The term geological survey can be used to describe both the conduct of a survey for geological purposes and an institution holding geological information.

A geological survey is the systematic investigation of the subsurface of a given piece of ground for the purpose of creating a geological map or model. A geological survey employs techniques from the traditional walk-over survey, studying outcrops and landforms, to intrusive methods, such as hand augering and machine driven boreholes, to the use of geophysical techniques and remote sensing methods, such as aerial photography and satellite imagery.

A Geological Survey can also be a national or federal institution employed to maintain the geological inventory and advance the knowledge of geosciences for the benefit of the wealth and health of the nation.

In the United States, the 50 state surveys are coordinated by the Association of American State Geologists.

Some examples of national geological surveys are listed here:

• Geoscience Australia - known from 1992 to 2001 as the Australian Geological Survey Organisation (AGSO)
• Geological Survey of Canada
• Geological Survey of India
• Saudi Geological Survey
• British Geological Survey
• United States Geological Survey

Individual states or provinces may also have a geological survey. Examples include:

• Alberta Geological Survey
• Geological Survey of Newfoundland and Labrador
• Pennsylvania Geological Survey
• Utah Geological Survey
• Delaware Geological Survey

External links[link]

• International list of country geological surveys

This geology article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Alan MacDonald (born in 1958 in Watford) is a children's writer living in Nottingham, England.^[1]

Writing[link]

He has worked in a team of writers on TV shows such as Tweenies, Horrid Henry, Fimbles and Oggy and the Cockroaches.^[2] He is the author of a number of books including the popular Dirty Bertie series with illustrator David Roberts, other works include The Sign of the Angel, Beware of the Bears and Pig in a Wig.^[3] He also wrote Gavin Peacock's biography, and many plays in his earlier career.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Bloomsbury Books: Author Biography

This article about an English writer, poet or playwright is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Marcia McNutt
Director of the United States Geological Survey
Incumbent
Assumed office October 21, 2009
President	Barack Obama
Preceded by	Mark Myers
Personal details
Born	1952 (age 59–60)
Alma mater	Colorado College University of California, San Diego

Marcia Kemper McNutt (born 1952) is an American geophysicist. She is director of the United States Geological Survey and science adviser to the United States Secretary of the Interior.

McNutt was president and chief executive officer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, an oceanographic research center in the United States, professor of marine geophysics at the Stanford University School of Earth Sciences and professor of marine geophysics at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Family and education[link]

McNutt's father was a small business owner and her mother was a college-educated homemaker. In an interview with the National Academy of Sciences, McNutt said that in their household, women’s education was a tradition and a norm, and that her parents encouraged McNutt and her sisters academically.^[1]

She was valedictorian of her class at the Northrop Collegiate School (now The Blake School), graduating in 1970. She received a bachelor's degree in physics summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Colorado College in 1973. As a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, she then studied geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography where she earned a PhD in earth sciences in 1978.^[2] Her dissertation was titled Continental and Oceanic Isostasy.^[3] McNutt is a NAUI-certified scuba diver and she trained in underwater demolition and explosives handling with the U.S. Navy UDT and Seal Team.^[3][4]

McNutt is one of six women scientists featured in the 1995 PBS (WGBH-TV) series, "Discovering Women."^[5] How she excelled in science with a household of young daughters and the help of housekeeper Ann and her daughter is described by Jocelyn Steinke in "A portrait of a woman as a scientist: breaking down barriers created by gender-role stereotypes".^[6]

McNutt has three daughters, two of whom are identical twins.^[7] Her daughter, Ashley Hoffman, was "Miss Rodeo California" in 2009.^[8] McNutt is a horse enthusiast and has shown her horse "Lulu" in the western pleasure class.^[8]

McNutt's first husband died in 1988. McNutt and Ian Young, an MBARI ship's captain, were married in 1996.^[9][10]

Early years[link]

