Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Rocks for the Future - with MIT Prof. Oli Jagoutz

Transcript

Rocks for the Future - with MIT Prof. Oli Jagoutz · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Professor Ali Yaguts, thank you for joining me here.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Planet Geo.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to have this conversation.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is going to be, I don't know where we're gonna go with this, but it'll be fun.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks for the time.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate it.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be good.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, yeah, absolutely.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: The uh the I'll start with our traditional opening question, which is like uh, because geologists, people like you and me always have very interesting answers to how they got into it.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: How did you get into geology?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: What was the inroads and your sort of early path?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Were you an early discoverer of the field, or were you kind of like a failed engineer or failed med student or something, which often we get?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I'm sort of both.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: I have uh a lot of failure in my life, but I also was early introduced.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: So my dad was actually a cosmochemist, and he sort of went on sampling campaigns and he took us as kids along.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I always like that.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sampling campaigns for a cosmochemist kid, what does that look like?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: So he did his PhD in the 70s, and it was uh about the composition of the mantle, and so we go around.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we go around to all these volcanic rocks in Germany and we connect mantles and nodules, you know, etc.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Kid, I loved it.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: I could totally identify those.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so these yellowish-brownish ones, when you hit those open, they turn green and they're beautiful.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's a long story which you can edit out, but I tell it to you anyhow.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I was in uh in childcare, so I was in preschool, and uh we went on one of those field trips, and I told all my friends, we gotta crack all these rocks here, and when we do, they're green inside and they're shiny, and you know, and they were just some other river pebbles, and so we had this uh childcare which had all these river pebbles landscape things.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I took one after the other and we cracked it open with the other ones, and they all weren't green, so we started breaking the rocks, and so ultimately there was one that was shiny, and and the moment I grab it, my friend of that time, who's still my best friend, he sort of hits it and breaks my finger in the whole access.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Early trauma of the geological framework.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, I have a sizable gap in my CV because then I traveled around the world, I started climbing with like I don't know, 15.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I always had a connection to rock, but I wasn't really keen to follow in the footsteps of the parents, you know.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Who wants to know that?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: And anyhow, so then um when I, you know, after I sort of bounced around for a couple of years, I was a nurse, then I decided I want to study medicine, and I really didn't enjoy just sitting in the library all day, and uh that wasn't for me.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then I I sort of narrowed it down.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted a job where I can work outside that I knew.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And there were two things that I liked.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: I liked geology, I decided that I like it, even so that we have the family tradition.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: And um, the other thing I was really interested in is etno pharmacy.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: So you go and you study the plants and the herbs that sort of indigenous communities use and try to extract some use.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so those were the two things.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then after sort of five years of not being very professional, I decided okay, I'm gonna study chemistry, and if I like organic chemistry, then I go in the pharmaceutical way, and if I organic chemistry, I go geologist.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so here I am.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: So what does that tell you about your organic chemistry professor or teacher at that time, right?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of pressure to put on them.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: He was actually the dad of a guy that did high school with me, and he was sort of known, he would come through this practicum.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: We had to cook all this stuff together, and it was totally uninspiring.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: You stand on there, and this fume, it stings, and you cook something, and then in the evening you have a white powder and you determine melting temperature, and it's this temperature, and then it's right.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: If it's wrong, it's you did something wrong, but you have no white powder, and the next day you cook another powder and it has a slightly different melting temperature, and that's all and at any moment that dude could show up at your bench and you know pester you with questions.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was not for me.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not for you.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I avoided organic chemistry like the plague.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: I just did not want to take that class.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: I knew how hard it was.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I went to a college that many people were in pre-med programs, and uh yeah, so I avoided that, and I really did not appreciate chemistry until I realized you could use chemistry to understand rocks.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then geochemistry was supremely interesting, but chemistry itself was totally boring.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's the studying the hammer is not interesting, but using the hammer is quite fun.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, do you think okay, so many things, because we we get lots of students, and I think there's a lot of people who who come at geology, maybe they don't have you know famous cosmochemist parents, but they come at geology late in life.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Was that a problem?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Did coming at it later in life, did that make it more difficult for you in some ways?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, probably not because you're uh a a really well-known MIT professor now, but was it harder at those early stages because you were later, or was it easier in some way?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was uh easier for me because at some point when I was in my first geology lecture, I really knew that's what I want to do, and I was really excited about it.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that makes a huge difference how you study and how you learn.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the moment I picked up geology and really was exposed to it, I just totally loved it.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: I just inhaled the material.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: I could not get enough of it.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I can imagine that you need to reach a certain level of excitement and however that gets you there.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, the gap, you know, that was great time.