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My ancestors were covered-wagon pioneers and seafarers,
seeking out adventures and challenges and my family
continued the tradition. Our weekends and vacations were
spent camping and hiking and horseback riding and river
rafting, often in the wildest, most remote places we could
find. Thus, I grew up with a profound love for wilderness
and adventure, with lots of practice in both self-reliance
and group dynamics.
When I was growing
up I wanted to be an artist. I took all the art classes I
could, in school, on weekends and during summers. What
attracted me most to art was a natural, inborn love for
spatial relationships. On family trips I always hogged the
maps and was the navigator, taking great pleasure in
translating between the paper map and the passing
countryside. My father was an engineer and my mother a
botanist, so I grew up in a household where science and
technical subjects were natural dinner-time fare. Thus, it
was easy to move over to science when I decided to change. I
have to admit, however, that to this day, many of my science
research projects look suspiciously like art projects, with
an especially strong emphasis on maps.
While I was in
high school, the Russians put the first man-made satellite,
Sputnik, into orbit. We were all astonished by this feat,
and it seemed that if scientists could do such an amazing
thing, surely they could solve all sorts of other, seemingly
more trivial problems like ghettos, starvation, world peace.
(How naive we were!) So I switched directions and when it
came time for college, I applied to various science schools,
ending up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During my
undergraduate years, I tried a number of different majors:
physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, electrical
engineering, and I did well enough in them, but I didn't
"catch fire". In my junior year, I took some geology
courses, pretty much by accident, and attended the Indiana
University geology summer field camp in Montana, just for
fun. Geological mapping is primarily a spatial puzzle: the
mapper must visualize the geologic structure and geometry,
figure out how these shapes are cut by the undulating
surface of the present landscape, and then translate all
that into lines and symbols on a flat paper map. I was in
heaven. Also, it was a revelation to me that people could
get paid for hiking around in the mountains and coaxing out
their secrets.
By the end of the
field camp I was hooked on geology, but I was nervous about
abandoning my high-tech, pure science ambitions for this
relatively grubby, descriptive, obscure field. I dropped out
of school for half a year to travel and to think about this,
but my feelings only grew. Everywhere I went, the mountains
were speaking to me in my new-found geological language. I
decided to switch schools to the University of California at
Berkeley. (I think my parents were pretty upset about this,
having paid three years of M.I.T. tuition, but, of course,
Berkeley is a world class school, too, so they encouraged me
to follow my heart.) I had completed a lot of math and
physics already, so I chose geophysics, but I crammed in all
the extra geology courses that would fit in my schedule. As
it turned out, this combination of strengths in
math-physics-geophysics and classical geology was somewhat
unusual and it put me in a special position to make
discoveries and connections that others weren't in the
position to make.
Part of my job as
a University Professor is to be an advisor for many
undergraduate students. I often tell them (and their nervous
parents) about my shifty college career: my several major
changes, drop out times, school changes. I believe that the
primary job of undergraduate students is to try out many
subjects, give each their best effort, and to find out what
suits them and their particular set of talents, to find out
what they enjoy doing. Finding a good career, doing things
that one enjoys and does well, is a prime ingredient for a
happy, productive life. And I often encourage students to
consider unusual double majors or double emphases, e.g.,
geology and communication studies, geophysics and economics,
geochemistry and political science. There are many extremely
important and exciting opportunities for people with
cross-disciplinary skills and insight.
After my
undergraduate studies, I spent a year working in the
Institute of Geophysics and Seismology at the University of
Chile. It gave me a chance to gain some practical experience
in my new field and to live and work and travel in a
different culture. I also took part in the summer internship
program at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and discovered
that one could combine geophysics with the adventure of
sailing the seas. Thus, when I was ready to go on to
graduate school, I applied and was accepted at Scripps
Oceanographic Institution in La Jolla, California.
I arrived at
Scripps in January of 1967 to find the place in an uproar. A
month before, Fred Vine had given a lecture about marine
magnetic anomalies and how they demonstrate that oceanic
crust is created by sea floor spreading. This concept, in
turn, validated the theory of continental drift and led to
the development of its modern version, the theory of plate
tectonics. Furthermore, the magnetic anomalies give us the
wherewithal to measure and chart the drift of the plates
through time. A great revolution was just starting in the
earth sciences and I had stepped into the middle of it! In
the light of the new concepts, all the data collected by
generations of geo-scientists was in need of
re-interpretation. Furthermore, the need for many new
measurements and experiments and compilations suddenly
became obvious. Dr. H. W. Menard was recompiling the
magnetic anomalies that had been measured by ships crossing
the northeast Pacific. The resulting map was so exciting, so
full of new relationships, that I could not stay away from
his lab, though I was supposed to be working elsewhere.
