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Interview of Diane McKnight by Morgan Seag on March 23, 2018,
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,
College Park, MD USA,
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/48262
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Interview with Dr. Diane McKnight, professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and currently program director for the Arctic Observing Network at the National Science Foundation. The interview begins with McKnight recounting her childhood with both parents having doctorate degrees, and she discusses the early science influences in her life. McKnight describes her decision to attend MIT for her undergraduate studies and subsequently her graduate studies in engineering, where she worked with Francois Morel. She discusses her engineering classes, campus life at MIT, and the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated field. McKnight then recalls how her early career work at the US Geological Survey led to her work in Antarctica. She shares stories of life at McMurdo Station, meeting Al Gore, and working on the Palmer Station Long Term Ecological Research project (LTER). At the end of the interview, McKnight reflects on how this work influenced her life and what life has been like since.
This is Morgan Seag, and I’m speaking with Dr. Diane McKnight, who is professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and currently program director for the Arctic Observing Network at the National Science Foundation. Today is March 23, 2018, and we’re speaking at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Thank you so much for being here.
It’s great to be here.
Great. So, if we could, let’s start at the very beginning. What was your upbringing like, and where were you born?
So, I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, when my dad was finishing his Ph.D. in chemistry, and he then went to work for DuPont in southern Texas. And so I lived – we lived there for the first four years, then moved. I started kindergarten in New Jersey. He moved to New Jersey and worked for Johnson & Johnson, and I became an undergrad at MIT from New Jersey. And my – I grew up hearing from my dad that no one would – he didn’t want any child of his to go to MIT. He thought it was a prison.
Because he had been to –
He finished his Ph.D. in three years, and – but then I went to interview at Tufts with my mother, and after the morning, I was like, no, I don’t want to go here. And my mom said, “Well, why don’t we go check out MIT, just to check it out?” And it was really exciting. We went on the tour, and Doc Edgerton had these strobe lights with the water drops.
Did Tufts feel kind of small?
It felt – I really wanted to be a scientist, and there really wasn’t much of an emphasis there. And… you know, whereas MIT just felt very exciting and comfortable. And so there’s – my brother ended up getting his Ph.D. at MIT, my younger daughter went to MIT, my niece –
That’s your brother’s daughter?
My other brother’s daughter. She ended up going to MIT. It’s just kind of this thing.
What was your mother like when you were growing up?
So, my mother was a preschool teacher, and then I remember vividly how she got her master’s degree in early childhood education in six years, raising six kids, while running a preschool. And she then did her Ph.D. in – at Bank Street College at Columbia University, finishing it in her early 50s, on the impact of the computer in the family, when home computers were first starting. And she did a linear study of four families, when they first got their home computer.
Wow.
Yeah.
Were you out of the home when she was working on her Ph.D.?
Yeah, this was when I was in grad – well, no. When she was working on her Ph.D., I was by then in grad school. Or maybe – yeah, I was finishing my Ph.D. then.
And what was your relationship like with your five siblings? Is that right?
Yes. So, I’m the oldest, and I’m – we’re all pretty different, and very close, though. And my youngest brother is 14 years younger than me, but my sister – my one sister is 10 years younger than me, so – but we – yeah, we do a lot of things together. We have a – we inherited from my uncle a condo in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that we manage as a limited liability, LLC. So, I, this morning, was finishing up the taxes. And so I’m the organized one in the traditional older sister role. Yeah, I always end up taking care of the logistics [laughs].
So, do you remember at what point science became a part of your life, or was it always from your father?
Oh, as it – in elementary school, there was one semester – one year when we were on what was called “double sessions,” because this area of New Jersey was – had more students coming in than they could take care of in elementary schools. And so my friend and I had what we called the “Have work, have fun” club in fourth grade, and we would do all these little experiments and stuff like that. And so I was – I remember my sophomore year in high school, I won an award for a book review I wrote, and the Scholastic magazine – you know, my teacher took me to New York to the New York Public Library, where there was this award ceremony. But I remember explaining to her, no, I want to be a – I’m going to be a scientist. And I became very interested in environmental science and environmental engineering.
How did that interest come about?
So, I – the first Earth Day was when I was in high school.
Oh, wow.
I rode my bike from one end of the town to the other to my high school. I was – we had this environmental club, and we would go to elementary schools and talk about recycling. And yeah, so that was early on, and then as a – so anyway, that was my – and then – yeah. I was in – at MIT I was interested in engineering, and there wasn’t really an environmental engineering track in any department. So, at that point, I graduated in 1975, so I was in mechanical engineering and took classes in Earth and Planetary Science. And I thought it would be good to take chemical thermodynamics, and I sort of put together my own – what I should know.
I want to ask you another question about what you were doing in high school with all these environmental science activities, because a lot of data – recent data shows that it’s in high school and middle school when girls stop being interested in science. At the time, did you – did it ever occur to you that this was something that boys might be more encouraged to do, or that you might be underrepresented in, or did you feel totally comfortable and welcomed in what you were doing?
I would say I took – I felt totally comfortable. I was in this upper-middle-class township. We had an outstanding physics teacher, so I took physics and then advanced physics junior and senior year. We used to call him swami Braun. We would have – they invested a lot in this new high school and all this physics experiment gear and studying momentum. And we – it was a great class. And the first year – the second year in high school, we were essentially using the undergrad text for Physics 1, and it was a mix of pretty much equal female/male students, but that wasn’t really an issue.
That’s great.
And you know, there were different cliques in high school, and the star quarterback, who was at some – half of his social life was being the star quarterback and dating the cheerleaders, but he was also in this amazing physics class. You know, that was just a separate – you know, honors, smart kids, doing physics. Separate world. And so people would be – in my high school, people could be in different groups, not all the environmental kids in the environmental club would be in the honors classes, so you could be in different groups. And then I remember my senior year – so there was sort of the hippie dope kids, and they had all decided to do – be in the play, and it was Zorba the Greek, this musical. And then – but those – that group, they lost interest before the production. [laughs] So the drama teacher came and recruited some of us responsible kids from the Honors clique to go be in Zorba the Greek. So, I got to be in Zorba the Greek. I mean, you see how that kind of – yeah, and it was more you’re doing – it’s all okay. That’s how I remember it.
That’s fantastic.
Yeah, so I can – I could hardly sing, but I would show up for the rehearsals and pay attention to where we were all supposed to be in the chorus.
Did you feel connected at all at that point to political movements that were going on, especially the environmental movement?
Well, there was the environmental movement, and then anti-war movement. So, my dad was so strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, so we had a walkout my junior year after Kent State happened, and I knew that whatever trouble I might get in if I walked out with everybody else, I would be in more trouble with my dad if I didn’t. I mean, it was a very political time, and my friends – some of my friends hitchhiked to Woodstock my senior year. I didn’t do that. It was – we were all very much in the here-and-now. My first year at MIT was – the Vietnam War was still raging.
What year was that?
I started in the fall of ’71. And there was a protest down Massachusetts Avenue. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Cambridge, Boston, which is this main drag connecting Boston to Cambridge. There was a protest protesting the involvement – the shipment of napalm that was going to be going by on the train tracks. And then that group – that protest was broken up by a SWAT team right at MIT, and the protestors dispersed through MIT. And the SWAT team tear-gassed my dorm, the Kresge Auditorium, the student center. You know, there was all this going on. My – that happened actually the spring semester, and students were given the option to finish their classes, just take whatever grade, or choose pass-fail and go back to their home – go back home to join in whatever protests were going on. And that wasn’t just MIT, that was across the country. It’s hard for people to remember this: to connect – to think that people, some people in our age group were as involved.
