Citation by Kenneth D. Ridgway
We are honored to present Terry Pavlis the Career Contribution Award of the SGT division of GSA. Terry has made important contributions to our community in many areas. These include:
(1) Structural processes in convergent plate margins:
Terry’s contributions in this area include recognition of ancient subduction zones/megathrusts, ridge subduction in forearc evolution (near-trench plutonism and high-T metamorphism in forearc regions), and the role of transpression in the structural evolution of forearc regions. Terry was one of the first geologists to convincingly document that the Border Ranges fault in southern Alaska marked an ancient subduction zone boundary. His 1982 paper is still the “go-to” paper on this topic. Terry’s 1986 publication “The role of strain heating in the evolution of megathrusts” was awarded the 1991 GSA–SGT outstanding publication award. Terry’s research on tectonic processes along convergent margins has stood the test of time and are considered first-order contributions.
(2) Extensional tectonic processes:
Terry has made fundamental contributions to the structural geology of extensional systems through his work in the Death Valley region and the northern Cordillera. Much of this work has focused on the role of magma intrusion in the structural evolution of extensional systems. Terry was also one of the first geologists to document that the Yukon-Tanana terrane in south-central Alaska had undergone a mid-Cretaceous high-magnitude extensional event.
(3) Digital Geologic Mapping:
Terry has been at the front of the group leading the charge to bring field geology into the digital age. Terry has been a leader in the beta testing of new software and field tablets for geologic mapping, and has provided advice on how to improve these systems. To disseminate the use of digital mapping to the earth science community, Terry has taught multiple short courses on this application to faculty and students at GSA meetings.
(4) Leadership in the Community and Mentoring of Students:
Terry has been the lead PI on several multi-institutional research projects. His leadership, for example, was the catalyst and vision for the STEEP project. This project evaluated the interactions of climate, structural, sedimentary, and subduction processes in the St. Elias Mountains of southern Alaska. The results from this project have revolutionized our understanding of the onshore and offshore Neogene tectonics of this glaciated convergent margin.
Terry has also been instrumental with assisting and mentoring many students, post-docs and young faculty members to get started on geologic careers. He has always provided a collaborative and rich mentoring environment for younger earth scientists. Terry and his colleagues have also been leaders in reaching out to underrepresented students and providing them with authentic field experiences and making these students feel welcome in our scientific community.
In summary, Terry’s career is defined by excellent impactful research with attention to rigorous analysis of field-generated data; he is devoted to the training and teaching of a next generation of diverse earth scientists; he is willing to put in the time and effort to develop and lead collaborations between a wide range of earth scientists; and he has served the Geological Society of America throughout his career. Terry Pavlis represents the very best of us as a scientific community.
Response from Terry L. Pavlis
I still can’t believe I am standing here to receive this award. It is an amazing honor, particularly when I look at the list of past recipients—many of my geo heros.
I say that even more because, when I was a teenager, back on the farm in South Dakota, I am certain I never would have been able to imagine standing here for something like this. Just picture two young clones (Gary out there in the audience and I). We have pitchforks in hand, standing in manure up to the fourth buckle of our 5 buckle overshoes, shoveling manure into a manure spreader. I think that at that moment something like this just wouldn’t have crossed my mind as a possibility for the future.
Now many of you know Laurie, my wonderful wife of 44 years—she is sitting out there. When I told her I was going to say something about pitching manure as a kid, she responded in her typical sense of humor with something like “what do you mean, pitching manure was perfect training to prepare you for a career in academia ….”
She has a point…
Seriously, I’ll come back to being a hayseed from SD in a bit, but I have sat through many of these speeches over the years. They have all been interesting; some make you laugh, some make you cry, and some make you think. But I always thought the ones that had a lesson for younger folks were my favorites. So I want to talk about 3 things that have been close to my heart for my whole career that I hope have lessons for the future: (1) field geology; (2) collaboration; and (3) diversity in geosciences.
