Quick and Dirty Dating

So many untouched cores of coral!

by Pamela Grothe

Week 1: Scripps

I started my two-week jaunt to California last week at Chris Charles’ lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Kim’s alma mater.  After several expeditions in the field, Kim has collected quite a collection of fossil coral from the Line Islands (and in particular from Palmyra), all of which have not been dated or geochemically analyzed. Since Scripps is just down the road from UC Irvine, we figured it would be a great opportunity to inventory the collection that exists there and take samples from them to date in addition to my samples from Christmas Island. Unfortunately, half the collection was off-site in storage bays located in rattlesnake habitat, so I was only able to inventory half the existing collection. That just means I will have to return another day to inventory the rest! In all, I found 48 cores that have not been analyzed yet that I measured, photographed, categorized, and sampled.

Week 2: UC Irvine

Doing what I do best, exploring the area on a 10 mile trail
run in Crystal Cove State Park on Easter Sunday.
I haven't seen hills like this since I left Boulder!

After enjoying my time in beautiful La Jolla, I bummed a ride up to Irvine on Friday afternoon from the guy who works at the Cal Tech Marine Lab, where I’m staying. It just so happened that he was in the area picking up sea urchins and saved me the headache of public transportation to head up the coast! With Kim’s connections at Cal Tech, I was able to stay at their Marine Lab right on the water in Corona Del Mar! The accommodations are far from luxurious but you can’t beat cheap oceanfront lodging.

I spent Saturday in the lab washing and drying the samples I grabbed at Scripps, and then took Easter Sunday to myself to explore the area and get caught up on some homework since I’m missing two weeks of classes.

And so the dating process begins! Carbon-14 is a radioactive element that decays with a known half-life of 5,730 years. Corals take up carbon from the water while it’s living, including stable 12C and radioactive 14C. Once it dies, 14C begins to decay while the stable 12C remains constant, thus changing the 14C to 12C ratio. By comparing the measured 14C/12C ratio with the 14C/12C ratio of the atmosphere an age can be calculated.  This is the radiocarbon age, which is not the true age because the 14C/12C ratio of the atmosphere has not been constant through the past. Luckily the experts have worked this out and we can just apply a calibration curve to our data (in my case a curve that also takes into account the reservoir age of the water in which the corals grew) and we get a true calendar age!

The AMS. Much bigger than our mas spec!

Carbon-14 atoms are rare and so in order to measure them you need an accelerator mass spectrometer, such as the one here at UC Irvine (pictured on right). These instruments are equipped with an ion source that bombards the sample with cesium ions, which are then focused into the accelerator by magnets. In the accelerator, they collide with Argon gas that is circulating throughout in order to break up molecular ions. The filtered ions then enter the detector and are measured. Only a special few get to operate this, so for this part, my only participation was watching the experts load my sample wheel from outside the high voltage cage.

Cartoon schematic illustrating the different
components of the AMS.

But there’s a lot of prep work to get the samples ready for the AMS. Luckily for me, I’m performing the “quick and dirty” method, also known as the fast screening method, so my prep time is reduced dramatically. Normally, the samples that go into the wheel are graphitized, a process that takes the original sample and converts it into graphite (leaching with HCl to clean the sample, dissolving in phosphoric acid to convert sample to a CO2 gas, and then graphitizing the CO2 gas to graphite). However, the quick and dirty removes all those steps and just uses the powdered sample mixed with pure iron!

Of course, that being said, the process of physically handling 85 samples still took three days. The samples I collected at Scripps needed to be crushed. Iron has to be weighed out to between 5.0 and 6.5 milligrams (about half-way through I became good enough to just eye ball this saving more time). Then 0.3 milligrams of the powdered sample needs to be weighed out and mixed with iron (this you can’t eye ball because the beam current works best with 0.3 milligrams of sample so there’s not much wiggle room here). The last step is pouring this tiny amount of sample into a pin-sized hole without spilling and then pressing it to 400 psi so that it is no longer loose powder. It took a bit of muscle memory before getting the tilt and pour method down without spilling my sample everywhere! But the biggest time consuming part of all of this is cleaning every tool in-between samples, as you don’t want to contaminate your next sample. It’s crazy how mush waste I generated in just prepping my two wheels as nothing is reused in this lab because of possible contamination.

