Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Cutting the Grand Canyon - Dr. John Douglass

Transcript

Cutting the Grand Canyon - Dr. John Douglass · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'm not.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever come into this like forum where we look at each other and you're like, and I I say to you, Jesse, I'm just not having a good day.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Does that ever happen?
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, actually not that I remember.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Not that I remember.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's rare that you need to be talked down from something, actually.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: Well, no, that's not true.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's usually over the phone when that happens.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's not over Zoom.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's true.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I you with sometimes I call you like in the middle of the day and I'm upset about something about something or something happened, or I remember there was one time.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: What was going on?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: It was last time you, me and Andrew DeWitt were together, it was at that regional GSA, and there was something you were, it was with your was it with your your solar panels?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: My solar panels.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: I was so mad worked up.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: Still upset about that.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: That was funny.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: That was that was one of the last times you had to be uh calmed down about something.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: But Kate, you're you're you're full of passion, right?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know what?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: And your passion needs an outlet.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: And you know what?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's okay.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: Passionate people make the world go around.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know what?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's why we do this podcast, Jesse.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's my outlet.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: My outlet.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, we so we just got done with an interview with Dr.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: John Douglas.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: And this was um, I think maybe a bit different than many of our other interviews because we really interviewed him about a specific not just one discovery, but theme of scientific topics, which is about the Grand Canyon.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, he's been really a big force in the spillover theory for how the Grand Canyon formed, right?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, because there's a backstory to this.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you and I just finished this audiobook on the Grand Canyon, and uh, you know, when we were getting ready, researching, doing our stuff and getting ready to do this, I came across a lot of stuff from John Douglas, a lot of videos that he had done.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: I read his papers, uh, and then we get this random email a few weeks ago from this guy named John Douglas, and he's just like, Hey, I'm a fan of your podcast.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And uh by the way, if you ever want to talk about the Grand Canyon, I'd love to discuss it with you.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, wait a second, I I know this guy, and so I uh I couldn't wait to talk to him.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've been giddy all day long.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: This was this was fun.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so Dr.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: John Douglas, he's a professor at Paradise Valley Community College.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: His work on this spillover theory, which we get into a lot of details about.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, hey, for those of you who want the weeds, this is an episode for the weeds, right?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: We talk about a lot of stuff, and it's great.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: But John Douglas has his PhD from Arizona State University, a master's.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: This is all in geography, by the way, and we kind of discuss the differences here, but geoscience, let's say, a master's from northern Arizona University, and has really been working on the problem of how did the Grand Canyon get cut, how did the canyon itself form for a couple decades now.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and has kind of led the charge on this theory.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: And his work has been highlighted in National Geographic, History Channel shows the National Park Service videos.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you type in how did the New Grand Canyon form, you're gonna find a video that is either centrally focused on his work or at least highlights his work in some way, shape, or form, right, Chris?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you and you can see his analogies.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he's built these gigantic sandboxes where he creates these lakes and and tests his theory, you know, and and he involves students in this.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's just uh you can see these videos.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: He's really all over the place when you talk about how the Grand Canyon was cut.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: Totally.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: And Chris, you know, we uh I must say our Grand Canyon audiobook, which is available on the Camp Geo app, you can go to the first link in your show notes.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: There we have the geology of Yellowstone, geology of Grand Canyon.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's a uh, well, let's say this episode we go much more into the weeds.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: We have a chapter in that audiobook on how the Grand Canyon got cut, and this is one of the models that we discuss, but there are other models out there in the literature.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: We kind of touch on that in this podcast episode.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, this is a compelling one.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: I know this was one of your favorite models when we recorded that chapter before this episode, and yeah, I could totally see why.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's a story that makes a lot of sense, and it has this like what I really like, and I like the way that John kind of phrased this, it's that sense of discovery in the field when he's like looking at these rocks and being like, Whoa, that's beach sand and it's super high up.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's that's just like pure geological discovery, and that's just cool to hear from anybody.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I agree.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: There are a couple of moments in this episode where there are these crucial discoveries that were found, and uh just listening to the person that actually made these discoveries and and you get a feel and a sense for his emotion at that time.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's just that that's a really cool thing.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, Jesse, have you had those experiences in your research?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um you had those kind of moments.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I would say yes and no.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: I was just thinking through this as as we were talking with John.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yes and no.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: I've had moments of discovery for sure, but because I'm a geochemist and like geochronologist, they often occur in the lab.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: So, like I the the first one I remember was um well, I had one in undergrad, but one in my PhD, where it's very you know, senior professor.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: I was talking about what data I was going to collect that weekend or that Friday, and he's like, Oh, if you find those values, you're the luckiest SOB out there.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was down in the lab collecting this data, looking at the numbers coming off, and it was like midnight or something, and these low oxygen isotope values came off, which meant I was the luckiest SOB in the world, right?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that was just that discovery where like I'm the only one who knew that for that period of time.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I'm the only one who knew that, and that was really, really cool.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: But that's not the same as like standing in this beautiful plateau mountains around you looking at the rocks in that way that John has.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't I couldn't say I've ever had that experience of like in the field looking at the rocks.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's exceptional.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: So, anyway.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, my contribution to that discussion would be uh two weeks ago.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: I am getting ready, preparing mentally to talk about plate tectonics with my upper level geology class.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I wake up at three o'clock in the morning, and I just I I had a thought about a way that I wanted to teach about paleomagnetism on the ocean floor, and uh how I wanted to have my juniors and seniors visualize this.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: I had never done it this way before, and I it was just it worked.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, it was awesome.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: Really you were doing it that day, you got to like see the results of it that day.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: I got it that day.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's awesome.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I came home and you know, it's one of those things that uh you know, Jenny and I are sitting on a hot tub after dinner, and I'm like, hey, I gotta tell you about this.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just it was it's not at the level of what you just talked about and and what John talked about and so on, but it absolutely is.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: You're testing, you know, you're testing how the thing works and and testing new ideas.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: I I think it's absolutely the exact same thing.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, I and I take back what I said before.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: I did have one of those feelings of discovery, but it was not actually new discovery.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: It was you teaching me about the Snake River Plane on Summer Science when I was asked you were quizzing me, I was sitting in front of the bus, we told the story before, but or you were driving the bus, I came up and sat there, and you just asked me how the snake river plane formed.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember that that is a feeling of discovery, even though it's not actually a new discovery, it's new to me.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: And that it's 80% of the feeling of discovery that you you know, where no one else knows it, but it it's a substantial feeling.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so and I think many probably of our listeners can feel that, you know, whether you're listening to this podcast or you're walking around looking at mountains and you're like, oh my goodness, that's how that thing formed.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like, that's amazing.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that that feeling is that's the feeling we're talking about.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: So it's powerful, it's very powerful.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think uh let's just get to it.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: This is John Douglas coming at you.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: But before we do that, real quick, there are two ways to support us.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: If you like this podcast, if you like Planet Geo, two ways to support us.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: You can head over to our website, planetgeocast.com.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: There you can donate to us, just you know, send us a few bucks, support the podcast.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: The other way, which we almost kind of prefer, is go to our new mobile app, Camp Geo, the mobile app, first link in your show notes.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: There you can listen to a bunch of free stuff.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: You can also purchase access to a couple of audiobooks that we have there, which that's another way to support us.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: So just to highlight those, and one of them is the Grand Canyon, the geology of the Grand Canyon.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: This is John Douglas' very deep dive into how the Grand Canyon got cut.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: So let's get to it.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: Dr.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: John Douglas, welcome to Planet Geo and thanks for joining us.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: This is uh this is very exciting.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: We're we're happy to talk to you.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for giving us some of your time.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh absolutely.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really excited to be here.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_02: Big fans of the show, our big fan of the show.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: Oh well, really appreciate it.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: I've been looking forward to this all day, John.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Chris, uh more than that, Chris has been giddy for a while now.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think Chris is fanboying out a little bit now.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he's watched a bunch of the videos following your work about the Grand Canyon, and he's excited to talk about them.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I I really am.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, absolutely.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to say it is mutual.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And Chris, specifically, what you've done being a high school teacher, taking students on those trips, that has got to be earth-changing to those students that you do that for.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's a gift, it's a gift to the people you do that for, it's a gift for the rest of their life.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: I just think it's incredible what you have done with your life.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'll second that.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'll I've I've been I've been the recipient of that.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I'll second that.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: Now I'm gonna continue.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna continue to interrupt you throughout this, despite that.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: So John, I I am very intrigued by the offer that you sent in an email to swap out trips.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: So uh let's uh maybe talk about that later on, hey.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: That was exciting.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Jesse, shall we just jump right in?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, let's do it.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: Let's let's get into it.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is my question.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: I always ask it, so I'll lead off.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: So, John, Jesse and I both have our own little stories, and we've shared this several times with our listeners about how and why we got into the geosciences, and you know, what was our moment?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we like to ask our guests that what got you into the geosciences?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Was there a specific moment that you feel?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it wasn't a specific moment, but I I'm incredibly lucky.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I actually had a Chris Bullheis as a kid that took students on backpacking trips to the Sierra Nevada mount.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I started in fifth grade all the way up through high school, going on six, eight, or ten-day backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevadas, either between Mammoth, California and Yosemite National Park or Yosemite Valley, or sometimes all the way down to Mount Whitney.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Was this through John?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: What can I ask?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Was this through school or was this like Boy Scouts or like some institute like that?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Or I think it's like Chris.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was just this crazy teacher.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: He got a bus license.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we would just take a school bus.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: We would he would put speakers in it, and he, you know, there would be other high school kids that were kind of in charge of like four kids, which I eventually did when I became a high school student.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I learned so much about being a leader, helping people out, and yeah, that's amazing.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Totally changed my life.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Was there a geoscience component to that, John?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Or was it just a trip?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a trip.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: But it got into my blood.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: I the rocks gosh, the first trip I ever did when I was in fifth grid, I remember I was probably crying at some point, and I'm going down a hill and I look up, and I don't know how familiar you are with the area, but there's two peaks called Banner and Ritter up there in the minarets.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And in my mind, it was like a castle.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was like a castle in the sky that there would have been a dragon right behind this thing.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just like, how is this real?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I could not get enough of it from that point on.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: So did that really get you into the geosciences?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like, was a direct path of like, hey, that's that's amazing.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: That mountain, that peak's amazing.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: I gotta learn about it.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: And like was this in high school you took these classes or or college that you started to kind of have the traditional education in the field?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: I know this was in the 90s.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: I would read books, but there was no classes.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: But my goal was to be basically Chris Bullheis.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: I was I wanted to be a high school teacher teaching geology and then taking people on trips in the summer.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: That was my dream.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Are you from California then?
