Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Super_Volcanoes: Dr. Robin George Andrews

Transcript

Super_Volcanoes: Dr. Robin George Andrews · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Hey.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Chris you're looking more bald than usual today.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_03: That's uh actually uh not possible.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: Are you freshly shaven?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: This morning.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_03: Nice.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, there we go.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yep, I have a routine.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'll never forget one of the things you taught me in class had nothing to do with geology or rocks or anything.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was you telling a story about you had actually shaved off a mole off the top of your head at one point.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: It was the first time I ever shaved my head.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'll never forget that story.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think we were dying in class.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: That was very funny.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: I it bled like a stuck pig.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_03: Like it was gross.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: What a uh first of all, stuck pig.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: What are you?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: 80?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, come on, man.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_03: Like sorry.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_03: It bled like crazy, Jesse.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_03: Is that better?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_03: It bled a lot.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_03: It bled a lot.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, I um had no idea it was well, I knew it was there, but I like I just I I didn't tell anybody what I was doing.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: This is the first time I ever shaved my head, and I didn't tell Jenny, didn't say, hey, do you think this is a good idea?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I just did it.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_03: And then it just, I'm like, oh my gosh, I have skin in my razor.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: It was gross.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness, just wouldn't stop bleeding.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: So then finally I got it to stop, and then I walk out, and Jenny is in the living room, and I'm like, I just walk in.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_03: There I am.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: And she's like, what she thinks you've gone crazy.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_03: What the hell did you just do?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_03: Because I'm now bald.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now bald and bleeding everywhere.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: So what a fun, what a fun job.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: I stopped the bleeding at that point.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: It took a while.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, we're not here to really talk about your bald head, but that that's just something that stuck with me for sure.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: We're here to talk about Dr.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: Robin Andrews, who we're interviewing today.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: So Dr.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Andrews is a science author, science communicator, PhD, geoscientist, did a really cool PhD project, you know, blowing up things, trying to simulate these MAR volcanoes, but has written a book recently that we're gonna sort of base our conversation on a little bit, but does a lot of science writing on the side as well.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Has written for the New York Times, Scientific American, is the 2022 recipient of the European Geosciences Union Crom Ward for Successful Reporting of Earth and geoscience topics generally, I suppose.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: So a really, you know, sorry, new, very accomplished writer and really interesting perspective on volcanoes, which was just made for a really fun conversation.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: It really was a fun conversation.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_03: He has a a great sense of humor.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um some of the things that he said during our interview just made me laugh, and and those were legitimate.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh, he just said that.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um I loved him.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: It was a it was a such a good book to read.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_03: I couldn't wait to interview him then.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: And the interview then lived up to the expectations.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: It was great.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: When I picked up the book, I thought it was gonna be one thing, and it wasn't that, and it was about super new word, volcanoes.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was really cool.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, our conversation, you know, just reinforced how interesting volcanoes are, first of all, but also that there's some really interesting volcanoes that don't get as much sort of public credit as they should.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was really uh taken by the underwater volcanoes chapters and the discussion we had about it.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, Robin's clearly very passionate about volcanoes and uh you know has found his purpose-calling interest here in this sort of science communication uh space.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was a really interesting conversation.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, we hope that you enjoy our conversation with Dr.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: Robin Andrews.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Hold on, stop.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: Push, pause everybody right now and uh go and give us a rating and a review.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_03: Seriously.
• 4:09
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• 4:11
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• 4:14
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• 4:16
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• 4:22
  SPEAKER_03: We'll get back to you.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_03: We promise.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: We love that stuff.
• 4:25
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• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're at Planet Geocast and our social media intern.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Give a little shout out to Olivia Leon right now, doing a great job, and uh, we got some great content on there.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: So follow us at Planet GeoCast with a C.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: Hey, should we do this?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_03: Let's go.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_03: Let's get to it.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_03: Robin Andrews coming at you.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: Here we go.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, welcome to Planet Geo, and uh, we are very happy to welcome Dr.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: Robin Andrews.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Andrews, thanks for joining us here.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, good to be here.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: This is really exciting.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna kind of frame uh a bit of the discussion about a book you just released.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: You're an award-winning science writer, you're a PhD in geology and volcanology, I think, but we're gonna kind of touch on that a little bit.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: But you just released a book that we're gonna kind of frame our discussion around called Super Volcanoes, What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: And this was a great read.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: This was super interesting.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: And thanks.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Both Chris and I have a lot of questions about it.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_03: I have a lot, I have a lot I want to ask.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: That's great.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: Cool.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's good.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_03: Sounds good.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_03: Sounds like it did a right thing.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_03: Just like Jesse said, uh so grateful that you're uh willing to spend this time with us, and I can't wait to get into this.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it's good.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Questions are always nice.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of I feel like if I spoiled everything about volcanoes in one go, then I would run out of articles alright.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_03: Jesse, you ready?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: What do you think?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: Should we dive in?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_03: Go, let's do it.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_03: All right, let's go.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so Robin, I have a question that we well, we always ask this when we interview people on our show.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um, how did you decide to get into geoscience and specifically like Volcanology?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_03: Was there because I have this with me, like there was a really clear moment in my life where I'm like, oh my gosh, this is it.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going, I'm all in.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: Did you have that?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so there are a couple of moments, but the one that was kind of instrumental early on was so I was interested in video games when I was very young.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Mum and Dad.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I and they by the way, they ruined like card games.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: So people are like, hey, do you want to play a card game?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And when you've been when you've someone hands you a Game Boy when you're like four, you're just like, I mean, it doesn't compare.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: The impatience levels go through the roof.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I um I love the Legend of Zelda games.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I the first one I ever played was one called the Ocarina of Time on the on the Nintendo 64 when I was about 10 years old.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like at the time, it was like this giant 3D world you could explore, and it had all these kind of things you could go and adventure into.