From The School of Earth & Energy & Environmental Sciences
At
Stanford University
5.25.23
Mary Ellen Hannibal
stanford.magazine@stanford.edu
At 12 points around the globe—including one at Stanford—scientists are working to detect when the “Anthropocene” began.
All photos via Getty images, except Earth photo (NASA), from top, left to right: Bob Sacha; Anton Petrus (2); Avigator Photographer; Paul Souders; Banks Photos; Aerial Perspective Images; jacoblund; Felix Cesare; John Parrot/Stocktrek Images; thitivong; Nuture; pa_YOn; Anton Petrus; Suriyapong Thongsawang; Francesco Bergamaschi; Cristian Martin.
In the late 1980s, Elizabeth Hadly became the first researcher to excavate the caves of Yellowstone National Park. By studying fossils and other markers of the past, the evolutionary biologist and ecologist helped reconstruct how surviving species adapted to the global warming that ended an ice age nearly 12,000 years ago, and with it, the Pleistocene epoch. Retreating ice left behind rocks and water and not much else. Photosynthesizing organisms eventually developed into vegetation that helped create soil. Gradually, the terrain became more complex and hosted more species. Today, it is the iconic American landscape of willow, aspen, wolves, and grizzly bears.
While contemplating the deep past, Hadly also began to observe unprecedented changes in real time. Small mammal populations were abruptly shifting, and fire frequency increased. “Going out every day for years, I started to see changes in the landscape,” says the professor of biology and of Earth system science. Over the course of 17 years, Hadly documented disappearing ancient ponds and vanishing amphibians. In 1988, fires ravaged the park. “I was evacuated from the caves I was working in,” Hadly recalls. “This was a part of the park that didn’t normally burn. It was a tipping point for fires in the West.” Decades later, she would realize she was witnessing the bookends to an entire geologic epoch—evidence of the start, and signs of the finish, of the Holocene, a time period marked by the ever-increasing influence of modern Homo sapiens.
Since 1998, when Hadly joined Stanford, she and her lab members have focused mostly on analyzing ancient DNA and other markers to assemble a picture of how mammal populations have evolved into today’s ecosystems. In 2016, she also took on the role of faculty director of Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, a 1,200-acre protected area in the Foothills where her husband, geologist and paleontologist Anthony Barnosky, served as executive director from 2016 to 2022, and where more than 70 scientists conduct fieldwork in any given year. Barnosky spent much of his career as an integrative biology professor at the University of California-Berkeley, researching past mass extinctions. The couple have collaborated on projects and traveled together for years. But at Jasper Ridge, their work would dovetail in a new way.
Elizabeth Hadly. Credit: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service. © 2017 Stanford University
As nature morphed before their very eyes, Hadly and Barnosky set about documenting the onset of the Anthropocene, a new epoch proposed for the geological time scale. A commission is expected to decide on it this year. “I’ve done work all around the world—witnessed ice caps melting on the Tibetan plateau, the impacts of poaching, and other increasing human footprints,” Hadly says. “How can we protect biodiversity now? What does it mean to support it under conditions we can’t predict?” The Anthropocene departs from the relatively stable climate that has characterized the Earth system for approximately 12,000 years. Its changes are moving targets and don’t resemble historical patterns. “The only way to understand nature now is in the context of the Anthropocene,” Hadly says. She hopes the new designation will help people better understand how fundamentally different Earth has become in recent decades. It will also give leaders and educators a common language for discussing what Hadly and Barnosky had been seeing on—and in—the ground. “We didn’t go looking for the Anthropocene,” Hadly says. “It found us.” Soon, they realized they could study it right in Stanford’s backyard.
The Importance of Telling Time
Officially we’re in the “Holocene” epoch-a time span that began some 11700 years ago and characterized by relatively predictable seasonality and a temperate climate. On the geological time scale the Holocene sits within the Quaternary the third period of the Cenozoic era (see graphic). If the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth can be conceived of as a book, the time scale acts as an ordering system dividing the narrative into chapters and numbering the pages. Epochs, periods, and eras are subdivisions that help us understand how the present came to be. The transition from one major subdivision to another is frequently marked by profound ecological change, including mass extinctions.
Infographic timeline: U.S.G.S. (source); all illustrations via Getty images: Tanarch (Earth); Alinabel (10); Alexey Makarov (human).