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_02: I grew up in San Diego.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: Oh wow, okay.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: Of the the sort of academic geologists I know, there's a significant fraction that had a Chris Bullheis in their life.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: You know, had a an early exposure by a dynamic teacher or somebody in their life, maybe not a traditional teacher, but a mentor or something.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of people who go on and end up like yourself getting PhDs in geology.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's a lot, actually.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I I don't know what the numbers are, but a third or more, I would say, of people I've met have have that early exposure.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: And it's just yeah, like you said at the outset, it's a testament to to you, Chris.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: People and people like you who kind of do this, you know what I mean?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't care what field you're in.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think that that's true pretty much across the board, don't you think?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: No matter if you're in business or somebody at some point lit the spark, right?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but I feel like you're selling yourself short in that there's a plenty of other teachers that teach geology and you take it 500 steps further.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because people need to see the rocks.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like you need to get out there, you need to you need to experience it, you need to wrestle with these concepts, these ideas, wrestle with what is geologic time.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like that is what gets under my skin when I was a kid.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's how I fell in love with it.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's something you can do in a classroom anywhere near as much as you can in the field.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: I agree completely with that.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so I want to come back to sort of the latter half of your path a minute, John.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: But real quick question about this, might be a semantic one, but I noticed your degrees are all geography degrees.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I have a yep.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I have a story there.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I want to hear about that.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I want to, but could you could you in your mind, what is the difference, if any, between geology, geoscience, and geography?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think there's a lot of people who get massively confused, and I'm one of them, about the differences here.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: Because I would class you as a geologist or geoscientist, right?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: But so is there a difference in in what is your and what's the story uh behind that?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: So basically I went to college and I took an education class and I just didn't like the education class.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And for some reason, I couldn't see myself going through with the whole education stuff.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then in geology, just the math, the physics, the chemistry, I kind of got overwhelmed with that.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: I was a kid, I didn't really know what I was doing, and I just went on this meandering path of trying out different majors.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like I love history.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, geology is basically history, but I love history, so I went down that path for a while.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then I ended up in geography because I my goal was to be, by the end, I was going to be a snow scientist.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I was gonna study avalanche paths, uh snow science, how much water, you know, snow packs are producing, that kind of thing.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I only came back to geology because the last class I took, it was in geomorphology and it was literally on how the Grand Canyon formed.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I took that class, man, talk about a drug, like an addiction, like it just got into my head.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: I the idea of the canyon as a problem, uh, in terms of how it formed, the different ideas, the mechanisms, its age.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: I could not get enough of it.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so when the class was over, and he told us we don't know how the Grand Canyon formed, and I was like, that's stupid.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: How can we not know how the Grand Canyon form?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's the freaking most popular national park.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's impossible.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: I I literally went to my snow scientist professor and I said, I want to be able to get a master's in how the Grand Canyon formed.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And don't do that, everybody else out there, because there's no money in that, and I wasn't qualified.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um luckily or unluckily, my he agreed to do it, and I then had to try to figure out how the uh the canyon formed.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it was very empirical, very much making up on the fly as I went along.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: So just to get this straight, John, that was geography that then you transitioned for your master's into geology.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: So my master's started?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was still in geography, but because geography is this umbrella where you can have geomorphology and kind of human geography and climatology, I guess.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: I was in the geomorphology angle of it.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I took a lot of geology classes, but that was the umbrella I was in.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's interesting.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: So that structure's kind of common that there's like a lot of overlap here.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: Human geographers, which are much more social science, I would say, than physical science, right?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, can be in the same department.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, in in the University of Alberta where I did my PhD, all the human geographers were in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so you know, but there's kind of a bifurcation between the social sciences and the physical sciences within that like departmental umbrella.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that's that's maybe useful for people to understand that the differences you're kind of all grouped together in a department, but there's fractures.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't fractures.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like Jesse, what you do, if I understand right, uh do you do patrology?
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Igneous petrology?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: Petrology, yeah, exactly.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that is not something any geographer would ever do.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: We would only ever do stuff on the surface.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: It would only ever be geomorphology.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: And typically fluvial stuff like that kind of thing.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Fluvial weathering, hill slope processes, just like how the landscape changes and develops over time.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of interactions between geology and humanity, maybe?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Is that yeah?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of by definition.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, kind of has to be, yeah.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's all on the surface.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's everything on the surface.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: In our in the Penn State, you know, hierarchy, in the geoscience department, there there's a different department that does the social like we don't have human geographers in our department, but our department houses all the landscape evolution people.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: So we're they're geologists, right?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: You know, by definition, because they're in our department.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: So there's like a big Venn diagram overlap here.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I uh yeah, I just wanted to clarify that.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: So that that's useful.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so then then so so we're at the point where like you've got the itch now about the Grand Canyon, and that's sort of it.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: So you did your master's with the same supervisor, it sounds like at um Northern Arizona University, is that right?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, and then you moved on to do a PhD in the more it sounded like quantitative gra geography or landscape evolution a bit.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was definitely the real deal.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: So down at ASU, I worked with Ron Dorn and I had other Norm Meek, Mark Schmeckley, like just really I don't know.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: I lucked out.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Really good guys, but I had to grow up a lot.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: So when I did my master's program, my brain had something to do with it, but luck definitely played a part in it because I found something interesting.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: But unfortunately, when I do my master's, I was localized and I didn't connect myself to everybody else that was working on the similar problems in the world in the literature, if that makes sense.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: I was really isolated and I didn't know how to be a scholar in terms of how to connect myself and get help from those other sources.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: When I went to ASU, that was one of the things my advisor, Grant Duar, he's like, no, you can't, that's not how this works.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like you have to give credit and understand what everybody else has done before you if you're going to make any steps forward.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a big transition for me uh down at ASU.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: But then, yes, then I did I studied at ASU, not Grand Canyon specifically, but Grand Canyon technically is what is called a transverse drainage where a river cuts across, you know, a mountain.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: I studied the four ways rivers cut across mountains or end up having cut across a mountain.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: I I just said hold on and hold on a second, Jesse.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: So No, let me I just want to double-click on that point.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very normal path.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like I find my PhD was the same.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: It was like, holy crap, there's this whole wide world and legacy of research.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like I had no idea how big this actually how little anybody knows, because there's so much, such a volume of previous work that you have to sift through.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't know.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a very normal process uh that people go through.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, sorry, Chris.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, kind of no, that's totally fine.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: No, yeah, I know you're not sorry.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, John, you said something.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: You said there are four ways that rivers cut across mountains.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is that correct?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: Can we talk about that?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: What are the four ways that rivers cut across mountains?