Do you see any echoes of this in what’s happening, even this week and last week with the student walkouts?
Yeah. Yeah, and I think that – again, I don’t know where it’ll lead, but certainly it can make a difference.
So that’s a little bit beside the point of –
Yeah, it’s – yeah. Yeah.
So, at MIT, there’s all this political stuff going on, and you are sort of designing your major around environmental engineering. Is that right?
In mechanical engineering, taking these environmental classes, yeah.
And at what point did you know that you were going to want to continue on to grad work at MIT?
So, I remember this well, because my senior year, the freshmen showed up, and the freshmen are talking about, well, they want to go med school, and they want to do this, and they want to do that. And my friends and I, afterwards we were sitting around saying, “Boy, we’re graduating a lot sooner than they are, and we haven’t been thinking about this at all.” We were just like, oh. [laughs] And there was this idea of the “real world,” that you could postpone the real world by going to grad school. And again, I was very much influenced by my – by watching my mother. And one of my – one of the friends in this circle of friends went to a fall job fair at MIT. She was in chemical engineering and came back and told us how horrible it was talking to these recruiters. So, we were like, “Let’s just go to grad school.” So, most of us in that group, we went to grad school.
Was there a community of women in your department, or did you have a co-ed, integrated group of friends?
So, I was on the – there was a women’s dorm at MIT that was built by Margaret [Katherine Dexter] McCormick. She’s a fascinating person, if you’re at all interested. And she had been – she had graduated from MIT and then married into the McCormick fortune, something like that. And she built this – she paid to have this dorm built, that had just been finished a few years before I came. And she insisted that MIT make birth control available to the female undergraduates, even though it was basically illegal in Massachusetts. And she was – this is what we were told. So, my friends and I were on the fifth floor west. We’ve had one mini reunion while I’ve been in D.C., and we’re doing our next one – you know, doing – taking advantage of my being in D.C., one of my friends is in DC. But we’ve stayed really close, and so we had this group, and then I was on the crew team, the women’s crew team, and then another – and then along these lines – so I majored in mechanical engineering. My freshman advisor was a professor in mechanical engineering, and he – every time I went to see my advisor, you have to have this signed and that – he would say, “You know, you should major in mechanical engineering.” And I did this summer project at the end of my freshman year, and decided to major, you know, in biomedical engineering. I didn’t like it that much, but I decided I wanted to major in mechanical engineering and identified that as my major. And so that fall apparently there were nine sophomore women in this class.
Of how many, about?
There were about, I think, 200 women in a class of 1,000. So, MIT is now about 50/50, but they were – MIT had gone from having – being limited in terms of the number of women who could be in the class by the availability of housing. There was a much smaller – like a sorority-sized space, so there only 75 women. And it was actually harder to get into MIT if you were female than male, because of this limited housing capacity, which is why – again, this is all what I was told. You should –
Yeah.
And so that was why Margaret McCormick built the women’s dorm, because this is back before co-ed dorms were common.
Right.
And – or even normal in any way, or acceptable. And so that allowed MIT to go to sex-blind admission. So, MIT had had while I was – and my sophomore year was the 100th anniversary of women at – undergrads at MIT. So other colleges were going co-ed at that time, but MIT had been co-ed forever, or very early on. So, there was a celebration of that, and there was – I remember in the area on the main building where we took our calculus exams, there was a bust of Ellen Swallow, who was the first woman to graduate from MIT, and she was a sanitary engineer. And so it was not – it wasn’t that unusual.
Did that create an inclusive culture, did you feel, that supervisors were –
Oh, so I started to tell this – so there were nine of us, and then we were invited to a dinner hosted by the mechanical engineering department, where the chair – I remember this vividly – invited all women associated with the department, postdocs – there were no female faculty. And some of the other – then the faculty – and they were celebrating the fact that nine of us had joined the department, and they had apparently decided that there were too many of this expanding class of women coming in that were majoring in chemistry and biology. And so many of us, really, we just didn’t know that the kind of physics we liked in high school was what you did in mechanical engineering. So, they had purposefully decided to be freshman advisors, to explain this. And so they were really proud of themselves and – you know, this – and us. And then I remember the department chair explaining: you are going to be sometimes the only woman in your class, in these classes, but we – we’re behind you.
The department chair is male?
Yeah. But he said, you know, “I want you to come talk to me before you change majors.” And I look back on that. It was really pivotal.
That’s amazing.
But again, partly it was they communicated that they were really excited about what they were doing, you know? And –
It wasn’t just checking boxes, it was –
Yeah, it – yeah, they were – it was like, well, we understand that nobody’s told you, you know, when you show up, that this is what you could do, and that you don’t have to be a chemist. [laughs] You see what I’m saying? If you think that all of this is more exciting than chemistry, which it may or may not be, then – you know, that’s where they were coming from.
Did you find that you had strong mentorship and support throughout your time there because of this culture they had created?
I wouldn’t – not from the department. I mean, I remember acing an exam in Thermo, and the faculty member, who was a really good guy, you know, took me aside. “I think this is great. Good for you.” I mean, but nothing – you know, I was on the women’s crew team, and we had to practice in the morning, so sometimes I would show up in class sort of straight from the river in my sweats because that was the option. And you know, I just remember explaining to my professor. He said, “Okay. You know, you don’t have to wear your sweats all day.” [laughs] But you know, so the thing about MIT that’s hard to explain that I think influenced me in many ways is that it’s a very incredibly – there’s people from all over there, so as a kid from New Jersey, or already in terms of outlook in many ways, not at the edge of things. And so I’ve talked about this from some other of my friends. My idea of what’s normal, when I left MIT after eight years, was like this wide compared to some of what other people who have gone to Stanford say. [laughs]
Right.
You know, it may have not had this as a – so it’s not so much inclusivity, but – or, maybe that is still inclusivity.
Diversity, for sure.
Yeah.
Was it international diversity, or just kind of across the spectrum?
International diversity. So, one of my friends is from Malaysia. Very rich family. And they thought that she should be able to have a servant sleep on the floor outside her door. [laughs] She had to explain to her parents, no, this is not going to happen here.
Wow. Yeah.
[laughs] Yeah, I mean – and the crew team – there were two of my close friends on the crew team that were African-American, and at McCormick Hall, there was a – one of the floors in the other, you know, on the east side of the dorm was where most of the African-American women were. And it was – and there was a kosher suite, and there – kosher floor. And it was more – partly there was – McCormick was a safe place.
Were most of the African-American women in that particular area because they had self-selected to live together, or was there some kind of –
I think it was because they had self-selected to live together. But they were – you know, they were – two of them were on the crew team. So, I – and we took some classes together. So, it was more like a home base. We didn’t think of it as a way that they weren’t engaged with the rest of the community. And there was this Chinese-American club that would have these dinners. The whole first floor of McCormick Hall was – there were kitchens and entertainment rooms. This was her vision of what this place should be so that the women who were at MIT could be organizers and have social events.
Do you think then that your experience would have been very different if you hadn’t had this safe space for women, if it had been an integrated housing community?
I don’t know. I mean – so the dorms, the culture of the dorms, are amazingly resilient. So, my – our younger daughter went – was on the Burton-Connor dorm down the road where my husband had been as an undergrad. And she was on Burton 3rd, which had a particular sort of innovative co-ed – I think it was co-ed by the time I was a senior. And she ran this – she’s really interested in energy, and so she and her friends had this energy competition where dorms could reduce their energy usage. And they got the dean of students to give a prize, so the dorms could be upgraded for their – this is so –
Wow.
