Try @ TXST

Giselle Kowalski:
Hi everybody. My name is Giselle Kowalski and I am the digital content producer here at Texas State University. You're listening to Try at Texas State, and today we're exploring the study of geology. Texas is known for its vast, wide land covered in bluebonnets and famous for its dry, rocky plains. It's been the backdrop for travelers who shared their stories on the West for generations. Here in San Marcos, we have the river and the trails that connect us to the place we call home. But where did it all begin? I sat down with the president of the Texas State Geology Club to talk about the rocks, formations, and underground wonders that dot our beloved city and how they play a role in our everyday lives, whether we realize it or not. So to start us off, please tell us your name, your major, and what you do with the Geology Club.

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, so my name is Alan Martinez. I am a chemistry major and a geology minor, and I'm the president of the Texas State Geology Club.

Giselle Kowalski:
So let's start from the beginning. So tell me a little bit about the Geology Club. What is it? What do you guys do, what do your meetings look like, that kind of thing, and how did you find out about it?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, so the Geology Club is just a student-led organization. We focus on advancing the geosciences here at Texas State. Our meetings are filled with guest speakers. We also do fun things. We've done a geode scavenger hunt around the Evans Liberal Arts building, and we've also done a rock smashing thing where we just smashed this huge boulder basically to get some smaller bits for rock tumbling. Other than guest speakers, we also have a show-and-tell and trade meeting every semester where people are welcome to just bring their collections and show them off to other people, and it's a pretty fun time.
So I actually found the Geology Club because I got interested in it through the Astronomy Club. We had gotten a guest speaker that worked with the Geology Club, Dr. Rene DeHon, and he focused on lunar mapping and he did a lot of the work for NASA on that. So he talked about it and after that I just went online. I started following a lot of people who were geologists and I got really interested in it. Once I attended my first meeting and went through it a little bit, I said, "Yeah, I would love to study this more."

Giselle Kowalski:
That's awesome. OK. Could you describe what geology is to a 5-year-old for us?

Alan Martinez:
So geology is just the study of the Earth, of all things that make up the Earth. It's the stuff that is below us and also above with other planets.

Giselle Kowalski:
So, OK, if you're looking through a geology lens, what does San Marcos, Texas, look like?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, so San Marcos is actually on what's called the Balcones Escarpment. It's essentially, if you think about it, it's two platforms. One is raised and the other is kind of lowered.

Giselle Kowalski:
To put it simply, the Balcones Escarpment is where the West begins. It's a zone of faults that runs across Central Texas dividing the state geologically.

Alan Martinez:
So if you think the panhandle of Texas, that's the mountain ranges area. And then if you think about East Texas like towards Houston, that's kind of swamp land or the valley, there's lower regions there. So we are right on the cusp of mountain region, flat region, and that's actually how I-35 came to be. That was one of the main passages for early Texan settlers and even natives traveled through that. This escarpment is where people stopped on their journey to Mexico.

Giselle Kowalski:
So we got to join you on a field trip for Try at Texas State to Cave Without a Name, and that was so cool. I had never been in a cave before. I had never experienced such darkness. So a Cave Without a Name, can you explain why it's so special and why you guys picked that as one of your excursions?

Alan Martinez:
We were just looking for a good group outing to do, and we had received a suggestion to go... one of the best caves was Cave Without a Name. It's a really good place because if you remember, we saw the river going through there, that was a part of the Guadalupe River. It was just really interesting to see also just descending in, there were a lot of fossils there. Texas used to be underwater, so you could see a lot of the remnants from that.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Alan Martinez:
Yeah. Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
If you could paint a picture for people that are listening to imagine Cave Without a Name, what would you tell them?

Alan Martinez:
Think of yourself in a very large grand room with a bunch of fountains on the ground and beautiful sculptures kind of draping over the walls. I think that would be a good picture.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, it kind of gave me... this movie came out afterwards, but it gave me Dune 2 vibes when we were inside because of all those incredible structures that were around us, and then the pools that you could literally see your reflection type of situation. Oh, I don't know. I got chills when I was down there. It was such a wonderful experience. Our guide when we went had told us that in the 1920s, a boy had found this cave because one of his goats on his property had fallen into the hole to the cavern. So with that kind of discovery of something new, have you guys made any discoveries like that in the Geology Club since you've been the president?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, definitely. So it's not my discovery, but our club's advisor, Dr. Wernette, she found something really cool. We have this kind of rock lab where we store a lot of rocks and minerals that were donated to us. Dr. Wernette and some others were just testing lab looking for things. They were using one of those radioactive meters and they found hidden under a table, this super radioactive mineral, I believe it's called carnotite, but it was incredibly radioactive.