In 2000, Earth system scientists began to question whether we have passed from the Holocene into a new epoch. The story goes that Nobel Prize–winning chemist Paul Crutzen lost his cool at a meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. One after another, researchers presented evidence of recent, profound changes to planet Earth due to the impacts of just one among millions of species. “Stop saying Holocene,” Crutzen burst out. “We’re not in the Holocene anymore. We’re in the Anthropocene.” Crutzen subsequently joined with biologist Eugene Stoermer to argue that we have entered a new category of history in which the activities of Homo sapiens have accumulated irreversible changes to the way the Earth system functions. Crutzen proposed the term “Anthropocene’ to “emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology.” In 2009, Earth system scientist Will Steffen published a seminal paper in Nature [below] warning that these changes are destabilizing what, to this point, has been a “safe operating space for humanity.”
That safe operating space is maintained by interactions between the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, and the biosphere. (That is, between air, water, earth, and life.) This unified system interacts partly through geochemical cycles, including the well-known beast of climate change. Burning fossil fuels puts too much CO2 into the atmosphere, which changes patterns in the hydrosphere. In turn, those weather changes affect biological life, which we are changing in other ways. Humans and our domesticated animals now make up more than 90 percent of the mass of all vertebrates. We are losing not only microbes, plants, and animals but also the interactions they contribute to the Earth system. By 2008, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London concluded that, yes, a new epoch had begun. But when?
The next year, a subgroup of the International Commission on Stratigraphy—the Anthropocene Working Group—focused on what it would mean to establish the Anthropocene. In 2012, Barnosky became a member of the group based on his research in biostratigraphy, the science of using fossils to tell time. Earth’s strata—its layers of rock and soil—show evidence of human influence in many places and times. Some researchers argued that the onset of agriculture marks the decisive turn in humanity’s power to shape-shift the Earth, but that evidence is not uniform around the globe. Likewise, the “Industrial revolution” would seem to be an obvious beginning point, but its impacts are unevenly distributed. For formal designation, a geological epoch must be discernable like the title of the Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once. “Global synchronicity” Barnosky explains, “is the gold standard for marking time in the rock record—for marking time, period.” He compares it to specifying time zones so that everyone knows when to log into Zoom.
In 2015 the working group recognized the Great Acceleration of the mid-20th century as marking the beginning of the “Anthropocene”. “Humans have been gradually changing the planet since we first became a species,” Barnosky says, “but nothing approaches the changes we see mid-20th century.” Industrialization, population, pollution, nitrogen fertilizer use, and more ratcheted up significantly around 1950, and all these markers continue to rise. From steel to concrete to plastics, the residues of our activities are found in the fossil record. The accumulation of human detritus has grown so massive that it has its own name: the technosphere. The Earth system has a new driver, and it’s too late to revoke our license.
The working group identified radionuclides from atomic testing as key geological markers for the new epoch. Above-ground atomic testing from the 1940s to the 1960s released distinctive isotopes into the atmosphere. The group decided that plutonium, which is not detectible in sediment that predates atomic testing, is the most useful synchronous marker of the Anthropocene. It is followed by “bomb carbon,” which introduced new levels of carbon 14 molecules into the atmosphere that have gradually accumulated at the bottom of freshwater lakes, sealed in layers by subsequent atmospheric depositions. They have also settled into polar ice, coral reefs, and stalactites. Extracting a cross-section of sediment—a core—from these repositories and identifying the plutonium and bomb carbon layers in them makes it possible to mark the Great Acceleration: a point in geological time where we can see a before-and-after in Earth history.
Geologists mark exactly when a new time period in the geological record begins and ends with a “Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point”—a “Golden Spike” for short. Much as the railroad barons used the term to indicate the transition between railway lines, geologists use it to indicate where one period yields to another. In 2019, the working group initiated a competition among scientists around the world to establish a single site that exemplifies the transition from Holocene to Anthropocene. Once it is chosen, a metal spike will be hammered into the site to serve as a reference point. The area will then be made available for researchers studying global change. Hadly and Barnosky put Searsville Lake at Jasper Ridge up for consideration.