Now that the samples are prepped and ready, it’s time to let the AMS do its job and wait for the final results.

Straight forward prep work for rapid screening dating method - no wet chemistry involved here!

Hello from Southern California!

by Pamela Grothe

Not all trips in the Cobb lab are to exotic places, but we still travel to cool places nationally too, visiting other labs and collaborating with others (as Stacy and Hussein have already blogged about). I should probably introduce myself first. Hi, I’m Pamela Grothe, Kim’s newest PhD student, blogging from Southern California. I started at Georgia Tech last August and am just beginning to wrap up my second semester. A bit about myself, I’m a native Virginian, however, I’m a Coloradan at heart. I moved to Atlanta from Boulder after spending the last four years there, working as a research assistant in a NOAA lab and completing my master’s degree at CU. Everyone tells me I’m crazy for trading Boulder for Atlanta, but hey, it’s ONLY five years, right! Other than science, I love to run and race. I also love to bike and swim, hike and camp, scuba dive and kayak, and whatever else that involves the outdoors – I think that is par for course for anybody working in the earth sciences.

My Research

A ridge of fossil coral rubble  on Christmas Island

I fall on the coral side of the Cobb Lab (despite the photo of me in a caving helmet). For my research, I will be working on a new method of using hundreds of short (5-20yr-long) fossil coral segments (a.k.a. rubble) to reconstruct the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and tropical Pacific climate variability over the last 7,000 years in the central tropical Pacific. To date, paleo-ENSO variability has relied on exceedingly rare, decades-long fossil coral sequences, 16 of which are presented in Kim’s new Science paper spanning the last 7,000 years. However, smaller fossil coral rubble pieces are plentiful on Christmas Island (see photo at right, and which the gang graciously collected samples of last May). The plan is to use these numerous but shorter rubble pieces to produce a more statistically robust paleoclimate reconstruction – it’s all about the numbers! That’s the gist of the project, which I am only just beginning and super excited about!

Southern California

With any type of paleo-reconstruction, in order to put your record in context, you have to know how old your sample is! And that’s why I’m in California. I’m here to date the fossil coral that the group collected all across Christmas Island last May. My new approach of using hundreds of fossil coral rubble presents a unique challenge to me though. As you recall from Stacy’s dating lesson on U/Th dating, it is a quite intensive and time-consuming technique and thus very inefficient for quickly dating hundreds of sample at a time. So I’ve been in touch with collaborators Dr. John Southon and Dr. Guaciara do Santos at University of California Irvine’s Keck Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab, working with them on a method to quickly date lots of sample using high throughput radiocarbon dating (up to 60 per day)!

So in a nutshell, that’s who I am, what I’m working on and why I’m in California. Next up will be more details on my actual trip, which also includes a side trip to Chris Charles' lab Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla to sample fossil corals that Kim collected back in 1998!

Climate Science Day on Capitol Hill

I'm just back from a trip to DC to talk to Congressional offices about climate science as part of the third annual "Climate Science Day on Capitol Hill" (here's a link to the 2012 event). Organized by a consortium of 15 scientific societies, including the AGU, the event saw 50 climate scientists from all walks of the discipline converge on DC for a 1/2 day training session on Tuesday followed by a day full of Hill visits on Wednesday. The highlight of the training session was seeing so many women delivering sage and substantive advice on getting our climate science messages across. Susan Hassol gave a rousing overview of climate communication do's and don'ts, followed by a bi-partisan panel of 4 female Congressional staffers who provided behind-the-scenes tips for making yourself heard through the din on the Hill. For Wednesday's visits, we were grouped into state/region, and my team included Jennifer Howard, an AAAS Fellow working with NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (and co-lead author of the Technical Report on "Oceans and Marine Resources in a Changing Climate" written for the upcoming National Climate Assessment, now in public review), Robert Lund (a climate statistics whiz in the Math Department at Clemson), led by Erik Hankin (an AGU Public Affairs Coordinator who knows his way around the Hill both physically and mentally).