This is so MIT. [laughs] And so she would talk about the different cultures of the dorms. And my husband and I remembered the culture of the dorms, and it was the same! Like, the – who won that competition? McCormick Hall. [laughs] You know, this is – yeah, so it’s – yeah. So, it’s more – I’m not that – I think now at MIT where the undergrads are 50/50, it’s not as big a deal.
Were there any challenges in being the only young woman in the class or anything else?
I don’t really recall. So, I don’t know if I told you about this before. So, my junior year, I took a course called “Androgyny,” which was taught by Mary Rowe, who was an economist. And she was a special assistant to the president of MIT for women in work at MIT. And her – she studied how changes in economics influenced gender roles. And so, we took this class. And at MIT you have to take one humanities course every semester. That’s still true. So, for my project, I studied sexist advertising in the engineering library, and I went to the – the engineering library is under the small dome. And I classified advertisements based on “very sexist”, another level, and – so, the nude women on top of machines was – [laughs] I’m not kidding! And then there would be – and then I had these very – some of the – there would be the same pose, but the women were wearing bikinis. And then there was a woman – you know, some highlighted [that] Madame Curie would have only had this best equipment. So this gradient. And so I wrote that up for my assignment, and the next – even before I had gotten my grade back, Pete Eagleson, who was chair of civil engineering, saw me in the hall. I knew him because I was on the women’s athletic council, and he was the faculty member involved with that. He said – I remember going down the main hall, and he said to me, “Diane, great report, but there was some typos.” She’d distributed it to all of the deans – all the department chairs in engineering.
Wow.
And this was –
How did that feel?
Well, you know, so this is my junior year, and it’s a spring semester, and I was rowing crew at the time, which is a big spring sport. You go have races and travel to go to your races. And so they – the – Mary – they’d scheduled for me to meet with the dean of engineering and the department chairs when they met. And so they – to talk about this. And I came to the meeting, and I remember the dean saying, “Well, we’re behind you if you want to lead this effort to reach out to the – these journals.” And –
Wow.
So, Pete Eagleson, who – this is where I got my degree, and I stayed in touch – he remembers me saying, “Well, look. I’m an undergrad, and I’m on crew, and I have a lot of quizzes and finals, and this is your problem.” [laughs] I’m not going to be – you know, this is your problem. And I just remember explaining that – appreciate that, but I’m not – I’m not going to form a group and start writing letters to these journals, that this is your problem. So, then Mary Rowe had me write an article in Technology Review. So, this, my very first publication is actually in Technology Review, and the title is, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” So, I don’t list this in my CV because the title is so weird. And so it was published in Technology Review in I think the fall of my junior – my senior year. And then – well, the other thing that happened is they had me go – the MIT library had me go back and there are slides documenting these ads for historical documentation to go along with this article. And so then Technology Review got letters responding to this article. They would send me to – at my dorm, in these manila envelopes, in case I wanted to reply. And they were, “You must be really ugly,” and all of this. A few favorable ones. And so I just – I told Technology Review I’m not going to respond to these letters.
How did that affect – or did it affect you?
Well –
This is like early trolling.
Yeah, but I just was like – this was at the same time my girlfriends and I are deciding to go to grad school. And I thought of these letters a while ago when Donald Trump was elected. You know, there’s just people like that, and that hasn’t changed.
When you said to the dean – that was his name?
The dean of engineering.
The dean.
I don’t remember his name.
When you said, “This is – I’m not going to do this. It’s your problem, not mine,” I can imagine a few different things that might have been going on. Was it, you were busy and this is not your problem, or was it, “This is not my burden. I’m the one dealing with it,” or was it, “I don’t want to be the poster child for this political thing,” or something else?
So more, I think – again, and you know how memory is influenced by how someone who remembers it well describes it – but I remember being kind of pragmatic and saying, look, I’m an undergrad. I have quizzes and exams, and I’m on the crew team, and I don’t have much leverage anyway. You are the department chairs. You’re the dean, and you can say, “We don’t want this in our library.” You have that clout, and this is your – this is your problem, to decide if you’re going to say that or not.”
Wow.
But more – not in a confrontational – just, here’s how it is.
Yeah.
Yeah, and – but it didn’t seem – no, I appreciated that they wanted to meet with me.
Did they remove those things from the library?
Well, I – somebody could study how things changed. I don’t really even know what happened next. You see, I don’t even really know what happened. You know, how – my impression from Peter Eagleson is that they did do some things, but as I said, things were changing so much anyway.
Yeah.
But you know, I – that would be a whole ’nother level of digging into things. Yeah.
In that case, should we move on to your grad work?
Sure.
How did you pick your supervisor?
So, I did my honors thesis in mechanical engineering with Francois Morel, who was my – who was my – both my master’s and my Ph.D. advisor, who was in civil and environmental engineering. But I knew at the end of my junior year that I wanted to go more into environmental engineering, and he was an assistant professor. There hadn’t really been anybody like him that I could have done my thesis with in engineering.
In terms of his research focus?
Yeah, on water quality. And I took a course in environmental chemistry that he taught my senior – first semester of senior year. And so that’s how we got started. And then I thought I wanted to go into sanitary engineering: wastewater treatment, drinking water treatment. And I applied to MIT, Harvard, and Tufts, because my husband was out at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, doing his Ph.D. in planetary science. So, I just applied there, and I got in those three places. But at Harvard and Tufts, I would have had to pay tuition. And then my advisor, Francois Morel, had a – I had a international copper research fellowship to study copper sulfate treatment of drinking water reservoirs, with the eventual treatment of red tides. That was the – you may have heard of hazardous algal blooms and, yeah, all of this, so that was an emerging issue at that time. And I – the international copper research association, I remember Francois’ grant, He explained how much copper it might take to treat Cape Cod. You know, so it was a new usage, potential new usage for copper. So anyway, I had this fellowship at MIT, and I had – it was close enough to what I was interested in.
Yeah.
So yeah. So –
Did you enjoy the research?
Oh, yeah. And my thesis advisor was kind of a wild, crazy guy, but we’re – I had a good experience. And the other – so he was a new assistant professor, and the other students in the group were generally older than me by four to five years because either they had done – been teaching or done something during the Vietnam War, and then were coming back to grad school. Because – taught at the Coast Guard Academy after their masters, done this, done that. The Vietnam War was a great disruption, in terms of carrying on – in terms of academic studies – for male students at that time, because your deferment didn’t necessarily carry over into graduate school.
Yeah. I understand that that’s one of the factors that contributed to the opening up of Antarctic research to women, is they didn’t have enough candidates to do fieldwork because so many men were otherwise occupied.
Yeah, I could easily see that. And – yeah.
So, did you do any fieldwork during your grad work?
Yes. So, my – I decided – again I wanted to study these drinking water reservoirs, so part of my thesis was collecting samples and studying the treatment of these reservoirs. And to prepare myself for that, I took summer classes at a marine station in phytoplankton ecology and zooplankton ecology at Friday Harbor at the University of Washington, where I learned to do fieldwork, because there wasn’t anyone at the department that I was in who knew how to do fieldwork. So, I decided to – I found – again, Francois is a new professor, he was from France and didn’t really know the lay of the land either. And so, I found these two field classes that I took my summer after my first year in grad school.
And what kinds of things were they teaching you?
