Blogging for Ada Lovelace Day
The first time I heard about Ada Lovelace was from Sydney Padua's webcomic, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (which is goddamn glorious, and I'll post an entry full of squee about it some other time). That led me to the link to Ada Lovelace Day (for which the first comic was originally drawn) and so now I'm here, posting about women in science. Specificially, women in my chosen scientific field of geology.
This is the part where I confess that before a two-second Google search which I performed only a few minutes ago, if you'd asked me about famous women geologists I could have told you about Mary Anning, and that would be it. (Further shame in that I wouldn't have actually called her Mary Anning, I would have said 'that women in the 1800s who found fossils in England'. I knew who I was talking about.) There are a few reasons for this - for a start, geologists do not really have any rock star fame except to other geologists. (Geologists also like to make awful, awful, sometimes unintentional puns.) Geology is also a fairly young science, and given the imbalance of famous men:famous women in the rest of the scientific disciplines, I honestly didn't think that women had a chance to make their make on the earth sciences just yet.
How very wrong I was! I am pleasantly surprised, of course, but disappointed that I've never heard of these ladies before. Geologists do not really go for history, apparently, because the only other famous geologist I can think of off the top of my head is Alfred Wegener, he of the plate motion theory. Forgive me, it's late and I'm rather tired.
But I'm rambling - what I should be doing is telling you about the ladies who rock. (That one was intentional and premediated. Apologies.)
So we'll start with Mary Anning, who collected fossils and discovered a whole slew of dinosaurs. But you'd be wrong if you think she was the only one looking at ancient animals in her local area - ever heard of Etheldred Benett? Around the same time period we also find Elizabeth Carne, who not only wrote several papers on the geology of her local area but also built a museum to house the mineral collection she inherited from her father.
Of course geologists are not content to study the rocks within reach of their doors - so I should mention Marjorie Sweeting, who was the first Western geologists to study the karsts of China. Another explorer is Maria Klenova, who charted seabeds in her native Russia and helped map the Antarctic coast. She was also the first female scientist to ever go set foot on Antartica. While I'm on oceanographers I can't go past Marie Tharp - she, along with Bruce Heezen, were the first to map the Atlantic ocean floor and discovered mid-ocean ridges while doing so - which was a major factor in dismissing the 'expanding Earth' theory in favour of plate tectonics and continental drift.
Sometimes you don't need to move anywhere to find amazing geology - such are the cases of Tanya Atwater, Kate Hutton and Lucy Jones, all of whom live near the San Andreas Fault line in California. Kate Hutton gets special mention here because she was a science advisor on the film set Tremors, and the seismic theories were (with one exception) accurately presented for once! I think the woman deserves a medal for that.
Inge Lehmann was a woman who had deep thoughts (oh dear there I go again) - ones about the Earth's core, that is. She was the first to postulate that the Earth's core wasn't a single molten sphere, but two separate concentric spheres with different properties. She backed up her theory by being the first to explain P-waves as reflexions at the inner core. The Lehmann Discontinuity is named after her and she discovered it by, and I must quote Francis Birchen in full here, 'through exacting scrutiny of seismic records by a master of a black art for which no amount of computerization is likely to be a complete substitute'. In short, she picked up what a machine might have missed, and I imagine her as a geology version of Henrietta Swan Leavitt (who discovered Cepheid variables), looking for the slightest changes in a vast sea of information.
A lot of female geologists are also interested in astronomy - I guess, as Kate Hutton says, 'Earth is a planet, after all, so it's sort of a matter of looking down rather than looking up.' So we can add to the list Claudia Alexander, who has studied the geology of Jupiter's moons. Susan Kieffer is equally interested in volcanoes and meteorites, as is Rosaly Lopes. While planets are our subject, I can't forget to mention Naomi Oreskes, who is uses her geology knowledge as she investigates anthropogenic global warming.
Clicking through the pages for all these amazing women, I was a little sad when I didn't see Australians among them - but I spoke too soon. Dorothy Hill not only mapped the limestone coral faunas of almost all Australia and made significant discoveries in stratigraphy, she was the first female professor at an Australian university. Slightly later is Irene Crespin, who also focused on palaeontology in Australia and in Indonesia. She also travelled 336m/1200ft down an oil shaft in a basket to look at sequences of Tertiary rocks, which takes courage or an obscene fascination with rocks. Or both, that works too.
So to prove my expectations utterly wrong, there seem to be female geologists hiding under every rock! Technically I'm posting this a day early (I shall amend the date) because tomorrow is busy for me - and to top it all off, I'm going to an industry night for geology students! So in a few years, I might be blogging about more Australian women geologists who have done more recent things. I've already said geology is one of the youngest sciences, but I think it's also one of the fastest moving. Because it really only began in the last hundred or so years, it's been attracting women right from the start. Even over a couple of years, you can see the differences - my geology classes at university were about 1/3 women, 2/3 men when I started my degree (in 2007). This year, they're about 40-60 percentage-wise.
