All of My Faults Are Stress Related : About

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Kim Hannula is a 40-ish geology professor at a public liberal arts college in the Rockies. Her New Year's resolution is to reduce stress by changing her rheology, or maybe by walking to work and looking at the pretty mountains.

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About this blog

I became a structural geologist by accident. I meant to study chemistry, but chemists spent too much time inside. Then I meant to be an environmental geochemist, but somewhere along the way I discovered that rocks are fascinating and gorgeous. So I decided to study metamorphic rocks, which still involves a lot of chemistry. But I got distracted by the question of how metamorphic rocks get buried and exhumed, and that led to studying how rocks get squashed.

And that's what a structural geologist does: studies rocks that have been squashed. Or broken. Or folded. They just need to change shape or position in some way. We call the process "deformation," which is a rather cruel term for something that makes pretty mountains.

I teach at a public liberal arts college, which means that I'm at the mercy of state budgets, I don't have grad students, and I spend a lot of time teaching. I've been teaching at the college level for 16 years, all at undergrad institutions. I've become mostly a geoscience educator rather than a research scientist by this point, but I still am amazed by the cool stuff the other people in my field do.

My old blog is here. My old posts include:

The sound of mylonites

Gender and the geoscience pipeline

Data, interpretations, and field work

No, misrepresentations of the process of science don't help prepare Earth Science students

High points

Oh, and I like mountains. Don't trust anyone under 14,000 feet.