- Kate Brodie
- Virginia Institute of Marine Science
Despite my love of the ocean, my first forays into science revolved around rocks. By 8 years old I had my own rock collection that I kept in old egg cartons, and every time we’d would go hiking in the mountains, I’d lug back buckets full of rocks to add to my collection. For my first science fair project I learned to sort them into Sedimentary, Metamorphic, and Igneous Rocks, and built volcano models of Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Kilauea. I remember learning about a rock called limestone, and discovering that it could only form in shallow, warm, oceans, and so that anywhere you found limestone today—whether on the top of a mountain or in the middle of a continent, sometime in the past, that rock had been under an ocean!
In high school, I learned to love science during my 10th grade physics class. Mr. Sando made science fun—we dropped homemade parachutes off buildings, built our own motors, and constructed bridges out of Popsicle sticks (and later crushed them). One day, he even shot himself on a wagon down the entire hall of the science building using a homemade “rocket” made partially out of an old fire extinguisher to explain force and acceleration. At this point I knew I wanted to be a scientist, but it wasn’t until my senior year of high school, when I took a geology class as an elective, that I knew I wanted to be a geologist.
From high school I went on to Dartmouth College for my undergrad, where I continued to pursue my interest in geology. I decided to major in Earth Science, and consequently went to field camp, nicknamed, “the Stretch”, for ten weeks during the fall of my junior year and traveled all around the western United States. I found a 500-million year old fossil cast of a trilobite in Wyoming, saw 10 national parks in two weeks as we traveled through Utah, mapped the location of a gold mine in Montana, and mapped the path of glaciers around Lake Tahoe. However, my favorite part of the trip was studying the old wave cut terraces along the California Coast. I knew then that I needed to get back to the ocean, and that coastal geology was my true calling.
This realization brought me to VIMS for my Masters Degree, where I’m working with Dr. Jesse McNinch to use radar technology to map the location and shape of sandbars along the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I’m studying how the shape of the beach changes in response to the formation and evolution of sandbars in the surf-zone after storms. Hopefully this work will help us understand areas of the beach called “erosional hotspots”, where storms do the most damage to the beach and any unsuspecting houses. I’m very excited about this project because I get to combine some of my favorite things together: the ocean, the beach, geology, and science!