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna say this now.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is another reason why your podcast is amazing.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: You guys do this all just with words, and that is a challenge because every other thing we do in geology, you can't do it without a picture or the landscape.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna do my best, and I have help.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: I have help from what other people have done in the literature.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Ron Torr.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the first one is uh John Wesley Powell, famous Grand Canyon geologist explorer, is antecedent.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: So with antecedents, the river is flowing first, and then the mountain lip mountain uplifts underneath the flowing river.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: And if the river has the capacity to cut through that rising rock, you will end up with an antecedent transverse drainage.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: The analogy that John Wesley Powell used is if you put a saw onto a log of wood, you can drop the saw onto the wood or lift the log into the saw and you're gonna cut either way, right?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: That's a good one.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: I like that.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: Lifting the log into the saw, that's a great one.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: Ooh, that's a really good one.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um the second one is super imposition.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: This one is the most difficult.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna try my best.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: So imagine the log that already exists, right?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: The mountain is exists probably structurally, but then you have to bury it in something.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Typically, at least out here in the west, you're gonna bury it in some kind of lake sediments.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh silts, clays, marls, just something that's it kind of gets draped across that landscape.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: The river flows across that drape, kind of acts like a ramp to allow that river to go across, and then for some reason, once it cuts down, it will cut through the bedrock that's below that soft rock.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Then the soft rock gets eroded away, and the bedrock below just emerges, and you're going to end up with a superimposed transverse drain.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Did that make any sense?
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that is.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I have a question on that, John.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: So can that be a cycle, a pro a process that cycles over and over?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm imagining two like a basin, restricted basins that kind of fill up with sediments over time, and there's this like, I don't know, granite mountain range in between, and the superposition happens over and over, like the stream gets cut off for some reason, then the basins fill up, or is it kind of a one-time and done thing?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: And this is kind of a question case too.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, Jesse, I think that's a a great question.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: We unfortunately don't have the ability to get a those cycles just because the rock record gets obliterated.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: But out here in the basin of range, I'm actually working with uh very good friend Brian Gautie, and we're studying a basin out here, and we're starting to get a handle on these earlier basins where you would have superimposition and stuff.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: But it's really tough once you get older than the first one.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: Are there examples like classic examples for antecedents and superimposition that people kind of know this is the way these formed or or not really?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Is it kind of up for debate these things?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, we definitely have good examples.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just trying to think what the audience would know.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um I feel mostly confident that the Columbia River Gorge is antecedent.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the Columbia River, you know, coming out of that eastern Washington, Oregon, that area, cutting through the Cascade Mountains, we think that that is antecedent.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's tough because the Cascades go back into the Cretaceous.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I somewhat struggle with that, but I think it is.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe, Jesse, a a different way of asking the question is what geologically are you looking for for an antecedent drainage system versus a superimposition?
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like antecedent, I think of entrenched meanders, right?
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: So typically with antecedents, you actually have we have active faulting.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Something is causing that mountain to go up.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you'll have evidence that the thing is going up.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh oftentimes you're going to have terraces that are abandoned high up in the structure, because as it's going up, you'll have terraces.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is famous in the Himalayas.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Himalayas have a number of transverse drainages with just classic stacked terraces going up the sides of the mountain.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: The same in the Andes.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: So typically, if you have antecedents, you're going to be someplace active.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have a couple here in Arizona where I work, Granite Creek, north of Prescott.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: We know that one's an antecedent drainage.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's actually in the process of getting captured.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's not going to flow where it's flowing for very long.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: So okay, what do we have covered two?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we have two more.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, wait, wait.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: I apologize.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: So just real quick, antecedents and superposition.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: In that case, the river is first, the mountain is second.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: The river is there, and the mountain either gets uplifted or you exhum the mountain.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: The river in its path.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: The river's path as we see it today was there before the mountain was there.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: A river first.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: For these next two, mountains first, river second.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the mountain is already there, and the river somehow cheats and gets across this mountain.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so the coolest one is river piracy, where the river is flowing next to this mountain and going somewhere else.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: And in the literature, you'll you're going to read that a lot of headward erosion on the other side of the mountain will work headward and capture that drainage, which will then cause it to go across the mountain.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: And once it does, that will be a shortcut, and then boom, it cuts across.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: You now have a lower base level, it's going to a lower place, and you'll end up with a transverse drainage.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: In my work, the headward erosion angle, it does happen, but it takes a lot of time.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: You need big asymmetry between your upstream drainage and your downstream drainage to allow that headward erosion to occur.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's more common for the upstream drainage to be a grading, building up its bed.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's starting to flow higher and higher.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: Rivers will do that to gain more energy because either the climate's drying out or it gets more sediment or it's just flowing inefficiently.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: And as it gets higher and higher, eventually it'll take a shortcut and go across your mountain.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Then it will cut and you got a piracy event.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: Good examples, or what do you look for in the rock record for piracy?
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I I wish I could just be like this massive river did this for people who are listening.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's okay for small ones.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: What we've realized here is that, you know, we always make jokes about staying out of the weeds.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, there's a lot of people who want more weeds.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: We've gotten that feedback from people.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so don't be afraid to dive into some weeds here.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so locally here in Phoenix, we have the Salt River.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the Salt River flows through our city here in Phoenix, Arizona.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: At least it used to before it got dammed and all that.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: The Salt River used to flow south of the city, south of this place called South Mountain.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it did that for one to two million years.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then it did exactly what I said.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: It took a shortcut and went across this gap that existed between A Mountain on ASU campus, Arizona State University, and Papago Buttes.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: And when it took that shortcut, it shortened the path that it has to travel.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Boom, it cut down.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: It abandoned this huge terrace.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: So most of Phoenix actually sits on an abandoned terrace.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Tempe.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's all an abandoned terrace of the Salt River once it took that shortcut.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's massive.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's unbelievable.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's so cool.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my cow.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: And they're more prevalent than I initially thought.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'll say then.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the fourth, John.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Fourth one.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: The one I spent the most work on and is by far the easiest one.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: All right, you have a river, gets dammed by that mountain.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually it fills up, gonna find the lowest spot, pours across.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: If it's gonna flow to a lower place, a lower base level, it'll have enough energy, it will cut a canyon, and you have a transverse drainage.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: A dam breaching or sp you call it spillover, but it's think of a dam breaking kind of an idea.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where I get it.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people get it.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: They're always like Yeah, put him in his place, John.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: Love it.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, no.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's okay.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's okay.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: I think I saw this question on a video.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's not a dam breaking.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is a sorry, that's a big legacy of this whole lake idea, is people hate this idea, basically, is what I found out.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely when I first proposed it.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: They don't like the idea of a lake pouring across.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: And they don't like it because it's catastrophic.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: At least in their mind, it's going to be catastrophic, basically because what you said is that it's a dam and it failed.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that is not the case at all.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: So for the Grand Canyon specifically, which I think is the best example, but we have a ton of examples of overflow out here in the West.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to be cutting across the Kyvet Plateau, and that is a 70-mile wide stack of Paleozoic and Precambrian crystalline rye, like that thing is not going to break.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it takes a while.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: Once the water goes across, the the current will be steep enough.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: You'll end up with waterfalls.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Those waterfalls will work headward, just like Niagara Falls, which is awesome.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Whoever came up with that question.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: And those as those waterfalls go back, when they hit that lake outlet where the water is initially pouring across, then you can have a big release of water, but I wouldn't say it collapsed.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: At the nick point, right?