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a volcano there called Death Mountain, which is kind of a staple of the of the series.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like obviously totally absurd.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's like monsters in there, it's kind of hollow mostly on the inside, and like the lava has some sort of sentience and things.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: But as like a 10-year-old, I was like, holy crap, like this is a thing.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is these things, this is this a thing, and and as soon as I could Google what volcanoes were, I was like, wow, these are everywhere, and they're kind of even cooler, like in real life.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: And no monsters will eat you, so that's kind of nice.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I kind of remember thinking, like, that's really cool.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And up to that point, I was thinking I was gonna get into like astronomy or something like that.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I still am, I still love the stars and things, but you can literally go to these volcanoes and stand on them and poke them, and that seems more satisfying to me.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that was like the thing that really made me think, this seems sort of weird.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure someone does this as a job.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a unique way into geology or geoscience, is you know, through volcanoes on uh on Zelda, right?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Was that it?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's really cool.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: I I've never heard Dr.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_03: Andrews, you win the award for the most surprising answer to how you got into geoscience.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: That we've not had that yet.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, that combined with some very supportive uh geography teachers and parents, and you know, they're just like, yeah, sounds correct, go for it.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds crazy, go for it.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, that's awesome.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's annoying how much those teachers have an influence over you, right, Chris?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, it's so annoying, it's so annoying having a great teacher.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: You don't even want to go there.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: You want to talk about annoying.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: You don't want to go there.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, Dr.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_03: Andrews, follow-up to that.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: So in your book, you talked about like you got to this point where you realized that you really didn't want to do research, that you wanted to do something else.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: Can you talk about that?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_03: What like what was this moment or this pivotal time?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_03: What happened?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of having been raised partly on video games, I treated everything a bit like a video game.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, what's like of the first video game series in academia, what's the the final boss of this?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, well, PhD seems to be a pretty awesome point to get to, to be like, I'm the doctor of volcanoes, which sounds crazy.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I was like, that that's it.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I really that was genuinely my like plan.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought I was like, yeah, I'm gonna really enjoy this and blah blah blah.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I did like enjoy aspects of doing a PhD.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like I enjoyed the research, I enjoyed like the experiments.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was a very experimental thing.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: There was like explosives involved.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: I got to see a few volcanoes all around the world as a result of it.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I did enjoy it, but the I just didn't like I'm quite impatient, that's one thing.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so academia is like, you know, you need you need to go through the grind of certain things.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just like, uh, I don't know.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And every now and then I tried to like use sort of flowery language in like writing academic papers, and my supervisor was like, no, don't do that.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I was like, but it makes it sound more interesting.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I just I really hated writing academic papers.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: I hated it.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I hated the idea of just like applying for grants.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: I was just like, you know what?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: I I think I enjoy telling stories about these things more than I do researching these things because it's just feels more kinetic.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: You would get along very well with my wife.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: She has the exact same opinion about my job.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: She's like, you don't actually ever do anything, you just think about doing things, and it takes forever to get anything done.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh there's some truth.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of truth to that.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, absolutely.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's yeah, yeah, it's a very frustrating process in many ways.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: But so uh I I could kind of glean this from the book a little bit that you did an experimental petrology PhD, but what was that path like and how did you sort of evolve throughout that process?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, let maybe just sort of back up and go through your academic journey a little bit more because you know I changed a lot in my interest throughout my PhD and even still today.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Can you kind of guide us through how your interest shifted?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: And were you doing experimental studies on volcanoes or were you doing partial melting generations of bagma?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: What were you working on?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so um my undergrad was a master's uh in London at Imperial.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: I really enjoyed that.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing I enjoyed the most about it was for the third year, I got to go to Vancouver for like a year abroad, and that's where I was really introduced to wait, A, a very beautiful city.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I love London, but Vancouver was was fantastic.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: But also, there's a lot more volcanology going on there than there was Imperial.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Imperial kind of lied to me about that.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they sort of were like, Oh yeah, yeah, we do, we teach this sort of stuff here.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: No, not really.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I went to pay, I went to Vancouver and basically just did all the volcanology courses was I wanted to do, and I was just geeking out about it.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was great, all the field work was great.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, the volcanoes are right there.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: You just look look up campus and they're right there, yeah.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right, yeah, just you're literally right there.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Part of uh one of the sort of courses involved some experimental stuff, and it was like I got to use uh, you know, I got to melt rocks in one of those special ovens kind of thing and partial melting things.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, this is cool.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if it like and then I sort of learned that experimental stuff was kind of a big component of this, you know.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: When you it's it's good to sit try and simulate these things like physically as well, not just numerically.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I kind of was looking after that.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: I I was looking for a PhD that was kind of like that, and one just randomly popped up in New Zealand.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even remember how I saw the ad.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think someone might have sent it to me, but the PhD was like, yeah, so you're used like TNT explosives to simulate these like magma water interactions.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I'm sold, yeah.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: Like sold.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even read past the second line.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, sold, that's great.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: New Zealand, great.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, like I said, there are aspects of it that are really good.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: I really love doing the experiments.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of them took place in the US and Germany and stuff, and New Zealand's like a really beautiful place, but it was just a combination of just you know, I was like, it's after the experiments are done, then there's a lot of like, so make a PhD out of this.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you're just like, uh, and and I just I didn't enjoy that.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't like it wasn't quite the sort of detective type thinking, and there was just a lot of back and forth and a lot of I don't know, like I understood why things are there, but also it just felt I don't know, everything very I felt very confined anyway.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like you don't need to feel like you need to validate a PhD in this crowd.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Chris knows I'm I'm over educated, he knows both of us are overeducated.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: No, that's what I was just gonna say, Robin, is you just described Jesse's life, and nobody wants that, you know.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it's okay.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_03: I understand.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it would that I'm really glad I did it, but I wouldn't do it again.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_03: Robin, I do have a question, and this is a hundred percent serious.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: How does a crazy high school teacher get his hands on one of these ovens?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um my gosh, that sounds like so much fun.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: If I told you you'd have to you have to avoid arrest, I think, because it would involve one of those sort of heists where you'd have to break in at night, yeah, that unscrew it really carefully, and it's really heavy.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and if someone's just used it, it's really hot.