Brave New Nature
In her 25 years as a Stanford professor, Hadly has traveled all over the world, continuing to chronicle the changes she began to study in Yellowstone. In 2012, she and Barnosky co-authored a paper in Nature [below] that caught the attention of the then governor of California, Jerry Brown. “Why aren’t you guys shouting this from the rooftops?” he asked the couple. “Well, we are trying,” Hadly replied. Brown asked Hadly and Barnosky to summarize the paper in lay language. The result in Anthropocene Review [below] from Sage Journals describes the many pressures we are putting on nature and why we must curtail them to safeguard future survival. The paper carries the signatures of hundreds of scientists from around the world and has been distributed globally, often by Brown, who hauled boxfulls on his international travels.
The Hadly Lab uses multiple data-based strategies to reveal the invisible past, including interactions among species and ecosystems. Her work shows that over many thousands of years, plants and animals have evolved in relationship with each other, and their interactions contribute to the functioning of the Earth system. She has also shown that as human impacts reduce other life forms, the evolutionary destinies of millions of species are being decided by humans, often without our knowing it. This can be viewed as a moral issue, but it is also a practical problem. We know humans need pollinators like bees and decomposers like beetles to carry out functions vital to our own well-being. We don’t know how many other species we need to support our “safe operating space.”
Hadly continues to study the genetic capacity of mammals to adapt as their habitats are altered or destroyed. Her research has helped show that tigers may need genetic intervention for their species to survive. Tigers are top predators and have an outsize role in regulating the food web. Hadly found that some Asian pikas in Tibet are moving to higher ground as the climate warms but may not survive the lower level of oxygen at higher elevations. Asian pikas are ecosystem engineers. Their activity modifies soil and helps host myriad plant and animal species. Life begets life, and we are unwittingly extinguishing parts of the process. “I couldn’t continue to simply publish findings about what is happening,” Hadly says. “Scientific papers can only take us so far. I wanted to tackle the challenge of managing a place with high biodiversity potential into the future.”
Just a short drive from campus, the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve sits in what is sometimes called the urban-wildland interface, where city meets suburb meets relative wilderness. Seismic activity from the San Andreas Fault has mashed together a high diversity of geology, soils, and landscape features. Searsville Dam, erected across San Francisquito Creek in 1892 to create a drinking water supply, transformed a riparian valley into a lake and has been steadily filling up with sediment for more than 125 years. To quantify change at Jasper Ridge, Hadly hired paleoecologist Allison Stegner, ’10, as a postdoc to pull long cylinders of mud from Searsville Lake. “I had worked with cores for years,” Hadly says. Like tree rings, lake sediment cores retain evidence of temperature and precipitation patterns. They contain pollen, which can be analyzed to identify biological responses, such as changes in tree and wildflower communities. “I have cored many lakes,” Hadly says, “but I’ve never seen any [cores] so long as the ones from Searsville Lake, and so discrete”—so clearly marked by historical events.
SEARSVILLE SEDIMENT: A CT scan of the Hadly team’s core shows plutonium, as well as increased human influence around the time of the proposed Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), aka the Golden Spike. (Chart: Modified from Stegner et al. 2023 [below])
Hadly and Barnosky began to see Jasper Ridge as an exemplary illustration of the Anthropocene. “Tony and the [Anthropocene Working Group] were talking about using cores to identify historic markers like plutonium,” Hadly says. “I realized we had that information in our Searsville sediment.” She and Barnosky nominated the site for Golden Spike consideration. Eleven other sites are vying for the label, including lakes in Canada and China, a peat bog in Poland, layers buried under Vienna, ice in Antarctica, a cave in Italy, coral reefs off the coasts of Australia and Texas, bays in Japan and California, and the Baltic Sea. As of this writing, voting on the Golden Spike is underway. “It’s a tricky decision,” says Jan Zalasiewicz, chair of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, “because there are too many excellent choices.” There will be one winner but no losers in this competition. All the sites will become reference points for researchers working to elucidate the new epoch.
The View from Jasper Ridge
In winter 2019, migrating cormorants and mallards touched down on Searsville Lake, taking no notice of a Rube Goldberg–like contraption floating alongside them. Buoyed by pontoons and sporting a motorized coring drill, the Vibracore was operated by researchers from Stanford and the United States Geological Survey. Stegner, now a research scientist in the Hadly Lab, guided a tall metal cylinder as it plunged into the sediment at the bottom of the lake. She leaned her tall frame against the coring mechanism and, pushing with all her weight, levitated briefly as the coring device went down.