How to sample aquatic ecology, but also we did – we had projects for both of these, I think they were two six-week classes back-to-back – and how to do nutrient analyses, how to collect samples for phytoplankton, what were phytoplankton. So that was an important skill that I recognized that I didn’t have, and when Francois knew that he didn’t have that either, and so we talked about that.
And so it was more research methods than like logistics and safety and that sort of thing?
Yeah, it was research methods, but also the topic.
Oh.
Yeah, yeah. So – yeah.
What were your findings in your dissertation?
Well, for – in terms of – so I did lab experiments about copper toxicity and the release of organic compounds by algae that control the toxicity of copper, but also I – in the field part, I found that – let me see if I can summarize this – that when the reservoir was treated with copper, the amount of copper that was added was just enough to titrate: to fill all the binding sites of the naturally present organic matter. So, you may have noticed that there’s lakes and streams that have a brown tinge, or – so all natural waters have some amount of what we call “humic substances,” that are derived primarily, for lakes and stream – most lakes and streams, from runoff from soils and wetlands. And you’ve seen how water in wetlands is very brown. So that organic material has a chemical composition that causes it to interact with metals, bind it. And that metal, if it’s bound to this organic material, isn’t toxic. You know, it’s kind of – the microbes don’t take it up, so that in order to effectively add just enough copper to knock back this algal species that can give a taste and odor to the water that’s difficult – very difficult to remove, because it’s in very low concentrations. It doesn’t impact the safety of the water, but people complain, and it’s bad, so they – they’re called “nuisance algae.”
So, the reservoir managers, they had an opportunity to take water from this river into their reservoir at the end of the summer if there was still high flows in the Shawsheen River. So, when they brought that water in, they always did a copper sulfate treatment. And you have to imagine a motorboat with bags of copper sulfate hanging off the side. It’s sort of blue when it dissolves, and the upper water column in the lake is fully mixed. And so I remember watching them do this, and they had told me ahead of time we were going to treat, so I had done the “before” samples. And then we went out that day and followed it. And it turned out that they added just enough bags of copper sulfate to titrate those binding groups and then knock back the particular type of algae that was blooming as a result of this addition. So, you knock back its growth three or four weeks, and by then it’s cold, and things are happening. And these concentrations of metal that are used are in the 60-micrograms per liter. They’re very low, because the aquatic organisms are more sensitive. So, there’s no human health – you have a copper requirement, because you know, from your food, it’s a – it’s an – enzymes – you know, whereas the aquatic organisms that’s living in the water and surrounded by water is more susceptible to taking up that metal. Yeah.
So, when you finished this research, did you think, “Oh, this is something that I want to stick with?” Did you think you’d make a career of it?
Well, so I – my husband by then had started his postdoc halfway through my grad career, and I – he had an opportunity out here to be a postdoc when the data from Voyager were coming.
[laughs] Wow.
Yeah. [laughs] Yeah, do you want to come out now that you’ve finished your Ph.D. and be here when the – Yeah. [laughs]
Yeah.
So he – so I wrote – looking for postdocs. I was also considering environmental engineering, consulting. About half of my class of Ph.D. students in environmental engineering went directly into environmental consulting. One of my close friends, who came into the grad program, Neil Shifrin, I remember when we started, he said – “yeah, when I first started working as an environmental engineer” after his master’s, “I saw well, you know, there’s these Ph.D.’s in the company, and they get paid more, and blah blah blah.” But then I – after three or four years, I realized they could do more. They had greater – bigger projects. Environmental engineering is very much complex projects. It’s gotten more and more complex over time in terms of designing something for a changing world. Yeah, anyway, so it wasn’t so much of a fallback, but a range of options that we – and that’s true in engineering in general, whereas in the sciences it’s more, well, if you’re “successful,” you’ll go on and be like me, an academic. [laughs] It’s about – that’s not as much the case. Or it’s not even the case.
So, you ended up working for the U.S. Geological Survey.
Yeah, so I got a National Research Council fellowship with the USGS to study acid mine drainage, which is a very big issue here. These are abandoned mines in the mountains. You may have seen them. You can see them from I-70.
Oh, really?
If you go by Georgetown, you’ll see these orange streams.
Oh, wow.
Blackhawk.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Those streams have a pH of 3-4, with very high metals.
That’s all from the abandoned mines?
From – yeah, from these – the weathering of the pyrite from the 1880s, the 1890s.
Wow.
So that’s – again, that was a – I didn’t see it as – I came out here, and I thought, “Well, all of this will be cleaned up.” Well, in my – early in my career. But because these are abandoned mines, because of the – many of them are in very high elevation. The winter, there’s what, 12 feet of snow, there’s avalanche danger, there’s no power. These are – there’s no primary responsible party. Even then, nobody – the people who got rich mostly were the shopkeepers who were selling shovels. So, these – so that I came to understand that there were all these other issues that controlled this problem. So, we – so in the USGS, I – we studied this in terms of transport, how the metals moved downstream, so it was very similar research to my Ph.D.
And then you ended up doing something pretty dissimilar, geographically. How did you end up in Antarctic research?
So, as a kid, I’d been very interested in all the explorers. In fifth grade, I read all these biographies.
How did you get introduced to them? Do you remember? Was it just sitting in the library at school, or –
So, I told you about how my – our Bridgewater Raritan Township was expanding, and all the schools – elementary schools were overcrowded. So, my – in fifth grade, they had built – the district had built a new high school, and it was sort of laid out in these buildings. And some of us, there were I think five fifth grade classes in one of the upper buildings of this new high school. So, there was a bookcase full of biographies on the wall of every one of these classrooms, so I read all these – I read a lot of biographies during class.
Did you think at that point, “Oh, one day”?
Well, I was really intrigued. And then my – when I was – so in 1985, I had been at the Survey since ’79. I remember hearing a talk about these lakes in the Dry Valleys, and how interesting they were, and I hadn’t – that was a revelation to connect how – how my interest in the Antarctic with what I actually did, studying lakes and streams. And then we – my colleague friend, George Aiken, and I – I had this idea that we would go to these lakes in the Dry Valleys and see if there was this class of material I just described earlier, humic substances. Are there – is that class of material present in an Antarctic environment where there are no plants? They’re not as – it’s not like the wetlands and the landscapes here. Could we go to a plant-free environment – we used to joke, “a plant-free continent” – and see if there are these compounds, and then that would mean in a regular lake or stream there is actually a mixture of source.
Yeah. Huh.
So, we found out, well, how do we get to Antarctica from USGS? And you may be aware that NSF is the lead agency that’s supposed to be for the research that other agencies want to do. It all goes through the U.S. Antarctic program. And my – our supervisor in the research program here in Denver was very interested. And I remember him bringing a new issue of National Geographic that was about the Dry Valleys, and you know, go for it. And so we wrote a proposal.
And was George at that time also working for USGS?
Yeah. So, there was four of us from the USGS, and George Aiken, Richard Smith, and Ned Andrews and I, and so we wrote this proposal. In the first proposal, we wanted to go to the Dry Valleys, the Vestfold Hills, which is on the other side of the continent.
Oh, wow.
There’s lakes there. And Signy Island, which is on the peninsula. Because we’d read about all these lakes, and we wanted to go to different lakes and do a comparative lake approach, which is a classic approach in limnology.
Right, but an ambitious approach in the Antarctic. [laughs]
[laughs] Yes. So, we wrote this proposal, and now that I’ve been at NSF – and I knew that it is the – the external reviewer said that this was a great idea. This is in this – exciting, this is what NSF is supposed to be doing, cutting-edge, something new. And it was reviewed by a prominent limnologist, David Schindler, who told me he reviewed it. But the logistics [laughs] – so, then the program officer met with us when he came out to visit.