MBARI, associated with the Monterey Bay Aquarium (back view shown), was founded and privately funded by David Packard to be the "NASA of the oceans".^[11]

After a brief appointment at the University of Minnesota, McNutt worked for three years on earthquake prediction at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. In 1982, she was appointed Griswold Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and she served as director of the Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Science and Engineering, a cooperative effort of MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.^[2]

Research[link]

She participated in 15 major oceanographic expeditions and served as chief scientist on more than half of them.^[12] She published 90 peer-reviewed scientific articles.^[12][13] Her research has included studies of ocean island volcanism in French Polynesia, continental break-up in the Western United States, and uplift of the Tibet plateau.^[14]

McNutt has made notable contributions to the understanding of the rheology and strength of the lithosphere. She showed that young volcanoes could flex the lithosphere, influencing the elevation of nearby volcanoes, and used a 3-D analysis of topography and gravity data to show that the Australian plate could be strong on short time scales and weak on long scales. She also showed how subducting ocean plates could weaken and identified a large topographic feature called the South Pacific superswell.^[15][16]

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute[link]

McNutt was president and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) from 1997 to 2009.^[17][18] During that time the Western Flyer, MBARI's research vessel, made expeditions from Canada to Baja California and the Hawaiian Islands.^[19] MBARI built the Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS), the first deep-sea cabled observatory in the continental United States.^[19]

US Geological Survey[link]

Appointment[link]

McNutt and daughter Merideth at left during confirmation hearing by the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources

In July 2009, McNutt was announced as President Obama's nominee to be the next director of the United States Geological Survey and science adviser to the United States Secretary of the Interior.^[20] The Senate unanimously approved her nomination on October 21.^[21] She is the first woman director of USGS since its establishment in 1879.^[20] Secretary Ken Salazar endorsed McNutt for the position.^[20] In a television interview following Obama's announcement, McNutt said:

Many other countries are far ahead of the U.S., in installing wind farms, installing solar panels, moving to alternate energies, and in preparing their populations for the decision-making necessary to cope with climate change.^[22]

BP oil spill[link]

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill. McNutt headed the Flow Rate Technical Group who determined the extent of the spill.

During her first year, four major events impacted USGS in quick succession: a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, an 8.0 earthquake in Chile, the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull and the BP oil spill.^[23]

In May 2010, McNutt headed the Flow Rate Technical Group which attempted to measure the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.^[24] Preliminary reports from the group said that the rate of the oil spill was at least twice and possibly up to five times as much as previously acknowledged.^[25] Subsequent estimates, based on six independent methodologies,^[26] were four times the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.^[27] A refined estimate based on new pressure readings, data, and analysis, released by the United States Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and McNutt in August, said that 4.9 million barrels (with uncertainty of plus or minus approximately 10 percent) of oil had leaked from the well until it was capped on July 15.^[28] The disaster was the largest ever accidental spill of oil into marine waters.^[29]

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility[link]

McNutt at Grand Canyon National Park with Secretary Salazar and other officials to mark an extended moratorium on uranium mining.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed a lawsuit against the department of the interior claiming that hundreds of pages of reports and communications should not be withheld, and their director, Jeff Ruch said in a press release, "...science is still being manipulated under the current administration".^[30][31] PEER obtained with the Freedom of Information Act an email from McNutt who wrote in part:^[32]

I cannot tell you what a nightmare the past two days have been dealing with the communications people at the White House, DOI, and the NIC who seem incapable of understanding the concept of a lower bound. The press release that went out on our results was misleading and was not reviewed by a scientist for accuracy.^[32]

USGS peer review process[link]

McNutt participated in the reversal of a 2006 USGS policy that required agency scientists to submit their work to two internal reviewers and obtain a sign-off from a higher level official before submitting their work to external journals who then applied their own peer-review process. Scientists can now have both internal and external reviews simultaneously and the internal process is reduced to one internal review plus sign-off by the USGS Office of Science Quality and Integrity.^[33]