Jennifer Howard (NOAA), Robert Lund (Clemson), Me,
and Erik Hankin (AGU) on a stroll between meetings.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, as my visit to Capitol Hill started in seat 21B of my flight up to DC, with Congressman Sanford Bishop (D-GA) in seat 21C, and my 2-year-old daughter Sasha in seat 21A. One has to appreciate the irony here:  I'm flying up to DC to meet with a legion of Congressional staffers in the faint hope that one of them may put my name under their boss' nose for 2 seconds, and as it turns out a real-life Congressman is literally forced to sit down next to me for 2+ hours! Of course having my 2-yr-old there provided comic relief, spilled milk, kicked seats, and spurred a sharing of stories about kids/grandkids (he has a 5-yr-old granddaughter and I have a 5-yr-old daughter). I think our conversation started when I asked him for one of his napkins in response to the first of many liquid spills. Once we realized we could actually have a substantive, if not interrupted, conversation, we gabbed on for the rest of the flight. He started with some probing questions about my thoughts on whether climate is best characterized as cyclical (no), whether the polar ice is really melting (yes), and to what extent Sandy is related to climate change (it's complicated). We then meandered through a broader discussion about the energy landscape, and the role for climate change in shaping energy policy. He spoke solemnly about how his vote for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill almost cost him his job. I acknowledged that while climate change may be taboo on the Hill for years to come, building the components of a comprehensive package of energy legislation would require new partnerships and conversations that happen across the aisle, one baby step at a time. We ended up talking about the importance of a broad-based energy education, to train the next generation of leaders who can appreciate the complexity of the energy/climate landscape. I of course sung the praises of my energy class, and the associated Carbon Reduction Challenge, and assured him that I would visit his office with my students this coming May (as we had last May). We spoke specifically about beefing up the presence of energy-minded GT students as interns on the Hill, and he gave me his super-secret e-mail and cell to follow up with. I've already gotten an e-mail from his Chief of Staff, and I'm looking forward to working with his office on areas of mutual interest.

The formal Hill visits went as expected, for the most part, with us blending in with a veritable sea of Hill visitors giving Congress their opinions about the upcoming sequester and looming budget fights. We had an edge in that we weren't there to speak about funding, which was a welcome break for the staffers we met with. Our only request was that they contact us in the future with climate-related questions and requests for information. We each gave a brief blurb on our specialties, and how they relate to the challenges facing Georgia/South Carolina. For example, what effect will rising sea level have on the proposed expansion of the Savannah port? Agriculture is big business in Georgia, and it's fair to ask whether climate change has played a role in Georgia's ongoing drought? We left a few 1-page "leaves", including an overview of 'Paleoclimate Research at Georgia Tech' (shown at the right). In most cases, the staffers thanked us for making the trip to visit them, and promised to follow up if they had any questions. In our meeting with Senator Isakson's (R-GA) staffer, we were repeatedly invited to inundate him with relevant information, saying the Senator is always interested in being at the top of his game on all energy-related issues. That's pretty much a home run for these sorts of visits. On the other hand, we had a pretty lack-luster visit with a staffer from another office, who seemed determined to throw cold water on our enthusiasm and hold the meeting to under 10 minutes. By the way, I think it was great that we only met with Republicans - I didn't fly all the way to DC to get a pat on the back, but rather to engage those lawmakers who represent the future of successful climate and energy legislation.

Reflecting on the experience, I am reminded how important it is to keep beating a dead horse when it comes to climate change, respectfully and consistently, and from a diversity of mouths. If the world moves forward one relationship at a time, then these cursory exchanges amount to something over the course of geologic time (i.e. several years in Capitol Hill time). There was faint talk about energy/climate legislation making its way onto the legislative agenda sometime this year, and the tone was decidedly more receptive than the first time I met with staffers from these same offices, back in spring of 2009. Progress is measured slowly, but steadily, in a realm where human interactions and trust-building trump all the graphs in the world. So I will go back to the Hill in May, with students high on energy efficiency, and again next February, for the 4th annual Climate Science Day on Capitol Hill, to once again shop my wares with an easy smile and an open mind.