Do you remember who that was?
His name was Richard [Williams] – I’m blank.
We can look it up later.
Whoever was the program officer before Polly Penhale. And so it was his last year.
What year is it?
This is 1986 or fall of 1985.
Okay.
And so he said, “The Dry Valleys. We do the Dry Valleys.” [laughs] Yeah.
Were you going to do more than one lake in the Dry Valleys?
Yeah, yeah. We had read about the different lakes, and so we did Lake Hoare, and Lake Fryxell, and I think we said Lake Bonnie, but then we actually scaled it back to just Lake Hoare and Lake Fryxell. And he also told us, only one year. The NSF only wants to support the USGS in their endeavors for a year. Because the agency – yeah. So, we –
Because they fund – they prefer to fund universities?
That’s definitely the case. And also we wanted to get these samples, so we – the proposal we wrote was for one year.
Okay.
But then the – we were talking to people who’d worked there – Chris McKay, Doc Simmons – and advice, and once we got our award and we had to fill out this support package, we said we needed this hut – these huts, and all of this, to do our work. And as it turned out – we didn’t find this out until actually we had showed up at McMurdo Station – that the logistics people hadn’t known that this was only a one-year award when they were building our huts.
[laughs] It was the Navy at the time?
Well, the Navy did the helicopters, but it was a support contractor that builds stuff. So we had a very successful season, and we essentially got done what we needed to get done. And we had a lot of learning curve and such. But at the – when we came back, Bruce Molnia, who was in Reston in the polar programs in the USGS, got in touch with Bob Averett, who was our supervisor, that NSF wanted us to write an extension to go back the next year, because – [laughs]
Because they’d made this investment in the infrastructure? [laughs]
[laughs] I remember George and I joking. I said, “I guess we can’t say now we’re going to the Bahamas.” [laughs] Yeah, so I mean, that’s the second year. And then we wrote another proposal. So we – I was the lead PI on the two proposals before the LTER.
And that was ’86-’87, and ’87-’88?
Yeah, and then the next proposal started in ’89-‘90. There was three years. ’89-’90, I didn’t go down in that season, and I was down for the ’90-’91 and ’91-’92 season.
Those three are LTER?
No, not yet. So, the first season of the LTER, the first field season, was actually the ’93-’94 field season. We had been funded the year before, but it takes a year to go down.
So, let’s turn to your first season on the ice. Could you describe what it was like landing for the first time?
It was so exciting. I remember everything about that. I remember waiting to go onto the LC-130 and the clothing issue. It was just overwhelmingly exciting. It’s hard to – you’ve been there. You get off the plane, and it’s so white and so bright, and it’s – the scale of everything. And then of course we were excited to go to the Valleys, because again that environment is quite distinct from the sea of ice.
Before you got to the Dry Valleys, did you spend any time in McMurdo?
Oh, yeah.
Do you have any impressions of the town?
Well, I think – I think I talked to you about how wild McMurdo was. We talked when I – should I talk about that?
Yes, please.
The – well, we discovered that our nickname was “FNG Beakers”: Fucking New Guy Beakers. And that we – the galley was set up where there was the officer [galley] and the enlisted galley, and the Navy and the other – the military groups were there, the officers. And so the helicopter pilots were all on the officer side, and then Ron LaCount was the senior U.S. representative, and he would tell me and tell our group, “Don’t just sit and talk to each other. You need to make friends. You need to reach out. You need to– ”. He was worried about us because we didn’t have anybody on our team who’d ever been down before, but he wasn’t – didn’t project it in that, “oh, I’m concerned about you,” but more, you know, telling us what to do.
Was it like a reach across the McMurdo class divide sort of thing?
No, because the scientists can all – or, most scientists then would eat in the officer’s galley.
Yeah.
But sometimes – and see, I think the contractors also had that flexibility. See, there was a lot more military people than contractors there now, so much of the contracting – the role of the contractor has expanded, as the armed services, the different groups of the armed services, are no longer interested in being in Antarctica, because there’s not the Cold War dimension that there was then. And so, but there was this different culture in the different groups. The people at the Berg Field Center were really helpful and really outgoing. My friend George is – was very outgoing. And so, you know, we made friends with the different groups. We made good friends with the pilots. And I think I mentioned how there had been all this upheaval and trauma associated with the death of a young student in New Harbor, which is right at the outlet of Taylor Valley, so there’s Lake Fryxell and then here’s New Harbor. So, this death of the diving accident had happened a few weeks before we arrived. And so there was that – you know, something like that impacts a whole community. And that’s still true.
And your second season, there was a plane crash that killed several people and the whole station felt it –
Yeah. And yeah, the whole – it impacts everybody. After we had been there a bit, there was a LC-130 crash out in the deep field where eight people died. And by then, we were mostly in the field, but it impacted everybody in the fixed wing, which were both Navy. I remember talking with the crew chief and the pilot and the co-pilot, who brought the body back to the – that tiny little medical center. It was the same – was something –
[END PART 1]
[BEGIN PART 2]
– some things have hardly changed. And so – but I wasn’t in McMurdo at the time of the recovery effort from the fixed-wing crash.
Do you remember any observations you made about the experience for women on station?
Well, what I – getting back to my first season: so one thing I remember is talking to Ron LaCount on New Year’s Eve at the Eklund bio lab, which was – did I tell you about the Eklund bio lab being this –
You did, but please tell it again.
It was – it was like a disaster area. It was just full of random chemicals here and there, really beat-up labs, broken equipment. We were like, “Really?” [laughs] Because you know, you think you’re coming to the U.S. Antarctic program, this is – they clearly needed to build the Crary Lab. And so, I remember talking to Ron after we’d had this very successful season, and we’d gotten things done, and somehow it came out that I was 34 years old. He thought I was in my late 20s. So, part of what he was doing, telling me what I needed to do, was because I tend to look younger – now, even, than I am – but more so even then. And sure, you know, if I was really even fresh out – so I graduated from grad school when I was 26. I went straight through, but –
So, you’ve got eight years’ work experience under your belt at this point.
Right. But it’s not so obvious, right? And the program manager is Polly Penhale, who is brand new.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. And we were flying around, we were collecting these 500-gallon samples [laughs] in these special crates that we had designed before we came. Ned and I designed them. And these 10-gallon milk cans that would fit – we could fit 15 in these specially-designed crates and bring them into this lab and processed them through these four-liter resin columns. And we had figured out how much water we would need from this, and how much – it was a very ambitious field program. So, we – so the helicopter pilots called them “milk runs.” And at first, they didn’t get it, what we needed to do that – because we had gone down and talked to people in logistics in D.C. about how to get the water from here to there. And we thought, well, we could have a pipe from the center of the lake to this camp on shore, and – or – but the water might freeze, and what we would do. And I remember Dave Bresnahan saying, “Let’s just keep it simple. Let’s – the helicopters can fly the water in these sling loads.” So, we designed this device, you know, this special crate, which then they reinforced with these metal bars at McMurdo to fly the milk cans to the field camp, and then we would process the water around the clock, sort of, there. And that was the plan. And the first – we ran – so we would collect the water, fill these milk cans up, and then the helicopter pilots were supposed to come and then sling it back. But the first – they were sort of out-of-sync, and they would say, “Well, it’s too late. We’re going back,” and we would be there with all this water in these milk cans. And so after a couple of days, it wasn’t coming together. We figured out that we could put – do you know what a banana sled is?
