28 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {punchline} PREVIOUS PAGE: Andy (third from left) and team spent two weeks mapping and sampling Mount Shishaldin volcano on Unimak Island, Alaska. ABOVE (from left): Andy at the USGS lab at Moffett Field in Mountain View; a photo of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. On an ascent up the north side of Mount Shasta, Andy Calvert pauses to munch down a Clif Bar at 13,000 feet. Making small talk with the U.S. Forest Service climbing rangers accompanying him, he points over to a dome at the top of the Hotlum Glacier, a formation known for its treacherous gullies and crevasses. “Someday, I want to go get a piece of that,’” he casually remarks. The response: “There’s a pretty good snow bridge, we could just do it now.” One “steep, icy and scary” rope belay later, Andy had his sample. “I felt like I was flying,” he recalls. “It was like I was flying out to get this rock and come back.” Certainly not a typical day on the job in Silicon Valley, but as a local scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Andy is charged with deciphering the eruptive history of volcanoes in order to predict future threats. “I have to get a rock sample from every lava flow I can get to,” he explains. “It’s probably 50-50 whether we’ll get a non-Mount St. Helens eruption in the Western U.S. in our lifetimes, but we should still be ready for it.” Looking back, Andy credits Mount St. Helens’ catastrophic 1980 eruption with inspiring his eventual volcanic-rock strewn path. As a seventh grader living over 200 miles away in Moscow, Idaho, he vividly remembers what went down (or rather, up) on May 18. “It was a beautiful sunny day,” he recounts, “and then this cloud started coming over and it got as dark as the darkest night.” After the eruption, half an inch of ash blanketed the city, triggering the cancellation of the last three weeks of school. “That made volcanoes even more interesting,” Andy grins. “I knew something about geology before then, but that was what really taught me that the Earth is dynamic.” Initially eyeing medical school as a Stanford University undergrad, Andy enrolled in a geology class recommended by a friend. “The class was at 8 o’clock in the morning, and I just couldn’t wait for it,” he recalls. “It was like falling in love.” Andy signed up for another class called Rocks and Minerals. “I thought, ‘Well, that sounds really boring, so if I like that too, I’ll be a geologist.’” Metamorphic rock—gneiss, schist and slate. Smooth. Coarse. Shiny. Opaque. Utterly captivated, Andy followed his heart. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford, Andy completed his doctorate at UC Santa Barbara. As he was wrapping up his studies, he caught wind of an opening for a geochronologist with the USGS volcano hazards team based in Menlo PHOTOGRAPHY: ANNIE BARNETT
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