Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Volcanoes Revisited: Part 1 - Volcanologist Dr. Diana Roman

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Volcanoes Revisited: Part 1 - Volcanologist Dr. Diana Roman · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, Christopher Balcuis.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Balcuis.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_03: Would you stop would you stop doing that?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I'm gonna hang up on you every time you do that.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I know, but you know why I do it is because I you know I drive a lot in Pennsylvania back and forth every week.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And whenever I call you, I've got my phone, you know, I've got one of those like car-mounted magnet holders, so I just slap my phone, it's got the magnet on the back, slap it up there so I can see GPS.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I my car like Bluetooth button takes forever for Siri to communicate.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I'm driving, I just press the button on my phone and I say, call Chris Bahuis, or text Chris Balhuis.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Siri says, What would you like to say to Christopher Balhuis?
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: So do you have to say it that way?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: You can't say bullheis.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because I have other yeah, I have other Chris's in my phone that sometimes it gets confused with.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I have to be really explicit with Siri.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's great.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_03: So I just got one of those things, right?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: Those the devices that you know just you just got a smartphone?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, no.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_03: I oh my god.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: No, I got the I have the smartphone, but I have the device that you put up on there, you know?
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: And my son was home for Thanksgiving, and he looked at that and he's like, seriously, Dad?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_03: You are so old.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, what?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_03: What the it's just convenient.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's so convenient.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Justin, oh my goodness.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_03: You are now old.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the old apparently.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_03: I don't get it.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's convenient, it's good to have.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: I don't understand.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: I don't understand.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: So good.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's so good.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we got him on all of our vehicles.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I felt so insulted.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that isn't so not that not that I've ever been afraid of being old, but like really that's what the criteria is for being old, is you have one of those iPhone holders.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: So whatever.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to all right, Chris.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's enough of nonsense.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we're on holiday break.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: I guess that's maybe why we're full of nonsense right now, is we're taking a little break from recording uh new episodes for a little while here over the holiday season.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's right.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, we had a lot of discussions about this.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: What were we gonna do?
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: And that was a really cool thing to look back, Jesse, at the almost three years of stuff that we have put out.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: And it is uh like I was amazed.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: What do you think?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_03: Were you did it hit you the same way?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: Like, oh my gosh.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was kind of fun.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was kind of fun, and it was also kind of funny because you know, I I think people have tuned into this now that we often debate what we're gonna do.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, we also came out of two very different ideas about what to do here of different themes to put together.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: So talking about that, and I was I was talking to my kids about my students, I'm sorry, about Camp Geo and how uh you know, like it's hey, listen, if you want to do this because of the content we're covering, do it.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's great.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's got all the images you need and all that, right?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: That go along with the content that you're learning.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_03: And this can be helpful for studying for tests.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: So go ahead.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but we don't get anything out of it.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's free and go ahead, right?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_03: But the thing that uh was really interesting, I described then Planet Geo to them.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I said, We're all over the map, we're doing this, we're doing that, and we have our processes, we have to pitch each other and we have to convince each other.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: And I got pissed as I'm sitting there in front of my students.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, wait a second.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: Like Jesse doesn't he doesn't trust me.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: He like I pitch an idea, he's like, Oh, Chris, you're full of shit.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, wait a what you know, no, that's not the way the process works.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_03: You I need to pitch an idea and you need to just accept it.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's not the way pitching works.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: I know that's what you want it to be, but that's not the way this works.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, goodness, you just want a bunch of yes men around you.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_03: I do.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_03: So anyway, all right.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: We did settle though on my pitch.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna throw that out there.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just a little, just leave that hanging.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna run a series on volcanism.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_03: We have great world-class volcanologists that we've interviewed.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: And then you and I, in the middle of this whole thing, are gonna just give our little rundown of volcanoes.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: So this is gonna be a four-episode release.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_03: Is that right, Jesse?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Four Yeah, that's right.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Four episode re-release.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we're we're going way back to some of our actually our first interview today with Dr.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Diana Roman.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, she's great.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: She's actually changed positions since we, well, not positions really, but titles, since we interviewed her initially.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: She's the H.O.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Wood Chair of Seismology at the Earth and Planets Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington, D.C., where I did my postdoc.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Diana for me is one of these individuals who I just respect her opinion all the time.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like if she was to pitch me an episode topic, Chris, I'd probably accept it and just trust her for with it.
