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Smash and Grab - How Big of a Sample Do You Need? · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:02
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to PlayPoint.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: Why don't we do it?
0:15
SPEAKER_00: In the middle of having a discussion about episode titles, and we just we we've got to hash this out with the record button on, I think.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: I this will give listener insight into how I would say, well, we're both pretty bad at titles.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: We are better than others, it but we we always debate them.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: So it's like two ignorant idiots debating each other and sometimes yelling at each other about episode titles.
0:40
SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh.
0:41
SPEAKER_03: Do you remember back in season one, four years ago, we would publish an episode and then change the title the day that we published the episode.
0:50
SPEAKER_03: We like changed it four times during the course of the day.
0:53
SPEAKER_03: You remember that?
0:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just so stupid.
0:55
SPEAKER_03: We I mean we we almost broke up over a title about I think it was it was an episode dealing with the Great Lakes, something like that.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that was a that was one of our big fights.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: And then we went to oh man counseling and got it figured out.
1:10
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
1:11
SPEAKER_03: Let's get the listener up to date on what we're talking about today, Jesse.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: This is you, this is your idea.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: All right, so I want to lead with a question to you, which happens to be my episode title idea.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: Well, okay, this the backstory here is I was asked to write a a review chapter, really, for this big book.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: It's called The Treatise on Geochemistry.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like a graduate student's handbook for geochemistry, covers everything.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: There's chapters on everything from the composition of the Continental Crust to what we know about large little shear velocity provinces and the deep mantle, etc.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: etc.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: But all geochemistry related.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: Is this a collaboration?
1:45
SPEAKER_00: This this book?
1:46
SPEAKER_00: The book, yeah.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: So there'll be like the way this works, there'll be like a lead editor and several editors that are kind of sectional editors.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: And what they do is they go around and ask people to write specific review chapters.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: So, like my colleague Andy Smai was asked to write a review chapter on a technique that metamorphic patrologists use a lot called depth profiling and sort of a metamorphic petrology section.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: I was asked to write a chapter, uh, get this on geological sampling, which is as vague as it sounds, and there was no guidance given on what to write about.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: It was just like you do geological sampling, write a review chapter about it.
2:24
SPEAKER_03: So that's kind of so did you get to read the chapter first, though, right?
2:28
SPEAKER_03: So you knew what the chapter was about.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: No, I have to write the chapter out of finish.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I thought you were reviewing a chapter that was written.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: I wrote a review chapter, like a review, it's like a review, a summary of the work out there.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: So I wrote the chapter.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: It's meant to be like a high-level review of what we know about geological sampling.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: So this is a difficult exercise, and this there's some interesting stuff that came out of it, I think.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: But Chris, you you and I do geological sampling all the time, and you and I have done a lot together.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: Here's my episode idea and question to you, which is how big of a sample do you need?
3:00
SPEAKER_00: How big of a sample do you need?
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Wait a minute.
3:02
SPEAKER_03: Are you are you suggesting that this is the title of the episode or the title of the chapter, or both?
3:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm suggesting the title of the episode.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: The title of the chapter uh that I wrote is geological sampling, but I also use that that how big of a sample do you need as the title for a poster at the geochemistry conference recently.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: And uh I really I think you're trying to be clever right now.
3:23
SPEAKER_03: You're you're rather proud of yourself right now, aren't you?
3:25
SPEAKER_03: You got a little smirk on your face, and and you when you said how big of a sample do you need?
3:30
SPEAKER_03: question mark.
3:31
SPEAKER_03: Um, you think that that that's that's rather catchy.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: No, here's why I'm smirking, is because I think I know what your answer will be to the question, how big of a sample do you need, Crispy's?
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Well, I am I like the big stuff.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: The answer is how big is the truck, but right?
3:47
SPEAKER_00: How how big of a rock can I lift?
3:49
SPEAKER_03: The answer to that is do I need a bigger truck?
3:51
SPEAKER_03: That's the right, that's the answer to the question.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: Well, you and I've collected some monumental samples.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: I think what did we do?
4:00
SPEAKER_00: One year we always drove your F 250, right?
4:03
SPEAKER_00: Or 350?
4:03
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: Which one was it?
4:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, 250.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: 250 diesel pickup truck that could carry a lot.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: We always loaded up a trailer, and one year we got like a heavy-duty dump trailer, didn't we?
4:13
SPEAKER_00: And just had that loaded up with rocks, the whole truck bed, plus camping gear.
4:18
SPEAKER_03: That was the Grand Valley trailer we borrowed.
4:20
SPEAKER_03: Let us borrow that.
4:21
SPEAKER_03: We actually took that to the Gore Mountain mine up in upstate New York, and the owner of the mine said, You guys can take whatever you want.
4:29
SPEAKER_03: And I don't know if he really knew what he was saying.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: Because you, me, and our buddy Andy uh went down there, and I mean, I have a beautiful Gore Mountain garnet sitting right at the entrance to our house and the path that comes to our house.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's huge.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: This thing, I I can hardly roll it over by myself.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, like it must have been three of us to lift this one thing into the truck bed.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean exactly impressive.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: So we collect big samples, is the point.
4:54
SPEAKER_03: Okay, well, I I I'm I'm in disagreement.
4:57
SPEAKER_03: Let's say for the title for this episode is it should not be how big of a sample do I need.
5:02
SPEAKER_03: Well, it's yours.
5:03
SPEAKER_03: I think a much better mine is smash and grab.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's a good one.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: That fits as well.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: All right.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: I I okay, I think I think I see a way we can merge this.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: Smash and grab colon.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: How big of a sample do you need?
5:18
unknown: Okay.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: How big?
5:20
SPEAKER_00: I don't know about that.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: One of my PhD supervisors always said, you should never have a colon in your title.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: Just decide what it is.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: Don't make it do things and bring them together.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: Just make a decision.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: That's perhaps good advice.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: That's good advice.
5:33
SPEAKER_00: Anyway.
5:34
SPEAKER_03: All right.
5:35
SPEAKER_03: So where are we in this paper, Jesse?
5:37
SPEAKER_03: Uh like have you written it?
5:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's written, it's it's been reviewed.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: It's officially uh available online now, but but the Oh, okay, cool.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: It'll be in like a volume.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'll send you a PDF for sure.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: So this was a difficult exercise, and this might give the listener a little bit of a window into the some insight here.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: Geological sampling go.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Chris, what does your what would you what would you want if you're reading that?
6:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm very curious.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: What would you if actually okay if you're gonna read and it's it's with a geochemistry bend and with a like solid, you know, metamorphic igneous rocks kind of lilt to it?
6:11
SPEAKER_00: So what would you want to read?
6:12
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I have a take on this.
6:13
SPEAKER_03: I would want to know because you're this is not about geologic sampling just because Jesse wants this in his yard, like all the you know, so much of what we have done.
6:22
SPEAKER_03: This is for uh for scientific review, this is for lab work to be done.
6:27
SPEAKER_03: So what exactly do you need uh to document when you take a sample?
6:32
SPEAKER_03: Like, do you need to take the the magnetic orientation of any magnetic minerals in there?
6:39
SPEAKER_03: Obviously, latitude and longitude.
6:41
SPEAKER_03: Uh what yeah, I mean, what actually goes into this?
6:45
SPEAKER_03: I'm interested because I have never done that sort of work.
6:49
SPEAKER_03: And I suppose that you and Mike Ackerson did this this summer when you were up in the Northwest Territories collecting samples for the Smithsonian, right?
6:59
SPEAKER_03: Is essentially what you guys were doing.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: And and I mean, I'm sure you know, you, Chris, and and everybody else who got an undergrad degree when you did field camp, you kind of learned about documentation, right?
7:10
SPEAKER_00: About what kind of notes you should take when you're looking at an outcrop, how you should archive that information.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: And so it's it's really quite for geochemistry, at least for the sort of petrology stuff where we're not actually looking, for instance, at magnetic signals.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: Like if you want to do magnetic work, that's kind of a different sampling strategy, and you have to document it differently.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: If you want to do sediment core logging, it's kind of a very different sample archiving.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: For our purposes, it's quite simple.
7:38
SPEAKER_00: It's exactly what you said it's latitude-longitude, and you want to know really well where the sample is.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: You want to be able to walk back up to the outcrop and say, oh, so-and-so collected a sample here.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: Jesse Rimick was here in 2018 and grabbed a sample from right there, and I want to grab one right next to it or right above it or right near it, or a different unit.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: So you kind of want to know that level of information.
8:00
SPEAKER_03: Are you able to use your phone then for the latitude and longitude?
8:04
SPEAKER_03: Is that good or not?
8:05
SPEAKER_00: Pretty good.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, the iPhone, when you're in airplane mode up in the north without any service, it does an okay job at GPS.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: It's still not as accurate as like a Garmin device that is connected to you know eight satellites or something.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: So it's not like a meter scale uh resolution or or accurate.
8:22
SPEAKER_03: What about a what about like a Garmin watch?
8:24
SPEAKER_03: Those things are are pretty good too.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: If you had that keyboard, you know, I haven't actually tried that with my Garmin watch just because it soaks up the battery when you're like live tracking all the time.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: So I just I have like a Garmin inreach for emergency communication that you can just drop ins to.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: So I I just use that.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: But the more important thing for me, and this is where so in this paper, there's a bit of storytelling because it's like, here's what I did wrong in the field back in the day.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: There are times that I would go back to a field site that I'd I'd been to and I had sampled two years later, and I couldn't find my own sample.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: That's like an embarrassing thing to admit, frankly, like because I should know that.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: I should have like I I'm not asking somebody else to repeat my my exercise.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to repeat it.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: Like, I should remember that, I should have documentation.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: So, kind of what I've evolved to doing is the GPS coordinates you got to have and write it down into multiple different places, your field notebook, your Garmin, another field notebook, or your colleague's field notebook, have it multiple places.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: And I always take photos and have those photos a couple different places.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: Take the sample out, label it, put it back where you got it, and take a photo in place so that you can really find it.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: Because even with a meter resolution, it's sometimes kind of hard to find where did somebody take a sample in like a three square meter area.
9:38
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
9:39
SPEAKER_03: I I also would assume that it's important to be able to get right back to where you found your samples from.
9:47
SPEAKER_03: Because if you write anything controversial, then somebody else might say, I'm gonna test this because I don't think Jesse Rymick is right.
9:56
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna go back there and come to my own conclusions.
9:59
SPEAKER_03: Does that is that a part of the process?
10:01
SPEAKER_00: And does that ever actually happen?
10:02
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's a very, I think a very common part of the process.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: And Chris, I you and I have this experience from from like banging around in the black hills looking for, I remember looking for the star lights.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: We were trying to get star lights out of the schist, and we ended up finding them eventually.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: But the descriptions are like, okay, there wasn't a GPS coordinate, I don't believe, but it was pretty specific.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: It was like you drive along, you know, highway, whatever, you turn left on this road, you drive for 1.2 miles, you get off and you hike 120 meters into the woods, and there's a little round outcrop, or is something like quite specific.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: But you end up getting into the woods, and there's like a couple different round outcrops, and you're like, which one's it?
10:39
SPEAKER_00: Is it the north side of the hill or the south side of this little knoll?
10:42
SPEAKER_00: It takes a while.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: So your title is really good because it's really hard to accurately smash and grab.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: Like it takes time, you know what I mean?
10:50
SPEAKER_00: To find these things, even with amazing stuff.
10:52
SPEAKER_03: Sometimes I think the descriptions are purposefully vague.
10:56
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
10:57
SPEAKER_03: Maybe that's to protect the site.
