We left it in a part of the desert that is not traversed so much. But every so often during monsoon season, there are these gully washers that go through there. We put it under a steel wire mesh, but that wouldn’t have kept it from being washed away in a really big rain. We did the best we could in terms of placing it in a place where it was a little out of the way. But we were lucky we were able to locate it again after two or three years.

What is fieldwork like for you? Can you tell me about your car accident? Did it change anything about how you approach your work?

This was one of these projects I had been waiting to do for a while, and I was super excited about it. I had done some fieldwork in Antarctica to collect meteorites, but this was going to be the first fieldwork where we would be collecting Icelandic volcanic rocks as analogues of Martian volcanic materials, with the goal of understanding the role of water and hydrogen.

It was a total fluke accident. We were in a very remote part of Iceland, and I would be hard-pressed to imagine there would be more than two cars on the road at any given time. We had lunch and we were heading back, and there was a caravan of cars right in front of us. My colleague who was driving decided to pass them. We were doing it at high speed when one of the cars from the caravan pulled out into us. The whole thing just kind of rolled over three times. I had been taking photographs out the back window and hadn’t put my seat belt on. I ended up being ejected. I was super lucky to have survived it.

I had to be airlifted out of Iceland. There was not a single orthopedist in the country who could deal with the level of trauma I had experienced. I was pumped full of morphine lying there for three days before they were able to airlift me out. I don’t really remember a whole lot of it. I spent much of the last fall in a wheelchair recovering and doing lots of physical therapy.

But I hope to be able to go back. My colleague from Iceland was able to send us most of the rocks we had collected. So we have the samples, and we are working on them now and hope to be able to go back and collect a few more to finish out the project.

I think I would feel some form of PTSD working on those rocks. I wouldn’t want anything to do with them.

Well, the accident itself is completely erased from my memory. My doctor tells me that is not uncommon in traumatic accidents like that. I just remember waking up in the ER, and obviously all the pain and discomfort afterward. But for a geologist, Iceland is a magical place. It looks like another world to me. Where we were doing fieldwork, it was mostly dark basaltic rock, and it was like a volcanic wonderland.