The fieldwork
aspect of geology offers the potential for countless disasters. Only by relentlessly
applying clear thinking and common sense can geologists avoid the pitfalls inherent
to their profession. Sometimes, all the preparation in the world won’t
help: Sometimes it’s just a matter of luck.
Virginia Sisson, Russell Seitz and two local guides walk down a trail to find
jade in Guatemala, where drought and hardship have made outsiders unwelcome
guests. Photo courtesy of George Harlow.
When Andy Masterson broke his ankle this past summer in Minas Gerais, Brazil,
he was lucky that he was not alone. Masterson, an undergraduate geology major
at the University of Maryland, was acting as field assistant to doctoral student
Barry Reno, who was working on the metamorphic petrology of central Brazil.
When the two men were descending a steep forested hillside in search of a schist
outcrop, Masterson suddenly dropped out of sight into a gorge below. He landed
on his ankle, which shattered on impact.
Dense vegetation and loud rapids made it impossible for Reno to determine how
far down Masterson was or how best to get him out. Because there was no easy
way down, the two students spent the entire day trying to find each other, with
Reno hiking both up-canyon and down, and Masterson painfully crawling up the
other side of the gorge.
When Reno finally found Masterson and got him to their vehicle, the car got
stuck on an outcrop of the very rock they were studying. “It just got progressively
worse and worse and worse,” Reno says. It was midnight before Reno was
able to deliver his field assistant to a doctor and several days before Masterson’s
leg was set.
Virginia ‘Jinny’ Sisson had a similar episode in graduate school.
Sisson is a professor at Rice University who works on jade deposits through
a research associate program at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1980,
in her first summer working on her doctorate at Princeton, she was crossing
a snowfield as part of her fieldwork in British Columbia. Suddenly, the snow
crumbled under her crampons. “I tumbled several hundred feet down the snowfield
and talus slope,” she says.
When Sisson’s supervisor Glenn Woodsworth at the Geological Survey of Canada
and another field assistant, Tom Heath, came to her rescue a few minutes later,
Sisson was impressed with their competence and first-aid know-how. “I realized
that I didn’t know anything compared to these two,” Sisson
says.
When Sisson returned to Princeton that autumn, she found that several other
graduate students had similarly scary experiences over the summer. Collectively,
they decided that a handbook was needed: a comprehensive guide to field safety.
Sisson and fellow graduate student Karen Kleinspehn (now an associate professor
at the University of Minnesota) polled professional geologists and compiled
their responses into a book. The American Geological Institute (which publishes
Geotimes) hired Gerald O’Reilly to polish up the results and published
it as Planning for Field Safety in 1992.
Despite the sound advice in the book and its rapid dissemination to a generation
of field camp attendees, accidents still happen. Chips of rock fly into eyes
when hammers are used improperly, backs are strained carrying packs full of
heavy samples, exposed skin gets frostbitten, and scalding pots of dinner are
spilled off wobbly camp stoves onto unprotected skin. Rattlesnakes continue
to bite, the sun continues to burn, and myriad diseases lurk in tropical jungles.
Volcanologists have a particularly risky specialty: Eruptions at Galeras, Mount
Unzen and Mount St. Helens have all claimed the lives of scientists studying
them.
Even routine travel can lead to peril. A van accident in May 2003 killed undergraduate
student Raquel Vieira de Savariego and professor Robert Goldhammer of the University
of Texas at Austin, as they drove toward their first stop of summer fieldcamp
(see Geotimes, July 2003). It
is important, says Lee Krystinik, founder of the geological consulting company
Krystinik Litho-Logic, to remember these folks who lost their lives and “did
not make it home with stories to tell.”
The world has become increasingly dangerous, Sisson says, with a new global
culture and technological developments allowing geologists to penetrate into
areas where they might not be welcome. For example, petroleum geologists are
at risk if they work in politically hostile areas. Some places, such as Iraq,
are considered so dangerous that many companies are refraining from sending
anyone into harm’s way.
Today, “your interactions with people are potentially much more dangerous
than any natural hazards,” Sisson says. This hit home for her when she
was doing research in Guatemala. At the end of a sweaty day of fieldwork, Sisson’s
crew stopped in a village for a cold drink. As Sisson wearily moved to open
the door, her translator stopped her. He pointed out that all the villagers
were carrying machetes. “I was pretty naive,” Sisson says, “but
then I looked around and noticed that several people also had guns stuck in
their waists.”