10:59
SPEAKER_03: Uh, I'm not sure.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: So here's my take on that is, and because I've I've done this, I've felt this.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: When you're out in the field and you're doing your own work and you're collecting samples of rocks that nobody's sampled really before or looked at, and you're on week two, it gets to be a lot like work.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: And there's a tendency to get a little bit loose in your documentation and be like, okay, this is a granitoid nice sample, blah, blah, blah.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I I got it.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: I got the point.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: Take a photo, go away.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: But what helps me, because I've done this wrong, I've done this bad, I have gotten loose in the field and then come back and been like, oh crap, that's a really amazing sample.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: I need to go back there and get more.
11:41
SPEAKER_00: And you go back there, you're like, crap, I took kind of lazy field notes.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: Like it, I can't exactly find it.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: Or like I took one photo and I lost it.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: I didn't duplicate it or something, you know.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: So that's happened to me before with a really cool discovery of a rock, and and it's embarrassing.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: So I always kind of keep that in mind.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: Like, hey, I'm collecting a new rock.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: What if I find the oldest rock in the world?
12:00
SPEAKER_00: What if this is it?
12:02
SPEAKER_00: I want to be able to come back here, and there's gonna be dozens of other people who want to come back here to sample this thing.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: So I always try and keep that in mind.
12:08
SPEAKER_03: I I would imagine I have a question for you.
12:10
SPEAKER_03: Do you find that as you get older and more experienced in this, and you've gone through the embarrassment maybe of not taking really good field notes?
12:19
SPEAKER_03: Do you find yourself being more patient with that aspect of the job now?
12:23
SPEAKER_03: In terms of I have a protocol and I'm gonna be very deliberate about going through that protocol.
12:29
SPEAKER_00: Have you changed much less rushed?
12:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm less like, oh, I gotta go to seven outcrops today.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: If I get five and I document them really well, that's good.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: So that's like a win, that's a good day, as opposed to seven and doing it kind of quick and dirty, you know what I mean?
12:45
SPEAKER_00: So it I for sure that has that has kind of happened.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: So I some of this writing was kind of like this personal takeout because like I've screwed up before and haven't hasn't turned into a massive embarrassment, but there are people, and this goes back to to your phrase of whoever sees the most rocks is the best geologist.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: One of the the best geologists I've ever probably met in this this regard is a woman named Val Jackson who mapped the north of Canada for 40 years.
13:12
SPEAKER_00: She had field notes from 1989 that she still has to this day that are unbelievably detailed that allowed us to go back to outcrops that she visited, walk up to them, find exactly where the sample was, and be like, this is it.
13:29
SPEAKER_00: This is the Val Jackson 1989 sample site.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: And we sampled it, and lo and behold, it's the same thing.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: And we've we've published several papers.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: I have a PhD student working on that whole project, big grant funded, on the backs of Val's very clear sampling notes, which is just an exercise like, here's how to do it right, this is how you do it correctly.
13:48
SPEAKER_03: And it's interesting because she did that very early on in her career, too, which is I think a a little unusual.
13:54
SPEAKER_03: That's that's amazing.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
13:56
SPEAKER_03: So, Jesse, when you are tasked with uh I need to go out and get samples, what are some things to avoid?
14:04
SPEAKER_03: We just talked about what are some things to do.
14:06
SPEAKER_03: So, what do you need to like steer clear of when looking for samples?
14:11
SPEAKER_03: What about some of that?
14:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a couple, I think it depends what you're after for sure.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: But for me, I'm usually looking for like the baseline rock, like uh if we're going out to the Sierra Nevadas, we want to collect the Kuna Crest granodiorite.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: We want like an average of that.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: We don't want one of the veins that are cross-cutting it.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: We don't want one of the app light dikes that are cross-cutting it.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: We don't want too weird of a sample, we kind of want an average sample.
14:36
SPEAKER_03: So you kind of walk are you kind of talking like Tualumni in Yosemite that too?
14:41
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in the in Yosemite National Park.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: Like if we're after the Sentinel Granodiorite or one of the Johnson granite porphyry or one of the rock types in there, and you kind of want the average, is what I'm after.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: And so we want to avoid things like veins or alteration, a lot of like weathering rinds on the edges.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: You kind of want to just ignore those and not sample those for this purpose.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: But I think, Kristen, this is something that we all struggle with.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: I'd be curious your thoughts on this because I you and I have experienced this when we go out, we're often after the spectacular, cool stuff, the the rare stuff, frankly.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: Even if you're walking around looking for the average stuff, your eye is drawn to the cool, unique rock.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: I think we all there's always a little bit of a bias in sampling.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: Like if I don't know, if Chris, if I was like, okay, go sample the Gore Mountain mine, how would you go about doing it?
15:35
SPEAKER_03: Because it's it'd be hard to do.
15:36
SPEAKER_03: Where are the biggest garnets in the prettiest gabbro around in the host rock?
15:42
SPEAKER_03: And which one has the best, like I don't know, the halo around the garnet.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what we talked about like uh last episode or two episodes ago.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm looking for.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: Totally.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: And that's the coolest that's what we got.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: If you're gonna study it, I want that one.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: I want to study that one, but it's it's perhaps not the best ever.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: So there's always this bias towards like coolness that we all kind of have, or uniqueness, or so it's a difficult thing.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: You you have to really fight to kind of avoid that a bit.
16:06
SPEAKER_03: Oh, so you're talking about avoid the I don't like this because I want to do the pretty stuff and I don't want to do it is that what you're saying?
16:13
SPEAKER_03: Kind of.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think there's certainly times when you want to.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: Like if I said, Chris, let's do a project where we want to understand how if we want to understand how the spectacular garnets formed, then we go for the spectacular garnets.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: But if we want to understand how the rock itself, like what is the tectonic setting of the rock itself, the most spectacular, weirdest garnets are probably not the best.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: We might want to get more of an average, which is gotcha a little bit more of a boring rock in the same quarry or something like that.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: Um that's not a great example, but you know, you that kind of makes sense.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: Like, how how do you find this?
