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Eleanora Robbins

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Eleanora Robbins
In 2023
Born
Eleanora Roberta Iberall

1942 (age 83–84)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
EducationOhio State University (BS)
University of Arizona (MS)
Pennsylvania State University (PhD)
Known forPalynology of ore deposits; microbial iron oxidation; outdoor science education on tribal lands
Scientific career
FieldsPalynology, geomicrobiology, economic geology
WorkplacesUnited States Geological Survey
San Diego State University

Eleanora Iberall Robbins (née Eleanora Roberta Iberall; born 1942), known as Norrie Robbins, is an American geologist. She worked as a research geologist for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) from 1967 to 2001 and was an adjunct faculty member at San Diego State University from 2001 to 2015.[1]

Robbins specialised in palynology, the study of fossil pollen and spores, and applied it to the analysis of ore and petroleum deposits. Her later work concerned geomicrobiology, particularly the role of microbes in iron and manganese oxidation and in acid mine drainage. She holds a United States patent, with Motoaki Sato, for an ozonation method of recovering metals from waste water.[2]

Robbins served in the Peace Corps in Tanzania from 1964 to 1966, where she was the first female field geologist with the Geological Survey of Tanzania.[3][4] After retiring she taught outdoor science to children on reservations in San Diego County, work for which the Climate Science Alliance gave her its 2023 Climate Adaptation Leadership Award.[5]

Early life and education

[edit]

Robbins was born Eleanora Roberta Iberall in Washington, D.C., in 1942.[6] Her father was the physicist Arthur S. Iberall, then at the National Bureau of Standards. The family moved to Cleveland Heights, Ohio, in 1952.[7]

She took a BS in geology at Ohio State University in 1964, an MS in geology and palynology at the University of Arizona in 1972, and a PhD in geosciences at Pennsylvania State University in 1982.[1][7]

Her master's research concerned an extinct mountain goat that had lived in the Grand Canyon. Working from fossil fecal pellets left in Stanton's Cave, in Marble Canyon, she identified the species and reconstructed its diet and the vegetation around the cave. The Arizona Daily Star reported the study in 1972, under her maiden name.[8]

Peace Corps service in Tanzania

[edit]

Robbins joined the Peace Corps after graduating in 1964 and was assigned to the Geological Survey of Tanganyika, later Tanzania, at Dodoma. She was the survey's first female field geologist. Her work there involved plotting geochemical survey data onto maps for use by exploration teams.[3][4] She has said that during a leave in 1965 she mapped boundaries at the Olorgesailie prehistoric site in Kenya.[7]

United States Geological Survey

[edit]

Robbins joined the USGS in 1967 and remained until 2001, working in Washington, D.C., Denver and Reston, Virginia.[1] Her early assignments covered titanium and rare-earth element deposits,[9] petroleum exploration on the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf, and fuel and mineral deposits of the Triassic Newark rift system.[10]

Palynology

[edit]

Palynology was Robbins's principal analytical tool. She used a rock-processing method that omitted the centrifugation step in standard preparations, on the grounds that it destroyed fragile organic structures such as fecal pellets.[11]

With Karen Porter and Kurt Haberyan she reported pellet microfossils from Early Proterozoic rocks, which the authors argued was possible evidence for metazoan life at that date.[12] The Atlanta Journal reported the finding in November 1985.[13] In 1992 the German news magazine Der Spiegel cited the finding in a feature on the origin of animal life, noting that the dating of the rocks was disputed.[14] An earlier paper with Porter linked zooplankton fecal pellets to the formation of fossil fuel and phosphate deposits.[15]

Robbins co-authored the monograph Petrolipalynology with Jiang Dexin, Wang Yongdong and Yang Huiqiu, published by Springer in 2016, which sets out methods for identifying petroleum source rocks from fossil spores and pollen.[16]

Geomicrobiology

[edit]

From the 1980s Robbins worked increasingly on microbial processes in mineral systems. She studied acid mine drainage and its remediation, including the chemistry of anoxic limestone drains[17] and the microbial communities of extremely acidic waters at Iron Mountain, California.[18] She published a morphological key for identifying bacteria and archaea in acidic environments.[19]

