Memoir 13: How I earned my living

Paleomagnetic field work

This may be me.  I can't be sure.

After reading about cool hikes and hair-raising adventures in the mountains, a history of my “adventures” in science will be pretty dry.  However, it’s part of the story, so here goes.

I have covered some of my work history already – for instance, my efforts for the Beaumont Hardware and Lumber Company.  In some ways that was more fun than anything I have done subsequently.  For shear personally satisfaction, driving a truck beats drilling rocks or giving lectures pretty much any day.  However, it pays a lot less – and, although I was a very bad truck driver, I was pretty good with rocks.  So I will skip that part.  My second “career” was with the U.S. Army, in which I served 1955-57 is subject of an essay all its own, which I have covered already, so I will skip over it, too, and go straight to: GEOLOGY.

You might well ask, “why geology?”  Well, there were three reasons.  First, my mother’s family had been into mining – and thus geology – for several generations.  For all my growing-up years I had rocks thrust into my face, accompanied by the question “Look, Myrl, Jr., isn’t this interesting?”  Actually, it almost never was the least bit interesting – but it made me acutely aware of the science of geology.  Second, my best friend at Caltech – Sam Sims – went into geology and always seemed to be doing fun things.  And finally: like most young people I thought that working at geology meant healthy and exhilarating rambles in the mountains, with only short trips to the office now and then.  As an aside - it doesn’t.

Anyway, when I got out of the army (1957) I went back to Stanford to get a Ph.D. in geology.  I had graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in economics, and I had only one course in geology on my record, so this promised to be a long haul.  Fortunately I had all the required math, physics and chemistry, from my Caltech year, but I still had to do most of the B.S. requirements, and then the graduate work.  No sweat: I was young; I had pretty good financial support from the school, no kids, and a working wife.  So I went at it hammer and tongs and made excellent progress.  Then I hit a mental roadblock.

It seems that, to get a Ph.D., you have to pass an oral examination, and also orally “defend” your thesis.  It is hard to believe now, but at that point in my life I was terrified of talking in front of anybody but close friends.  (Now, of course, I think it’s a kick in the pants.)  I watched other grad students get marinated, skewered, and roasted on a spit by the Stanford geology faculty.  Most of them passed eventually, but the process absolutely terrified me.  So, to my eternal shame, I bailed – took an M.S. (using the research I had already started), and went to work for Standard Oil Company of California, in Oildale, near Bakersfield, California.

My thesis, by the way, concerned “paleomagnetism” – the permanent magnetism often retained by rocks from the time they come into existence, and what you can learn about the earth by studying it.  It turns out you can learn a lot of things, many of them important, and some undetectable in any other way.  But more on that later.  As it happens, I was nearly a founding father of that scientific art. 

Chevron, of course, didn’t give a fig about paleomagnetism.  I had an M.S. from a top school, good grades, and took showers every few days, so they hired me at the going rate – I think, about $6000/year.  (This must have been about 1961,)  They set me to doing the most pedestrian, most mind-rotting sort of stuff – basically, matching up “well logs” from one drill hole to another, and trying to construct a sub-surface structural map therefrom.  Yes, yes – I know it was important.  But it also was poison for the soul – or, at least, to my soul.  I suspected that, if I stayed with Chevron, eventually I would make a lot of money.  I also realized early on that the oil business could be extremely absorbing, and potentially rewarding even in a non-monetary sense, if you regarded it as a business.  But, at that tender age, I wanted to be a real        SCIENTIST!  (Sometimes I second guess myself.  It would be nice to have $100 million to donate to ovarian cancer research.  Or even $1 million.  But, no – on balance I was far better off in pure research.)

So, after only about one year with Chevron I got the offer of a position with the U.S. Geological Survey, in Washington, D.C., and I jumped at it.  By now I had two kids, a pregnant wife, and not much money.  The job required me to live in or near Washington, D.C., which is an expensive place.  Furthermore, I took a pay cut.  But the work was far more interesting, and gave me a measure of independence.  I did field work all over the place – from Virginia to Minnesota.  None of it particularly shook the earth, but it was a solid beginning.  And all the time my poor wife, Virginia, had to cope with three kids and relative poverty!  I would have been content to stay with the USGS for the rest of my career except for two things: I didn’t want to live on the east coast, away from “real” mountains, and my boss was slowly giving me ulcers.

