About the Professor

At the beginning of my very first physical geography lab class the TA, Ron Dorn, told us his goal for the class.

By the end of the semester he wanted us to be able to get on a plane, go anywhere in the world, get off the plane, and understand the landscape around us. He wanted us to be able to explain how the climate was related to the location, and how the climate was related to the plants and animals that lived there, and how the climate and geology and plants and animals all worked together to create soils that reflected these influences. That we would be able to run time backwards and imagine what that landscape looked like in the past, and run it forward and imagine how it would look in the future. I thought to myself this is what I want to spend the rest of my life studying.

That feeling was strengthened after he explained that geography was a holistic discipline, and that geographers looked at how different forces all act together to create phenomena. He went on to say that to understand a phenomenon we had to understand each element of that phenomenon on its own, as well as how all the different elements fit together. He was studying desert varnish, a dark stain that accumulates on exposed rock in deserts and other dry regions. Scientists had looked at desert varnish, but did not understand whether it was a biotic or abiotic process. In order to understand desert varnish, he had to study geomorphology (the study of landforms), climatology (study of the forces that create climate), microclimatology (how those forces create the climate in a particular place), microbiology, organic and inorganic chemistry, and how all those elements created desert varnish.