2005 Guest Night Speaker David Applegate is a Field Geologist at Heart

Guest Night Speaker David Applegate
is a Field Geologist at Heart
By Linda Sternbach
Our HGS Guest Night speaker is a senior government scientist at the USGS who is also field geologist at heart. In an email interview in March, David Applegate reveals what attracted him to geology and why he jumped at the chance to lead the USGS Earthquake Hazards program in Reston, VA.
About our speaker:
Applegate leads the Geologic Discipline''s Earthquake Hazards Program of the U.S. Geological Survey, based in Reston, Virginia, which provides coordination for geologic hazards across the Bureau. Applegate has a B.S. in geology from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he did his dissertation on the tectonic evolution of the Funeral Mountains in the Death Valley region of California. He still spends time as an adjunct professor at the University of Utah. He sent us this photo of himself in the field in Utah.
figure caption:  David Applegate, Guest Night speaker, co-instructing the University of Utah''s field camp in the Raft River Range of Idaho in May 2002. The photo is by David Dinter.  Applegate is adjunct faculty in the University of Utah  Department of Geology and Geophysics.
HGS Bulletin: What made you want to study geology/geophysics and continue to the Ph.D degree? Was there a significant teacher or mentor that guided you in your geological studies?
Like many geologists of my generation, I was drawn into the science through the writings of John McPhee, who gave me a perhaps overly romantic view of field geology in the western United States and a window into the pursuit of deep time. At the end of my sophomore year, I switched to geology from being a history major, making up the pre-requisites as I went. I was thoroughly hooked after spending the summer before my senior year at field camp in Idaho and Wyoming and then doing my own research in the Olympic Mountains of western Washington. I was eager to keep learning and particularly to spend time in the Basin and Range: the Death Valley region of California as it turned out.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to both my undergraduate advisor, Mark Brandon, and my doctoral advisor, Kip Hodges, for giving me the opportunities they did. Kip taught all his students to identify interesting problems and then assemble the tools needed to solve them, rather than becoming hidebound to one tool and then searching out problems to try it on. He encouraged us to care about writing well and to view our analytical skills broadly, both qualities that served me well when I decided to do postdoctoral work in the U.S. Senate as the American Geophysical Union''s Congressional Science Fellow and in all my jobs since.
HGS Bulletin: What was the path that took you to your job at the USGS?
A lot of my job is externally focused, representing USGS in a variety of settings, including the White House National Science and Technology Council''s Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction, for which I serve as vice chair, the USGS''s parent Department of the Interior, Congress, other Federal agencies – for example NOAA, with whom we have worked very closely on the tsunami response – and external partners. Those aspects of my job may explain the path I took to get here.
I have been on the job for just over a year, spending the previous eight years at the American Geological Institute, a non-profit federation of 43 geoscience societies, running their government affairs program and editing Geotimes, the newsmagazine of the earth sciences. At AGI, I worked on a wide variety of policy issues that affect the geoscience community and where the members of our member societies -- the largest being the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and the American Geophysical Union -- had a great deal of knowledge and perspective to contribute: energy policy, environmental policy, science policy, and natural hazards policy. Both of my jobs at AGI were about translating between geoscientists on the one hand and the public and policymakers on the other.
Although natural hazards policy was always an important part of my work at AGI, my interest deepened while working with Pete Folger at AGU and a wide range of other organizations like the American Red Cross, National Emergency Management Association, and American Meteorological Society to establish a Senate caucus on natural hazards, co-chaired by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC). The caucus was intended to sustain political interest in making the Nation more resilient to natural hazards. It''s easy for politicians to take credit for handing out relief after a disaster has struck, but it is harder to find ways for them to take credit for softening the blow of natural hazards through mitigation and preparedness.
When the opportunity arose to come to USGS and focus all of my energy toward reducing the impacts of natural hazards, I leapt at it.
HGS Bulletin: What has been the most memorable event of your work with the USGS?
This past year, we have seen the reawakening of Mt. St. Helens, the long-awaited magnitude 6 earthquake on the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas, and extensive landslides following the torrential rains in southern California and the four major hurricanes that struck the East Coast last fall. But nothing compared to what happened on December 26th off the coast of Sumatra. The weeks and months that followed have been dedicated to doing whatever we can to ensure that such a disaster will not occur again.
HGS Bulletin: What is your impression of the TV and print/internet media reporter relating to issues about tsunamis and earthquakes? Have you been interviewed on TV and how did you handle this? Is TV an effective medium to educate the public about geologic hazard preparedness.
In the days following the Sumatra earthquake, I gave a wide range of print, radio and especially television interviews. Once the news networks had extensive footage from the devastated areas, they went to near-saturation coverage, and with the death tolls rising day by day, the story lasted longer than other similar stories. The media questions changed as they moved through several news cycles, first the interest was solely on understanding what had happened in South Asia, then it turned to the question of whether it could happen here, and then to the question of what the US was planning to do in relief and response.
Overall, my impression of the media was quite positive. I felt that the reporters I spoke with were trying to get the