My boss was a self-made leader in geophysics – trained as a mathematician – who all but gave birth to the art of aeromagnetic surveying   His name was Isadore Zeitz.  Izzy was branch chief for the Regional Geophysics Branch, which was supposed to do practical surveys and experiments, leaving the more cerebral stuff to the Theoretical Geophysics Branch.  I desperately wanted three things:  to get into the other branch, get back west, and get away from Izzy.  Izzy was loyal to his troops and always willing to help, but his idea of management was to open your office door, turn blood red, and shout.  He never seemed to be relaxed, and he frequently seemed greatly outraged.  His face was usually a dull red in color.  We all thought he was a heart attack just waiting to happen.  Izzy died last year, at the age of 96.

Well, I applied several times for a transfer to either of the two other regional centers for the USGS: Menlo Park, California, or Denver, Colorado.  Other people got transferred, but they usually did so by using one powerful tool – they would threaten to quit and go to work for a university.  But I couldn’t make that threat: I lacked the proper union card, a Ph.D.  So I was stuck.  Finally, in desperation I took a leave of absence from the Survey and enrolled at U.C., Riverside, where in 1969 I finally earned that all-important union card.

But, then, having qualified for a university position, I decided to see what such a job was like. 

There were two vacant positions on the west coast at that time: San Diego, and Bellingham.  I chose the latter for two reasons: a smaller teaching load, and first-class mountains nearby.  I fully intended to return to the Survey after a few years, but I never did, and I have never regretted the choice.  For all its “iffy” weather, Bellingham turned out to be the best place on earth – at least for me. 

So, I moved upward through the ranks at WWU swiftly, mainly because I was publishing lots of papers.  I was a good teacher, but never a truly outstanding one.  I like to think that this was because my proclivities and talents bent naturally toward the research aspect of the job, at the expense of all the other parts.  I was a lousy participant in “university governance”, as all those committees were called.  I met my classes and did a good job, although my best teaching probably was with graduate students.  I started at WWU in 1969 and retired at the end of 1997.  I received the first Outstanding Researcher award, in 1984, but I never was the Outstanding Teacher, although I was nominated a few times.

I was fortunate enough to secure quite a few National Science Foundation grants, which allowed me to do field work nearly every summer (and also to evade the financial necessity of teaching summer school.)  Here are some of the places I have worked (this list includes field work for the USGS.)  In chronological order:  the Appalachians, the Great Lakes area, Colorado, Washington, Oregon and California, Nevada, Colombia, Chile and Argentina, the Caribbean (Barbados, Granada, Tobago, St Vincent and the Grenadines), and Greece (the islands of Lemnos, Lesbos and Samothraki).  Of these, the work in Washington and Oregon probably was the most significant, but the trips to Greece and Chile were the most fun!    

Note that all this travel, while remunerative in several ways, also was hard work.  For example, in South America one did not stay in fancy resorts or eat gourmet meals off linen tablecloths.  Rather, one slept in tents or crappy rooming houses and ate stuff one could cook.  Yes, we had some blow-out meals, but mostly it was tough beef, bread, and rot-gut red wine.  Also, showers could be scarce and sporadic – and drilling rock is a muddy business.  More than once I have gone for a week without changing my underwear – but you didn’t want to know that.  Suffice it to say that we knew where all the hot springs were in southern Chile.

Okay, 1500 words already and you are getting bored.  Let me tell you, nutshell-like, what all this research was about.  Fundamentally it was aimed at understanding the birth and evolution of mountain ranges.   How paleomagnetism can contribute to this is, as authors frequently say when they don’t want to get side-tracked, “beyond the scope of this review”.  In another nutshell - paleomagnetism sometimes can indicate how a particular block of rock has moved – rotated, moved north or south, or both – since it formed.  Thus we have shown that pieces of the west coast of North America have move northwestward along the continental margin by large distances in the last 100 million years or so.  By contrast, using the same technique it can be demonstrated that similar pieces of the western edge of South America have not moved either north or south, but rather have rotated in place like ball bearings.  Observations such as these then open up tempting vistas for speculation about how and why these things occurred, and I have always been addicted to speculation.

One might say that this novel way we used paleomagnetism was a new and logical outgrowth of plate tectonics.  It was moderately important, and continues to be.  None of us won the Nobel Prize, for sure, but at least we didn’t have to teach Geology 101 during the summer to keep bread on the table.  And it was fun.