Geology then and now

Today I came across some photocopies of letters home from a Bryn Mawr sophomore geology major in 1918.  In it, the student thanks her mother for sending her homemade ambrosia candy and talks about a geology field trip she just got home from. If you’ve been reading my blog you should know by know that I love geology field trips, so of course I got excited when I saw it.

Here’s an excerpt I found especially interesting/funny–the student is talking about her professor who led the trip:

“…managed beautifully. It can’t be easy for the young man (he’s only about thirty-five) to engineer sixteen girls through all sorts of changes of trains, etc. And he never lost his composure for a second. Everything went just according to schedule. That was the case with the Valley Forge trip too. I say if you want anything done, get a MAN to do it. I like Dr. Wright very much. No one could be more polite and obliging to everyone than he is. He knows a lot too.”

Given the history of the geology department, I found this excerpt funny— “if you want anything done, get a man to do it”!

Ironically, our department was founded by Florence Bascom…here she is with her Brunton compass, dressed ready for the field.

Florence Bascom, in addition to being a cool lady, was a pioneer for women scientists. She was the first woman to be granted a phD from Johns Hopkins University, and, at the time, the only woman in the US to hold a doctorate in geology. In 1895 she founded BMC’s geology department.

Here’s a silkscreen a Bryn Mawr alum made commemorating our awesome history. The print was made during a printmaking class she took during her senior year. The alum is currently working for the New Jersey Geological Society–I was lucky enough to hear her speak about her current research a few semesters ago when she presented at Bryn Mawr.

When Florene Bascom started the department, she was certain that students received training not only in classrooms, but also in the field. The Valley Forge trip the student refers to still happens today–every student who takes geo 101 goes there to study in the field. Here’s a clipping from our student newspaper that my friend Kersti who works in special collections sent me. The article is from 1958.


The Marine Geology class I am in had a field trip this weekend. We went to Island Beach State Park in New Jersey. It was a fun trip, and hopefully these photos will prove that geology students today certainly don’t need a man to do something right!

 

Mary digging at trench at the beach.

Don and Anna taking a core.

So whether it’s in 1985, 1918, 1958, or last weekend, field trips have always been a cornerstone of our department from its beginning.

And, I’m pretty sure some of the other major departments might get a little jealous sometimes.

Here’s one more of my favorite clippings–it’s not from the College newspaper and I’m not sure of the date, but it’s still pretty cool. It says, “Are these Bryn Mawr students America’s brainiest girls?” And there’s a photo of a Mawrtyr in a paleontology lab.

Field trips aren’t just for elementary school…

One of the reasons I love my major so much is that for every geology class offered, there is a field trip component that goes along with it. We get to actually see what we are learning in the field instead of in a powerpoint slide or a textbook. This is also one of the reasons I decided not to go abroad–as a geology major, we get to travel a lot anyway!

Last weekend was the invertebrate paleobiology field trip. My class went to Calvert Beach in Maryland to stay the night and look at Miocene-aged cliffs and poke around looking for fossils. Even though it was a bit wet and rainy, we had a lot of fun.

Above are some of my classmates looking at the fossils, and below is a close-up of what they are looking at! The first is an internal mold of a bivalve (not the actual shell, but an impression of the shell in the sediment), and the second are really tiny gastropod shells.

We also spent some time looking for shark’s teeth on the beach. Here’s one tiny one that I found.

The next step was to take the samples we collected back to the lab to clean them and identify them. Then the class will compile their work so we can use them to help us with our individual research papers which we will be working on for the rest of the semester.

Here’s some pictures from back in the lab.

 

My cleaned samples that I collected while on the trip.

This is Erin, another geology major. She is a junior. Holly, a senior physics major/geology minor cleaning her samples!