• 4:59
  unknown: Oh gosh.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: That hurts less.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: But no, but seriously, she's she's excellent.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: That hurts less because you compared me to Diana Roman and like, you know, so that's okay.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I I went to her for a lot of career advice when I was a postdoc there and applying to faculty positions and sort of negotiating with Penn State at the startup um package.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so she's just great in all aspects and particularly good in volcanology.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: So she was a professor in the Department of Geology at the University of South Florida.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: She has a PhD, she was also a financial analyst for Barclays Global Investors before her PhD in geology days.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: She's got an undergrad degree from Cornell University and just all around exceptional volcanologist.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm actually really excited to re-release this episode in this interview because it's awesome.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it was one of our early episodes that we did when we first started this podcast, and it was amazing.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: I remember prepping for it.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: I absolutely loved it, and I loved the interview.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and let me interject real quick here.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was an early episode, so our audio is not as good as it is now.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you might hear a bit of audio difference.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a little bit uh we weren't quite as good back then, it turns out.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've learned something along the way uh over the past couple years, which is a good thing, I guess.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it is anyway, but the content remains the same.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely it does.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Very exciting stuff.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: So today is the first of four in our Volcanology re-release, and Dr.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Diana Roman coming at you.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: But before we get to that, Chris, please check out Camp Geo.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: The link is the first thing in the show notes.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really cool, what we're calling conversational textbook for geology.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's everything we teach, Chris and I teach in our geology classes, delivered to you in a sort of a mobile friendly form.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: So check that out.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can follow us on all the social medias at Planet Geocast.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: You can send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail.com.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Go to our website, planetgeocast.com.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: The link is in the show notes.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: There you can support us, you can learn about us, and you can listen to all the past episodes.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_03: And please share our podcast with somebody else that might like it.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: That'd be awesome.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Diana, how are you?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_04: I'm doing great.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_04: Good to see you both.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's great to see you too.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: We are excited to have you here.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Planet Geo.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: So, before we get into the interview, I just want to give a brief introduction to you.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: You are a staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and that is a job title that uh people may not be familiar with, but we'll get to that later on.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: You were a professor at the University of South Florida before joining the Carnegie Institute, and you're a volcanologist.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: You study volcanoes.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: You've published around about 50 papers on volcanoes.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: You've won several awards for your volcanology research, and we're just super excited to talk about volcanoes.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: You also have a really interesting career trajectory.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna get into that at the end of the episode.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Chris, so where are we gonna start?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hey, you want to start getting into some volcanology stuff then?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, let's do it.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do it.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Donna, give us the elevator pitch for your research.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what is the one or two sentence pitch to convince me that this is interesting?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_04: Well, so I study how volcanoes work, and this is really important because volcanic eruptions affect all of us, whether we know it or not.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_04: They might affect you as you're flying in an airplane, they might affect the climate we live in.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_04: So it's really important to understand A, how they work, and B, what they're likely to do on a range of timescales.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_04: So my research is basically focused on understanding not only how eruptions happen, but also what's going on under the ground in between eruptions.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_04: And that turns out to actually be very interesting and very important.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: So Diana, can you tell us what you do?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_03: What do you actually do on a day-to-day basis?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_04: So the main thing I look at is actually seismic data.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_04: So earthquakes.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Is that what when you when you say seismic data, this is just earthquake data?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what what are we talking about with seismic data?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_04: So seismic just means vibrations in the ground.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_04: And that can be, you know, man-made.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_04: Traffic produces seismicity, nuclear explosions produces seismicity, but natural processes, which is what we tend to think of first, produce seismicity, and volcanoes produce seismicity.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_04: So that's my main tool of looking at how volcanoes work.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_04: So what I actually look at are tiny, tiny earthquakes.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_04: You certainly wouldn't be able to feel them even if you were standing right on the volcano, but my instruments can record them in quite a lot of detail.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_03: So you use seismometers then, and you put them in buckets, if I understand correctly, and you dig a hole in the ground, right?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I'm a good depot.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_03: Tell us about that.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_04: I'm a good Home Depot customer.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_03: So actually, Diana, I've seen pictures of you in a hole.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_04: Usually upside down in a hole somewhere.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_04: But um, we got we got new instruments, so we don't need the buckets anymore.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_04: It's actually been fabulous.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, tell us about that.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_04: So, what we used to have to make little vaults for our instruments in the ground.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_04: So, we'd have to dig a hole and pour some concrete, let it set, come back, get a day later, and then make a little house for the instrument where we basically take a 10-gallon bucket from Home Depot, you know, those orange buckets, and we f we just flip it upside down and we set our instrument on the concrete, we set the bucket on top of the instrument, and then we we bury the whole thing.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: The concrete is just to stabilize the instrument, then?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_04: Is that the Yeah, we didn't want to put it in the dirt, and it kind of gives it a little bit of better coupling.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, again, we're trying to look at tiny, tiny vibrations.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_04: So it just kind of helps the instrument physically connect to the ground a bit better.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: So do you how many pounds of concrete are we talking about here?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_04: Um, not just a lot of things.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Chris wants a sazmomer in his backyard.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_03: He's trying to budget it out here.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: Angle here, Diana.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: I will lug the concrete up the mountain for you.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_04: Well, the flip side.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_03: You just have to take me with you.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_04: The flip slight.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um I I always told my grad students, like, okay, at least you have practical skills, you know how to mix concrete if the whole science career doesn't work out.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_04: But you know, it's not a whole lot.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_04: We're maybe one bag's worth, but usually like a 40-pound bag?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my gosh.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have to get into training there, Christopher.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm good to go.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_04: We're we're done with the concrete.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's uh so what is the new what's the new stuff like then?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: What do you what happened?
