Oh! The Outcrops You'll Go! A Dr Seuss Inspired Geological Adventure

Well, its the end of 2016, and it is getting pretty hard for many of us to find positives from this year. Like so many other geologists right now, I am out of work, after getting laid off from a job that I loved. It does not feel like a very merry Christmas!

Despite it being a really rubbish time at the moment, when I think about it, there really is nothing else I’d rather be than a geoscientist, and I think most geos feel the same way. We are all passionate about the interesting science that we do. For me, I know that I have always been fascinated with the Earth, right from when I was a kid. I really was a big science nerd at school! When I was 14, I built a polariscope to look at how stresses are transmitted through materials. The following year I built a horizontal pendulum seismograph and ran it in our basement in South Australia for several months – and it worked! I picked up dozens of earthquakes from as far away as Alaska. Now, here I am, almost 25 years later, and little has really changed. I am still fascinated with, and learning about, the same things – stresses, and faulting and earthquakes and geomechanics. I still love what I do.

So, about a year ago, I wrote this talk as a way reminding myself and others why we love being earth scientists. Coming up to the end of 2016, I thought that it might be a good time to dust it off and share it with others.

I was inspired by Dr Seuss because, let’s face it, his rhythmic and rhyming stories, filled with silliness, are pretty awesome!  I thought about how cool it might be to try and do something similar on geology. However, I also quite liked one particular story about how Dr Seuss, or more properly, Dr Theodor Seuss Geisel, got his ‘big break’, and I think that his story is a good lesson for others, like me, that are feeling ‘redundant’.

The world actually came very close to never experiencing Dr Seuss’ wonderful stories. Dr Seuss’ first piece of children’s poetry was “And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street”, which he wrote while travelling to America by ship. Apparently, it was the constant beat of ships engines that inspired the famous rhythmic nature of his children’s poems. Yet, when he wrote this first piece of poetry, he couldn’t get it published. He said that around 40 publishers rejected the book. The story goes that he was actually on his way home to burn the manuscript when he had a chance encounter with a former university classmate who managed to help him, finally, get it published. So, it was really just perseverance and luck, as well as having a good professional network, that got him his big break, and allowed his delightful gifts to be shared with the world.

I think this resilience and perseverance is reflected in my personal favourite Dr Seuss book (and his final book): Oh! The places you will go! It is a great tale of how life and the world are fantastic and exciting, and that you can forge your own path. But the story also describes how life goes through its ups and downs, and the need to face and press through life’s challenges - like the downturn so many of us are currently in.

So, that is how this talk came about. I thought, why not talk about some of the spectacular geological sites that I’ve had the pleasure of visiting over my career. I thought this might be a nice way of trying to remind us all of why we love what we do, even when things are as glum as they currently are.

So, I hope you will find my Dr Seuss inspired ‘geological bed-time story’ interesting, as well as a bit of fun, and I hope that we all continue to be passionate about the geosciences, no matter how down and gloomy things may get.

Click on the video link below to hear an ~10 minute narrated version of my Dr Seuss geology talk, or read it yourself in the slides below (but don't forget to read in Dr Seuss rhythmic rhyme!).

Narrated Video

Story Book Version: