Anna Jonas Stose

Early life Anna was the only child to George and Mary Hughes Gilbert Jonas and grew up in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Her parents ran a family-owned business called the Williamstown Glass Company where she worked during World War I as a cashier. and would end up working by her side on the Appalachian Mountains.

Education Anna received formal education from Bryn Mawr College on the 1982 Virginia State Geological map, which was not accepted in the geological community at the time, but with today's enhanced understandings and technology, we have realized her theories and findings were ultimately correct, and her discoveries are still used in science today.

Findings from the Appalachian Mountains Throughout her research over the Appalachian Mountains, Anna worked alongside her husband George W. Stose, and many of their findings were published together. Crystalline rock makes up the southern Appalachian Mountains and was mobile during the Precambrian and again during the Paleozoic era. During this time, there was intense crustal folding and intrusion to the rock formation. Once the crust folding ceased, granite rock carved through the inner part of the mountain range.

Publications Anna's publications spanned sixty years. In 1905, she published her first paper, it focused on the rocks of the crystalline Appalachians. In 1965, she published her last paper that described the cataloging of lithologies, and the potential origins of 18th-century tombstones in old cemeteries located in Cape May County, New Jersey. In her last paper she also noted that the correlation of certain rocks dated back to Early Paleozoic rocks. Anna was the first person to interpret the Brevard Zone rocks as having formed along a thrust fault. Afterwards, contrary to Stose's interpretation, other geologists saw the Brevard Zone was actually the trace of a large strike-slip fault. For many years, this idea obtained widespread acceptance, but at the present time, Stose's explanation is believed to be more accurate.

In a book called Studies of Appalachian Geology: Central and Southern, which was published in 1970 and edited by George Fisher, Stose is the geologist with the most listings in the author index. Stose and her husband, George Stose, compiled county wide reports such as the "New Holland quadrangle" (Jonas and Stose, 1926), "Geology and Mineral Resources of York County" (Stose and Jonas, 1939), "Middletowne quadrangle" (Stose and Jonas, 1933). These reports laid the foundation for southeastern Pennsylvanian geology. In 1944, the couple wrote a report on the Geology of the Hanover-York District (published by the U.S. Geological Survey). This is their only work that is formally listed as Stose and Stose, and is still acknowledged by today's geologists due to the advanced explanations and illustrations contained within the publication.

Later life Anna spent time working at the American Museum of Natural History throughout 1916 and 1917, she then worked as a geologist for the Maryland and Pennsylvania Geological Surveys between 1919 and 1937. She worked as a geologist two more times, firstly for the Virginia Geological Survey from 1926 to 1945, and secondly with the U.S. Geological Survey from 1930 until her retirement in 1954. Anna later died on October 27, 1974, due to a stroke, while George Stose died back in 1960. Her work is still used today as a tribute of her contributions to field of geology in a time when women were not recognized.