My love affair with igneous rocks began before I had a name for them. Growing up near the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, evidence of the power lurking within the Earth never left my sight. I lived near a mountain stream glittering with mica and edged by gneiss cliffs several times my height. In high school, my earth science class finally taught me what I could call them. That evening, I pulled over on the highway to stare at the mountain silhouettes, marveling that they had once rivaled the Rockies in stature, and feeling the weight of the eons needed to whittle away those miles of rock. I lived in a small fundamentalist community; my preacher, warning us of endless hellfire, had once described eternity as the time it would take for an eagle to level Stone Mountain—a magnificently exposed granite intrusion of Devonian age—were the bird to graze its beak across the rock face just once every millennium. That night, gazing at the Appalachians and envisioning two continents, riding upon magma, colliding, I realized that my preacher understood neither fire nor eternity.
Advisors
Nancy Ellen Abrams
Connie Barlow
Tom Clark
Donald Crosby
Terrence Deacon
Michael Dowd
Michael S. Hogue
Stuart Kauffman
Karl Peters
Joel R. Primack
Lynne Quarmby
V.V. Raman
Chet Raymo
Edmund Robinson
Loyal Rue
Barbara Smuts
Jerome Stone
Bron Taylor
Carol Wayne White
Wesley Wildman
Alison Wohler
Paul Woodruff
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Ursula Goodenough, President
Michael Cavanaugh, Secretary
Todd Macalister, Communications
Terry Findlay, Webmaster