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Volcanoes Revisited: Part 4 - Volcanology Director Tina Neal · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, Christopher, you're just a funny guy right now.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that every time we start an episode, we're laughing in the intro?
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: What is going on?
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think everybody needs to know.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like, we're talking before we start this, you know, and then you always start us and we're laughing at each other.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: So tell me.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think because you're usually laughing at me.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: What is it that I did right now that made you laugh?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, apart from looking at you, I think it's just your general demeanor and struggles with technology are really cracking me up here, you know.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: You're just you're technologically an 85-year-old man.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually not true.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's not I don't know.
• 1:00
  unknown: True.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: So we're still on a break, Chris, from recording new stuff.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: We're actually recording new stuff in the background, but we're on a break from releasing said new content.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: So we've all got something to look forward to in the new year here.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: And this, Chris, is part four of our volcano re-releases, which yet again is another interview with just an exceptional geoscientist.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: That is right.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we I don't know how we landed this one, but we landed Tina Neal, and she is the head of the I don't know, what do you call it, Jesse?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's the Volcano Observatory for the United States.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: So what's that called?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, her title is Science Center Director of the uh Volcano Science Center for the United States Geological Survey, which obviously is a quite a big title and quite a cool job, I would say.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: And you describe this as like volcanology, and volcanologists are basically the equivalent to being an aquatic biologist who swims with the dolphins.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like being a volcanologist is sort of the really cool job in geology that everybody, you know, every little kid wants to do is study volcanoes, kind of right.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, everybody wants to see red lava, and myself included in that.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: I have never seen it.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen so much hardened red lava, but I've never seen it's not the same.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Although I get really excited over like pahoihoy flow textures and uh flow textures and bombs and you know stuff like that.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: But no, I've never, nope, not yet.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Chris, there is a lot that gets you excited in geoscience, a lot that gets you dialed up and fired up.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: So uh this person Tina Neal is, like we said, the director of the Volcano Science Center for the U.S.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: Geological Survey, and she's got tons of experience, massive amounts of experience.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: She's overseen the work of 170 employees at the five volcano observatories, has worked on really cool stuff all the way through her career, and in this interview, she gets into some of that really cool stuff.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: She has seen red lava.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of it.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of it, right?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Has served as scientist in charge of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and done all sorts of stuff at various volcano centers in the United States government geological survey.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: So really interesting interview.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Two episodes ago, we interviewed Dr.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Andy Calvert, and he said, You have to talk to my boss.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that's this episode.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: That was very true.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: We did need to talk to her.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: And Chris, I just want to say here, you touched on it earlier.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'm frankly extremely honored that we get to talk to people like this.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's blown my mind the level of people who are willing to give us an hour of their time and chat about their careers and geoscience and what it means to them.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's just one of the coolest parts about doing this podcast with you is the people we get to really talk to.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: So cool.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: 100% agree.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the other thing is just what you and I learn from each other.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is a symbiotic relationship that we have.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: We both learn so much from each other doing this.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: All around, this thing is so cool.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: I love doing this podcast.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: I do too.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so, with that, before you listen to Tina Neal, leave us a review in a rating.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: We haven't asked for that for a while, but that really helps us.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: We've got a couple recently.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we love that, and it helps the algorithm, helps other people find Planet Geo and really upset in the algorithm there.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: You can also go to our website, planetgeocast.com, send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail.com, follow us on all the social medias, and another thing you could do for us is click on that first link in the show notes and go check out our Camp Geo conversational textbook and leave us some feedback on that.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: We're excited to have this available now, and uh, we'd love to get some feedback from you.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Cheers.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Cheers.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: Tina Neal, welcome to Planet Geo and thank you for joining us.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: We are really appreciative of your time here.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, you're welcome.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_03: Glad to be here.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: This is uh this is really exciting.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: So before we get into some questions, you are the director of the United States Geological Survey's Volcano Science Center.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: And you're based in Alaska, is that right right now?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's correct.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_03: I'm in Anchorage.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: And you've you've sort of you have a Wikipedia page, so that's rare among guests we get on this, but that's pretty cool.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you've you've been all over the place.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: You've sort of studied a lot of different volcanoes and been at these volcano observatories for much of your career with the United States Geological Survey.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: And we're gonna get into that, but we like to kind of get the full view of a geoscience career and start at the beginning, right, Chris?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Right on.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, Tina, we always ask this question because there are certain defining moments for Jesse and I in terms of like when and why we got into the geosciences.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Was there something that happened to you along the way, kind of an aha moment for you that that led you down this path?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_03: There was, and it's going to sound familiar to you both.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but before I share the aha, I'll just say for context, I grew up in southern Connecticut and kind of an outdoors context.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_03: My my family had property on a lot of acreage.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: I spent a lot of time in the woods, and we had some outcrops of metamorphic rocks, and I used to think I was going to get rich off the garnets.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: So I think rocks were part of my childhood.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and being a child of the 60s, I was also very influenced by the space age and uh the Gemini program and the Apollo program.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_03: My sister worked at CBS News and used to bring home the press packets.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: So, like many volcanologists uh and geologists, I wanted to be an astronaut.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_03: That was my early childhood passion.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I anticipated doing that by going into medicine in college.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: And then I went to a lecture one night on the geology of Mars, and I was just gobsmacked.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_03: I had no idea that people did this kind of work, that they looked at other planets through the eyes of a geologist.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_03: I really all I knew about geology was the rock cycle until I got to college.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_03: The professor who gave this lecture was a man named Tim Much.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: And he unfortunately died.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: Where was this?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: This was at Brown?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: This was at Brown University.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: He he was killed in a climbing accident before I was able to take a course from him, but he was an amazingly inspirational man.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I went to see him the very next day and said, I want to do this.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: How do I do this?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: And he was very gentle and sweet with my naive enthusiasm and said, Well, take a geology class.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_03: So I did, and uh, I was hooked.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: What level were you at in had you were you fairly advanced in your degree at that point or not?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I think I was nearing the end of my sophomore year, so I had to really hustle to to cram everything in.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: So what what led you to this lecture in the first place then?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: I don't remember.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: I wish I I wish I did probably just the space connection, uh you know, Mars.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_03: Mars probably caught my eye.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: So that was my aha moment for sure.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: And then of course, Mount St.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: Helens erupted in 1980 when I was also still in college.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: And that was a seminal event for many of us, captured our imagination and reminded us that we live on an active planet, the first big eruption in the United States, and certainly my lifetime for many, many generations.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: So um, yeah, it was it was a great confluence of timing.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_03: And this uh man named Tim Much, who I credit credit my discovery to.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: That is very cool.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: And how did you get into the United States Geological Survey then?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you've been working there for for the majority of your career, if I'm not mistaken, um at various volcano observatories.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: So what led you to sort of a service, you know, I out of uh it's a service, right?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the geological survey.