A great many
visitors stopped over at Scripps while I was studying and
working there. They came from all over the world and stayed
for weeks or months and shared their insights in seminars
and over lunches and dinners. It was so exciting, there were
so many new connections to explore, so much to be done, I
often could not sleep at night. We would meet in the morning
to try out our overnight inspirations, or sometimes we
couldn't wait and would call and get one another up in the
wee hours. The excitement has died down some over the
decades, but this is still one of my favorite aspects of my
work: exploring ideas with colleagues, scribbling on the
dinner napkins, each of us bringing her/his own data and
knowledge and experience to the subject at hand,
inter-meshing our disparate expertise and constructing
something brand new, feeling a new idea grow and clarify in
our minds and our sketches. It's a wonderful experience.
When I arrived at
Scripps, the "Deep Tow" group was about to go to sea to make
a very detailed survey of the Gorda Rise, off northern
California. They needed a student to come along and to work
up the survey data. It would be the first close-up look at a
sea floor spreading center! I signed on at once and never
looked back. By this stroke of luck, I became embroiled for
life in the effort to understand the process of sea-floor
spreading and the details of the formation and aging of the
world's oceanic crusts. I have never lost my fascination
with this subject and have continued to explore it with new
technologies as they came along: mapping with various
sophisticated sonars, deep sea cameras, deep diving
submersibles. (I have visited and studied the deep ocean
floor, 2.5 to 3.5 km deep, on twelve different dives in the
small submersible Alvin. It is amazingly different down
there. It's a little like going to Mars!) With each new
improvement in our surveying techniques, we learn a new
level of refinement; we answer many of our previous
questions and formulate a new, deeper set.
In the 1980s I
worked a lot with a research group led by Dr. Richard Hey
that was documenting the phenomenon of propagating rifts. We
had known for a long time that spreading centers were able
to change their trends in response to changes in plate
motion direction, but we didn't understand how they
accomplished these reorientations. It seems that a rift
segment begins to crack and extend itself in the new
direction, steadily propagating past other segments and
establishing the new trend. Now that we have documented the
existence of these features and learned to recognize the
patterns they produce, we are finding their traces in many
ancient sea floor records all over the globe. Sections of
the sea floor that were formed during plate motion changes
are full of them!
My other primary
research interest has concerned the history of plate
tectonic interactions in western North America. It was clear
from the beginning of the plate tectonic revolution that the
San Andreas fault system in California was a major
strike-slip plate boundary between the Pacific and North
American plates. However, when we examined the magnetic
anomalies in the adjacent Pacific ocean basin, they implied
a very different plate configuration for past times. They
showed that the ocean floor here was formed by sea floor
spreading between the Pacific plate and another oceanic
plate, the Farallon plate. The Farallon plate had once lain
between the Pacific and North American plates but had since
been completely subducted along much of its length. The
subduction of the Farallon plate allowed the other two
(Pacific and North America) to come into contact only rather
recently and only then to form the San Andreas fault. The
geologic record in California told a similar story: a long
history of subduction and a relatively young origin for the
San Andreas system.
My combined
background in marine geophysics and land geology put me in
the perfect position to explore these interactions between
the oceanic and continental plates. I could see that the
oceanic and continental geologic histories should be very
intricately interrelated here, and I could not resist
thinking and reading and talking and experimenting. (It is
to the credit of my graduate supervisor, Dr. John Mudie,
that he encouraged me to continue in this direction, even
though it was a major distraction from the Deep Tow survey
work that I was being paid to do.) When the dates of the
magnetic reversals were finally established first-hand by
the Deep Sea Drilling Project in 1969, the final piece fell
in place. I went into a frenzy of writing and drafting. The
result was a paper about the origin and evolution of the San
Andreas fault system.
Much of the
definitive data for the plate tectonic revolution came from
the oceanic realm. This was natural since the ocean floors
have relatively simple histories, being formed by sea-floor
spreading, travelling a while, then being destroyed at
subduction zones. The continents, on the other hand, are
much more permanent features, so that the record of each new
tectonic disturbance is overprinted upon older records and
the resulting histories, structures, and compositions of the
continental crusts are complex and heterogeneous. Over the
decades it has become more and more clear that simple rigid
plates cannot be used to describe most events that can be
observed in the continental geological record. The plate
motions can give us general ideas, e.g., Africa and North
America collided in the late Paleozoic, causing continental
shortening in the southern Appalachians, then split apart
again in the Triassic, forming rifts and then the Atlantic
Ocean, but such generalizations do not tap the quantitative
power of plate tectonics. For this reason, the origin and
evolution of the San Andreas system is particularly
interesting. It is one of the few continental tectonic
problems that can be approached in a quantitative way using
the step by step predictions of rigid plate motions that we
get from the oceans.
I have been
talking and waving my arms almost from the start of my
geologic career. In the 1960s marine geology was a very
small field and most schools and research institutions
didn't have anyone on their staffs who specialized in this
subject. Thus, when word of the revolution spread, we
oceanographic graduate students found ourselves in the
unusual situation of having a profound story to tell. I gave
seminars all over the West, to anyone who would listen. It
was a heady experience. I love explaining things, anyway,
and these audiences were rapt!