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: At the nick point.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: Once that nick point hits the outlet, right?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say the nick point is 10 feet tall.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: You have a 10-foot waterfall.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: If it hits the outlet, now you've just lowered the entire lake by 10 feet.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the entire lake, however big it is, the area, multiply that by 10 feet, all that water will now go downstream.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: That will generate a flood for sure.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I wouldn't say like a dam break.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: So I asked this in I asked the damn question in part because a leading question here because you said people don't like this idea.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe what you could do is frame the evidence briefly for this forming the Grand Canyon, and we can get into weeds with this too.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: But like just at a high level, what is the evidence for this that led you to propose this spillover specifically for the Grand Canyon?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think you just kind of touched on it a little bit just there.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: But could we kind of double click on that a minute?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: So going back to when I was my master's student, didn't really know anything, and I was driving out there looking, I was reading about different gravel deposits, and I would go out there and I'd look at them and then I'd pick up the rocks and be like, this is a gravel.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: I had no idea what any of it meant.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: I made an observation, and the observation was just upstream of the Grand Canyon, you have the Colorado River that's flowing in Marble Canyon, flows downhill.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: You have the little Colorado River just upstream of the Grand Canyon, flows downhill, and it meets up with the Colorado River just east of Grand Canyon, just upstream of Grand Canyon.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Where those two rivers meet, they meet at the top of a hill, a little hill, it's kind of a dickhill called Cedar Ridge.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's a subtle anaclinal upwarp that dips towards the Kaivat Plateau.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: And rivers are not supposed to meet at the top of a hill, right?
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: Water is supposed to flow away from the top of the hill.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: So when I recognized that that's what those rivers were doing, I thought to myself, if I could get a handle on how two rivers could meet at the top of the hill, I might have a handle on how the canyon formed.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: So then it took me two months of thinking about it, sleeping on it, whatever, whatever.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally I was just driving in a van.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: I was actually headed on a river trip, and it just hit me.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, whoa, if I hit a lake up high that's pouring across and you have the nick points going down, pouring across, and you take out the lake outlet and allow that lake to lower down, lower down until it hits that Cedar Ridge, you would split into two lakes, and then you could end up with Cadra River going off to the north and little Cloud River going off to the south, and you could account for the geometry of these two rivers that meet at the top of a hill.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the first piece of evidence that I had to support it.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: You surmise that if this is what happened, now, now what, right?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now you got to go find the lake.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the first thing I did is I went and so I'm dating my my wife now, is heck and girl, love her to death.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: And we were boyfriend and girlfriend at this time, and I'm this, you know, fiend-dish freak about this thing.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to build a model to see if I can demonstrate this just in a pile of dirt.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like, wood does this work?
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: If I have a lake and it cuts, will I split?
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I do that, but I'm just laughing because we had to steal.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: I ended up, we stole some wood from this like little manufacturing plant, and I probably shouldn't have, but the wood was sitting here.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I was laughing because I went to go pick up the wood.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: I told Meg, I was like, hey, we just grabbed this wood.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think anyone's using it.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: She's like, I bet someone's using it.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, well, maybe, but we could just grab it.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: So then we go over there, and then while we're getting the wood, she's like, Do you think we should be doing this?
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if we should be getting this wood.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, very loudly.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: Don't talk about that.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um so then I was able to demonstrate it in a physical model that yes, then you need to find the actual rock evidence for the lake.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that led me to the Bidaochi Formation.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about that.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: Dang, this is a big topic.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um I know it's a big topic, but it's fun.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: This is and it's okay.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's just let's get into it.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is the heart of your research right here, right?
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, definitely now, yeah.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the Bidochi Formation is a beautiful rock formation.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: You guys should go, everybody should go see it.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely beautiful.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Although it is on the Navajo Reservation.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to collect rocks, you'd need permission.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it is a stack of clays, sands, silts, and marls that sits kind of out in this big open.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it still looks like a basin today.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's a giant low-angle simcline called a SAG, St.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: John's SAG.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: The basin started to form about 16 million years ago.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know how the basin formed, although John He at his U of A just published a paper in Nature on the topic, which is so cool.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so proud of him if he's listening.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: I actually told him this Tuesday night, but respect.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: That is so cool.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: The basin forms.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm going to do the old idea first, and then I'll do what I think is really going on.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: So the old idea is 16 million years ago, we start getting a lake in this basin east of the Grand Canyon.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: What is Grand Canyon today?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: And as that lake is filling up, about 8 million years ago, we get a bunch of Mar volcanoes erupting.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: You get the Hopi Buttes.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: So the Hopi Buttes are just volcanoes that when the magnet comes up, it hits just wet dirt, basically, causes that water to flash of steam.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so instead of building a nice cone, like a cinder cone or something, you get a big hole in the ground, a mar volcano.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a bunch of Mar volcanoes sitting out there.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's the middle member.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then the upper member also starts at eight million years ago, and that's where the system transitions into having a lot more sand coming in.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of being mostly silts and clays, we're getting a lot more sand, and it covers a much bigger area higher up on the edge of the basin, is the upper member.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the thinking there is the upper member represented the basin drying out, and the sand was river systems that basically filled in this lake basin as the basin dried out.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: That was the thinking of what was going on up there.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: So in that model, is that this is a restricted basin or is there an outflow somewhere from this lake?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: No outflow.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: So this is just going in and it's drying and forming evaporites or or not forming evaporites, but it's yeah, good question.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um we do have some gypsum, but definitely not halite.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: At least I've never seen any halite.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: There might have been halite somewhere else that's eroded away, but even based on what I've seen lately, I don't think that's the case.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's just too cold up at that elevation.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, maybe not.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: So something I'm not clear on, John, and if you can clear this up, that'd be great.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: So you talked about the the lake filling up, and then you talked about the lake draining.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: So you talked about the mid-member and the you know the clays and so on, and then you went you transitioned higher up into sand.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: What was causing it to go from filling to emptying?
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Was it spilling over at that point?
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: Is that what you're is that what you're getting at?
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, sorry.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the old model for that formation.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: So what I actually I just gave a talk at the Arizona Geological Society, and so a paper that I'm kind of working on trying to get published is I'm trying to change that that paradigm in that it's actually the opposite, that that early lake was fairly dry, and then over time it actually gets wetter.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the volcanism doesn't kick off until the lake starts getting bigger.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that connection is there, but that that is what happened.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then now that sand that we're seeing in the uh upper member, a lot of it is fluvial.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: No question.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's subarial red beds, but a lot of it is actually beach sand.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we have a lot of carbonate in that sand, and that carbonate is in places it's TUFA, in other places it's stromatolytic, microbiolites where you know get little critters in there, building laminate.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's mind-blowing.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot tell you how mind-blowing it is to be finding this stuff.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: And another passion of mine for over the past year, because I'm a freak, I got into ostracods.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Have you guys ever studied ostracods?
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Nope.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: I just trying to see if you guys are the same thing.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: So ostracod, they're just little millimeter fossils, little guys, little shell creatures with little insects and shells go around eating stuff.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: But they're uh a really good indicator for what the lake quality, the water quality was like, if you can figure out what species you're looking at.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: I am not an expert on the species, but I collected a bunch of sediment.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was able to process it and find a bunch of these ostracods.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm lucky to have two colleagues, uh, a guy named Jordan up at uh Northern Arizona University and Andy Cohen at U of A.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: These guys are like, they know their stuff.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it's incredible.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: It is so I it is incredible.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: So the lower member, we've only found one ostracod species.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's a new species.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna name it after Todd DeLege.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: He did his master's there in the late 90s on the Pidochi Formation, and I just want to give him credit because what he did was not a master's thesis.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was like two dissertations.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: We would not be where we are without Todd.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's gonna be called heterocepus delegia.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: But these critters are so hardy.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: They're known, they can live anywhere.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: So in the 1950s, the guy was studying these guys, and he went home and he came back to his lab on Monday, and he was like, Oh crap, I forgot about my critters, and he didn't take care of his water correctly, and it had totally depleted of oxygen.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: So totally gone, become anoxic.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: And he thought, oh, I killed them, they're dead.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes in and looks in and they're fine.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: They're going around doing their thing.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: So was able to figure out they can handle anoxic conditions, super hardy critters.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also weird that we only have one.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: We only have the heterociparous delegia.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's weird too.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Typically, you have some sort of you know ecosystem of other ostracods.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't have any other real fossils either.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have fish.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: I did find one bone.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it's I don't think it's a fish bone.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: If I had to guess, I would say it's an amphibian.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: So right now we don't have much, and we have one ostracod.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that ostracod can handle some really funky water.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: What I think happened is the Calra River was stuck somewhere farther north on the Colorado Plateau, and then it entered the Bidahochi Basin.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: And when it entered the Bidachi Basin, boom, things change.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now did it change like crazy, crazy.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you go out there and look at it, like the contact is sharp in places, but it's not crazy.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: But in terms of life, everything changes.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: You have like tons of mammals, tons of amphibians, tons of reptiles, tons of fish.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_02: Can I interrupt and ask you a question, John, on this?