This work extended to ancient iron deposits and the question of whether mineral forms resembling bacteria are genuine fossils. Robbins described iron-coated microstructures from the Isua iron formation of south-western Greenland,[20] and in a paper with her father proposed that hollow iron-oxide rods could serve as a search image for former life in samples returned from Mars.[21]

Robbins studied the corrosion of the wreck of the SS Central America, a steamship that sank off North Carolina in 1857 and lies at a depth of 2,200 metres. Working with the scientists of the recovery expedition, she examined the rusticles that had formed on the ship's ironwork and tentatively identified the bacteria building them as the iron oxidizers Leptothrix and Siderocapsa. In October 1991, at the USGS laboratories in Reston, she sealed iron and sterilized seawater in vials and added rusticle material from the wreck to half of them; iron-oxidizing bacteria colonized those vials and not the controls. A rusticle from the RMS Titanic, tested in the same way in 1992, gave the same result. The expedition's report concluded that iron-oxidizing bacteria, rather than the sulfate-reducing bacteria that had been proposed for the Titanic, appeared to be the dominant agents of rusticle formation in the deep ocean.[22]

To obtain a modern analogue for Precambrian iron formation, Robbins organised the JIMES expedition to the iron-rich bays of Santorini in Greece, working with Chrysoula Kourtidou-Papadeli of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a group of local secondary-school students who collected samples over about eighteen months.[23]

After retiring from teaching she continued fieldwork on the microbial geochemistry of the San Diego River watershed.[24][25]

Science education

[edit]

Robbins began running outdoor science programmes for children while at the USGS. From 1989 to 1998 she ran a summer programme called "What's Under Your Feet?" for children in the Anacostia area of Washington, D.C.[7] The USGS subsequently published a children's activity book of the same title, written by Robbins with Penni Rubin.[26]

Alongside her wetlands and acid-mine-drainage fieldwork she ran short science programmes for Shawnee children in Ohio, Ojibwe participants from the Bad River reservation in Wisconsin, and the children of coal miners in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.[27] In April 1996, while she was conducting research in the Swatara Creek watershed in Pennsylvania, elementary pupils at Pine Grove brought her water samples from the creek's headwaters and tested them with her.[28] In 1998 she enlisted an Advanced Placement biology class at Windber High School, Pennsylvania, to make a biological inventory of a mine-drainage reclamation site on a tributary of Dark Shade Creek, where manganese was being removed from the water.[29] She also ran programmes for Chickahominy children in Virginia and Piscataway children in Maryland.[30]

After moving to California in 2001 she founded the Science Explorers Club, which she ran on reservations in San Diego County, taking Kumeyaay, Luiseño, Cupeño and Cahuilla children onto their own land to study local geology and ecology.[7][5] Writing in 2024, April Nurse described the club as having run for twenty-three years across twelve tribal communities and reaching about a thousand children.[31] With Riggs and Darner she published on approaches to recruiting Native American students into the geosciences.[32]

In 2012 Robbins searched Balboa Park for the site of the Kumeyaay village of the chief Hatam, on the reasoning that the village would have stood on running water. She located the creek, by then buried in an open culvert behind a city maintenance yard, its course still marked by willows, and matched its position to accounts of the village. Voice of San Diego reported the search, quoting her: "Being a geologist, I drove around and around looking for the river, because a village requires a river."[33]

Awards and honours

[edit]
  • Listed in American Men & Women of Science in the 19th edition (1995/96), 20th edition (1998/99), 21st edition (2003) and 22nd edition (2005).[34]
  • Inducted, with other members of her family, into the Youth on the Move International Educators' Hall of Fame, 2015. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported the induction and photographed her tutoring children at the Barona Reservation.[35]
  • Climate Adaptation Leadership Award, Climate Science Alliance, 2023, for her work with tribal youth at Pala and intertribally.[5]

Selected publications

[edit]
  • Porter, K. G.; Robbins, E. I. (1981). "Zooplankton fecal pellets link fossil fuel and phosphate deposits". Science 212: 931–933.
  • Robbins, E. I.; Porter, K. G.; Haberyan, K. A. (1985). "Pellet microfossils: possible evidence for metazoan life in Early Proterozoic time". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 82: 5809–5813.
  • Robbins, E. I. (2000). "Bacteria and Archaea in acidic environments and a key to morphological identification". Hydrobiologia 433: 61–89.
  • Jiang, D.; Robbins, E. I.; Wang, Y.; Yang, H. (2016). Petrolipalynology. Springer.

