Scientific Research
During Stopes's time at Manchester, she studied coal, coal balls, and the collection of Glossopteris (seed ferns). This was an attempt to prove the theory of Eduard Suess concerning the existence of Gondwanaland or Pangaea.
A chance meeting with Robert Falcon Scott (Scott of the Antarctic) during one of his fund-raising lectures in 1904 brought a possibility of proving Suess's theory. Stopes's passion to prove Suess's theory led her to discuss with Scott the possibility of joining his next expedition to Antarctica. She failed to join the expedition, but Scott promised to bring back samples of fossils to provide confirmatory evidence for the theory. (The interior of Antarctica, being perpetually below 0°C, is not suitable for life, and the existence of fossils can be taken as providing inferential evidence of major changes in biological conditions in that region during geologic time.) Although Scott died during the expedition (1912), his corpse was found; and located near the bodies of him and his companions were fossils from the Queen Maud Mountains that did indeed provide this evidence.
In 1907 she went to Japan on a scientific mission, spending a year and a half at the Imperial University, Tokyo, exploring for fossil plants in coal mines on the island of Hokkaido. She published her Japanese experiences in the form of a diary, called Journal from Japan: a daily record of life as seen by a scientist, in 1910.
In 1910 Stopes was commissioned to date a geological structure in New Brunswick, Canada, known as the Fern Ledges, due to a heated debate concerning the age of the Ledges. Canadian scholars were divided between dating the Ledges to the Devonian age and the Pennsylvanian period. Stopes arrived in North America before Christmas to start her research and on 29 December she attended a dinner in St. Louis, Missouri, where she met Reginald Ruggles Gates. (They became engaged two days later.) Starting in earnest in February 1911, she made geological excursions and visited geological collections in museums, before shipping specimens back to England for further investigation. Married in March and back in England on 1 April with her new husband, she continued her research, dispatching her results in mid 1912, finding for the Pennsylvanian period of the Carboniferous.
During the First World War she was engaged in various studies of coal for the British government, which culminated in the writing of a Monograph on the constitution of coal with R.V. Wheeler in 1918. However, due to the success of work in marriage issues and birth control, her scholarly work began to flag and her last scientific publications were in 1923.
Read more about this topic: Marie Stopes
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