Afghan mineral wealth[link]

In September 2011, a USGS team including Jack H. Medlin, Said Mirzad, Stephen G. Peters and Robert D. Tucker^[34] published a report^[35] which they presented at the Afghan embassy in Washington, DC, detailing 57 information packages about Areas of Interest (AOIs) that total at least 1,000,000 metric tons of untapped mineral deposits they have found in Afghanistan.^[36] Scientific American speculated that replacing "opium and Taliban strongholds with a mining bonanza" could "could change U.S. foreign policy and world stability".^[34] This report, which points to resources that The New York Times said in 2010 were worth $1 trillion,^[37] was put into the public domain.^[34] McNutt said at the time:^[38]

There is always increased risk for commercial ventures investing in new mining facilities in frontier areas such as Afghanistan, but by putting our information on the locations and estimated quantities and grades of ores in the public domain, we lower that risk, spurring progress.^[38]

Map of Jupiter's moon Io[link]

File:Io geological map sim3168 sheet.pdf In 2011 and online in 2012, USGS released a geologic surface map^[39] of Jupiter's moon Io, which is the most volcanically active body in our solar system, about twenty-five times more active than earth. David Williams of Arizona State University was the project lead. The maps are made of the best images from NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 missions (acquired in 1979) as well as the spacecraft Galileo (1995–2003) named for Galileo Galilei who discovered Jupiter's moons in 1610.^[40] McNutt said:^[41]

More than 130 years after the USGS first began producing quality geologic maps here on Earth, it is exciting to have the reach of our science extend across 400 million miles to this volcanically active moon of Jupiter. Somehow it makes the vast expanse of space seem less forbidding to know that similar geologic processes which have shaped our planet are active elsewhere.^[41]

Animal extinction and disease[link]

The Hawaiian Islands lost another species

In 2012, USGS declared the blue-tailed skink named Emoia impar extinct because none have been observed in their home the Hawaiian Islands since the 1960s.^[42] McNutt, quoted by John Platt for Scientific American, said:

No other landscape in these United States has been more impacted by extinction events and species invasions in historic times than the Hawaiian Islands, with as-yet unknown long-term cascading consequences to the ecosystem.^[42]

In a press release, McNutt introduced a lecture by David Blehert, a USGS research scientist, speaking on white nose syndrome which may afflict six species of North American bats and may have "far-reaching ecological consequences":^[43]

...they are in a race against time to find a way to manage this scourge before it is too late for these under-appreciated little mammals.^[43]

Federal "Big Data" initiative[link]

McNutt spoke on a panel of leaders of US agencies (OSTP, NSF, NIH, DOE, DOD, DARPA and USGS) who rolled out the Obama administration's "Big Data Research and Development Initiative."^[44] Tom Kalil of the Office of Science and Technology Policy said, "By improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promises to help accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and transform teaching and learning."^[45] USGS announced the latest awardees for grants it issues through its John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis.^[46]

Energy: fossil fuels, fracking and biofuel[link]

Reuters reported that USGS released into the public domain a new estimate of the world's oil and gas resources, the first such report since 2000.^[47] Excluding the U.S. the USGS found: "565 billion barrels of conventional oil and 5,606 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered conventional natural gas in 171 priority geologic provinces of the world".^[48] The report said about 75% of the resources are in four places: South America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and the North American Arctic. "In particular, this assessment underscores the importance of continuing to strengthen our energy partnerships in the Western Hemisphere with nations like Brazil..." said secretary Salazar.^[49]

Bloomberg News reported that during her testimony in March 2012, McNutt told the United States House Committee on Natural Resources that "less than 1 percent of wells drilled to dispose of the water after fracking causes 'induced seismicity'. McNutt said more information would reduce the risk of induced earthquakes in a year or two. She said:^[50]

It's a very solvable problem. You either have to put the holes in a different place, or pump it at a different rate.^[50]