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: So at the so I'm trying to visualize the previous explanation of the Bidahoi b um how do you pronounce it?
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_02: Bihi, yeah.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: Bidih hochi, okay.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: That uh the uh the previous explanation of the formation was it that you there was a lake there and it was and this is forming the lower member, but the lake dried out.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: It it eventually got dried out, and then it was a bunch of river uh kind of rivers meandering back and forth across this plane.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's the previous model.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: You're saying no, that's not what happened.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: The lake is getting deeper, and the grand the upper Colorado River entered.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: It is this entering and forming the lake, or is it entering like midway?
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: Is the lake there when the river enters?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like where in this sequence of sediments is this happening, this event?
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: Good question.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the lake before the river gets there, before the Colorado gets there, is fairly small.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: But if you go out there and look at the rocks, at sometimes you can't tell.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can't tell that the Colorado has arrived.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's the same green clay.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: We can tell because of strontium, we have a chemical signature that can tell us.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: But you don't you can't tell just by looking at the rocks.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: But once that hose of the Colorado starts going into that basin, the lake does get deeper over time.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then as you move into the upper member, that's where things change.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we start getting more species of ostracods, but these guys, instead of being like heterociparous, they can handle more alkaline water.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: So out here in the west, we have Pyramid Lake.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the Sierra's go into Nevada and it's a closed lake basin.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: And you can go swimming in it, it's nice, but it's hard water, alkaline, moderate salinity, nothing like ocean levels, but it's a little bit funky.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's what our lake is like.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then recently, fairly high in the section, I can't believe this happened.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: I was out there, I was helping a PhD student who's working out there, who works at uh University of Washington, Emma Heiteman.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm supposed to be digging a trench so she can measure sections for her research.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: She's going to be doing clumped isotope research.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: And my daughter is out there with me because she's crazy and gets bored and wants to go see Pirachi too.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: And finally I look at her, I'm like, I'm sick of digging.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go look for fossils.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know we're on a side of a hill that has fossils.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like, we go fossil hunting.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: So we leave and we start finding, we find awesome fossils, giant gastropods, but all the stuff that people had known about.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: But at the really high end of section where no one had looked, just by dumb luck, we found a bone bed of fish bones.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in those fish bones, we have an ostracod species known as Cithrissa lacustris.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: The species far, it's probably a new species because this is so old, about five and a half million years old.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: But that guy is it is known for very, very fresh, deep lakes, is what it's known for.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's up there in the sand, which was used as the evidence before for it being rivers, and now we're finding an ostracod that only lives deep, cold lakes.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: And this is upper member, this is after the color in your the sort of revised interpretation, your argument is that this is after the Colorado River arrives, and we gotta now the lake's getting bigger and cleaner.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, and the sand is is beach sand, not you know, sort of drying out sand.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: At this location, it's beach sand.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: In other places, you do have fluvial sands that are going into the lake, and those sands get preserved, but the sediments associated with the lake were not at at other locations.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: John, how prolific is this organism in that upper layer that only thrives in freshwater lakes?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I've only found it in one bed, but in that bed, it's the dominant ostracod.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then I reached out to an expert, Allison Smith, but she's been incredibly gracious.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: She actually sent me a book on ostracods from Lake Baikal in Russia.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, cool.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_03: Oh wow, very cool.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's where these ostracods are famous from is Lake Baikal.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is thought to have been the cradle for when these species formed, and Lake Baikal became fully oxygenated at uh sometime in the late Miocene.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: Very cool.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: So the difference between the two models for forming this transverse drainage that is a Grand Canyon of like overflow versus piracy, it's really all in the lake.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_02: The story is like the the difference is in that the fact that we had this lake here, and so that's why we're focusing on the lake upstream.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know if piracy is still considered for the Grand Canyon.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what people actually are are thinking on that.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: But the old model for the Bitahoche was uh wet lake, boom, you get the volcanism, and then you dry out.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the new model that I'm giving is dry, boom, wet.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you have this kind of dry lake, boom, get the volcanism, and then we get this wet lake.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of the transition.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and what we have is the highest sediment that we have in the basin is at 2,250 meters.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's the highest upper member stuff we have.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: The spillover point for the Grand Canyon is thought to be about 2,300.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we're 50 meters off.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's not very far off.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you cannot be over it because that doesn't work.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: A lake can't be higher than its sill.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so you're gonna lose stuff from erosion and you're gonna have tectonic who knows what jostling will occur.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: But that highest stuff, like no, no joke, man.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: I went, I went there with my daughter.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: Guys, I study how rivers get across these things.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't actually study lacustrian sediments.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm looking at these rocks, and I'm like, I don't know what this is.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: And my daughter's out there and she's with me, and she's having a great, she's not worried about her friends, she just looking at rocks, doesn't care.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: I like have sweats pouring off of me.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: And she's like, hey dad, check out this rock, it has lines on it.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I lines, and so I pick it up and I look at it, and she hands me a stromatolite.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just like, What?
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: How do we have a stromatolite at 2250 meters?
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like you look around, there's there's no water.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: We're up on Balakai Mesa.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's there hasn't been a stream in here for millions of years.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it was this changed everything.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so it was that like that day revolutionized your thinking on how the Grand Canyon was cut, right?
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: I have always thought it was a lake, but it I was like, this lake was really here.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: This lake was here, and it was big.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like this thing is huge.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's the part it slaps me in the face.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like I just like, uh, I struggle with that.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think I read somewhere or saw you maybe.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: You said it's bigger than Lake Michigan.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_02: Which Chris got really offended about.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: I I must say.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: I got to go back to the city.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_02: I don't blame you.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: I you're probably proud of it better than how old is that lake?
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: About five foot ten?
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm kidding.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's gotta be it's under yeah.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: I work with Andy Cohen at uh University of Arizona, and he's a lake specialist, and he studies Lake Tanganika in Africa.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Andy is so awesome.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: You guys, I'll see if I can get him on your graduate show.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: I love Andy to death.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: He's funny, he's just great.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Lake Tanganika, he studies rift lakes out in Africa.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is the second biggest lake in the world.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: It is the second oldest lake in the world.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's like five other things that it's the second on.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: And number one is Lake Baikal.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so whenever I'm with Andy, I always try and bring up Lake Baikal just to kind of rough it a little bit.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's funny.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: I I I'm not saying your lake's not cool, but I gotta tell you, Lake Baikal is like so, John.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: So take us then to the next step.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we have this really deep lake.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: You're close to the To the top.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now what happens?
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: We still haven't talked about cutting the canyon.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: So at that point, I mean the whole reason the canyon itself is going to cut and look the way it does is because the the way I visualize the plateau, at least the southern Cairo Plateau, like imagine if you had a pool in your backyard, like a real shallow pool, like a cheap Las Vegas motel pool, and it's sitting in your backyard, but you lift it up and it's sitting up above your house, and it's kind of weird.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then as that thing fills up with water, you're like, oh man, that's crazy.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what's going to happen when the water pours out of that thing?
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's what this lake was like.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's this giant lake on this elevated basin, right at its edge, is the boundary between the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: When that water is going to leave the plateau and go into the basin and range, you're going to cut a canyon.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't matter where it ended up flowing.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: The difference in base level is 4,000 vertical feet, 3,500 vertical feet.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's why Grand Canyon is as amazing as it is.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's that difference in base level is having that.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: I want to sort of visualize this.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_02: So we got this big lake that fills up to the rim of, let's be simple about it, the rim of the Kaibab Plateau, or the the Kaibab uplift, basically.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_02: And then it starts to trickle across.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's a stream then that that that starts to flow outwards, but it has, you're saying, this huge base level difference.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: So there's an amazing ability to down cut.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_02: There's like waterfalls in here, presumably.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_02: Is there one waterfall?
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: How does this work?
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: How does it evolve?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like get us to now from there.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm guessing what I'm wondering is how quick does that happen?
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_02: I can imagine a s a term called spillover theory being interpreted as having happened very, very quickly, like flood sort of level of quickness.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I and that's not the model.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_02: So what was the rate of the cutting?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: Not I would say not quick at all.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_02: Not quick at all.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_02: So okay.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because you have about 200 miles from Kevin Plateau to the edge of the Colorado Plateau before you drop down to where Las Vegas is today.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of rock.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot, a lot of area for waterfalls to have to retreat across.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's not well understood either.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not doing this, but there are there's a grad student at University of Arizona, Nitsan, and he is working with a guy named Jay Quaid, and he is doing clumped isotope analysis of that high TUFA, the highest deposit, the beach rock, and uh that's associated with the beach sand.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: And when he looks at those clumped isotopes, the water is very fresh.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the water is really close to being like rainwater coming down in that area.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: That I was not, I did not expect that.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: John, real quick, can we back up a second to can you explain what tufa is?
