Rosemary Askin

Seag:

This is Morgan Seag. I’m speaking with Dr. Rosemary Askin, whose married name is Rosemary Askin Cully. Today is Friday, March 2nd, 2018, and we’re speaking at Rosemary’s home in Jackson, WY. Thank you so much for being here and doing this interview, Rosemary.

Askin:

It’s a pleasure to talk with you. …I think. [Laughs].

Seag:

[Laughs]. We’ll find out!

Askin:

[Laughs]. Yea.

Seag:

So, let’s start at the beginning. Where were you born?

Askin:

I was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. Do you want the date?

Seag:

Sure.

Askin:

February 8, 1949.

Seag:

And what was your upbringing like? What were your parents like?

Askin:

I had an awesome childhood. My dad was actually from the South Island: he grew up on a farm, but he was an engineer, a civil engineer. And my mom, who used to work for the bank, she was good at math, which I didn’t inherit. [Laughs]. But anyway, she was a caring and wonderful homemaker—she looked after the three of us kids.

Seag:

Do you think that any of your interest in science came from your father?

Askin:

Absolutely. Yes. We always—we spent a lot of time on the farm, and some holidays, we went camping and we were always looking at trees and looking at, you know, whatever it might be and talking about them.

Seag:

And was your mother there as well?

Askin:

Yes, yes. She was very interested in that sort of thing, too. But she was… she was pretty quiet next to dad, you know, she let him take the upper hand more or less.

Seag:

Did you have siblings?

Askin:

Yes. I have a younger sister, Alison, who is two years younger than me, and then my brother, Roger, who is another three years younger than that.

Seag:

And what kind of schools did you go to?

Askin:

Well, we went to the local elementary school, which was Kilbirnie School, just up the road from where we lived. And from Form one, which I think is—is that grade five here, in the US?

Seag:

I don’t know.

Askin:

Anyway, from Form one in New Zealand (that’s about age 11 I suppose), Ali and I both went to Queen Margaret College, instead of going to the local high school, because my parents wanted us to get the education from that school—which they had decided was a better education. It was a girls’ school, a Presbyterian girls’ school. And Roger went to the equivalent boys’ school.

Seag:

And did you feel that it was a better education than you might have gotten elsewhere?

Askin:

In some things, maybe. But you know, honestly I don’t know. We were sort of—grew up not trying to think that the kids in the other school were any better or worse than us. But I loved the school, yes, it was a wonderful school.

Seag:

Do you remember any of your teachers?

Askin:

Yes, absolutely. My teacher at Kilbirnie School was Miss McElroy, and I had her for three years running. She was very strict, and she drummed into us math and science and all that sort of thing. At Queen Margaret, form one was Miss Priest, form two was Miss Andrews. I could recite the whole lot off—I won’t. But we had our headmistress – who turned out to also be our English teacher, and she was a Scottish woman, Mrs. Nancy Black. Very strong Scottish accent, very strict, and a totally awesome English teacher. Between Dad and her, we didn’t get away with too many grammar mistakes. I’m probably making all sorts now. [Laughs]. And we had awesome science teachers. Mrs. Clark, I remember was actually the wife of Professor Bob Clark at the university. So, she taught me science and then he was my geology professor.

Seag:

I’m skipping ahead a little bit, but is that how you came to know Professor Clark?

Askin:

No, not at that point, I didn’t know anything about what he did at that point.

Seag:

Just a coincidence.

Askin:

Yes, yes.

Seag:

That’s so funny.

Askin:

Yes.

Seag:

And so, she [Mrs. Clark] was in Christchurch, but he was in Wellington?

Askin:

No, no, they—this was in Wellington. Sorry, I didn’t say that at the beginning.

Seag:

That’s alright.

Askin:

I was born in Christchurch, and after a year my parents moved to Wellington, because my dad worked there in the Ministry of Works. And he later became Head of the Ministry of Works, Commissioner of Works, later on in his career, so he had to be in Wellington, much to his disgust. [Laughs].

Seag:

Did you know anything about Antarctica during this time?

Askin:

A little bit. I mean we learned about it in geography in school. We all knew Antarctica was there. We heard stories of people coming back, we knew some of the historic stories. I didn’t know too much about the science. We knew there were penguins there, and that sort of thing, and—yea—something about the climate.

Seag:

Did you have any sense that it might become a part of your life?

Askin:

Not—not when I was younger. No, not at all.

Seag:

So how did you end up getting your bachelor’s degree at Victoria University of Wellington?

Askin:

Well, it was the university obviously in the same city there, and it was a good university, so I started there. I didn’t know if I would end up doing the whole degree or any advanced degrees there, but I certainly wanted to start at Vic, and a lot of my friends were going there.

So, when I signed up, I was always going to do science. I was never very good at languages, and I wasn’t interested in history or arts at the time, and so I was definitely going to do science of some sort. And I was always good at biological sciences, and marine biology was something I was interested in, working in fisheries or something like that. So, I signed up for that first year, I think: chemistry…chemistry, zoology, and was searching around for a third subject. And Dad claims that he suggested geology, which may well have been true, I don’t remember that. But anyway, so that first year I did geology.

So I did a double major all the way through, with some botany as well, and at the end of my third year after the BSc, you can choose to either go elsewhere, or if you were going to carry on there, and stay at Vic, a Bachelor of Science with Honors (which was a one-year), or a two-year Masters. So, I did the Honors degree. I was going to do it in fisheries, and I discovered at that point that they did not let women on the fishery boats. So that was a no-go.

Seag:

How did you find that out? Do you remember?

Askin:

I think I talked to the professors, and checked with fisheries, because I was just sort of, you know, casting around at that point. I think I mainly talked to people in the zoology department, and they told me.

But at that point, I was sort of undecided—the zoology department was very dry, and not much fun, and the geology department on the other hand was totally awesome. So, I didn’t really push the fisheries thing. [Laughs]. I did geology, because it was fascinating, and we had awesome field trips, and I just really enjoyed the people there. I started in geology and because I was biologically inclined, I started doing—you had to do an honors project, sort of like a mini-masters project, and so I did that in palynology. There was no one there at Vic that did palynology, so I sort of thrashed around and probably made a ghastly mess of my Honors project [laughs] and got help from the palynologists out at the Survey, at GNS.

And then towards the end of that year, the folks had just come back from Antarctica. They had VUWAE—Victoria University of Wellington Antarctic Expeditions—they’d been having those trips for fourteen years from Vic. And all through the geology classes, we always had people come back from Antarctica and give talks, and there were fossils and, you know, rocks and volcanic rocks, bits of Erebus, and fascinating stories. And so, I decided that might be something I would like to continue on as a Ph.D.

Seag:

So, did you have to start a masters first, or it was straight into your Ph.D.?

Askin:

No, that was a common thing that you did an Honors, and then a Ph.D. You often didn’t bother doing the masters, then the Ph.D. if you stayed at the same university.

Seag:

Okay.

Askin:

So, I think probably—I don’t remember, to be honest, but probably back when I was signing up for the Honors, I had a Ph.D. in mind, but I didn’t know exactly on what at that point.

Seag:

And before we get to the Ph.D., what was your undergrad experience like outside of school?