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: So what led you there?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_03: After my junior year, I had uh an opportunity to go to the astrogeology center in the USGS in Flagstaff, Arizona.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: And uh this was again because of the wonderful support I had from Brown University professors, in that case a man named Jim Head.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so as an intern in Flagstaff, I worked on a geologic map of Olympus Mons on Mars.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, this was using Viking orbiter images, which which now look so primitive, fuzzy and high altitude, and make out the crater, and that's about it.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_03: So that was my introduction to the USGS in Flagstaff and USGS research and astrogeology and this concept of being a US geological survey scientist.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I through those connections, I later was able to have uh an opportunity to start working in Hawaii at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, really.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that was your first stint there.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you came back more recently to uh be the scientist in charge, I believe was the was the title, at the Hawaiian uh volcano observatory.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, this was uh an interesting time there because you and the observatory team were finalists for this Samuel Heyman Service to America Medal, which is a very fancy award in uh in the US government.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: But this was monitoring Kilauea during this eruption.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: So can you kind of paint us a picture of what was going on?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: This was relatively recently.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: Was it 2017 or was it 2018, I think.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_03: The eruption was in 2018, and uh the award service was in the fall of 19.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_03: So, first of all, yes, it was an incredible honor, and and total credit and hats off to the staff at HVO and all of the scientists from other places that came to work with us during that eruption.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: I think the award can I can I interrupt there?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: HVO is the Hawaii Volcano Observatory, but other people flew in during this eruption.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: Is that is that kind of how it works?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: So very early on in the event, it was clear that we our staff of of 30 or so people could not handle the workload.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_03: And so scientists from the other volcano observatories came in in shifts or uh to help out and continued to do so for for months.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: So it was really an effort of the whole volcano science center.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_03: But um, yeah, HVO was was called out for this award.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and really the staff scientists there, they just put their heart and soul into the eruption response and uh absolutely deserved it.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: So uh, you know, what were we doing at the time to monitor Kilauea?
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_03: It as you know, all the volcano observatories as a part of their mission to track activity at the active volcanoes in their jurisdiction and to track activity 24-7 and to look for changes that might mean that there's a change in hazard status.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: And so we were doing that at Kilauea and using all the tools that all observatories use: 24-7 seismometers, uh GPS, and other geodetic instruments like tilt meters, um, various cameras, doing a lot of direct observation and the like.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of our listeners are very general, like people who don't have a geoscience background.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: So could you go into a little bit more detail about the tools of the trade?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: And and actually, I'm interested in the structure of the volcano science center.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: How like so there's a bunch of observatories, how do they interact, and what tools are you using?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what is the mandate for this type of uh institute?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: So the the mission of the Volcano Science Center within the US Geological Survey is to track activity at the potentially active volcanoes in the United States.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_03: And there are 161 of them by our current count.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oh wow, that's a lot.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, did you know that that were that many?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: I I had no idea that it was no wow.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's the that's the comprehensive list of what we consider to be potentially active volcanoes.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_03: Now, this includes some of the small basaltic fields in New Mexico and Arizona and Utah, um, things that haven't erupted for a long time, but could again.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: And so the observatories, we've broken up the area, the United States geographically, and observatories have a certain area of jurisdiction, and they're responsible for tracking activity at those volcanoes using a variety of techniques.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_03: Seismometers that track earthquakes at the volcanoes and underneath the volcanoes.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, GPS and tilt meters are instruments that look at the ground deformation, how the ground is moving up down east, west, north, south, um, at volcanoes in response to changes in magmatic pressure.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_03: Gas sensing instruments, uh, various kinds of cameras that are looking just at the visual field, but also at thermal imagery.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_03: And then, of course, satellites are increasingly becoming a tool to monitor volcanoes from space, looking again at ground deformation, at thermal emissions, gas emissions, and the like.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_03: So each observatory has a has this same suite of tools.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_03: And then, depending on how accessible the volcanoes are, you might also have geologists or geophysicists who go out to the volcano every day, every week, and make direct observations with their own eyeballs.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um, because nothing replaces the human eye when it comes to looking at the volcano and seeing what it's doing and understanding it.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_03: So, of course, at Kilauea volcano, where our observatory was sitting, right on the top of the volcano until 2018, there was an active lava lake there in 2018, and our geologists would go down there just about every day, take measurements of the level of the lake, observations of the lake surface character, what it was doing, samples of the Tephra that would be erupted from the lake and the like.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Were you standing on the rim of the caldera?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_03: The observatory was up at the on the rim of the caldera.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so there are five five volcano observatories within the volcano science center.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: There's Alaska, the Cascades, California, Yellowstone, and Hawaii.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're standing on the rim of the caldera, looking down on the lava lake, Tina, could you smell the gases?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_03: Depending on the wind direction, absolutely.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that's cool.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: That is very cool.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: So, so what was going on?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: Why was 2018 such a big, you know, momentous event?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: And what like why were people flying in to help?
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_03: So in 2018, uh, it wasn't a it was completely a momentous event.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, for many of us, it might be a life, a once-in-a-lifetime eruption experience.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_03: The volcano had been essentially steadily erupting with very little change uh since 1983.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_03: There had been a vent active on its east drift zone within the national park and it had been erupting almost continuously since that time.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: In 2008, a vent opened up at the summit of the volcano inside the caldera within the Holly Matwama Pit Crater.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_03: And this had been erupting steadily since 2008, and the lava lake had been rising.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_03: But in April of 2018, we saw a very significant change.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: The Pu'o vent or eruption site essentially collapsed, the lava column drained out of view, earthquakes began occurring to the east, down the east rift zone from Pu'o.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, we could see the ground deforming, and this was because magma was intruding down the rift zone towards the populated part of southeastern Hawai'i Island.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_03: And so uh eventually what happened is lava broke out inside of residential subdivision, and for the next three months we had an eruption where lava flows were uh destroying homes and uh reached the ocean, and uh it was a consequential eruption for the people of the Hawaii Island community, and scientifically it was a very interesting eruption, but uh this was the largest eruption in the United States really since 1980 in terms of impact.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: The response to that eruption, the science that was conducted, the efforts that the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory staff went through to keep people informed and help keep people safe.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_03: That was really the basis for the the SAMI award.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, Tina, I saw you telling a short story to a group of people, and it was it was called It's Time to Go.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um can you tell us about that real quick?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: We shouldn't laugh at that, but that's a great name.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so the the the community of volcano, which is a small rural town at the top of the volcano just outside the national park, they have a really wonderful art center there, and they had people who went through the eruption experience uh tell these seven-minute stories about things that were born to them.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I chose to tell the story of what it was like really in the days following the start of the eruption inside the volcano observatory up at the summit, uh, when it became clear that we had to abandon our building and leave.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and so this story was about the sense of uh increasing severity and frequency of earthquakes, um, recognizing that cracks were forming in the building, and the uh support the support beams that held up the ground floor of the observatory were starting to be agitated and potentially come loose from their support columns.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_03: It just was not a safe place to be.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think wasn't it a 6.9 event that told you it's uh we we need to leave.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_03: Well, believe it or not, it wasn't the 6.9.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the six okay, the 6.9 earthquake followed a couple of five point something uh foreshocks, and and that that was a structural response of the volcano to the intrusion into the East Rift zone.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, it was a big event.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: I I happened to be in a helicopter at the time, so I didn't feel it, but I I heard all the stories.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: Over the subsequent couple of weeks after that May 4th big earthquake, uh, we were starting to just have earthquakes every day, multiple earthquakes a day, large enough to really shake the building, as the summit of the volcano was beginning to subside and collapse.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_03: And so it was the cumulative damage from a couple of weeks and the and the prospect that this was not going to end anytime soon that really convinced us to leave, along with ash explosions that were occurring from the summit event.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's pretty dramatic.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: So so this is the summit is kind of collapsing because the magma's draining out the volcanic eruption that's occurring down down the the mountainside.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: Is that is that what was going on?
