From 1964 to 1966, Eleanora (Norrie) Iberall Robbins served as a Peace Corps volunteer with the Tanzania Geological Survey (TGS)
An American geologist in Tanzania
Caption: Eleanora (Norrie) Iberall Robbins leaves with crew for field work in Kondoa, Tanzania, in 1965.Courtesy of Norrie Robbins.
From 1964 to 1966, Eleanora (Norrie) Iberall Robbins served as a Peace Corps volunteer with the Tanzania Geological Survey (TGS), immediately following receipt of her bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University. Stationed in Dodoma in the days before computers, her assignment was to search anomalous values in notebooks of stream sediment geochemical data taken by Williamson’s Diamonds.
“None of the men at TGS wanted the job,” Robbins recalls, “so the survey decided this would be a perfect assignment for a female Peace Corps geologist.” She became the first woman sent out in charge of a field party. And for her vacation, Robbins volunteered for Louis Leakey, mapping the Olorgesailie hand-axe site in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya.
Successful Peace Corps service, Robbins says, gave her noncompetitive eligibility for a U.S. government job; she was hired by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 1967 based on her foreign experience. One assignment at USGS focused on the economic deposits in the Early Mesozoic (rift) basins of the eastern United States. Robbins was able to apply insights from her Peace Corps mapping in the Great Rift Valley of Kenya to the coal, petroleum and mineral deposits of Virginia and North Carolina.
Through correspondence with Philip Momburi, a current geologist at TGS in Dodoma, she continued pursuing her “lifelong interest in trace metals in the environment.” Momburi is researching human bioaccumulation of deleterious trace elements.
Now retired from the USGS and serving as adjunct faculty at San Diego State University, Robbins teamed up with Momburi to present their work at last November’s Geological Society of America meeting in Seattle, as part of a session on the emerging field of geology and human health.