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: So you're saying I can't buy one?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think you should try and make one and then report back and see how it goes.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Look out Hudsonville Public Schools.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: The high school is gonna be ex- There's gonna be an explosion, and then you're gonna have new uh health and safety standards there.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Just give out hard hats to people and don't explain why.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: So, Dr.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_03: Andrews, we want to jump right into this because everybody that knows me knows I'm a huge fan of Yellowstone.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: Huge.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like a little bit overexcited about Yellowstone.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Is that possible?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Chris wants to die when Yellowstone.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: He wants to go there and you know have the ash hit him in the face.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is what he said.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_03: You need to stop saying that.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_03: I don't want to die.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: I'd like to do it.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it would be quite a way to go, but you know, it would.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it would have to you you'd have to have someone recording from very far away.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, is it?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's right.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: All right, Dr.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_03: Andrews.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: If you had like five minutes to tell someone about volcanoes or Yellowstone, what would you say?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the first thing I'd say about Yellowstone is it is not gonna bring human civilization crashing down, which I think is the main thing, nor will it erupt with no warning.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it's one of these things that's just like it's honestly made out to be uh nature's weapon of very massive destruction somehow.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think like sort of documentaries are kind of to blame for this, like over-engineered documentaries, but also tabloids in the UK are obsessed with Yellowstone, obsessed for some weird reason.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, the the BBC wrote that TV movie thing, right?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: That was like it was like a BBC Discover thing.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was like a dramatized version of, and even though there's some bits were okay, it was the worst possible scenario.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it really is.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think tabloids are the thing that keeps it up in like the social media age, really, because every now and then you just see an article and oh uh I think a bear sneezed in Yellowstone, and that only means one thing, you know, Yellowstone's gonna erupt and kill us all.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: My favorite one was the article that implied that the culling of the bison in the park was related to an eruption, like they knew something and they were taken out before, and it's just crazy.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, right from the offset, I'd be like, it is not gonna kill us all or bring civilization down, and the chance of it engaging in an epic eruption is so small on any given day and in the near future, you know, it may never do what it's done in the past again.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: So Yellowstone is like beautiful and amazing and really cool for so many reasons.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're more likely to die falling into one of the hot springs, which people do really regularly somehow.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Shockingly, right?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: So Chris teaches uh a field course.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's basically a geoscience field course for uh 25, I don't know, Chris, 25, 26 students now, 26, yeah.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: 26 high schoolers that they put in big buses and drive across the Midwest out to Western US, and they go to Yellowstone every time.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: I went on this as a as a kid in high school.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, Yellowstone is like the huge, it's a crazy cool geologic feature, right?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it's very kind of it's a good hook into volcanoes, I suppose.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, you talk in the book about you know how there's sort of many major eruptions.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, Chris, maybe you can explain this better, like because you've been to Yellowstone a lot more times, like the sort of typical understanding of Yellowstone geology, and then you kind of reframe it, Robin, in your book a little bit.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: I think what Jesse's referring to, Robin, is that you know there are these three massive eruptions from Yellowstone, but you did a great job of framing this differently.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: That this was not one event three times.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_03: This was more drawn out than that.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_03: So does that you remember exploring to our listeners?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so eruptions are often thought of as like one big thing that happened, either like lava just keeps coming out or there's a massive explosion.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you kind of I think Mount St.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Heaven's eruption in 1980 was part of why people think of that like singular explosion, because there was like a giant explosion in May 1980, and it was like crazy big, and then everything just stopped sort of after that for a while.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: But it kind of kept erupting, but in a really slow, casual, like calm way.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I think people always remember that giant explosion for good reason.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's where the idea of oh, if there's going to be an eruption, it'll be like a giant explosion.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, like if Yellowstone engaged in like the worst possible case scenario where you know it evacuated all of its giant city-sized magma chambers, it would be like terrible for like the region, for sure.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like it would not be good.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I think what's kind of even if it was like a moderate eruption, if that continued for years, that would cause so much problems.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and it's it's kind of lucky it's sort of in a relatively unpopulated area.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like I always think of Aucklands and it's got like volcanoes, 60 volcanoes in the bay.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if one of those erupts for like one or two years, all that ash will like ruin their electrical circuitry or like smother any kind of any crops, or there's not really that kind of thing there, it would block up the sewage for years.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't believe that.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that was a crazy thing.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like all I could think of was the Shawshang redemption scene, but everyone is doing it, you know, and it was just like it was just so so the geological evidence shows that these really big eruptions, it aren't just a one big explosion, they're done.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's like a big ramp up of activity, and then there's a really big explosion, ash goes everywhere around the country, and then they kind of ramp down and go up again.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, there's they're like roller coasters that go on for a long, long, long time, except roller coasters that everybody hates, sort of thing.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, they can go for months, years.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you said, Robin, that these may have actually gone on for even longer than maybe a human lifespan.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's crazy to think, right?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_03: That is crazy to think about.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's crazy.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's like gaps in between.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's uh it comes down to how do you define when an eruption ends.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: For a human, it's like, well, when it's when stuff stops getting destroyed generally for a fairly like for a few weeks.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: But to a volcano, it doesn't care.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's no, it doesn't have a schedule.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: There, so what so are they pauses between those things or is it all considered one big eruption?
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like no one can, it's kind of arbitrary.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like nature doesn't care, it's just gonna do what it wants, or thing.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like when you say where does space begin?
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's like nature doesn't care.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: It can be wherever you want, like you know.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: So of the three major events in Yellowstone, they're not a singular massive eruption, it's more sort of pulses of eruptions over a fairly long duration of I mean human timescale-based duration, then.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure, yeah, yeah.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And with the one, the original really big one uh 2.1 million years ago, that was, you know, that could have gone on for like a human lifetime sort of thing.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: So can you imagine if that was happening today?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Again, like there's no evidence that this is gonna happen ever again, but like if that did happen today, it would just cause like people born in this era would just accept that there's a part of America that's just constantly erupting ashes of the sky.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's such a weird thought, but that's what it would have been like.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_03: So you actually said something that I I really want you to, you're the expert in the room.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I want you to go ahead, feel free to get scientific on us here with this.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_03: But you talked about how this might not ever happen again.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: There might not ever be a super eruption Yellowstone.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I want you to explain this because uh how is that possible given the history of the whole track of the hotspot?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: You know what I mean?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: Like, there are dozens of eruptions and these eruptive centers you know in the last 17 million years.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_03: So is it gonna do it again, just maybe not where Yellowstone is now?