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's as simple as that.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the the vents in in the lower east drift zone at lower elevation were draining the summit magma system, and the roof of the volcano was falling in, partially collapsing.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: You were sitting on top of that.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_03: We had a okay.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: There's cracks in the building and lots of earthquakes.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh, it makes sense.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Jesse, I saw uh there was then a webcam of the the national park sign during the 6.9 event, and it was rocking and rolling.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it was it was shaking pretty violently, yeah.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was really cool.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so Tina, um you have been the scientist in charge at the HVO, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, the Alaskan Volcano Observatory.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: What exactly does a scientist in charge, besides having a really cool title, what do you do?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: Uh yeah, sure.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_03: So I was the scientist in charge of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_03: I not not the Alaska Volcano Observatory.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: At AVO, I was a staff scientist.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um but what a scientist in charge does uh really is is lead the observatory in a number of different aspects of its operation.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_03: I like to say you're it's like you're the coach of a really high-functioning team.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_03: You've got a staff of scientists and technicians and administrative support professionals, and you're all united in trying to better understand your volcanoes, uh hazardous processes, deliver information to help keep people safe, and really conduct a lot of fundamental scientific research to inform doing a better job at that hazard assessment and warning process.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: So uh you're the you're the science leader, you're the leader of budget planning, workforce planning.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_03: Uh you're trying to set priorities for the volcano observatory.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_03: You're advocating on behalf of your staff and your science program within the bureaucracy of the USGS, of course.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_03: Uh there's lots of competing demands on money.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um you're also doing a lot of interaction with other government agencies.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_03: And that's really important because, as you know, in order for communities to be safe around potentially active volcanoes, uh, people have to be informed, they have to be prepared, and emergency response agencies have to have plans for what they're going to do when lava threatens to break out in a subdivision or an explosive volcano threatens to erupt that's upwind of your community.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: So we have a lot of relationships with partners at other agencies at the state, at the local, state, and federal levels.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: I also think that the scientists and Charge has a main job, and that is uh looking over the horizon.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: What's coming next?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_03: What do I need to be prepared for?
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: Are we prepared for the next eruption or the next uh event that we're not quite thinking about?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_03: That kind of thing.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Do you do less science because you have all these other hats that you have to wear?
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_03: For most scientists in charge, you are not engaged much in active research.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_03: That's not true of all of them.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_03: Some have the capacity and the time to still be doing scientific research, and we encourage that because it helps maintain your uh your sharpness, your credibility, your engagement with your staff.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but some some jobs are just really too consuming to be very active in that regard.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: But it varies.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: I would imagine being uh the scientist in charge at HVO during the 2018 was one of those situations.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: For me, it was.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but it's a little bit of a a little bit of a personal decision, I think, and depending on who the who the person is for sure.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_03: I think the most important characteristics of a scientist in charge, in addition to having some long experience dealing with volcanic crises, doing volcano science, and having a kind of a breadth of uh understanding of the various disciplines in volcanology, is really the ability to lead a team of diverse, very high functioning individuals and helping facilitate their work.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: One side question to that, and you kind of touched on it, but it's easy for me to imagine what a volcano observatory is doing in a time of crisis.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody's running around, you know, trying to help, right?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: What about when there's no eruptions going on?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like, is it a lot of sort of predicting where things might happen next or troubleshooting of the systems you have in place?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like, like what's going on in the background, sort of normal time when it's not a crisis?
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, good question.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we're not like a fire.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: Well, even at a firehouse, in between fire responses, firemen and women are busy.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: They're they're I like this analogy.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: I like where this analogy is going.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_03: They're fixing their equipment, they're they're buying new equipment and making sure it works.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they're looking back at the last response and saying, hmm, how can we do a better job next time?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: But in the in an observatory setting, you've got scientists who have just been delivered a fire hose of data and information, and they're trying to make sense of it.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_03: And so uh in the aftermath of the 2018 eruption, for instance, there have been a number, you know, just dozens of scientific papers that have come out and more will come out as both USGS scientists and lots of academic and other collaborators work up the data and and extract insights from the science.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_03: So there's always something going on.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing I'll say is that even if a volcano is not erupting, we still have to monitor it 24-7 if it's potentially active.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_03: And so there's keeping up with all of those data.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_03: And uh you have to watch it carefully, you have to address any perturbations and make sure that either you understand why they're happening or that they're not of great consequence.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: So it's always a busy time at a volcano observatory.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I guess that's good.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: So you've worked at volcano observatories in both Hawaii and Alaska, and these are very different tectonic settings, very different sort of plumbing systems, very different volcanoes.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: Can you like what's your view on that?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: What like I don't know, just can you sort of riff on on the differences there and what's interesting about each uh each individual place?