Giselle Kowalski:
So I did a little digging to learn more about carnotite. It's this bright yellow, soft and earthy mineral that is highly radioactive like Alan said. It's an important source of uranium and is mostly found in the western part of the United States like Colorado and Wyoming. Carnotite is typically an occurrence of crusts and flakes of sandstone, and it had a big moment of popularity during the nuclear weapon era of World War II. Miners flocked to Colorado and Utah to mine the mineral once the Atomic Energy Commission offered large subsidies for uranium ore.

Alan Martinez:
And so they called the Environmental Health and Safety officers to come get it, and so they came with a big lead box and they put the mineral in there, and even inside the lead box, the mineral was still emitting radiation from there, and it was just stored there for who knows how long. So it was pretty crazy just to hear about that.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. What did they do with it afterwards? Do you know where it went?

Alan Martinez:
I don't know where they took it after that. I imagine somewhere to try and just get it away from people, but they probably had to hire some people to take it far away. Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's wild. A radioactive mineral.

Alan Martinez:
Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
Oh my God. Did you guys take any precautions after that or was it just like, "OK, it's out of our hands now"?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, the Environmental Health and Safety people, they went through the whole lab testing for radiation. They took one of our gloves for some reason because it was emitting some stuff.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's a good story. OK. I'm going to kind of switch gears a little bit and I want to talk more about your views on geology, but I know that you've talked a lot about how astrology and geology kind of go hand in hand for you, but what do you find most beautiful about this study of geology?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, so I actually find it really beautiful how geology is all around us. It's within our walls as gypsum and anhydrite and it's all over the ground, the soil we walk on, the weathering, the erosion, all that stuff that's happening underground, and I think it's really interesting to see how it goes from ores and minerals underground into things like our phones, our refrigerators, laptops, things that we use in everyday life.

Giselle Kowalski:
What did you say with the walls? You mentioned two different things that I've never heard before.

Alan Martinez:
So within our walls, it's kind of that white dust, that's called gypsum anhydrite. We're just lining our walls with rock to prevent fire from going out there. It's an easier barrier. Before we used that mineral, we actually used to use asbestos, and so after they found out the hazards of that, they switched over to anhydrite gypsum or dried up gypsum.

Giselle Kowalski:
OK. Thank God. Good to know. Also, I just wanted to point out, you have a shirt that says, "Have a nice day." Am I reading that correctly? But it's spelled G-N-E-I-S-S. Can you explain that to me? Is this a geology joke?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, it is. So gneiss is a metamorphic rock. You can see... or on my shirt, it has a picture of the rock. It has layers, so it's basically just metamorphic rocks are just rocks that are squeezed into a different type of rock. Yeah, it's just a joke for other geologists.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, I was going to say that's a joke with prerequisites, but that's kind of perfect because I was going to ask you, what do you wish more people knew about geology? Because I didn't know that gneiss was a rock. If there's anything that you would like people to know that would maybe make them more interested or just have that spark that you have for it, what would you tell them?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, I think it's really interesting to see the, I guess the history of geology, how we found out about how we can turn minerals into our bones and things like that.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. Is there a certain mineral, because you brought up the phone thing. What are we using in our phones? I don't know anything about that.

Alan Martinez:
A lot of electronics are made out of silicon, and we get a lot of that silicon material from ores in the ground, and you might've heard with cars and stuff like that. There are rare earth elements. That's stuff with very... they're heavier elements that are found within ores in the ground. They're processed from their ore to extract the mineral or the element behind it, which is then used to enhance the properties of electrical conductivity and stuff like that.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. This might be a dumb question, but is that why it's called Silicon Valley?

Alan Martinez:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's because they manufacture a lot of the silicon chips there and research it.

