Marguerite Thomas is considered to be the first African-American woman to obtain a doctorate in geology. The African-American professor and biologist Ernest Everett, who decided to sponsor and direct the scientific careers of two girls of colour, Roger Arliner (the first African-American doctor in Zoology) and Marguerite Thomas, the first African-American to obtain a doctorate in Geology, played a decisive role in this.
She was a contemporary of scientists such as Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, or Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring."
Geology was a predominantly male field of work, but from the end of the 19th century a group of women dedicated their lives to it, such as Katia Kraft, who developed her career as a volcano researcher, taking her to travel the world in search of dangerous volcanic eruptions. Etheldred Benett, an expert in fossils, who was admitted in 1836 as a member of the Imperial Society of Natural History in Moscow, thinking, given his name, that he was "an Englishman expert in fossils". When it was discovered that it was a woman, it almost created an international problem. We can also mention Dorothea Bate, who traveled alone to remote sites and, when she needed help, hired local men as guides and interpreters. Between 1901 and 1911, she explored the mountainous areas of Crete, Cyprus and the Balearic Islands, finding in the first two, fossils of pygmy elephants and hippopotamuses and in Mallorca, the Myotragus balearicus, or María Gordón, who explained how the mountains of South Tyrol, in the Alps, had been formed. All of them were pioneers and thanks to their work, we have a better knowledge of planet Earth.