The Academic Job Search: Notes from the Frontline

by Jessica Conroy

I did it. I landed a tenure track faculty position. And not just any position, but one I really, really wanted.

I’ve been summing up the last year or so in my head recently—whenever I feel guilty about not getting as much done as I had wanted, I ask: what, exactly, did I do the last year? Then I feel better, because the answer is I applied for 13 jobs, and prepared for and went to 6 job interviews. In between I had 2 field seasons in the tropical Pacific, analyzed a mountain of water isotope model data, and worked toward getting 3 very different manuscripts ready for publication. And I spent a very intensive (but fruitful!) week at NSF Expert Witness Training Camp. So I guess I did some stuff.

Getting a job takes work. Thirteen times over I carefully crafted my research and teaching statements to match the institution and the call, polished up my CV, and sent applications into the ether. Once the interview invites started rolling in, I spent weeks making my job talk as perfect as possible--keeping it as scientifically sexy as possible, but still interesting to the igneous petrologist in the room (who also votes on you, remember). Prior to each interview, I also researched each institution and department to death, and practiced my talk like a maniac (since going over time in a job talk is the kiss of death). And maybe I made some flash cards with interview questions, too, because I tend to overdo things.

The interviews themselves were the most exhausting experience of my life. That is not hyperbole. Being something of an introvert and a classic imposter syndrome case (it waxes and wanes, but never seems to go away for good), being ‘on’ for 2 days straight six times over was an ordeal for me (confession: I drank 5-hour energy during my bathroom breaks!). But, despite the hours of stressful prep (and the mental exhaustion that sets in afterward), the interviews were actually kind of fun. You get to meet lots of interesting people and talk shop. Only in a couple instances were people jerks to me, or was I the victim of mansplaining.

 What required the greatest emotional fortitude, though, was the waiting afterward. I had heard from three of my highly successful mentors, all amazing scientists who exude Science and Nature papers from their pores, that “You won’t get the first job you apply for,” and “I didn’t get X job,” etc. This is frightening information, I think, for the first-timers on the academic job market. Those of us who have gotten to the point where we are getting academic job interviews are not used to failing. But, fail I did. I learned that you can have a great interview experience, give the best talk, and still not get the job. And this has to do with ‘fit’ and ‘need.’ Completely reasonable, but even when I didn’t end up wanting the job, rejection stings a bit.

 But, here’s the bright side: Of all the applications I sent out, I got offers from my top 2 choices. I even wound up having to decline interviews at four more schools after those offers came in. So I did ok! I’m proud to proclaim that starting in August, I’ll be an assistant professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign!

Dual-Career Issues 
Like many other female academics, I have an academic partner. In grad school I fell in love with a charming, handsome thermochronologist. We got in engaged in 2011, and have spent the last 1.5 years apart as he finishes up his PhD in Arizona. Long distance is not fun, and is not a long-term option for us. We knew our ultimate goal was two tenure-track positions at the same school. But how to make it happen? We had seen it work at Arizona, and at Georgia Tech, but we had also seen it not work. My plan was [to try] not to worry about it until I had an offer. So I never brought it up, until interview #4. I was asked what my fiancé did, and I just decided to be completely honest, and not make a big deal about it. Although I did talk him up, which was easy to do. I quickly realized that the question was being asked in order to inform me how wonderful the institution was about spousal hire. Not to ‘out’ me as a candidate with a two-body problem. This happened a second time, as I set up an interview at another school. Then I mentioned my academic partner on the phone to the search committee chair, and the department arranged to have us both fly out to interview at the same time.

Both institutions where I got offers were very open to finding my fiancé a position. Illinois moved quickly, and had him out for an official interview about 2 weeks after I got a formal offer. He rocked it, they loved him, and it was clear he would fill a need in the department. There were many reasons why we picked Illinois, but one of them definitely was their progressive attitude about spousal hire.