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, what did you mean?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: What do you mean?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so as you as you mentioned there, like that you have this this kind of track, this like these scars that go across uh kind of the Pacific Northwest.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And basically, uh the Yellowstone uh is powered by something called a mantle plume, which is this kind of like a big fountain of very buoyant uh superheated material that comes up from like the fringes of the Earth's like liquidy heart sort of thing.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: And and these are really not very well understood, partly because they're really hard to see, it turns out.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's hard to see.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: We're never going to see them with our own eyes.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we kind of have to sort of work out how sound waves bend through them.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's all kind of it gets a bit esoteric most, but um, these plumes are thought not to move.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: But the surface of the earth does.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the tectonic plates move about like jigsaw pieces on like a swimming pool or something.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the North American plate, which as you can imagine, is when North America sits kind of is moving in a sort of relatively constant direction.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: So that means that the hotspot is like cooking a line across America kind of thing as time goes on.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been doing this for at least 17 million years, maybe like way longer, but the evidence only goes back clearly that long.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: So like Yellowstone's sort of predecessors, ancestors have existed all along a track going all the way to, you know, uh basically right the shorelines of Western America.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And right now the hotspot where the plume is is under Yellowstone, but it's still moving.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually the hotspot is going to move under these really thick mountain range to the north.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not clear if it will be able to like create enough magma to even pierce through the surface, sort of thing.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: So at the moment, Yellowstone is still being powered by this like mantle plume, which heats the crust and makes lots of magma and things.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: But just because there's magma there doesn't mean it's going to erupt.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Most magma just sits there and cools down and just never erupts.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um so is the idea that you sorry, is the idea that the the sort of crust, the lithosphere, the lithosphere root is a lot thicker as you move inboard as as you know, North America plate is drifting across Yellowstone, it's moving to the north relative to Yeah, towards Canada, yeah, towards the Canadian border eventually, yeah.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: So the lithosphere root is too thick there, so the mantle plume might not be able to punch through it.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: Is that what you're doing?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, potentially.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's kind of like it does extra sort of rocky shielding that it might not like it will do some melting, but it won't necessarily be able to punch its way through.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: But even if it does, you're still taking away a heat source from where Yellowstone is.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: So eventually what we know as Yellowstone supervolcano will die out.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: At the moment, its magma reservoirs are like mostly solid, they're like a couple of percent molten, and you need them to be close to like 50% molten.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: So unless that changes, you won't you might get some small eruptions, but you won't get anything near like an apocalyptic kind of cataclysm.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: You need 50% molten to erupt, basically, to like mobilize the smush thing.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a bit of a fudge, but yeah, you need you need the magma reservoir to be uh at least like half liquid for it to have any chance of like erupting to the surface for magma reservoirs like this.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's is nowhere near close at the moment.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: So like there's at the moment it's giving no sign at all that it's gearing up for anything, it's asleep, basically.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's a good segue into the next thing, really, is your description of what a magma chamber looks like, which does not fit the model that you see in books all the time.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: And Jesse gets very excited about this.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm gonna let you two guys talk about what a magma chamber looks like a second, and um yeah, I'll just sit back and listen.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, yeah.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I I do I do get fairly excited about this.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I guess you know, the idea that like we've never actually seen a magma chamber seismically or with any kind of crustal imaging that we can do.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's an interesting phenomenon.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how do you generate this 50% magma thing that can erupt, right?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's such an interesting question.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, can you describe our current state of understanding of the magma chambers beneath Yellowstone and how we would potentially tell if these things are getting cut off or if they're sort of getting cooled down such that they're frozen?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: How do we kind of test this?
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: How can we decipher this, I guess?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the the science has really helped pave the way to seeing what's inside the earth is seismology, which is essentially, you know, the earth makes a lot of noise.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: You can make it yourself, um, or it makes a lot of noise perfectly fine on its own, and earthquakes that make a lot of noise and they release a lot of like seismic energy, which is kind of different from noise, but it releases a lot of energy in the form of these seismic waves.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And depending on what they go through, they kind of change speed and direction.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: So they go faster through more like rigid material, which tends to be solid, and they slow down when stuff gets a bit more gloopy.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you kind of do this over and over again, you can kind of work out what exactly the materials are that they're going through.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: So when things are really shallow, so if you've got a really shallow magma reservoir, it's people don't really think they're like big caverns of just molten rock anymore.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's more like I think I described it as like the devil's sponges and um Bielze of sponges.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you've got this like solid network um with full of holes which allow like the liquid to move through, kind of thing.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: And in this thing, the the solids is like the crystals that are coming out of the magma as it's kind of cooled down.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if there's a route to the surface and that liquid is hot and buoyant and gassy, then it will punch through to the surface.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of what like seismology and like experiments and labs and simulations are kind of showing.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: But there are there are like huge limits to seismology sort of thing.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the deeper you go, the lower the resolution is, basically.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you need to instrument the hell out of something to have any idea where anything is.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just put an A seismometer and be like, done.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: You need like hundreds of things if you want to see it.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, so it's expensive and tricky.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if the thing was pure liquid, if there's a big pure liquid blob down there, we would see that like that's dead easy.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it would be really clear, like completely clear, right?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like the outer core.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this because seismic the certain seismic maze wouldn't even go through it, it would just be like this big shadow zone where you're like, okay.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: So is the difficulty trying to tell what percent of the the crust or the magma chamber is actually magma and what percent is solid?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like, are we trying to figure out is it 7% or 15% or 50%?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: Is that that where it gets fuzzy?