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: And Tina, also feel free to dive into like the underworkings of the geology of these two different systems, too.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yes, um, Hawaii and Alaska are very different, and people are sometimes amused that I went back and forth between the two because they are so different.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_03: They do require different wardrobes completely.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_03: But in all seriousness, of course, Hawaii is a hotspot ocean island system, and you've got basaltic volcanoes erupting magma from from deep within the earth with very little uh residence time in the earth's crust, so not much chemical change on its way to the surface.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: So you mean, just to clarify, if you mean not a lot of residence time, that the magma comes from the source to the surface fairly quickly.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: It traverses the crust fast.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is that correct?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_03: That's correct.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_03: And and so what we're seeing is fairly primitive magma from the Earth's interior in Hawaii at these ocean island systems.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so as a result, you develop these large uh basaltic shield volcanoes that are fairly gentle sloped.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they can grow to massive size, as we see on Hawaii Island.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_03: And their eruptions tend to be non-explosive and produce lava flows, which people have seen pictures of, these rivers of molten rock that can move very quickly, but without the production of a lot of ash or tephra.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: Hawaiian eruptions, of course, are wonderful in the sense that because they don't explode very often, you can approach them very closely.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_03: And so, as a scientist, you can gain access and get it's very accessible.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_03: You can move closely to do experiments, to make observations, to collect samples.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_03: And uh that's one reason that Kilauea volcano in Hawaii has been a destination for scientists all over the world, because you can work up close and personal with that volcano.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's frequently active and it's very accessible.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_03: In contrast, in Alaska, uh, as in the Cascades or Japan or other environments where you have a geologic process called subduction going on, where two tectonic plates are meeting, uh, one is being pushed slash dragged below the other.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: Magma that is generated in that process, uh, what by the time it erupts at the surface is higher in silica and therefore tends to be more explosive in its nature and produce ash clouds and pyroclastic debris.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, these volcanoes and their eruptions are quite a bit more dangerous to approach closely.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_03: And so we that we don't.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, it's very rare that we would get up close and personal with an Alaskan volcano eruption.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_03: So, in that case, at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, we do a lot quite a bit more of our work remotely during eruptions, meaning we might fly out in an aircraft but observe from a safe distance, or um look down with satellite sensors to track the eruption, or use distant geophysical instruments like seismometers and infrasound and GPS to track the activity.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, so there's this very big dichotomy of access during and proximity during an eruption uh that's a really important difference.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: If I could just add one really other important difference between the two.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um in Alaska, thankfully, we don't have many people living really close to or right on these active and potentially active volcanoes.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_03: So there are a few communities that are close enough to be of concern.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, being downwind of an ash-producing eruption, uh, that impact can travel quite a distance.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_03: But in Hawaii, you've got thousands of people living right on potentially active volcanoes.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: And that's a huge difference.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_03: It imparts a difference in terms of the tenor of your work, in terms of the seriousness and and uh impact of an eruption immediately upon people.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, interesting.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: Which which system do you prefer?
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_03: Which system do I prefer?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's a really hard choice.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_03: They both have their attractions.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I would be remiss also, and I'll be criticized if I don't clarify this.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_03: You know, in Alaska, one of the reasons that we have such an effort to monitor the 52 or so historically active volcanoes, even though people aren't living on them, is that explosive eruptions from Alaskan volcanoes can endanger aircraft.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_03: And we have thousands of people flying overhead in jet aircraft between North America and Asia every day.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_03: So um colleague once referred to those as towns in the sky, uh, which is a good way to put it, and that that's our immediate hazard of concern in Alaska.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's a actually like that.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: Towns in the sky.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's a pretty cool one.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's a that's a good phrase.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: So there's 50 active volcanoes that in the that under the purview of the Alaska Volcano Observatory.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's a lot.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, I had no idea.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, Tina, have you ever been in a dangerous situation while working on a volcano?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: Has anything like ever made you anxious?
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: I need to preface this, Tina, because I took a lot of classes from Chris and he would always just go on and on and on about how he wants to die in a volcano.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: If he can, he wants to die in a volcano.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: So he's just obsessed with you know being there and getting hit with the ash cloud in his face.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like if he's gonna go out, he wants to go out in a volcano.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: So that's where this question's coming from, I think.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: Right, Chris?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: Am I wrong?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: No, yeah, she can answer this wherever she wants.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I'm often asked this question, and I I would say that in Alaska, in the years that I was doing field work out on volcanoes, I was never afraid of the volcano.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_03: In part because I was never really close to or on the volcano when it was erupting, uh, for the reasons discussed.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: In Alaska, as with all field work in Alaska, the things that made me nervous from time to time were the weather, conditions of flying, either in small aircraft or helicopters, or sometimes marginal at best, and uh the big the big bears that are in parts of Alaska.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_03: So those were things that bothered me most in Alaska.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_03: Now in Hawaii, I did have one experience that I'll never forget, and that was being lost in the fog, the whiteout condition right near the Pu'o vent on Kilauea's East Rift Zone.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_03: It was getting ready to go into one of its high fountaining phases, and my colleague and boss Ed Wolfe and I were out there mapping the lava flow from the last phase, and it started to rain, and it all the recently hot in place lava was very hot, and so it just became a steam bath.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_03: And I was right next to the cone, and I knew there was lava up in the cone, and it was getting high and about to spill over into the channel.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_03: And I this was before GPS, and I didn't know really exactly where I was, and I had to get around the cone.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_03: So uh that was an that was a nerve-wracking day, but it obviously ended well.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I nobody wants to take unnecessary chances in our group, and I I feel like safety is a value we all have.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um surely we push the envelopes at times, but always for a good reason.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_03: And and I think uh by and large, people are very safe.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_03: We don't want we don't want anyone to get hurt or die.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have any close encounters with the uh with the bears in Alaska?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: Uh on a couple of occasions, yes.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: Many of us carry firearms to protect ourselves against bears in Alaska, and I I never had to shoot an animal, thank goodness, but I did discharge my weapon a couple of times to try and scare them away.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think if that really works.
• 33:12
  unknown: Yeah.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: In the field work I do in the Northwest Territories, you get uh the same opinion about how likely you are to scare a grizzly away with your shotgun, little shotgun uh blasting in the air.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: So Tina, you dropped a name, uh Ed Wolf.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: That name sounds very familiar to me.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: Was he one of the volcanologists that played a role in Pinotubo?
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, all right.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: I I knew I thought I recognized the name.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_03: So good memory.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Ed Ed was my first supervisor at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_03: He he took a chance on me and um, Tina.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: So to me, being a volcanologist, and I think to a lot of people, it's like a dream job.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um so is there a is there a downside to this?
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, for an earth scientist.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: Don't worry, Tina.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: No, no one no one's gonna hear your answer here.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: So you can feel free to be you know very honest with us.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's just me and Chris here.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_02: Don't worry.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks for that.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um I I was I I've thought about this.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_03: Is there a downside to being a volcanologist?
