All of the scientists profiled here love fieldwork. How could they not? They collect data to satisfy their curiosity (sometimes, there truly is the thrill of discovery!), develop camaraderie and close friendships with their field mates, visit foreign and beautiful lands, and experience different cultures. But, there are also physical, mental, and emotional hardships associated with outdoor labor in the oft-rugged terrain that is home to many of our most interesting field sites. Blazing heat or icy cold, sun, dust, wind. Bugs (insects, pathogens, or both), poisonous snakes, bears. Hauling in the water you need, digging your own toilet, digging out stuck field vehicles. For the newcomer, this can all be a bit daunting.

Which is exactly why rookies need to go to the field with someone like Dr. Naomi Levin. According to her students, Naomi likes to add fun and games to fieldwork. For example, after spending a few days at the Elandsfontein archeological site in South Africa, she started a game in which she’d buy pizza and beer for all the students if she could correctly predict what they would find in a 2-meter hole. Crucial explanation point #1- The rock layers of interest at Elandsfontein are largely buried by modern dunes, and so many holes are needed to reconstruct the paleolandscape. Crucial explanation point #2- Students do most of the digging. Crucial explanation point #3- The game ended with many happy students.

Another popular game that Naomi created at Elandsfontein- “It’s time to play fizz or no fizz!!” The basis for this game is that for decades, white nodules in the sediments were thought to be carbonate: the color was right and the hypothesized paleoenvironment was right. But, carbonate fizzes if you drop HCl on it, and Naomi discovered that the many of the nodules did not fizz. Naomi used the “fizz or no fizz” game to get archeological students to learn if the white nodules and other material at the study site had carbonate or not and why they may or may not have carbonate. Many of these students left that season very interested in rocks!

Many of you may be wondering what the big deal is about carbonate nodules, and why Naomi spends so much time finding and analyzing them. Carbonate forms in some soils, and chemical analyses can be used to determine the environment in which that soil formed. The amount of heavy vs. light carbon documents past vegetation. Grasses incorporate more heavy carbon into their cells than do most shrubs and trees, and so carbonate nodules formed in grasslands also have heavier carbon than those that form in forested regions. The ratio of heavy to light oxygen can tell us about the amount and seasonality of rainfall, as well as the source water for the rain.

Thanks to Naomi’s work on carbonates, isotopes in fossil teeth (similar principles of reconstructing paleoenvironment as described for carbonates), and stratigraphy in East Africa, we now know a lot more about the environments in which our earliest hominid ancestors arose and evolved. In particular, considerable controversy surrounds the question of whether our earliest ancestor who walked on two legs was a savanna or forest dweller. Did a transition from forests to grasslands drive the evolution of bipedalism, or were other factors more important (e.g., freeing up our hands for tool use, infant care, or other)? Thus, Naomi’s work bridges disciplines – geology, paleontology, anthropology, and paleoclimate – and she has shown that crossing disciplines produces really excellent science!

For more information on Dr. Naomi Levin, please visit: http://www.nlevin.net

In October, Naomi received the Donath Medal, the highest award given by the Geological Society of America to a scientist under 35. Her citation and response are available here and an interview with GSA TV here.

It is common knowledge that burning fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal) adds carbon dioxide (CO₂) to the atmosphere. All scientists and a steadily increasing proportion of non-scientists also know that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, which means that increasing the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere will cause temperature to rise. And thus we have GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE, which has been widely publicized and (regrettably) politicized. Unfortunately, global climate change is not the only misfortune of our CO₂ emissions. CO₂ does not remain in the atmosphere for all eternity – it has to go somewhere, and one major somewhere is the ocean. Adding CO₂ to water makes it more acidic, and voila, OCEAN ACIDIFICATION, global warming’s popularly neglected, ugly stepsister. So why care if the ocean is getting more acidic? Well, many of your favorite marine critters (corals, clams, snails) have external hard parts made of calcium carbonate, which dissolves in acid. Even minor changes in the ocean pH (e.g. 8.2 to 8.0) can cause problems with skeleton building, growth, reproduction, or survival, especially when coupled with warmer temperatures. Get it? Got it? Eek!

Dr. Rowan Martindale scours the fossil record for past examples of ocean acidification and its effect on reef ecosystems, particularly the corals themselves. Her dissertation research focused on the Late Triassic (235 – 201 million years ago), when the ancestors of the creatures that make up our modern reefs were just gaining prominence. Rowan investigated reef composition and ecology to understand how these reefs worked, and she also compared reefs from different parts of North America and Austria to document geographic differences in reef composition, diversity, and structure. Rowan’s knowledge of Late Triassic reefs is especially important because the Triassic-Jurassic boundary is one of the five largest mass extinctions in Earth’s history and included  widespread reef collapse.