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: A little bit.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: It gets a little fuzzy, but like they're they're pretty act reasonably accurate because you know, if you really set up a big seismic grid somewhere, and Yellowstone has a really decent one, and recently had like a really massive one because of an experiment they they've recently run.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they're still going through the data though.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, they're really heavily imaging at least a shallow magma chamber, which is still massive, but then there's one beneath it that's I think four times the size of New York City.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: I can't remember now.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's it basically is a normal, so it sits on a really vast one.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that one's harder to see, but you can kind of broadly estimate like how solid or liquid is.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's pretty well constrained.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: If something's really shallow, the trick is you really need really high resolution, like seismic imaging.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because what you want to know as well is like, well, if this does cause a small eruption of some sort, where is the magma going to come out?
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is it gonna come out over there?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: Is it gonna go out over here?
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yellowstone's like big.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, even if it doesn't erupt, if magma kind of suddenly intrudes right underground and it superheats some water, that can create a like a hydrothermal explosion.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the harder part at the moment.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're on a big scale and you're making estimates, they're pretty good of like melt and things, but working out like the pathways, and especially because they can keep changing, that's really difficult.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, okay, okay.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, um, so switching gears, you mentioned in the book uh this is a quote that really jumped out at me, and it's a quote, I think it's direct.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_03: You said the origin of the planet is volcanoes.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_03: Can you uh elaborate on that?
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: I thought that was a very interesting statement.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_03: I loved it.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, uh, volcanoes don't just look cool, they really like do drive the sort of fates of world, sometimes define them.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, Earth used to be like a big magma ocean when it first came into being, essentially, in the violent birth of the solar system.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: And as soon as that cooled down a bit, you have basically solid bits that are colder and hot bits, and the hot stuff will always want to come out.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: So volcanoes were the first things to appear on Earth.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: And when a volcano erupts, it um it erupts new land, um, some of which form like the building blocks of the continents we live on today.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Today it's the volcanoes erupting create the youngest land um on Earth.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can see it happening all over the place.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: They erupt gases and liquids that give a planet its first draft.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: Atmosphere, sometimes they can really give a planet lots of its water.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: People still can't agree.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like, is Earth's surface water largely sourced from like within the planet, or did it get delivered by like soggy asteroids or something?
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably a bit of both.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, volcanoes are like the best landscape architects, like a planet has.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like they change the surface, you know, if they're underwater, they provide elements and chemical and electrical circuits that help incubate life.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're often seen as like destroyers, but mostly they create habitats and land and atmospheres that if there is life, some life will be like this is great.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's they really do make a planet sort of thing.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: And if that's if a planet is still erupting, then it shows you that the planet's got like an active, healthy geologic heartbeat.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: If a if there's a rocky planet and all its volcanoes aren't erupting, uh, that's not good.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's like a comatose planet, you know.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's not great.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_03: That's not a planet I want to be on.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_03: No, I agree.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like Mars or something, you know.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Mars, you might get an eruption again one day, but really, like it is not as not an irradiated desert.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Ideal.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: So so we're gonna move on.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: I I I want to move on to some like non, I guess, well, non-super volcanoes.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, this is an interesting point because you call the book super volcanoes, but actually, uh Chris and I about halfway through when we were reading it, we're like, actually, this seems to be not necessarily super volcanoes, like really, really big volcanoes, but like super cool volcanoes, maybe or something.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: Can you yeah?
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell I don't know, that was just our take on it.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: That is it.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what it was.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly how much shit did you take for that?
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh oh, um, it depends.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like, not as much as I thought.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I guess because volcanoes are just like academic, proper I'm still studying volcanoes, volcano just hate the term super volcanoes generally, um, because it is kind of silly.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's basically a super volcano, all one word, is um technically a volcano that erupts more than 240 cubic miles of matter in one go, which is as you can tell, it's super arbitrary.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's like if it was 239.9, it would be nature wouldn't be like, damn, oh, that's so close.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, nobody cares about a second.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of it's just like it's a very big eruption.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: So um, but I I mean the term has kind of stuck, and especially in the minds of people in you know the UK and America and that, like the term super volcano just has like a sort of buzz to it.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well, if I make it two separate words, which isn't the technical thing, and kind of just talk about volcanics, I think it's really cool and stuff like that.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I was debating whether to actually explicitly say, by the way, this isn't all about like Yellowstone world ending, blah.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: But I thought, you know what?
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: People will be will get it, they'll get it.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I have received two very angry emails um from readers who are just like, I only wanted death and destruction.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what are you doing?
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and I was just like, that's okay.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_03: That's unbelievable.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_03: I wondered about that.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, that thought crossed my mind because you know, I thought I was gonna pick up a book and read about Yellowstone and Toba and Krakatoa.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, Krakatoa, even that 1883 eruption, like super famous.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone, even if you know a bit about it, you're like there was a giant explosion, lots of people died.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: That was that's not even a super volcano, so it's just like who cares?
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's so it's so arbitrary.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, yeah, if I had eight chapters on eight recent super volcanic eruptions, I don't think we'd be here to read it.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_03: I raised my eyebrow though.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_03: I can't believe, like, I didn't even realize, you know, one word versus two words.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, you start off, I think you were talking about the 2018 Hawaii eruption.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, huh, interesting.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, and then Jesse, you know, he he's like, You're a little slow over there, you know.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um, this is about super volcanoes, not super volcanoes.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little cheeky, it's a little cheeky.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: But when my editors are like, so what do you think?
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think of the cover?
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, make sure the words super and volcanoes are on two separate lines, so no one can ever access it, you know.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: So there you go.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I was just like, so I've covered my base enough.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: On the note of non-super volcanoes, but super cool volcanoes, you have a uh sort of weighty chapter on mid-ocean ridge volcanoes, which we have, you know, we've talked about Yellowstone on this podcast a decent amount.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: We have not really talked much about mid-ocean ridge volcanoes.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: So can you give us an intro into why these are important to think about and sort of maybe uh, you know, a couple highlights that you think are interesting?
