It is Time to Share All We Know
Including as scientists studying a planet full of mystery, how we know and what we can never know.
On the bottom bunk in a wooden dorm in south Florida in May 1994, I laid my head down on a plastic bag of ice scooped from the ice machine in the cafeteria. The cold of the ice sunk into my face and ear. A tiny, white drugstore fan clipped to the side of the bunk whirred. It was hot, all day and all night. The only way I could get myself to sleep was to douse my hair in cold water from the water fountain outside the dorm.
Mom had always said, “don’t go to bed with a wet head”. I had dismissed this in favor of cooling my head in the only cold water available, climbing the stairs to the room I had shared since early January with two other women who were also teaching marine biology at the Newfound Harbor Marine Institute, and then falling into my bed with the discount fan pointed directly towards my wet head. Mom’s advice wasn’t meant for me to survive the heat and humidity of the Florida Keys in the second story, attic-like room of a wooden dorm in May.
I’d piled ice into a bag and placed it on my pillow for a different reason though.
I was planning to pierce my own ear. It seemed doable. I wasn’t scared. The idea of threading a needle into the cartilage of my upper ear and then the stud didn’t appeal to me. My plan was to lay on the ice awhile, numb my ear, and then pierce my ear with the gold stud earring that I’d sharpened with a file and sterilized with rubbing alcohol.
Why was I doing this? I was bored. Tired of drinking cheap beer, and short funds for other entertainment. Since my graduation from Duke University with a Bachelor of Science in biology, I’d been working for five months as a marine biology instructor for $50/week, room and board. Despite a diet of Cheerios, peanut butter and jelly, and spaghetti, I’d lost weight. My job was a 6:30 am to 8:00 pm routine that included meals with the kids, driving triple-hull catamaran motorboats to mangrove forests and coral reefs, making sure no one died, and answering questions about the incredible marine life. All the while it was increasingly hotter in the Keys. The ocean was now bathtub warm, and I had been overheating for a month.
During my undergraduate degree, I’d studied marine life and the ocean itself, its physics and chemistry, to escape the large classes and competitiveness among students in Duke’s biology courses. There were a lot of students majoring in biology who planned to go to medical school. I didn’t want to heal people. I wanted to know how our planet works.
I took classes in marine biology, global change and plant health, in part because I wanted to learn about these topics and, because pre-meds wanted to learn about animals with backbones and cells not sea cucumbers and planetary change.
I knew our planet’s health affected human well-being, though we didn’t talk about this in the science courses I took, even the ones on global change. In 1994, the oceans were seen as vast, the alpine and Arctic as formidable, and human actions were still seen as insignificant, not completely, but mostly. The swelling of our population and crippling of Earth’s systems was yet to come.
I picked my head off the bag of ice and swiftly pushed the gold stud through my upper ear. Done. An earring where I’d long hoped to have one. I smiled into the mirror and saw the right side of my mouth lift, but not the left. I tried to smile again. Wait. What? Someone once told me that there are nerves in the upper ear that are linked to the nerves in our faces. I’d been told that ear piercing could lead to facial paralysis. The left side of my mouth could not, would not, rise no matter how hard I tried to smile.
Had I really been so impulsive as to alter my face for life? I sought the advice of a friend, Joanna, who wisely shared that the bag of ice had numbed more than my ear. In the heat of near-summer in south Florida, it did not take long for my face to warm and my smile to grow.
Impulsivity likely has benefits. Risk-taking enables people and knowledge to grow by leaps and bounds.
Taking risks is part of science. And risk in science and in life has been part of my path westward to Colorado, and ascending and descending elevation and latitude to study the Earth. In 1994, when I began studying High Mountains at the University of Colorado, Boulder for my PhD, global change -- the heating of our planet and other extensive changes to climate; the chemistry of the atmosphere, lands and seas; and the overuse of living and non-living entities -- was making the news but rarely the headline.
Despite years of epic hikes and freezing toes since then, I and other scientists have not risked enough. We were taught to stick to the facts. We were told not to share ourselves.
It is time to risk more than my safety on mountain tops, in bush planes and crossing Arctic rivers. It is time to share all that I know. It is time to share what I’ve learned by studying and living in Earth’s remote places, and what I’ve learned about myself by venturing there.