Askin:

Outside of school? Uh…I was doing track. I used to dream of running in the Olympics. I wasn’t near good enough for that, but that was a big part of my life, and had been, ever since I was about thirteen, twelve or thirteen or so—I joined the Kiwi Athletic Club. Both my sister and I—she was a way better athlete than I ever was. She was a natural, I was not. [Laughs]. But I was sort of fast, so I did reasonably well. So that was the main thing I did outside of school, that took a lot of time with practice, especially when I was older, training every night, and meets on Saturday. Plus, music, I learned piano for many years.

Seag:

And so, what was it like applying for the Ph.D.? What was the process?

Askin:

Oh, I think we just, you know, talked to the various people in the department, and signed up. And I thought, I want to do palynology in Antarctica, because I had a—[laughs]—very little, as it turned out, experience in that field. But I sort of did a bit of research into it and it seemed like that would be something that would be really well worth doing. And, also, I probably got advice from Peter Barrett. Peter was my main thesis advisor, and the funny thing is, he had just come from his Ph.D. at Ohio State, and arrived I think that week, or just a bit earlier, and I walked into his office, poor guy, and said, "I want to go to Antarctica." [Laughs]. I don’t remember what he said. [Laughs]. But he may very well have been one of the people that sort of steered me towards the palynology project, because he was very knowledgeable on Antarctic geology, he’d done his MSc at Auckland, and then Ph.D. research in Antarctica. He worked in the Beardmore Glacier area, so he knew exactly what needed doing.

Seag:

And there were not many palynologists in Antarctic science at the time?

Askin:

No. No. Not at all.

Seag:

Were there many other women in your program?

Askin:

In my geology 2 class, there were only two women in a class of I think 20 and three women in our smaller third year class. And we had a lot of field trips, including field trips we used to organize ourselves, apart from just the class ones. So, we were a very cohesive little group. And that was partly why I went into geology, rather than the zoology side of things. [Laughs].

Seag:

And when you started your Ph.D., was there any sort of fieldwork before the Antarctic trip?

Askin:

That I did myself you mean?

Seag:

Yea.

Askin:

Not really. Did I collect my own samples from the Whanganui River? I might have, a few samples from the Whanganui River Basin for the Honors project, but I think no, because there was somebody—there was a guy doing a Ph.D. up there who I think might have provided a few samples. It was hardly my directed fieldwork. But I had done jobs working at the geological survey, and the food chemistry lab.

That was one of the things that was very disappointing about being a female in geology, when you were a student in those days. All the male students had holiday jobs: summer holiday jobs, working for mining companies either in New Zealand or in Australia. And the girls could not. We could not get jobs. I think one girl, she maybe got a job as a cook at one of the mining camps, but that was it. No geology.

So…two years I worked for the food chemistry lab, as tea lady, and extracting fatty acids out of sheep feces to produce an edible food, a bit like yellow marmite in little pellets. The next year, I’d had enough of that, and I went to the geological survey and sat at a desk all day and wrote up quarry reports. [Laughs]. So that was, that was what we got to do as girls in New Zealand geology at the time.

Seag:

Were you satisfied, or did you feel rewarded by that work? Were you frustrated?

Askin:

No, I was frustrated with that, yea. Because the guys would all come back and ooh, they’ve had this fantastic summer storming through the mountains in Queenstown, or near Perth, or somewhere in the middle of Australia, you know, with really good jobs, and of course their experience was fantastic. And…we didn’t get that.

Seag:

It was the individual companies that wouldn’t allow women to work for them?

Askin:

Yea—yea, I think so. I think so at the time.

Seag:

Can you tell the story of how your first field expedition came about? And perhaps what year when this all started, that you’d head down.

Askin:

Okay. So, the first season in 1970, Peter Barrett was organizing a trip to South Victoria Land. And Peter I think then he was a post-doc because he was originally not my main thesis advisor. I had to have Paul Vella who worked on foraminifera, because he was more senior. But Peter was actually the one that was my main mentor. Peter was organizing a trip along with another person, Barry Kohn, and Rodney Grapes, they were both Ph.D. students at Victoria University. Rodney was also a Junior Lecturer and worked on igneous rocks, and he had a student, David Reid, they were going to work on the Jurassic Ferrar dolerite, the igneous rocks. Another student, John McPherson, was going to work with Barry and Peter on the Devonian Aztec siltstone (he was doing sedimentology). And then, I was along to work with Peter and Barry, and collect samples for palynology. We actually measured sections, and in—oh, I can talk about that later, in exceeding detail—but anyway, and then there were two other people, so there were eight of us altogether. There was Alex Richie, from the Australian Museum in Sydney. He worked on Devonian fish fossils, and he took an assistant who ended up doing a Ph.D. also. And that was Gavin Young, from the BMR in Canberra.

Seag:

And so you were going to head down, it was the austral summer of 1970.

Askin:

70-71 season. VUWAE 15. Yes.

Seag:

And can you tell the story of how they secured permission for you to participate?

Askin:

[Laughs]. Yes. Yes, because it was one thing not to be allowed on the fishery boats, but then to head south—because at that time, the logistics support was done of course by the US Navy, and they were not about to allow a woman to go in the deep field by herself with a bunch of guys. Professor Clark, Bob Clark, who was the department head, and the husband of my science teacher it turned out, Bob Clark spent a lot of time on the phone to Washington. I’m not sure who he spoke to at that time. He wouldn’t really tell me, he probably talked to NSF, and he probably talked to the Navy folks, the people in charge of the logistics. At that time, it was…not ITT…who were doing the logistics?

Seag:

The Navy and…

Askin:

It was the Navy and…

Seag:

Was it—it was before ASA—Holmes and Narver.

Askin:

Holmes and Narver, yes, okay. So—but mainly Navy. And so, in the end the final stumbling block was that it would be a military and Navy doctor, who was a male, who I think—I don’t know the rules for the military but I think that he was not allowed to work, or was uncomfortable, if I got hurt, working on a woman without another woman present. So, the way they got around that (Bob Clark must have been a real whiz) was that the leader of Scott Base for that year, who was Brian Porter, was going to stand in as my dad, should the need arise. So, then it was all okay and I got to go. [Laughs].

Seag:

And what did you know about the experience of working in the field before you went? Did you have training, or hear stories…?

Askin:

We all heard stories, you know, from people coming back, and they’d always have these incredible photos and… they didn’t talk too much about how cold it was. Vic had been doing their own expeditions for so many years, so they had all their own equipment. The tents and everything were in Scott Base. We had our own cooking gear, ice axes, geology hammers and gear, and some clothing—we provided all that type of stuff. The food and sledges and tents, heavy down clothing and the big items were all provided from NZARP and Scott Base. So, I knew about all the stuff, and then…I was part of the, of course at that time, the New Zealand Antarctic program, we had training each year. It was the equivalent of your Happy Campers. We went and spent—I think it was like three nights and two days at Tekapo, in Army huts, and did our training [laughs]. And you listened to lectures for hours on end and went out and learned how to do self-arrests on the glacier there and heard horror stories about the color of your pee [laughs], and all the usual things, and frostbite and medical stuff, and that was—that was essentially our training.

Seag:

Was that just your field group, or was that everybody that was –

Askin:

That was everyone with—everyone with the New Zealand Antarctic program was there.

Seag:

Do you remember what your family and friends thought of you going to Antarctica?

