Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / The History of Granite - Dr. Mike Ackerson

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The History of Granite - Dr. Mike Ackerson · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:02
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
0:12
unknown: Hey.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: Jesse Radmick.
0:14
SPEAKER_03: What the heck are you?
0:16
SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, we just we just got done doing one of my favorite things in the world, which is talking about science and philosophy with Dr.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: Mike Ackerson.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: Full disclosure, him and I are pretty good friends.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: One of my closest scientific, not really collaborators, we haven't collaborated on a lot, but we you know, we talk a lot.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: Uh we overlapped.
0:33
SPEAKER_03: Really interesting.
0:34
SPEAKER_03: So I did not really know this.
0:35
SPEAKER_03: I didn't know how tight you guys were.
0:37
SPEAKER_03: Well, but that's to like to truth be told, I I don't remember meeting him before either.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it's true.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: Chris's memory banks are full.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: If anybody's interested, they're full.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: New information kicks out old information.
0:51
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, that's true.
0:52
SPEAKER_03: That does happen.
0:53
SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm gonna tell like that's a whole different story.
0:55
SPEAKER_03: But I I think that when he was with us when we saw the reactors, Bowen's reactors, then everything else just blotted out.
1:04
SPEAKER_03: Like I think I might have blacked out.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: Totally.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: I get it.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the tour around Carnegie is just it's so unbelievable with the history of science, the history of our science.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's just unbelievable.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: Mike, we go back a bit.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he grew up near where we grew up, you know, I don't know, 20 miles down the road or something like that, but we we never knew each other.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: Um, he did his undergrad at Michigan State University, and then he did a master's at North Carolina, University of North Carolina, and then he did ended up doing a PhD at a place called the Renssler Polytechnic Institute, which is a small technical college.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: It's a sort of uh engineering school that had one of the most I don't think this is arguable.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: Bruce Watson was his PhD supervisor, who's probably the best experimental petrologist of his generation, um, and just established this amazing research group there, and Mike did his PhD there.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: And then Mike and I overlapped at Carnegie where we did our postdocs together.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: So we overlapped for several years there, and we became kind of close because it was at the beer hour, and I showed up and and I'm meeting people, and Mike sidles up and you just get a big beard, and he's got a bald guy, and he's kind of like, Oh, hey, what's up?
2:08
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, where are you from?
2:09
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Michigan.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: He's like, Oh, me too.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: Where in Michigan?
2:12
SPEAKER_00: I was like, Oh, you know, west side, southwest corner.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: He's like, Oh, me too.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: I'm from Grand Haven.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: What's the where are you from?
2:17
SPEAKER_00: Oh, Hudsonville.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: And then we go through it, and like his parents are both teachers, my parents are both teachers.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: He had geology in high school, I had you.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: So we had this like many shared experiences and and kind of you know scientific overlap.
2:29
SPEAKER_03: So anyway, yeah, Jesse, this interview really I think hits all the bases.
2:35
SPEAKER_03: We we talk about research, we get into the weeds on granites and Owens, and so it has like this is weedy for people that want that.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: Let me say this we get literally as far into the weeds as you can.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: We talk about where the limit of knowledge about granites actually is.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: That's as far as you can go into the weeds, right?
2:53
SPEAKER_00: You can't go deeper than that.
2:54
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
2:55
SPEAKER_03: But then we got philosophical.
2:57
SPEAKER_03: We we talked pedagogy in terms of education, or and we talked pedagogy with research, and we talked about to me, one of the coolest aspects of this interview was really me kind of moderating you two in terms of the process of scientific discovery and the risks that are taken, and how science is not it's not the end all be all.
3:21
SPEAKER_03: It's it's you two and everybody else is doing the best with what they have, and it's gonna change, it's gonna evolve.
3:28
SPEAKER_03: And uh this is something that is important for outsiders like me to understand and appreciate and understanding that science is not black and white, it's it's a ton of gray, and it just evolves, it's an evolving system, totally, and it's a beautiful system.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree, Chris.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: And I I think it's it's just so fundamentally important to have a a society that gets that and has a pretty clear-eyed view of what science is and isn't, what is good about it, what is what it what the human aspects of the scientific endeavor are, and we talk a little bit about that.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, we're all we're all human and we have our emotions are involved, and we have to figure out how to deal with those.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: And I I think it's really important to understand how this works and to be honest about it, because there are people who say, Oh, all science is hypotheses and therefore they're wrong.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: You can never prove everything, you know.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: And then there's people who say it's theoretical.
4:24
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, exactly.
4:25
SPEAKER_03: And then there's people who say Oh, okay, it's theoretical.
4:28
SPEAKER_03: End of argument.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: So therefore it's useless, right?
