Brendan McNulty: Head in the Clouds

If I didn’t like what I was doing, I wouldn’t do it. - Brendan McNulty, professor of earth sciences

Professor Brendan McNulty of the Earth Sciences, Geology and Geography Department in the College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences has won this year’s Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Award, one of the most prestigious awards the University can bestow upon an educator.

McNulty did it, in part, by keeping his head in the clouds – really in the clouds.

McNulty’s focus is on the crust of the earth. That “crust” goes down several tens of miles. It also goes up a few miles. In studying it, McNulty has come to know parts of the Andes mountains as well as some know their own backyards. Most of his work there was done at altitudes of 14,000 feet and higher. He knows the rugged, sky-scraping Sierra Nevada equally well, but to someone who has spent so much time in the Andes, those are foothills.

McNulty has been in the Andes to develop a new theory about the storied mountains. “I’m working on the subduction of the Nazca Plate,” says the enthusiastic chair of the Geology Department, naming the Pacific tectonic plate that is slowly sliding under the South American plate like a thick spatula undercutting  a thin pancake. “Usually you would think that when two plates collide, the stuff in the middle should buckle,” he says. “It did, and there is a wrinkle in it, and the wrinkle is the Andes. But, the wrinkles should be contracting, getting closer together. The buckling is happening, but we’ve documented that the Andes are actually pulling apart, too.”

The question, McNulty says, is why. He intends to find out.

“I’ve been to the Andes six times now,” he says. “The data has been gathered. Now we go through it all, but I’ve already published some papers on it,” including one that landed him on the cover of the June 2002 issue of Geology.

“We think the Nazca plate is hitting the South American plate, then subducting [sliding under it],” he says. “Typically, in subduction, it keeps going down, then heats and melts into magma. We think in this case it is going under the South American plate, then flattening and sliding under the South American plate, pulling the Andes apart. We were basically the first ones to document the pulling apart, in a 1998 paper.”

McNulty is conducting other research, too. He has a two-year, $84,000 National Science Foundation grant that could result in a new model of groundwater contaminant movement that could be used worldwide. His project assesses the movement of methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, in water deep beneath the surface of the earth. MTBE, a gasoline additive banned in 1999, is toxic. One of its byproducts is formaldehyde, considered a carcinogen. That the long-lived MTBE is moving with the water is well documented but, until McNulty – widely considered one of the leaders in his field – created his project, no one tracked how the water moved in various geological formations and rock types. The study will cover much of Central and Southern California.

Students are involved in the study, and eight of them are now being trained to work on it. McNulty likes to include students, but not, he says, his eyes wide with meaning, in the Andes. “You really have to be prepared for that,” he says emphatically. “At that altitude, if you’re not fully prepared, you can get really ill. Altitude sickness. We had a graduate student go with us once and it didn’t turn out too well.”

For years, the rangy 6-foot-three-or-four McNulty said, he trained hard year-round to be ready, including competing in triathlons. “I still got sick a couple of times,” he admits. The MTBE project won’t involve such physical strain.

When McNulty returns from his travels, he brings all his knowledge – of geology, altitude acclimatization, handling the burros used to carry equipment, physical preparation, and travel, to the classroom. Even more important, he brings a willingness to think outside the box. As he speaks, he gestures. In class, he says, he uses texts, diagrams, and photos, but he also uses his hands and the chalkboard, and he’ll snatch up bottles, pieces of paper, anything to make the point. And teaching is what he likes best, even if being at a teaching university rather than a research university has some drawbacks.

When it comes to doing research, McNulty says, “the new dean here
[Charles Hohm] is wonderful, and encouraging. I think the problem is money. If you want to do research here, you have to get your own grants. It’s tough. If I didn’t like what I was doing, I wouldn’t do it. I really enjoy what I do.”

- Russell Hudson