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it sounds really simple, but basically we can just bury them now.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_04: Um they come in much better cases that can withstand being stuck straight in the dirt.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_04: And so we just stick them right in the ground and like a like a flower bulb, and we pack them in and that's it.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_03: Does each one measure three senses of motion then?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_04: Most of them do, yeah.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_04: Um there are still some that only measure one, but it's really important for us to get those three.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Th the three senses of motion.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: What are we talking about here?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_04: Up, down, left, right, up, down, east, west, and north-south.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, there's basically just three, three, three that are perpendicular to each other.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_04: And from from that we can resolve anything.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: We can just the signal around.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_03: So when you say tiny, tiny, how tiny are we talking about?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_04: Well, my instruments can measure things that have a negative magnitude down to maybe negative magnitude one.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_04: And that sounds a little counterintuitive.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_04: That's because the magnitude scales are calibrated for larger earthquakes and so and for earlier generations of instruments.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Negative magnitude.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I must admit, I've never heard of this.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Negative.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, what is this in movement, in like real movement?
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_04: We can we can do that.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_04: Um, again, it's you know, you wouldn't be able to see it if you were watching the ground very closely.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's really something that only the instrument can pick up.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_04: One of my colleagues at one point, we calculated the volume of energy in all of the earthquakes, and he said that's actually about one Snickers bar's worth of energy.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great calibration point.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so this is where you get you get your data from these seismometers.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: You put them around a volcano.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what are you doing with this data?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_04: Well, so we're looking for earthquakes.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_04: So we basically record continuous data, and there aren't earthquakes necessarily happening all the time.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_04: So one of the major first steps, and actually a lot of my time goes into pulling those events out of this continuous signal.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_04: So first I have to find the earthquakes in this stream of noise, continuous stream of noise, and then I have to measure them.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_04: And so when did they arrive on different instruments?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_04: You know, did they push the ground up or down first?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_04: These are the sorts of things that we actually look for in the data.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the questions are okay, we're using our earthquakes around volcanoes, and what do they tell us?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell Well, so actually, it's surprisingly simple.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_04: One of the biggest things we want to know is how many of them are there, how fast are they occurring?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_04: So one of the first things we always do is we just analyze the continuous data and we want to try to count when are the earthquakes happening and how many per hour or how many per day.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And what numbers are we talking about?
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're talking about like a hundred an hour, are you talking about like two an hour?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it depends on what the volcano is up to.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_04: Some volcanoes are very quiet.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_04: Some volcanoes have a lot of seismicity in their background states when they start to move into eruption.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_04: We see that the number of earthquakes goes up and also the the nature of the earthquakes changes.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_04: So that's actually a lot of what I try to study and understand.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_04: So we try to look at things like where are they located?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_04: So are they, you know, right under the surface or are they a few miles down?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_04: Look at how big they are.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_04: So again, what is their magnitude?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_04: And we try to add up that you know that energy and figure out you know how much is being released.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_04: We look at again things like how is the volcano pushing on the ground?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_04: Is it pushing in a direction that's sort of suggests that there's maybe some magma being intruded somewhere?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_04: We can see that in the earthquakes.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you're getting this kind of view, using it to get a view underneath the earth and see what stuff is moving around and when it might potentially erupt, if at all.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we're trying to just figure out how the ground is breaking as magma moves through it.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_03: So uh, Diana, I've heard you talk before about the pitch of a volcano, like the noise.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: Can you talk a little bit about that?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_04: So another thing that we look at is basically what is the frequency content of a little wiggle that represents an earthquake.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_04: And so by frequency, which I'm gonna use interchangeably with pitch here, we just mean like how frequent are the waves coming across the instrument.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_04: So how rapidly is the ground vibrating?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_04: And and one of the neat things about volcanoes is that earthquakes from volcanic processes have a pretty big range in frequency or pitch, and that it's actually meaningful to us.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_04: So that's one of the reasons that volcanologists are very focused on understanding, you know, is this a high frequency earthquake or is this a low frequency earthquake?
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_04: Where is the energy?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_04: Where are the strongest vibrations in kind of a frequency spectrum?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I think I remember this talk, Dana.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: You had a really beautiful analogy for high frequency and low frequency with a comparison to sort of vocalists.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: So can you can you run us through that again?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_04: By high frequency, I mean like if you're listening to Mariah Carey, very high-pitched soprano.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_04: By low frequency, I mean very white, so very low-pitched, you know, bass voice.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, it's very analogous to human speech or human singing.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: And does each volcano have like a specific range or does it vary, you know, volcano to volcano?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, do volcanoes in Hawaii, do they have the same are they very white or I mean every every volcano has has the ability to sing like Mariah or sing like Barry, but what what we tend to see is the sequence.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_04: So most volcanoes in their background will be kind of doing the soprano thing.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_04: We tend to hear much higher pitched or see much higher frequency earthquakes.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_04: And then as we move closer to eruption, Barry White shows up and starts singing.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_04: And so that's that's not, you know, and this is one of the things that I I've studied quite a bit.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_04: Is this really a consistent pattern?
