Profile of Susan Brantley

As a bus rattled down the Pan American Highway across the sun-washed desert of northern Peru in 1980, a young American woman gazed out the window at buttes and bluffs, searching for a flagpole that would point the way to the result of a rare phenomenon on Earth’s surface: a massive salt deposit, formed when water from the ocean gradually evaporated over a 20-kilometer stretch. Around midnight, the bus dropped off Susan L. Brantley, who was on a Fulbright scholarship in Peru. The next morning, Brantley gathered her pack and walked west into the desert, hiking up a butte to locate a research camp near the salt deposit.

Although Brantley had come to Peru to study an unrelated topic—the impacts of heavy metal mining on rivers in the central valley—samples from the rare deposit led to her first major scientific publication (1) and foretold her current reputation as a prominent figure in geochemistry at Earth’s surface.

Now a Distinguished Professor of Geosciences and Director of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Institute at Pennsylvania State University, Brantley has developed innovative strategies for measuring how natural processes, such as weathering, unfold in the environment. “We’re changing the planet so quickly now,” Brantley says. “I want to understand how our human impact is going to change our environment.”

Much of Brantley’s childhood was spent in a suburban jungle of backyard swing sets, neighborhood races, and mud pies in Rochester, New York. “My mom was always telling us that we had to go outside. There were no fences, so we’d all run in packs up and down the neighborhood.” Her impressive high school transcripts made it difficult to narrow down college admission offers. Brantley enrolled at Princeton University, eventually focusing on a field she considers central …