HOW I BECAME AN EARTH SCIENTIST
HOW I BECAME AN EARTH SCIENTIST
I have always enjoyed science and unraveling the relationship between the things around us. But it was not until I was a senior in high school and introduced to physics that I fully appreciated the simplicity and power the physical sciences have for explaining and understanding our everyday universe.
About the same time my two best friends and I talked our parents into letting us backpack alone over the Colorado Rocky Mountains (this is when the B&W photo of me on the previous page was taken). Despite the fact that we were basically following a state highway, we were forced to confront enough critical decisions in planning, timing and execution that we (certainly I) broke the last ties of childhood. Putting the pieces together, making choices, thinking through consequences are elements of success as important to scientific study as they were to those boys crossing the mountains.
A natural curiosity and love of the outdoors led me to pursue geology over physics as a freshman in college (the hard work part is that I majored in both). Plate tectonics captivated my attention - it was a time to rethink the very evolution of our planet in terms of a magnificently simple yet powerful concept (seafloor spreads from mid-ocean ridges, continents drift, volcanoes form over subduction zones between the two).
I next ventured into exploration geophysics. Before I started, I received some sage advice from a family friend who worked for a mining company. He counseled me against going into mining for the "glory" of locating vast new mineral deposits - mother nature was not so yielding and most of the high grade deposits had already been found and developed. What was left to do required a long-term commitment, a realization that there would be set-backs as well as frustration, and if I was very lucky, maybe I would discover something worth developing. Science and this GLOBE program are not that different. Many of us will never make a great discovery, particularly as individuals. Much of science involves teams of people (including yourselves) working toward a goal which may change due to policy or upon reevaluation. What attracts many of us to science is not necessarily the global discoveries as much as the day-to-day discoveries, revelations, and satisfaction that the search brings to us and the sharing of what we know.
More recently I have shifted my focus to what I call global hydrology - trying to better understand how the hydrologic cycle is coupled with the land and atmosphere on a global basis. Here again my timing has been fortuitous as warnings of potential global climate change due to human fossil fuel consumption has spurred a vigorous and interdisciplinary push into better understanding and modeling our climate system. It is not enough to consider each sphere (bio-, hydro-, atmo-) in the classic tradition as separable from the rest - what is critical is to understand how these vital Earth processes interact with and influence each other.
May each and every one of you have a Happy Holiday Season!
Cheers,
Jim Washburne 12/4/95
P.S. If you want to find out more about soil moisture, explore a developmental home page I have created for this project at: http://www.hwr.arizona.edu/globe_home.html