the “suicide hill” ski jump that Eiler (Henrickson ’43) liked to tell stories about. An overcast day, one of those days when the temperature at noon (about 48o F) was exactly the same as it had been at breakfast time. As the day wore on it began raining. The Upper Peninsula was treating us to another one of its dreary days.

An excerpt from Wendell Duffield ’63‘s book Chasing Lava. Read on for a tale of terror on a magma bed!

LOGIN 102,100
HELLO [announcements....]
READY
OLD GRUB
READY
RUN
GRUB   07:27 AM    20-SEP-78
THIS PROGRAM IS DESIGNED TO HELP PLAN FIELD TRIP MENUS. ANSWER 
THE QUESTIONS AND IT WILL DETERMINE THE QUANTITIES OF FOOD 
YOU SHOULD ORDER.

Thanks, I was wondering about that. Brushing aside the fact that…

It was not until the glory days in the dusk of the 1970s that we got around to trying the obvious, although in self defense we must add that it was not until then that we had the talent available to do it.

In the fall of 1979 Fred Seymour ’80 was a senior, on the home stretch of his geology major here at Carleton. He also had achieved the rank of cook at Dino’s Restaurant on Water Street…

Two intrepid paleontologists Carleton recently released into the wild, Butch and Brett Kessler Dooley ’91 and ’94, had barely returned from their honeymoon trip to the Rocky Mountain states in the summer of 1994 when they had to respond to a call placed to the paleontology museum of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. It was a request for assistance in identifying some bones unearthed by prisoners digging fill from a hillside on the prison grounds. Butch was a graduate student with the LSU museum at that time.

As if it weren’t bizarre enough to be excavating a mastodont skeleton under the continuous “protection” of prison guards (Brett and Butch had at least two armed guards watching them at all times), the episode turned even more weird when a human skeleton was discovered in the same outcrop about 20 feet above the mastodont. Brett and Butch capped the experience by submitting to an interview by two murderers for the prison inmates’ magazine.

My very first field trip with the Carleton Geology Department was the departmental fall trip to the Black Hills, South Dakota, in what felt like winter (it was actually October), 1975.

I had been working here for a month or so. My memory is vague as to who did what either in preparation for or during the trip, because at that point I didn’t know many of the people very well.. That was about to change with a jolt.

Field work can be hazardous; things don’t always go as planned. This letter, from Brett Kessler ’94, arrived during the summer of 1991 after she and three other students (Butch Dooley ’91, Starr Johnson ’93 and Emily Darby ’94) began a field project in Virginia in which parts of a fossil whale were excavated for reconstruction in the Virginia Museum of Natural History at Martinsville, VA. We thank Brett and Butch for allowing us to share this letter, and wish them better luck in future travels! The project was successfully completed despite 130-degree temperatures in the excavation pit and other logistical woes. Emily traveled separately.