Ventures in the Sun: A Photo Essay

Yeah, I’ve been gone for a good bit. I can explain. Politics, the pandemic, and health crises sapped my will to write. Then the sun came out. (And there were so. many. volcanoes.) In this essay, I will ‘splain what’s been going on, and show you some of the beautiful sights we saw as we broke free from a confining year.

This was a summer of slowly learning how to adventure again.

The pandemic was rough, even for introverts. We couldn’t travel out to our favorite volcanoes, and even local outdoors walks in areas without many people felt fraught. The winter was especially tough. My partner was an essential worker, and though we never caught COVID, we risked it daily. Political turmoil made everything much worse, especially when the Capitol was attacked in January. The stress of it all caused me to withdraw and him to relapse. We nearly lost each other. Words failed me for a long time. It felt like nothing would ever be safe again.

But in spring, he went into residential treatment, and my friend M and I began tentatively venturing out. Just to nearby parks, at first. She introduced me to Union Bay Natural Area, where magnificent views of Lake Union, the Issaquah Alps, and Tahoma (Mount Rainier) provide a lovely setting for many fantastic birds. That’s when my passion for the sun was rekindled after a year of being unable to venture out.

A Caspian Tern flying over Union Bay, with Mount Rainier as a backdrop. Credit: Dana Hunter

I brought her to North Creek, where trails through the wetlands and along ponds provide many more opportunities for birding (yes, it’s become our thing), plus lovely views of the ridges that the Cordilleran Ice Sheet bequeathed to the Puget Lowlands.

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Ventures in the Sun: A Photo Essay
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Dana’s Pandemic Holiday Shopping Guide

Ah, yes, it’s that time of year again, where the holidays bunch up like they’ve put off celebrating til the last minute and suddenly it’s time to give All The Gifts. Of course, this being 2020, and many of us being in America where the ostensible leader can’t see reality past his artificially inflated ego, this is a complicated holiday season. Many of us will be socially distancing still. Viruses don’t take holidays, even when we wish they would.

Thanks to eCommerce, though, we can still give our loved ones some nice little gifts if we don’t want to skip that part, many of which will help while away a long pandemic winter. Let’s explore!

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Dana’s Pandemic Holiday Shopping Guide

Rosetta Stones Has an Exciting Future In Store!

Since leaving the now-defunct Scientific American Blogs Network, Rosetta Stones has settled happily into its sweet summer cottage. It’s been all about earthquakes lately: we’ve talked about the most recent Oaxaca quake, and checked on Puerto Rico’s still vigorous earthquake sequence. We’re going to be exploring the fault zone this sequence seems to be related to soon. It’s very groovy!

I know it looks like it, but I swear Rosetta Stones isn’t turning into Dana’s Earthquake Emporium. I’ve got a review of one of the best Mount St. Helens books of all time loaded up – you’ll see it this Thursday. I’m having a subterranean homesick blues spell courtesy of giving old photos new life in Adobe Photoshop Express, so we’ll be stopping by some of my favorite Arizona geological haunts. And I’ve got some very hawt books about Hawaii volcanoes to tell you about!

But summer doesn’t last forever, and the sweet summer cottage is only an ephemeral home. What happens when the season ends?

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Rosetta Stones Has an Exciting Future In Store!

Rosetta Stones Has a New Home!

For those who have been missing Rosetta Stones since the sad demise of the Scientific American Blogs network, I have fantastic news! We’ve moved into a sweet summer cottage while our custom forever home is being built. Bookmark this site, and come join us for a summer full of fun, phenomenal, and sometimes fearsome geology!

Image shows Rosetta Stones title superimposed over a photo of the sea and serpentinite rocks. Below is the headline

It’s got comments!

I’ll notify you here when new posts are available. You can also check in on our official Facebook page for regular updates and extras. And you can get early access to blog posts, exclusive content, and all sorts of extras on Patreon, so please do consider becoming a Patron. There are many levels to choose from, starting at just $1 per month.

To see what’s in store for this new Rosetta Stones epoch, check out this post. Raise your geologic hammers, and let’s get rocking!

Rosetta Stones Has a New Home!

Four Must-Read Mount St. Helens Books

It seems like entire libraries have been written about the Mount St. Helens eruption. Here are four books well worth reading.

Let me just start by stating the obvious: this is far from a definitive list. It’s just a microcosm of must-reads. These are four books that provided particular insight. Some are out of print, but used copies are fairly easy to find. This is the stack I would personally hand to anyone wanting to learn all they can about that fateful day, who want accuracy, but who don’t want anything too technical or difficult.

You should purchase a box of your preferred tissues to go along with these books. You’ll get to know some of the people we lost up there. And it’s hard. But I feel we owe it to the dead to remember them, how they died, and to try to prevent the same thing from happening to others.

There are incredible stories of survival here. At times, there are frank discussions of terrible injuries. What a volcanic eruption does to a human body is truly grim. So be mindful of that. Take breaks when you need to.

The best part of all of these stories is that science prevented catastrophic loss of life and human suffering. And we learned so many lessons that helped save lives when other volcanoes erupted.

Mount St. Helens is one of the most fascinating volcanoes in existence. These books do her justice.

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Four Must-Read Mount St. Helens Books

Forty Years Ago Today: The Cataclysm

“Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!”

– Last words of USGS volcanologist David Alexander Johnston, 8:32 am, May 18th, 1980

Dave Johnston would be 70 today, if he hadn’t been up at Coldwater II, watching the volcano. He should have been safe: before they’d chosen the site, they’d investigated the ridge and determined Mount St. Helens hadn’t done anything particularly terrible to it for thousands of years.

