Based on Interviews With Professionals Using Science in the Workplace

Paleoseismologists study geologic records to learn about earthquakes that happened thousands of years ago and then use that data to create models to forecast the probability of future earthquakes. 

Paleoseismologist Chris Goldfinger.

“It is a wide-open field,” says Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist at Oregon State

University in Corvallis, “because a lot of cities around the world are sitting on time bombs [active fault lines].”

Work overview.

My job is to assess hazards in fault areas in cities. Cascadia [the Pacific Northwest] is a prime example—no one had any idea there was a gigantic fault below Portland and Seattle, and now no one is sure what to do, because the cost of doing anything is in the billions or trillions of dollars. I look at geologic evidence such as offsets in the ground, landslides, or submarine landslide deposits. I take core samples from such active fault areas as Cascadia or San Andreas in the United States or others in Japan or Sumatra. This “ring of fire” around the Pacific Ocean has the easiest-to-find earthquake signals, which help us understand other fault areas.

I spend a month in the field at a time and collect about 100 core samples. For those deposits triggered by earthquakes, I try to figure out the timing, magnitude, and origin of the quakes. I use that data to build a time-and-space framework showing how a big fault behaved over long periods. The resulting map looks like a flipbook of a region with each frame showing a different earthquake.

To understand the nature of an earthquake threat, we provide a long history so people can know the probabilities and we can better determine our course of action. I use modeling software to estimate dates and to create earthquake-type movement in a representation of the seafloor. Other software simulates the effects of a tsunami moving to land. I model turbidity currents to see where sand will get deposited.

Goldfinger pulls a seafloor core sample from a storage rack in his lab. Photos by Oregon State University.

Training and helping graduate students is a big part of my job. My favorite part of the work is discovering something new and cool. It still amazes me how much you can learn about the big-picture things that happened to the Earth by poking around in dirt. The part I like least is politics. If I discover that a hazard affects people, it instantly becomes political, because developers are now saddled with an earthquake problem.

Career path.

In high school, I saw geology students packing shovels in a station wagon, heading to Death Valley. It looked like fun, and it was stunning to me that you could gain an understanding of what you’re standing on and where mountains came from, just by looking around and observing things. In college, I got a dual degree in geology and oceanography in the mid-1970s. Plate tectonics had just been discovered 10 years earlier, and all the big-picture concepts about the Earth had just come into focus.

After I graduated, I started building a sailboat with the aim of sailing around the world. Then I talked to a neighbor who was doing interesting work in geology, and I decided to go back to geology and combine that with my interests in boats and the sea. When I graduated with my PhD in geology from Oregon State University, the university hired me to work in the school of oceanography, which recently merged with the geology department.

I got interested in studying the past. But I realized that it’s also important to understand what is going on today. That’s why I began studying subduction zone earthquakes and tsunamis.

Knowledge, skills, and training needed.

Paleoseismology is multi-disciplinary and requires a good background in geology and marine geology. The latter is not a subset of regular geology; the principles are very different. For the marine work, it’s good to know about remote sensing, weather, and seamanship, and it’s handy to know how to build instruments and repair things. Because you go out on a big expensive ship with 50 to 70 people at a time, it requires a lot of teamwork and logistics.

Advice for students.

Get a broad grounding in all the necessary subjects. Gain some computer skills also.

Bonus Points
Goldfinger’s education:
BS in geology and oceanography from Humboldt State University; PhD in geology from Oregon State University

On the web:
http://activetectonics.coas.oregonstate.edu/
Related occupations:
Seismologist, structural geologist, paleoclimatologist

Editor’s Note

This article was originally published in the Summer 2016 issue of The Science Teacher journal from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA).

Get Involved With NSTA!

Join NSTA today and receive The Science Teacher, the peer-reviewed journal just for high school teachers; to write for the journal, see our Author Guidelines and Call for Papers; connect on the high school level science teaching list (members can sign up on the list server); or consider joining your peers at future NSTA conferences.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

Future NSTA Conferences

2016 Area Conferences

• Minneapolis, October 27–29
• Portland, November 10–12
• Columbus, December 1–3

2017 National Conference

• Los Angeles, March 30–April 2

Follow NSTA

Exploring Science and History With the Library of Congress.

In 1869, 25-year-old Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher first identified and isolated deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), calling it nuclein. Decades later, scientists identified the DNA molecule’s role in determining genetic inheritance. But not until 1953 was DNA’s distinctive double-helix structure discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick. Working at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, they used tools as simple as pencil sketches and handmade physical models to form their ideas.

In his 1988 book, What Mad Pursuit, Crick explained: “Our first attempt at a model was a fiasco.” But later models and sketches,

The double-helix sketch.

including the one shown here, helped them visualize possibilities and test solutions, which led to demonstrations, illustrations, and diagrams through which they shared their findings with others.

One such diagram appeared in a 1953 article in Nature in which the two young scientists (Watson, 23, and Crick, 35) announced: “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of [DNA]. This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.”

