The world of geoscience is a realm of discovery, where ancient rocks tell the story of Planet Earth’s 4,600 million year history, while holding valuable clues for our future, if you know how to read them. Four pioneering geoscientists decipher these stories for us in celebration of International Geodiversity Day.
The world of geoscience is a realm of discovery, where ancient rocks tell the story of Planet Earth’s 4,600 million year history, while holding valuable clues for our future, if you know how to read them. Howeverm from an outsider's perspective, the field of geology might not seem so exciting. For some it conjures up images of seemingly indistinguishable rocks, for others, stern scientists in lab coats.
In this exclusive article, we'll introduce you to four pioneering geoscientists who defy such preconceptions.
First, we’ll meet Aswatha Biju, a 16 year-old palaeontologist from India. Aswatha has been passionate about telling the enchanting stories of fossils from age 10, and now shares them with others on a global scale.
Next, we’ll speak to Clare Fletcher, whose research looks for signs of life on Mars! Their research centres around the conservation of Mars' unique geological heritage for future generations.
Dr Priscilla Grew has extraordinary stories to tell, from a lifelong engagement with geology. From being the only US female scientist on expeditions to Siberia, to publishing ground-breaking research in the field of garnets, Priscilla is one of just a handful of women to have a mineral named after her.
Lastly, we'll hear from Dr Sherene Williamson, who sheds light on the profound importance of geological insights for Small Island Developing States. Sherene's work aims to empower local populations to coexist harmoniously with the unique geological challenges and opportunities of these distinctive landscapes.
Aswatha Biju: "India's Youngest Paleontologist"
Meet Aswatha Biju, a passionate 16-year-old from Chennai, India, who is on a mission to educate and inspire others about palaeontology. Her journey into the world of fossils began at the age of five, when she mistook a fossilised ammonite for a living shell. At 16, Aswatha has a ‘tiny museum’, displaying her personal fossil collection, and has educated over 20,000 students about the wonders of palaeontology.
I was able to attract people's attention into an imaginary world. They were able to travel back in time and imagine 'how did these specimens look millions of years ago?'. When I was able to link creativity along with true scientific fact, there was good reach.
Hello Aswatha! Please could you tell us about how you first became interested in palaeontology?
My journey with the field of palaeontology began at five years old, when my father gifted me an encyclopaedia. I wasn't able to read but I loved seeing the pictures. On one particular page there was a large image of a fossilised ammonite, which I mistook for a living seashell. My mother took me to the Chennai Government Museum where, in the entrance to the geology department, there was a big display where we were able to touch and feel the specimens. I realised that my assumption was incorrect because the texture of the stone-like preserved fossil specimen was too hard and heavy. It was rough in texture, where typically a seashell wasn't. That is when I was first introduced to the field of palaeontology.
Tell us about your fossil collection. Do you have a favourite fossil?
I used to display my fossil collection at home, but now I have my own 'tiny museum', built with prize money from a national award of the Indian government. In my museum, I have 136 specimens and my most favourite is Ammonite. It's from the Mesozoic era, aged 66 to 83 million years old. It was the specimen that drew me into the field of palaeontology, which is a very big and vast ocean with unlimited expectations.
How did your interest in palaeontology evolve from a personal interest into a drive to educate others?
I understood that the field was not that well known among the crowds and citizens of India. I started raising awareness when I was aged 10. Now, six years later, I have educated more than 20,000 students and others globally. I recently led both online and offline workshops, during summer camps, on the occasion of Mary Anning’s birthday. Now we have formed a group called the Fossil Forever club; each day I send activities, notes, articles and competitions to students, and they work accordingly.
People consider geodiversity, geology and palaeontology, as dry subjects. I believe we can make it interesting by adding innovative and creative ideas. When I first, at the age of 10, started telling people about palaeontology, I used a PowerPoint presentation, showing some of my fossils. But I wasn't able to attract a lot of people. That is when I started writing stories. I began using my fossils as models, as demonstrations for how fossilization occurs.
Will you be celebrating International Geodiversity Day this year?
Along with students from the Fossil Forever Club, we will host a fossil day. Using play modelling, origami, story narration, puppetry, songs and poetry, we'll make sure that students gain a clear understanding of different aspects of palaeontology.
Clare Fletcher: Conserving geoheritage on Mars
Clare Fletcher is a passionate geoscientist and PhD candidate at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology, University of New South Wales. Clare's work revolves around understanding and preserving the unique geological features of Mars. With a deep-seated love for rocks and a drive to bridge the gap between science and communication, Clare shares insights into their vision for a more inclusive and diversified geoscientific community.