Askin:

They thought it was exciting. Yea. Yea. They were very excited, yes. [Laughs].

Seag:

What was it like deploying the first time?

Askin:

[Laughs]. I was probably in a bit of a daze, but yes, getting on that plane with all your gear, and sitting in that Herc, you’ve done that, all bundled up, in your down and mukluks, and, yes, wondering what on Earth this was going to be like. And then stepping out at McMurdo is just like another world—it’s like you go through a curtain, and it’s sort of like [facial expression: awestruck].

Seag:

Yea!

Askin:

Yea.

Seag:

We wondered sometimes if it was possible it was like the Truman Show, that we’d just ended up on a sound stage in Hollywood, and it was all a trick.

Askin:

Yea, [laughs]. It is just like going into—stepping into another world. Because you have this sort of surreal experience in the Herc, you know, sitting for hours and the noise, and the heat, and—[laughs]

Seag:

And so, did your field experience start at McMurdo?

Askin:

No, it was Scott Base. I wasn’t at McMurdo until years later, when I went with the USAP program. So, I was based at Scott Base. And, yes, that was interesting. That was fun. It was a really close-knit group of people there.

Seag:

How many people were there, about?

Askin:

…I don’t know. There’s…probably…I’d have to go back and look. I’m thinking that there’s probably about, back then, ten or twelve people that wintered over there, and then maybe twenty or more summer staff at Scott Base, plus all the science parties as well.

Seag:

So somewhere in the dozens.

Askin:

Yes. Low dozens. So, we were there, but they tried to shuffle us through so there weren’t too many—because it was a small base.

Seag:

And so, then you headed out to Victoria Land for your first -

Askin:

Yes. Well, first we spent the time getting the gear and snowmobiles ready, and we did a trip in the snowmobiles. We went up—drove on the sea ice up to Cape Evans and Cape Royds to try them out. I don’t believe we pitched a tent and camped out up there, I don’t remember, I think we just did a day trip. And we played in the ice caves, and we went skiing, and earned ourselves the Scott Base Ski Club badge—which you got if you skied from the top to the bottom without falling over [laughs], and so we sort of prepared and enjoyed ourselves until we got the flight out. And then we were taken out onto the Skelton Névé, which is just south of the Dry Valley region. I need to show you a map to show you where all this stuff is. Out onto the Skelton Névé by C-130, and offloaded, and there we were! With very old motor toboggans, and we put up our tents. Peter and Barry were the only ones that’d been to Antarctica before.

Seag:

And what was it like arriving there?

Askin:

It was amazing. There we were, out in this vast snowfield, with the mountains over there, and a big pile of gear and motor toboggans, and when you get off in the field (and I sort of grew a little used to it but not totally), because when you are offloaded from a C-130, the engines are still running, and everything’s wheeled out the back, flat out, and there’s incredible noise, and fumes, and you’re in a big rush to get everything out, and get one tent up, and get one radio set up, so that they know they’ve got comms. And then once we’ve got that, at least one of those set up, then the Herc took off—and there we were.

Seag:

And what was your camp like?

Askin:

Well, we had four Scott tents, old ones they were, we had nice new yellow ones later, but these were old blue ones, pretty dark. I think Peter and Barry had their work cut out for them with all these newbies on the job, putting up these tents—we must’ve put a tent up I’m sure, in training someplace, near Scott Base. I’m sure we did, to learn. We had a whole bunch of sleds, and snowmobiles, and all the food boxes for six or so weeks of work. The two-man ten-day food boxes. [Laughs].

Seag:

And how long were you planning to stay there, the first time?

Askin:

It was either six or seven weeks to start with. Yes. And then we were to have a pick-up, and move further north, then four of us were to go to the Darwin Mountains, actually minus one person at that point. He got hurt. The others went to Allan Hills, the igneous guys and John went there. So, we split up for the last two thirds of the season.

Seag:

So, before the split-up, what were your sleeping quarters like?

Askin:

Just those Scott tents. Two people per tent. And it was funny, because my dad built the kitchen boxes, and I don’t know if he did it that first season or for the other seasons after that first one. So, we had this hinged kitchen box that the primus stove sat on top of, or we put it down on the floor, two bed rolls down the sides, and our personal stuff at our feet or down the sides. Very cozy. And, yes, all the snow and packs and gear piled up around the tents to keep them from blowing away.

Seag:

And how did the team co-exist? What were your relationships like?

Askin:

That year, really good. Yes. Pretty good. There was—you know, there was always one or two days when people are… you know, there might be one person that didn’t fit in quite so well, but basically, for that trip, everyone got on really well.

Seag:

What did you do in your off-time, when you weren’t working?

Askin:

Sleep. [Laughs]. No, we had the field notebooks. And that’s something Peter taught me, which I should’ve done better in later years, but he always had us go over them—because we wrote in the field in pencil, so that night after we had cooked dinner or while we were cooking dinner, we inked over everything. And we read a lot. I wrote letters, wrote up notes.

Seag:

And you were there to do science, so what was that like, your normal routine?

Askin:

Uh…breakfast, and I think that first season, I think the radio comms were only Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, so it wasn’t like we had to be in camp at certain times every day, which gave us a great deal of freedom in the hours we had available, to work on the sunny side of an outcrop, or longer hours some days, for example. I think that changed in later years. Um… but maybe if it was the morning, we’d do our radio schedule into Scott Base…We’d make our lunch—for the day would have sledge biscuits (God, the food was awful from those boxes, though we did have, luckily, some supplementary food)—sledge biscuits basically. We had a bit of fruit cake, and then we had a flattish plastic bottle that we kept in our breast pocket to keep it thawed. We’d mix up Tang, or some sort of stuff to drink, and we’d get that all sorted plot out where we were going, get dressed up, and take off on the motor toboggans.

And the first part, after we set up our base camp—we actually then traveled south. We headed south to Mount Metschel, which is just on the southwestern side of the Skelton and worked there first. And that’s when we first discovered that the motor toboggans and traveling wasn’t quite as easy as we had thought. The sastrugi, the wind-ridges, on the Skelton Névé were really bad in patches. The sleds were old, there was stuff breaking and failing, and the motor toboggans were very old. It’s just as well Peter, and I think Barry too at that time, were good mechanics because we spent a lot of time doing repairs. I remember that first trip, just to get to Metschel, which was probably something like a few miles, just took all day. [Laughs]. Because we were fixing motor toboggans on the way.

Seag:

And would you camp out at the destination, or were they all day trips?

Askin:

First we moved our whole camp. We left food boxes and a stash there at Skelton Névé because we were coming back there and being picked up from there too, and then we took what we needed for the next few weeks and headed off south to Mount Metschel. We camped there for a few nights and did some work there. It was a cold place. And then headed on towards the Warren Range, which is a huge dolerite massif. That’s where Rodney and Dave were going to be working. And then the rest of us headed slightly further south, to work on some unmapped mountains there. And we mapped and described the Beacon sediments. I’ve still got the green books that—I can show you those later—that describe all those sections. And we recorded the color of the sandstone, with the color and code compared with a soil color chart, and then the weathering color, grainsize, and then the bedding characteristics, whether it was flaky bedding or thick bedded or whatever it might be, and the contact surfaces, other observations, and those are all done in incredible detail. And collecting the sandstone samples for Peter and Barry, and the palynology fine-grained samples for me, and…

Seag:

So were you all working together to help each other collect samples?

