The start of my story

I am on the tail-end of a five week research trip in Antarctica and while logistics are keeping me confined to base, I decided to finally start what I have been passionate about for a long time, but too scared to actually start - talk to people about Antarctic sediments and why I personally care so deeply for them. 

I did not always care about rocks, I thought some of them were pretty and I collected crystals and rocks as a kid, but the concept of layers of rocks underneath my feet was lost on me as a Dutch kid. You see, the Netherlands is a very flat country of which 26% is located below sea level (1) and while I knew mountains existed, my child brain did not grasp the concept. What I did have, was an interest in sea-level rise, and I am forever grateful for my high school geography teacher who allowed me to ramble on about sea-level rise in an end-of-school essay. 

When I was travelling Aotearoa New Zealand as an 18-year-old, I noticed many of my conversations ended up being about sea-level rise and the vulnerability of the Netherlands under future climate change (sorry to anyone who was stuck in a conversation with me at that time). I decided to study physical geography in New Zealand, hoping I could satisfy my need for information about these topics. I ended up accidentally taking the "introduction to geology" paper and realised during the first lecture that this. was. it. I changed my major to geology that same day.

Rocks record the history of our planet. Modern environments show us how the rocks are being formed: a sandy beach becomes a sandstone if you allow enough time to pass, a river bed becomes a rock type that is a mixture of pebbles and clasts that we call a conglomerate and the ripples you see on the seafloor at a modern beach, have been found in ancient rocks all around the world. It showed me that there is a consistency to the processes of our planet and the rocks are a connect-the-dots puzzle to the history of our planet, and the history of our planet gives us hints to its future. 

300 million year old ripples (front) and modern ripples (back). An iconic image captured by geologist Ian Kane in Ireland. Image sourced from here. 

I learned that the only hills in central Netherlands were pushed there by a giant bulldozer, a glacier, that was present during the last ice age (or the last glacial maximum) about 21,000 years ago (2). I learned that these bulldozers really do not care about the size of rocks they push places, grain sizes range from mud (the smallest grain size geologists use) to boulders the sizes of houses. 

Geology underpins most of the knowledge we have about what our planet looked like in the past. Geology is part of the reason we don't still believe that the Earth is ~2000 years old, the reason we know there were past warm and cold periods, the reason we know our continents have not been in consistent locations over Earths history. 

The present is the key to the past, and the past is the key to the future.

It is because of this that I knew geology was the subject to stick with, and so this is where Linda's scientific journey, and slight obsession with Antarctica, begins.