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: It is a marvelous profession.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_03: And and I, you know, for 38 years, I feel so fortunate to have had this journey.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's given me so much.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_03: I think the things that occur to me that could be considered downside are well, one, there are not many jobs as a volcanologist.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_03: And so when I'm trying to encourage early career scientists or students to go into earth science and maybe become a volcanologist, I always feel a little disingenuous because there aren't that many jobs, and I don't want people to get their hopes up.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_03: It would be nice if we could hire more volcanologists.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but another thing is that in the heat of the moment, in a crisis, if it can be extremely pressure-packed, and there can be a a lot of um anxiety and well, pressure and stress, really, if if people's lives are on the line, if if big property infrastructure is at risk, and and you're in the hot seat to give a correct interpretation to emergency authorities and those at risk.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_03: For some people, that's a probably a real adrenaline rush and a wonderful thing, but not for everybody.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_03: Some of my most challenging moments in my career have been trying to explain what might happen and also being honest about what we don't know.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I think being able to do that and talk about that uncertainty was extremely hard.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I lost a lot of sleep over how to do that well and helpfully.
• 35:54
  unknown: Yeah.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and the third thing that occurred to me about a downside, if there is one, is that if you're working especially internationally, unfortunately, in many countries, a lot of the people who are at highest risk from volcanic hazard are the marginalized communities who have uh less resources at hand.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_03: And and I suspect that that's hard to see when you're there, either doing scientific research or responding to a crisis.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_03: And and there are just so many societal challenges for people in those situations, in addition to a volcanic hazard.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I think at times that that can feel a little oppressive.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly understandable.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: So on the note of you know, communicating these the uncertainty or the potential outcomes, like what is what is the general public, what should people know about volcano monitoring and volcano hazards and sort of the future of this stuff?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think uh we we see reports every once in a while of like, oh, you know, people, your phones, everybody's carrying this accelerometer around, so we can utilize this to collect new data.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like what what do people need to know about this or what should they be aware of, if especially if they live on or around these things?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, thanks for that question.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think, of course, uh we'll be a little United States-centric here, but it this could apply to many countries, and and that is if you live near or downwind of a volcano, certainly if you live in a valley around a volcano, it's important that you get to know your volcano, find out what what's what is known about the volcano from your local scientific agency or state authority, and and and be assertive about what preparations are in place for what your community should do if the volcano should wake up.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: In the United States, with the U.S.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_03: Geological Survey that you would would inquire of in the local observatory.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_03: We all have websites where we put data and pictures and information and hazard assessment reports and various graphics.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a lot out there that you can learn about, and I people should be encouraged to do that.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um there also there's also a lot of good information about how to be ready for a volcanic eruption.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the things um that I'd like to emphasize is that you know, we all have a lot to worry about.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_03: We've got COVID, we've got inflation, we've got, I mean, the list can go on and on and on.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_03: I I'm familiar with this concept of the finite pool of worry, and you don't want to add volcanic eruptions to everybody's worry list, but the same things that you would do to get ready for a volcanic eruption will serve you well getting ready for a winter storm or an earthquake or a landslide in many cases, a lot of commonality to just general emergency preparedness.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a good message to reinforce.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but I guess the other thing to say about volcanoes and monitoring is that uh scientists are always working hard to improve our understanding of monitoring data.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_03: And we're also working hard to expand our monitoring footprint.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_03: That means putting out more instruments so we cover more volcanoes in a better fashion.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, that's largely dictated by resources, but that's part of my job now is to find more resources.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_03: So we're in a good trajectory, at least in this country, of increasing our ability to give early warning.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_03: And um, through time, we're getting better at it.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_03: We're we're able to detect things earlier with more instrumentation.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_03: And so um, I'm hopeful that we're gonna get better.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: Cool.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's that's really useful.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: I like that analogy of uh, you know, what if you prepare for volcanic eruption, you're prepared for a lot of other things at the same time.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: That that's that's uh that's useful.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: I like that.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: I never considered that before.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I've never lived right near a volcano either.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_02: So um, but I I would get the sense of this sort of limited amount of worry that you can uh add to your life.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's uh yeah, I'll have to think about that a little bit more.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: But Tina, let's get a little technical here.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, again, with volcanoes and how the earth works.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I really have two questions that that kind of came to mind.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: One is how you know, how are volcanoes and seismic activity or earthquakes related?
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because that was certainly something that was going on uh in the you know 2018 Hawaii event.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then also, where what causes these spurts of activity with something like the Hawaiian hotspot?
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, I mean, there's the simple answer, and then there's the longer answer, which is we still have a lot to learn, uh, obviously.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, but in general, earthquakes are intimately related to volcanoes for a couple of reasons.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: They reflect the state of stress inside a volcano.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_03: And that stress can change with the structural state of the volcano, but particularly with when magma and gases are moving within a volcano.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so earthquakes happen when magma moves and puts pressure on the rocks and opens micro cracks, or gases and fluids come off of the magma and begin to strain the rocks and develop earthquakes and or general vibration, something we might call volcanic tremor, seismic tremor.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_03: So earthquakes generally, seismic activity is a broader family uh term to encompass all kinds of earthquakes.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's a great tool to find out the state of activity of the volcano.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_03: Is it quiet or is magma moving?
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and and so that's one reason seismic networks, instruments on the volcano that are tracking earthquakes that allow us to detect them and locate them precisely and understand the character of the seismicity, what kind of earthquake it is.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_03: This is like the gold standard of volcano monitoring.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_03: And all volcano observatories use that tool and have seismologists on their staff that interpret these data.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_03: Most volcanic earthquakes related to magma moving are pretty small.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_03: You might feel some, but many of them are very tiny and have to be detected by dense networks of instrumentation.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_03: Now you do get these big earthquakes occasionally at volcanoes, like the 6.9 on May 4th and 2018 at Kilauea.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_03: And in that case, it's a it's essentially a volcano-wide response to a to a changing volcano-wide event.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: So in that case, the magma was being injected into the rift zone, it was putting pressure on the south and mobile flank of the volcano and basically pushed it towards the ocean to the seaward, unbuttressed side.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_03: And that the flank failed along a basal fault, and that failure coincided with the 6.9 earthquake.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_03: So it was a big structural response to a big magmatic event in the volcano.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so there are different classes of earthquakes that happen at volcanoes, depending on exactly what's going on.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: That that's really cool.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_02: And and Chris, the magma pulses, that's an interesting one, too, the sort of magma pulses, especially at a place like Kauai.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I didn't really address that, but um, yeah, there's a really fascinating earthquake family, or we call it a swarm going on right now in Hawaii below the community of Pahala.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_03: It's about 20 miles or so um southwest of the summit of Kilauea at a depth of 25 miles or so is this just cloud of earthquakes.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_03: And it we don't really understand what this is.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_03: The the best model really has it reflecting some process at the head of the of the column of magma that's rising from the hot spot.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_03: But exactly how that then differentiates into the plumbing system to feed Mauna Law, Kiloa, and Loehi volcanoes is a complete unknown and uh something of an area of really active research right now.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_03: So there's still a ton left to learn, lots of PhDs left to be done.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, there we go.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_02: Keep all the students very busy doing this type of stuff.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: Very good.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Chris, did you have a follow-up on that?