Askin:

To start with. And as I said, Dave and Rodney were off working on the dolerite so they camped separately out there, working mostly behind the dolerite massif. And then four of us, we were there working on the sedimentary sections. Gavin and Alex were looking for Devonian fish fossils, and John was doing his thesis on the red beds that the fish fossils were in. So, everyone was sort of working more or less together but working on different parts of the outcrop.

So, we’d got all that work done, and then came back to our Skelton base camp. From there half the group was moved to Allan Nunatak. They actually man-hauled around there, because there were no more motor toboggans. That’s a whole separate story: they were falling apart all over the place. They man-hauled around the Allan and Coombes Hills—fortunately it’s not too big an area, but still. Peter, Alex, Gavin and I worked on Portal Mountain and then travelled with the last toboggan up to the Lashly Mountains (we actually went back there on a subsequent trip) and came back to the Skelton base camp. Then we got a C-130 transfer up to Horseshoe Mountain and also worked north of there, across the top of the Dry Valleys. And then we went back to Scott Base, and three of us plus a Scott Base field assistant went down to the Darwin Mountains for two weeks.

Seag:

That’s later that same first season?

Askin:

Yes.

Seag:

And can you describe your research questions?

Askin:

I was interested in the palynomorphs, which are fossil pollen and spores. Their cell walls are the most resistant naturally-occurring organic substance. And so, the actual cell walls of a pollen grain, or a spore from a fern, are preserved in the rocks. (Getting them out of the rocks is a whole different story). Because plants have evolved through time, each layer of rocks, more or less, has a different assemblage—as the plants evolved, the pollen and spores evolve along with them, so I wanted to try and sort out what the vegetation was like, and the age of the rocks. What they were mainly interested in, the others that I was working with, was if I could get a decent relative age for the rocks, to develop a sort of zonation for the rocks there.

Seag:

So, what were your methods while you were on the ice? Were you just picking up samples that were easily removable, or were you…

Askin:

Well, not the surface rocks. Pollen and spores are susceptible to heating. They can be cooked: they’re organic matter, so they can be burnt to a crisp. But they’re also susceptible to oxidation. So, I wanted to get not the surface rocks, that’d been sitting there for a while being oxidized. So, I’d chip in and get a fresher rock. And I knew from my puny [laughs] honors thesis efforts, and also doing a bit of research before I went down, that the fine-grained rocks are what the pollen and spores are preserved in. It turned out they were not extractable from the coal. They might have been preserved, but I couldn’t separate them from the other organic matter. And the coal was pretty heated up, too. So, I knew I wanted to be collecting mudstones: mudstones, siltstones, fine sandstones. But coarse sandstones obviously are not going to be any good.

Seag:

So, what did you enjoy about that first season?

Askin:

[pause]. Oh, gosh. I—I guess when you go to Antarctica, you are either totally hooked or you dislike it intensely, and I guess I was just totally hooked. The scenery was just spectacular. It was like—you turned around, and it’s like "whoa, look at that." I enjoyed the science, and I really enjoyed the people, working with them. They were all awesome folk to work with. The project was exciting: I couldn’t wait to get back to the lab to see if I got any pollen out. I mostly didn’t for a lot of those samples [laughs] that first year, but it was just a very exciting place to be.

I reminded myself each season when I went back that, you know, once I got back down to the ice, “ah yes, these were the bad parts.” Because you sort of put the miserable cold out of your mind, and your fingers just freeze—I think I got frostnip, and I think I’m suffering the consequences now on my toes. Because we had those yellow mukluks for travelling and around camp, but they were no good on the rocks. They had no support in the ankles, or anything, so we wore leather boots. And they had sort of a leather liner, but those were not particularly warm. So, yea. Frost-nipped toes and fingers, and just being totally miserably cold a lot of the time. But you forget that…until you’re back there again. [Laughs].

Seag:

What was it like being the only woman in a group of men on the ice?

Askin:

You know, it really, I had been one of very few women geologists in the geology classes, and in the athletic club, and various other things, so from what I remember, it was no big deal. I do remember going—the second year I was there, I did get invited to a party, it was some big event for some American holiday or fundraiser, I’ve forgotten what it was. They had a giant party in the hanger there, at McMurdo, and going over the hill [from Scott Base], and being the only woman there, it was something else. [Laughs].

Seag:

That was in ‘71-72?

Askin:

It was either that year or ‘71- Yes, I think it was the second year, ‘71-’72, I think you’re right. So, it was, yea, [laughs], kind of flattering. Basically, it didn’t bother me in the field. It really didn’t.

Seag:

So I have a quote that I found online, which…[looking for quote]…Scott Base leader Brian Porter once remarked that you "gained the respect and admiration of all the men of the 1970-71 New Zealand Antarctic Research Programme, and set a high standard for future women who may be involved in research in Antarctica, traditionally a man’s world only." And it was interesting to read that, because so many of the women who were the first at a particular site recall feeling like the weight of future women’s presence was on them, that they had to succeed in order to keep the door open.

Askin:

Yea.

Seag:

Did you experience any of that?

Askin:

A bit. But I don’t really remember any…crushing weight of [laughs]…But you know, because it was just assumed that there would be more women coming, and that there were already other women there. So, it was not a particularly big deal. Yea, it was nice of you to put that in. [Laughs].

Seag:

Yea, it’s a nice quote! So, you got back to New Zealand at the end of the season and had to get the spores out of the rocks.

Askin:

Yes. Yes. There was a funny story, which I probably should not put in. [Laughs].

Seag:

[Laughs]. Alright. We can talk about that later.

Askin:

[Laughs]. So, yea, the palynology processing is kind of a nasty task. You’ve essentially got to dissolve all the rock, and separate out the organic matter, and then separate out the pollen and spores from all the other organic junk that’s there too. So, you dissolve the rock. First you break the rock into small pea size or slightly smaller chips. You break it up with a hammer: you can’t grind it with a mortar and pestle because you’ll bust up the spores, so you know, chip chip chip with a hammer. And some of the rock’s pretty hard. So, you chip the rocks up to a particular weighed amount, and then you put them in, if they need it, hydrochloric acid, to get rid of the carbonate. And then you wash many times and get rid of that soluble portion and particulates. But the worst part is then you dissolve the rock in hydrofluoric acid, which dissolves silicates, because sedimentary rocks are basically silicates, most of the sedimentary rocks of the whole world are siliceous. Hydrofluoric acid dissolves silicates, but it also dissolves bone, and it is not to be inhaled, and it is deadly fatal if you get it on you.

So, you do all this in a fume hood, very carefully. And of course, you can’t use glass beakers, because it dissolves the glass, that being silica. So, you use—I used teflon beakers, and you do it in a fume hood. There’s horror stories of people—there was a guy in an Australian lab, he had a palynology lab in his garage. He was processing samples and he splashed hydrofluoric acid on himself. He had a swimming pool outside—he went and leapt into the swimming pool, so it was immediately diluted. But he died in agony evidently, about two days later. So, it’s—it’s nasty. Yea. So, you’ve got to be careful. You wear big gloves and apron and everything and do this in a fume hood.

