Forget Indiana Jones - Hopkins has an exciting adventurer of it's own.
You can find Professor Bruce Marsh in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department planning his next trip around the world. He has conducted research in Antarctic, he has been attacked by Kodiak bears in the Aleutian Islands and he has had no end of fun doing it.
We took some time to sit down with him and learn about his work and the department that is the "hidden jewel" of Hopkins.
News-Letter (N-L): Who or what would you say most influenced your decision to enter the earth science field?Bruce Marsh (BM): I'm just kind of doing the same kind of things I was interested in doing as a kid . . . I would go off and explore little areas; I would make little huts in places, go to the shorelines and do little pretend scientific things.I have an occupation in geology . . . but I've been all over the Earth, and I'm basically doing [the same things I did when I was little]. I think it's key for human beings to look at what they're doing in their lives when they're young and say, "How would I blend that into an adult career?"
N-L: We hear that you travel to Antarctica every year to research. Could you explain a little about the trip and your research there?
BM: We fly out of New Zealand to a place called McMurdo. It's an eight-hour flight in a C1-30 aircraft. We work in the area called the Dry Valleys region.
It's spectacular ?- it's never had ice or snow on it. It's one of the . . . most ancient areas on Earth. These valleys have been cut by wind and water.
It's a microclimate; what happens is that the magnetic intrusions are so resistant to ice that they dam up the ice, and it's so dry and cold that the ice actually evaporates.
The area ranges from 10,000 feet to sea level, so at 10,000 feet the air is thin and doesn't have any moisture in it, and when the air cascades down to sea level, it's compressed because of the difference in pressure, so it heats up by 50 degrees Celsius. It can absorb a lot more moisture, and it sucks up all the moisture in this region. It's like a big hairdryer.
Sometimes when we're down there and it snows, it evaporates right in front of our eyes. It's a really neat part of the world.
N-L: Is it dangerous to work in such an extreme environment? BM: It's dangerous in terms of being in the field. This is a no man's land - you have to be careful that someone doesn't fall, you have to make sure you stay warm and people don't get hypothermic - there are lots of normal worries. I've done this kind of thing a lot; I've worked with and been attacked by Kodiak bears, I've worked underwater in vehicles in Iceland, I've crashed in airplanes in Baja California - I've been through a lot.
I tell people I feel like an aging middle linebacker - I'm starting to worry. So I don't think I'm going back to Antarctica anymore, because I've been working there 16 years with nine expeditions, and we've really had a wonderful run.
We have so much information that now I just need to spend time writing it all up. My research was basically studying the roots of old volcanoes there, but I'm now starting a new big project in Hawaii.
A geothermal company drilled, by accident, into a hole that goes into the first active magma body, and they contacted me. I've been working with them - they're terrific to work with. They are getting very hot water [around 300 degrees Celcius] out of this hole, and they put it into turbines to get electrical energy.
They are supplying 50 percent of the energy for the island of Hawaii. It's totally geothermal, just coming from the hot water. The hot water goes to steam, runs the turbines and generates electricity. When the water cools down, they pump it back into the ground, it heats up, and they use it again. I'm learning a lot from them - it's very interesting.
N-L: What is your advice to students who would like to pursue a career in earth sciences?
BM: We're a really flexible department, and when you're over here you're treated like one of the family.
People come over here and say to me, "It just feels different over here." It is different here. You get your own mailbox, you get your own key to the front door, you get your own key to the library and we even have parties.
I even have an undergraduate, Emily Jordon, who's giving one of the lectures in my classes on the research she's been doing. The key is to have fun, and we're definitely having fun over here.
N-L: Tell me about the time you were in a plane crash.BM: I was a graduate student and we were very interested in going down to Baja California and doing some surveying . . . My advisor was a World War II pilot and he'd been in the Korean War. He was a superb pilot . . . He attempted to land on a beach and we hit a hummock of some sort of grass.
As we hit this thing the plane somersaulted up in the air and rolled over in the air upside down.
I was in the back seat and I put my hands on the ceiling as the plane came right down out of the air upside down and crashed on the roof. I thought the roof was going to come in on me so I just tried to lift it off with all my might.
And all our equipment fell down there and we were left hanging . . . As all this gear came down it broke all the bones in the back of my right hand. We were all kind of in shock and we were there for three or four days and no one could find us.
A crop duster from California happened to be coming down in this pleasure boat and anchored at another part of the island.
