Located 75 minutes from Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Yosemite – the “Three Sisters” as Dr. Robert B. Lull calls them – Fresno sits in the lush agricultural land in between and serves as a gateway to three iconic national parks.
The United States is home to 63 national parks, attracting about 300 million visitors each year to experience their natural wonders. Beyond the beauty, the unspoiled and protected land provides scientists with pristine ecosystems for experimental controls and unique geology supporting rare lifeforms.
Lull’s new book, “Our Natural Lab,” published by Oxford University Press, reveals these parks are the birthplaces of some of the most significant scientific discoveries in human history.
The book highlights how samples taken in Yosemite and Olympic national parks built climate science’s famous Keeling Curve, demonstrating increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. Other examples include how findings at Pinnacles and Mauna Loa led to an understanding of plate tectonics, how Lassen’s volcanic mud may reveal secrets of life’s origin and how a Channel Islands canyon yielded some of the continent’s oldest human bones.
As Lull’s book shows, every time we breathe air free of lead, enjoy microbe-based meat substitutes or dairy-free cream cheese, we benefit from discoveries made deep within U.S. national parks.
“What’s crystal clear from these stories is that national parks aren’t just places where routine science occurs, but also essential settings for some of science’s most important breakthroughs over the last 150 years,” sLull said.
Lull said the idea for the book started when he was filling in for a professor on sabbatical to teach the “Revolutions in Natural and Social Sciences” course for Smittcamp Family Honors College students at Fresno State. Since his background is in media and communication, he decided to reframe the course using science and nature documentaries.
One episode he showed told the story of geochemist Clair Patterson, who calculated the age of the Earth by measuring how long it takes radioactive uranium to decay into lead.
“I noticed as Neil deGrasse Tyson was telling this story on ‘Cosmos,’ he talked about how they went into the mountains, and they showed a paper on the screen during this particular episode,” Lull said. “It sounded interesting, so I looked it up, found that the research took place in Lassen Volcanic National Park, and was intrigued.”
Lull looked up the 1960s study measuring lead-laced snow at Lassen Volcanic National Park, just six hours north of Fresno State. He later found that Patterson had established a field station in Thompson Canyon, a remote location in northeast Yosemite National Park. The lab ran for 25 years to sample how much lead came from natural sources.
“They measured the rock as the baseline, but they kept going back measuring the little meadow creatures, the grass. They’d measure the snow when it snowed. They measured everything, and the story was always the same. There’s way too much lead here,” Lull said. “There’s no road anywhere near here, so it’s floating in the air and it’s contaminating the natural environment.”
Patterson’s work revealed the Earth is 4.55 billion years old, a number that has held since 1956 after decades of varied estimates. He also found that the entire planet was contaminated with lead, leading the Environmental Protection Agency to ban leaded fuels for highway vehicles in 1996.
While Lull was fascinated with the national parks’ role in the study, it was not until the pandemic when media outlets widely reported that PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests used to diagnose COVID-19 stemmed from a 1966 discovery by microbiologist Thomas Brock. He found a heat-loving bacterium called Thermus aquaticus living in Mushroom Spring in Yellowstone National Park. That heat resistance meant scientists could cycle temperatures repeatedly to amplify DNA and RNA fragments.
“We’ve got the lead story here, and we’ve got the PCR story here,” Lull said. “These were directly relevant to human health and science, and so I kept pulling on that [thread] and the book came out of that.”
Lull hopes “Our Natural Lab” will inspire his students’ curiosity, deepen the local appreciation of the national parks in the Valley’s backyard and enlighten readers to the scientific importance that hides within the natural beauty of the public lands.
“Anything [the book] can do to cultivate more of a connection to the natural world locally – as granular a level as my students, and as wide a level as the whole region – that’s a major goal of mine,” Lull said.
Although thoroughly researched with hundreds of citations, the book features the accessible, narrative flow of a documentary and is intended to be enjoyed by science and nature lovers alike, Lull said.
By revealing the world-changing breakthroughs that occurred in the “Three Sisters” – Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon – Lull hopes to inspire his students and Valley residents to explore the world-class natural laboratories right in their backyard.
As he tells his students at the end of every class, “Put your phone down, go touch grass.”