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: I traveled the world and stuff like this, so I've done a thing and then I was ready to do it.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, in Germany there was a lot of I was not the only older student at that time.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Germany has a tendency to have really old students, and then just when I was an undergrad, they started to cut down on this.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: So what they did is they put age limits to a lot of these fellowships you can apply for.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you get to that thing, that becomes a little worrisome because you you're sort of depending, you do a PhD and this and that, but in the end, I never had to depend on it.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I got a PhD and then I got a postdoc, and then I got this job, and that's all I ever did.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a direct path once you've figured it out.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: There's an age limit to support, and that makes it harder.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: But I, you know, I don't think the age makes uh so much a difference as that you have the maturity that you really know what you want, you know.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: I and whenever that is ready, I just took longer.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's right.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, I think that's right.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: The direction, if you are more focused than everybody else and you like it more.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: I I I don't really buy into the advice of do what you like or do what you love necessarily.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: But if you do find something that you love, you are probably gonna do it better than the next person, and you're probably you're gonna work harder at it, therefore you probably could do it better.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the only reason to do something that you love, I think.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I also think it, you know, you have to put in some effort to really figure out what it is you love.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, when we do a high school, I mean it's a little better now, but I was exposed to none of that.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I had physics, chemistry, and biology, and I liked physics.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: I hated chemistry in school, but again, that usually relates to teachers.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that's all you know.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden you go to university and there are hundreds of subjects and you don't know anything about it.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's difficult to expand if you have no exposure to it.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, my exposure to you, obviously, I've read many of your papers when I was a PhD student, and I knew you from working on ARC, the formation of Continental Crust in ARCs, and largely focused on Coastan, the Coastan ARC math lift.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that was during your PhD, did you get into that?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then you you continued on, I mean, for for several years, at least as one kind of uh thread.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then I met you through some students at MIT, but then more recently you've sort of deviated substantially from that.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I think it'd be very interesting to talk about the deviations, but before that, let's talk about Costan because it's super interesting.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: What are your thoughts on, I don't know, Koistan?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: How do you form continental crust?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Go.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I know this is a huge topic, but if you could summarize your you know, decade of your life and so in 10 papers.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so yeah, I mean, you know, Kohistan is of course the master beat of everything in terms of arc magmatism, but the simple thing I think to say is you form continental crust like Bowen envisioned it.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean you have magmatic differentiation, which somehow seems to be controversial still in this community.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's an important role of water, and there's an important role of density sorting.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a couple of at the lower crust where you lose a component.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: What's Coistan and why Coastan?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: For people who don't know what this is.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: So Koistan is an intra-oceanic island arc, so it's a system similar to the Mariana, and it formed in the Tafian oceans 100 million years ago, and when India and Eurasia were still separated, and then when India and Asia collided, it got sandwiched in between, got tilted on its side.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: So now you have a crustal section where you can go from upper mantle rocks, let's say that were 40-45 kilometers deep, to unmetamorphosed sediments on the top.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so yeah, this is one of the most and it's in the Himalayas.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's basically 100% outcrop, there's no vegetation.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there is for the Himalayas actually reasonable access in terms of roads and you know, it depends where you really want to go.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you have to go with donkeys and stuff, but it's beautiful, and it's beautiful and it's 100% exposed.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: You have the most amazing rocks, you know, you have like meter-scale garnets sitting there.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just amazing.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: The Himalayas, Nangapaba, they're all there, you know, and the locals, it's fantastic.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, oh spectacular.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what a good excuse.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think similarly about my colleagues who like you know do research in the Bahamas, and so their fieldwork is going scuba diving in the Bahamas or something like that.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, okay, this is a scam.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Why why am I flying up to bug-infested Northwest territories to like scrounge around for old rocks among lichen and stuff?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is stupid.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Between moss.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: I can tell you the professional thoughts that went into doing all of that.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I studied uh in Mainz, there was a good structural geology professor, and it's always the professor that sort of guide you in a direction.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I really liked structure, and I like the powerfulness and the simplicity of it because you sort of understand how the rocks move, deform, flow, whatever it is, you know.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: But you don't need an awful lot of machinery.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: You basically just go out in the field, you measure it.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: If you know the structures, you know, you can understand it, and you put it all together, and you get a really core and picture.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so my master thesis was on the what is called the Glaros thrust in the Alps, is sort of a famous thruster.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: When it was time for me to decide about a PhD, I knew I wanted to stay at ETH because I really liked Zurich, because I like the mountains.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh, you know, I got different offers.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: The only thought I put into going to Koistan was like, Well, I know the Alps, why don't I check out the Himalayas?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's all.