So, you do the hydrofluoric acid stage, and then you’ve got to wash that many times, and you do that in hot hydrochloric acid, wash many times. And then there’s various other processes you do after that, to try and get rid of some of the organic sludge that is adhering to them, to bleach the spores a little, so you can see them through a light transmission microscope. And so, the other part of the process includes fuming nitric acid (all of this is done in a fume hood)—fuming nitric acid, which is pretty nasty. You can get it on your hands and it’ll turn them orange and brown, but it won’t kill you. And, like the hydrochloric acid won’t kill you either, but they’re nasty burns. So, you do everything in gloves. So, fuming nitric acid, then you can do heavy liquid separation in zinc bromide or zinc chloride, where any mineral grains sink and the pollen and spores supposedly float in the layer between that and a light acid cap. And the sieving you could do; but I did not have sieving available to me at that time. And then you mount this residue that you get on a glass slide: some people use glycerine jelly, or various sorts of plastics that you use to mount them on a glass slide, and then you can look at the residue on a microscope.

I spent many, many, many frustrating weeks with these samples. The sediments that I was working on are intruded by Jurassic dolerite, which is the intrusive equivalent of basalt. So you can imagine this molten lava pouring between the sediments when they’re buried, and the heat from that molten lava—and the steam of course, and fluids permeate through the sedimentary rocks, especially if they’re porous, and then it cooks all the organic matter. So, it turned out that a lot of the samples I processed were barren of palynomorphs. There was just lots of black organic matter. And when you looked at the coal, they were fairly high rank coals, they were semi-anthracites, and you know, really highly cooked coals that I couldn’t extract palynomorphs from. I learned afterwards to tell the amount of baking by the sort of “clinkery” sound of the rocks, but this was like a first experience. I went back twice for my thesis—three years of fieldwork total. Of about 170 samples the number that actually contained anything that was identifiable was quite small. There were 33 that contained identifiable microfossils, and only 19 that were good enough for quantitative counts. And there were only really two samples that I finally got from Mount Bastion, which I could actually say were beautiful. [Laughs]. So, it was—it was tough going, getting that material out of those rocks.

Seag:

And so your next two seasons were also with VUWAE?

Askin:

Yes.

Seag:

And they were ‘70…

Askin:

VUWAE 16 and 18. I skipped a year.

Seag:

So that’s ‘71 -72 and ‘73-74, probably?

Askin:

Yes. Those were the years.

I also, besides, I didn’t just work on the pollen. I did a little bit of work on the coals (not much, because I was not a coal geologist), but I also collected Glossopteris leaves from the Permian coal measures, which are sort of spathulate-shaped leaves, and then fern-like Dicroidium and other leaves, and silicified wood, and various other material from the younger Triassic rocks. Those I included, I identified those as well.

So, for part of my thesis time I took myself to Australia, and that might’ve been the year that I missed doing fieldwork. I went to Australia because there were people there (there was no one in our department) who worked on Gondwana fossil material—the rocks are very similar between South Africa, parts of South America, India, Antarctica, and Australia. Not so much in New Zealand, because they don’t have the similar sequence of rocks. I spent a few weeks in Brisbane, working there at the geological survey, looking at all their type material and collecting publications, and getting some help there. That was with Noel de Jersey, who was a palynologist there, and then John Rigby who’s a paleobotanist. He worked on the leaves. And Geoff Playford, a palynologist at the university. Then I went to Sydney, and met up with Robin Helby, who’s a palynologist. Years later also palynologist Liz Truswell she’d done Antarctic work, and Mary Dettmann, but not that trip; but yea, so there were two or three different institutions I went to, to try to get some help in the middle of the thesis.

Seag:

And then how did the Ph.D. program wrap up for you? You submitted the thesis in ‘74?

Askin:

No, ‘76. I finished with my oral exam the day I left New Zealand, about the 28th of February ‘76. I don’t remember if I submitted it in December, or January. And in New Zealand back then you got the thesis fully bound. And those fully bound editions go out for review. So, they went, two of them, to Australia, and to my committee, and then their comments came back for the oral exam.

Seag:

And then before we finish the Ph.D., did your experience in the field change at all from year to year, or was it pretty consistent?

Askin:

I became a little more confident about what sort of rocks that I wanted to collect. I looked at an outcrop and if it was too much dolerite, it was like "eh, eh." You know, I sometimes collected a couple of samples, but I knew they wouldn’t be much good. I collected a bunch of the Aztec that’d been oxidized (that’s why they’re red rocks), including the purple/grey and green mudstones, that were no good.

Seag:

And so you finished the Ph.D., and then applied for a Fulbright…?

Askin:

I finished the Ph.D., and then…before I finished that, I had gotten married to another Antarctic geologist, and he wanted to go to the US. I would have stayed in New Zealand probably, but he wanted to go to Ohio State, work with David Elliot, and work on Mount Erebus, or continue his work on Mount Erebus. So, he wanted to do a post-doc at Ohio State, so I said I would too. And then he applied for a Fulbright, so I thought what the hell, I will too. And then I got it, and he didn’t, and that might have been the beginning of the end. [Laughs].

Seag:

So, arriving at Ohio State to work with Jim…

Askin:

Schopf.

Seag:

Schopf. And how did you find Ohio State when you arrived?

Askin:

Totally different. Rather overwhelming—you know, Ohio State was huge. It was mind-boggling. And coming from our little university, it was overwhelming. And Jim Schopf himself was overwhelming at first. But once I proved I knew what I was doing, we got on like a house on fire, and he was the sweetest guy. With amazing broad knowledge.

Seag:

That’s great.

Askin:

Yea.

Seag:

And how long were you at Ohio State, the first time?

Askin:

Ah…the beginning of ‘76 to 1980. When I moved out to Denver.

Seag:

And did you go south with USAP during that time?

Askin:

No. Not until 1979-80.

Seag:

No. Lab work, mainly.

Askin:

Yes. I think—is that right? Yes, Jim had a lot of material from all over Antarctica, and I went through all his slides, and all the palynology, and we worked on a zonation, because I’d done a sort of preliminary zonation for the ages in Southern Victoria Land—so we worked on expanding that right down through the Transantarctic Mountains, and wrote a couple of papers on that.

Seag:

And what took you away from Ohio State?

Askin:

Ah—I had met someone and followed them out to Denver. [Laughs]. Unfortunately, my first marriage broke up not long after I started at Ohio State. So, I had met someone, and followed them out to Denver.

Seag:

And you were working at Colorado School of Mines?

Askin:

Colorado School of Mines. At Ohio State, I was a post-doc then a Research Associate when I was there, and so I basically—I had a grant and I went and spoke to them at Colorado School of Mines, and later did the same thing later for UC Riverside, and got another grant from there, and basically asked, if I bring the grant money and earn my own grant money, may I work here in a research position. And that was fine with them.

Seag:

And what kind of research were you working on?

Askin:

The Antarctic palynology. And I think initially I had a microscope on loan, the one I used at Ohio State. Also, I started doing consulting work when I was in Denver. Jacobson Consulting, Inc. was my company, and I did a fair bit of consulting work there—there was a lot of exploration going on, that was the really hot time in petroleum geology all through the Thrust Belt, so I was doing consulting work for a lot of different oil companies in the Thrust Belt, plus some in Alaska and Svalbard and various other places around the world. So yes, that’s what I was doing, and I was able to buy myself a microscope.

