O’hare Airport, Chicago Illinois, 7:05 am
Kathleen Ritterbush, Paleontologist
“…Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Sholders…”
-Sandberg
I spent the last few days hustling around Hyde Park and downtown Chicago getting ready for Peru. The last six month’s I’ve lived here as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. I experienced my first winter, first fireflies, and at Friday’s geology department softball game against the chemists, my first mulberries!
On this expedition I’m planning to show off the work I’ve done the last few years to a gaggle of ambitious professors and collaborators bent on new research directions. As a paleontologist I look for signs of animal life, and indications of how those animals interacted with each other and with their ocean home. Two of our collaborators are chemists who study how erosion on land feeds crucial minerals to the seas, and how this changes the ocean through time. We’re interested in how Pangea volcanically splitting apart influenced ocean chemistry, how the chemistry influenced the animals, and how the animals influenced their coastline homes.
Two hundred million years ago Pangea was splitting and an astronomical number of animals went extinct on land and in the oceans. Afterwards, dinosaurs got a good boost on land by expanding into new ecological opportunities. I spent the last few years looking at what happened in the oceans, and in addition to the usual new clams and new snails, there was a radical reorganization of which animals ruled the roost on the coasts.
Sea sponges spread out over vast areas previously occupied mollusks and crinoids, turning something that might have looked like the Florida coast into something more like the sponge meadows of the Antarctic shelf. I spent the last three years searching for their fossilized parts in the American west and Peru. When I found their tiny needles in microscope slides of rocks, I knew they were close. When I found their bodies preserved as three-dimensional blobs and sacks and vases strewn over fossilized seafloor rock layers, I couldn’t even believe my eyes. With a lot of help from professors and other grad students, I spent a few years analyzing the fossils in the lab and under the microscope, and returning to the field to look for more.
That search led to Peru, and to a remarkable professor who did her dissertation on a pack of rocks that happen to contain one of the best marine records of the Triassic/Jurassic history ever found. Several professors at University of Southern California decided to push for more funding, and now we’re on our way. It’s my job to show the chemists the rocks with the sponge fossils. It’s our job together to decide how to get more out of these rocks, how to take samples that might, after careful work in the lab, reveal what happened in the ocean 200,000,000 years ago.
In some ways I’ve been preparing for this trip since last May, when we learned our grant proposal was funded. I transformed a solo month of Peruvian field work into a scramble for materials the chemists could try out in the lab. A series of taste tests, if you will. Now we go back together, armed with preliminary results.
We’re going to present our research at an international symposium in Lima, then head to the high Andes for two weeks. I prepared field guides for the crew, and I’m still preparing more detailed field notes for myself. Over the past year I’ve been scrutinizing almost 200 microscope slides I had made from the Peruvian samples from six different Andean mines and mountainsides. I’ve drafted schematics to represent the rocks, the fossils, and the microscopic contents. Together we’ve submitted two academic articles on the results, and I used these figures to prepare field guides for the crew.
There’s never enough time. I always want one more hour on the microscope, one more hour with my computer drafting station, one more hour to read over accounts of previous expeditions from the 1980s and 1990s. Then I export myself into the field and have only what’s in my head. This year I’m making a technological leap and using an iPad mini – my first tablet – to keep the photographs and microscope results and chemical test results at my fingertips in the field. I’m hoping the new graduate student on our team – Joyce Yager – can show me some clever ways to use it.
I didn’t brush up on my Spanish enough, and what’s more I’ll be surrounded by the team members speaking English, which challenges my emersion. I didn’t write blog posts over the past month like I planned, and I still need to submit my research symposium abstracts for the big international meeting in October. I figure I have time for that in Houston before our Lima flight.
One last minute priority that paid off was getting physically and mentally into better shape. The cruel “polar vortex” winter, a cross country move, and time away from rocks took a toll on my motivation. After long consideration I took the plunge and joined a Dutch style Muay Thai kickboxing club. Learning to casually kick an opponent in the thigh is actually a combination of about eight sophisticated tricks of balance and rotation. Turns out it’s physically impossible to fret about job applications or impending research deadlines when someone’s about to punch me in the face. Three weeks later I’m feeling more human, and hoping my lungs do a bit better in the Andes. Academia can bring subtle isolation and stress that we each need to navigate cleverly to survive. I’ve been sparing and boxing; I’ve been getting my own big Chicago shoulders.
I’ve been worried about the upcoming trip, and discouraged, and unsure how it will go. I know it’s going to be cold, I know I’m going to wish I’d looked at my slides differently, and I know I’m going to wish I had another week on the rocks. Every time I revisit a field site I see it with new eyes, and bringing a pack of wily senior scientists along is sure to revolutionize my perspective. I find field work so captivating because it is completely transformative. Sure I like the llamas and the food and the people and the travels, but the way a week’s passing brings a whole new outlook on science and deep time is just unbeatable. I don’t know what I’ll find, but I’m expecting the good kind of trouble.
