Martha Cary “Missy” Eppes transformed our understanding of processes operating beneath our feet and built bridges between communities. Her groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research links rock fracture mechanics and surface processes. Her early career was rooted in soil geomorphology. In the past decade or so, the wide arc of her research has changed how we think about rock cracking. Back in the day, I, and most geomorphology undergraduates, was taught that great temperature ranges and/or water expansion in preexisting cracks were required to fracture rocks, leading to the breakdown of rock, and by extension, the mechanisms underlying mineral-soil production. Missy and her collaborators discovered that physical weathering in virtually all rock types progresses by moisture (climate)-dependent subcritical fracturing under almost all of Earth’s surface and near-surface environmental conditions. I doubt it was her goal to create new, better textbook explanations when setting out on this path. Rather, my sense is that her fearless intellectual curiosity guides the questions she asks and her research agenda. In creating a new community of scientists and engineers who care about cracking, she has proven herself to be a generous contributor, planner, and research matchmaker. When finding a chasm, she creates community. Although she has been recognized for her research contributions, including recently receiving the Geological Society of America’s Kirk Bryan Award, this Williams Award also acknowledges the (mostly invisible) service done to help the scientific enterprise run smoothly and efficiently and expand opportunities for others. Missy spends countless hours sharing what she has learned over years by slow trial and error to kick-start others’ research and saves other people’s time and resources. Her substantial service, teaching, and mentoring contributions include a myriad of efforts for the scientific community, society, students, and women and minoritized individuals in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields—too many to list here. I am so pleased Missy was named the 2022 Marguerite T. Williams awardee. She embodies the AGU of the future—an organization of scientist-weavers, tying communities and knitting ideas and creating something beautiful in the process. —Jane Willenbring, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.

Jane Willenbring’s intuition regarding my matchmaking inclinations is accurate, because I come by it honestly. Frank and Frankie Eppes were enormous people pleasers, in the highest and best use of that term—my father an ever vigilant liaison between people and what brought them joy, and my mother a firm believer in constantly attending to life’s beauty so that it could be leveraged to make others feel at ease. These are values I cherish and to which I aspire. So just as my obsession with rock fracture has indeed been driven by passionate curiosity, it has been equally driven by delight in presenting knowledge gaps to people whose company I quite enjoy and whose own expertise serves to fill those voids. I chuckle that growing fissures are the tie that binds so many friends together: rock physicists, engineers, climatologists, geographers, stone preservationists, artists, microbiologists, computer scientists, planetary geologists, and, of course, my entire Earth surface processes family. The science also benefits from this diversity. A structural geologist sent me to fracture mechanics to better understand competing (synergistic!) forces driving rock fracture. There, I stumbled upon rock physicists who were, apologetically in their own deep-crust literature, conducting experiments at 1 atmosphere and 20°C. When my fellow geomorphologists suggested I prove the efficacy of climate-dependent subcritical stresses by cracking rocks in the lab, I enthusiastically responded that those experiments were already complete! So, in effect, my “big idea” had been at the party the whole time. I just translated an invitation for her to join the dance floor and made a happy announcement to the crowd! Matchmaking also broadens perceptions of research unexpectedly. An artist pointed out: “Missy, the world thinks of climate change as melting glaciers and rising seas. You are saying it will affect us in ways we have never thought of, down to the smallest cracks in our bedrock. That is profound.” A dancer proposed that we fluidly exchange the words “person” and “rock”; there is no rock on Earth that does not have cracks—ever evolving defects caused by the greatest, and least, of forces. These fractures alter the very nature of the rock itself, influencing her tendency to break or heal, her ability to withstand great stresses, and her capacity to retain precious resources. Try to name a single event in Earth’s history not connected in some way to cracks. Please email me if you think of one. —Martha Cary (Missy) Eppes, University of North Carolina at Charlotte