From all that
talking, I soon learned what was easy and what hard to
understand and explain. For example, the relative motions
between two plates are easily understood by most people: for
example, Africa and South America spreading apart. On the
other hand, the relative motions among three or more plates
is generally quite difficult to visualize. For example, with
respect to the North American plate, the Pacific plate is
moving to the northwest (along the San Andreas) while the
Juan de Fuca plate is moving with the Pacific, but also is
spreading away from it toward the east-southeast. Adding up
these motions, we find that the Juan de Fuca is subducting
beneath North America in a northeasterly direction. It is
not very intuitive, to say the least! When I wrote about the
San Andreas system, I took a lot of care explaining the
underlying concepts and ideas. It felt audacious at the time
(Who was I, a graduate student, to be tutoring the world?)
but I've been glad ever since. Because the San Andreas
system is one of the few land geological features that
clearly benefits from the quantitative understanding of
plate motions, my work is commonly used as a teaching
vehicle to introduce students to plate concepts, in general.
About being a woman in a male dominated field of
science...
I am the third of four children, the second of three
girls. When we were growing up, our parents encouraged us to
do our very best in anything we wanted to do. They glowed
over every accomplishment and took great relish in helping
us learn about anything that caught our interests. When I
got out into the world, I was astonished to discover that
women weren't supposed to be able to do all sorts of things.
Things that I had been doing all my life and that my mother
had done all her life before me. So, of course, I didn't
believe it!
In those days
there were myriad restrictions barring women from many
activities and especially from field situations. Women were
not allowed on many of the ships in the oceanographic fleet.
(Women on ships are unlucky, don't you know?) The early
support from my family gave me great strength to stand firm
and smile and insist, knowing that I was right, knowing that
the rules and restrictions were unjust. I had important work
to do and I needed to do it from a ship. Several
anti-discrimination laws and court cases in the 1950s and
1960s also played a crucial role. I never threatened anyone
with a lawsuit, but I know that the possibility was
mentioned from time to time by my male colleagues to prod
various recalcitrant administrators into doing the right
thing. (Administrators hate lawsuits.)
It has been a
great pleasure to me through the decades to watch the
numbers and diversity of women grow and flower in the
physical sciences. Of course, there are still vestiges of
prejudice. The intensity and isolation inherent in research
efforts and especially in field work accentuate all
inter-personal interactions, good and bad. For the most
part, I find that the women and the men are happier with an
integrated approach, one that capitalizes on the talents and
strengths of a diverse working group.
About science and geoscience education for
non-scientists...
One of the things that is becoming more and more clear to
me is that everyone in modern society needs to have a
fundamental understanding of science and technology. Ours is
a technological age and one in which the results of our
technology are fundamentally altering our planet, our only
home. The users of this technology must understand the
consequences of that use.
Earth science, in
particular, offers a unique, long-term view that all world
citizens need to incorporate into their thinking. The earth
was here long before we humans evolved and will continue,
indifferent to whether we thrive as a species. Many geologic
processes such as earthquakes, floods, landslides,
beach-cliff erosion, and volcanic eruptions have been
occurring for billions of years and will continue, no matter
what we do. We now have enough understanding of many of
these phenomena to take them into account when planning our
structures and our activities. We know how to minimize the
impacts of many natural disasters, but it won't happen in a
democracy unless the citizens understand what is
involved.
Another aspect
that geologists need to communicate and citizens need to
learn concerns the very real limitations of our planet's
resources and environment. We are using up the world's
supplies of fossil fuels at an alarming rate and with
reckless abandon. Along the way we are fundamentally
altering the global atmosphere, an experiment whose
consequences we can only guess at. Many of the world's
communities are already suffering water shortages and it can
only get worse as their populations continue to expand. At
the height of a terrible drought a few years ago, I listened
with total astonishment to a talk-radio caller who was
asserting his fundamental "right" to take a long hot
shower!
Beyond these
practical matters there is a more fundamental reason that
people should learn about the natural world. It is fun and
interesting and empowering to learn the reasons that things
are the way they are. The shapes and colors and textures of
the countryside tell their own stories to the viewer who is
geologically aware. The configurations and locations of
continents, oceans, mountains, plains, swamps and deserts,
all are understandable and somewhat predictable. A basic
knowledge of geology can enhance every cross-country trip
and can deepen every person's appreciation of the planet and
of the back yard. It brings the world map to life.
For all these
reasons I am now devoting a lot of my energy to public
geo-communication. This ranges from teaching large classes
to non-science majors, running workshops and field trips for
all levels of teachers, and, lately, creating computer
geo-animations to bring our slow-moving, huge processes into
human time and space and ken. (A new jazzy version of my old
mappy art projects! We never escape our basic selves.)
I have one son, Alyosha Molnar, now grown up and starting
his first real job as an Engineer after graduating with
highest honors from Swarthmore College. (Proud Mother, me?)
He is such a pleasure to me! Indeed, though I've had great
fun and excitement in my career, raising him was by far the
most interesting and exciting and absorbing thing I ever
did.
My son has lots of
cousins. My siblings and I are constantly inventing
adventures for them all: passing on that love for wilderness
and adventure and that self-reliance and group dynamics;
helping them find their powers and strengths; letting them
know they are wonderful and should reach for the stars.
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