BJØRNERUD’S LATEST BOOK OFFERS ANOTHER PATH TO UNDERSTANDING OUR PRECIOUS PLANET

By Ed Berthiaume

A new book from Lawrence University geosciences professor Marcia Bjørnerud provides another avenue into understanding the important complexities of the natural world.

Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities, the latest in Princeton University Press’ series of pedias, is a celebration of the fascinating vocabulary—and backstories—in the geosciences.

Coming at a time when climate change crises are heightening the urgency in understanding the earth, Geopedia adds to an impressive volume of work from Bjørnerud that makes her a sought-after voice in geology, tectonics, and related areas of study. It doesn’t come with the scope or weight of her critically lauded 2019 book, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, also from Princeton University Press, but it offers yet another opportunity for readers to better understand the planet—its history and its future.

With a mix of wit and insight, the book delves into interesting and evocative geologic terms used to describe everything from rock formations to the study of geologic time. With each entry, Bjørnerud weaves an essay that is both fun and informative, creating a travel companion of sorts for anyone wanting to explore the planet. Princeton University Press describes its pocket-sized Pedia Series as “encyclopedic in nature and miniature in form.”

A frequent contributing writer to The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and other publications and a popular guest on podcasts, Bjørnerud began writing Geopedia during the first year of the Covid pandemic. It was a bit of an escape at a time when everything had gone remote, she said, and it was another chance to make the geosciences more accessible.

“I’m a collector of words and have always been interested in etymologies— interesting words with interesting stories behind them that collectively could tell a bigger story,” Bjørnerud said. “You can either treat it as a chocolate box where you open it randomly and pick out one and take a bite; or if you do actually read the whole book, and it doesn’t have to be read in any order, I think you’ll come away with some sense of the intellectual experience of the geosciences. And a fair amount of geology, too.” however, is a highly controlled river, with two dams upstream from campus, one at its outlet from Lake Winnebago in Menasha and the second at Olde Oneida Street.

Bjørnerud, the Walter Schober Professor of Environmental Studies and professor of geosciences, has been teaching at Lawrence since 1995. Her 2005 book, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth, and 2019’s Timefulness drew wide praise. Timefulness, which puts a fresh focus on the relationship between humans and natural history, was named to the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Awards Short List and was selected as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology.

Haley Hagermann ’14 was the book’s illustrator.

Following the path downstream (east) you will encounter informational plaques on “Early people of the Fox River” and “The River in Time,” highlighting the long natural and human history of the river. The Fox’s geologic evolution shaped human settlement in two important ways. First, by glacial happenstance, the headwaters of the Fox River near Portage lie within only a mile or so of a stretch of the lower Wisconsin River, a major tributary of the Mississippi. This means that the Fox River provides a connection between the Great Lakes and the entire Mississippi watershed, which includes 40% of the area of the continental United States. Long before Europeans arrived in North America, First Nations peoples used the Fox as a route for trade. In the 1840s, a canal was built at Portage making it possible for steamships to travel all the way from New Orleans to Menasha.

The second extraordinary attribute of the Fox is its longitudinal profile—the change in elevation with distance downstream. Most rivers are steepest in their upstream reaches, and their gradients, or slopes, become gentler toward their mouths. The Fox is the opposite: between Portage and Lake Winnebago, it is a lazy, slow-moving river that drops only 36 feet in 110 miles, for a gradient of 0.33 ft/mile or 0.06m/km. But the Lower Fox from Lake Winnebago to Lake Michigan at Green Bay falls 169 in just 39 miles, a gradient of 4.33 ft/mile or 0.83 m/km. The extraordinary water power of the Lower Fox is what first attracted Amos Lawrence, from a Massachusetts textile milling family, to the area.

The reason for the Fox’s unusual profile is that the lower part of the river is a relatively recent addition. Until about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age, the Appleton area was under the bed of a great meltwater lake known as Glacial Lake Oshkosh, which was impounded by ice. As the last ice melted and the lake drained, the channel of the modern river was established, and the river began to cut down through the clayey lake sediments to the level of Lake Michigan. The elevation difference between Main Hall Green and the river path represents the erosive work done by the river over the past 10,000 years.

During this same time, small tributaries to the Fox did their best to keep up with the downcutting done by the main river. In Appleton, many of these creeks have now been rerouted underground, and their valleys are used as public green spaces including Peabody, Jones, and Arbutus parks. Lawrence’s Banta Bowl occupies the channel of one of these “lost tributaries.”

Now retrace your steps and return west on the river path, carefully crossing Lawe Street. Stop to visit SLUG, the Sustainable Lawrence University Garden—a model for sustainable agriculture, which uses compost from the dining halls to nourish the soil, in a closed loop system that mimics natural biogeochemical cycles. Geoscience students have also used the garden as a test site for a carbon dioxide sequestration strategy in which crushed basalt, a common volcanic rock, is added to soils. Calcium-bearing minerals in the basalt react with CO2 in the atmosphere to form calcite, mimicking the geologic carbon cycle (see Stop #5), and other elements in the basalt help to provide nutrients for plants.

Continue past the back of the Wellness Center to the steps east of Briggs Hall. At the top of these steps, turn right, then immediately left to the mulched area between Sampson House and Youngchild Hall.

STOP 8: ROCK PILE AND GEOSCIENCE DEPARTMENT

Next to the exterior wall of Youngchild, you will find a treasure trove of rocks from all over North America and beyond—samples collected and studied by geoscience students and faculty but no longer needed. Feel free to take anything that catches your eye—and then stop into the second floor of Youngchild Hall to see if any resident geoscientists are on hand to help identify your rocks. ▪