Searsville Lake.
DELVING DEEP: At Searsville Lake [just above] in Jasper Ridge, researchers extract sediment cores to show more than 125 years of Earth history. (Photos from top: Nona Chiariello; Anthony Barnosky)
Nearby, Hadly and others watched from a rowboat. Winching the Vibracore back up out of the depths, Stegner gingerly extracted the muddy bounty, capped the aluminum tubes, and passed them to Hadly. In all, her team extracted 14 cores from Searsville and nearby Upper Lakes. Back at the lab, Stegner and colleagues analyzed the plutonium and bomb carbon in the cores, as well as mercury and other heavy metals, and correlated them with specific time intervals captured in the sediment. Evidence of the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes—marked by disturbances in otherwise continuous sediment—helped them establish dates for each layer. The team also compared their findings with archival material, such as newspaper accounts, oral histories, and old photographs. Species disappeared when the area was logged and plowed for agriculture; once Jasper Ridge was protected, oak populations increased. The presence—and disappearance—of microfossils correlated with the recorded dates of herbicide and pesticide applications at Searsville Lake. “This is a different kind of science,” Hadly says. “The history and its geographical markers are intertwined. Teasing them out creates a picture in which the past becomes the present and the Holocene becomes the Anthropocene.”
Rob Dunbar, a professor of Earth system science and of oceans, says Hadly is helping pioneer a necessary intellectual approach to our changing world. “There is a strong case to be made for defining reference sections for the Anthropocene wherein interdisciplinary, precise, and well-dated scientific knowledge tells us what happened and why, the extent to which humans contributed to change, and the outcome on biodiversity, hydrology, climate, and community resilience.”
What’s in a Name?
Not everyone is keen on the term “Anthropocene”. Some argue it redoubles our human-centric bias with respect to the rest of the living world, although some of the suggested alternatives, including Capitalocene, Plantationocene, and Homogocene, are not much better. Tadashi Fukami, a professor of Earth system science and of biology, counts himself among those resisting the word’s reference to humanity and “the very arrogance that has got ourselves into this environmental crisis in the first place.” Regardless of the terminology, Fukami says, Hadly’s research helps demonstrate “how intricately humans are embedded in complex interactions with other species.”
“Anthropocene” itself has become a cultural meme. Zalasiewicz calls it “a new way of understanding the human role in environmental transformation.” In a 2019 textbook, he and his co-authors, including Barnosky, reference international law and medicine as arenas in which an official designation will be useful. International treaties assume planetary stability, based on “current conditions for an objective and unchanging reality that has surrounded us since time immemorial.” But the very geological boundaries of sovereign nations are changing as sea levels rise, ice melts, and coastlines move, raising issues about the extent of treaties and, for example, fishing rights. A formal designation is not going to change the “underlying geological realities” of our new epoch, they wrote, but may help us anticipate international aggravations arising from it. In 2015, a Commission on Planetary Health reported that the current systems supporting human well-being are inadequate to address Anthropocene issues, including pollution-related mortality. Establishing the epoch will provide a common reference point to help redefine some of humanity’s most basic guidelines around how we live.
Last May, at the House of the World’s Cultures in Berlin, the 12 teams vying for the “Golden Spike” presented their evidence. Stegner spoke for Searsville Lake, explaining how the long tubes of mud bear witness to history. She explained the land’s original occupation by Muwekma Ohlone people and its subsequent colonization. She elucidated places in the core that reflect Mexican and American “chopping up” of the landscape for ranching. “These are global signals of the “Anthropocene”,” she said. The news wasn’t all bad. She showed where tree communities had recovered when cattle grazing was discontinued. “When you limit impacts,” she said, “things tend to recover.”
In the end, 11 of the sites had the same punch line: plutonium. That evidence of human activity was so clearly discernible in every core presented that even the staid members of the Anthropocene Working Group were taken aback. “The major moment coming out of the last few days is progressively clear,” Zalasiewicz commented. To find another such pattern in the Earth, discernible everywhere on the globe, would require reaching back more than 11,700 years to the Pleistocene.
