Story written for the WVU Geology Alumni Newsletter

An Andean Geologist in the Appalachians

I was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, a city perched at an elevation of 8700 feet in the northern Andes at the original source of the myth of El Dorado. As a teenager I developed a fascination with stories of travels to the remotest regions and the highest mountains. My grandfather, who ironically was the most sedentary person imaginable, fed my early interest with an eclectic mix of books by authors such as Marco Polo, Maurice Herzog, Darwin, the Baron Humbolt, etc. I even remember reading a book on geology written in the days before plate tectonics.

In high school the only outlet for my lust for travel and adventure were the yearly week-long outings that each class organized. I did my best to steer these trips to places that resembled those I had read about. I have fond memories of being violently ill with altitude sickness both on the Ruiz Volcano (the first time any of us had seen snow), and on the Cocuy Range (which I climbed a few years later as a guide to a large, and unhappy group of French tourist, but that is another story). And it was several years until I learned that the delicious sleepiness that overtook me on the Purace Volcano, after being drenched all day by freezing rain, is called hypothermia.

I started my Freshman year at Yale as a Mechanical Engineering major, but that didn't last long. In fact, after the first problem set, which required us to perform what seemed like an endless string of unit conversions - BTU to calories, horse-power to watts, and on and on - I started looking for something else. In geology I found a subject that combined the natural sciences and the physical sciences in the most pleasing manner. Even better, judging from the photos that illustrated many of the lectures, it seemed that geologists spent most of their time in amazingly beautiful and remote places. It was only later when I worked for EXXON that I discovered that even geologists have to be very canny and careful or the corporate powers will chain them to a desk.

You could say that my intellectual awakening, the time when I made the connection between mountains as landscape and playground and mountains as the key to understanding the earth, started in the Appalachians, when I was an undergraduate at Yale. So it is fitting that I return to the Appalachians to teach students structural geology.

As a Master's student at the University of Arizona, I studied with Peter Coney, one of the great thinkers in the regional geology of mountains and continents. Under Peter's tutelage, I took my newly acquired skills as a structural geologist back home, to the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia. There I strived to produce accurate geologic maps and cross sections of a complex area of the Andes where several large tectonic faults slice through the northern margin of the South American plate, while trying to avoid getting bitten by the farm dogs or being shot at by the farmers.

For my Ph.D. at Stanford I worked in the Brooks Range of Alaska and in the Russian Far East, studying the structural geology of several critical areas with the aim of resolving some of the big questions in the plate tectonic history of the Arctic and the northern Pacific. All these studies required some creative logistics - floating a raft down the Chegitun River in Arctic Russia, trekking across vast tracts of tundra in Alaska, where caribou, grizzly bears, and wolves are the only visitors in camp.

One of the rewards of working in such remote areas is the thrill of exploring a place that is virtually unknown, however this lack of knowledge also means that one person can only study a small piece of a giant puzzle, and therefore may be unable to see the complete picture. West Virginia may seem tame in comparison to the Arctic. But the structural geology of the Appalachians is equally fascinating and challenging, and has the great advantage of having been studied for over a century. The scientifuc value of places like the Alps and the Appalachians, which in some ways are the cradles of our science, is that because the geologic framework is well understood they allow us to study the process that brought this framework together.

I hope I can bring my unique perspective on regional geology - from experiences in the Andes and the Arctic, back to the Appalachian realm where my geological curiosities were first seeded.

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