It's a long way from gathering your first rock collection to becoming a full-fledged modern geologist. And geologists still begin with that rock collection, but they have more to learn all the time. It used to be, not so many decades ago, that a rock hammer, a microscope, and a lot of time tramping the land were all you needed to start making a contribution to the science, but no longer.
Today's earth scientists also need to know their way around the computer, along with the math, physics, and chemistry background to make the most of the machine's power. And the scientific toolkit these days includes spectrometers, electron microscopes, spacecraft, explosives, and seismographs, just for starters. So for geologists to have the longest possible careers, schools need to teach kids more and teach them better. That classroom box of stones and fossils won't cut the mustard any more. Some schools are rising to the challenge.
Consider the Let's Make Diamonds program, which has been bringing teams of kids to the Center for High Pressure Research in Stony Brook, New York, where they use the heavy-duty equipment there—presses, furnaces, crushers, and x-ray diffraction apparatus—to create and characterize diamonds. The Women in Science and Technology (WISE) program has been sponsoring groups of girls, but local boys go there too.
A more ambitious program in Alaska has students monitoring how the crust deforms in earthquake country. In this case the sponsor is the American space agency NASA—and that's something to learn about modern geology right there.
The strain that builds up in the crust around an earthquake zone is measured using the Global Positioning System or GPS, a set of precisely tracked satellites that is revolutionizing all kinds of things. With a fairly cheap GPS sensor mounted on your bicycle, for instance, you can pinpoint your position anywhere on Earth to within a few meters. With the kind of GPS equipment that earthquake scientists use, they can measure motions of the crust as small as a few millimeters per year.
Crustal strain monitoring with GPS is a promising technique, and NASA has been making GPS observations in south-central Alaska, where strain has been building up since the enormous magnitude-9.2 earthquake of 1964. A few years ago they recruited high-schoolers and their teachers on Kodiak Island to take measurements across the strain zone, repeating them after a few years. Several mainland high schools have made measurements, too.
This is a beautiful arrangement for everybody—the scientists can have local people gathering good data around the year, not just during their own field season. The results feed numerical models of the earthquake faults' detailed behavior, helping us inevitably gain a better picture of the deep-earth "weather" beneath Alaska. Some of the research results are on the Web. And NASA is starting to do the same sort of program with data from the Mars Orbital Laser Altimeter. (See NASA's enormous geologic education program here.)
The teachers have a real science project to build learning opportunities around. Teachers love to learn, more so than most people, and they're enthusiastic about this program. Kodiak high school teacher Eric Lindscheid, for instance, not only got his students involved but advanced professionally himself, being chosen to join the "Space Explorers" program and study data from the Lunar Prospector mission.
The students get a taste of up-to-date science, learn the reasons for doing it, and feel the warm rush of contributing to the safety of their home town and families. This is good for all young citizens, whether or not they become earth scientists.