I was out mapping geology and happened to get on a high place and I said, "My God, there's a boat out there." It was this really remote place . . . no one would have found us.
We couldn't get at the batteries for the radios [to call for help]. There was acid leaking out of them.
N-L: What was it like to be attacked by Kodiak bears?BM: I've worked in the Aleutian Islands a lot. I've been around these 1500-pound Kodiak brown bears. Once a three year old cub - he weighed maybe 600 pounds himself - starting coming over toward us. I fired a warning shot.
As soon as that happened, the mother, who had been strolling another half-mile away, just came after us like mad.
I had a rifle and was getting ready. The bear was across the river and coming like mad. It was kind of a dangerous situation. Just as that bear was going to go over the bank and tear off after us, this undergraduate who didn't realize [what was going on] - he was cleaning up stuff - he picked up a big blue tarp and shook it.
[Bears] don't see very well so she thought it was another big bear and she looked up and roared up on her back legs.
I was petrified. I had her in my sights and I didn't know what I was going to have to do.
Then she grunted a few times to the cub and the cub started turning away. She finally dropped down . . . and slowly turned away. It seemed like it took 10 minutes but it apparently took two.
N-L: What led you to pursue a career in earth sciences?
BM: Well, it's curious. When I was applying to college, I looked down the list of all the things [I could major in], and I knew biology and physics, and I liked all that stuff, but then I saw geology.
There weren't any geology courses in my high school. It's like today; you probably don't have any geology courses even today. I had one page of geology in my whole physics book.
But I was raised in the woods. My father was a forester and I was raised on the shores of Lake Superior where there were lots of big rocks and cliffs, and I looked at those things a lot so I thought I probably should learn more about it.
So I just checked it off on the form, and I went to Michigan State University for undergraduate, and I've liked it ever since.
N-L: What do you think studying geology brings to any individual and to the world?
BM: When you look out at the earth around us, everything is really involved in the earth.
We need air, water, mineral resources. Just think about it - your camera has all kinds of stuff in it, this Mac has a titanium cabinet - it all comes out of the earth. Where does water come from? It comes out of the earth. What we breath, our climate, its all related to geology.
If you look at the biggest problems on the Earth today, AIDS, cancer, water, hunger, soils, all the base metals, even all the oils, coal, knowing how to handle the stuff, where it is, what to do with it, it involves international relationships.
Would you ever imagine the price of gold - when I was little it was $33 an ounce, and now it's $1,000 an ounce. So for geologists, this is at the core of the whole planet, of understanding these big problems.
If you just listed all these big problems, this department really has three-quarters of them under its responsibility. We're finding out now, for example, that there's water in the crust of the Earth.
We find out there's water down many miles. How do you access it? How do you handle it? How do people retain water? How do you keep Las Vegas or Phoenix with water?
People aren't going to leave, but rivers are being sucked off the surface. This is stuff that we do as scientists, and it's fundamental to our whole existence on this planet.
This is how I got into it as a young guy - I just started thinking, "God, this is so important to us." Mining, oil production, water, it all comes out of the ground. How does this actually work? How does it happen? Evolution, what happened in the past, meteor impacts.
Look at what happened to the dinosaurs. Just think of trying to understand what would happen if an asteroid started approaching us. That's another part of our existence, protecting the Earth. There are over 100,000 asteroids out there that are over a kilometer in diameter.
Just think of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The one that wiped the dinosaurs out 65 million years ago was about eight or 10 kilometers in diameter. You put this in a global extinction event, it wiped out 65 percent of everything on the Earth. 250 million years ago we had another event like this, it wiped out almost 90 percent of everything on Earth. We don't know if it was a meteorite or a big volcanic eruption, but these are really serious things.
We try to have the students really think responsibly about how fragile this is. You look at the moon, and you realize that's what the Earth used to look like, erosion and rain, and all of this has sculpted the Earth into something beautiful for us, but you look at all the other planets and you realize "boy, it's a deadly world out there."
We get 200 tons of meteorite debris a day hitting us. We're now old and mature enough that we can actually see an asteroid coming in, so we have to keep our eyes out, and if one comes, we have to say, "What are we going to do?"
This is really fundamental stuff, really important. Eventually people say we may find asteroids and things that are full of precious metal and we actually may have spacecrafts that will mine these things and bring them back to Earth.
Not to mention having another colony on Mars, for example. So, it's what we are, and this department, I think, is really the grassroots of our whole existence here.
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