These furnaces would run for six months at a time, occasionally breaking with “bangs like gunfire.” After almost a year of building and running the experiment, her samples hadn’t melted, so she simply began again at an even higher temperature and pressure. She casually mentions how her arc welder used to shock her via her eye socket. She also describes her early research building high-pressure furnaces to melt rock powder. These conclusively tied the Siberian flood basalts to the end-Permian mass extinction, a key result for both biology and geology. Over several years, these expeditions netted 850 pounds of samples that led to a slew of papers from a multi-institution, multi-nation group of researchers. She also recounts even less glamorous aspects of those trips: the occasionally difficult team dynamics, the fruitless quest for zircon crystals, wrangling Russian permits, and a scary escape from an alcohol-addled local. There, she found herself helicoptering onto the tundra and navigating freezing waters in a pontoon boat held together with duct tape, sharing an aircraft cargo bay with thawing, smelly caribou carcasses, sipping vodka around the campfire in the snow, and eating in clouds of mosquitos so thick that the insects landed in her food as it was en route from her bowl to her mouth. One thread is a fascinating account of her adventures as a geologist, particularly her expeditions to the remotest wilds of Siberia. To cover all that ground, Elkins-Tanton braids several different threads into one book. But Elkins-Tanton overcame those obstacles-and others far more profound. At times she felt she didn’t belong, and at other times she was told so. She wavered between forestry and geology as she was applying for college, she was stymied by organic chemistry as a freshman, and she was told she either wasn’t studying hard enough or wasn’t good enough. Given all that, perhaps the biggest revelation in her new autobiography, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, is that this stellar high achiever was plagued by the same doubts and lack of confidence that afflict the rest of us. There is even an asteroid-Asteroid 8252 Elkins-Tanton-named after her. The results she’s generated have been foundational and have earned her a constellation of prestigious awards. Her self-described “curvy” career path has taken her research into planet formation, magma oceans, mass extinctions, and mantle melting. She’s currently a professor at Arizona State University, she helps run a learning company, and she is the principal investigator for NASA’s “Psyche” mission to a metal asteroid. At various times, she has been a farmer, a trainer of competition sheepdogs, a children’s book author, and a management consultant for Boeing Helicopters. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a Siberian-river-running, arc-welding, code-writing, patent-holding, company-founding, asteroid-exploring, igneous petrologist professor. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.
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