16:45
SPEAKER_00: Because you when we're going out on our rock collecting trips, it's like we're always looking for cool, unique, spectacular.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: How much important stuff do you think we walk we we sort of skip over?
16:57
SPEAKER_00: I I'd guess a lot, probably.
17:00
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I would I would assume so.
17:03
SPEAKER_03: But the other side of that though is that you when you're looking for these very hard to find locations, just the the number of mileage and walking and and often driving that you do, you get to see the variety also.
17:17
SPEAKER_03: And sometimes then you're you find things you didn't expect.
17:21
SPEAKER_03: Uh you and I have personally had this experience, I think, many times, um, where we come across things that are just absolutely beautiful specimens, and we get to sit there and talk about, but that's not what we were after.
17:32
SPEAKER_03: We were looking for something else.
17:34
SPEAKER_03: That's true.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's a that's a very good point.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what is the one I remember a couple from the Black Hills where you're just kind of like driving along, or we're like walking along, and then you're like, oh, we can't find it.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: You go back to the guidebook, and then there's a sentence in there that catches your eye.
17:48
SPEAKER_03: When I think of that, I think of the Minicata formation in the Black Hills that we weren't looking for that.
17:52
SPEAKER_03: We were but then we we found it to be a striking rock formation, actually.
17:56
SPEAKER_03: And and so we did some collecting with it.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: No, that's a good example.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: So there's always there's always something interesting about most rocks, and but but walking over them just with a singular focus can kind of be you kind of have to, but it can also be you can also miss stuff with it.
18:12
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I'm I'm actually just right now beginning to introduce rocks and and the rock cycle to my young freshman earth science students.
18:20
SPEAKER_03: And so I'm trying just to get it across the board, like just take a swipe at it.
18:26
SPEAKER_03: Like, why why is this important?
18:28
SPEAKER_03: And and you you start to think about the the amount of information that you can get from a rock that you have in your hand.
18:35
SPEAKER_03: If you can pick that rock up and you can classify it as are you, you know, a sedimentary, are you igneous, are you metamorphic?
18:42
SPEAKER_03: And once you can like get to that point, then the information that you can get just from 10 seconds of holding it in your hand is is actually amazing.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: Totally.
18:52
SPEAKER_03: The story that that rock has to tell, you know.
18:55
SPEAKER_03: So that's where I'm at right now.
18:56
SPEAKER_03: I'm trying to convince my students that I am not a total nut job and that that this is actually awesome stuff.
19:02
SPEAKER_03: How's that going?
19:03
SPEAKER_03: Uh well, it's a it's a work in progress.
19:05
SPEAKER_03: I'm on a few tasks, though.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you can update us over the next couple weeks, whether you've used it.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: I I I it's hard to lie to high schoolers, they're pretty good at picking up on your lies.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: I'm not lying though.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: Oh, you think you're normal?
19:17
SPEAKER_01: I do.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm not lying to them.
19:22
SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, yeah, yeah, you're really normal, Chris.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
19:27
SPEAKER_01: All right.
19:28
SPEAKER_01: Point taken.
19:29
SPEAKER_01: Point taken, yeah.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: Um now that I now that I got the Planet Geo hat on.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: I think what's that?
19:35
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I was gonna I was gonna ask you why you're not wearing the hat, and I still don't have you know, so do I do I have to no no no?
19:41
SPEAKER_03: I can just get on I can just get on the website Norway.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: It's right, yeah, yeah.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: Planetgeocast uh com.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: It's on there.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: I'll just do that.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you you can order one yourself.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: There you go.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: All right.
19:50
SPEAKER_03: So you might have to order a few.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there you yeah, that's right.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: You gotta have them do one hanging on the tractor and uh one.
19:57
SPEAKER_03: Well, I gotta give one to my mom and dad, and absolutely.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: Oh yes, I can't wait.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: You gotta get a photo for me of Joyce sleeping when you rock up on a Friday with the Planet Geo hat on.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: You know, like visor diamonds, covering her eyes on the porch, you know.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that'd be great.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: That'd be the best.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: It's on its way.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: Got the Planet Geo hat on now.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, okay, so Chris, do you want to hear about the second half of this geological sampling thing that we wrote?
20:24
SPEAKER_03: That is Yeah, absolutely.
20:26
SPEAKER_03: So this is a part of your review, then, right?
20:28
SPEAKER_00: This is a part of the review, and this is the part that's like the how big of a sample do you need part.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: So the Baxter here is again something I did wrong, I think.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: My PhD supervisor, Tom Choco, who's uh a great scientist, just an overall amazing human being.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: I I asked him to help write this review chapter with me.
20:46
SPEAKER_00: And he wanted to do a test of the statistics of geochemical sampling.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is there's a whole bunch of lit well, there's some literature out there on if you think, Chris, of the Gore Mountain amphibolite or pick your average granite.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: A granite is a coarse-grained rock, right?
21:06
SPEAKER_00: It has grain sizes you can see.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: There's some randomness to sampling a granite.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: So if you take a big granite and you want to get an average, and you can't collect a hundred kilogram sample that goes in the back of Chris's truck, if you just can't collect that big of a sample, you won't you need something in your backpack?
21:25
SPEAKER_00: You collect a small fist-sized sample, and you're gonna get a random number of quartz grains and a random number of feldspar grains.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be a random assortment of grains that you hope is pretty close to the the rock.
21:37
SPEAKER_00: If you collect a tiny thumb-sized sample and then measure the geochemistry of that, you might randomly get too many quartz grains in there or too few felt spars, and you might get a weird composition that's not an average of the rock.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: Does that like lead in make sense?
21:52
SPEAKER_03: Right.
21:52
SPEAKER_03: So this actually does make your title make sense.
21:55
SPEAKER_03: How how big of a sample do I need to get a representative cross section?
22:00
SPEAKER_03: Of what's in the right.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Exactly, representative.