Since he is earlier in his career, we thought it best if he had a couple years off from teaching to build his lab and get his dissertation papers out. So Illinois offered him a 2-year research assistant professorship with the start up to build his lab. His position will transition to a tenure track line after 2 years. We got it in writing of course (very important).

Thus, the stress of the job search has ended. We’re going to be Fighting Illini come fall!

Now, I can worry about getting tenure.

Climbing Mt. Everest: the undergraduate researcher

by Elizabeth Wiggins with input from Eleanor Middlemas

Cobb lab undergraduate researcher Liz Wiggins presents her
research to Cobb lab alum Jud Partin at the 2012 Fall Meeting
of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

I like to think of the journey from student to scientist as a marathon. Obtaining both an undergraduate and graduate degree is a lengthy process on its own. Once research is added into the mix this journey becomes much more complex, and rewarding. As an undergraduate senior preparing for graduate school I have found the path for my marathon is not an easy road, it is quite the opposite. But now the goals I am close to achieving are beyond what I could have ever imagined.

At the start of Eleanor’s and my fall semester, Dr. Cobb casually dropped Mt. Everest onto our marathon path. She gave us the choice to climb, or rather sprint up this mountain and be light-years ahead of our peers, or to take the easy way out and bypass it completely. We chose Mt. Everest, of course. Along with taking 18 credit hours of coursework (a hefty amount at Georgia Tech) my marathon would now consist of taking the GRE, finishing my own research project, writing a proposal for the NSF graduate research fellowship, presenting a poster of my research at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, and applying to graduate school – all within 5 months. Eleanor’s path would be similar except she would also be participating in her first field expedition to Borneo.

Cobb lab undergraduate researcher Eleanor Middlemas
posing with Kim at her poster at the 2012 Fall Meeting
of the American Geophysical Union.

The process began in the summer and early fall with locating and contacting prospective graduate research advisers. For me, this process was terrifying but has helped me learn how to network as a scientist. The search itself makes the whole world feel like it is at your fingertips; just find the most interesting and hottest research out there and begin to make yourself a part of it. After countless emails, phone conversations, and Skype meetings with prospective advisers both Eleanor and I have found some incredible programs that we recently applied for.

Getting a NSF fellowship is a career- defining achievement, and affords more flexibility in the choice of graduate research. It is also the most pristine, polished, and time consuming application I have ever completed. In the course of two months each of the three essays went through at least 10 drafts before they were finished. Add this load in with normal school work, research in the lab, and studying for/taking the GRE and our Mt. Everest comes into plain sight.

Liz collecting fossil corals on Christmas
Island during our May, 2012 expedition.

There wasn’t even enough time for a sigh of relief after the NSF application was officially submitted. In less than two weeks we would be presenting our research posters at AGU. Entering into a new state of panic and exhaustion, I began to truly feel like a real scientist. Long days evolved into long nights in the lab, but in the end I had a beautiful poster with (mostly) completed research results to present.

Attending the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union is a mind-opening experience full of endless opportunity, although to the rest of the world it probably seems more like a festival for earth science nerds. Along with presenting our research and enjoying other presentations, we were able to meet and mingle with prospective advisers and graduate students in their labs. The entire experience has exponentially increased my desire to continue on this path towards becoming a scientist, fully understanding all that entails.

Eleanor and Danja Mewes, another Cobb lab
undergrad, at Gunung Mulu National Park,
Malaysian Borneo, during our October, 2012
caving expedition.

 Winter break allowed us time to apply to our chosen graduate schools. Back at school we will be wrapping up our research projects and beginning the next leg of the journey – writing a manuscript for submission to a peer-reviewed journal. To enter graduate school with a first-author publication under your belt is an impressive achievement. It also means that we will have experience in how to write (and hopefully publish) a scientific paper. As we complete this leg of the marathon, our futures are bright, and hopeful. 