Seag:

And when you say Jacobson Inc. was your company, is that the company you were working for, or it’s a company you owned?

Askin:

No, it was my consulting company. But that was completely separate from the Antarctic research.

Seag:

Okay. And how did you get the grant money from NSF? Was it through Antarctic programs, or was it -

Askin:

It was the Antarctic program. Always.

Seag:

And so you continued working on which samples, when you were at Mines?

Askin:

At CSM I was working partly on material from the South Shetland Islands. The year before (the 1979-80 season), I’d been to the South Shetland Islands, and that was with David Elliot, while I was still at Ohio State, to President Head and nearby areas, as well as to Hope Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula. I also worked on samples from Seymour Island that I had gotten from David from when he’d been there earlier. And then I did fieldwork on Seymour Island in February-March 1982. I went to Seymour Island, that year, with Bill Zinsmeister, Rodney Feldman and various other folk. Carlos Macellari and Brian Huber were working on their theses. I think there were about ten or twelve of us then on Seymour Island. And then I had Ruth in ‘83, so the next two seasons on Seymour Island that my grant covered, I had two other guys go down and collect samples for me. So, I was working on that material.

Seag:

And was that to spend time with Ruth?

Askin:

Yea. Because I couldn’t—you know, I was breast feeding, and I breast fed for a year, and didn’t want to leave her at that point.

Seag:

And I read that ‘82 was the year you were on a team that discovered the first mammal fossils.

Askin:

Yes. That was Mike Woodburne, who was at UC Riverside, and his team working with him on the mammals and other vertebrates, including Judd Case who also worked on the fossil plants. Yes, they made some exciting finds down there. Seymour Island is a treasure trove of fossils.

Seag:

Oh wow. And so what were the next few years like, in the mid-80’s?

Askin:

Mid-’80s, what was I doing then? Probably looking after Ruth. Plus microscope work. I think I did some conferences at that point, and Steve looked—her dad looked after her. And I think my mom was there for one, she came over from New Zealand. But basically I don’t think I did any fieldwork until I got back to Ohio State.

Seag:

So, I think we’re not quite back at Ohio State right? First is UC Riverside, is that…?

Askin:

Oh, that’s right! UC Riverside, where Mike Woodburne was based. Ruth was born in October ‘83 in Denver, and in 1986 we moved to California, for Steve’s work.

Seag:

Oh, okay. So, this is all overlapping.

Askin:

Yes.

Seag:

So, you continued doing this research and conferences and things, and ended up back at Ohio State. And why back to Ohio State?

Askin:

Steve was no longer able—his eyes were bad, and he could no longer do microscope work—he was a palynologist originally too, and he had various medical issues, and was unable to work for Chevron anymore. And so he left Chevron and went back to Ohio State. He was fascinated by the history of some of the older geologists: Orton, who the Orton Museum at Ohio State is named after, and half of the geology department is in that building. It’s the one with the beautiful bell tower, and the geology library. So, he wanted to do some historical research. And he also did some geology teaching then. And I went back to Byrd Polar Research Center, that was in 1994, and got back into doing some work on the Transantarctic Mountains again.

Seag:

Was it a research position?

Askin:

Yes, I was in a research position with Byrd Polar, and I also did some teaching in the geology department. The first year I was there I taught a couple of quarters of historical geology, which was a second-year geology undergrad course. After that, I taught some graduate palynology courses, and took part in other people’s graduate seminar series and did a bit of teaching that way. But I was mainly employed at Byrd Polar on grant-supported moneys.

Seag:

From NSF.

Askin:

Yes, from NSF.

Seag:

And were you working as part of a research team, or independently?

Askin:

It was sort of collaborative research with John Isbell and various other people who worked on the same rocks: David Elliot, Jim Collinson, Molly Miller, various people like that. When I was down in the Shackleton area, and Graphite Peak, I worked with them there. And then after that, I was working on the drilling projects, which were big, international, collaborative projects in the Ross Sea area.

Seag:

And did that start…mid-90’s are we?

Askin:

Uh, late 90’s I think, Cape Roberts. The countries for the Cape Roberts Project were the US, New Zealand, Italy, Germany, UK and Australia.

Seag:

And the Cape Roberts Project is part of ANDRILL?

Askin:

No. It was a separate earlier project. For Cape Roberts everybody took turns going to McMurdo, and so the first year, 1997, Ian Raine was the terrestrial palynologist, and John Wrenn, Graeme Wilson and Mike Hannah were doing the marine. And then I was on Cape Roberts 2 and 3, with Ian, John, Graeme and Mike. CRP2/2A was in 1998, and CRP-3 in 1999. It was an incredible experience, all working together in the Crary Lab as core material came in.

So that was the Cape Roberts project. And then the next big international drilling project was ANDRILL. And for that, they just sent the project scientists and the sedimentologists and others who were going do the initial main core study to Antarctica. Instead of having the whole hoopla and taking over half the Crary Lab and probably costing a fortune, they had most of the scientists back at their home institutions, and with the people describing the core and collecting initial samples in the Crary Lab, along with the paleomag work and that type of thing. And then the cores were sent back to Tallahassee, to FSU, the core storage facility. And then we all had these core parties: we went to workshops and marked our preferred sample levels with little flags in the core (which we did at Cape Roberts too, but this was back in Florida), and received our samples from there. So, at that point most of the science was done back in the various home countries.

Seag:

And when you got back into the field in the 2000s, after having seen the early ‘70s and the early ‘80s, and then the ‘90s, was it any different?

Askin:

Yes, it was hugely different. Especially from when I first went, where it was small field parties; I was working out of Scott Base, not such great equipment all the time; the food was awful in the field… [Laughs]. And the Navy running operations at McMurdo for the few times I was over there, and then after that there were these huge numbers of women in McMurdo. And of course, I was then based at McMurdo, or else I was in the Antarctic Peninsula. Huge changes. And I hadn’t really lived in McMurdo before that work, and the drilling projects. So, I’d never really experienced McMurdo, but it seemed it was way, way different.

Seag:

Did you have any feelings about whether you preferred the old way or the new way?

Askin:

I think the first time you experience something like that, and it’s a small, intimate group, it seems better than when it’s, you know, thousands of people at the scene. The first experience, I think, was definitely the best, in my memory. But then I also loved working on the Cape Roberts project. I loved going through McMurdo for the various projects I worked with in the Transantarctic Mountains. And then of course working on the Peninsula was entirely different, because you go down through South America, one of them I went through Chile and the other through Argentina. And that’s a totally different experience, too.

Seag:

Can you describe how it was different, aside from the obvious, that you’re going through Chile and Argentina?

Askin:

Well, much smaller operations—it’s not like going through Christchurch. The New Zealand thing was different again, the USAP experience, going through Christchurch, where you pick up all your clothing and you get on the Herc and go. Going through South America is a lot smaller, you sort of get to the port (Ushuaia or Punta Arenas), and you’re rushing around town trying to buy extra food and getting on the ship, and then you’ve got that long sea voyage to get to where you’re going and coming out—they’re just different.