References

[edit]
  1. 1 2 3 "Eleanora I. Robbins (Norrie)". Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, San Diego State University.
  2. ↑ US 6485696, Motoaki Sato; Eleanora I. Robbins, "Recovery/removal of metallic elements from waste water using ozone", issued November 26, 2002, assigned to United States Department of the Interior
  3. 1 2 Warner, D., ed. (2024). We Came, We Saw, We Changed: Creating a Peace Corps Legacy in Tanzania 1964–1966. LCCN 2024907333.
  4. 1 2 "Interview with Eleanora Iberall "Norrie" Robbins, September 28, 2022". Peace Corps: The Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries.
  5. 1 2 3 "Climate Leadership Awardees: Norrie Robbins". Climate Science Alliance.
  6. ↑ "Robbins, Eleanora Iberall". Who's Who in America 20O4. Vol. 2 (L-Z) (58th ed.). New Providence, NJ: Marquis Who's Who. 2003. p. 4346 – via Internet Archive.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Paget-Clarke, Nic (May 2, 2014). "An Interview with Dr. Eleanora (Norrie) Robbins". In Motion Magazine.
  8. ↑ Maggio, Elizabeth (May 31, 1972). "Extinct mountain goats once lived in desert". Arizona Daily Star. p. 44. Archived from the original on September 29, 2026. Retrieved September 29, 2026 – via Newspapers.com.
  9. ↑ Herz, N.; Valentine, L. E.; Iberall, E. R. (1970). "Rutile and ilmenite placer deposits, Roseland district, Nelson and Amherst Counties, Virginia". U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin. 1312-F. doi:10.3133/b1312f.
  10. ↑ Robbins, E. I. (1983). "Accumulation of fossil fuels and metallic minerals in active and ancient rifts". Tectonophysics. 94: 633–658. doi:10.1016/0040-1951(83)90038-0.
  11. ↑ Robbins, E. I.; D'Agostino, J. P.; Haas, J. L. Jr.; Larson, R. R.; Dulong, F. T. (1990). "Palynological assessment of organic tissues and metallic minerals in the Jerritt Canyon gold deposit, Nevada". Ore Geology Reviews. 5: 399–422. doi:10.1016/0169-1368(90)90044-N.
  12. ↑ Robbins, E. I.; Porter, K. G.; Haberyan, K. A. (1985). "Pellet microfossils: possible evidence for metazoan life in Early Proterozoic time". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 82 (17): 5809–5813. doi:10.1073/pnas.82.17.5809. PMC 390642.
  13. ↑ Cooke, Robert (November 19, 1985). "Complex life may be 2 billion years old, ancient rocks indicate". The Atlanta Journal. Athens. p. 42. Archived from the original on September 29, 2026. Retrieved September 29, 2026 – via Newspapers.com.
  14. ↑ "Rückkehr in Darwins Schoß" [Return to Darwin's bosom]. Der Spiegel (in German). No. 49/1992. November 30, 1992. pp. 242–252.
  15. ↑ Porter, K. G.; Robbins, E. I. (1981). "Zooplankton fecal pellets link fossil fuel and phosphate deposits". Science. 212: 931–933.
  16. ↑ Jiang, D.; Robbins, E. I.; Wang, Y.; Yang, H. (2016). Petrolipalynology. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-47946-9. ISBN 978-3-662-51701-7.
  17. ↑ Robbins, E. I.; Cravotta, C. A.; Savela, C. E.; Nord, G. L. (1999). "Hydrobiogeochemical interactions in 'anoxic' limestone drains for neutralization of acidic mine drainage". Fuel. 78: 259–270.