22:01
SPEAKER_00: That's a great, that's the perfect word for it.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: Representative.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: You can imagine a basalt, a basalt where it's very, very fine grain.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: You can collect a pretty small sample, and our intuition tells us like they're probably going to be pretty close.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: There's been a lot of work on trying to quantify this or to provide kind of a guide for how big of a sample you need, depending on the rock you're sampling.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: And all those people who did these models is all sort of geostatisticians.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of it came out of the exploration community because you can imagine somebody out there looking for gold deposit really should know how big of a sample you need to know whether there's gold or not, like whether to make that determination.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: So the exploration geologists care about that.
22:41
SPEAKER_03: So this was a study that your supervising professor Tom Chaco did then.
22:45
SPEAKER_03: He actually broke this down.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he wanted to do this.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: He said there's all this statistical literature, but nobody's actually tested it with a granite.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: And I said, No, that's that sounds really boring.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to do that.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: So if if you want to do it, you can do it.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: You can pay for it.
22:59
SPEAKER_03: I look at this and I I don't think it sounds boring.
23:02
SPEAKER_03: I I um I disagree with you.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, I you're right, Chris.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: You it's good that you disagree with me because I was wrong.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: This is not boring at all.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: So so what Tom did is he went to the granite countertop store and found a big off-cut piece of a granite countertop.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: It's a K-feldspar, what we call K-feldspar megachrystic.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: Um, we've talked about this with the Sierra Nevada's, like it has big K-feldspar grains in it and then quartz biotite, you know, all the other granite minerals.
23:29
SPEAKER_03: So the the megacrists, the megacrists are are they surrounded by smaller crystals then?
23:34
SPEAKER_03: So it's like big floating so you're gonna have and yeah, you're gonna have variability in the exactly a lot.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: So he got this rock from the granite countertop store.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's called Sapphire Brown, is the trade name, but it is a it's actually granite.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I know, right?
23:49
SPEAKER_00: Um it's so he took it, he took this huge slab, took it back, and he broke it apart into a bunch of different size pieces.
23:56
SPEAKER_00: Like he took one kilogram size and did that five times, took five one kilogram samples, took five two kilograms, etc.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: A bunch of different sizes of samples, did it five times, and then sent all those to the lab and said, measure the geochemistry of all these different sizes for me.
24:12
SPEAKER_00: So what we get now is sample size versus the variability, because we have five replicates, so we can see how scattered the silica concentration or the potassium concentration is in those five kind of replicates of each size, because they should all be the same if it's a really good average.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: And what you see is the small samples, like a half a kilogram sample, uh like a one-pound sample, there's a lot of variability because the K-Feldspar grains are quite big.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, we did this thing.
24:41
SPEAKER_00: Well, we I can claim we now because Tom really did it, and it turns out it was amazingly interesting because all the statistics that people had done before were wrong.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: And Tom tested this, really did a test of how good are the statistics, and the statistics were wrong because they didn't really account for this thing we call closure in geochemistry, where when you grab a sample of a rock, you have a hundred percent of the minerals in that sample.
25:06
SPEAKER_00: You always have to think in terms of a hundred percent.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: So that's what we call closure.
25:10
SPEAKER_03: So, what was the size where when you went above a certain size, then it all evened out?
25:16
SPEAKER_03: What was that?
25:17
SPEAKER_00: What essentially the closure is extremely dependent upon the rock that you have in front of you.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: So what we ended up doing is redoing the model, redoing the statistical model with a method we call Monte Carlo simulations.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: And we have talked about Monte Carlo.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: This is going back a couple years ago, but basically you just do random simulations a thousand, ten thousand times.
25:37
SPEAKER_00: What we did is we built upon this earlier statistical work, and and you could build a synthetic rock.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: So now we have a little program that says, okay, Chris, what minerals are in your rock?
25:46
SPEAKER_00: What's the composition?
25:47
SPEAKER_00: So do you have K-feldspark quartz, biotite, amphibole?
25:51
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you've got those minerals.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: Uh, what are the grain sizes and how much of those minerals are in the rock?
25:57
SPEAKER_00: So you put that into your model, and then you can spit out a sample size that you might want that would give you a certain variability on your potassium content or something.
26:06
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what about the variability within the rock in terms of uh you know, grain size, texture?
26:12
SPEAKER_03: What a porphyritic rock is that's another wrinkle in the the equation.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: At the moment, it's a it's a it is the question, right?
26:20
SPEAKER_00: Our model gets close but not perfect to reality because we did this reality test.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: And the modeling that gets close but not perfect because of exactly what you're describing.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: Like not every K-Feldspar grain is one centimeter by two centimeters by one centimeter or or whatever, right?
26:34
SPEAKER_00: So there are ways.
26:35
SPEAKER_03: So can we get to I'm excited here.
26:38
SPEAKER_03: Can we get to the end?
26:39
SPEAKER_03: Can we get to the number?
26:40
SPEAKER_03: What is the number for the rock that like the the megachrist granite?
26:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
26:44
SPEAKER_00: So if you're walking across the Sierra Nevadas, the big K Feldspar megachrystic, you see the big K Feldspar megachrys, you have to collect about a 20 kilogram sample to get holy Oh my gosh, okay.
26:56
SPEAKER_03: That I did not expect that.
26:58
SPEAKER_03: Shocking, right?
26:59
SPEAKER_01: Because that's like a 42-pound rock.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: Because the K feldspars, they're like 10 centimeters.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: Those things are huge suckers, right?
27:06
SPEAKER_03: Like they are.
27:07
SPEAKER_03: They're they're the size of a baseball.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: If you want to get a potassium content that's plus or minus 1%, so the potassium in that rock is like 6% of the rock.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, maybe that's too high.
27:16
SPEAKER_00: Four or five percent of the rock is potassium.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: If you want to get plus or minus one percent, you have to collect like a 20 to 25 kilogram sample.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: A huge sample, massive.
27:26
SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's amazing.