Dave had thought there was a chance she’d blow laterally, like Bezimiany volcano on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. But volcanoes rarely erupt sideways, and when they do, it’s seldom with such force. Miles away, high on a ridge where lahars couldn’t reach, they thought it would be okay. It’s never safe in the Red Zone. But for science, for public safety, you take the calculated risk.

You can never know for sure. And sometimes, like Dave, you end upon the fatal side of the calculation.

Today, take a moment to honor all of the volcanologists who have sacrificed their lives in the quest to further our understanding of these beautiful, dangerous mountains.

Dave Johnston collecting samples from the crater of Mount St. Helens, April 30th, 1980. Credit: Rick Hoblitt/USGS

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Forty Years Ago Today: The Cataclysm

5 Fantastic Pioneering Women in the Geosciences

It’s International Women’s Day. While we’re appreciating living women worldwide, let’s celebrate some of the pioneering women who made the current state of earth science knowledge possible.

Illustration of two women sitting back to back holding rock hammers.
Credit: Dana Hunter

Pioneering Women in the Geosciences: Introduction

Geology has many fathers, and we know them well. But few of us can name its mothers. Mothers who sacrificed far more than most of the men did – many women could only succeed in the geosciences if they remained unmarried and childless (and some organizations, like the British Geological Survey, made that a formal requirement). They fought discrimination and doubt. They worked hard for a fraction of the recognition their male colleagues got. Despite all the decks stacked against them, they made important contributions to our knowledge of the world. Forgetting the women who left us geoscience legacies is intolerable. We need to remember.

This series seeks to restore these women to our lexicon of famous geologists.

Zonia Baber: “The Public May Be Brought to Understand the Importance of Geography”

Zonia Baber (1862-1955) is one of those people you aspire to be and fear you will never manage to become even half as good as.

And I only chose her as our first Pioneering Woman in Geology because of her name. I had this list of women I knew next to nothing about, and I hovered a finger over it, and said, “There. That’s an interesting name. Let’s start with her.” Then I found out she was a geographer, when I’d hoped to begin with a geologist. She was a teacher, when I’d wanted women who worked in the field. An American, when I’d hoped to start with a different country. Bugger. But Mary Arizona “Zonia” Baber? Still couldn’t resist the name. So I read past the first sentence in the Wikipedia article, and promptly fell in love. She co-founded the Geographic Society of Chicago, which was modeled after the National Geographic society? Awesome! Involved in social issues? Brilliant! Feminist, even so! And then I found out that she’d got her start in geology. Her geography had rock and earth all the way through. Outstanding.

Mary Horner Lyell: “A Monument of Patience”

You never hear of the other Lyell. Sir Charles, you know quite well: he set the infant science of geology firmly on its feet and inspired Charles Darwin. But there’s another Lyell who was a geologist, and without her, Charles Lyell would have found his work far more difficult, if not impossible. When he married Mary Horner, he pledged himself to a lifelong scientific partner.

Why don’t we know her?

Marjorie Sweeting: “The Basis for a World Model of Karst”

One of the best karst geologists in the world was technically a geographer. That’s the thing with physical geography: women were allowed to do it, and some of them made it just as geological as they liked. Dr. Marjorie Sweeting (1920-1994) certainly loved doing geology. Let’s call her what she was: geographer, geomorphologist, and distinguished Cambridge Fellow. The quality of her life’s work, plus my affection for alliteration, leads me to crown her the queen of karst.

I’ve fallen a bit in love with all of the women in geology I’ve researched and written about so far, but Marjorie was the first who got me copiously salivating. You see, I’m a bit of a karst addict. I especially love the karst landscapes of China. So finding out that this remarkable woman led the first set of British geomorphologists to China, and was the first western geologist to study those astounding landscapes, sent me into an agony of ecstasy. And I discovered a woman every bit as remarkable as the landforms she studied.

Inge Lehmann: “A Small Solid Core in the Innermost Part of the Earth”

At the age of 105, Inge Lehmann (1888-1993) looked back on a long, productive life with satisfaction. During her career in seismology, she had made two major discoveries and made other significant contributions. She’d won multiple prestigious awards, become a fellow of the Royal Society, and had honorary doctorates bestowed by Columbia University and the University of Copenhagan.She was an immensely talented seismologist.

She experienced her first earthquake when she was growing up in Østerbro, Denmark. “I may have been 15 or 16 years old when, on a Sunday morning, I was sitting at home together with my mother and sister, and the floor began to move under us,” she later wrote. “The hanging lamp swayed. It was very strange. My father came into the room. “It was an earthquake,” he said. The center had evidently been at a considerable distance, for the movements felt slow and not shaky. In spite of a great deal of effort, an accurate epicenter was never found. This was my only experience with an earthquake until I became a seismologist 20 years later.”

Janet Vida Watson: “A Scientist Who Communicated with the Earth”

Dr. Janet Vida Watson’s geology career is a love story.

She loved her rocks immensely. To her, they weren’t inert, cold stone. They had character. They had emotions. She loved her “happy rocks,” and trusted them more than she trusted the isotopes labs wrested from them (though she never shied away from new technology: on the contrary, she eagerly embraced it). She turned to them throughout her career, and they imparted their life stories to her, sometimes revolutionizing an aspect of earth science in the process.

She loved geology so much she did it on her honeymoon, with her groom, John Sutton. She adored field work, and teaching students to do this good science of rock-breaking. She loved it to the end of her life.

5 Fantastic Pioneering Women in the Geosciences