United Press International reported in March 2012 that USGS has developed a tool that can map grasslands using remote sensing data from satellites. The technique will help if and when global demand for biofuel products increases as an alternative to fossil fuels. McNutt said in a statement that the study:

takes some of the guesswork out of deciding whether it could be feasible to raise a potentially high value crop for biofuels on America's grasslands.^[51]

Earthquakes: hazard reduction, research[link]

In cooperation with the Department of Veterans Affairs, USGS continued to monitor and record in detail the performance of veterans hospital buildings during earthquakes. Recently, two buildings were fitted with sensors at the Memphis VA Medical Center which is within the range of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, the most active earthquake zone in the Eastern United States. USGS works with the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) both to monitor buildings during earthquake events and to help design safer hospitals in the future.^[52]

USGS promised up to $7 million in grants for earthquake research in 2013. The agency has funded about 90 such grants which, for example, cataloged southern California earthquakes to better prepare emergency responders, the public and the media. Projects also provided seismic hazard estimates for safer buildings and roads, and provided data on ground shaking to help minimize damage.^[53]

Awards and honors[link]

A photo of McNutt (shown at the school's Gilman Entrance) was part of the University of California, San Diego celebration of 50 Years 50 Leaders.

She is a fellow for the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Association of Geodesy. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She chaired the President’s Panel on Ocean Exploration under President Bill Clinton. She serves on evaluation and advisory boards for institutions including the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Stanford University, Harvard University and Science magazine.^[12] In 1988, McNutt won the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union, presented for outstanding research by a young scientist, and in 2007 she won the AGU's Maurice Ewing Medal for her contributions to deep-sea exploration and her leadership role in the ocean sciences.^[2][15]

She is a past president of the American Geophysical Union (2000–2002).^[2] In 2002, Discover magazine named McNutt one of the top fifty women in science.^[54] In 2003 she was named Scientist of the Year by the ARCS Foundation.^[2] She holds honorary doctorates from the University of Minnesota and Colorado College and was recognized as Outstanding Alumni in 2004 by the University of California, San Diego.^[2] McNutt chaired the board of governors of the Joint Oceanographic Institutions which merged to become Consortium for Ocean Leadership for which she was trustee.^[14]

McNutt is a member of the USA Science & Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty, a collection of the most influential scientists and engineers in the United States that are dedicated to reinvigorating the interest of young people in science and engineering.^[55]

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Marcia McNutt

• "Marcia McNutt, Director, U.S. Geological Survey". U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey. http://www.usgs.gov/aboutusgs/organized/bios/mcnutt.asp. 

Videos

• Exploring the Ocean. PopTech via Vimeo. 2005. http://vimeo.com/18064763. 
• Avoiding the Slippery Slope: Leadership Lessons from Inside the Oil Spill. Stanford Graduate School of Business, via YouTube. February 3, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM1ctDywmmE.  – one hour speech
• On Leadership: Marcia McNutt on the science of leadership. August 4, 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership-marcia-mcnutt-on-the-science-of-leadership/2011/08/04/gIQAdHMxuI_video.html.  at The Washington Post
• On Leadership: Marcia McNutt on gaining credibility. August 3, 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership-marica-mcnutt-on-gaining-credibility/2011/08/03/gIQArPvKsI_video.html.  at The Washington Post

v t e Directors of the United States Geological Survey Clarence King (1879–1881) John W. Powell (1881–1894) Charles D. Walcott (1894–1907) George O. Smith (1907–1930) Walter C. Mendenhall (1930–1943) William E. Wrather (1943–1956) Thomas B. Nolan (1956–1965) William T. Pecora (1965–1971) Vincent E. McKelvey (1971–1978) H. William Menard (1978–1981) Dallas L. Peck (1981–1993) Gordon P. Eaton (1994–1997) Charles G. Groat (1998–2005) Mark D. Myers (2006–2009) Marcia McNutt (2009–present)