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then I went there and I worked with a guy who is uh structural geologist, and he puts me in this uh complex, that's called the Chilas complex, and it's like the most homogeneous, undeformed, giant hunk of gabbro norite with total void of structure whatsoever.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, real quick intro level, basic level gabbro norite.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Go.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: I am in gabbro norite.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: A gabbro is CBX bludge, and if you add uh OPX to the mix, you give it a gabbro norite.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, there we go.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: All right, perfect.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we're in the in the kind of the mantle.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Are we in the lower crust or the mantle section of Coastan at this point?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's in the rift section, so it's the lower part of it.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: I went in there thinking I map out structures and shear zones and stuff like this, and I mean there's nothing.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there is a little bit changes in foliations, but I stared at these very homogeneous kilometer scales.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you drive two hours and the rock is exactly the same.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: And and so then, you know, I had these rocks and I was like, I mean, structure is not gonna cut it.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: But luckily at EDH we had a really strong uh petrology group.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started to talk to them, and then I got really excited about it too.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: These igneous questions, those are great questions.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I really stumbled into it.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Then I did all the igneous work.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: But then once I finished the igneous work on Kohistan, the one thing that I never believed was the story of how the collision works.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: What I didn't believe was the evidence they put forward.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so after I thought I said what I had to say about the igneous work, I got back to the structural part of my life and try to understand how the collision history and how the collision sequence between the Ark and Eurasia and the Ark and India works out.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: That is a large-scale question because that really determines actually the final collision of India that connects the Himalayan orogeny to environmental changes and stuff like this.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so that of it sort of then led itself.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I realized I think what most people think is actually not right.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think it works different.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I had very controversial GSA talks where people stand up and yell at me and uh you know, whatever, dude.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: And um, but anyhow, so you know, you don't get discouraged when the community thinks you're wrong.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: You're probably right, it's my opinion.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's okay to be to be the outlier uh in a group like this.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody tastes what the other one does, but there's no progress.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think that's the most interesting talks to sit and listen to is when people get uh kind of excited, let's say, to put it politely, at each other.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: It makes for an interesting talk.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, that's the best learning experience.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: I remember my first conference I ever went to was the year after my undergrad, or maybe the senior year of my undergrad.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember sitting in a talk and watching, I forget who it was, I don't remember the names at all, but it was something about the moon.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, people were yelling at each other, actually yelling at each other, getting up and screaming at one another.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, hold, this is what a scientific conference is?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: This is crazy.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I learned, you know.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: It made me terrified to give a talk, but you know, you learned what it was like and to see what's already the more data poor, the more opinionated they, you know.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: I know data, but I know.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we've talked about that before.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: The Archean community is a uh it's an experience, hence the shift.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: But okay, so that kept you there.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is a good exercise in in geology.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: When you find a there's very few places that have exceptional sort of template exposure, like you're describing, a hundred million-year-old ancient art crust that's tilted and you get a beautiful cross-section.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's what we're striving for in geology.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you're sampling, collecting samples, you're looking for one little window on an outcrop that gives you the best picture, the best version of the story, or whether you're looking at a huge tectonic cross-section that gives you this beautiful story.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: But once you have that new window or that really well-preserved window, you can do all sorts of stuff with it, like you've done in the cursor.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay, real quick, what is the story then?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: What did people think about the collision?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then what do you think about the collision that's different?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: So the the the standard view, and I think there's still a debate.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't really follow it anymore.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: But the standard view when I came in was like, okay, the Kohistan Arc was sitting south of Eurasia, and then around 80 million years it collided with Eurasia.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a Bekak basin, they separated, and then it collided with Asia, and then it was sitting there, and then India came in and it collided with the Koistan Arc at 50 MA.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: The reason that is relevant is the the suture between the Koistan Arc and uh Eurasia is called the Indo-Suture, and that Indo-Suture is really one of the best dated sutures in the Himalayan system.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, the suture isn't that trivial, and so the Indian suture is actually pretty well dated with you know sedimentary records, high-grade metamorphic rocks, they have Koiside and dime uh uh circons with Koiside inclusion where they get ages of 50 MA, you know, it's pretty well good.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so then this observation was extrapolated and say, well, okay, since Koistan was attached to Erasia and we know the Industries 50, you know, further over to the east, it's a little more dodgy, the record isn't so great.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: But there's always hints of a 50 MA event there.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: But we know it well from the Hindusuture, hence the entire collision needs to be 50.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: It hangs on that you make the uh the suture that is north of the Koistan, which is called the Shayok suture, that you make that 80.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the constraint on that was rubidium, strontium, whole rock ages from granites far away.