Kathleen Ritterbush, Paleontologist
“…Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Sholders…”
-Sandberg
 |
| "Cloud Gate" aka "the bean" in Chicago's Millenium Park |
I spent the last few days hustling around Hyde Park and downtown Chicago getting ready for Peru. The last six month’s I’ve lived here as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. I experienced my first winter, first fireflies, and at Friday’s geology department softball game against the chemists, my first mulberries!
On this expedition I’m planning to show off the work I’ve done the last few years to a gaggle of ambitious professors and collaborators bent on new research directions. As a paleontologist I look for signs of animal life, and indications of how those animals interacted with each other and with their ocean home. Two of our collaborators are chemists who study how erosion on land feeds crucial minerals to the seas, and how this changes the ocean through time. We’re interested in how Pangea volcanically splitting apart influenced ocean chemistry, how the chemistry influenced the animals, and how the animals influenced their coastline homes.
Two hundred million years ago Pangea was splitting and an astronomical number of animals went extinct on land and in the oceans. Afterwards, dinosaurs got a good boost on land by expanding into new ecological opportunities. I spent the last few years looking at what happened in the oceans, and in addition to the usual new clams and new snails, there was a radical reorganization of which animals ruled the roost on the coasts.
 |
| Sponges fossilized on a seafloor preserved from the Early Jurassic, 200,000,000 years ago |
Sea sponges spread out over vast areas previously occupied mollusks and crinoids, turning something that might have looked like the Florida coast into something more like the sponge meadows of the Antarctic shelf. I spent the last three years searching for their fossilized parts in the American west and Peru. When I found their tiny needles in microscope slides of rocks, I knew they were close. When I found their bodies preserved as three-dimensional blobs and sacks and vases strewn over fossilized seafloor rock layers, I couldn’t even believe my eyes. With a lot of help from professors and other grad students, I spent a few years analyzing the fossils in the lab and under the microscope, and returning to the field to look for more.
That search led to Peru, and to a remarkable professor who did her dissertation on a pack of rocks that happen to contain one of the best marine records of the Triassic/Jurassic history ever found. Several professors at University of Southern California decided to push for more funding, and now we’re on our way. It’s my job to show the chemists the rocks with the sponge fossils. It’s our job together to decide how to get more out of these rocks, how to take samples that might, after careful work in the lab, reveal what happened in the ocean 200,000,000 years ago.
In some ways I’ve been preparing for this trip since last May, when we learned our grant proposal was funded. I transformed a solo month of Peruvian field work into a scramble for materials the chemists could try out in the lab. A series of taste tests, if you will. Now we go back together, armed with preliminary results.
We’re going to present our research at an international symposium in Lima, then head to the high Andes for two weeks. I prepared field guides for the crew, and I’m still preparing more detailed field notes for myself. Over the past year I’ve been scrutinizing almost 200 microscope slides I had made from the Peruvian samples from six different Andean mines and mountainsides. I’ve drafted schematics to represent the rocks, the fossils, and the microscopic contents. Together we’ve submitted two academic articles on the results, and I used these figures to prepare field guides for the crew.
There’s never enough time. I always want one more hour on the microscope, one more hour with my computer drafting station, one more hour to read over accounts of previous expeditions from the 1980s and 1990s. Then I export myself into the field and have only what’s in my head. This year I’m making a technological leap and using an iPad mini – my first tablet – to keep the photographs and microscope results and chemical test results at my fingertips in the field. I’m hoping the new graduate student on our team – Joyce Yager – can show me some clever ways to use it.
I didn’t brush up on my Spanish enough, and what’s more I’ll be surrounded by the team members speaking English, which challenges my emersion. I didn’t write blog posts over the past month like I planned, and I still need to submit my research symposium abstracts for the big international meeting in October. I figure I have time for that in Houston before our Lima flight.
One last minute priority that paid off was getting physically and mentally into better shape. The cruel “polar vortex” winter, a cross country move, and time away from rocks took a toll on my motivation. After long consideration I took the plunge and joined a Dutch style Muay Thai kickboxing club. Learning to casually kick an opponent in the thigh is actually a combination of about eight sophisticated tricks of balance and rotation. Turns out it’s physically impossible to fret about job applications or impending research deadlines when someone’s about to punch me in the face. Three weeks later I’m feeling more human, and hoping my lungs do a bit better in the Andes. Academia can bring subtle isolation and stress that we each need to navigate cleverly to survive. I’ve been sparing and boxing; I’ve been getting my own big Chicago shoulders.
 |
| Cycling around Chicago's brief and wonderful summer, at Buckingham Fountain |
I’ve been worried about the upcoming trip, and discouraged, and unsure how it will go. I know it’s going to be cold, I know I’m going to wish I’d looked at my slides differently, and I know I’m going to wish I had another week on the rocks. Every time I revisit a field site I see it with new eyes, and bringing a pack of wily senior scientists along is sure to revolutionize my perspective. I find field work so captivating because it is completely transformative. Sure I like the llamas and the food and the people and the travels, but the way a week’s passing brings a whole new outlook on science and deep time is just unbeatable. I don’t know what I’ll find, but I’m expecting the good kind of trouble.
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