Yeah.
Okay. So, we figured out we could put five 10-gallon milk cans on a banana sled, and there was still this moat ice. It was really smooth. And we could – with our crampons, we could pull these banana sleds back to the camp along the lake edge from this one stream, Canada Stream. So, we figured out which – and then we got a sample from the deep water that was more enriched in organic matter, so we didn’t need as much water. We’d only need 120 gallons. So, we decided we could get started with collecting the water ourselves, and then Ned Andrews, who’s more of a – not a geochemist, but a geomorphologist and a hydrologist. So, he went back into town to try to talk to people to explain what we really needed to do here. So, but as they were coming – so they agreed to bring Ned back to town, but as they were stopping at Lake Fryxell to pick us – to pick up Ned, Carol Bowles and I were hauling this water down from Canada Stream, which is about a mile and a half. But –
Fifty gallons on a banana sled.
But you have to imagine, you would just sort of yank it, and all – it’s like these hockey puck experiments in physics. I mean, they would just slide. So, it looked a lot –
It’s like curling.
Yeah, it’s like curling. It’s exactly like curling. And so, you know [laughs] – so Ned later told me that he told them, “She’s done waiting for you guys to figure this out.” But I didn’t tell him to say that. We had just figured out another way to get started, because they didn’t – and I understood how they didn’t quite get the sense of this organic material. And we had this tubing that was lined with Teflon, and all of this, so it wouldn’t introduce any organic contaminants. And I thought it was so important to get this material and process it right away so that these microbial products wouldn’t degrade. That’s what we thought. And then we found out that the average age of the stuff in the lake, the humic fraction, is 2,000 years. [laughs] Okay. You know, it wasn’t going anywhere.
You’ve got time.
We didn’t really need to – it could have sat out there in those milk cans for a couple of days and nothing was like – in retrospect, nothing was going to change, but we didn’t know that.
Yeah.
So, we – you know what I mean? Like –
Yeah.
We just thought, oh, it’s so important to run it through these columns, catch it before it changes.
I think that’s a common theme of your first year: you don’t know what you don’t know.
That’s why you’re there! And I remember George and I looking at the C-14 ages and saying, “Really?” [laughs] Yeah.
So, I think that the story began, and has taken us to a wonderful place, but in response to the question about the experience of being a woman down there, did you feel like it was similar to what you were experiencing in the U.S.? Were there different challenges or different rewards?
Well, I think it was more of an issue that we were young and brand new.
Yeah.
And that that issue was overshadowed in terms of what else was going on. I think I told you also about Greenpeace…
Yeah.
…rifling through the – Ron LaCount’s office, turning everything upside-down, the concern about sabotage in the context of two – of these two – eight people died in the fixed-wing crash, so that tension – those were what was going on at McMurdo that first year.
It’s a tense context to have your first season.
Yeah. Well, you’ve been there when that’s happened when – that is –
Yeah, it’s terrible.
Yeah, and it had just happened. Yeah. So again, I didn’t think it was particularly any different from being at MIT. If anything, it was more accepting than when I started at the USGS.
Why is that?
Because in the USGS – when I first started at the USGS, it was very Midwest. Most of the scientists were from the Midwest. My advisor was from New York. I discovered over the first couple of years that every woman I’ve met who worked at the USGS had initially been hired by Jerry Feder.
Wow.
It was like a one-woman affirmative action – a one-man affirmative action team.
He’s a New York guy?
He’s a New York guy, and his wife was very active in the League of Women Voters. But again, also that was nuanced. I was very young. I was from MIT. There was this kind of, “how are you going to be, because you’re from MIT?” Yeah. My – the second year I was there, Ron LaCount had this dinner – an event when a group from Georgia – Georgia, the country – where Russia was still not allowing any women to come to Antarctica. And so there was this group from Georgia that he hosted, and he had arranged to have women from all the different walks of life at McMurdo. So all the McMurdo guests were predominantly female. But that was his – that was something Ron was doing to make this point.
Feminist diplomacy.
And there were very – the scientists were very hospitable.
The Georgian scientists?
Oh, yeah. They – this was not necessarily the way it was because they thought it should be this way, the scientists.
They were more open-minded?
Oh, sure. And so, it was a great – I remember that. And I remember exchanging – they would give us these postcards with Georgia. And it was a really wonderful evening. So that was more making a point that was appropriate in the overall context.
I interviewed somebody else who has not approved the transcript yet, so I won’t say who, but who was a support contractor side in the mid to late ’80s, and said the same thing happened to her, with the Soviet visit, that she was pulled in as sort of a cultural ambassador.
You know, it could be the same visit. She may have remembered it as a Soviet visit. But they were from Georgia.
Yeah. Huh. I’ll follow up with her.
Yeah, I don’t – so I think that was the ’88-’89 season, the same season that Al Gore came down.
Oh, yeah. And he came out to see your field site?
Yeah, he came to our camp, and he was only supposed to be there for about 20 minutes, but he was really interested in what we were doing, and we were explaining this idea of how this would help us understand the chemistry of natural waters in the U.S. And I remember showing him our – we had a carbon analyzer, and a liquid chromatograph, and this hut, and we had all these columns. In fact, I’ll tell you a funny story. So that season, the fuel train that goes across McMurdo Sound to New Harbor had been delayed or hadn’t run because of – the ice went out earlier. Some reason. So, we show up, and all our gear, instead of being staged already at New Harbor, is at – still in town. And we had packed all our stuff up, because we didn’t know that we were definitely going to be coming back, because we thought we were done. And it [laughs] –
Welcome to the Program, as they say. [laughs]
And so, we show up, and we do our briefing that first day. And they say well, this – a congressional delegation, Al Gore is going to be here in a week and a half, and we want you to show him your carbon analyzer and how you’re doing all this stuff out in the field. And we had earlier gotten our briefing that we were at this point in the line to get helicopter support to get set up, even. I remember explaining, well, we once it gets there. And you know, not in any kind of pushy way, just, hey, if you want us to be doing this to show this off, we have to have everything out there. And so, we got moved to the top of the line. Yeah. But that’s just how they still have to work. need at least two or three days to turn all this stuff on
Yeah.
Right? Because they wanted to make the point that we can do high-level science in the field. Yeah.
So, kind of focusing on these first five years before LTER –
Yeah.
At what point in your first season did you think, “Oh, I’m going to come back here,” and why? What did you like about it?
Oh, it was really exciting. But literally, I was not planning to come back the first season. We – I hadn’t – it was very intense. We were very focused on, this is our first season and our only season. We don’t know, and so we would need to get done what we were going to get done. We had a calendar, and here are the samples we wanted, and we would keep track, and we have to leave by such-and-such a time. So, we weren’t really asking that question. And then it was in the second year when we thought about, okay, let’s – here’s this question, then we want – that’s when we wrote the second proposal. That was more of a decision to write the second proposal, and then during that investigation is when we – I was more involved in studying the streams, and we could see the change. The lakes rose about a foot and a half in the ‘90 – during the ’90-’91-’92 season because of all this greater melt.
Oh, okay.
We put in a stream gauge in the beginning of the ’90-’91 season at the outlet of Green Creek, which is across from Canada Stream. You know, the Canada glacier?
No, I don’t know it.
Okay, well anyway, there was one stream gauge where we put in where it was already going under water by the time the LTER started.
Wow.
And I think I mentioned earlier how our group that had helped us design the camp, and then Bob Wharton asked me to pick up a – the data logger for the met station that he had left. And we were really motivated to try to write this LTER proposal, especially during that last – the three years.
