‘Every Rock Has a Story’ offers a schist-y saga — with a Yale connection
Yale’s Maureen Long takes Ethan Baxter, host of the YouTube series “Every Rock Has a Story,” to visit an outcrop of the metamorphic rock schist in Massachusetts.
If you want to get the gist of a hunk of New England schist, Maureen Long is a great person to consult.
Long, the Bruce D. Alexander ’65 Professor and Chair of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is an observational seismologist and an expert on the structure and evolution of the continental lithosphere of North America. She has conducted innovative research on the ways in which seismic waves reveal the flow of Earth’s mantle, deep underground.
And recently she took her expertise — and her desire to inspire a diverse, inclusive generation of future scientists — to a YouTube series aimed at grade school students and their families. Long appeared on the season three opener of “Every Rock Has a Story,” which is hosted by Yale College alum Ethan Baxter ’95, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Boston College.
Each episode of the video series tells the story of a particular rock or mineral.
In this case, it’s a piece of schist, a type of metamorphic rock made of easily identified grains or flakes. Its presence often marks places where continents collided millions of years ago.
“Sometimes the story of a rock isn’t just about what the rock is,” Baxter says in the episode. “Sometimes it’s more about where the rock comes from.”
That’s where Long comes in. For their discussion, she takes Baxter to an outcrop of schist in Florida, Massachusetts, a town located in the western part of the state, along what was the original edge of North America 475 million years ago.
“If we go back hundreds of millions of years in Earth’s history, what is now the continent of North American was actually a little smaller,” Long tells Baxter. “There was an ancient continent, known as Laurentia, which is kind of the core of North America. During the time when the Appalachian Mountains were being built, there were several microcontinents that were getting slammed onto the side of Laurentia.”
Earlier in the episode, Long took Baxter to see a seismometer instrument she has set up in nearby Shelburne Falls, another Massachusetts town, to gather data.
“We can see the edge of North America right here at the surface,” Long said. “But we’re using the seismic data we’re collecting to try to image and understand what that edge of North America looks like deep underground.”
Long’s appearance on “Every Rock Has a Story” also was featured in a news segment on WTNH.