Field Geology: It is what got me into geology and was/is my passion. I have always felt blessed by having been able to pursue a career founded in field work. I was attracted to field work because it allowed me to do something that was both physically and mentally challenging, particularly the mental challenge of 3D visualization that is the foundation of structural geology. But as a bonus, you get to do this outdoors—important for someone who grew up as one of 5 free range children spending most of our time outdoors on a South Dakota farm! Most of us who have done a lot of field work have been heard to say something like “I can’t believe we’re getting paid to do this” and that was certainly true for me. Unfortunately, more and more of geology is moving away from the reality of field work. And you can recognize this in people’s approach to problems. I’ve often said you can always tell someone with a lot of field experience because they are not married to their hypotheses—and there is a reason for that: In field work your hypotheses get challenged every time you top a hill so it is hard to be dogmatic when you keep being beaten down that way. Field work is the foundation of all geology, and I sincerely hope there is a future for others to pursue basic field research. That is the main reason I have been evangelical about modernizing field geology. Hopefully people will keep on with some of those efforts.
Collaboration: The most important lesson I learned early on as a geologist was the importance of collaborative research. Collaborative research is very common today, but put yourself back 50 years and it was not. Geologists have always had a tendency to be lone wolfs. I will roughly quote Mark Brandon here (Mark, if you’re here, not sure if you originated this or heard it and repeated it, but it doesn’t matter which).
“Geologists are like cowboys and geophysicists are like Mormons. When things get rough, geophysicists band together to work toward a goal (like Mormons). Geologists just get drunk and start shooting at each other (cowboys).”
That description is too close to the truth; things have gotten better, but there is still some truth to it.
My career of collaborative research began with Ron Bruhn, my MS and PhD advisor, who treated me as a colleague rather than an underling—back then and to this day, he and I have a symbiosis that is hard to beat. But that was two people with parallel interests, and collaborations of that kind have been around forever. The more important lesson I learned early on was from 3 people who became lifelong friends and collaborators: Linc Hollister, Jinny Sisson, and Sarah Roeske. What I learned from them was the importance of a collaboration with people that have deep knowledge of a subject that you only know enough about to be dangerous by yourself. I doubt Linc remembers this, but an aha moment for me came from an early discussion we had while he, Jinny and I were walking back along the Copper River Canyon on a rainy (no fly) day with the USGS TACT project. Mind you we didn’t know each other well yet, so when he looked at me with the quizzical look that only Linc can give you (and undoubtedly melted many a graduate student), he asked the simple question “Do you consider yourself a structural geologist or a metamorphic petrologist?” I could tell this was a test, so I thought about it for a minute because at that point in my life I thought I could wear multiple hats. I answered something like “I am basically a structural geologist that has a good understanding of metamorphic petrology, but it isn’t my specialty. I could tell looking at Linc’s face that I had passed the test. But I thought about that long after because subsequently the three of us worked together in the Alaska range (snowed into a tent most of the time) and interior Alaska. Then Jinny and I joined up with Sarah on a project together, and what I learned from those early experiences was the power of having collaborators with overlapping interests but different expertise and eyes tuned to different things. You feed off each other’s knowledge, learning from each other as well as keeping each other honest. Note: You have to swallow your pride in these cases and not be afraid to admit you were being a bonehead. Since that experience there is very little research I have done as a lone wolf; I worked with geophysicists (include a spouse and twin brother), sed-strat folks (like Ken and my UTEP colleague Rip), geochronologists, glaciologists, paleomagnetists, etc etc. I learned so much from all those colleagues and hopefully they also learned from me plus they also helped me with my greatest handicap—being a lousy writer! So young geos out there, don’t be a lone wolf, hunt for collaborators and work with them!
Diversity: Unlike collaborative science, this is an area where our field has not done well. We have gotten better but we have a long way to go—all I have to do is look out at this audience and there are not enough black and brown faces looking back at me. At least we aren’t just a bunch of white guys anymore—women have made big impacts to the field. But underrepresented groups remain grossly underrepresented.