So, is it 4:00 that you have somewhere to be?
Well, I’m going to meet somebody here at 4:00, yeah.
Okay, so we’ve got 25 minutes left.
Sure.
Maybe we can focus on the LTER years, and just leave a few minutes at the end…
Sure.
…to fly through the rest of your career if that’s okay. [laughs]
That’s fine.
So, the LTER came about because you were seeing the benefits of collaborative and comparative research. Is that right?
Yeah. And more integrated research and how the ecology and biogeochemistry was responding to this quite visible change, and how we were excited to be part of this larger community in ecology. The LTER network has become more and more – but even then, clearly, a way to integrate, and for me personally, the themes I was working on were related back to understanding lakes and streams more broadly.
I believe you said Polly Penhale played a role in –
Oh, Polly was – again, I wasn’t at NSF, but you know, she made a big impact, and she was – from my understanding, it was her idea to have this opportunity for these two LTERs to help put biology and ecology in the “big science” category. And we’re still there. This is a long time later. But that by – Dick Williams. That’s the name of the guy. Dick Williams was the previous program manager.
Okay.
And that by taking the chance and letting the panel review process for the LTER sites help decide whether this was high-enough quality, that we would meet this bar set by the biology program, the environmental biology program, that that would raise the stature of what was happening in the Dry Valleys and at Palmer Station, and that would also serve. So I felt that Polly was very – I think she was the person who made that happen. I don’t know how that worked on her side. You could talk to her.
Yeah, I will ask her.
Yeah.
And so you mentioned that the first proposal was not funded.
The first proposal was not funded, and that proposal was – there were problems with it, and one of the review – there was – but there was pushback because we had this microbially based ecosystem – this was before microbiology really took off as an important area of research or was recognized. And I think I told you one of the review comments specifically said this would be as interesting as studying a pet rock.
[laughs]
And we had all these great pictures of these microbial mats under the lakes, and they just thought these were too glossy, too NASA-like, so we’re not even going to look at these. The other problem with the proposal is we didn’t have much terrestrial ecology because Diana Wall, who I hope you talk to – or you have –
I have, yeah.
It wasn’t on that proposal because she had just come down in ’89, ’90 I think was her first season after Bob Wharton gave her some samples to see what’s in here. So, the second proposal was a much better proposal, but the other thing I wanted to emphasize, that what happened in between those two years is that Gene Likens, who was on our advisory committee for our first proposal, when we didn’t get selected, we were pretty much told, “Close, but no cigar,” kind of, “Don’t give up.” And then there was this opportunity for the – this was our last opportunity. And he said, “What can we do to help?” So, he hosted a workshop that was funded by NSF at the Cary Institute, where – because he had worked in the Dry Valleys in his earlier career. He’s a very prominent ecologist. John Hobbie came, who was the PI of the – of the Toolik Lake LTER, and Gene Likens had – was the leader of the Hubbard Brook LTER, and Oscar Holm Hanson, a famous marine biogeochemist, and others came. And he said, “If I host this workshop here at this Cary Institute,” which is like Mecca for ecology, “they’ll all come.”
These people who had been there when they were my age – you see, our age – and tell stories, and then invited Tom Callahan, who was a program manager for the LTER program, and Polly. And we organized this workshop, and Tom Callahan got to hear these prominent ecologists sit around and reminisce the way Antarctic scientists tell stories about all these things they did. And so we were suddenly much – instead of being just out there, more connected to how understanding of lakes had evolved, and terrestrial ecology. And it was a much better proposal. And then thanks to – I think Diana was critical. And yeah, so we really felt that we were buoyed in a key way, and – because you have to realize, Millbrook, NY, is 30 minutes north of Poughkeepsie. It’s not like the easy destination. But Gene Likens was so sure that people would come.
And it worked.
Oh, yeah. Just – and I remember we explained this to Tom Callahan. He said, “Yeah, Gene Likens wants to host it, we’ll come there.”
Oh, wow.
Yea, Something like that. So, you know, that was a great endeavor, but we were very motivated to make it work. Yeah.
I have a few…
Sure.
…questions that I’m going to try to space out appropriately.
Sure.
The first is, could you describe the breadth of research being done among the various PIs and how you determined what sorts of ecologists to include, and was anybody not an ecologist who was involved?
Oh. Well, the first proposal – again, limnologist Barry Lyons is a geochemist. The chemistry drives so much of how the lakes are different, and Bob Wharton had benthic phytoplankton ecology. So, we – it was pretty much a team that Bob put together, and we had – my colleague Andrew Fountain was the glaciologist on that team. One of the negative comments we got was there was too much physical science in this LTER proposal. And so that glaciology part that Andrew had written in this intervening year – in addition to the workshop, Andrew wrote a proposal to the glaciology program and the Antarctic program to study the glaciers and the runoff. And I was going to be the stream ecologist and the hydrologist because I had already put in these stream gauges for the previous project before the LTER.
In any event, when the second one was reviewed, it was a stronger proposal, but Polly called me and Bob and said, “Well, we have to talk about an addendum, because you have to address a deficiency that the group has identified.” And so we – I was in the field someplace, and we would get on this conference call with Polly, and she said, “Well, the committee is – the panel is concerned you don’t have a glaciologist. So, you have to write an addendum to include a glaciologist.” [laughs] I said – we talked about, well, you know, “Polly, we have Andrew, and he did submit this proposal.” And one of the reviews actually said that “Andrew Fountain is the only person we could imagine doing this work.” Of course, she’s in biology. The glaciologist in polar programs hadn’t gone and told her that, “Oh yeah, we rejected this proposal from Andrew Fountain.” So, then that was kind of a slam dunk…
Yeah.
…that we needed to have a glaciologist. And then that’s how we studied these – he studied not only the – what controls this – again, we were following the directions from the previous review process. So that’s kind of how it evolved.
I wonder if you could explain: There are clearly benefits to this collaborative, integrative model beyond just intellectual benefits. I wonder if you could describe how – you mentioned to me, I think, the last time we spoke, that people had been – and we can strike this if need be…
Yeah.
…but helping each other out in the field. So, what are the benefits, and what are the mechanics of how that collaboration actually works?
So, we – in the process of deciding what to do, we make a commitment to the data that other people will need to interpret what they’re doing in a more robust way in this changing environment. And the other way – in terms of helping each other out in the actual execution of the field work. I think I may have explained about this idea of the PI in the field.
Yes, please do again.
Yeah, the PI in the field is taking responsibility for the whole field team, not just your group within the LTER. You know, if I’m studying streams, but – we lay out – and we did this from the very beginning – that the PI in the field is a point of contact for NSF, for the program officers – or the support contractor for our team. And that way, we can send our students down to do fieldwork without us being there, but they’re still the PI in the field. So, in addition to the staff, say, at Lake Hoare camp, there’s – we’re accepting responsibility for everybody succeeding, that making it possible to be there the whole season if that’s what the students need to do. In my case, for the stream flow, we don’t know if it’s going to start in late November, mid-December, first week of January. I go down in January because that’s when it’s sure there’s [going to] be stream flow, but there’s high-flow years and low-flow years, and so the students will be down there longer. And yes, so there’s the actual collaboration, and then we overlap in the field. So, we brainstorm and do things and really can rely on each other.
So there are benefits, then, to…to the – collaborative, it’s just the right word, the process of coming up with ideas and questions and solutions, and also it sounds like on a pragmatic level that if you have to do more teaching or service duties, if you’re chair this year, then you can take care of things...