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_04: But it's something that, you know, we kind of have as a paradigm that when Barry White shows up, you start getting a little interested because that might mean that you're getting into something uh that might culminate in an eruption.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: That's really interesting.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_03: Do you also try to do you try to understand why low frequency Barry White shows up means it's you know, we're getting down to business now.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_03: Do you try to understand why that happens?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_04: So a lot of research in my subfield of volcano seismology is what are the processes mechanically that are causing these lower frequency events?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_04: And we have a lot of ideas, a lot of arguments, but most of the ideas really revolve around moving a fluid through rocks.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_04: So it's it's kind of analogous to like blowing air through an organ pipe.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_04: We tend to set up these lower frequency vibrations.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_04: So we're still not sure the exact mechanics, and it probably varies from volcano to volcano, but we we think we have a general concept, but understanding that.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um So do you think it's degassing?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_03: That is that what's driving this then?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_04: Or that's that's pretty much the primary understanding is that what's happening is you're starting to get magma to a point where it's losing a lot of gas.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_04: That gas is moving through the rock and setting up these vibrations.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I guess that this brings up a question of, you know, during an eruption, there must be like lots of earthquakes going on.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: And in the in the lead up to the eruption, presumably a lot of eruptions going on as well.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: But what's happening when there's not an eruption?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what's the background stuff?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a lot of stuff to interrogate in there?
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it really depends, again, on the volcano.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_04: Every one of them has they're all special snowflakes.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_04: They all have they all have a personality.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_05: There we go.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_05: I love that.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_04: And actually, I mean, a a huge question in my field right now is trying to understand A, what controls that personality, and B, how can we kind of move beyond that personality to find common processes?
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_04: It's actually a really challenging thing.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: On that note of comparing volcanoes to one another, when I was at Carnegie, at least you were using some AI algorithms and some voice recognition kind of software algorithms to understand volcanoes.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I th I thought again this was like super interesting and really compelling.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: So is that are you still working on that?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a uh a fertile scientific ground for you?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_04: So I need to get back to that.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_04: So again, you know, I talked about how a lot of our energy actually just goes into picking these signals out and characterizing them.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_04: And so, you know, I'm always trying to think about clever ways to do this.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_04: And so this a few years ago, I got Siri on my iPhone and I started thinking about how she worked.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_04: And thought, okay, let's let's see if we can use some speech recognition techniques to pick out these signals.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_04: So there are some signals that volcanoes produce that are important that share a lot of structure with human speech.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_04: So I developed an algorithm that went in and looked at the data to find that.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_04: So I came up with a very simple algorithm to kind of pick things out that had a certain structure to them that looked like human sound.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_04: And it actually worked really well.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_04: And I kind of got away from it, but I've been thinking there are some really other neat developments in speech recognition that I think might solve some problems.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_04: And one that I've been thinking about for a few years is what's called the cocktail party problem.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's get into this.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: This sounds fun.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_04: All right.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_04: So the cocktail party problem is actually What the hell is the cocktail party problem?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: I just sat up, I'm good, let's go.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_02: Chris perked up, I can see him.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, I thought it was, it was getting a little technical.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_04: So this is actually, I think I'm not sure I'm gonna get the field right, but an issue in cognitive neuroscience.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_04: So imagine yourself in a crowded room with you know a lot of different voices talking.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_04: You have two sensors, your ears, and your brain has the ability to use those two sensors and process their input to kind of hone in on a single conversation in a very noisy field of sound.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah, okay.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_04: So there's been a lot of interest over decades of how does your brain do this.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_04: And then recently, something called computational auditory scene analysis, which tries to kind of mimic this coning in on a signal that you can pick out some characteristic like the sound of a particular person's voice and filter all the noise out to get a better, you know, better hearing what they're saying.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, yeah.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm totally no, I'd never thought of this, but I totally know what you're talking about.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: You can kind of pick up on a conversation across the room and ignore the person that's boring right in front of you, I guess, right?
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_04: If you have a little bit of a template in your brain, you can do it.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_04: And so so there's been a lot of work in signal processing and engineering and other disciplines to see how to adapt this as an algorithm.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_04: And it would actually really be if if we could make it work, I think it would be really neat to try to apply to some of the harder things to hear the volcanoes.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: So this would be trying to filter through the Mariah Caries to get at the very white.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Would that be the kind of uh what you're trying to look for?
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_04: No, we actually we still want to hear Mariah, but we want to hear her when she's whispering in uh in a noisy room.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's really interesting that you're pulling things from other fields.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so how does your previous career path in venture capitalism, uh in entrepreneurship, are you using specific tools you developed there in this research?