Seag:

Did it feel significant to you that there were more women down, or was it just different in numbers? Was the culture different at all, or the experience of being down there?

Askin:

The culture was definitely different. And it was—it was better. Yea. It was a lot more natural sort of society than what had been before. Originally, as I said, I didn’t know McMurdo very well when I went those first-years but it was definitely all male, and military-run, so it was very different from the—[laughs] – mixed communities that were there later on. [Laughs].

Seag:

And what about your research? Did your research questions change, the overarching things that you’re studying?

Askin:

Ah—in a way. You know, I was still trying to reconstruct vegetation and see how climate was changing over time. Instead of doing basic research like "how old are those rocks?"—we basically knew for the first Beacon study they were probably Permian and Triassic, but where in the Permian and Triassic? And so those were sort of more basic questions at first. More detailed work came especially with the drilling projects, and the work I’m doing with Sophie, with fluctuating ice sheets and in getting involved in the controversy over the younger times in Antarctica: whether the ice sheet arrived and stayed, or whether it was dynamic and pulsed back and forth, and whether there was increased or changed vegetation in those warmer intervals or not. And so, I’ve been playing with more of those sorts of things. And now we’re looking more at – for example, with a student that Sophie has now that I’m helping, she’s working on pollen and spores, and marine palynomorphs, from the sediment under the ice streams, and so where did those come from and what do they mean in terms of the vegetation, climate, and paleo-topography, and so forth. I’m also interested in when did some of the first grass pollen, and Asteraceae (daisy family), and other taxa, when did they first appear in Antarctica? Some things, other taxa we found on Seymour and adjacent islands, both plants and animals, it seemed a lot of taxa evolved in Antarctica and dispersed out to other land-masses.

Seag:

And when—or maybe why, whichever is the more significant angle to look at this—did you shift from looking at the rocks in dry valleys or mountain ranges, to looking at ice? Or, you’re looking at spores in ice…

Askin:

Ah, no, below the ice, the sub-ice or seafloor sediment. Well, especially in the drilling projects. We’re working with a much higher resolution. People are looking at fine layers, and one of Sophie’s students was tying the pollen cycles, the plant cycles, to orbital cyclicity. So it’s much, much higher resolution, which is really fun to do. In contrast, the first research I did back in the 70s was very gross sort of basic stuff.

Seag:

How did you begin working with Sophie? And Sophie, what’s her last name?

Askin:

Warny. She was with the ANDRILL project, she was one of the marine palynologists, at LSU. And it turns out, John Wrenn who worked on the marine microplankton—he actually did his Ph.D. on Seymour Island working with Peter Webb. And John Wrenn was the initial head of CENEX (Center for Excellence in Palynology) at Louisiana State University, and he was the US person doing marine palynology with the Cape Roberts Project. For ANDRILL, there were New Zealand palynologists, marine and terrestrial I was the US terrestrial palynologist and then there was a German palynologist. And Sophie had gone to work with John, and I’ve forgotten the order of this, but John developed cancer, very sadly, and died. So, she took over the CENEX position (she also teaches and is curator for their Natural Science museum). For ANDRILL she took over the marine palynology for the US part of the project. Because they were trying to share around to the different contributing nations, you know, a sedimentologist from there, and one from there, and a palynologist from here and one from there, and so on.

Seag:

So, your other big project, that I know of at least, during this period has been setting up the Polar Rock Repository.

Askin:

Ah, yes.

Seag:

Can you tell me about that?

Askin:

That was, um, you know, some previous people had thought about a repository. I was not the first person to try, that thought about doing that, and to try getting funding for it. As I was there at Byrd Polar, I sort of fell into working on that project. The first thing I did actually was to set up, or try and set up a database, I got an exploratory grant to set up an Antarctic rock database. And I of course am totally hopeless with computers, Tim would tell you [laughs], and so obviously it was not going to be me writing the software, but I did hire a student and, um, yes, we had a couple of disasters in there, trying to get a student who actually did the work. But we had one person, Christie Demosthenous, who did a great job at a preliminary software for a database. And then we had a couple of other students who worked on successive stages of that. And we actually developed quite a good Antarctic geologic database that was searchable for different rock types, and that was sort of the preliminary step. And while doing that, I was also looking into funding, and talking to Scott Borg, about possibilities for the Rock Repository. So that was part of it. David Elliot and Peter Webb – they were big proponents for this—quite a few people were interested in doing this. And in the end because it was the Polar Rock Repository, I also had a co-PI at Byrd, Leonard Polyak, a Russian guy who was an Arctic geologist, he worked on young material from the Arctic. And so he was the Arctic side, and I was the Antarctic side. Scott Borg put a lot of work into that, we went back and forth, because they had originally told us NSF does not pay for buildings, for “bricks and mortar”.

Seag:

And what was Scott Borg’s role at that point?

Askin:

Scott Borg – at that time he was the director of Antarctic Sciences in the Office of Polar Programs, NSF, and so he had a lot to do—you know, he’s the one that should be credited for pushing that through. And he was there for the first shovel in the site, and then the site changed because they discovered that wouldn’t work. [Laughs]. But anyway, yea, so we had various iterations of buildings and designs, and what might be possible, and looking into costs, and finally we got a proposal together and it was funded. So, then it was finding an architect, and getting it done. The geologic database was going to be part of that, and Anne Grunow in fact looked into it and found a better product—that she liked better, because she became the curator. I was interested in getting it built, but I was not interested in staying as the curator, whereas she really was super at that job, you know, so I’m so thrilled she did that. But she found a commercial database product that was better. So, you can search online—you can look up "US Polar Rock Repository" and search online for different areas and rock types that you might want to obtain.

Seag:

And then did you have different scientists who had conducted fieldwork over previous decades donate their specimens?

Askin:

Yea. There’s…, we wrote to a lot of people, we asked for donations for the artwork [laughs]—which you’ve seen. And yes, that’s the idea. Because you know, people were dying, rocks were disappearing into basements and of course, it cost a fortune to collect these rocks. And some people were unhappy because they said if the rocks were in the rock repository they’d be told when they wrote a proposal to certain areas—maybe go to, you know, I’m just throwing out a name, George Glacier – and they wanted to work on the rocks along the side of the George Glacier, and then they’re told, “oh we’ve already got those collected, they’re in the repository. Sorry, no fieldwork, but you can get them from the repository.” And so some people were not happy with that idea. And you asked me the other day if that had ever happened, that someone had had a fieldwork proposal turned down for that reason, I don’t know that. I don’t know how much they have from the Arctic, to be honest. I think it’s mostly Antarctic at this point. But—I think, you know, for everyone, it’s great that all their rocks that they collected can be safely housed in one place, with all the field notes (I still have to finish typing mine up for Anne)—field notes and maps, any related materials, and this stuff that goes way back. I mean, Jim Schopf’s material, material David Elliot collected a long time ago, and so on—there’s so much potential…

Seag:

So, you’ve mentioned a couple of times the word climate. I’m curious about whether you’ve had any interaction with the political side of that conversation.

Askin:

Ah—there was a proposal that we had, with Sophie, and we were told it had been funded. But the money hadn’t come through, and we hadn’t got the final okay for it. And then it was withdrawn two weeks after the deadline for writing a new proposal. So, Sophie and I were really disappointed about that.

Seag:

When is this?