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't a constraint, okay?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's all I said at that point is like, whatever you want to make the Shyok, I'm not gonna sell the house on that.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm looking at the map, I'm picturing the map here, and you know, you've got the Himalaya.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: You're saying that the 50 MA is dated well in one spot, but if you take that kind of same suture structure to the east, it's poorly dated, and then there's one to the north that people thought was 80.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: That your argument is there's no real good constraints on that age.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you like there's one location that you think is pretty well dated, but the rest the other structures in here are not as well dated.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: The fair statement is that if you go towards the east, first of all, it looks like it's a a pretty good line.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: You can extrapolate it, but you know, it's border region, there's a major strikes-lip fault going through you.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, nobody has mapped it.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, over into the east, there's always evidence that something happened at 50.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's totally true.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, but then there was always this weird gap where other structures don't get active, metamorphism doesn't get active until 40, 38 million years.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: So, what is this 10 million year gap in a collisional system?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so it wasn't ever clear.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know where this is now.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't follow that discussion.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: I know, and then see papers that support our model, and then I see other papers that don't, and you know, they can continue discussing it.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Anyhow, so what is really true is that the Shyok suture zone was poorly dated.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it was an important suture zone because of what I just explained to you, because the the Indus is well dated.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if the Shiok is older, then the Indus is actually dating the Himalayan collision.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: But if the Indus perfectly dated at 50, but the one in the north is younger, then it just doesn't date the collision.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay, gotcha.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: So we put a lot of effort into the Shiok, and I had a great student with Greg Martin, who is now in Austin, and he he really worked that superb out.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you can clearly show that this is not 50.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that this is not Cretaceous, the collision in the Shiok.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, really?
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Evidence that put the Koistan arc, I forgot the numbers, but nearly 2000 kilometers south of the Eurasian margin at the time it was supposedly already attached.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: So this is saying the Himalay really, the Himalayan collision is much younger then?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so my preferred age is around 40 MA.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: 40 MA, okay.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: 50 MA event that we see on the northern Indian margin is the collision of India with this intra-oceanic subduction system.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, got it.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: You had this Mariana system, and it's even possible that a long strike it became just like the Mariana today, turns into one system that is once with uh Japan.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it could be very similar and it could be different in the east and the west.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's all possible.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: But then when India arrives, it goes down this trench and it, you know, it slows down in my model because you stuff in low density continental crust into a trench, and that slows it down.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the continent condition that slows it down, it's the forced subduction of continental material into the upper mantle where it doesn't want to be, and so it fights next, slows down, ultimately you probably break off the slab, who knows?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: So the model is India kind of aggregates what is now Kohistan first and then collides later with Eurasia.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the implications of this are people might think, oh, it's 50 versus 40, who cares?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a big climate driver.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: The Himalayan uplift matters for the Earth system in many ways.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: So dating that precisely is important.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, cool.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: So there's since ever this idea that you know the uprise of the Himalayan mountain modified the global climate and stuff like this.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, there is a change in climate roughly at that time.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: What we then postulated that it's not necessarily the Himalayan mountain building, but it's actually the abduction of these calcium and magnesium rich rocks on the continents that you then weather it and we put it in the tropics.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, there was a model from Kent and Montoni published that said, well, the tropics is very sensitive for these, all these chemical erosional processes.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then we realized our poliomagnetic data puts it right there.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm gonna simplify this, so please correct me.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: We're we've oversimplified.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, the idea here is we talk about chemical weathering of crust as a drawdown of CO2, but you can't just do it with quartz.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you weather quartz, you're not producing a lot, you're not drawing down CO2 because it's just silica ions in solution.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: You need in your argument, calcium-magnesium in solution will then bond with the bicarbonate, which uh eventually will precipitate out, carbonate minerals in the ocean, and effectively drawing down CO2 through that reaction pathway.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you're saying you need ultra-mafic or mafic rock, calcium-magnesium rich rocks at tropical latitudes where chemical weathering is rapid to do that process.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a fair oversimplification?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: Or I just think fair simplification, even though I ended up not believing the whole calcium-magnesium combines with CO2.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: But that is sort of the standard view, and I I do think that's true.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so what you need is a combination of physical and chemical erosion, because if you have only chemical erosion and no transport, you make a laterite and it's dead.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so the system doesn't weather anymore.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: So collisional system where you have uplift, you have both.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: You have physical because you have topography, and you have chemical.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: And if you are in the intertropical convergence zones, you know, the mean annual temperature is the highest, precipitation rates are high.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just very conducive to do, and this is all known.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Glaude Allegra and all these people desert, they have worked on that.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't do this.