Sometimes, students and colleagues at conferences ask me how a farm girl from rural Kansas grew up to study shipwrecks. It's a reasonable question, but to answer it requires going back in time a little—first a generation, then a geological era. Despite having also grown up on that same farm, my father was a Seabee in the US Navy, and given that I was born on a Virginia Navy base before moving back to my family's homestead in Kansas as a toddler, I spent the first couple years of my life breathing salty air. Maybe this natal exposure to oceanic natrium even led me back to the shores of the Atlantic, on either side of which I’ve been living for the last several years.

But despite all this skirting of the Atlantic, there's also an undeniable—if latent—oceanic force deep within the prairie. This force silently swells up from the vast flatness of the limestone. Riddled with monstrous fossils, the calcareous limestone was formed in the Mesozoic era when Kansas was an inland sea. Where there once was saltwater and unimaginable creatures in it, there now grow tall grasses and grains that, while concealing more imaginable creatures, undulate against a seemingly infinite horizon. In Kansas, uncannily, the ancient sea is ever-present.