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: You looked like you had another question.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I don't know.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_02: I have a lot a lot I mean, you have tons of questions, I'm sure.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_02: We had like we both do.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: I do, I I do.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: How well do you understand the plumbing network of Hawaii?
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_03: We have a a fuzzy cartoon.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_02: That's a really interesting question.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: Because I've actually, Tina, I I want to just jump on that.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_02: Because the way you've been describing you know the eruption of 2018, it seems like you have a pretty good grasp of it.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like you're talking about a lot of like features that I would have not imagined we knew about really as a community.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, yeah, that's a great question, Chris.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, maybe I'm I'm underselling our understanding a little bit.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_03: We we have a it depends on the volcano, of course.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um I mean we have a pretty good idea of the Kilauea plumbing structure because we've had more than a hundred years of observation at Kilauea.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so we understand that there's a summit magma reservoir complex, and then uh two rift zones that that lead from the summit in different directions, and the same at Mauna Loa.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_03: And we can draw cartoons that illustrate that.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_03: And indeed in 2018, as we talked about, we had magma draining from the summit, going into this rift zone core and erupting 20 miles downstream.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_03: But in detail, it starts to get very fuzzy.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_03: We don't know exactly what the geometry of this summit reservoir really is.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_03: There's a shallow, more northerly component and a deeper, more southerly component, but we don't know how they're connected.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: They are connected.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: How how how deep are they?
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the sh the shallow one is a kilometer or two below the surface, and the deeper one is more like two or three or four kilometers deep.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: Again, in when that fills up, do you get to do you see that like from seismic data?
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_03: We definitely see changes in the pressure state of that system um based on earthquakes and also the ground deformation, because a kilowella will actually inflate and deflate like a balloon, depending on the fill state of that summit reservoir system.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_03: And we measure that in a variety of ways.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_03: We have tilt meters that look at the ground slope, and we use GPS, which tells us the same kind of thing.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that is very cool.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, but your your question is an important one, and I and you and you wanted to get a little bit at where the future of volcanology is going.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I think being able to more clearly define those plumbing systems, that plumbing system in detail.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_03: What are the real boundaries of the geometry?
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_03: How do these different reservoirs connect?
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_03: Are there are there valve systems between these different parts of the plumbing?
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_03: And what do they look like?
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_03: I think in the next 10 years, we're going to be getting better at defining some of those for some volcanoes, where we have good instrumentation and we can do some good experiments.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_03: For instance, uh, one of the things we'd like to do at Kilowea is put out like a thousand nodal seismometers.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_03: These are these little coffee can size seismic instruments that you can put out for short-term deployments.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_03: And they basically out there collecting information all the time in a very dense array, and it allows you to basically do an X-ray of the subsurface.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_03: So things like that will allow us to go from a fuzzy cartoon to a slightly clearer cartoon.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: So and is this development, the ability to do this, is this like a technological development?
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_02: Is it a like a cost of producing these seismometers?
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_02: Is there some other data set that is going to be really instrumental in pushing this type of um imaging the magma chamber forward?
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_02: Or is it sort of seismometers getting smaller and cheaper, I guess?
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_03: It is seismometers getting smaller and cheaper.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, this sense of miniaturization in all of our sensors really has driven a lot of technological change.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the ability to have a seismometer in something the size of a coffee can makes it much more nimble.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_03: You can you can deploy them and take them, take them out of the field really quickly and move them around.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_03: It really allows you to get a much denser array in the field.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the same thing with GPS.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the first GPS came to Hawaii in the late 80s or no, no, early 90s, maybe.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_03: They were the size of a big trunk and you needed a truck to carry them around.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and you had to stay up with it and babysit it all night long.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_03: But now we have real-time ones that are out in the field and and they're much smaller.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_03: And so that miniaturization of all sensors is just going to continue and make us these types of observations easier and more powerful.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_02: So is that is that type of development um well, I have kind of two questions.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, like what is the value in knowing in turning this fuzzy picture into a clear picture?
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_02: I think I kind of it kind of makes sense for for something like Kilauea, you know, where oh, if if the summit magma chamber that's usually here is draining, it's gonna go, it's gonna punch out down there, probably, or or something along that.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: Is it is it first of all, so my first question is, is that correct?
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_02: And second question is does that same sort of imagery or better imagery of the magma chamber, does that help when you're looking at other volcanoes like Yellowstone or the Cascades?
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like, is it equivalent across these different volcano types?
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there are general principles that are probably equivalent or at least uh comparable across volcanoes.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_03: But in point of fact, every volcano is a little bit unique and it will have its own sort of structure and personality.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_03: So in the long run, you want to replicate this sort of technique at every volcano of concern.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_03: But it is important for the reason that you mentioned the better understanding you have of the internal plumbing, the better you're going to be able to interpret the monitoring data at the surface.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_03: So when we will in the future, when we see changes at Kilowayoff, um, with this added insight of what the geometry of the plumbing system and the dynamics of that plumbing system really are, I think there will be more certainty in issuing a forecast.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, this looks like just another normal inflation, deflation, or wow, this looks different, like it's heading towards an eruption, and potentially even saying where eventually.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_03: Another example that just leapt to mind is that these kinds of studies at a place like Yellowstone allow us to make some broad statements about the state of the magmatic system at a big caldera and determine whether there's a lot of available melt to erupt or not so much melt.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_03: So there are there are very direct lines between an increasingly focused and clear understanding of the subsurface to an understanding of the potential hazard.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, Tina, I think a lot of people struggle with how we don't have a clearer picture of the plumbing system yet, with like using all of the seismic data that is available to us.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like if I if I said, hey, draw a diagram of what it looks like below Hawaii.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: I envisioned that you would draw this massive you know magma chamber uh at the base of the lithosphere, and that magma chamber then feeds the shallower reservoirs um, you know, just below the summits and so on, with these big systems of pipes leading to them, right?
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: Is that kind of what you envision?
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's one one general model.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_03: But again, in in the in the details, we start to have multiple options.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_03: In other words, when you have this rising plume below the active volcanoes of southern Hawaii, are there angled pipes that go to each of the volcanic systems, or are there some parallel plumes that are feeding the two different sort of lines of volcanic centers, the Loa and Mickea lines that head back upstream?
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_03: There's an interesting region of tremor that's been discovered uh deep below Kilauea.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_03: And is that representing a magmatic pathway from the head of the plume as it ascends?