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is data that is out there in the literature.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, what the only thing that we showed is that our collision scenario works really well assuming.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: That process with the observed temperature variation.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's one.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's how I transitioned from igneous processes to tectonic process, from tectonic process to climate driving or climate variation processes, which sort of led me to where I am today that I think can use geological processes and do better for the environment.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, this is a great segue.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: That was a the better segue than I could have ever done.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: So well done on that.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is really valuable for people to center the conversation here.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because I was really struck, I think it was uh maybe a year or two ago, we had a conversation, I think, at a conference or something like that about this.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you you basically are not working on anything like that anymore.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: This igneous petrology, how did the continental cross form?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's a 50, 80, 100 million-year-old question.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know what's going on there.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: You you've abandoned that effectively, and you're working on other stuff, and I would say societally relevant stuff.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: So take this in any order you want, either focusing on what you're doing right now or focusing on what the geosciences should be doing right now.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: What are your thoughts?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: What's interesting to you in this space?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think as a field we should be doing more of?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think students should be focusing on and thinking about?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's a wide open space, but take it wherever you want and we'll we'll follow that path.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm not sure where this is heading, but so what one thing that I realize for myself is that I get bored about specific questions.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: I could not work on the original of Continental Crust for 40 years because I think people just start repeating themselves as I said in you know in 2010.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then if you say that in 2050, you missed your mark.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I think you should go in a field, you make your contribution, of course, you get to the depth that is relevant to make a good contribution.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: But then you said what you had to say, and then you know, let other people go on and don't try to obstruct the field, don't try to impose your feelings on this, and just move on.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing, I do think that a geological process and understanding how the earth regulates climate is gonna be key to help us understand how we can modify climate if that's the path we want to go down to.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: I do think that geologists have an awful lot to offer to this.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: I love this, yeah.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: We we do understand fluid rock reactions, we understand weathering profiles, all of these different things.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I get this question a lot: how do you come up with new ideas in a field that you have no idea about?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: I you know, I mean, you want to have some basic knowledge, you know, you don't want to be just scratching the surface and asking chat GDP.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: But if you have some decent understanding of processes, then I actually think it could be really valuable if you come in with an outside view.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so just because I haven't worked on it doesn't mean I don't have anything to offer.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I happen to have observed this process, know about this, and that could be irrelevant, and you guys don't know about it because it's not in your field.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: So you bring outside expertise, outside excitement, and I think that's really where the field needs to go.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's talk about sort of specifics then within that, because from my view, I agree with everything you're saying here, and me personally too.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm much like you, I'm distractable, I don't want to work on the same thing for more than a decade.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I have my own suite of things that I think are interesting going forward, but what are they for you?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, everything from geothermal energy to critical minerals to carbon sequestration, like this is a wide open space that geoscience skill sets and grounding could be applied to.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: What in that is interesting to you?
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Or what are you working on now that's most interesting?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: The projects that I work on, I do uh carbon sequestration.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: When I said before in the discussion that I didn't really believe that Earth takes the calcium and the magnesium from the ultramefic and makes a carbonate because there isn't an awful lot of dolomite.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: We published a couple of papers where we show that it's probably more over the organic side of things, okay?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: So that you make clays which protect organic material, and that's how and I also think that the organic side is something that is really important to you know find solutions for CO2 sequestration.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: The way we want to do it now is this unorganic side.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: You take CO2 that you now filter out of a 400 ppm here and then put underground and you hope that the calcium in the plagiarizer, the magnesium in the olivine reacts with your bicarbonate and makes a calcite, magnesium, tholomite, you know, whatever.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: But we produce so much organic waste.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: So humanity produces 12 gigatons CO2 equivalent in sewage, manure, and whatnot.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so if Earth regulates it through the organic side, then we should think about regulating it through the organic side.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because sewage, as a matter of fact, I don't need to collect, it is being collected.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: I have access to it.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: And sewage, our sewage, has 30% carbon in it.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Can we go back real quick, Alec?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: You're saying that the it's not calcium, magnesium plus CO2 or bicarbonate making limestone or dolomite in the way that the intro textbook says.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: You're saying that clays protect organic material.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's actually burying organic material, is the CO2 drawdown that pulls it out of the atmosphere.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the weathering CO2 link, in a way, is burying organic material.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so yeah, I I do think that at least that's a significant component.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, got it.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then you're saying let's take waste that we produced and let's do something with that.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: What is that something that you want to do?
