The Geoscientist’s Secret is Patience: Professor Stephen Self

"Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The UC Berkeley Earth & Planetary Sciences (EPS) Department is one of few across the USA that continues the tradition of a graduation exercise. A field camp for seniors settles into a remote corner of the UC natural reserve in the Sierra Nevada mountains called SNARL. “They sure enjoy examining a bedrock formation that can only be reached by paddling” says Adjunct Professor Stephen Self. Primarily a field geologist, his many trips include a summer month spent in -22 degrees celsius weather supporting a research team in Antarctica, PhD work on volcanology in the Azores, and looking at lava flows in Iceland. He really gets around.

Listing Self’s field projects is being modest about his major accomplishments raising volcano science from its infancy to today. “[W]hen I began in volcanology… there were hardly any approaches to understanding how volcanoes erupt, why they erupt, how to tell if a volcano is going to erupt, and what might be the effects of the eruption.” 

In an undergrad lecture on petrology at Leeds (in the Sixties), Professor Ian Gass said nobody works on what comes out of volcanoes. “Why not?” thought Self. There they are erupting right in front of us. Gass pointed him to physical volcanologist George Walker at Imperial College London for PhD study, and they went on to double-handedly raise the place of volcano study within the earth sciences. 

Self developed the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) that has been used for the past fifty years to measure the size of volcanic eruptions. Before the VEI there was no standard way to rate them and no standard list of known incidents. “Now the situation is very different with all potentially eruptible volcanoes in the US identified, and most monitored.” Volcanoes affect the atmosphere, causing changes in weather and climate. In extreme cases they can have an impact on half the world’s population.

In the academic year 1783-84 the weather went crazy. Lack of rain in Africa resulted in a famine in Egypt that killed about one-sixth of its population. Western and northern Europe had the hottest summer up to that time, kept ships from leaving port, and killed over 20,000 British people. Hailstones were large enough to kill cattle. The French harvest of 1785 failed. (Recall that the 1789 revolution was spurred by hunger and poverty.) In North America it was so cold that the Mississippi River froze at New Orleans and ice floes were reported in the Gulf of Mexico. Benjamin Franklin noted a permanent dry fog that prevented the sun from melting the snow. This was all due to an eruption in Iceland of the volcano Laki; it was six times the size of Mount Pinatubo in the amount of sulfurous gas emitted. Stephen Self and a colleague combined historical sleuthing with observational work at the volcano to learn what really happened, and their conclusions have been incorporated into insurance industry calculations regarding economic losses from volcanic eruptions.

His work dealing with risk factors, as well as not having previous grant ties while still being a naturalized US citizen with an unbiased perspective, brought Self to the attention of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and he was hired in 2008 by them to study the risks of disposal of high-level nuclear waste. Was there any chance of a volcanic incident in Nevada, where the proposed Yucca Mountain storage facility was supposed to be built? After examining every detail of the geologic evidence, Self and his NRC team concluded that the area would not have any eruption in the 10,000 year window the radioactive material needs. But politics happens. Nevada senator Harry Reid, who served as Leader of the Senate, killed the Yucca Mountain Project and left the US government with no answer to disposal. “No country in the world has cracked this problem of what to do with their nuclear waste.” Government works on a four-year time scale; nuclear waste solutions need to last for centuries. No wonder that Self prefers now to focus on teaching locally, and mentoring field research exercises.

Stephen Self joined EPS in 2012 and knew a kindred spirit in Michael Manga. “He and I put our heads together and came up with a new field camp as a kind of capstone course.” Manga has a geophysical background and Self is a physical volcanologist. “I don’t study the chemistry of volcanoes much – I study what they do when they explode or when lava flows.” Their combined talents brought a new focus to volcanology at UC Berkeley. This goes back to his original inspiration as an undergrad – plenty of geochemists work on volcanic rocks but that does not make them true volcanologists. Self credits his advisor George Walker (UK) along with Shigeo Aramaki (Japan), Hans Schmincke (Germany), and Ray Cas (Australia) for putting volcanic science on the path that leads to today. Modesty (again) prevents him, but most earth scientists would include Stephen Self (UK/US) and Sir Steve Sparks  (UK) on the list.

Many professors worry that students are changing as we move into the internet age, but Self is not too concerned. He never thought higher test scores mean a better geology student. That is not what’s needed for field study. What is needed? “Patience,” he immediately responds. “Love of the outdoors. And toughness.” He went on that Antarctic trip “for fun.” OK, but the scientist still shows through. Professor Self adds that “telling the story of the rocks” requires that we change our minds as new data teaches us new lessons. 


A small coda: one of Self’s many many former students is running the NASA Artemis exploration team. Lori Glaze is carrying the science forward so we can eventually tell the story of the moon’s rocks and volcanoes. A test flight is on track for next spring. Imagine how cool a senior trip could be a few years from now. 

Topics

Faculty topic page, Mathematical & Physical Sciences topic page