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, well, so not so much from the the entrepreneurship side of my first career, but actually from the finance side.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_04: So applied economics is basically a lot of calculus and statistics and specifically time series analysis.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_04: So it's like watching the Dow Jones, right?
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_04: Everybody's trying to model it and figure out what it's gonna do next.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that actually It's very fun to watch it go up and down and go up more than down.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_04: Nobody knows.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_04: But actually, a lot of those general concepts, or at least that familiarity with time series analysis tools has translated over, you know, is is still a very common theme.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_04: I'm basically just looking for patterns in time, um, and then we try to model them or understand them.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_04: But first we have to identify the patterns.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_04: So it is actually surprisingly similar, again, in a skill set that I didn't know would transfer over, but that has.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: I guess the big question in my mind is are you a better volcanologist because of your advanced economics background?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know about better, but I think it it's certainly the kind of volcanologist I am.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_04: All scientists have a flavor or a personality to the the way they work, the way they conduct their research.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, I like data, I like large data, I like long time series of data.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_04: And so that I think is my just my style of doing research.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell So, Diana, the kind of the direction that you're going with your research is just to predict what volcanoes are going to do?
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I don't do any forecasting.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_04: So pretty much any country on earth that has potentially active volcanoes has usually a federal agency that's in charge of monitoring the volcanoes and making those forecasts.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_04: I don't do that, but I do work with them very, very closely.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_04: I work with several volcano observatories around the world.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_04: And really what I'm trying to do is develop tools for them or develop understanding that can ultimately help that process of making those forecasts accurately and quickly and in more detail.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: So then how has the research changed since St.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_03: Helens and Mount Pinatubo to now?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_03: How have things changed?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I already told you about my great new seismometers.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_03: That's a game changer, man.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_04: No more concrete in my backpack.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a little disappointed about that because I'm serious about being your Sherpa.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_04: Well, we still have to dig the holes.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, there you go.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_04: No, but I mean, in all seriousness, you know, one of the big things is actually the internet has really, especially in volcano seismology, because data streams of, you know, instruments that are on volcanoes now go straight into a central server that I can look at in real time and I can get data.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_04: And that's been amazing.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of my research is actually from data that I pull straight off the internet.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_04: I never actually set foot on the volcano.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_04: And the other thing that's really changed is that now we're trying to combine observations.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_04: So while I look at seismicity, I have colleagues who look at how the ground deforms or what kind of gas is coming out.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_04: And so I think there's been a lot of progress in looking at those streams of information in parallel and really trying to use these different constraints to actually come up with models, and I mean like numerical models, computational models of volcanoes.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_04: It's very analogous to weather science.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, a hundred years ago people were doing pattern recognition, and now you have multi-physics fluid dynamical models running on supercomputers ingesting data.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_04: That's kind of the direction we're starting to go in.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Let's break that down a minute.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: For weather prediction, you mean that, you know, oh, on the first Tuesday of November last year it rained, so the first Tuesday of this year it might rain again.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Is that the kind of pattern recognition you're you're referring to?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's more like um red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky in morning, sailors take warnings.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_04: So people have recognized that color of the sky was an an indication of what the weather might be like in the next day.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, so pattern recognition and you know, kind of having maybe a conceptual explanation for why, but and it works, right?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_04: But we're still very much in pattern recognition mode.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_04: Like I said, there's a lot more attempts to actually do physical models and really tie it to fundamental physical principles.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_04: But we're, you know, a lot of what we're doing is looking for patterns and trying to explain them with some simple ideas, and we're really trying to move move beyond that.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_04: We need to.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_04: It's exciting though.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: So Dana, what you know, let's let's move into think about the future.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: What's where do you see the future of your field in the next five or ten years?
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: What's the most exciting here?
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_04: Well, today I was just trying to pick uh signals out of continuous noise.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_04: Umsing an algorithm.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_04: But I think doing more but in a more kind of systematic manner, and I think this is something that a lot of us in the field are talking about that really we need to go make our measurements consistently on a lot of volcanoes, you know, different personalities.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_04: So I think we're really trying to get standardized and to not just study an individual volcano, but study a class of volcanoes to understand again how they work as a system.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_04: And I mean, this is still trying to get towards kind of a pattern recognition in data, but at least that will be the basis for us to really make better models, like again, the the weather forecasting analogy, where we can say, okay, these are the conditions for this type of volcano.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_04: Here's some information on its current state, and then we can actually model it forward.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_04: You know, that's probably going to happen over the next few decades, hopefully.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_04: So maybe in my at the end of my career, I'll get to see some real progress.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_04: That's just kind of getting going right now.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_04: It's a great direction.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a question I've always wondered about volcanology and volcano seismology specifically.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, give me like a ballpark estimate of how many seismometers are out there today detecting volcanic noise or volcanic earthquakes, and how many volcanoes are those sitting on?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I yeah, so I've actually been trying to figure this out.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_04: It's not an easy problem because you know it's a lot of different countries.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_04: But I would say the vast majority of Earth's active volcanoes do not have a single seismometer on them and have never had one on them.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_04: But a handful of volcanoes, let's say maybe about 10, have what we'd call sort of Cadillac networks where they have dozens of instruments.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_04: Mount St.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_04: Helens all you know is a very charismatic volcano, so it gets a lot of instruments.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yellowstone, obviously, Kilauea, but you know, there are very interesting volcanoes that in hindsight it's like, oh, we should have had an instrument on that one.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_04: But we have we have no way of, you know, out of the hundreds of volcanoes in the Andes, we have no idea that it was that one that's just been sitting there.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_04: So it's a little bit frustrating because you know we kind of make a decision about where to put the instruments, and um, you know, they tend to go in the places where there's already something known or something active.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Why do we assume that there will be a systematic trend in volcanoes?