I have often asked myself the question of why we have this problem. I personally was oblivious to the issue as a young man and that lack of empathy for other cultures is, I think, at least part of the problem—ignorance, not malice. In fact I’m embarrassed to admit how ignorant and oblivious I was. Gary can back me up on this one, but that little farm community we grew up in was, in retrospect, the most racist place I have ever lived, and I’ve lived in some pretty racist places. The minority group there was Native Americans (the Lakota people) but you could have substituted any other minority. It was partially the time. There was still a living memory of genocide and segregation was still legal. We had a Native American neighbor who was a good friend of our father. His parents both lived to be over 100 and were born in the 1860’s so had experienced first hand all those terrible late 19th century events. I always regretted not knowing them, but a little kid and centenarians who barely spoke English weren’t a natural fit.
But I am off subject. In retrospect that society was as segregated, or more segregated, than the deep south at the time, and yet I am embarrassed to admit that as a kid I didn’t even realize how bad this was. The two groups just seldom crossed paths and that is a tragedy because the two groups could have learned so much from each other. I tell this story because on the one hand I am ashamed to have lived through it, but on the other hand, it shaped my attitudes about race later in life. When I left that environment I initially stayed in my lily white world but fate eventually took Laurie and I to the University of New Orleans and a community with a very different demographic. There we learned the rich African-American/Creole culture of New Orleans and met some of the most talented and wonderful people I’ve known in my life. I even developed a jealousy for the culture with its unique social interactions; yet there remained appalling, and blatant, racism. For those old enough just think back to when the KKK guy almost became governor of Louisiana. He lost to Edwin Edwards in the race with the famous slogan “vote for the crook, it’s good for the state. Note, that slogan was ironically appropriate because Edwards later went to prison for corruption—but it beat David Duke!
It was in that environment where Laurie and I landed in the mid 80’s in a university that was about 90% white in a city that was about 90% black. Yet within that university, here was a geoscience department that had a significant number of African-American students; a huge anomaly at the time given that if you went to a GSA meeting in those days you would be hard pressed to find anyone with dark skin who wasn’t working in a service position. Why was this department different? Largely the work of one man: Lou Fernandez, the chair of the geo dept. He had launched a diversity program before most places had even heard of diversity. He was a personal inspiration to us and when the program got a little discombobulated in the 90’s Laurie volunteered us to take over the program (btw, she really was the one who spearheaded it, I was just the helper). Laurie had long been committed that sort of thing, but when she brought me into the program it really opened my eyes to all the issues of diversity in the geosciences. Through that program we met some of the most talented people I’ve known in my life; some from backgrounds that would make you shudder, yet they persevered. Later when we moved to El Paso and worked with a similar program in conjunction with UTEP colleagues and collaborators like Ken and Lisa White, we worked with an even more diverse group with a broad mix of Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians and Native Americans in one of the most interesting cultural exchanges I’ve ever seen. Again, it was so much fun and so rewarding to see groups like that and see now where many of them have gone.
So why did I spend so much time on these stories? Because I fear the modern political climate is in the process of killing diversity programs like the ones we worked on so long. To do that would be tragic, not just for our profession but for society in general. In his famous “I have a dream” speech Martin Luther King had one line that is forever burned in my memory. His dream was his children could one day live in a country where they were judged by their character and not by the color of their skin. I suggest everyone follow that dream. People are people, some are jerks, some are great, some are crazy, but it has nothing to do with the color of their skin. They are just people.
We have come a long way toward King’s dream but we are not there. In fact we seem to be going backwards. What can you do? You can fight the closure of diversity initiatives at your institution/company. You can go out into the community, particularly if you live in a community of color, and promote the geosciences at K-12 schools and community colleges. Lou Fernandez proved that even one person can make a difference. Don’t assume that mega programs like the UT Austin program Geoforce can solve the problem. Geoforce has had an impact, but a broader community involvement could do a lot more and for a lot less money. Get involved.
Thank you.