At the end of the Triassic, a huge amount of magma quickly (by geologic standards) erupted, splitting the supercontinent Pangea and creating what is now the Atlantic Ocean. The volcanic province covered an area larger than the United States or Canada and released lots of CO₂, SO₂, and other nasty gases into the atmosphere and ocean.  Analyses from plant fossils and soil carbonates at the T-J boundary provide an independent line of evidence for increased CO₂. Using a range of interdisciplinary studies from geology to climatology to modern reef ecology, Rowan and her colleagues have concluded that oceanic acidification was likely a major player in the T-J extinction. Rowan has now moved on to studying another reef extinction event in the Early Jurassic (~183 million years ago) that coincides with large volcanic eruptions across South Africa and Antarctica. She and her colleagues seek to determine whether ocean acidification also played a role in this event, which produced a less severe extinction. By comparing and contrasting this extinction and reef collapse with the T-J event, Rowan hopes to determine what factors allow organisms to survive a major climate perturbation event.

In keeping with the field theme of the blog, I asked Rowan to share one of her favorite field stories, and it’s a good one:

“Before I went to Austria (PhD work), I consulted one of the great Austrian paleontologists Dr. Alfred Fischer who was an emeritus faculty at USC. Al is a legend and even in his late 80s still had a photographic memory of field sites he’d only been to once in his 20s/30s. Unfortunately due to his age, Al couldn’t join me in the Alps, but he gave me directions to several great sites (some of which were just ‘up the hill, to the left a-ways’….. which turned out to be a 3-5 km hike up a kilometer of elevation). While I was doing research on the Late Triassic Steinplatte reef near Tyrol, Austria, my field assistant and I found that the Austrians had built numerous billboards on the mountain to explain the paleontology that one might encounter during your hike (e.g. under your feet is the Rosso Ammonitico, a red limestone with fossils of ancient nautilus-like organisms). We hiked up the mountain (all the while thinking what an awesome idea this was), and when we reached the top, where the best corals were supposed to be, low and behold there was a big billboard about Fischer’s coral reef! I couldn’t believe it…. even though he was sitting at home in San Pedro, CA, Al had managed to join me in Austria! We took a bunch of photos and tried to read all the German descriptions of the fabulous corals that were at our feet and then brought them back for Al to see his enduring influence.”

I am seriously jealous that no such billboards exist for the paleobotanical sites of Roland Brown, Harry MacGinitie, Leo Hickey, and Scott Wing that I’ve visited in Western North America!

For more information on Dr. Rowan Martindale, visit her professional website here or UT’s profile of her.

It’s been nearly 3 weeks since my last post, and I have not yet reached my goal of 30 profiles. Life got in the way, and I had to spend nearly every minute of that time packing up my house and lab at Miami University and moving cross-country to my new position at the University of Wyoming. I am eternally grateful to my parents for spending two entire days carefully wrapping fossil plants in toilet paper – to misquote a favorite shirt of one of my former colleagues, “My job is rarely glamorous but never boring.” Now that I am at my new post in Laramie, awaiting the arrival of nearly all my worldly belongings, I will get back to work on the 15 profiles that remain from my original commitment. And then we’ll see where things go from there. There are some fabulous scientists coming up!

But first, I want to take a minute to publicize two creative projects that aim to combat the subtle yet persuasive biases that dissuade girls from pursuing careers in STEM fields.

1. LEGO’s Research Institute

LEGO has confirmed that as of August 2014 “Paleontologist Barbie” will no longer be the only paleontologist doll made by a major toy company. LEGO will release a “Research Institute” LEGO Ideas set that consists of three female scientists, the brainchild of geochemist Ellen Kooijman. Unlike the Mattel model, Kooijman’s LEGO paleontologist wears the eminently practical blue jeans paired with a tan long sleeved shirt (no short shorts or bright pink canteen here!) and carries a large gray magnifying glass. Here’s hoping LEGO follows her design. Thank you to everyone who wrote to inform me of this. Can’t wait to get my set!

2. The Bearded Lady Project: Challenging the Face of Science

This summer, I’m stepping out of my scientific comfort zone and taking part in a creative, artistic endeavor with director Lexi Jamieson Marsh and photographer Kelsey Vance. Exciting? Absolutely! Terrifying? Truthfully, yes, but then I remind myself just how talented and motivated my collaborators are!

Intrigued? Check out the TBLP tab on my blog, or click here to visit the project’s website.