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: I I mean, for me reading this chapter, I felt like you were particularly passionate about these volcanoes.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's not true, but I was reading between the lines a little bit.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: I really enjoyed writing about it just because I thought it it's it's kind of it's sort of absurd to me that like so Earth is obviously a volcanic planet, but most of its volcanoes are underwater.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: And there's that thing that's often said that, you know, we know more about the surface of the moon than you know what's on the seafloor.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, yeah, the sea's in the way.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's really hard to like we'll do, you know, it's really oceanographers and volcanologists are like, it's really annoying.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much ocean in the way, damn it.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and and I was like, so how do people explore these underwater volcanoes?
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: We don't even know how many there are, which seems like a sort of oversight in our town are like, how does the planet work?
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and they actually go down there to look at these things and like these still in these bubbles, these submersibles.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I I got particularly excited when I was chatting to one and they were telling me about not only remote-controlled submarines that are kind of tethered to a boat, but completely autonomous, artificial intelligence-controlled submarines, you know, with names like Spock and Kirk for good for goodness' sake, obviously.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so good.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that that can explore this sort of these underwater labyrinths and these sort of bubbly, fiery cauldrons that are full of life, by the way, all by themselves.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, this is to me, the reason I love underwater volcanoes so much is because this is exactly what it would be like to look at them on another planet.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they won't have life, maybe it will, but it's kind of extraterrestrial what's going on down there because we it's just so beyond our normal experience sort of thing, you know, and so little's known about it.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, come on, that's who how can you not write about that?
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's just fundamentally interesting.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I found the aspects about potential for economic mineral deposits, that's obviously a big field of interest for exploration geologists, but also environmental concerns as well, is really it's an interesting, you know, field, the sort of underwater volcanoes.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: Very, very interesting.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I love that chapter.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: I really I loved writing about it.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: And aren't the people that work on these things so cool?
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're so interesting.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're just uh the way they describe things, either really casually or just completely full on, you know.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe this harkens back to your PhD a little bit, the the you know, using TNT and magma stuff.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: But you talk about how underwater eruptions are not as explosive as subarial or you know uh eruptions above the ocean surface.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: Can you give us that primer on that?
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think I understood it.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: It had something to do with the water pressure, but also something to do with magma's interaction with the water.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_03: And before you jump into that, I just want to say that like I appreciated that part of the book immensely.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people know that when you take magma and water and mix them, that it leads to explosive like bad things happen, right?
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_03: Well, then a lot of people then assume that these underwater volcanoes are potentially really devastating.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: And your explanation was something that I'm gonna use now from now on in my classes.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_03: It was great.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_03: I loved it.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, do it.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_03: Let's go, let's talk about it.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so obviously, as illustrated by the recent eruption in Tonga, if you have a volcano that is just underwater or just above it, that is a terrible combination, especially if there's a lot of gassy magma.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: And there's still science is still trying to work out exactly what the deal is.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's really hard to get all the underlying physics quite clear because explosions naturally are quite dangerous.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you can't freeze them and stick your head and be like, look at all the other different bits.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: But it's generally thought that if you have like magma in a in a bucket, as everyone does, you know, I've just got one over there.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you just dump water in it, a lot of steam will come off, but it won't explode, it will just be like a bucket of steaming magma.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: And similarly, if you pour magma onto water, it will just boil it off.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: They might get bubbles through the magma, but nothing really happens.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: It seems to be that you need to sort of have some turbulence where the water gets sort of intermingled with the molten rock.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: And if this water gets trapped and then heated really quickly, there's a lot of kind of different processes, but basically, this water expands so violently that the only thing it can do is like fling all that magma out of the way.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a really powerful pneumatic drill almost.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: It just sort of blasts the magma into loads of countless pieces because it has nowhere else to go.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, when you when you kind of like like the volume of that of like little blobs of water can expand by like 3,000 times, sort of thing.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's surprisingly good at like knocking molten rock out of the way.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: The only thing is if it happens really deep underwater, the overlying pressure of the ocean is so extreme that that bubble is coming up against a lot of resistance.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it has to like really struggle to push all that stuff out of the way.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if it's just below the surface of the water, it's basically like atmospheric pressure.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you're basically giving magma like a supercharged explosive mechanism when you have it in like shallow water.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: So shallow, bad, but when it's deep, that's why we're not constantly running around going, oh crap, you know, there's like all oceans are constantly exploding.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: Normally you only see if an underwater volcano erupted because like all this pumice just suddenly appears and then just crashes into Australia.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a really weird thing.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is this like a sort of um sort of a runaway process then?
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm thinking like, you know, a fission reaction or something where you know water separates and then it breaks into steam and then it separates more and it flings more water and breaks it and it kind of mingles a lot more.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it depends.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's a runaway if like so if you just have lava leaking into the into the water kind of column, you can kind of get this mingling, especially if it's quite aggressively erupting.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that can cause like moderate explosive activity in the days leading up to that giant explosion in Tonga, there was like eruptive activity happening.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that was because you know, you had magma water mixing, but only small amounts of magma was involved.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: At some point, it's thought that like this magma chain, it had been filling up for like a thousand years, and essentially it had been it the magma inside this volcano was like doming the surface of the volcano.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was really straining to get out, and if that creates cracks in the roof, and if that water sneaks into one of these cracks and causes an explosion, you're basically taking that whole cap off the magma as well.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when you get like a runaway overaction with like all the magma and all of the water just like violently mingling and exploding.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, within like a heartbeat, you can get like a that kind of cataclysmic explosion.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's great that that's quite a rare thing.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, right.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a related question to this, and it relates to your experiments you did in your PhD, maybe, or maybe not you, but the field that you're in for your PhD.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: What are the scale of these experiments you were doing?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like, we're can you describe like one of these, you were putting how big of a TNT charge you're using?
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't know what I guess the question here is I I've been thinking about the scale of geoscience observations relative to the scale of our interpretations.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we often do these tiny experiments where we're like observing something really small and then we extrapolate it to a tectonic plate.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like a huge scale difference.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: And you you touched on this, like getting the physics of eruptions right is really hard.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know, what are we working with as far as data that we we know works well, like experimental data or something like that?