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: You told me you were cooking poop at some point.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: About clays and stuff like this, but uh and that's not what we do right now.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: So, what we do actually right now, and that relates to the fact that I used to go for talks and you know I got exposed to people that work on totally different things, and then you connect the dots.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: Anyhow, so what we use now is we use industrial waste gypsum, which we also produce in copious amounts.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, I had colleagues here at MIT that worked on sulfur-reducing bacteria for the Archean sulfur cycle, for example.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they worked a lot on it, and so I learned about their work because we present each other our work once a week in our faculty meeting.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then when I realized that we produce copious amounts of this gypsum, and then there is this bacteria that actually loves this gypsum and it just needs a carbon source to live with it, and then it was pretty quick to actually connect all the dots.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that is really the thing that is if you know, if you come out from the outside world and you have some background and you happen to have listened to this talk a while back and you didn't forget about it, that's where you can all of a sudden make these connections that are pretty plain and visible, but people just haven't made it yet.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is all the egg of Columbus.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, once you do it this way, it sounds pretty logical, but you gotta find it.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta do it.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody's gotta do it first.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, okay.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it works really well.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we, you know, we patented it, and now we do the whole.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't want to do a startup, but there are people that would be interested in.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: We also talked to a major mining company.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: I just came off a call with Madden in Saudi Arabia, which is one of the phosphor producers, they might be interested in taking on.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the way we w do successful carbon sequestration is you find a way how you actually make money doing it.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so if you can't make it a business, it won't work.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's so easy.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: The way we make money is we produce side products that is relevant.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: So gypsum has calcium is calcium sulfate, okay, and uh what the bacteria does, it takes the sulfate, reduces it to sulfate.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: We take the sulfide and we make elemental sulfur.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you have seen recently the sulfur prices.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, because of the Strait of Ormuz, something to do with that, yeah.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean sulfur, that's people don't understand that.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, we go away from oil and gas and we need new energy.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: That most people get.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a whole product tree coming out of oil that we need to replace if we truly go away from oil and gas.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: And sulfur is one of the most important ones, okay?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because sulfur in the form of sulfuric acid is one of our main industrial chemists.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: One of the important applications for sulfuric acid is fertilizer production.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the way we do fertilizer is we take apatite, calcium phosphate, and we treat it with sulfuric acid, we leach out the phosphor, and the sulfur from the sulfuric acid combines with the calcium from the apatite and makes this industrial waste gypsum.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: And for each ton of phosphor, we produce five to six tons of gypsum phosphate.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that sits in stacks and has no real news.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's you know environmentally concerning.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: You don't want it, you know, it's sort of not in my backyard.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: You don't want to live to it.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: It can get airborne, it can get washed away.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: But the point is we need sulfur because we need fertilizer, because you need to feed eight billion plus people.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: So if you envision a world without oil and gas, where do you get your sulfur from?
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you make fertilizer and how do you feed people?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: So we need to think about this.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: And this is one way we take you can actually make this whole waste to value, which is sort of popular now, but you can recycle the sulfur with the help of biology and then put it back into the sulfuric acid so that if you actually one day move away from oil and gas, you have still a source of calcium.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: And ironically, there was this guy in the 50s, Postgate, who worked on sulfur-reducing bacteria, which is what we use, and he did all that work to find a source for sulfur.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: No kidding.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: That was before we actually knew how to distill uh sulfur out of oil and gas.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it's before the sort of modern cracking procedures for oil and gas.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: He actually was interested in after the Second World War, there was a shortage of uh sulfur, and so he actually looked into the similar process that we use now with new sulfur, and so you know, then then this oil came up, and then his work wasn't relevant, but it was of course very irrelevant uh scientifically, and he's sort of the founding father of microbiology.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: So he actually thought about this, okay?
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: He's interested in that going in this direction.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so you've tied a very nice through thread to your work that you're doing in research, I suppose, mainly.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: How about?
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, now you're running the Earth Resources Laboratory at MIT.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that's giving you like a broader exposure, right?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: In some capacity to like all these types of problems that geologists could potentially be applied to.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: What is your advice to students, either undergrads, graduate students, etc., who are inspired by a conversation like this, thinking my geology degree could be useful to solve big societal problems in ways that are non-traditional.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: What should they think about?