Geology is our only way to time travel. We can't get in a time machine and go back to early Earth, or back to when the dinosaurs were around. Geology allows us to see what was going on millions or billions of years ago.
Hello Clare, thank you for speaking with us today. Could you begin by telling us about your current work?
Hello, it’s great to talk with you. I'm currently working on creating an exogeoconservation framework for Mars. ‘Exo’ means space, ‘geo’ is for geology, and 'conservation' refers to the protection of sites. So I'm looking at potential signs of life on Mars, as well as ancient environments that life might have formed in, and working on how can we protect those for future science, study and knowledge.
Can you talk about one of the most exciting moments in your career so far?
It was probably during my masters, which I did on conserving the oldest convincing evidence of life on Earth - the 3.5 billion-year-old stromatolite fossils found in Western Australia. I got to see these ancient, ancient, ancient life forms that are essentially everyone's great, great, great, great, great, great, great, to however many powers, grandparents. You can actually see the environment that these microbial forms lived in, the shallow pools, the volcanic caldera, and the different structures of the communities of these organisms. It was a beautiful moment. It's a really stunning landscape as well.
Not only do I have the extreme privilege of getting to see these sites, but I have the extreme privilege of trying to protect them so that we can continue to study them, so that more people can see them, so that we can understand the origin of all life on Earth.
The theme for International Geodiversity Day this year is "Geodiversity is for everyone". What does that evoke for you personally?
Geodiversity needs diversity in its people, as well as in the geology itself, to be complete and whole. It's a discipline that benefits greatly from new and diverse perspectives, from more women, more queer people, more people of colour, from people from every nation on Earth. There are so many places that we don't have such a wealth of knowledge on, and it would be great to have people from those areas study the geology, the soils, the fossils etc.
On your university’s website, you say that you have "a big passion for science communication and a strong love of rocks." Why is science communication exciting and important?
I think science communication is important because if you can't communicate the science you've done, then you essentially may as well not have done it because no one will ever know about it. So being able to communicate your science both to other scientists and to the public more broadly means that we can all learn, and it also goes the other way. If I can communicate
If you were talking to a non-geoscientist, someone who perhaps doesn't see themselves fit in the mould for a career in geoscience, what would you say to them directly?
If geosciences is a career that you're thinking about but not quite sure about, I would say just go for it. It's a great way to get out to see the world and to learn about what's there beneath your feet every single day. It's something that we can all bring our knowledge and unique perspectives to, and we can all get enjoyment from as well.
On your university’s website, you say that you have "a big passion for science communication and a strong love of rocks." Why is science communication exciting and important?
If you can't communicate the science you've done, then you essentially may as well not have done it because no one will ever know about it. So being able to communicate your science both to other scientists and to the public more broadly means that we can all learn, and it also goes the other way. If I can communicate my science to other people, then maybe they have other knowledge that they can impart back to me, and we'll learn from each other.
What would you say to a non-geoscientist, someone who didn't see themselves as fitting the mould for a career in the geosciences?
If the geosciences is a career that you're thinking about but not quite sure about, I would say just go for it. It's a great way to get out to see the world and to learn about what's there beneath your feet every single day. It's something that we can all bring our knowledge and unique perspectives to, and we can all get enjoyment from as well.
Dr Priscilla Grew: Lifelong pioneer for geology
Dr Priscilla Grew is a distinguished geologist and retired professor from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. One of 120 women to have a mineral named after her, Priscilla’s career has left an indelible mark on the field. These days, Priscilla volunteers for international organizations involved in the geosciences.
I want to make sure that people know that whether you're eight years old or 82 years old, you can enjoy Geodiversity Day and all the excitement of geology, rocks, and minerals
Hello Priscilla, could you begin by introducing yourself and telling us where you're calling from today?
Hello! I'm Priscilla Grew and I live in Nebraska in the middle of the United States in the Great Plains. I'm a geologist and a retired professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. I'm now volunteering in international organizations involved in geology.
I started being interested in geology at just eight years old, when my mother took me mineral and fossil collecting. She was a musician and loved minerals and fossils as a hobby. I remember going to a wonderful place in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, where there were plant fossils. I could see this beautiful leaf in a rock, it was as though it had been pressed yesterday. Even at eight years old, I could understand that this had once been a leaf, long ago.
You're one of about 120 women to have a mineral named after you. Could you tell us about the mineral and why you were selected to name it?
Yes, it was a wonderful honour. It's called Priscillagrewite-Y and it was discovered in Jordan, near the city of Amman. It's a garnet. Garnets are important minerals, not only for gemstones, but also because they can tell us things about the origin of rocks. The only problem is... I can't wear my garnet! It’s too tiny to be seen by the naked eye. You have to have very special equipment.