Yeah.
…or if you need to be home for Christmas, you mentioned.
Yeah, and for me, when my kids were young, I would stay home every other – so I’d be – go down two years, stay home, go down two years, stay home. And that was what I did, and that was fine.
Did it work for you?
Yeah. I would say that, and that it worked out. You may have seen this recent NPR podcast with – about these Arctic women and working in Greenland. You should look that up. And they’re talking about, you know, their young kids and how they were reacting.
Laura Koenig.
Laura Koenig.
I just listened to that.
Yeah, and I thought about that, because my parents would come out and stay with my husband and our daughters when I was in the field, especially the first season. After the first season, I didn’t miss the winter holidays again. I would leave maybe before New Year’s, but not before Christmas. And what I – what I tell younger women is, my kids were so much closer to my parents than they would have been. [long pause] Yeah. So, it’s – it’s kind of intimidating being on this.
I understand. Yeah.
Because my mom, which – who has passed away.
I’m sorry.
It was 10 years ago, but it’s still – anyway –
Would you like me to pause?
Yeah, let’s just –
Or I can move on with –
Let’s move on. Anyway, my kids are much – were closer to my parents. And my dad’s doing great, but yeah. So that was very important to my parents and my kids.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So –
So, it was very – you know, I didn’t expect to be – you know, hit these points that when you talk about them more continuously –
It happens a lot. I’m sorry.
No, no.
I will change the subject.
Sure. Sure.
You somehow ended up with a historian as a PI on this scientific project.
Oh, yeah.
How did that happen?
Oh. Well, that was another – you know, there’s a lot of serendipity, and the LTER network was saying, “Oh, we need to connect with social science.” And as you know, nobody lives there. It’s a very small group of people at McMurdo, and we needed to be part of where the LTER was going as a research –
The worldwide LTER?
The, you know, the 22 research sites. And so Barry Lyons – and we talked, and well, let’s think about how we would do this. And there’s a geopolitical part, but then that wasn’t as good a fit. And Diana Wall knew Adrian Hawkins, who’s this environmental historian, and we thought, well, so many people who are like us are aware of the history, and so many people who think of this region think of Scott and Shackleton. And so we invited Adrian, and he has been terrific in terms of allowing us to understand how – what the values were like 100 years ago, by being able to read and interpret the diaries, because everyone wrote diaries, but it’s a special skill to read six different diaries and figure out what was really going on. And [Frank] Debenham didn’t include a picture of Lake Fryxell when he made a sketch of that basin, and other people said, “Oh yeah, there was this big lake.” And so you don’t want to conclude from Debenham’s sketch that there wasn’t a lake. And so it’s just – he’s informed us, and then he’s been so effective at asking these questions about the – working with us in the human impact on the Dry Valleys, but also as he thinks about how environmental history informs understanding.
Yeah.
So, I’ll tell you one more funny story. So, we – the weekend of April 6th, 7th, and 8th, we’re going to be doing a – at the National Science and Engineering Festival, Shackleton’s Science Camp as part of the NSF booth exhibit area. And so one of my grad students – NSF agreed to pay for the grad student to come to show – they’re going through a Scott tent and look through a microscope at diatoms named after – you know, navicula shackletoni. And so my grad students are going to – NSF is paying for my students to come, but my one student needs to postpone his prelim exam so he can do this. [laughs] Yeah, as a grad student. And so we had to ask the social scientist on his committee for the environmental studies program, would he be okay if we postponed Nick’s exam so that he can travel. I got this email back: “Totally fine. I’m a huge Shackleton fan.” [laughs] Everybody knows. So, in a way, we’re also connecting with – through Adrian, in a much more effective way. Because we’re – so we’re displaying how Shackleton’s group, at the Discovery Hut on the, on the shore of Pony Lake, they were collecting lake samples and then all these species were named partly after Shackleton, because West and West did this diatom research that they published in 1911…
Yeah.
…which is only – I think I told you about Adrian finding the map of Cape Royds...
Yes.
…from the diaries that I had gone to the library…
Yeah.
…the year before, and I would have never – I didn’t know that existed, so I didn’t find it.
Yeah, yeah.
Whereas Adrian knew how to find it, and he found it.
Yeah.
So, I mean, we all respect what each of us brings to this in terms of our expertise.
There were two more aspects of your career…
Sure.
…that I’d just like to get on tape, even if we don’t have time…
Sure.
…to dig into them. But you told me that teaching was very important to you, and then of course now you have been working at NSF for the last two years.
Yeah. Yeah, so I really was very pleased to have moved from the USGS to being a professor. It’s – I love teaching field classes. I teach a graduate field class and an undergraduate field class, Introduction to Applied Ecology for engineering students. And then – so that was a major motivation, and having more of my position be involved in mentoring graduate students is very important to me. And what was the other –
NSF.
NSF, yes. NSF has been a great opportunity. I’m at a different point in my career where I can contribute to moving things forward for the Arctic. I’m the program officer on this team, Navigating the New Arctic. The President’s budget, just released: $30 million. It’s one of the top six – there’s six big science ideas that the Director of NSF is pushing towards, in a more interdisciplinary way, wants to do science, and the LTRs are all about that. And so one of these six themes is “Navigating the New Arctic.” Yeah, I’m done in June, but hopefully it’s going to all go forward. Somehow, they’ll spend $30 million in 2019 if the money is really there, and it’s exciting to be able to bring some of my experience in the Antarctic towards this, and I did work in the Arctic in the 2002-2003. Yeah.
I wish that we could dig into your accolades and achievements, and your – you helped develop bio-geosciences as a field.
Yes.
And is there anything you would like to say before we finish up?
So, one of the things I’m most proud of is this children’s book.
Oh, yes.
The Lost Seal. And the other activity – so we – Adrian and I have worked on that together. And he has – so I published that. We did that for the International Polar Year.
In 2007?
6 or 7. And then the Palmer LTER, which started around the same – just before us in this first cohort, they did a book, Sea Secrets. And now there’s about 12 books. And we have – so I’m the author of this first one. It’s about a real event. It’s been very rewarding. I got to – I was invited spring of 2016 to do a reading of The Lost Seal at the American Museum of Natural History…
Wow. [laughs]
[laughs] …in the room where the big blue whale is.
[laughs] I’m gonna cry now.
[laughs] In the – at the end under where the blue whale’s head is. And you know, 4,000 people came. And I told the story about five times. There would be 400 people trying to listen to me, and it was –
That’s so cool.
They had penguins down at the other end, and I just – you know, being a member of the National Academy of Engineering, that’s all great, but this was so cool.
That’s amazing.
Yeah, and so you know, that somebody would track me down, you know? “You’re Diane McKnight. You’re the” – well actually, they sent an email to the database manager. “How do I get in touch with Diane McKnight?” So yeah, that was really a highlight to be – because this was a story I’d tell when I – my kids’ teachers would ask me to come back and talk about Antarctica. And it’s all true. And they showed the video of the real seal on this wall that was the size here, and I’m standing in front of it. They did it, and there was docents from the museum that were there. It was awesome.
That’s awesome.
So that’s another aspect of being an Antarctic scientist, but if we hadn’t written the book, you know, that doesn’t happen quite the same way.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, thanks.
Absolutely. Anything else?
No, I think that’s it.
Thank you so much.
But again, thanks for the patience with my being emotional, but it’s –
Oh, likewise. [laughs]
[laughs]
And 4:00 on the dot.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you so much.
You’re welcome. Yeah.
[END]