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Issue of
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From rocks to stardust Earth Sciences marks 50 -- make that 106 -- years BY JANET BASU |
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The School of Earth Sciences is
metamorphosing again. The rocks that earth scientists
study undergo metamorphic transformations on a geologic
time scale -- tens of thousands to millions of years.
Earth scientists from Stanford have been analyzing those
rocks for just a tick of that time, 106 years, back to
the founding of the university. On a human and academic
scale, however, that has been long enough for several
transformations -- from studies of the solid rocks that
were the basis of Herbert Hoover's 1895 degree in mining
engineering to a leading role in the discovery of
underground liquids such as oil, natural gas and water,
to work on how to prevent and solve environmental damage
in the ground -- to the revolutionary realization that
the crust of the earth itself is in a constant state of
motion and alteration, shifting and crumpling beneath our
feet.
Additional material on the 50th anniversary
