A ROCK SOLID PARTNERSHIP
Geologists share life and work at Natural History Museum
Pair of married geologists trade running commentary back and forth on everything from Martian terrain to Chaco Canyon during tour at New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.
Showing two visitors through the infinitely fascinating New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, 1801 Mountain Road NW, Larry Crumpler and Jayne Aubele stop first at the exhibit boasting a model of a Mars Exploration Rover against a mock-up of Martian terrain.
The rovers Spirit and Opportunity, launched by NASA, landed on different parts of Mars in January 2004. But this exhibit, designed by Crumpler to replicate that part of the planet where Spirit set down, was created before Spirit got to Mars and started sending back pictures of its new stomping grounds.
“We did it all in 2003,” said Aubele, a geologist and the museum’s adult programs educator. “We took a big gamble. But Larry nailed it.”
Crumpler, also a geologist and the museum’s research curator in volcanology and the space sciences, used his imagination, what he already knew about the surface of Mars and rocks from Carrizozo to devise the dead-on depiction. His intimate relationship with the New Mexico landscape helped a lot, too.
“Mars is like New Mexico — only more so,” Crumpler said. “Both have arroyos, canyons, sand dunes, dust devils and dust storms.”
A good team
As the tour continued past a display representing the planets in our solar system, the interactive Chaco Canyon Sun Dagger exhibit, a moon rock that’s more than 2 billion years old and the walk-through “Age of Volcanoes” installation, Crumpler, 67, and Aubele, 68, traded running commentary back and forth, bouncing from topic to topic with a practiced dexterity.
“Our understanding of the solar system has really changed,” Aubele said. “We are the first generation to see the face of all the planets.”
“Pluto turns out to be wildly more exotic geologically than we ever anticipated,” Crumpler added.
“We do have meteorites that we know are from Mars,” Aubele said. “The problem is we don’t know where on the planet they came from.”
“We have more different kinds of volcanoes in New Mexico than in any other state,” Crumpler said.
They make a good team. And no wonder. They have been married to each other for more than 33 years. Their’s is a “rocky’ relationship, but in the best kind of way.
“There seems to be a lot of geologist couples,” Aubele said. “Geologists are the only ones who can understand each other. And you get to work on things with your life partner.”
Lonely, rugged work
Crumpler is from WinstonSalem, N.C., and Aubele from Cleveland, Ohio. Inspired by America’s evolving space program and Earth’s connection to its fellow planets, both became intrigued with geology. He got his undergraduate degree in the field at North Carolina State, and she earned hers at Cleveland State.
They met in the early ’70s when they enrolled in graduate school at the University of New Mexico. They got to know each other during classes and on field trips, some of which involved searching for and mapping volcanoes.
While working toward their master’s degrees in geology at UNM, Crumpler did a volcano survey on a plateau north of Mount Taylor and Aubele did the same at the Cerros del Rio Volcanic Field at White Rock Canyon in Santa Fe County. This was lonely, rugged work, tent camping in vast, empty swaths of land.
“You have to get out and walk the ground,” Aubele said. “The Cerros del Rio was totally isolated. I would go for a week without seeing another person. It was like being an explorer.”
Later, while working on their doctorates in planetary science at the University of Arizona, Crumpler, Aubele and a third graduate student did volcano surveys in a large area of eastern Arizona, between Springerville and Show Low. Their base camp during the summers between 1978 and 1984 was in a 9,000-foot-high aspen meadow.
The territory they surveyed was the last large volcanic field to be mapped in the Colorado Plateau, which spans 130,000 square miles over several southwestern states.
“It was like landing on another planet because you are the first to see the geologic story,” Crumpler said.
The work there could be exciting in lots of ways.
“One time I was going through a gate and wrapped around the bottom of the (fence) post was a rattlesnake,” Aubele said. She found another way through.
Crumpler and Aubele were married on Jan. 1, 1985, and left the Southwest to take positions at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
Mars to Larry
They were at Brown for 12 years. But if you love volcanoes and living in a landscape that looks like Mars, Rhode Island comes up short. When a chance to work at the museum cropped up, they returned to Albuquerque in 1997.
As the museum’s adult programs educator, Aubele arranges, hosts and sometimes instructs programs for the general public, K-12 teachers and museum volunteers. She also works on maps of the planet Venus for NASA.
From his second-level office at the museum, Crumpler, a member of the Mars Exploration Rover science team, sends instructions to and receives information from the rover Opportunity. Spirit stopped communicating in 2010. And for the last couple of weeks, a massive dust storm on Mars has threatened to choke off Opportunity’s solar power.
“It’s a life-and-death struggle,” Crumpler said. “We are all very nervous. We are just hanging out and waiting. So far, Opportunity is weathering the storm.”
Living with lava
Crumpler and Aubele continue to work together on volcano surveys, most recently at the fiercely forbidding El Malpais National Monument in Cibola County. But they don’t do any tent camping there. It’s tough enough just to walk El Malpais.
“We can only make a couple of miles a day,” Crumpler said. “It’s so rough. There are no trails, not even smooth-walking ground.”
They are never distant from the shared passion that drew them together. Even when they are at home. They live on Albuquerque’s West Side, not far from the volcanoes that dot the horizon there. They can drink their morning coffee within 300 feet of the relatively young, 200,000-year-old, lava flow.
“Lava flows make up a lot of (New Mexico’s) mesas,” Crumpler said. “New Mexico is a totally different landscape. It invites you to paint it, to understand it.”