Kuwanna Dyer-Pietras didn’t plan to become a geologist. She wanted to be a storm chaser.
After watching Twister in the mid-1990s, she enrolled at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with a loose plan: get a geology degree, transfer to Reno for a meteorology program, and end up tracking tornadoes for a living. But the moment she sat in her first geology class, that plan evaporated.
“I absolutely fell in love with the subject,” she said, “and just never left.”…