Lower Hutt

"It's going to make a huge difference," says Laura Wallace, a geodetic scientist at GNS Science in Lower Hutt, New Zealand.

Big break: As a student at the Chilton Saint James School, a private all-girls school in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, she was recognized for her precocious acting talent.

“It’s a major earthquake and tsunami hazard to the largest population centres, and it’s not very well understood,” says Laura Wallace, a geophysicist at the GNS Science research institute in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, and co-chief scientist of the upcoming cruise.

The same bacteria almost certainly were present in the shale before the avalanche, but heat from the slide erased the DNA signal of the existing microorganisms, says co-author Mauri McSaveney, an emeritus engineering geomorphologist at GNS Science in Lower Hutt, New Zealand.

"They're pretty widespread and a really fundamental part of how faults work," says Laura Wallace, a geophysicist at the University of Texas in Austin and the research company GNS Science in Lower Hutt, New Zealand.