Stating that their model was “radically different” from those proposed by other scientists, Watson and Crick described DNA’s structure as a double helix with the bases pointing in and forming pairs of adenine (A) with thymine (T), and cytosine (C) with guanine (G). The small, “purely diagrammatic” figure that they included (drawn by Crick’s wife, Odile, and similar to the pencil sketch), showed how the components of DNA fit together.

They acknowledged the need for more experimental data and asserted, “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

They were right. Knowing the structure of DNA is, in fact, the key to understanding how genetic information is copied and passed along to future generations.

About the Source
The double-helix sketch shown above is available online at the World Digital Library (WDL), a project of the U.S. Library of Congress with support from the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations around the world. The WDL makes available online significant primary materials from all countries and cultures. The original sketch is part of the Francis Crick papers housed at the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine in London. The library’s online research resource entitled “Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics” features the digitized papers of 22 scientists and organizations. Most of Crick’s personal papers are housed at the University of California–San Diego. The complete James Watson Papers are housed at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives in New York.

Related Student Explorations

• Scientific models
• Peer-reviewed scientific journals
• X-ray crystallography
• Rosalind Franklin, Linus Pauling, Maurice Wilkins, Jerry Donohue (other scientists involved with DNA research)

Lee Ann Potter is the director of Educational Outreach at the Library of Congress.

Editor’s Note

This article was originally published in the Summer 2016 issue of The Science Teacher journal from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA).

Get Involved With NSTA!

Join NSTA today and receive The Science Teacher, the peer-reviewed journal just for high school teachers; to write for the journal, see our Author Guidelines and Call for Papers; connect on the high school level science teaching list (members can sign up on the list server); or consider joining your peers at future NSTA conferences.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

Future NSTA Conferences

2016 Area Conferences

• Minneapolis, October 27–29
• Portland, November 10–12
• Columbus, December 1–3

2017 National Conference

• Los Angeles, March 30–April 2

Follow NSTA

I just took a fifth-grade position, and the principal showed me the classroom I’ll have. It’s a brand-new building, and there’s nothing in the classroom—just the student tables, bare bulletin boards, a few empty bookshelves, and a teacher desk. When I was student teaching, the classrooms had lots of interesting bulletin boards and centers, but this is really barren. What can I do in a short time and with a small budget? —A., California

New teachers should realize the classroom displays and bulletin boards in the classrooms of veteran teachers are the result of many years of experience and collecting. But starting with a blank space can be good—you won’t have to go through someone else’s “stuff.”

Imagine how you want the room to look and feel. Remember that less is more and avoid covering every available space and filling every nook and cranny. Students should be able to focus on their work, and some classrooms are so cluttered it’s distracting.

I can’t speak for the other subjects you’ll teach, but for science there are a few quick things you can do to make the classroom attractive and conducive to learning:

• Use some shelf space for a classroom library with books on a variety of nonfiction topics and reading levels. Start with books from the school library and supplement with books from yard sales or children’s book sales during the year.
• Reserve and label a place in the room as a “science center” with materials for activities related to what students are currently learning. This science interest center could also have objects or materials for students to explore (e.g., shell collections, animal bones, rock samples, weather maps, simple machines). Students may enjoy adding to your collection throughout the year. Change the materials with each unit of study. Any science-specific safety equipment (such as goggles or aprons) could also be stored here.
• Add a few plants (live or artificial) to the room.
• Find out what technology will be available in the classroom—laptops, tablets, etc. You’ll need a place to store these, close to outlets where they can be recharged.
• Set up a private study center for students doing make-up work and independent study or who need fewer distractions. You’ll probably want to have other areas for small group instruction and project work.
• Invest in some plastic tubs to organize materials and keep them out of the way.
• Although it’s not part of the décor, find out what safety equipment and science materials will eventually be in the classroom.

In terms of bulletin boards…

You can spend lots of time and money on elaborate bulletin ones, but that is not really necessary! I found that the most effective bulletin boards were those created with student materials (or by the students themselves) and whose content served an instructional purpose:

• Include a “word wall” with the key vocabulary for each subject. Start with a blank space and as you introduce a new term, ask a student to create a card with the word and post it on the wall. Refer to it often during class discussions or writing assignments. The cards can be taken down and used during review games, too.
• Safety rules should be posted in a prominent (and permanent) place. During the first few weeks of school, students could make the posters for display here.
• Reserve some space to display student work.
• Maps from a travel club cover a lot of bulletin board territory. A state map can fit into science, social studies, and math activities.
• Print magazines and the Internet are great sources for pictures related to your current units. In addition to their decorative value, these pictures can be used to stimulate discussions or as part of writing prompts.
• Set up a space for a photo gallery. Display some of your own photographs related to a topic and encourage students to share their photos or bring in related pictures or news articles. Post photos of students engaged in your class activities.

I know experienced teachers who deliberately start each year with blank walls or bulletin boards. As the year progresses, students add their own artifacts to the classroom.

As a beginning teacher, you’ll have to prioritize your time. The bottom line is that the learning activities you and the students do are more important than elaborate teacher-created bulletin boards and other decorations.

For more ideas:

• Displaying student work
• The classroom as learning center
• Classroom science centers

Photo: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3022/2942099404_1a7248a39a.jpg