Askin:

That was last year. I think. And I thought it was climate related and political, and I think she might have too, at the time. It turned out later it was probably more to do with a personnel problem, outside of the palynology group. So, it was likely related to that.

Seag:

You have a land feature in Antarctica named after you.

Askin:

[Laughs].

Seag:

Can you tell me that story?

Askin:

That—well, I believe what happened was the US board for Geographic Names -and the, whoever it is that does the mapping and naming down there—was doing some more detailed mapping in the Darwin Mountains, and they had a number of features that they needed names for, instead of Peak 592 or whatever there might be. And so, you know, I’d been a person that’d worked there, so they plunked my name on a peak. But unbeknownst to me, because they didn’t tell me.

So, thirty years after my first visit, we went back there to do some work in the area. I was horrified to see where Peter and I had been: because I worked with Peter there, and he had these giant long legs and could climb up dolerite sills like nobody’s business. I was showing Tim some of the places where we’d motor tobogganed to the bottom of this dolerite sill, climbed up the sill, and then worked the section up there, climbed back down, and it’s like—there’s no way in hell I could climb that now. I’m not quite sure how I did that, except that I was definitely younger and fitter, but anyway [laughs], to get back to the point, thirty years later I went back and John Isbell, who we were working with, he was—he was doing some work on various other peaks, and wanted to name them instead of just having numbers or, you know, "unnamed peak southwest of whatever", or map coordinates, and so he contacted the geographic society and said he wanted to name one after me, and it turned out they said “oh, there already is one!” Which I didn’t know about! Which would’ve been nice to at least have seen the mountain. I have it in photographs, photographing something else that it was probably that blip there, but it might’ve been nice to stand on it. [Laughs]. But it’s kind of cool to have it.

Seag:

And is it—it’s Mount Askin?

Askin:

Mount Askin. Yes. [Laughs].

Seag:

Is there anything else about your scientific career that I should’ve asked you? I’ve got a couple of final questions, but anything I missed?

Askin:

Oh, I don’t think so. I’ve—there’s still so much that I haven’t finished. It’s like, each project—the problem with not having a salary, a set salary, and having to constantly get funding, is that you’re on a project and you get halfway through and you get a little bit published but you’ve still got all the taxonomy and other stuff that needs to be done, but you’re already writing a proposal for the next one, and suddenly that’s starting, and so you’re constantly trying to catch up. Palynology research takes a long time. And then I got into the rock repository thing, which took a lot of time. And so I had—I would like to spend at least another twenty years looking down the microscope, trying to get everything finished up that I haven’t yet done. There’s a lot of undone work, I’m ashamed to say.

Seag:

So, along with all this work that you had yet to do, somehow you ended up in Jackson, Wyoming, which is where we are now.

Askin:

Yes.

Seag:

And would you like to talk about your non-scientific life here? How you got here? Or -

Askin:

How I got here was because of Tim! Who wasn’t going move east of the Mississippi. [Laughs]. Yes we had a long telephone relationship, you know, starting off as friends, and sort of just staying in touch after doing fieldwork, and then getting closer and—he would always say to me, come move out here, but I was busy working there, and Ruth was at school there, and… so he would occasionally say to me, the offer still stands, or I would ask him, does the offer still stand? [Laughs]. So… when I got the rock repository finally built, I moved out here, and it was also—it fitted well with Ruth who had finished her first year at college, so we moved out here at the end of June, we got here first of July 2003.

Seag:

And of course, now you’re teaching karate and tai chi and qigong, am I pronouncing that right?

Askin:

Yea, qigong, I—yea, I started karate back in Columbus, Ohio, and so continued doing that here, and also started doing a lot more qigong and tai chi. I still practice karate and take classes, and I help teach karate, and I also have my own tai chi and qigong class, which is really fun. So I spend a lot of time doing that; I spend a lot of time looking at palynomorph photos and helping Sophie’s students and working on, you know, writing papers and revising papers with Sophie and her students, and I still have a whole bunch of slides here that I spend a little time on the microscope every so often. But my eyes are not as good as they should be for that, and I have not a very good microscope anymore, so I do what I can on that.

Seag:

And do you tell these stories about the Antarctic much? Have you told them to your daughter, son-in-law…?

Askin:

Yes, some of them. Yea. They’re usually the more exciting ones, like when I—the motor toboggan ran away, or when I fell off the zodiac [Laughs].

Seag:

What is that story? [Laughs].

Askin:

Oh, that was—that was when I was at Hope Bay. I’m probably lucky to be alive. One time when I was at Hope Bay -

Seag:

In what decade, what era is this?

Askin:

This was 1979-80, I think that season, with David Elliot at Hope Bay. And then we went to the South Shetland Islands after that. At Esperanza Station, the Argentine Station, at Hope Bay – it was the British hut we stayed in, the British hut there,—we were being picked up and bad weather was coming in. And they had the ship in near the wharf, and they were getting worried that we wouldn’t—that the waves were really coming up, and they weren’t going to be able to pick us up. So, it was rush, rush, rush. We had rock boxes and gear that we were loading from the jetty onto the zodiac, and then taking them out to the Hero, the ship that we were on, and cranking them up from there. So I get onto the zodiac, and I’m kneeling on top of all these rock boxes, and the waves are splashing over my head, and it was rocking and rolling like this, and get out to the Hero, and I have to throw up the rope, which is about that thick around, and it’s sodden wet and freezing cold, and so I throw with all my might—I get it up there actually—I throw it with all my might but I put so much effort into that that I went in the water. [Laughs].

Seag:

Did they fish you out?

Askin:

And I came up, I remember thinking as I went down—it was nice light blue, bubbly water—thinking as I went down, "damn I’ve got my camera around my neck!" and thinking as I came back up, "no I haven’t, it’s the radio!" [Laughs]. Isn’t it bizarre what you think? Yea. Anyway, I came up with my hand up like this, and the motor had cut on the zodiac, but fortunately I was near enough that the guy on the zodiac grabbed my hand and yanked me out of the water. And then, so I, then I get up top, and everyone’s yelling "man overboard!" and they wanted me to go down again so they could practice [Laughs].

Seag:

[Laughs]—now that you’re wet and freezing—

Askin:

[Laughs]—yea. Yea. So that was my, that was my—[laughs] water experience.

Seag:

So, I’ve asked a lot of questions about how careers and lives change over time, and that sort of thing, but I haven’t asked specifically about the adventure. When you think about your own Antarctic life, what stands out to you?

Askin:

[Pause]. Hard to think any one thing. As I said, it’s so spectacular once you go down there, and experience that feeling; and the weird silence when the wind’s not blowing—that weird silence where you hear the inside of your head, and the—yea. It’s just, it’s—it’s sort of… yea, overwhelming, working down there. And a real privilege to have experienced it.

[Tim, Rosie’s husband, in background]:

Well also, Rosie, being in a place where no human’s ever been before, that’s pretty unique.

Askin:

That’s kind of cool, yes. Walking on places where there’s—no one has walked before. Yea.

Seag:

Well is there anything else that I should’ve asked you, or that you’d like to share?

Askin:

I can’t think of anything right at this moment. I may later. [Laughs]. That I can tell you, that you can write down.

Seag:

Thank you very much.

Askin:

Oh, you’re very welcome.