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse and I love TUFA.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: We love it a lot, but a lot of our listeners might not know what tufa is because it's kind of a niche kind of thing.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a variety of TUFA.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: In TUFA, you get carbonates that are going to form around the shore of a lake, or at least the one that I'm talking about.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: You can get it in springs, you can't get it in rivers, the ones I'm talking about are a lake.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: But it's basically when the water goes through a chemical chain where you're going to get calcium carbonate to combine and you're going to rain carbonate onto either the lake floor if it's a lake, or you can have it start collecting in rocks in a river or stream, or in a spring.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's a number of different types of tufa.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, tufa is supposed to be cold water, travertane is supposed to be hot water.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: You can have porous, so it has a bunch of holes in it as it forms.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: It could be the gas bubbles from the carbon dioxide.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: And other times it can be pretty resistant, pretty strong.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: But it is a type of limestone.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: So where are we, John?
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we've we got the nick point.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: We've spilled over.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: You said it took a long time.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: We have a lot of relief down to the base level.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so much what I'm saying about the fresh water.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: What's fascinating about that fresh water is the lake is probably overflowing at that point.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea with lakes is if they're really fresh, you're you have constantly water coming in and constantly water leaving, and it has a very low residence time before it's going downstream.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's telling you that A, it was already cutting, and B, it's going to be a long process for us to have rocks that are recording that signature of the cutting taking place because the water is going across.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_02: Because you you got water leaving now.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just the lake's not just filling up, it's yeah it's also filling up.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: You're going from being close to being open.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, John, I'm really interested in something that you said at the top of the interview.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: You said that like you've met a lot of resistance.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: You put it a little bit differently.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: So can we talk about that?
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm really interested in this.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Jesse and I go back and forth on what you doctors are supposed to have figured out at this point.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, there's just a so much debate here.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I really want to explore that aspect of it, why the resistance, and then maybe we'll transition into some of the other theories on on how the canyon got cut.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, great.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd say big picture, the resistance is in geology, we have this lag of uniformitarianism.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: So uniformitarianism, ever since Charles Lyle, this concept uh the present is the key to the past.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to understand something, if you want to understand a beach deposit, go look at a beach, watch the process work, and then you can go understand the rocks.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very powerful.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's a definitely a good tool.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that it isn't the only thing that happens.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_00: We have plenty of evidence in the geologic record where you have things that you're not going to go find it happening today.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a big example is a meteorite hitting our planet, killing off the dinosaurs.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: But in a variety of levels, we got to start embracing that there can be sudden change that occurs in our landscapes.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: We have to give our planet more credit, that it is more dynamic than maybe the uniformitarianists would have wanted.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: So from that angle, I think the problem was when you had a lake and you have a lake spilling across, everybody instantly goes, big lake, dam failure, you know, massive flood, and we don't see evidence for that, so it doesn't work.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that logic, those logic steps would block people's minds from understanding it's actually a very simple process.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: It happens all over the West out here.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: So right now we're studying all the rivers out here: Salt, Gila, the Verde River.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_00: All of these rivers have examples of an overflowing event, a spillover event, which is the term that's more commonly used.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's part of uh our hangover of having to deal with uniformitarianism.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I will say I did shoot myself in the foot.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is a cautionary tale.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_02: John, could I interrupt real quick on this before before you go to this cautionary tale?
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_02: Because this is, I think it's a really interesting, I think a very important point that you just made about uniformitarianism.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I we deal with this in igneous petrology too.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like there is there are hangovers about aspects, I mean the time scales are different and longer, but I think uniformitarianism is kind of the I think of it as like the slow, gradual process makes big change over long times, right?
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_02: Something's happening slowly over long times makes big changes.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that's not the Earth operates, I know the the paleontologists, I think, are the ones who use this punctuated equilibrium term to think big change rapidly and then kind of stasis for a while.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_02: And the meteorite impact analogy is a great one.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_02: But we deal with this in igneous petrology too.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like we think of subduction zone systems as having just gradual magnetism for hundreds of millions of years on some margin, but actually there's big pulses in this.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_02: There's like big pulses of magnetism, there's flare-ups all the time.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not a slow, constant process.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's punctuated with lots of drama.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_02: And that's different than like cat, you know, I hesitate a little bit because the terms there's like a big gradient between that and like everything happens just by only catastrophe.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like there are really important things that happen over slow processes, like you said.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_02: So I just wanted to highlight that that I think that that's a great point.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think we deal with that hangover in in a lot of the subfields in the geosciences.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_02: So awesome.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so here's the caution tale.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: In 2000, I just got my master's thesis.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: I've got I finished my master's, and they're having a symposium at Grand Canyon National Park.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the symposium is how the Grand Canyon formed.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: And there's gonna be a hundred geologists there, and I'm gonna go there and I have my talk, and I'm gonna be giving a talk with one of my advisors, uh Norm Meek at Cal State San Bernardino.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he has an analogy of the overflow process from uh Mojave River out in uh California.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna say that there was this idea for this lake.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: So when I give that talk, how do you think the audience responds?
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've been to a couple GSA meetings and and uh when somebody steals up there and I did not.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: So this is what's crazy.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: I had a Disney moment.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: I literally had people raising their hands, think this is awesome, this is so cool.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: You're kind of addressing these different problems.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I also was dumbfounded.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was terrified.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: This this has a dark side, so just wait.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is the cautionary tale.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: What I didn't realize is that symposium was held for people to talk how the grand canon formed.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_00: But the people who put it on, the reason they're putting that effort in is because they have an idea they want out there, or at least acknowledge.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: So the person that was putting on the talk was sitting in the front row when I was having this Disney moment.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so he stands up, walks towards me, and uh shakes my hand and turns and looks at the audience and he says, you know what, this is really cool.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: I bet your idea and my idea can work together and explain how the Grand Canyon formed.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's listening.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is what you do.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I should have said.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: I should have said, man, you are a luminary in the field.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for that consideration.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to work with you on this.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm speechless.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: What a fantastic opportunity.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I actually did.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still paying for it to this day, but not anywhere as much as I did back then.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_00: In my mind, when I heard your idea and my idea are going to get along to explain the canyon, I was like, that's not how this works.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I know what your ideas and they are actually mutually exclusive.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like it doesn't work.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then I should have picked my words better.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_00: But what I said was, thank you, I appreciate that.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: But Lake Overflow can stand on its own.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: So from that point on, I walk back to my seat, and then by the next day, I am getting it was a it was a rough next day.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then it was a rough ten years, ten years later, we have another conference.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_00: I get heckled at that conference.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: So there are ways that you do this politically, and then there's ways that you don't do it politically.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's a really I mean it's a it's a shitty experience, frankly.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_02: It it's especially you know when students are involved who who rightfully don't really know how the system works or don't, you know, are young and vigorous and interested and engaged and either offend or get offended by senior people.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's always a just a terrible situation to be in.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_02: But it is a good lesson.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like politics, we think this academic per thing, and it's like ideas live on their own bare benefits, but no, life is all politics and like absolutely, you know, absolutely.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm thinking about this.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking about how I would have responded to this, you know.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you have done it?
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like, well, I don't know.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm 52 right now, and uh I would probably have been more diplomatic now.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: But right back as a young, you know, right on.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm saying.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_01: As a as a young, young person just working on their PhD right now or finished up their masters, I probably would have gone your way.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: I you know, I I don't know.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm not very political.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't like to play that way.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: I just kind of say things the way they are, and I probably would have said what you did.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse, what about you?
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: What have you been in this situation before?
