Most normal people for their friend's
birthday might post a fun selfie or a
cute picture of a baby animal, but not me.
It was my friend Aaron's 22nd birthday
so I posted an epic photo of the
Jurassic Navajo Sandstone to her
Facebook wall. Now, you have to understand
that the Navajo Sandstone is the poster
child for a feature in geology known as
cross-bedding,
which represents fossilized ripple marks
or sand dunes. The cross beds in the
Navajo Sandstone can be metres high
which is absolutely insane considering
most cross beds are only several
centimeters tall or so. Aaron and I had
never seen the Navajo Sandstone in
person, but it's in every single
introductory geology textbook, so you can
bet we knew just how freaking awesome it
was. A few months later, during my first
semester as a graduate student at Utah
State, I went on a field trip to
Southwest Utah where, you guessed it, the
Navajo Sandstone and it's incredible
cross-bedding
is exposed. For days leading up to the
field trip, I was practically beside
myself with excitement because I was
finally going to get to see the Navajo
Sandstone with my own eyes. We were
camping in Snow Canyon State Park and
when we arrived it was completely dark. I
absolutely could not handle it because I
knew our campsite was literally
surrounded by Navajo Sandstone. I could
feel the 200 million year old sand dunes
taunting me from the darkness. I vividly
remember waking up in the morning, seeing
it was light out, ripping open my sleeping
bag and leaping out of bed much more
easily than I normally would. I burst out
of my tent, and knowing me, was making
some sort of strange noise that
indicated I was incredibly excited and
from across the campsite my friend Brady
asked, "Hey Amy, what is that?" You can only
imagine how I responded. Now, most people
want to know how in the world that came
to be so incredibly excited about rocks.
I can pretty much pin it to two
experiences that shaped both my passion
for and way I think about geology. As an
undergraduate, I studied abroad in New
Zealand and if you've seen the Lord of
the Rings movies, you might imagine that
New Zealand is a geologist's paradise,
and it absolutely is. While I was there, I
went on a five-day field trip to the
Alpine Fault Zone, the boundary between
the Pacific and Australian tectonic
plates. On this field trip, I got to sit
on that plate boundary with one hand on
the Pacific plate, which underlies the
entire Pacific Ocean, and one hand on the
Australian plate, which underlies the
entire Australian continent. These are
the moments that at least I as a
geologists dream of. Two weeks after I
returned from New Zealand, I set off on
the geology rite-of-passage: field camp. I
spent four weeks in the deserts,
mountains and forests of Montana and
Wyoming,
making geologic maps, being hands-on with
the rocks and forging friendships that
will last a lifetime. It was also the
first, but definitely not the last,
documented evidence of me actually
hugging a rock. What was so incredible
about my field camp experience beyond
all the amazing places I got to go and
beautiful geology I got to see is that
it was like a geology immersion program.
I emerged from field camp feeling like I
could speak geology and because of this
new understanding, I felt so
fundamentally connected to the science. I
can still vividly remember the moment
when everything clicked and I knew I had
to do this for the rest of my life. If
you would have told me in that moment
that once I did get to graduate school I
would be doing research on one of the
most famous Faults in the world, the San
Andreas Fault, I probably would have
fainted on the spot. As a graduate
student at Utah State, I work on one of
the most enigmatic sections of the San
Andreas, the southernmost section in the
Coachella Valley. There hasn't been a
major earthquake on the southernmost
San Andreas since humans have lived
there, which makes it a critical area for
geologic research. The better we
understand how the fault operates and
behaves - how and when the system slips
and deforms - the better we will be able
to predict hazards such as ground
shaking when the big one does happen. And
so, you might think that in graduate
school my enthusiasm for geology has
grown astronomically, and it has, but my
graduate research has allowed me to
become more than just the girl who gets
ridiculously excited about rocks.
My research has given me grounding as
both a researcher and a scientist. It has
allowed me to turn my passion into
profession, not only getting to do what I
love every single day, but also having
opportunities to share my work with
others. My field area in the Mecca Hills
has several popular hiking trails and
people will often stop to ask why I'm
crawling all over the canyon with my
nose to the rocks. Just barely a month
ago, after explaining to someone the
geology of the Mecca Hills and that I
was studying faults in the San Andreas
Fault Zone, they responded with a look of
childlike excitement and said, "Wow, I
really should have taken a geology class!"
It is in moments like these where I am
the most excited about geology; where I
can respond and say, "Heck yeah, you should
have! Rocks are literally the coolest
thing on the face of this planet!" The
clues that the earth leaves behind that
allow us to investigate the record of
the past and provide insight into the
present should be enough for anyone to
geek out on rocks.