The five-day meeting included workshops and discussions among the scientists and the general public. An exhibition called “Earth Indices” by European artists Giulia Bruno and Armin Linke took place in the main exhibit area, with enlarged images of the scientists at work around the globe: underwater among coral reefs, encased in snow and ice, spelunking into the recesses of the Earth, and coring Searsville Lake. Hadly, Barnosky, and Stegner contributed a 39.4-foot-long photographic banner of Core JRBP2018-VC01B [above]. The CT scan was laid out across the exhibit space dated at intervals. A colorized X-ray illustrated the differences in sediment density. But how could individual museum visitors interact with such a document? “All of us contribute in some way to the processes defining the “Anthropocene”,” says Zalasiewicz, “but we struggle to grasp the totality of the complex planetary changes now underway, and quite how we relate to them.” At Hadly’s suggestion, museum visitors marked important years in their own lives on the banner’s time line. People eagerly scratched in births, deaths, immigrations. The monumental moments in people’s lives appeared as minuscule slivers against the core. Yet its time line points to a destiny we share with the Earth.
Nature 2009
Figure 1: Beyond the boundary. The inner green shading represents the proposed safe operating space for nine planetary systems. The red wedges represent an estimate of the current position for each variable. The boundaries in three systems (rate of biodiversity loss, climate change and human interference with the nitrogen cycle), have already been exceeded.
Nature 2012
Anthropocene Review 2014
The Anthropocene Review 2023
Figure 1. Map of Searsville Lake and the San Francisquito Creek Watershed. Green outline (a) = extent of Searsville in 1892 CE; A = coring location for JRBP2018-VC01A; B = coring location for JRBP2018-VC01B. Blue shaded polygon (b) = San Francisquito watershed; green shaded polygon = Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve; blue lines = creeks. (Map prepared by Trevor Hébert, JRBP). Reproduced in color in online version.
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Stanford University
The Stanford University School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences
The School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences
The School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences (formerly the School of Earth Sciences) lists courses under the subject code EARTH on the Stanford Bulletin’s ExploreCourses web site. Courses offered by the School’s departments and inter-departmental programs are linked on their separate sections, and are available at the ExploreCourses web site.
The School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences includes the departments of Geological Sciences, Geophysics, Energy Resources Engineering, and Earth System Science; and three interdisciplinary programs: the Earth Systems undergraduate B.S. and coterminal M.A. and M.S. programs, the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) with Ph.D. and joint M.S, and the Sustainability and Science Practice Program with coterminal M.A. and M.S. programs.
The aims of the school and its programs are:
to prepare students for careers in the fields of agricultural science and policy, biogeochemistry, climate science, energy resource engineering, environmental science and policy, environmental communications, geology, geobiology, geochemistry, geomechanics, geophysics, geostatistics, sustainability science, hydrogeology, land science, oceanography, paleontology, petroleum engineering, and petroleum geology;
to conduct disciplinary and interdisciplinary research on a range of questions related to Earth, its resources and its environment;
to provide opportunities for Stanford undergraduate and graduate students to learn about the planet’s history, to understand the energy and resource bases that support humanity, to address the geological and geophysical, and human-caused hazards that affect human societies, and to understand the challenges and develop solutions related to environment and sustainability.
To accomplish these objectives, the school offers a variety of programs adaptable to the needs of the individual student:
four-year undergraduate programs leading to the degree of Bachelor of Science (B.S.)
five-year programs leading to the coterminal Bachelor of Science and Master of Science (M.S.)
five-year programs leading to the coterminal Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts (M.A.)
graduate programs offering the degrees of Master of Science, Engineer, and Doctor of Philosophy.
Details of individual degree programs are found in the section for each department or program.
Undergraduate Programs in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences
Any undergraduate admitted to the University may declare a major in one of the school’s departments or the Earth Systems Program by contacting the appropriate department or program office.
Requirements for the B.S. degree are listed in each department or program section. Departmental academic advisers work with students to define a career or academic goal and assure that the student’s curricular choices are appropriate to the pursuit of that goal. Advisers can help devise a sensible and enjoyable course of study that meets degree requirements and provides the student with opportunities to experience advanced courses, seminars, and research projects. To maximize such opportunities, students are encouraged to complete basic science and mathematics courses in high school or during their freshman year.