Roll on women in science!
Blog for Ada Lovelace Day!
This is the part where I confess that before a two-second Google search which I performed only a few minutes ago, if you'd asked me about famous women geologists I could have told you about Mary Anning, and that would be it. (Further shame in that I wouldn't have actually called her Mary Anning, I would have said 'that women in the 1800s who found fossils in England'. I knew who I was talking about.) There are a few reasons for this - for a start, geologists do not really have any rock star fame except to other geologists. (Geologists also like to make awful, awful, sometimes unintentional puns.) Geology is also a fairly young science, and given the imbalance of famous men:famous women in the rest of the scientific disciplines, I honestly didn't think that women had a chance to make their make on the earth sciences just yet.
How very wrong I was! I am pleasantly surprised, of course, but disappointed that I've never heard of these ladies before. Geologists do not really go for history, apparently, because the only other famous geologist I can think of off the top of my head is Alfred Wegener, he of the plate motion theory. Forgive me, it's late and I'm rather tired.
But I'm rambling - what I should be doing is telling you about the ladies who rock. (That one was intentional and premediated. Apologies.)
So we'll start with Mary Anning, who collected fossils and discovered a whole slew of dinosaurs. But you'd be wrong if you think she was the only one looking at ancient animals in her local area - ever heard of Etheldred Benett? Around the same time period we also find Elizabeth Carne, who not only wrote several papers on the geology of her local area but also built a museum to house the mineral collection she inherited from her father.
Of course geologists are not content to study the rocks within reach of their doors - so I should mention Marjorie Sweeting, who was the first Western geologists to study the karsts of China. Another explorer is Maria Klenova, who charted seabeds in her native Russia and helped map the Antarctic coast. She was also the first female scientist to ever go set foot on Antartica. While I'm on oceanographers I can't go past Marie Tharp - she, along with Bruce Heezen, were the first to map the Atlantic ocean floor and discovered mid-ocean ridges while doing so - which was a major factor in dismissing the 'expanding Earth' theory in favour of plate tectonics and continental drift.
Sometimes you don't need to move anywhere to find amazing geology - such are the cases of Tanya Atwater, Kate Hutton and Lucy Jones, all of whom live near the San Andreas Fault line in California. Kate Hutton gets special mention here because she was a science advisor on the film set Tremors, and the seismic theories were (with one exception) accurately presented for once! I think the woman deserves a medal for that.
Inge Lehmann was a woman who had deep thoughts (oh dear there I go again) - ones about the Earth's core, that is. She was the first to postulate that the Earth's core wasn't a single molten sphere, but two separate concentric spheres with different properties. She backed up her theory by being the first to explain P-waves as reflexions at the inner core. The Lehmann Discontinuity is named after her and she discovered it by, and I must quote Francis Birchen in full here, 'through exacting scrutiny of seismic records by a master of a black art for which no amount of computerization is likely to be a complete substitute'. In short, she picked up what a machine might have missed, and I imagine her as a geology version of Henrietta Swan Leavitt (who discovered Cepheid variables), looking for the slightest changes in a vast sea of information.
A lot of female geologists are also interested in astronomy - I guess, as Kate Hutton says, 'Earth is a planet, after all, so it's sort of a matter of looking down rather than looking up.' So we can add to the list Claudia Alexander, who has studied the geology of Jupiter's moons. Susan Kieffer is equally interested in volcanoes and meteorites, as is Rosaly Lopes. While planets are our subject, I can't forget to mention Naomi Oreskes, who is uses her geology knowledge as she investigates anthropogenic global warming.
Clicking through the pages for all these amazing women, I was a little sad when I didn't see Australians among them - but I spoke too soon. Dorothy Hill not only mapped the limestone coral faunas of almost all Australia and made significant discoveries in stratigraphy, she was the first female professor at an Australian university. Slightly later is Irene Crespin, who also focused on palaeontology in Australia and in Indonesia. She also travelled 336m/1200ft down an oil shaft in a basket to look at sequences of Tertiary rocks, which takes courage or an obscene fascination with rocks. Or both, that works too.
So to prove my expectations utterly wrong, there seem to be female geologists hiding under every rock! Technically I'm posting this a day early (I shall amend the date) because tomorrow is busy for me - and to top it all off, I'm going to an industry night for geology students! So in a few years, I might be blogging about more Australian women geologists who have done more recent things. I've already said geology is one of the youngest sciences, but I think it's also one of the fastest moving. Because it really only began in the last hundred or so years, it's been attracting women right from the start. Even over a couple of years, you can see the differences - my geology classes at university were about 1/3 women, 2/3 men when I started my degree (in 2007). This year, they're about 40-60 percentage-wise.
Roll on women in science!
Blog for Ada Lovelace Day!