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_03: There's still a lot of questions about the details, but um and they they just don't show up on the seismic data then.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_03: Not in a not in a unique way that's well, not in a way that's interpretable in a unique fashion, I guess is partly what I'll say.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_03: So we talked about this nodal seismometer deployment, and um I'm very excited that uh there's a University of Hawaii professor who's going to work with HVO later in 2022 to to deploy one of these nodal dense arrays right over this cloud of earthquakes in southern Hawaii.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_03: Again, to try to better image the shallow portion of the crust there and understand what's going on.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's very cool.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_02: So stay tuned.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_02: Very exciting stuff coming out.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, Tina, can you tell us uh what your favorite volcano is?
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: Two ways.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: One is just like pleasing to the eye.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: You just love to look at it, you know, eat a lunch and drink a beer and just stare at the volcano.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the other one is uh what's your what's your favorite one to study?
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's a very hard question, of course.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's like asking a parent to choose their favorite child, but I I would say that in Alaska, my favorite volcanoes are are I have two, Okmach and Antiak Chak.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_03: These are two caldera systems, which are beautiful arrays of different kinds of volcanic landforms within these 10 kilometer wide basins, um, and big enclosing walls with cross-sections through volcanic sequences that are very dramatic.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_03: So those are my two favorite in Alaska.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_03: In terms of pleasing to my eye, Codapoxy volcano in Ecuador, I've always found unbelievably beautiful.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good choice.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_03: Although it's interesting, as it loses ice and snow through time, it's becoming a different visual.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_03: But as you know, there have been some beautiful paintings of Codapoxy through the years.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that one is the most beautiful for me.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_03: And then I always have a very, very, very affectionate place in my heart for a Kilauea volcano.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_03: It was my first volcano, really, um, where I spent a lot of time.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_03: And um, yeah.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's very cool.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_02: So you you mentioned uh codapoxy, and so you served for uh for I think a couple two years maybe on the United States Agency of International Development.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_02: You were the first, I think, volcanologist advisor to that um agency.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_02: And well, what was going on there?
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: Where did it take you?
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, what what's the state of international volcanology, I suppose?
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so um I was the first, what was called geoscience advisor to the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at the U.S.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_03: Agency for International Development.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_03: And that position grew out of the very long and successful relationship between USAID and the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program, which is a jointly funded program of the USGS and USAID.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_03: It came to be in the aftermath of the Nelvado del Ruiz eruption in 1980, 85, I think, um, where Norm Banks, a geologist at HVO at the time, convinced USAID that we really needed to have a standing group of volcanologists in the United States who were able to respond to crises around the world to help the local volcanologists and the local governments deal with these crises.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_03: And so USAID, through its Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, began the volcano disaster assistance program with USGS.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_03: And it grew through the years and was an extremely successful hazard mitigation program.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_03: They asked for a USGS representative to advise on not just volcanic hazards, but also other earth science hazards, earthquakes, volcanoes, um, landslides, tsunamis, things like that.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_03: So that was my role there.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm really pleased that I left that job in 2000.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_03: And now there are similar programs to VDAP in the landslide and the earthquake world.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_03: So USGS is helping respond to disasters in in all these areas around the world.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_02: And you personally, you worked in Ecuador.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and where else did you sort of help, I suppose, or provide assistance?
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so I I got to do a wonderful project in in Kathmandu, Nepal, and trying to prepare prepare the city for earthquakes.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um let's see, we did some post-earthquake work in in Colombia and landslide work in Venezuela.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_03: Uh yeah, really, I had an opportunity to go to a lot of places.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_03: And it wasn't, it wasn't just all disaster response too.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_03: It was also trying to put in place programs to do things ahead of time to reduce the vulnerability of communities.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, this is USAID, their their mission.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they're an executive-level independent agency in the government that works under the jurisdiction of Department of State, but they're independent, but they they are our arm of foreign assistance uh abroad.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_03: And so they do lots of work in both humanitarian response and and economic development, civil society, all sorts of things.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: Was that a part of then that program?
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_00: Was that a part of us aiding with the Pinotbo?
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_03: The the VDAP group, this volcano disaster assistance program, was central to the US involvement in Pinatubo.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you already touched on it, Tina, about um is it difficult to get a job in volcanology?
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because you said there just aren't a ton of them, um, which is very disappointing to a lot of my students.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it's uh so you maybe touch on that briefly again, but then also what is the working degree?
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not quite sure what you mean by working degree.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_03: In other words, what are the degrees that would position you best to go into volcanology?
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, exactly.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yes.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_03: So uh yeah, the truth is there there aren't a lot of jobs in volcanology, but you know, if that's your passion, you should definitely pursue it.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_03: And uh I'm an example of somebody who managed to make that work.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um so most of us are are geoscientists, either we have geology degrees or geophysics degrees, but increasingly um there are people coming into volcanology with allied discipline degrees, so physics and chemistry and computer science, uh, mechanical and electrical engineering.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_03: We need a lot of people to create these new monitoring instruments.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_03: So it's becoming a little bit more diverse in terms of degree types.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to do research, typically you need a PhD, but I have many colleagues, myself included.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I stopped at after a master's degree, and we also have many employees with bachelor's degrees.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_03: So uh the full array of options are there for you.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_03: It really depends on what you want to do.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_03: But again, I most people come from the geosciences, but not all.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_02: And our are internship programs, you know, for those, you know, my students who are in college and maybe pursuing a geoscience degree, if they want to have your job, oh Tina Neal, that's the job I want.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_02: Are there internship programs?
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_02: How do they sort of how do you get plugged in a little bit?
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there are some uh student student jobs available with USGS, and um, of course, it never hurts to reach out and introduce yourself at a scientific meeting or or other venue to to senior USGS colleagues.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, don't be don't be shy about writing a letter or introducing yourself.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_03: There are uh programs like the National Association of Geology Teachers program that place, I don't I don't think you have to be a recent graduate.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not really sure what your status is, but place early students and early career folks in observatories for summer field experiences.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_03: So they're out there.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but I also would always advise people to create a resume and get plugged into the USA jobs website because that is where all of our competitive um job opportunities are announced in the federal government.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_03: And you can set up alert whenever there's a USGS job open, even customize it to a certain area.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_03: Good thing to it's a good system to learn to use early if you want to work for USGS.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, very useful.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_02: All right, uh Tina, this is a good one.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: Hold on, I got one uh one other one, Jesse.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_00: Tina, uh one thing that I just dying to ask actually is what is the most dangerous volcano in the United States?
