Field Trip on EARTH Magazine

Down to Earth With: Paleontologist Lisa D. White

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 11:19:12 -0400

Lisa White, assistant director of Education and Public Programs at the University of California Museum of Paleontology, at the 2016 meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Credit: Thea Boodhoo.

As a college student at San Francisco State University, Lisa D. White’s first choice of major was photography. She was drawn to landscapes, and dreamed of becoming “the black female Ansel Adams,” she tells me, surrounded by fossils. We’re in a lab at the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) in Berkeley, where she is assistant director of Education and Public Programs. She is also a micropaleontologist, and from 1990 until joining UCMP in 2012, she was professor of geology and later associate dean at San Francisco State University.

Teaching geology to biologists: An essay on an interdisciplinary field trip in Africa

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 14:21:50 -0400

Jill Peterson, an Adams State student on the trip, painted this representation of the field trip. Credit: Jill Peterson.

We stop next to a wide, dry, creek bed on the floor of a steep canyon near Tarangire National Park in northern Tanzania. Elephants spray water on themselves and their companions. In the tall baobab trees on the far side of the valley, monkeys jump from limb to limb and tree to tree, over the heads of impalas that don’t seem to care. I am standing in the back of one of our open-top Land Rovers and, like the monkeys, I’m waving my arms this way and that as I discuss the geologic strata in the canyon walls. Like the impalas, the khaki-clad college students in the Land Rovers don’t seem to notice.

Geology for everyone: Making the field accessible

Thu, 06 Aug 2015 09:43:35 -0400

The design of this field trip at last year's Geological Society of America meeting in British Columbia created the opportunity for all participants to engage in the field activities that best suited their abilities. Credit: International Association for Geoscience Diversity.

On Oct. 18, 2014, at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Vancouver, British Columbia, the society hosted, for the first time, a field trip that was fully accessible to geoscience students and faculty with disabilities. The trip, which we led, is bringing attention to an often-ignored issue in the geosciences. Many students with sensory, physical or intellectual disabilities may be potentially discouraged from pursuing geoscience degrees when faced with course requirements that involve physically rigorous field-based learning.

Creationism creeps into mainstream geology

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 06:41:58 -0500

Field trip 409 at Red Rock Canyon Open Space near Colorado Springs, Colo. Steven Newton

Steve Austin, chair of the geology department at the Institute for Creation Research, was one of the field trip leaders. Steven Newton

It was easy to miss the part where the field trip leader said the outcrop formed during Noah’s Flood. After all, “During these catastrophic flood flows, turbulent, hyperconcentrated suspensions were observed to transform laminar mudflows” sounds like a reasonable description of alluvial fan processes. And “massive marine transgression” sounds scientific enough. But when creationist geologists use those phrases, they take on a very different meaning.

The Coconino's starring role in the creationist-geologist battle

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 06:41:58 -0500

Contact of the Toroweap Formation (top) and the Coconino Sandstone (bottom) in the Grand Canyon. Steven Newton

Arizona’s Coconino Sandstone — a deposit seen in the Grand Canyon and elsewhere — plays a central role in the creationist argument that the upper rocks of the Grand Canyon were deposited during Noah’s Flood. In fact, the posters presented by students and faculty of Cedarville University at the 2010 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Denver, Colo., pushed a consistent narrative: The Coconino did not form in an eolian (wind-blown) environment. Why is this so important? If the Coconino is eolian, it means the Flood did not happen.