Local residents, who were under strain from drought and resulting poor crops,
did not welcome outsiders, including other Guatemalans. To them, some outsiders
were coming in and “taking away their resource — jade — without
fair compensation,” Sisson says. So despite the fact that her team was
paying for the jade it collected, they elected to move on: As refreshing as
a soda would be, it wasn’t worth confronting an armed and agitated populace.
Sometimes not being able to interact with people in their native language can
also endanger geologists overseas. Clifton Farrell, a senior program manager
at the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C., was a graduate student
at Harvard in the late 1970s when he was awarded a scholarship to study the
Kuroko mining district in northern Japan. In spite of taking an intensive Japanese
language course prior to his departure, key phrases were still missing from
his vocabulary.
One day, Farrell was underground in the Hanakoka mine near the city of Ohdate.
“The mine was not in active production,” Farrell says, and therefore
he expected little danger. “I heard a miner pass by quickly, speaking some
words that I did not understand. I did not pay attention to this man,”
he recalls, “but shortly after he passed, a blast occurred in a different
section of the mine, and a large section of the roof came tumbling down right
beside me. The rock obliterated my field notebook, but I was not injured, except
for having the living daylights scared out of me.”
Afterward, Farrell scrutinized mine roofs before he entered. He also learned
some new words: “I expanded my vocabulary with more mining-related words,
[and] some rather spicy, ungentlemanly terms of shock.”
Scientists have also had to learn lessons in the wilderness, through some terrifying
encounters with large predatory animals. Kerry Sieh, now a professor at Caltech,
and Dennis Bird, now a professor at Stanford, were undergraduates at field camp
when they were attacked by a mountain lion in 1971. The two were walking along
a ledge of limestone in the Roberts Mountains of Nevada. “I heard a whimpering
sound and looked up. There was this big tawny animal crouched on the ledge”
above Bird, Sieh recalls.
The mountain lion pounced on Bird, knocking him onto a pile of talus. Although
seriously injured from the fall and the cat’s claws, Bird had the good
sense to play dead. Sieh jumped off the cliff and began throwing limestone cobbles
at the big cat. Several of his missiles missed their mark. As Bird recalls,
“He missed my head by a few inches and nearly took me out!”
“I never was much of a baseball player,” Sieh says, but he finally
hit the lion between the eyes. It bounded away.
Sieh then turned to Bird, who was bleeding profusely. “Literally, he was
soaked in red, head to torso,” Sieh says. Worried that the big cat might
circle around and attack them again, the two hiked out 5 miles. Sieh got their
supervising professors and a car. Together, they drove Bird 120 miles to the
nearest hospital, in Ely.
Cynthia Dusel-Bacon, a research geologist with the USGS Mineral Resources Program
in Menlo Park, Calif., had an even more traumatic animal attack. Dropped off
by a helicopter in east central Alaska to map by herself in 1977, Dusel-Bacon
was unarmed, following the strongly held view of her supervisor. A black bear
popped up out of the brush 10 feet away. “The bear was startled and in
predatory mode,” Dusel-Bacon says. Although she spoke in a firm voice and
waved her arms, the bear ran around behind her and knocked her down.
“It immediately tried to put my head in its mouth,” she says. She
tried to radio for help, but the radio was inaccessible in a buckled pocket
of her pack. The bear ripped open her right side and dragged her by her right
shoulder. “My only recourse was to play dead,” Dusel-Bacon says. “The
whole time, either my head or my body was grasped by the teeth of the bear.”
When it took a break, she used her uninjured left arm to retrieve the radio
and call for help. “At that point, the bear saw I wasn’t dead, and
came over, and mauled my other arm.”
A rescue crew arrived by helicopter, buzzed the bear and evacuated her to a
hospital. Both of her arms were amputated. In spite of this tragic encounter,
she is still a geologist today. “What happened to me was a very natural
thing in the animal world,” Dusel-Bacon says. “I don’t hold it
against Alaska, and I don’t hold it against the bears. It certainly hasn’t
dampened my interest in geology.”
Dusel-Bacon still returns to Alaska for summer fieldwork. She brings her geologist
husband, Charlie Bacon, who functions as a gun bearer and sample collector.
“The moral of all these stories is ‘don’t work alone,’”
she reflects. “And yet some people still do.”
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