Women's attire at the AGU Fall Meeting

by Kim Cobb

Every year before the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, there is a flurry of conversation in my mostly female lab about what to wear. I understand that this was also discussed on the Earth Science Women’s Network listserv. For someone who has never been, it is impossible to know what to expect. This is science after all, and geology at that, so much of the online guidance about corporate conference attire is off-base. As women in earth science, it is especially difficult to balance several competing aims when packing for AGU. First and foremost, AGU presents a unique opportunity for professional development– one that is particularly important for younger scientists. Getting a job after graduation requires making a name for yourself outside of your lab. Presenting a polished, put-together appearance reflects a seriousness of purpose, self-confidence, and shows respect for the collective scientific efforts on display at AGU. Add to this the intuitive understanding that attractive people are at a distinct advantage in our society (see supporting research here and especially here), and these drivers would in isolation push women towards the coordinated, tailored suits that are so common in corporate settings. It is important to remember that science is an arena where individual intellectual accomplishment is highly valued, so there is more latitude for personal style than in corporate America.

However, several important factors push AGU women’s attire in the other direction, closer to the average AGU men’s outfit of jeans paired with a pullover sweater. Most obviously, attractive young female students are likely wary of distinguishing themselves from the sea of male colleagues by calling attention to their femininity. And then there’s the whole “geology” subculture:  rock hammer-toting, North Face-wearing, “I’m-so-busy-solving-earth’s-mysteries-that-I-hardly-have-time-to-shave”. In this world, a Mac laptop is a fashion statement. Finally, some recent research (summarized here) has uncovered a distinct bias against the hiring of attractive women in male-dominated fields. If young women are subconsciously aware of such a bias, it will also push them towards a more androgenous look.  

What follows is my attempt to provide some guidance for young women beginning their careers in geoscience, especially as they consider conference attire. It was also really fun to collect these images from well-dressed women scientists, as a fashion aficionado myself. I didn’t know most of them, so you can imagine the reaction I got when I asked to take their picture for an AGU fashion blog! They turned three shades of red and giggled nervously. Some preferred to remain anonymous, while some, like my esteemed colleague Adina Paytan, reveled in the spotlight. I owe a big thank-you to these ladies, who were great sports.

Below I present several looks and discuss why I believe they make successful AGU outfits. [Update:  Many readers have bemoaned the lack of pants featured here. I love wearing pants to AGU myself, and I in no way meant to suggest that one must wear a skirt and/or boots to AGU to look "acceptable" or fashionable.]

Lynn Soreghan, Prof. Univ. of Oklahoma. I love the
effortless-ness of the outfit, impeccably accessorized,
with matching coat and boots. It's "earthy" but modern,
 and the vest adds a touch of academic elegance.

Jen (awake) and Annie (asleep) Pierce, Boise State
University. What can I say, there is nothing that says "I'm a fearless female scientist" like a baby in a sling paired with some incredible red boots! Great wool skirt too.

Yours truly, sporting my new, ridiculous(ly cute)
Italian shoes. Matching bag is a coincidence. I do like
to wear skirts at AGU, most often with a plain,
unmemorable, but well-conceived (and warm!) top.
Here, it's all about the accessories.

Anonymous. I think this outfit hits all the right notes. She
looks nerdy and interesting, but attractive, in a Euro-styled aesthetic that is made particularly memorable by, once more, great red boots. I like her hair worn down here, which softens the look. 

Anonymous. I saw meters and meters of scarves at AGU,
whose gifts are on display here. The long skirt is flattering
yet nondescript, while the scarf and coordinated sweater
add interest and draw the eye to her face - a good thing.

Betsy Madden, an all-but-PhD'd grad student at Stanford. I love the ease that this outfit conveys, and the pairing of neutrals with the colorful textured skirt. She certainly seems ready to be at the front of a class.

Sylvia Dee, grad student USC. She is making
a bold statement with the all-black look, which
is very effective against her striking red hair and
blue eyes. The metal-studded flats are a good
choice, adding some playfulness to the ensemble. 

Adina Paytan, UCSC. Sporting a killer blue dress at the
AGU Honor's Banquet. She wears her sunglasses at night.
A brilliant scientist, close friend and colleague, and one
of my role models.