Marcia Bjørnerud, professor of geology, had already written a textbook,
The Blue Planet: A Laboratory Manual in Earth System Science. This time, she
set out to write more of a “nightstand book,” something, as she
puts it, “for Earthlings.” The result, Reading the Rocks: The
Autobiography of the Earth (Westview Press, 2005), is science wrapped in a storyteller’s
history of the place we all call home.
The book, which already is on the required-reading lists of the geology departments at the Universities of Maryland and Northern Iowa, draws upon research she conducted as a Fulbright Scholar in 2000 on exposed rock complexes on the island of Holsnøy in western Norway.
A structural geologist who studies mountain-building processes, Bjørnerud was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of America in 2003. In addition to serving as chair of the geology department, she directs an environmental-studies program that, in only its fifth year of existence, already is graduating a dozen majors annually.
During the past year, Bjørnerud co-authored “Inhibited eclogite formation: The key to rapid growth of strong and buoyant Archean continental crust” in Geology and “Positive feedback processes in the generation of pseudotachylytes” in the Journal of Structural Geology. She also collaborated with six students in the creation of a pamphlet, “Building Stones of Downtown Appleton.”
This past summer, in conjunction with the U.S. Geological Survey, she led two students, Jennifer Murphy, ’06, and Alexandra Rathbone, ’07, on a field-research exercise near Lake Namekagon in northwest Wisconsin, where they studied ancient plate-tectonic boundaries in a fault zone.
Professor Bjørnerud is pictured with geology majors Christopher McFarlane, ’06, and Alexandra Rathbone, ’07. The fireplace, in Hiett Hall, is flanked by panels of gneiss, a 3.7 billion-year-old metamorphic rock, that Bjørnerud arranged to have salvaged when Appleton’s downtown J.C. Penney building was demolished..