I studied garnets when I was doing my doctoral thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. We had a very fancy new machine called an electron microprobe. I was working the night shift on this incredible machine, examining a sample of manganese. It was the middle of the night, when this black and white image came out, of the most beautiful sewn garnet with bands. I just ran up and down the hall. I was just yelling. I was so excited. That was my big moment and so I was able to publish the first image in a scientific journal of that zoning.
The International Mineralogical Association currently recognises almost 6,000 minerals. Why do you think so few minerals are named after women?
Well of course many minerals are not named after people, they're named after other things - locations or the chemistry etc. And historically, they were sometimes named maybe for a couple, actually my husband and I have His and Her minerals!
I'm in a cohort at the time when minerals weren't really named after women. I think people weren't paying attention for a while, and then some of the staff at the Harvard Mineral Museum did a compilation a few years ago and, to everyone's surprise, there were less than a hundred named after women.
I went to a women's college for my undergraduate, and then to the University of California, Berkeley. When I got to Berkeley, there were like 80 men and three women. I realised then that if I hadn't gone to a women's college, I probably wouldn't have majored in geology. It would have been too intimidating.
Is there anything you could tell non-geologists at home, to help them appreciate or better understand the geology of their local area?
I think maybe one of the most important things to understand, is the sense of geologic time. We're so used to dealing with time on the human scale, and so it's very difficult for us to even imagine thousands, tens of thousands, millions of years. Try to find out how old the rocks are in your local park. They'll give you some terms like 'Palaeozoic' or 'Devonian' or 'Pleistocene' and you can just look those up very easily, but I think that understanding of geologic history is perhaps the most interesting.
For example, in the United States, we have the wonderful Grand Canyon National Park. When people first come to the rim of the Grand Canyon, it's just an overwhelming experience to see those layers. What you have to remember is, right here in Nebraska, if we were to dig down underneath my kitchen, where I'm speaking, there are just as many rock layers of geologic history as there are when you can see them in Grand Canyon National Park.
One of the things I always would mention to my students when we started out was 'Do you know where your water came from this morning when you turned on the faucet?'
Now here in Nebraska, when I turn on my faucet, I'm getting water that came from the Rocky Mountains.
Can you talk about your most exciting scientific expeditions?
Yes, well fortunately, when I was teaching at Boston College, our department chair very much encouraged me to go to international geological meetings. I’d actually gone to the International Congress in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the year before during the Warsaw Pact invasion which actually happened right during the conference.
Just a year later, in 1969, I went on a field trip to Siberia, the only American woman on this trip. We went to Lake Baikal and lived on a boat, and then we would get off the boat during the day to go on excursions. We went up along the western shore of Lake Baikal. I remember the local people staring at me because they'd never seen that in those days - some of these areas, no American woman had ever been to. Of course, there were women geologists and one of the pictures shows me with some of them from, at that time, the Soviet Union.
One of the interesting things about Lake Baikal is that there is a deposit of the mineral Lapis Lazuli, a very beautiful blue mineral that's been used since ancient times - in ancient Egyptian jewellery, in the Middle Ages by artists, especially when they were painting images of the Virgin Mary with the bright blue robe. At that time, most of it came from Afghanistan, but one of the other locations where it's found is near Lake Baikal. And of course, during the era of the czars, they used to bring pieces of the lapis and make it into beautiful ornamental objects.
So it was a very interesting trip to actually be near that locality. We also went to a wonderful place where we collected beautiful green crystals of the mineral Apatite.
The trip was a combination mineralogy and geology. And actually, over the course of the expedition, some of the Soviet geologists collected a mineral that turned out to be a new mineral, which was named after our expedition. It was the best field trip I ever went on.
Do you see geology as an important tool for international cooperation, for diplomacy in other areas than science?
I mean, we've almost returned to the conditions of when I was an early-career scientist, during some of the worst years of the Cold War. My husband also, he spent 16 months in Antarctica on a Soviet expedition where it wintered over two summers in a winter.
Over the course of our careers, we had a lot of collaboration and work with Soviet scientists, in spite of it being the Cold War. And of course, now there are big issues in all of our scientific organizations about what the policy should be, during this period of conflict in Ukraine. We're into this period where I think every individual scientist has to make a decision about the way forward, whether they are going to be co-authors, or what their policy is going to be.
Of course, there are many displaced scientists now around the world and that's extremely important for everyone to be aware of. There are people who need help to get their careers going again when they've been displaced involuntarily.
Why is International Geodiversity Day important?