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_02: Not in a talk at the like relatively junior stage.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I you know, I I've experienced this in review, John.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure like you have, where you get really aggressive reviews, and I get really hot under the collar quickly about that.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_02: And luckily I've had mentors who are like, no, you're not writing that in a response.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_02: You can't say that in response.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_02: This is a very secretary.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: But you gotta get that out of your system.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_02: You gotta get it out of your system.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I I I learned from I had good advice, good mentors around, and it wasn't like in a talk where I was doing it, I had to respond in some way.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_02: I've had that a little bit more frequently, but it there's a level of maturity that comes, you know, from a couple of things.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_02: Like I would not do that.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, but you probably wouldn't have done it in year two of your PhD either.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_02: That learning ramps up pretty quickly, I think.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_02: But it's a tough one.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's a and it happened it happens.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's just not a fair situation to be put in either.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: You totally got blindsided there.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, it's that is not what I thought.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's very yeah, very difficult.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: Holy cow.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that's a completely unfair position to put a student in when you're on stage and give a good talk and then go up and and you know, say put any sort of um decision-making system in front of somebody who's giving one of their early talks.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, frankly, I I gave a talk at GSA when I was, yeah, like right away in graduate school, and I don't remember it.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_02: I blanked, like I have no idea what happened.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_02: I I like I was so nervous.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_02: Crazy stressful.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_02: So nervous.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_02: I have no idea.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_02: I know I got a couple questions, no idea what they were, how I answered them.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing is in the memory bank about it.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like uh this was Jesse, was this in a GSA?
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you're watching the are you watching the light go from green to yellow to red?
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_02: No, exactly.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, I hate it.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just trying to I'm just trying to get the words right that are on my slides, you know, and like and then I get a question about something, and that's something of to the effect of, oh, okay, you maybe misidentified this thing.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, no idea what I said in response.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_02: Luckily it wasn't on a hot button topic, like the Grand How did the Grand Canyon form?
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a pivotal moment because that you made some enemies, you burned a bridge.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I almost lost the publication.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we were gonna publish a publication.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_00: I lost first authorship.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: They tried to kick us out.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_00: My co-author, who took first authorship, did the work to get it done by basically citing all those people a lot.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then even the section that they put us in the book.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: I can show you guys this is the book, and the section that we're in is basically speculation and other ideas on how the canyon formed or something.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: But it was like really subtly kind of you know digging at us.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh or not so subtly.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, here we go.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: Selected theories and speculation.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_00: Speculation.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: Not exactly what you were looking for, huh?
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hey, but we got it in there.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_00: We got it in there.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, all right, but not no but let me just say you're now you've been your work has been highlighted by the History Channel and National Park Service and all these cool videos that you've you've been in Discovery Channel, National Geographic, all that interesting stuff.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_02: That's really it might take a while to get in there, but good ideas do prevail over long-term time periods.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, like my main goal now is I'm just trying to get other people involved.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_00: I want to, you know, Chris Bullheist this.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I've I gave a talk at GSA not last year, but the year before.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_00: Basically was a sales pitch on the Bedoji formation.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like, guys, this place is awesome.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody is studying this thing.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: The upper member that I talked about has never been studied outside of petroleum geologists in the 60s, right?
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then one dissertation out of U of A in the 50s for the youngest deposit right next to the Grand Canyon.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_00: How is that possible?
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's unbelievable.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that is changing.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we now have students, uh PhD students out of U of A and uh University of Washington that are working on it.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: And hopefully more.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: I want more.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's plenty of work to be done.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: John, to that point, so what's next for you?
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, where are you taking this now?
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we have two grants, two NSF grants, which is so funny.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: I've never been on an NSF grant.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: Everything that I've done is out of the back pocket.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is all gorilla geomorphology.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is, you know, not stealing wood out of a, but kind of.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's very low key.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um now there's two NSF grants.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: One of them is at a University of Washington.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: They're looking at the clumped isotopes to try and figure out when the Colorado Plateau got uplifted.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh University of Arizona just submitted one, and that one is looking at Pliocene climate change.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: So the amount of CO2 out in the atmosphere today is similar to what it was in the Pliocene, although it is rising very fast today.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the models that we have for our climate here in the Southwest indicate that we really dry off.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: But if we look at the rocks, the rocks are saying we have a lot of lakes down here in Arizona, you know, around the mile Pliocene boundary, even up to the Plio Pliocene boundary.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's a disconnect there between why do we have these lakes?
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yet these models are saying we're drying off.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what this other grant is about, is trying to get a handle on that.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: But for me personally, I just submitted for a permit because it's going to be drying off here.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_00: So in March, I'm hunting for more ostracods.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll be going out there with my daughter.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: I want to find more of these uh called Citrissa lecustris.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're the ones from Lake by Call.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's my very about those organisms.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_01: Are you going to different locations within that same level to look?
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I I found them by dumb luck.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now that I know kind of where they are, I want to go there and then and then hire.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so beautiful out there.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's it's just a win-win.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like anytime you get to spend out there is a just a win.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_02: So I I have one maybe final question about the the Grand Canyon.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_02: So the time I'm trying to remember what numbers you put on this, but if I remember correctly, because Chris and I just you know recorded a little audio book on the the formation of the Grand Canyon.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's for it's this is way deeper than that.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_02: We have like maybe a 15-minute conversation about the forming of the canyon.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_02: But and I must say Chris was a a big fan of your spillover model before this interview as well.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_02: So we get it.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, we do.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if I remember the the geochronology, the thermochronology from the different segments of the canyon, the youngest was like six million years maybe or something, and I think that matches up with what you said.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like when of the Ostercod record?
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_02: And can you does that match up with how long it would take to kind of have incision across the plateau before the lake kind of drains out?
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just trying to understand how long between the lake bridging over and the canyon being cut to the depth it is.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_02: Is your model testable with more geochronology, thermochronology from the canyon itself, or not really?
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_02: Because the time frame, so is it like 10,000 years or I don't know, 100,000 years to cut this?
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a I mean, there's a big kind of maybe controversy is the word for it.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the geochronology that came out of the canyon by doing the appetite vision track dating, there was a lot of the Grand Canyon is old papers that were published.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I disagree with those papers.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'd already, you know, had said that it was a lake and it was cut about six to five million years ago.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: And some of them were saying the canyon goes back to the Cretaceous, that they have this thing incredibly old.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I struggle with the appetite fission.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: So this is how I I view that is it's a great tool.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: We can use these tools to help us understand the rate at which these rocks get exposed as they were lifted.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: But those models that they're coming up with, those numbers, need to be put in the framework of the rocks as they exist today.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: You got to go out in the field and look at what's there.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at the canyon, it's roughly the same width all the way across.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, canyons retreat over time because you have resistant rocks, then weaker rocks, resistant rocks.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you get canyon retreat.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_00: If this thing had cut multiple stages, it would look different.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_00: If it was even 15 million years old, it would be much wider because these canyons are going to age.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's a young feature.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_00: Downstream of the Grand Canyon, the Bows Formation, a tremendous amount of work has been done on the Bows Formation, but that is all about the arrival of the Colorado coming out of Lake Bitahoche.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: It comes down, hits Lake Mead, and then four other lakes, and it does this lake overflow process all the way down to the Gulf of California.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: The timing that we have downstream matches up with what we have upstream currently in the Bitahoche.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: Although I will say we need more work done on the timing.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: The timing up in the Bitahoche needs more work.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, at the moment.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_02: Is it dating these MAR deposits or the ashes that are in there?
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_02: What does that work look like?
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um Ostrogards won't help us, but uh ashes.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: We have ashes up there that need to be dated.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're trying to do uranium dating.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_00: We did try to do it on a uh micrite.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: This micrite that we found, it's crazy.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_00: All the micrite is is just little tiny crystals of calcium carbonate that rained out of the lake water when the chemistry was right.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this micrite that we found, I mean, it was like it was soft.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_00: You could just pick it up in your hand, and I made a thin section of it.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: And when you look at it, I mean this is the most foreign thing in the world.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was just this cloud of carbonate just rained out of this lake onto the ocean floor and then piled up, and then a beach sand went across it.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: Really pure.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: I've never seen something that pure before or since.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so we tried to date that, and it just didn't have enough uranium to actually get a solid date.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: So it's still a work in progress.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we also have zircons, so there's a lot of sand up there.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, zircons, they have uranium in their mineralogy.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll get there for sure.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, the timing really lines are full.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that yeah, that I guess that was my question.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_02: We're kind of getting this similar like six million year kind of signal across the apart from some of the really old thermochronology that you referred to in the canyon.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but we've been working on phosphorite geochronology and uh some phosphorites you can get decent uranium lead ages.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure if the resolution would be as precise as you'd need it to be.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I mean, does a what kind of geochronology do you need?
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_02: Do you need plus or minus hundred thousand year ages or we can't do that?