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Why isn't everyone super unique?
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_04: So here's here's another good analogy, and and I'm stealing this one from an Icelandic friend and colleague.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_04: But if you think about medicine, so each one of us as individuals, our bodies are very unique, right?
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_04: And they they carry our history, they carry our genetics.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_04: But ultimately, the field of medicine has approaches to sort of see through that individual, you know, to understand it first, characterize it.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_04: What is your family history, what are your um lifestyle behaviors, and then to get through to the the fundamental of the systems, the organs and the disease processes.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_04: So we kind of feel that volcanoes are the same way.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_04: In at the end, you know, we understand the process that causes volcanism on Earth, and it's the same for at least there are a few different types, not that many different ways to make a volcano on Earth.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_04: So we have to be able to see through that um that personality.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_04: We have to be able to do it.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's a really interesting analogy, and uh I think my medical doctor fiance will appreciate that one.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so let's transition here to talking about your career path, Diana, because I know you have a really interesting one.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_03: All right, so Diana, I have to ask, because you know, when I was going through college, there was a clear defining moment when I realized, all right, I love geology.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_03: I'm this, I'm all in.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: You came about this in a different sort of way, but was there ever a defining moment for you?
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_04: Actually, there really wasn't.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_04: I think it was a five-year-long process in total of me sort of starting the idea and then the the moment when I kind of thought, okay, it's complete and I can consider myself a volcanologist.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: Your undergrad, you did you do you have a geoscience degree or undergrad geology degree or something like that?
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_04: No, so um, unlike you, Jesse, I you know, I had two weeks of earth science, I think in the seventh grade.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_03: And I know that's why it really hurts to hear.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_04: That's why I said I would my life would have been maybe very different, but um, you know, so I kind of kind of forgot about it.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_04: I was really into science in high school, but I really grew up thinking I wanted to go into finance.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_04: And so my first degree is from Cornell in applied economics with concentrations in financial economics and entrepreneurship.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: And wow, so okay, so let's get this off the bat.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: You're way smarter than Chris and I.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just start from that baseline when we start the conversation there.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, Diana, that sounds really boring to me.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, I mean, you're a volcanologist, and you know, every biology person wants to swim with the dolphins, and uh every geologist wants to see red lava.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_03: That's our version of swimming with the dolphins, and and you do that on a regular basis.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: So, how in the world do you go from finance into where you are right now?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it was really just a series of coincidences, I think.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_04: So at Cornell, the finance program for undergrads is actually in the School of Um Agriculture.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_04: So Cornell is the land grant.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_04: So, along with my major classes, I actually had to take a lot of science, mostly biology.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_04: But two years before I finished my degree, I realized I had an outstanding science class that I had to take and it couldn't be biology.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_04: So a friend of mine was a geology major and really into volcanoes and made it sound exciting.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_04: So I thought, okay, I'll uh I'll finish off this credit and take a geo class and be done with it.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_04: So that was that was the start.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: So what was the class you took?
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_04: It was actually a field mapping class.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_04: It was a class that was run on Saturday mornings, and we got to go out.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_04: We did, you know, a little bit of stuff in class during the week, but the main part of the class was actually we we went out um in upstate New York on Saturday mornings and kind of looked learned geology in the field, learned how to map, learned how to use a Brunton compass, all that good stuff.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_04: Lots and lots of shale and limestone.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm still though, Diana, I'm still a little confused.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_03: You worked in finance for a while though, right?
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_03: Like how did this how did this happen?
