I always get a little annoyed when articles don't just get to the point (what are endoterrestrials and talking only about them) instead of making me feel like I'm reading a novel. Thanks to your post, though, now I think I understand that it's to appeal to a wider audience (wonder if it works), and maybe to get some more appreciation or admiration for the people involved.
>I always get a little annoyed when articles don't just get to the point (what are endoterrestrials and talking only about them) instead of making me feel like I'm reading a novel.
That's like 80% of US long form journalism. Everything has to fit into a storytelling narrative and reported like you're reading some biography.
I would hope so.
She's a geobiologist. Most people are going to visualize a geobiologist as some pasty, probably fat, person in a lab coat with a microscope deep inside some fluorescent lighted big building doing boring things with rocks (the geo part) that are covered with moss, fungus, or animal shit (the bio part).
The article starts her out driving a "Land Cruiser across the bumpy, rock-strewn floor of Wadi Lawayni, a broad, arid valley that cuts through the mountains of Oman". So right off the bat, no lab and an exotic location in a general region of the world that is troubled.
Later, the section you quoted implie that this sort of thing is common for her. She doesn't just occasionally get out of the lab to far flung corners of the world. The visualization people have at this point is no longer "fat pasty lab kind of scientist".
The kind of scientist they are visualizing at that point is Indiana Jones.
Look at some of the other locations they describe her working at after the above description. Deep undersea. On a thin crust on top of an active lava flow. That expands on the scope implied by the physical description, cementing the image.