Assistant Professor Andrew Gase may be one of the newest faculty members in the Department of Geosciences, but his past with Boise State goes much further back.
“I became interested in seismology when I came to Boise State as a master’s student,” Gase said. “[My roommates’] advisor gave him an issue of the magazine, Oceanography, and it was sitting on our kitchen table. It had a bunch of seismic images of mid-ocean ridges and I thought ‘okay, that’s really cool’.”
That early experience laid the groundwork for Gase’s career. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in geological sciences from the University of Texas at Austin and returned to Boise State in 2024 to teach and research seismology.
His work often takes him to sites around the Pacific Ocean, including off the coast of New Zealand. There, he works with local experts to deploy seismometers on the seafloor and use sound energy sources, called air guns, to explore the insides of the Earth.
The sound waves produced by those energy sources travel through the Earth’s crust. Changes in rock type, composition and density cause those sound waves to reflect back up to the surface, where sensors record the returning energy, which is used to create an image. The process is similar to medical ultrasound imaging used to see inside the human body, but on a much larger scale.
“Routinely, we see 10 kilometers deep. So about six miles down from the sea surface,” Gase said.
That deep imaging unlocks a treasure trove of data, which Gase uses to study earthquake generating faults and the water stored in the Earth’s upper crust. “The water cycle isn’t just on the surface,” he said. “[It] goes all the way down into the deep mantle because of the process of subduction.”
“We tend to think of rocks as solid, but they’re actually more like sponges,” Gase said. That porous upper layer of the Earth’s crust is important for many reasons. For humans, it could be a place to store carbon extracted from the atmosphere. The water within it is also a catalyst for melting rocks in the deeper earth when one tectonic plate dives beneath another. This melted rock, called magma, feeds the volcanoes that are a universal feature of the subduction zones that Gase studies.
Although his research does not yet focus on Idaho’s geology, echoes of the phenomena Gase studies are all around the state. Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve is the result of relatively recent volcanic activity from a couple thousand of years ago. The Idaho Batholith, a huge mass of granite under most of the central part of the state that’s responsible for some of its most well-known mountains, was formed by a subduction zone tens of millions of years ago.
“I love how much active geology is around us,” Gase said. The Idaho landscape, with its rich geologic history, both young and old, makes the region an exciting place to work as a geoscientist.
For new students weighing their options, Gase has these words of wisdom: “Geosciences is the best science for people who are unsure about what kind of science they want to study. There are people working on the physical side, others thinking about chemistry, there are geobiologists thinking about how fossils form. There are also a lot of people doing computational problems. It’s made for people who have lots of interests. The one thing that unites these disciplines is a desire to learn how the Earth works as a system.”