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_03: You're gonna have to give me the long version.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a little slow.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, so I I uh Chris is a lot slower.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: A lot slower.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_04: So I signed up for this thing thinking, okay, I'm just knocking out, you know, another requirement for my degree.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_04: And on day one, I was hooked.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_04: I fell in love.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember kind of walking around campus in a bit of a daze after that first class, thinking, oh no, what am I gonna do?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_04: Because I still loved finance, I still loved entrepreneurship, but this was very unexpected.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_04: And, you know, I was I was uh like a year and a half out from graduating at that point, and I'd spent, you know, Cornell tuition is not cheap.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_04: So I put a lot of time and money into my current then career path.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so you know, I kind of tried to stuff this feeling and interest aside, and um, you know, I thought I still, this is what I've wanted for a long time.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_04: I've worked very hard on it.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_04: I really need to finish this out.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_04: So I, you know, I finished my my major, I graduated a year and a half later.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_04: I managed to stuff in a couple more geology classes here and there.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_04: I'm known as this weird, I was the weird mascot of the geology department, weirdo from finance.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_04: And I wanted to give, you know, working in finance a shot too.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, I felt like, you know, this is a this is a very unexpected turn in my life, and I don't want to do something on a whim.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_04: So let me let me stick with it with what I'm doing and see how this plays out.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_03: And then you just decided to jump?
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_04: So after I graduated, I moved, this was in 1997.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_04: I moved to San Francisco and I started working at Barclays Bank as a financial analyst.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_04: And this was during the dot-com era in San Francisco.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, what a time to be with San Francisco.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: That must be amazing.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_04: So it was a lot of fun.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_04: It was a really, I mean, we were basically trying to figure out this new thing, the internet, you know, how what to do with it.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_04: And, you know, a lot of Cornell grads who moved to the Bay Area were computer scientists and engineers, and they were working for, you know, startups and places like Yahoo.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_04: Basically, they were trying to fill that, figure out what you know, what to do with the internet, and I was on the finance side trying to figure out okay, where to throw money.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and uh so that was a really exciting time.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_03: Oh wow.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_03: So hey, look at looking back, were you right?
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_03: Oh were you through the money?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_04: So that's that's that's the next part.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_04: So about a few months after I started working at Barclays, I got together with another Cornell grad, a computer scientist, and we decided to start a company.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_04: So we we had a dot-com startup.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember sitting in a cafe in um you know North Beach, and we were kind of kicking ideas around of like what could we do?
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_04: And at one point he said, Well, what about an online travel company?
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_04: You know, where people can go and buy their plane tickets just through a website.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, That's insane.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_04: People will never trust trust the internet enough to buy their plane tickets.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_04: Let's moving on, crossing it off the list.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_04: So um, yeah, so that was a big miss, obviously.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, what an interesting time.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, what what was the company you ended up starting?
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: So um the company It wasn't pets.com, was it?
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_04: That's like the famous No, I mean that was that's the other like famous miss.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_04: I that was a year before me.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_04: But we were talking about pets.com that night, and like, you know, the this was an obvious idea and it it fell apart.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_04: So the company we ended up starting um was uh basically an online chat.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_04: Like some at the time, you know, Usenet had been around for decades and um you know was was it's sort of a grassroots thing.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_04: It it nobody owns it, nobody had commercialized it.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_04: And so we thought let's let's try to commercialize Usenet and basically set up a you know a forum for people to start discussions and we could bring in experts uh do this sort of thing.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_04: So basically what we tried to start was the closest thing right now is Reddit.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_04: Um very cool.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_05: It's very interesting.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_05: What an exciting time.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one kind of follow-up question to that that is do you find any parallels in your that career path uh with your research career path?
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and if so, what what are they?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_04: Well, so here's where it started getting me back to volcanology.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_04: So I loved having a startup.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_04: It was one of the most amazing experiences.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_04: And I realized, so you know, the startup obviously failed.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not you know running Reddit right now.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_04: Um we didn't we didn't manage to get our second round of venture capital.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_04: Um so the startup folded about a year in, and I realized at that point that I really didn't want to work for the bank anymore.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_04: I was either gonna run my own company again, try again, or I was gonna just go do this volcanology thing.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_04: In hindsight, I didn't know it at the time, but actually being a research scientist is very much like running your own small business.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_04: You have to wear a lot of hats, you have to be in charge of personnel and finance and marketing and product and you know design and development.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_04: And so actually, that's been a really neat parallel for me.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's interesting.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I've gone through this a little bit.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I tell some of my family members, oh, being a new professor at Penn State, you know, you get this startup money to do research.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a little bit like a startup company.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they don't buy it, they they don't buy the argument.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_04: It's a lot like it's a lot like getting a startup going.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: The staff scientist position is something people have a hard time understanding.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: So can you explain kind of what your role is right now at Carnegie in the staff scientist role and how it compares to a professor at a large university like University of South Florida?
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so Carnegie's a really unique and neat place in that we're basically professors, but we don't teach.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_04: We don't have students, we have a lot of postdocs like you, Jesse, a former postdoc at Carnegie.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_04: Um so we do we do a lot of training and mentoring, but uh basically we just do research.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but we run our own labs, we you know, write grants, um, we run projects, and we kind of do the research side of what university professors do.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_04: So it's sort of similar in that sense, but um you know we have a lot more of our time and energy to put to research.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_03: So, Diana, I was uh my I was watching a video on YouTube on you, I was doing my research, getting ready for to interview you, and my wife was next to me, and so she you right away caught her attention.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_03: So this next question really comes from her.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: Oh boy, this could be a doozy coming from Jenny.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, geology has a reputation for being very male dominated, and you're a very prominent female scientist, and you know, so can you have you had obstacles to overcome?