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, we would take that.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: We would take that in a heart feet now.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because now we have.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, no, no.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_00: I would say that's too coarse.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like right now we have one zircon about halfway up the upper member, and it's a six million year old zircon.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_00: But we still have half the member going up that we don't we don't know.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that six is just a maximum age.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: We like we who knows what happened after that six.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we should stay in touch because our lab we're we're sort of working on these calcite dating and phosphorite dating methods.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_02: We've not done anything this young, so it would be interesting to see if it's possible or useful or not.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_02: So anyway.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm surprised though that you'd think that you'd be able to get a pretty good date from the ash layers.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_00: You would think.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um What's the problem?
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's a learning and process.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_00: So you get the ashes, like we we understand how the ashes work, right?
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_00: The rocks are fresh, you have sanodines, you have zircons.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is that when you collect the ash, it was just a disconnect.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_00: So us in the field, when we collected, we thought you had to get a ziploc bag and you were good to go.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then we would send our Ziploc bag off to the lab and they'd be like, bro, we didn't find anything.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: And there's we can't date it.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then we were just like, oh, that sucks.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: It literally took us this is embarrassing, but probably 15 years before someone finally said, Well, that's because you need to give them five bags.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if you give them five bags, they're gonna find it and it's not a problem.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: So right now, they're all downstream of Grand Canyon in the Bows Formation.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're collecting ashes now with the five bag bright to redate everything downstream.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going up to the Bidahochi this May.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is with the Arizona Geological Survey and the United States Geological Survey.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to go to these ash deposits that we have tried to date in the past, and we're going to get, you know, garbage bags versus gallon bags.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean the thing is these zircons that you're after are dense.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_02: They're super dense stuff.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_02: So actually, the ones you you get in far-flung ashes are tiny and really hard to separate and hard to date.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_02: That's a difficult ask.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, there's a lot of labs who do it really well now.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_01: But um So, Jesse, this five-bag thing makes sense to you then?
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, totally.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, I get that.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, back in the day they'd collect their you know, five-gallon bucket full of sample to get zircons out of it, you know, to do this stuff.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_02: So that and then you get, you know, if you don't perfectly sample it, you get reworked like detrital stuff down in because the ash is kind of reworked and see how this would be a pain in the butt.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they also and they can also look at the two weeks to do, like, you know.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: And they can also look at the geochemistry of it, and then you can maybe line it up with a specific volcanic event.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um those are those are your two ways of doing it.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_02: But working for a uh my my geochronology hat, obviously, my radar is going off like, hey, is this this is interesting.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's a it's an interesting chronology.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_00: You guys are welcome anytime.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_00: I will take you out here, no problem.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to go to some of your guys' field sites listening to your stories, and oh my god.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_00: The iron candle talks.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's maybe as cool as no, no, it's not even close to as cool as figuring out when the Grand Canyon was cut.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's just a cool problem to no even if the the landscape sucked, but the landscape's amazing.
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_01: So well, John, we're to the point where we are at our last question that we typically ask.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I already know.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: I I already know, I think, I think I do anyway, what your worst day as a geoscientist was.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's flip the table.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell us about your absolute best day as a geoscientist?
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it actually was just recently.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_00: I was up on Balakai Mesa in this upper member looking at these sands, and it's hard to put in words how lonely it is doing this work, because I am not at a university, I'm not part of a research group, it's just this kind of weirdo amateur guy that does this as a hobby, and I'm really into it, and I think I'm doing good work, but it's always very isolating.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_00: But then when I got Andy Cohen out of U of A, this famous lake guy, he's standing with me up at this really nice exposure of sand of the upper member of the Bit of Hoji and very high in the section.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_00: And when I'm standing there with him, he looks at it and he goes, Holy shit, that is one of the best examples of beach sand I've ever seen.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_00: He goes, the tabular stacking that you have of the beds and the size, the depth of these beds, the size of the grains, not only is that beach sand, but that is a big lake.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is not something that a small lake would produce.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_00: You have a tremendous match.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_00: The wind is blowing a long ways across this lake to get good sized ways to make this stack of sand that we're looking at.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's just I don't know.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's one thing to have something in your mind and then to have somebody else who's he's not I'm not gonna say he's not biased, but he's not he just loves the rocks.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_00: He he he loves the experience, he loves trying to understand these things that he's looking at.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: And to him, it was just like, dude, this is a textbook example of beach sand, but it just happened to be at this 2200 meter plus spot.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's at the top that's at the top of the the Bid Hoach Formation here that you were talking about.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, so cool.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was just funny though.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I told him, I'm like, man, I that is crazy.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because I he does he know a little bit about the canyon, but I started like, we have a big lake really high in the section.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, Well, how high, how high does that have to be?
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, Well, the spillover point was 2300, and where we were at was 2250.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_00: And just straight face, he looks at me, he's like, We got 50 meters to go.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_00: What are you doing?
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_00: Why are you talking to me?
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_00: I get out there and find it.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, No, you don't understand.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you have erosion, and the we're at the highest.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_00: There is no other highest.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_00: But it was just so odd.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was it felt like I was becoming part of a community and not just kind of isolated out there by myself that I had been for kind of a long, long time.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I get it.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's cool.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I think there's nothing like I mean, I I don't live in this world.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh most of the discovery feelings are in the lab when you're like looking at data after you've collected it.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_02: But that I don't know, there's something about your field or the sedimentology geomorphology where you can look at the rock and be like, this is how it happened.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_02: Have that that moment of discovery while you're out there in the field looking at it and looking around you.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's that must be totally cool.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is addictive.
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_00: It is so man, it was so cool.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's amazing.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, everybody everybody needs that at some point, you know, to be you know what you're doing, you know what you're doing is right, and to be told that by somebody else that you know what, you're on the right track.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's really affirming.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's awesome.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it was more than I ever thought would happen.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, you know, you know, puts and allong just kind of doing my thing.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_00: I never I never thought we would find beach sand up at that high.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't think it was beach sand.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_00: When I looked at it, I was like, ah, it could be Aeolian.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, the beds aren't right and this isn't right, but it's not my specialty.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm trying to play it safe.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to say it's beach sand, because if it comes from me, it's gonna be like, well, of course you think it's beach sand, you know?
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I was like, ah, you know, it could be this, it could be that.
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_00: But to have him just stand there and be like, textbook example.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's so cool.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_02: What a good day.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well, John, we want to have an update after this summer's work.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_02: After you're out there uh collecting and looking at more stuff and finding more ostracads, we should uh we should definitely do this again.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_02: And thank you so much for spending, I don't know, close to an hour and a half with us and giving some of your time to us here to talk about this totally cool story.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_02: We super appreciate it, and it's been totally fun to talk to you.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I love everything that you guys are doing.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_00: I love this podcast, I love the energy that you bring to this.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like you guys talk in the way that I talk.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's I don't know.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like it's a way people talk when they've actually been there and seen the rocks that the the love cover of it comes out.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's not this dry, boring, like it's just something that I don't know, your passion really rings true.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and I think I think more people would understand why we do what we do when they hear that.
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we appreciate that.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_02: And uh Chris is Mr.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_02: Passion over there.
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_02: I try and I try and make it nice and dry and boring, and Chris is just always making a lot of things.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_02: You do a pretty good job, Jesse.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_02: You do a pretty good job of that.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_02: I try my best, right?
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we gotta talk about thermochronology and all this nonsense, right?
• 1:12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I yeah, no way, man.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_01: You both bring the passion.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like it is both of you.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I know.
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_01: I just give him a hard time.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_01: He he just he he needs that.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_01: He's gotta be we've got to knock him down a pick or two every now and then, you know.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, he gets all doctory on us and nobody wants that, you know.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, when you and Chris exchange field trips, I uh I might tag along.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm good at carrying rocks, so you know, if you need to carry the fire.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_02: He does make a good chirpa.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm pretty good at that.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's one of the few things in life I'm good at is carrying stuff.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I'll come and uh carry some ashfall deposits for you.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that'd be great.
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you weren't younger than us, so that helped.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_01: You got it.
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, excellent.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_02: All right, John.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_02: We super appreciate it.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, we'll have you on again and after the see what you discovered this this summer.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, all right, guys.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for your time, John.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you so much.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_00: I super appreciate it.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're amazing.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, thanks for listening.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_02: We always appreciate it.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_02: If you have questions, send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail.com.
• 1:13:08
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• 1:13:10
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• 1:13:15
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• 1:13:24
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• 1:13:30
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• 1:13:32
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• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_02: Cheers.