27:27
SPEAKER_03: What about um just a regular granite, not a tualumny kind of thing?
27:32
SPEAKER_00: It goes down substantially into the couple kilogram range, depending again on your size.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: So it's heavily weighted towards these big grain size.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: The big did you do one for say basalt?
27:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, basalt's very small.
27:44
SPEAKER_00: You can do 500 grams.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you if it even if it has small porphyrblasts, like if it has sort of phenocris, feldspar phenocrists or olivine phenocris, just because the background rock is so small, the grain size is so small, you can collect a pretty small one, uh, a small sample, and it's pretty accurate.
28:02
SPEAKER_00: So we talked about the Gore Mountain Garnet.
28:04
SPEAKER_00: We put the Gore Mountain Garnet.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: We didn't test this empirically, like we didn't set subsample the Gore Mountain Garnet, but we put it into our model, and it says that you need like an 80 kilogram sample to get I have one.
28:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, not have it.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: We need to crush the entire thing.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: Oh put it all through a crusher, and then we'd get a an iron concentration that is you know plus or minus one percent iron on the on the value.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: So so this this was interesting for two things.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: First of all, like the statistics were wrong, and I think it's important for really important for exploration geologists, people like going after lithium pegmatites, for instance.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: I mean, when you have spodgmine crystals the size of your house, you are so like subject to this random sampling so much.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I will also collect bigger samples of my of my gneisses, the rocks I collect in the field.
28:54
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna that's my next question, actually.
28:56
SPEAKER_03: So you deal with the Acosta Nice up in the Northwest Territories.
28:59
SPEAKER_03: This is a really complicated rock.
29:01
SPEAKER_03: So if you put something like that into your model, how big of a how much do you have to take?
29:07
SPEAKER_00: It needs to be in the kind of the granite size, like a kill, a couple kilograms, probably.
29:11
SPEAKER_00: But what that means, so I my normal sampling routine up until now was typically you'd try and take like a two-fist size sample, is what we would call it.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, so put your two fists together, and that's kind of the broadly the size you want.
29:24
SPEAKER_00: And that's great.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: That's kind of the size we need.
29:26
SPEAKER_00: But what I would always do is I'd take that back to the lab, I'd cut it in half, and half would just go in and archive.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: It would say, I'm saving that for later.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: This was a really expensive rock to collect.
29:38
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna save that for later because I don't know what I might need it for.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: And then I'd deal with a one fist size sample, and I'd crush that up, and I would separate some of it and leave the crushed bit for later.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: So I'd end up only really analyzing less than I need to, like less than the one or two kilograms.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: So, really, what I need to do is either crush the full sample, the full fist size sample, or I need to collect a doubly big one, you know, two a bigger sample so that you can do when you're processing.
30:08
SPEAKER_03: Well, to me that makes sense, but it is expensive, especially if you're on a float plane, you have to be leery of weight and all those things and weight and space.
30:15
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly you're collecting more samples, but you're already up there.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: So, what we did this past summer was we collected big samples because we had the space and time and we were already up there.
30:24
SPEAKER_03: Do you ever get to collect just uh like all right?
30:27
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna collect this for scientific purposes, but this is too awesome of a rock.
30:31
SPEAKER_03: I need to have one too.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: Do you ever get to do that or not?
30:34
SPEAKER_00: I uh not for well, so we we could have this conversation with Mike.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: Like Mike Atkinson's not allowed to have a personal collection, actually, as a museum curator at the Smithsonian, because you can imagine, like, if you're um Gabby Farfan, who we interviewed, if she's a gem collector, she's going off and saying, I have a million dollars to buy a diamond from here, and I'll buy it from you if you give me that little one by the side for my own personal collection for free.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: Or, you know, you you could imagine people doing deals like that.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying Gabby doesn't and would never, but that's why these rules are in place for people like Mike.
31:07
SPEAKER_03: So does that mean that Mike can't have the kind of stuff that I have in my front yard around my flower gardens and so on?
31:14
SPEAKER_00: Like he couldn't have that technically he's not allowed, yeah, to have have that kind of a collection, I think.
31:19
SPEAKER_00: For me, I do take some samples that are quote unquote personal, but they're usually not for my yard.
31:26
SPEAKER_00: Like I don't have any in my yard that I collected with research money.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: They'll sit in my office, and I'll usually have them because they're great teaching ones.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: Like, usually those spectacular ones are great teaching tools.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: And you can take them into my intro-level class, I bring in a beautiful Acosta Nice sample that I haven't cut at all because I want to bring it in and say, look, this is the oldest rock in the world.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: Look how pretty it is.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: Hold it in your hands, you know, do the ooh and ah over it.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: So I do stuff like that, and I have given out what I have taken is is like a kind of a grab bag of little chips of the old rocks.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: So I have a bucket sitting in my office, and I'll take those when I give talks, like public science talks.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: And usually if if somebody comes up afterwards or asks a couple of really good questions and are clearly interested, I'll I'll give them a piece.
32:11
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I had one that I cut into a little coaster.
32:13
SPEAKER_00: It was a four billion-year-old rock, and I was giving a talk here at a local distillery, and uh guy came up to me, was super interested, asking a lot of questions, like just really enthused about old rocks.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: He had a rock collection at home, he brought his wife up and introduced his wife to me and stuff.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: And and so I gave him one and I gave him this piece and said, Yeah, here's a piece of the oldest rock in the world.
32:33
SPEAKER_00: It's a coaster, and it's yours if you promise to use it.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: And he looked at me and he almost got like teary-eyed.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: He was like so appreciative.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: So I do like stuff like that where people for me, it's it's I'm using research funds to do that, but it's it's clearly inspiring other people, right?
32:52
SPEAKER_00: It's it's clearly like for outreach purposes, it's not for me to have cool rocks in my house or something, I guess.
32:58
SPEAKER_03: If that was I get it, yeah.
33:01
SPEAKER_03: That's really interesting.