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: Skill sets, career paths, graduate schools, like I don't know.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's could confusing landscape to give advice on because everything's shifting underfoot.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, that's a that's a difficult question.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, first of all, you know, you need to be good in the fundamentals.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so you need to be good in chemistry, math, physics, you know, you need to be good in geology.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: You need really need to be able to read rocks to make observations.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you need to have the basic skill sets.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's really important.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then you need to be broad.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really challenging because you come in and you know you're just starting, and you get broad with time.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: What was really useful for me is going to all these conferences and then actually going to the talk and not just to the beer after.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I had those conferences too.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: You need to go sit and talk.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: You need to do a little bit of both.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: But um, conferences are hard work if you're trying hard.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, you know, it just you know, uh going to a talk basically saves you reading a paper.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can still read the paper, or you should read the paper if that's interesting, but you get a gigantic overview.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and then you know, you go to sessions that uh you know that you're sort of interested in, but you're not quite sure that whether that you have relevant expertise.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: And with time, you will see the gaps.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you will oh, this is you know, they don't think about this, but I actually know something about it and I have something to add to it.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, as you know, that now that I do ERL, it I mean, I'm not a geophysics, and you know, uh ERL was dominantly, you know, for 40 years, only geophysics.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I and I I'm not an inversion guy, I'm not a magnetotelluric, I don't know any of that.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't I don't have much to add to the traditional thing that we did, but the only thing that I have to add is that I'm willing to think about totally different things, you know.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: So now what we do in in ERL is this we just try to think really differently about the way we do things.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it's you know, even though I'm not a geophysics person, okay, I can understand what the problem is with, let's say, geothermal.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: I it's not difficult to understand what the questions are, okay?
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: Drilling at these temperatures, we don't have the material to do it, okay?
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: So now you have to come up with new ideas how you do it, and so you have to be innovative and you need to see the gaps.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: And with steel at 400 degrees is not gonna cut it, that's not gonna be the way to do it.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: So come up with new ideas.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I go totally in the wrong direction, but that's also what tenure is for.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know lying about it.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the tenure is nice because I I don't need to worry about losing my job tomorrow because I don't publish this paper.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I do think that you should do everything to get tenure.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: And once you have tenure, you should take the academic freedom and allocate a certain percentage of your time to just never never land science.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so you're some high risk, high stuff, but uh you know, pre-tenure that is a kiss of death, of course, if that's the only thing you do.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, then afterwards, you know, and then you want to think about it.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, I'm circling back now.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: We are interested in critical minerals because that is important, yeah.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that goes back to my rules as an igneous petrologist because you know there's a huge role of water in forming all these deposits because a lot of it relates to dewatering.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so now I can go back to the work that I did, I don't know, 15 years ago because I did work on the liquid line of descents of water-rich magmas and how they differ from liquid line of descents of water poor magmas.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: And now with the help of uh AI, you can quantify that, get hydrometers, you can use those hygrometers to map out areas where you had a lot of hydro smelt.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean you will form copper deposits there, but it makes it more likely to form copper deposits.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so this is like a regional prospectivity tool.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can say, hey, on average, in a hygrometer is the water content of uh in this case.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Probably you're looking at minerals uh that are hygrometers, give you kind of a sense of the water content of the magma initially or regionally in some way, shape, or form.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: No, we just do plain out whole rock, you know.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, whole rock.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, oh, even better then.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of diagram kind of a guy?
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: X versus Y.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's see what happens.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I love X versus Y.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but it's simple because the the water changes the face stability, and so you crystallize different minerals, or if you crystallize the same minerals, they can have a different composition, like bladder glaze is more anathide rich when you have melt, and that changes the trajectory of your derivative liquid.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: So water controls how the melt evolves, and you can then, if you have the melt, you can re-invert it.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now I guess now I'm an inversion guy.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you can you can reinvert it and you can come back to the original water content.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: And this approach is, you know, this is an AI approach.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: This doesn't work like classical pedrology, where you measure a melt inclusion or you measure a KD or a distribution, and you get a value for that rock.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is a statistical approach.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I take a population of rocks, and then I say 80% of those rocks most likely were that.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's different.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the the the sort of probabilistic approach to it as opposed to a sort of a deterministic thing.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I think that's a um that's a super interesting pathwork.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: But the goal is kind of to say, hey, if you're interested in copper porphyry and looking for copper deposits, don't look in Nevada, look in Arizona or something kind of like that.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: Not like don't look at this coordinate, but look at this region as opposed to that region.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: So what what's next?
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: What's like uh an interesting this is one of them I'm guessing though back to your roots and whole rock stuff, but how how interesting to you is geothermal or carbon sequestration or any number?