Giselle Kowalski:
I always wanted to know why. That's crazy. See geology. That's awesome. I know we're talking a lot about how you use geology in everyday life, but I feel like a lot of us don't understand how prevalent it is like you're saying. So what kind of careers can someone have in that field if they want him to make a job out of it?

Alan Martinez:
So geology is a very comprehensive type of science, so it pulls a lot in from biology, from chemistry, art, there's a lot of art in it, and just learning more about the Earth can teach you a lot about your specific field and it can teach you how to spot misinformation, stuff that's fearmongering, stuff like that.

Giselle Kowalski:
In your day-to-day life, what do you notice more knowing what you know about geology, what do you see in everyday life that you think other people would probably just pass by and not make a second thought with it?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, so it's funny because I guess earlier this week I went to float the river with one of my friends and a few times over when I was there, I was thinking about how the roots were holding up all the dirt there and just how the river shaped the earth there, because roots are a very important part of stabilization. It holds a lot of the soil together, whereas if you go to a sandy area, you can't build or anything on there because it just flows.

Giselle Kowalski:
Switching gears again here, and I'm going to talk a little bit about geology in Texas State, but how has being a part or really honestly a major part of this club shaped your experience here at Texas State?

Alan Martinez:
So being a part of the Geology Club, it really gave me a, I guess, sense of direction. Before I found geology, I had never really heard about it or considered it as a career, and so learning more about it, I studied chemistry and I didn't really want to do things like pipetting in a lab. And so when I learned about geology and crystal structures and stuff like that, I got really interested and I found that that's what I would like to further pursue.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. It kind of opened up that door for you, huh?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, definitely.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's fantastic. I love hearing that too because you found out about it through the club, right? Not just the minor. Did you choose your minor immediately?

Alan Martinez:
No. Yeah, I was a little bit undecided with my minor. I think I had started as physics and I was taking physics classes and I was like, "Oh, this is cool, but I don't want to do this." It's a lot of math and geology is too sometimes, but yeah, it's a lot more conceptual in that.

Giselle Kowalski:
So if you could go to any cave in the world or explore any very worldly geographical feature, where would you go?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, I actually just learned about it, but in New Zealand there's this place called the Waitomo Caves, I think it's also called Glowworm Cave. You could see pictures of it. It just looks crazy like there's stars in the night sky. It's like a blue light that goes all over the cave and it looks really beautiful. And just New Zealand as a whole is a really interesting place geologically because it's actually its own continent, a lot of it is underwater. And so what you're seeing as New Zealand is actually the mountains of that continent.

Giselle Kowalski:
So if you could recommend someone go somewhere in Texas or that lives here in San Marcos that would like to go check out a cave or maybe something that's pretty impressive, where would you recommend them to go?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, so I think it was Longhorn Caverns. For one, they have a bat population living there. I think they're called, I don't know if they're called chicken nugget bats or something, but they're really tiny bats and they live there in the cave. And then also if you go further in the cave, there's this huge cavern of calcite crystals. It just looks insane. So you go in and they turn off the lights and they shine a light onto the calcite crystals, and it kind of refracts in a really interesting way. So it lights up the cave very beautifully.

Giselle Kowalski:
And where is that?

Alan Martinez:
It is in Burnet, Texas, so right by Austin.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. OK, perfect. OK, next field trip, we'll go. That's awesome. So if anybody would like to get involved in the Geology Club, how can they find you? Where should they sign up?

Alan Martinez:
Yeah, so you could follow us on Instagram or Facebook for our, I guess, latest updates. We also have a website where you can reach out to us and we'll get back to you, but you're welcome to reach out or just attend one of our meetings. We meet every other Wednesday during the school semesters, so yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Alan. This has been such a fantastic conversation. I hope you enjoyed it too.

Alan Martinez:
Awesome. I did. Thank you.

Giselle Kowalski:
Thank you. Thank you so much to Alan for joining me in this conversation about geology in Texas. And thank you so much to the Texas State Geology Club for letting us join your excursion at Cave Without a Name. And thank you for listening to this episode of the Try at Texas State Podcast. Make sure to tune in next time to learn more about something else you can try on campus at Texas State. And also remember to follow us on our social media @TXST. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University Network represent the views of the hosts and guests, not of Texas State University. Again, I'm your host, Giselle Kowalski, and I'll see you next time. Bye y'all.