33:02
SPEAKER_03: I similar experience just last week, you know, we're doing mineral identification and uh with my freshman earth science, and a kid just kept commenting that and I he's just a really neat person, he's very out there and enthusiastic, and he just loves amethyst.
33:18
SPEAKER_03: And so I just you know walked back and grabbed some of my own personal amethyst stuff, you know, and I gave him uh like a it was a chunk of a geode, you know, that I gave him, and he was the same thing, just blown away.
33:29
SPEAKER_03: Like, oh what you're giving this to me?
33:31
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: I mean it's so cool, just don't lose it.
33:33
SPEAKER_00: It's cool to be able to do that, and I think inspire the next generation, really, or inspire people, even if they don't go into geology, like this kid, even if he doesn't become a geologist, he's always gonna have that passion in his brain.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: He's always gonna have that amethyst crystal somewhere, right?
33:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, and and it it might be the seed to an entire career, or it might just be somebody who continues to appreciate our earth and the way that he remembers Chris Belly's teaching him, which is great either way.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: So I have a uh one question for you to end on here, Chris.
34:00
SPEAKER_00: And this is well, it's it's partially related to this geological sampling chapter we talked about, but this is a big issue that Mike Ackerson deals with all the time being at the Smithsonian, and every university out there deals with, because I, over my career, over my career thus far, have collected a ton of, I mean, tons, tons, literally tons of samples.
34:19
SPEAKER_00: I have uh probably a hundred five-gallon buckets full of research samples that are sitting, and the university has to figure out how to deal with these sample collections and where do they go and what do they do with it?
34:28
SPEAKER_00: So have you thought, you're a lot closer to retirement than I am, have you thought about what is gonna happen to all of the the classroom rocks?
34:36
SPEAKER_00: Your personal ones will stay in your yard, but the ones in the classroom, what's gonna happen to those?
34:41
SPEAKER_00: Have you do you have a plan in place for your kind of teaching archive or collection?
34:46
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
34:46
SPEAKER_03: What's gonna happen?
34:47
SPEAKER_00: Um they they stay in the school, they stay there and and somebody else is there like another young teacher who will like inherit them or use them or that's a work in progress still.
34:57
SPEAKER_03: We just have a lot of retirements happening right now.
34:59
SPEAKER_03: I I happen to come in at a time where where we were just hiring massively, and now a lot of those people are retiring and moving on, and and so yeah, we're replacing those kinds of people.
35:10
SPEAKER_03: And and when when they replace me, then yeah, I I hope that somebody will want them and use them.
35:16
SPEAKER_00: It's the same with research collections, but like people retire and they don't replace.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't have wanted somebody's research collection unless it was very much overlapped with my my interest, and they usually don't.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: So Mike at the Smithsonian gets a lot of requests from retiring professors to say, Will you take my collection into the Smithsonian collections?
35:35
SPEAKER_00: Because the university is going to throw it away because they don't have a space to deal with it and nobody wants it.
35:39
SPEAKER_00: So and we just dealt with this.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: There's an amazing mineral collection or deposits mineral collection from crazy places in the former USSR that nobody gets to anymore.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: And it's all here at Penn State, and we're trying to figure out what to do with it.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: So sample archiving is like a whole nother field.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: What do you do with these samples that cost 50 grand to get?
36:02
SPEAKER_00: And now they're sitting there and and for various reasons they ended up not being worked on, and we but we still want to hang on to them because they have value.
36:10
SPEAKER_03: So it's a whole nother with my collection, you know, it also just adds to the aesthetic of the room.
36:17
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you walk in there and it's a it's an earth science room, you can just feel it.
36:21
SPEAKER_03: And so even if they aren't gonna be used in the ways that I use them, it still adds to the whole atmosphere of the the whole that setting.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: You're totally right.
36:32
SPEAKER_00: You're absolutely right.
36:33
SPEAKER_03: It's thousands of samples, you know, literally, and they're all cataloged and pretty and they're minerals, they're sort of amaz an amazing archive.
36:40
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm gonna my my PhD supervisor, Tom Chaco, he's he's not too far away from retiring, and he's we've had this conversation.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: He's like, I want you to have, if you're willing, I want you to take all my Acosta samples because the University of Alberta is gonna dump them.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: And there are a lot I collected my PhD, there are a lot that he collected before and after, but it's also like I gotta figure out what to do with them, where to put them, how are we gonna do work on them, like make use of it so it's not just taking up space?
37:06
SPEAKER_00: Like it's a it's not easy to deal, it's not an easy thing.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: No, you're right.
37:10
SPEAKER_03: It's not I'm at that point.
37:12
SPEAKER_03: I am running out of room because I'm still collecting, you know, and I every time I do something that it comes from a different location, I go through the same process.
37:20
SPEAKER_00: Are you you know more given that you're you're you're running out of space?
37:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, and you're kind of well, you're past retirement age.
37:28
SPEAKER_01: Um are I can say that for teachers, right?
37:31
SPEAKER_01: You're past 30.
37:33
SPEAKER_01: I am not.
37:34
SPEAKER_01: I are you past 30 years?
37:35
SPEAKER_00: No, 28.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: Oh, close.
37:37
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: All right, fair enough.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: But uh, but yeah, I mean, do do you find yourself more, I don't know what the right word is, gracious with your samples, like giving them away more and and just being like what am I gonna do with all this amethyst?
37:50
SPEAKER_03: Like, here, I I would love for you to have yeah, but when when you have a student, uh let's say a geology student who's a junior or senior and is just really, really fired up about everything that you're doing, and then they expressed an interest in something, and I'm like, well, wait a minute, you know, I have two of that.
38:06
SPEAKER_03: I I don't need that.
38:07
SPEAKER_03: Give it away, give it to that person because that just act of kindness or or just uh I don't know what to call it really, but can be a spark for that person that you don't know where that influence starts and you don't know where it ends.
38:22
SPEAKER_00: Totally ends, and so you just well people I think it I always think of it as kind of like a sort of returning the favor, right?
38:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was that was done to me at a young age.
38:31
SPEAKER_00: 100%.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: And now you and I are in a position to do that a lot.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: It might have a big impact, it might have a little impact, it might have no impact, but the big impact ones are the you know, make it worth everything else.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean, like the you that might be the seed to an entire career.
38:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, my PhD supervisor has a rock, a quartz crystal, that was the seed to his career.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: And I kind of have the same thing with one rock, I've got it on the shelf.
38:56
SPEAKER_00: Like it's a rock that is for whatever reason it wasn't given to me, I found it, but it was the same kind of thing, right?
39:02
SPEAKER_00: So you never know.
39:03
SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a cool thing to be able to do it.
39:05
SPEAKER_03: It's funny because the sometimes they want to pay for it.
39:07
SPEAKER_03: They're like, well, here, I have some money, and I'm like, no, put your put your billvold, put your wallet away, please.
39:14
SPEAKER_03: No, this is a gift.
39:16
SPEAKER_03: I want you to have this.
39:18
SPEAKER_00: I I agree completely, but also hi grandpa.
39:21
SPEAKER_00: Did you just call it a billfold?
39:23
SPEAKER_00: I did.
39:24
SPEAKER_00: I I actually I didn't know Dave Bullheis was showing up to the podcast with me today.
39:31
SPEAKER_03: That was good.
39:32
SPEAKER_03: That's so funny.
39:33
SPEAKER_03: It's that is as soon as it came out.
39:36
SPEAKER_00: We're getting in this old mindset, though.
39:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it is.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: You kind of get like uh, I don't know if it's sappy, but you kind of look back and you think, I mean, I'd I've done this when we just moved.
39:45
SPEAKER_00: We moved all of the rocks and stuff.
39:46
SPEAKER_00: You kind of get sentimental, like looking back and be like, look at all these rocks I have.
39:50
SPEAKER_00: First of all, it's amazing.
39:51
SPEAKER_00: There's amazing stories tell of them.
39:53
SPEAKER_00: Second of all, I might have too many.
39:55
SPEAKER_00: Like I uh, you know, I can get rid of some, and that's okay if they're if they're gone to the right purpose.
40:00
SPEAKER_00: I'm no longer in like the hoarding phase where it's like I want to have more, more, more.
40:04
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
40:05
SPEAKER_03: You know, I went through a little bit of what you're talking about just the other day, uh, because the way that I go about introducing why I am as nuts as I am about rocks, is I take four or five rocks that are in my collection back in my lab, and I bring them up to the front, I set them on a table, and I tell the story of them.
40:25
SPEAKER_03: You know, so I'll take like some lightning strike obsidian, some porphyry to gandesite from violent volcanic eruptions, all this kind of really cool stuff.
40:34
SPEAKER_03: And I'll tell the story about those rocks.
40:37
SPEAKER_03: And when I'm trying to pick four or five, Jesse is a very difficult task.
40:41
SPEAKER_03: How do I pick my four favorite children?
40:45
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know, and tell their story to it's but also as you're doing this, you're going down memory lane every single time you look at these rocks and say, Well, I remember where I got that, and I remember who I was with and what I was doing and how old I was.
41:00
SPEAKER_03: When I it's just it's a trip down memory lane.
41:03
SPEAKER_00: It's an amazing story, and I want to hit pause on that because this is a podcast episode.
41:08
SPEAKER_00: I want you to bring those five rocks home.
41:10
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna tell the story of each of those rocks, and we're gonna hit record, and I'm gonna listen, I'm gonna ask questions, and that I think that's a really cool way to introduce why you're a rock nerd, and anybody listening to this who's listened to more than one episode knows that already, but in a more detailed, uh intimate way, I think that's really important.
41:26
SPEAKER_00: So, all right, well, let's do that.
41:27
SPEAKER_00: Okay, bring them home.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: If you're done with them, bring them home and we'll do it.
41:31
SPEAKER_03: I'll be done with them tomorrow.
41:32
SPEAKER_03: Okay, perfect.
41:33
SPEAKER_00: Bring them home and we'll we'll record one uh here in the next couple weeks.
41:36
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: All right, cool.
41:38
SPEAKER_01: Well, hey, we uh we stayed out of the weeds.
41:40
SPEAKER_01: Is this something you're actually liked this episode a lot, Jesse?
41:43
SPEAKER_03: This was fun.
41:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I I want you to send me the link, yeah, for sure.
41:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean it's uh that's what the goal was, but I'm sure there's a bunch when these these big vague uh titles, it's hard to know what to what I know, but that's also the beauty in it, too, is is you're not given a lot of direction in this.
42:00
SPEAKER_03: Just hey, write a chapter on this, and you get to take it pretty much wherever you want.
42:04
SPEAKER_03: And your take on it, it's unique, and it's something that a lot of people nobody would think of that take outside of the research world.
42:11
SPEAKER_03: So I think it's very interesting.
42:13
SPEAKER_03: I actually do.
42:14
SPEAKER_03: I I this I really, really enjoyed doing this episode.
42:18
SPEAKER_03: Oh, good.
42:18
SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
42:18
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know what I'm excited for, Chris, is going in geological sampling with you again.
42:22
SPEAKER_00: You're coming to Pennsylvania sometime here this fall, and we'll go we'll have to go do some geological sampling.
42:26
SPEAKER_00: I got a couple good hikes and locations we can go check out.
42:29
SPEAKER_03: We'll do some smash and grab.
42:31
SPEAKER_03: Smash and grab.
42:32
SPEAKER_00: We'll sit there and agonize over how big of a sample we can actually carry down the mountain in our backpack.
42:36
SPEAKER_00: Oh, we've we've done that many a time.
42:38
SPEAKER_00: We'll have to go do it again.
42:39
SPEAKER_00: For sure.
42:40
SPEAKER_00: Cool.
42:40
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43:26
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