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_04: You know, no, and but I want to couch that in saying that I think you know, I'm lucky in being able to say that, and I'm also somewhat rare in being able to say that, but I I really don't feel like I had that many obstacles because I was female.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_03: Do you work with a lot of other female volcanologists?
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_04: I work with volcanologists.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_04: You know, there are a lot of women in volcanology.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's one of these sort of interesting subfields in geology that is maybe less male-dominated.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's interesting.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, geology is uh notorious amongst the sciences for being male dominated, and science is already a fairly dude-heavy.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm curious what you know what the future looks like in this space.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: What are things that you know people in Chris's position or my position or your position can be active about um in this space?
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_04: Actually, I I guess just again reflecting on you know coming to this answer of I don't feel like I had obstacles.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_04: I got lucky in that I was in a very male-heavy world, you know, from the very uh beginning of my career in finance.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_04: It was Silicon Valley in the 90s, and you know, I got confident really fast because I got treated like competent equal.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_04: So that was kind of the tone that I, you know, I had from the beginning of my career, and that was lucky.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_04: But then in grad school, I think what was really important was that I had a female PhD advisor who was very successful, but I also had two very close advisors who were men, and um they were up in Alaska, so I spent time with them every year up in Alaska, which is you know, there are a lot of men.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_04: Um again, you know, I I had this combination of role model in my um my advisor, but I also worked with men and developed confidence because they treated me like I was another scientist.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_04: And so I think that those two things really, if I if I can claim any success, I think a lot of credit might go to that.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_03: Alright.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_03: So what is your favorite volcano?
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_04: Oh no.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_04: This is like asking somebody who your favorite child is.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, I'm uh this time I I get this question.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna name one just because it's I think it's an underdog and it's a weirdo.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe I have the most affection for, I wouldn't say favorite, uh volcano in Nicaragua called Taleka, where I had an almost decade-long deployment of instruments that ended in 2016.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_04: And one of the neat things about Taleka is that it actually, in its when it's when it's just sitting there not erupting, it's very white.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_04: And it's very white loud, like lots and lots of these low frequency earthquakes.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_04: And then before it erupts, it switches into Mariah mode.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_04: And then right before it erupts, it gets completely quiet.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_04: So it does things backward of most volcanoes.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_04: And so we've been very interested in studying, you know, what's going on there.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_04: Is that characteristic of the type of eruptions this volcano has?
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's been a really fun one just because it's it's a a strange little one and it also makes a lot of earthquakes for us to study.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_03: Like, is there something about it aesthetically that you love too?
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_04: It's not very pretty.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_03: So which one is your favorite from that perspective?
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, Fuji-san.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_04: So I was actually I was lucky enough to be invited to a conference in Japan in January before we all got shut down.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_04: And uh they took us out and we had a for a field trip and we had a the most gorgeous view of Fuji.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_04: And I I never get tired of looking at that volcano.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_04: It's so beautiful.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_03: I've never seen it firsthand, just pictures, and it's it's gorgeous.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_03: Diana, what is your favorite volcano experience?
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, this is an easy one.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_04: It's this is much easier than the favorite volcano.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_04: So when I was in graduate school starting my PhD, my department took a field trip to the big island of Hawaii, and we got to go out onto the active flow field, and I got to stick a rock hammer in lava and like actually pull.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_04: And what was amazing about it was so magma has viscosity, which is like you know, water, it's very runny, it's it's low viscosity versus molasses, it's high viscosity.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_04: So that's actually low, but low, that's the water analogy.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_04: And I just remember sticking my hammer into it and pulling and getting a physical understanding of you know how thick and viscous lava is.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_04: And that actually is, I think about this a lot.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_04: It's it actually is a big part of my research, you know, how viscosity of lavas and magmas uh affects earthquake activities.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_04: So that that was just like one of those, like it made it real.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_04: It was really cool.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, well, I think you know that covers all of our questions here.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: Diana, thank you so much.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: This has been amazing just sitting down and talking to you.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I to be honest, you know, I'm I we've talked a lot over the years when I was a postdoc at Carnegie, but I learned a lot just in this conversation right here.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was I've been excited all day, uh actually all week to talk to you.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, I really have.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_04: It's been my pleasure.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_04: This is this has been a lot of fun, actually.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's great to see you again, Jesse.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_04: It's great to meet you, Chris.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_04: And uh, this has been a really fun conversation.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_04: My favorite subject.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_02: So couldn't we bad?
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know about that.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, that's a wrap part one of our volcanology re-releases under the belt.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: We got three more coming at you over the next couple weeks while we are on a break here.
• 46:06
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• 46:09
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• 46:12
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• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we'd also ask that you check out our Camp Geo conversational textbook.
• 46:22
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• 46:24
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• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: So check that out and let us know what you think.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Cheers.