Coterminal Master’s Degrees in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences
The Stanford coterminal degree program enables an undergraduate to embark on an integrated program of study leading to the master’s degree before requirements for the bachelor’s degree have been completed. This may result in more expeditious progress towards the advanced degree than would otherwise be possible, making the program especially important to Earth scientists because the master’s degree provides an excellent basis for entry into the profession. The coterminal plan permits students to apply for admission to a master’s program after earning 120 units, completion of six non-summer quarters, and declaration of an undergraduate major, but no later than the quarter prior to the expected completion of the undergraduate degree.
The student may meet the degree requirements in the more advantageous of the following two ways: by first completing the 180 units required for the B.S. degree and then completing the three quarters required for the M.S. or the M.A. degree; or by completing a total of 15 quarters during which the requirements for the two degrees are completed concurrently. In either case, the student has the option of receiving the B.S. degree upon meeting all the B.S. requirements or of receiving both degrees at the end of the coterminal program.
Students earn degrees in the same department or program, in two different departments, or even in different schools; for example, a B.S. in Physics and an M.S. in Geological Sciences. Students are encouraged to discuss the coterminal program with their advisers during their junior year. Additional information is available in the individual department offices.
University requirements for the coterminal master’s degree are described in the “Coterminal Master’s Program” section. University requirements for the master’s degree are described in the “Graduate Degrees” section of this bulletin.
Graduate Programs in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences
Admission to the Graduate Program
A student who wishes to enroll for graduate work in the school must be qualified for graduate standing in the University and also must be accepted by one of the school’s four departments or the E-IPER Ph.D. program. One requirement for admission is submission of scores on the verbal and quantitative sections of the Graduate Record Exam. Admission to one department of the school does not guarantee admission to other departments.
Faculty Adviser
Upon entering a graduate program, the student should report to the head of the department or program who arranges with a member of the faculty to act as the student’s adviser. Alternatively, in several of the departments, advisers are established through student-faculty discussions prior to admission. The student, in consultation with the adviser(s), then arranges a course of study for the first quarter and ultimately develops a complete plan of study for the degree sought.
Financial Aid
Detailed information on scholarships, fellowships, and research grants is available from the school’s individual departments and programs.
Stanford University campus
Leland and Jane Stanford founded Stanford University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.
Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.
The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 126 NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 24 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals including 139 gold medals.
As of October 2020, 84 Nobel laureates, 28 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.
Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.
Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.
Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.
Land
Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.
Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.
Non-central campus
Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.
On the founding grant:
Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.
<https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land.
Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.
Off the founding grant:
Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.
Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession. In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.
The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.
China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University(CN) (KIAA-PKU).
Administration and organization
Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually.[83] A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).
The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. Persis Drell became the 13th provost in February 2017.
As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.
The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.
Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.
Endowment and donations
The university’s endowment, managed by the Stanford Management Company, was valued at $27.7 billion as of August 31, 2019. Payouts from the Stanford endowment covered approximately 21.8% of university expenses in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University, the University of Texas System, and Yale University had larger endowments than Stanford.
In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the Stanford Challenge, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported 366 new fellowships for graduate students, 139 new endowed chairs for faculty, and 38 new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.
Research centers and institutes
DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Center for Ocean Solutions
Together with UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.
Discoveries and innovation
Natural sciences
Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.
Computer and applied sciences
ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.
Internet—Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.
Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.
Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.
Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.
RISC – ARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and University of California- Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as the SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.
SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.
Businesses and entrepreneurship
Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.
The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.
Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.
Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:
Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.[163]
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).
Student body
Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students as of the 2019–2020 school year. Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%.
Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master’s degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year. The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%. The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.
As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.
Athletics
As of 2016 Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.
Its traditional sports rival is the University of California, Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.
Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 126 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won 522 individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 270 Olympic medals total, 139 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Traditions
The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.
Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.
Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs. UC Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).
“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.
Award laureates and scholars
Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:
19 Nobel Prize laureates (as of October 2020, 85 affiliates in total)
171 members of the National Academy of Sciences
109 members of National Academy of Engineering
76 members of National Academy of Medicine
288 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
19 recipients of the National Medal of Science
1 recipient of the National Medal of Technology
4 recipients of the National Humanities Medal
49 members of American Philosophical Society
56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
4 Pulitzer Prize winners
31 MacArthur Fellows
4 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
2 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
14 AAAI fellows
2 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners
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