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: Critical minerals is a huge space from you know hydrogen to lithium to copper to nickel.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like the critical minerals is a really broad umbrella in a totally different deposit types are being opened up.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: So with the the four things that I work on, and uh, you know, I'm not doing this all alone.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: We have a really nice crew here, DRL of faculty and researchers.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: We have about 15 faculties and researchers from all different disciplines.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I do geological hydrogen, I do critical minerals, I separate those out, but uh I do uh geothermal and then I do carbon sequestration.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: So let's ignore the whole sewage thing that I talked about, which is above ground.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you do carbon sequestration the way we do it in uh carpflicks, where you pump it underground, all these four themes have the same problem.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: You want to go underground and then you want to access something that sits in a rock that has limited permeability, limited porosity, and you want to increase or maximize the reactive surface area so that you can leach out the element of interest.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so we are thinking about mining.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: The future of mining will not be an open pit mine, it's much more like fracking.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: You put something underground that takes out what you want, and then all these things have the same problem.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I make a chemical reaction between water and peridotite that can give me hydrogen.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: I make a reaction between water and a hot rock, and I take the heat out.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: I make a reaction between uh uh CO2-rich fluid and my plagically spearing rock and I try to deposit the calcite.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's always okay.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: But the under rock mechanics, physics, and chemical processes is always like how do I produce sufficient reactive surface area for my uh reaction of interests?
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and that's why it's really conducive to actually combine all of these things and think about it combined.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, you know, if we have a mine that mines copper underground and it happens to be in an area with elevated heat flow, you could mine copper and the heat, okay?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then people want to put CO2 in their fluid and deposit it in the baridotite and take the hydrogen out.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, people think about combining these things, so but though all these underground things relate.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: All these reaction spaces you're describing are in a reaction, a temperature PT space that's pretty understudied when it comes to uh metamorphism.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is metamorphism we're doing effectively.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is metamorphic petrology.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is metamorphic petrology.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think that this is the metamorphic petrology is the way of the future because of all exactly that you just gave a beautiful pitch for all the reasons that it's important, but it is an understudied space.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know much about 350-degree solutions interacting with rocks.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know what that is, actually.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: The basic stuff is really, I mean, some people argue they do.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, I'm a little suspicious of whether we actually know the basic thermodynamics of some of these the reactions that happen here.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a super interesting space, and you have a great pitch for the geological knowledge because you have to know the rocks.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: You also have to be able to know how to look at nature and say, oh, wait, nature did this back in time.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: It might have taken 10 million years to do it, but that's the reaction I want.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to induce that now in the earth today on a 10-year time frame, a mining time frame, or something like that.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like you got to be able to read the rock record.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a nice pitch that.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we're running up against the clock here, Ollie.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is the hopefully just an intro conversation, too many more.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I'll leave you with our closing question here, a traditional closing question, which is what has been your best day as a geologist?
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I have really I didn't have a best day.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: I have lots of days, you know.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: I I mean, you know, your first paper, when you get the first paper published and you get the email that your paper is accepted, you know, that's pretty nice.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good day.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: Then there's also great days in the field when you go out and you know, it's like, you know, every day I go in the office and I think today I'm gonna find something awesome.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: And 99% of the time I find nothing.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: But this the 0.1% where or today that is actually for once a good idea.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, those are great ideas.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing I really like is now that I'm a professor, you know, when I get the emails from my students that I get a job and stuff like this, you know, that's nice.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's really good.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: Sort of you put your offsprings and they they take it, they they think similar because you taught them into thinking, and they take it and it's accepted by the community, and these people are accepted because they're good, and you know, they just sort of flourish, and that's nice, you know, it's really cool.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: So every stage of technology, so your first paper is exciting, and your end of your field work with a nice cold beer is exciting, but then as a professor, seeing how your effort in educating people pays off, and they take it to dimensions or the directions you never even thought of, and you're sort of proud about it.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh I just got my first taste of that.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: My first PhD student just defended actually this week and headed off to an excellent postdoc fellowship.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and it's you know, sort of like, oh, I okay, that feeling, I get it.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: That feeling of like, hey, they're doing a great job, they're going off and you know, get to do things in the broader world.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, it's exciting.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I I that I like that.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: That was a great answer.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm lucky to not have just one day.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I appreciate that.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Ollie, this has been great.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for all the advice and uh insight into the wide world of geology and its new relevance.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate that.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I look forward to our little conference coming up, a little bit exciting to talk more detail about science.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I appreciate the time.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining me.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: It was great, Jesse.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: All right, see you soon.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: All right, see ya.