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean it's getting increasingly precise.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, basically you kind of run experiments that try and simulate a they're good at isolating a handful of processes that might be happening rather than try and replicate all of it.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: So and that way you can kind of go, oh, that's why it happened in that order or something like that kind of thing.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: It won't tell you everything, but so the experiments I was involved in, there were they were basically creating buried explosions, some with TNT, um, creating like you know, house-sized craters, and some with just pressurized gas and like ball bearings in a lab, because you can do more of those basically.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, the the kind of volcanoes I worked on are called MAR, M-A-A-R, and they're really weird because they tend to just explode once.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, something happens with a magma underground where you get this big explosion, and instead of like a volcano, uh like a mountain shape, you get like a depression crater.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: And often you get them when you have these shallow magma water interaction sort of thing.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: But it's really hard to like mingle magma and water and cause a giant crater forming explosion without getting killed.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: So burying explosives and using slow motion cameras and markers is kind of how you do it.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the main thing I took away from that was like, well, they're a bit like nuclear weapon craters.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you bury a nuke and blow it up, it looks exactly like this.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I spent a lot of my PhD reading, uh, how do you bury?
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: How far do you need to bury a nuke to cause this sort of crater?
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: I must be on some sort of list somewhere.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: But like there's so much reading material.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_03: Is there a well known example of one of these?
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: Of like a nuke.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, of a mar or a yeah, yeah, Amar, yeah.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, that New Zealand is kind of covered in them.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: There are loads in Japan.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: There aren't really there isn't really one that's like not in the way that like you have Mount St.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: Hens or Mount Fuji or Kilauea or something like that.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: There Often like loads of them in one go.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: You get like fields of them.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: So you see them in like volcanic fields.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: Quite a few in Alaska.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_03: Does Newberry and Oregon have these kinds of things?
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I I think so, but I'm not sure.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: But it seems probable that at some point uh you'd get these sort of things.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: But they're not like named with the same sort of it's not prestigiousness, but you know what I mean?
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't have that kind of that kind of well-known thing.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: You get loads of them because you can get loads of them in one go, and then they never erupt again.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_00: They've kind of got a bit of a weird again, like you know, like you've buried an explosive.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's really weird, they're just weird, which made them really hard to write about.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, no kidding.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, yeah.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_03: You talked about uh Marie Tharp.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_03: And to be honest with you, I was a little pissed off.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_03: Not at you, I was pissed off at my own education, I guess, in that I had never heard of this person, but what an amazing contribution.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, seriously, I I called Jesse up right away after I read it.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_03: I said, Jesse, what the hell have you heard of this?
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_03: And he said, Yeah, but only recently.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_03: And first of all, let's back out of this a little bit.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_03: And and can you describe her contribution, please?
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_03: And then um, I don't know, why is this not why is this a secret?
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_03: I don't understand.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of yeah, so the whole thing, like her contribution was essentially to revolutionize the way we understand, you know, how the earth's surface transforms and is made and how oceans are made and stuff, which is that's a pretty big deal.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's not like a small thing, um, especially as like she wasn't like co-authored on any papers, she wasn't allowed on research cruises, you know.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: She was this was in the um in like the 50s and the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: She was an assistant to her male colleague sort of thing.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all very infuriating and it's sort of just like, she's obviously better than everyone at this, you know.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: She basically created, you know, she was instrumental in creating very big maps of the sea floor.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: When sonar was like a brand new thing, she kind of was tasked with a menial, like, can you stitch all these uh sonar depth profiles together to see what's there?
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: And she basically didn't just do that.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like, um, the but you know, some people I was interviewing for this said, like she she kind of like could intuit what the sea floor would look like rather than just like lines up and down, like, oh, there are canyons here and crevices and things like that.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like a few decades earlier, the scientific community were aghast when Alfred Wegener and other scientists suggested suggested that what we all know today is true is that like the earth's surface drifts around like these jigsaw pieces, you know, the continents aren't where they are now, sort of thing.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um and they moved around, and people were like, that's heresy, that's you know, that's bullshit.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh basically Marie Thart came along and with her massive contribution, um, she helped cement that as an actual idea.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: And she she essentially discovered what we call mid-ocean rifts, you know, these these sort of incised valleys within mountains that kind of go through, not necessarily the middle of the oceans, but they kind of extend underwater all the way around the world and they're all interconnected, they're all essentially big lava factories.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: She did this mostly just confined to, you know, a room and told to like, yep, just plot these things out and tell them what you see.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it took ages to convince people, you know, even when her team of her and all the other and all the other guys, uh basically she wasn't credited with it.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was uh like uh person she was assisting to, you know, someone's like, young man, you're shaking the foundations of geology, and she just got like no recognition for it for for most of her life, really.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, it's but I I think like even like now, then that should be fixed, but it's it doesn't seem to be.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, your your book, you know, shined a light on this, which I I'm really grateful for because I learned a ton about it.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and that's the thing, yeah.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's the thing about it as well.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like the reason I wanted to bring it up is because so when I bring introducing the book, I say in her own words.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and literally she is she's spoken about this herself like in a massive amount of detail.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I had like a very abridged, like the potted, the key hits in her in her biography kind of thing.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I wanted to include it wasn't was partly because it's a really interesting story and people should hear about it, obviously, but also because it provided such a nice skeleton for this chapter about underwater volcanoes that you could start, okay, at this point in her life story, stop like, what did we know about volcanoes at the time and the planet?
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, basically it occurred to me that each bit, each major milestone in her life was such a massive educational experience for like geoscientists that you could just say, like, okay, just this bit of her work alone.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: Let's explore this.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what does that mean for oceans being born?
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean for earthquakes?
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean for volcanoes?
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: She was a great science communicator, great scientist.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it was just a shame that people dismissed her ideas as girl talk at one point, which is so offensive, right?
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, that's amazing.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, um, that was one of the best to me, one of the best parts of the book, and I appreciated it a lot.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was kind of a theme that sort of I think ran throughout it, I suppose.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, Robin, what's next for you?