I think it's so important. I was thrilled when the new Geodiversity Day was established because geodiversity is the complement to biodiversity, and it also echoes our efforts to have a more diverse workforce globally in geology. In my work with international scientific organizations, we're always trying to encourage more involvement of early-career scientists, encouraging them to take opportunities to be involved in science policy and volunteering on committees.
A part of Geodiversity Day is involving everyone. It's a lifelong opportunity for you to be interested in the geology of where you live, where you travel, where your children go to live, to learn about their geologic setting. There are so many opportunities.
Dr Sherene James-Williamson: Geoheritage expert for Small Island Developing States
Dr Sherene James Williamson is a senior lecturer and museum curator at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. An experienced geologist, Sherene is passionate about how we can use geology for disaster preparedness, climate change resilience, and geoheritage preservation in the context of Small Island Developing States.
Hello Sherene, thank you for speaking with us. Firstly, could you tell us why geodiversity is so important for Small Island Developing States?
Geodiversity is simply the natural variation we find on the Earth’s surface. Because it encompasses geology, geomorphology, water resources, soil, etc. it impacts human lives on a daily basis. All substrate found on the Earth’s surface, be it derived from internal or external processes, are significant for all aspects of human, social, and economic development.
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) represent geodynamic locations, by their underlining geology and method of formation. This forms the backdrop for various activities, ranging from their high biodiversity, due to the geologically diverse substrate, to tourism, and in some cases natural resources for mineral exploration, all of which contribute to geoheritage.
In your opinion, why is “Geodiversity for everyone”?
"Geodiversity is for everyone" because people cannot separate themselves from the land. Geological and Earth materials are used in daily life, in one way or another. It is important for Small Island Developing States to engage with local populations, with a view to helping people understand how they are impacted by, depend on, and can use geodiversity.
Geodiversity is responsible for the tectonic hazards experienced by many Small Island Developing States. Islands that are volcanic experience eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis, among other related secondary hazards. These events have the potential to continuously impact the growth and development of these small states. SIDS are also environmentally significant places due to high endemism and high biodiversity. Many geosites are linked through their history, as important battle sites, or wrecks of sunken ships from historic events, remains of plantations, Enslaved African heritage, barracks, landing sites, rock art, and diverse evidence of indigenous peoples, among others. These places enrich the use of geodiversity, adding layers of cultural and societal meaning.
As such, disaster preparedness is chief among the activities for populations of SIDS. In many of these places, folklore and practices are hinged on the landscape. Traditional farming practices on some soil and slopes are created due to both the internal and external processes that shape these small unique spots of interest across the globe.
Climate change will impact, and has already significantly impacted, the coastlines of many small island states. Given the shared colonial history of many of these locations, there are commonalities that make such places vulnerable. Many of the towns and cities were established along the coast. Many modern residential and tourist activities are concentrated in “beachfront” properties. The effects of coastal erosion are evident in many places. Some islands are already lost due to the rise in sea level.
How can technology be used for challenges such as disaster risk reduction, geoheritage and climate change ?
Technology will play a significant role in sensitization, awareness, and resilience-building for current and future populations. For example, the island country of Tuvalu is moving towards replicating itself with virtual and augmented reality as climate change, particularly sea level rise, threatens the territory. This innovation allows for the safeguarding of its culture and landscape in the event of loss and displacement. Future populations will still be able to connect with the culture.
A seismic heritage tour is being designed for the city of Kingston and Port Royal. The Great Kingston Earthquake of 1907 and the Port Royal Earthquake of 1692 caused significant changes in the landscape. Except for one memorial, which is not in view for the ordinary travelling public, the building loss, the changes in architecture, and the destruction, caused by the subsequent fire, have not been represented throughout the city. The erection of a virtual tour and, if funding is obtained, the input of interactive signage, will draw persons into an experience of the past disaster, in order to build awareness and resilience. Following the UNESCO International Geoscience Project “IGCP 718: Bringing Geoheritage to life”, and in collaboration with “IGCP 692: Geoheritage for Resilience”, a virtual inventory of geosites across the Caribbean is being created. This will promote awareness of geodiversity, which, it is hoped, will promote the establishment of geoparks in the region.
The use of technology will become commonplace in reenactments and disaster preparedness mitigation planning and simulations. With the advent of AI, there are significantly more tools available.
Conclusions
The testimonies of Aswatha Biju, Clare Fletcher, Priscilla Grew and Dr Sherene James-Williamson, have illuminated many facets of geodiversity. From the red plains of Mars, to the hidden geological treasures of Siberia, their stories remind us that geology transcends borders, nationalities and ages. As we celebrate International Geodiversity Day, let us carry forward the spirit of inclusivity and curiosity. It is a reminder that our planet's geological wonders are not just a subject of study but a source of inspiration, practical need and unity.