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well Wow, what a question.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_03: As with most of these questions, it's more complicated than one would think.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think I think I would not get much pushback from from my colleagues if I said Mount Rainier, because of the potential for the generation of volcanic mud flows or lahars, um, even in the absence of an eruption, just related to an edify a collapse of a part of the volcano and the rapid flowage down valley, and there are communities there that are within an hour or even less uh travel time.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_03: So warning time could be short.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um so Rainier is a dangerous volcano, and we're focusing a lot of attention on that right now.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_03: We're trying to develop a modernized Lahar warning system.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: What does that look like?
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: What is that?
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_03: A modernized Lahar warning system has um many, many more sensors in the field than we currently have, uh, different types of sensors, so that you can not only detect the presence of a of a moving Lahar, but also localize it and know where it is and how fast it's moving.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_03: And then, of course, uh all of the telecommunications infrastructure necessary to make those that that data move quickly, alarms to be alert to go off in the right places, and then ultimately information to reach the emercy authorities so they can make a decision to about whether to evacuate or not.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um but that work is underway.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_03: Cascade Volcano Observatory is leading that effort and um and doing a great job.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so the the Lahar is a sort of a waterborne volcanic ash sort of mud slide, I guess, kind of, or mud flow, basically, right?
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so you're described the way you're describing is something that gives you what an hour, a couple hours notice, or a couple days notice, depending on the the location.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, is that right?
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the for the actual event itself, once you verify that a flow is happening, um, you know, obviously it depends how far downstream you are, but the the hazard or is is going to be happening very quickly.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_03: In other words, there are communities that are within an hour or less, um, 30 minutes or so of the potential initiation point.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_03: It depends on where it starts, in which drainage.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_03: If the volcano wakes up and we start to see earthquake activity that reflects the movement of magma, of course, we'll be putting out that information and communities will begin to be prepared and at least know to be paying more attention.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_02: No, I just I ask because I think the Lahar thing, most people think of volcanic hazards as, you know, if you're caught in the wrong spot, you're done.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's you can't, there's no like really warning.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_02: You either got to predict it's gonna happen or not.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_02: And and so this Lahar thing, having some early warning is is not intuitive for volcanic hazards, I think, for people.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I that was an that's an interesting um project.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, very important project.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, the other part of the equation is is is both the emergency response agencies and the communities having plans for response, so knowing what to do, where to go, and how to do that.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_03: And the Washington State emergency planners and uh the relevant county groups have all been working on this for a long time.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, oh, very cool.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Tina, this has been super fun.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_02: I've learned a ton.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we always end our interviews with this question, which is what has been your best day as a geoscientist?
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_03: That was also a hard one to pick one.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because I've had so many You can pick more than one, Tina.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, I've had so many wonderful days, but I'll just I'll just share two.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_03: One was my very first, literally my very first day on the job in at Hawaiian Volcano Observatory in 1983.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it was a Monday, it was June 13th, and I was at the staff meeting being introduced, and and all of a sudden Kilauea began erupting on the East Ripzone.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_03: And so my new boss, who was Ed Wolf, just very calmly said, Let's go.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_03: And we got into a helicopter and away we went.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_02: Oh man.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_03: Landed in the middle of the lava fields and started walking towards the spattering cone.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I I looked down and below my feet in the cracks of the lava flow, I could see it was incandescent, it was orange and glowing and hot.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_03: I remember that's I'd never done such a thing.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't know if I was safe or not.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_03: I I very sheepishly asked Ed.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_03: I I said, Is this okay?
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_03: He was a real gentleman and didn't make me feel stupid.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um Explain explained that this was safe and we were fine.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, that was a remarkable day because I'd never been so close to erupting lava and it was a a complete multi-sensory experience.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_03: The other day that jumps into my mind always when I reflect on this is uh at Anti Akjack volcano with my dear colleague and friend Game McJimsey.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_03: We'd been working in this caldera for a couple of field seasons under trying to understand the eruptive history.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_03: And we started to find evidence of lake of lake clays at higher elevation than the caldera floor, like up on the flanks of some of the intercaldera cones.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_03: It was very confusing.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_03: And then Game noticed that on the walls of the caldera there were these subtle terraces.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, over the course of the day, we developed this hypothesis that there had been a large lake inside this caldera that was no longer there, and that indeed it had drained out the one gap in the caldera wall in a catastrophic fashion.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_03: This was really Game's idea, and we accumulated the evidence and published on it in the coming years.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_03: But to me, this was just a wonderful experience about exploration and discovery.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_03: And to me, it was exactly the kind of stuff that a field geologist loves to do.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_03: Telling the story of the landscape and you're searching, and sometimes it involves digging a hole, but you find evidence that tells you what happened in the past.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_03: And uh that will always sit with me as a really warm, wonderful experience as a volcanologist.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_00: Did you follow it downstream?
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_03: Well, on the way out of the caldera that summer, we flew over the river.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_03: This is in the wilderness and it was kind of a long distance, but we saw evidence of of bedrock plucking that was also consistent with a very large flooding event over bedrock.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_03: And then the next summer we saw big flood deposits downstream, and the story became more solid.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_03: But uh just that that sort of light bulb moment that came on after accumulating different observations was was really fun.
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's unbelievable.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_02: Those are two great stories to end on, Tina.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_02: Good picks, Tina.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, those are great.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thanks for your time, Tina.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_02: We really appreciate this.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we've learned a ton, and uh, it's a real pleasure talking to you.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_02: This is uh this has been really exciting.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_02: But uh I was excited about this for for several several days leading up to this.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, Tina, again, we we really appreciate it.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_00: I know you're busy, and just to to give us this time is just uh so generous.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you so much.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_03: You're welcome, Jesse and Chris.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_03: Nice to meet you both.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_03: Good luck, and we'll be in touch.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, that's a wrap on this interview.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_02: As usual, check out all of our stuff at the social media accounts at Planet Geocast.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_02: Go to our website, planetgeocast.com, send us an email.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_02: We love that stuff.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_02: And if you haven't yet, check out Camp Geo, conversational textbook for the geosciences.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_02: Need some basics, share it with friends.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_02: I know personally, a lot of people that are friends of mine or family of mine who've always kind of been curious about what it is I do as a geologist like this because it kind of gives them a little bit of a framework to understand geology, understand the basics of geoscience.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_02: So go check that out.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesse, this is a wrap on our volcano theme.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_00: What is coming up next?
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_00: What's our next re-release theme?
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we're gonna re-release a couple more episodes here on the geology of elements, really.
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_02: We've done a couple on different elements, lithium being one, iridium being another one.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I I'm a fan of these.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_02: We've got a new one gonna release at the end of this on neodymium, which I'm really excited about.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so I like these.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_02: The sort of geology of a particular element that is important to society is kind of an interesting theme we got going on.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_02: What's up next?
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_02: All right, peace.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_02: Enjoy.