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you've actually Chris just texted me the other day, he's like, oh, wait, I see Dr.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: Andrews on CNN.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, well, we're interviewing.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_03: I'll tell you about this.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_03: So it was Saturday morning, and uh I was watching the news kinda, and I was reading your book.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: So I had the volume on real low, and I'm I'm like, holy shit, Jen.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_03: Hey, this is the guy we're gonna interview in a few weeks.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: So you summoned me.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: You must have said my name three times or something.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but so go ahead, Jesse.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, you've written for the New York Times, you've had cover stories there, you've written a load of different very cool science communication articles.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: What are you working on now?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: What's next?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: What's driving you forward for the next several years here?
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, yeah.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like this is the only being a science journalist is the only thing I can think of doing.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think I'll be good at anything else.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this is I I love doing it so much.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: My editors are great.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to write another book, you know, on something probably different subjects, you know, but um one word super volcanoes.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, but nice that it's nice to take a bit of a, you know, this book kind of I came together during the pandemic.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: And after, like, I know we're still in a pandemic, but I got to December, this last December pass, and I've done a lot of writing and just finished a book and the book had come out, and all the nerves about review started to go away because people seem to like it.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I just crashed.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like in December, I was like, I'm just gonna play Halo, that's all I want to do.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's like Halo, that's all I want to do.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: And now I'm getting back into the writing, but I'm kind of I think now I the imposter, everyone has imposter syndrome a bit, but the imposter syndrome for me has kind of gone a little bit quiet now.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: I've always enjoyed it, but now I'm really gonna like I'm gonna take my time, I'm gonna think of big projects I want to work on and actually like revel in the fact that you know what, people do think volcanoes are cool.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm not that bad at this writing thing.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: So um yeah, well it's you you can you can put the imposter syndrome in a box, you know.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: That that that can go away for a while.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's a cool book and very cool writing.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: All your articles are very cool.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_03: You know, anybody that's into biology thinks swimming with the dolphins is that's the end all be all, right?
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_03: Well, volcanology is that for the geoscience like field.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't everybody's interested in it.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um Robin, what I I wanna, I'm really interested in this because I have my own answer to this.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_03: What is your favorite volcano and why?
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it it kind of it's like a mood thing, it changes depending on what I'm thinking about.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: But right now it's it's Mount Fuji still, even though it hasn't erupted in several hundred years.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: There are personal reasons why I enjoy it so much, but I just think it's incredible that you can climb this like perfectly, as nature will allow, perfectly symmetric volcano.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it really is a stunningly like it's like somewhat like an architect built it, you know, it's so pristine.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you can climb it during these summer months, and then you go above the cloud layer and you can see the Perseids meteor shower, like as clear as you will ever see it.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: You feel like you're in space, especially because if you get high enough, you need the oxygen to kind of to help if you start feeling a bit faint.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just like this wonderful thing that you can do.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's like hard climb, but it's not like impossible.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you're kind of relatively fit, you can do it.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it just standing atop this mountain, which is is kind of culturally very famous, and just standing by the cloud line and seeing like the sun come up, but the especially the shooting stars and things, it's just like this is only possible because of this perfectly placed volcano that like is just safe enough to climb at this these summer months, kind of thing.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know, it's just like this throne of magma that you're standing on.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_00: It just seems extraordinary to me.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's just so beautiful that I it's hard to beat, and it's not even erupting, which is great, actually.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want that one to erupt.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's too beautiful to blast itself apart, it's too symmetrically beautiful, as you say.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a stunning volcano, yeah.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_03: That's interesting too.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_03: I would love, we don't have time for this, but to hear you talk about Fuji and the geology behind it because it's kind of peculiar, you know, it's so steep, but yet it's made up of a runny kind of lava, and it just goes against the textbooks, you know.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_03: And and I'd love to hear you talk about that at some point.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, Jesse.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, as Chris, as you mentioned, we're kind of out of time here, but uh, we always end our interviews with this last question.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so, Robin, what has been your best day as a geoscientist?
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: My best day?
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's really tricky.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, like it depends when you count as being a geoscientist, but I think the first time I showed my parents what lava was like out close meant a lot as well.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm very lucky to have very, very, very supportive parents who are always like, yeah, you're interested in that, you should pursue that.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't matter how bright, just go go for this thing.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: And but they had never seen like a volcano erupting in any manner.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: So when I when uh took them to uh Stromboli in Sicily and was like, look at this, and there's this like giant 500 meter high like lava fountains, like you seeing really is believing.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you know, they didn't need convincing that what I was doing was like excited, but when you see that, you're like, Oh, I get it.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I get it.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: And just you know, kind of repaying that support back by showing them a spectacular thing, you know, it just meant a lot.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that was more than any like scientific revelation or epiphany or anything, that meant more to me than any other anything I did during my brief stint in academia.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, I'd say that.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great answer.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: Excellent answer.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_03: Jesse that might be the common denominator with the volcanologist.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_03: Seriously.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_03: It might be.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_03: Everyone that we've interviewed has said the same thing.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_03: They say they want to go into volcanology, and their parents have been supportive.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's true.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's true.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lesson in there somewhere.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this has been uh interview with Dr.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: Robin Andrews, author of Super Volcanoes, What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: Robin, thanks very much.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: This has been really fun conversation, great read, very interesting book, and uh yeah, this has been a super fun conversation.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for spending time with us.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: We love it.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um my pleasure, honestly.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_00: Really great chat, T T.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_03: You are uh it's like midnight in London right now, so late night for you.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's still you know what?
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_00: I actually have to write something after this.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it's gonna it's gonna go on, but I'm I'm on East, I'm East Coast time, really.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um but but but also very very night owlly.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, mornings horrible.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just like something pour concrete into my brain.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_03: We really appreciate uh you donating your time for us spending an hour with us.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_03: It was great fun.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_03: Great fun.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: Great to meet you too as well.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_03: But don't forget about us.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_03: What when you come out with your next book, have your publicists send us a copy and we'll have you on again.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_03: I'd love to do it again.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, it'd be great fun.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, super good.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: If there's any interesting volcano stuff happening in the world, we'll uh we'll hit you up.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: This would be this would be great to do again.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, they don't stay quiet for long, do they?
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's right, that's right.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_01: All right, thanks, Robin.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: Really appreciate it.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: Nice to meet you.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: Have a good one.