  18. ↑ Robbins, E. I.; Rodgers, T. M.; Alpers, C. N.; Nordstrom, D. K. (2000). "Ecogeochemistry of the subsurface food web at pH 0–2.5 in Iron Mountain, California, U.S.A.". Hydrobiologia. 433: 15–23.
  19. ↑ Robbins, E. I. (2000). "Bacteria and Archaea in acidic environments and a key to morphological identification". Hydrobiologia. 433: 61–89.
  20. ↑ Robbins, E. I. (1987). "Appelella ferrifera, a possible new iron-coated microfossil in the Isua Iron-Formation, southwestern Greenland". In Appel, P. W. U.; LaBerge, G. L. (eds.). Precambrian Iron-Formations. Theophrastus. pp. 141–154.
  21. ↑ Robbins, E. I.; Iberall, A. S. (1991). "Mineral remains of early life on Earth? On Mars?". Geomicrobiology Journal. 9: 51–66. doi:10.1080/01490459109385985.
  22. ↑ Herdendorf, Charles E.; Thompson, Thomas G.; Evans, Robert D. (March 1995). "Science on a Deep-Ocean Shipwreck". The Ohio Journal of Science. 95 (1): 4–212. hdl:1811/23642. ISSN 0030-0950. Robbins's work is described at pp. 81 and 149–153.
  23. ↑ Robbins, E. I.; Kourtidou-Papadeli, C.; Iberall, A. S.; Nord, G. L.; Sato, M. (2016). "From Precambrian Iron-Formation to terraforming Mars: The JIMES Expedition to Santorini". Geomicrobiology Journal. 33 (7): 1–16. doi:10.1080/01490451.2015.1074322.
  24. ↑ Robbins, E. I.; Quigley-Raymond, S.; Lai, M.; Fried, J. (2018). "Microbial geochemistry reflecting sulfur, iron, manganese, and calcium sources in the San Diego River watershed, southern California". Geosciences. 8 (12): 495. doi:10.3390/geosciences8120495.
  25. ↑ Hampton, Laura (March 24, 2021). "Partner Post: Investigating Geology in San Diego". Climate Kids, Climate Science Alliance.
  26. ↑ Rubin, P.; Robbins, E. I. (1992). What's Under Your Feet? (Report). U.S. Geological Survey. doi:10.3133/70007450.
  27. ↑ "Discovering geoscientists to be". Winds of Change. 8. American Indian Science and Engineering Society: 41. Winter 1994.
  28. ↑ Forney, Rahn (April 21, 1996). Written at Pine Grove. "Students test water samples". The Daily News. Lebanon, Pennsylvania. p. 3. Archived from the original on September 29, 2026. Retrieved September 29, 2026 – via Newspapers.com.
  29. ↑ Wojcik, Sandy (September 23, 1998). Written at Windber. "Windber students to get first-hand look at stream cleanup". The Daily American. Somerset, Pennsylvania. p. 3. Archived from the original on September 29, 2026. Retrieved September 29, 2026 – via Newspapers.com.
  30. ↑ U.S. Geological Survey (1997). Activities Related to American Indians and Alaska Natives (PDF) (Report).
  31. ↑ Nurse, April (November 24, 2024). "Science Explorers Club Now Part of San Diego History". Indigenous Network.
  32. ↑ Riggs, E. M.; Robbins, E.; Darner, R. (2007). "Sharing the land: attracting Native American students to the geosciences". Journal of Geoscience Education. 55: 478–485.
  33. ↑ Bennett, Kelly (December 3, 2012). "'A Village Requires a River': Sleuthing in Balboa Park". Voice of San Diego.
  34. ↑ American Men & Women of Science (19th ed.). 1995. Her entry also appears in the 20th (1998/99), 21st (2003) and 22nd (2005) editions.
  35. ↑ Warth, Gary (November 8, 2015). "SDSU professor, family inducted in Hall of Fame". San Diego Union-Tribune.
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