Ed Mathez

Dr. Ed Mathez ©AMNH

"Working at the Museum has provided me with the unique opportunity to describe my profession to the public through exhibitions, with the opening of the Hall of Planet Earth, and now to educators through this online course." Ed Mathez, Curator in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the American Museum of Natural History, believes that informal educational experiences such as these help people to understand the Earth in a unique and more powerful way than more traditional methods; they give people a chance to use their imaginations.

Ed entered college thinking that he would be a history major; he just didn't know the history he would go on to study would be the history of our planet. "My mother's a geologist, and she suggested I take geology to fulfill the science requirement," says Ed. He had good teachers who convinced him to take a field course in geological mapping in Red Lodge, Montana, after his freshman year. Ed immediately developed a love for the field.

Ed went on to major in geology, even though he says he still wishes he had taken a few more history courses because, "Geology is a historical science. Geological processes occur over such long times and across such vast distances that we can seldom understand them by only trying to reproduce them in the laboratory. We look at the rocks to understand what happened in the past: how a set of rocks formed or how a landscape evolved. These questions are fundamentally historical."

During his later undergraduate years, Ed worked summers in Minnesota, running geophysical surveys for a mining company. "We were looking for copper and nickel ores in the base of the Duluth Complex. It was not easy, because you couldn't see more than a few meters in front of you in the summertime when the vegatation is filled in. There is not a lot of exposed rock; everything seems to be covered with overgrowth." This experience steered Ed into the field of petrology. He took that interest in petrology to the University of Arizona, where he completed his master's thesis on mapping in the very northernmost part of Minnesota. One of his professors took him on an interesting expedition to the Galapagos volcanoes where he was involved in mapping the walls of the calderas (collapsed craters) and this experience cemented his focus in petrology.

Ed Mathez at an outcrop of stromatolites in Mauritania, West Africa. ©AMNH

Ed's next stop was the University of Washington, where he ran a laboratory overseeing the use of the electron microprobe. "At Arizona we had a very old electron microprobe, and I used to try to get it to work, and that's how I somehow got into overseeing a lab," Ed recounts with a laugh. At the same time he was working on his Ph.D., researching submarine basalts. "I started studying them, and I realized that they were unique in a certain respect. They are glassy--the lavas that erupt on the ocean floor cool so rapidly that an outer rind of glass forms on them--but the glasses had little crystals in them. I recognized that this was a magma caught in flagrante, in the process of crystallizing." So that observation became the focus of Ed's doctoral study.

As magmas crystallize, volatile elements, primarily sulfur and carbon, enter the vapor phase. "I got into the study of fossil magma chambers because I was interested in how this vapor interacts with the rocks as they cool," says Ed. He continues to study how partially molten systems crystallize, particularly in fossil magma chambers in a South African body of rocks called the Bushveld Complex, which he still visits every few years. He also studies the geochemistry of platinum, "which is related because the platinum group elements are concentrated in the same rocks, but we don't completely understand the processes responsible," Ed explains.

Another of Ed's current research projects is also linked to his graduate work on carbon in submarine basalts. "One of my discoveries was that there are carbon films on cracks in these glasses, microcracks too small to be seen with the naked eye. I've been spending a lot of time studying the geochemistry of carbon on microcracks to understand how it influences electrical conductivity. Why are certain rocks more conductive than others? What imparts electrical conductivity to a rock?" Electrical conductivity is important because it's one of the remote ways in which geologists study the structure of the Earth, the crust in particular.

Ed explains that the reason he is working on this problem right now is to understand a completely different problem from the original study. He considers this kind of circuitous path of study to be "typical for any scientist. You really can't anticipate the direction your research may take because you're working at the very edge of knowledge. That is what I find stimulating and fun about science."

Dr. Mathez examines tube worms collected on the joint AMNH-University of Washington expedition to hydrothermal vents on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. ©AMNH

After being awarded his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 1981, Ed joined the research faculty there. In 1987, weary of raising most of his own salary through grants, he applied for a job opening at the Museum. "It wasn't easy to move from Seattle to New York, I have to tell you, but I decided to go because the Museum is completely unique. It's one of the very few big research museums in the world." At the Museum, Ed had more flexibility in his research and a high standard of support. "The institution has gone through an unbelievable renaissance since I've been here," he notes happily.

Ed believes that research and teaching are intimately connected, "because the activity of research is seeking knowledge. Part of that activity, by its very nature, is sharing that knowledge, and by sharing it you acquire more knowledge. Because you have to contextualize it to understand it." He has always liked teaching, "because it forces you to look deeply into issues and learn in much more profound ways. Also, I get excited about things, and I enjoy transmitting that excitement."

The Museum gave Ed the opportunity, and the challenge, to teach in a different way--through an exhibition. How could an exhibit capture the enormity of the subject? "I wanted to explain to people how the Earth works as a set of global systems, something like how your car works, or how your body works, because that's the essence of modern science," says Ed. This represented a real departure from the traditional way Earth Science has been taught. "The first order of business was trying to understand all these systems, from climate on the surface down to convection in the core, in sufficient detail and with deep insight to be able to explain it to others. Secondly, you have to know and convey how they interconnect and influence each other."