4:30
SPEAKER_00: Some people say it's all hypothesis, so therefore it's useless.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: And some people say it's science, therefore it's true.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: And neither of those is accurate.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: You know, the answer, as in most things, is somewhere in the middle, and it's a really important thing.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: And I love ta I I frankly love talking about that aspect too.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: So selfishly, it was fun for me in that aspect.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: But Mike is also a curator at the Smithsonian Museum, as he says, you know, in charge of our nation's rock collection, which is one of the coolest job titles that we've ever, you know, uh had.
5:00
SPEAKER_03: We've had some cool ones, and and this is up there.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: This is up there.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we interviewed the director of DARPA.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: That that's a cool job.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, but also so is being in charge of the nation's rock collection.
5:11
SPEAKER_03: Or or as Jackie Fardy says, unlocking the secrets of the universe.
5:14
SPEAKER_03: That's her job title.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: That's a pretty good one, too.
5:17
SPEAKER_03: That's a pretty cool one, too.
5:18
SPEAKER_03: That's it.
5:18
SPEAKER_03: Me, I teach.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, well, that's a cool job title, too.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: That's a very cool job title.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: I just think it's a it's an interesting discussion.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: Mike's very thoughtful.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: He's very open and honest, and I think it's just uh it's a great interview.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: So, Chris, before we get to it, if you like Planet Geo, if you like this podcast, we just appreciate it if you kind of support us.
5:37
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5:39
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5:40
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5:42
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5:43
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5:46
SPEAKER_00: Actually, though, what we would like is if you go to the Camp Geo app, and on the Camp Geo app, we have tons of free content, basically audio podcast style, conversational style stuff with images.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: We have almost the full physical geology book on there in Camp Geo form.
6:03
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6:04
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6:05
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6:06
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6:15
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6:17
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6:17
SPEAKER_00: And more to come.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: And more to come, exactly.
6:19
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6:21
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6:22
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6:23
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6:25
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6:29
SPEAKER_00: Mike Ackerson, let's get to it.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: Dr.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Mike Atkinson.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: Hi, buddy.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: How you doing?
6:38
SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
6:39
SPEAKER_03: How are you guys doing?
6:40
SPEAKER_03: Doing great.
6:41
SPEAKER_03: It is so nice to meet you, by the way, Mike.
6:43
SPEAKER_03: Before we get it.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: You keep forgetting this.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: You you keep forgetting this.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: You've met Mike before.
6:49
SPEAKER_02: At Carnegie, yeah, we met at Carnegie.
6:51
SPEAKER_02: When you and I have no recollection of this.
6:54
SPEAKER_03: Like, are you serious?
6:55
SPEAKER_00: You we saw Norman Bowen's stump.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: When you and Jenny came and visited at Carnegie, Mike toured us.
7:04
SPEAKER_03: Norman Bowen's stump.
7:06
SPEAKER_03: Oh.
7:07
SPEAKER_03: Remember that?
7:08
SPEAKER_03: Right.
7:08
SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry.
7:09
SPEAKER_03: Everything else was blotted out of my but because it started to glow like the holy grail.
7:16
SPEAKER_03: And so sorry, Mike.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: Humans became insignificant.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: That's really bad to say.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: That two and a half hours that Mike toured us around the Carnegie Experimental Petrology Labs are wiped out in Chris's memory because Norman Bowen's dump.
7:32
SPEAKER_03: All I focus on.
7:33
SPEAKER_03: I still tell the story, but Mike is left out of it.
7:35
SPEAKER_03: I've told the story of my students.
7:37
SPEAKER_03: The stump just appeared out of nowhere.
7:39
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
7:40
SPEAKER_03: It's right.
7:41
SPEAKER_02: Mike, were you bald back then too?
7:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I've been bald since uh since I was in my early 20s.
7:47
SPEAKER_02: Which yeah, pre-puberty, yeah.
7:50
SPEAKER_02: I know I was desperate.
7:52
SPEAKER_02: You actually just never were there.
7:53
SPEAKER_00: So uh for the listener, Mike, we go way back.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: Uh the funny story we met at Carnegie.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: We were postdocs, you know, sort of in the sort of early stages of our careers, but we also grew up like 20 miles away from each other and never knew it.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, and we're sort of similar age.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: And so that leads us into our traditional opening question, which is Mike, how how did you get into the geosciences?
8:15
SPEAKER_03: Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
8:16
SPEAKER_03: I have another question first.
8:18
SPEAKER_03: Sorry.
8:18
SPEAKER_03: Mike, you went to Grand Haven, right?
8:20
SPEAKER_03: Is that correct?
8:21
SPEAKER_03: Grandhaven High School.
8:22
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Grand Haven High School.
8:23
SPEAKER_03: I have to ask, did you have you had Earth Science in high school then, right?
8:28
SPEAKER_03: Earth Science.
8:28
SPEAKER_03: Oh, yes, absolutely.
8:30
SPEAKER_03: Was Jason Hunter one of your teachers?
8:33
SPEAKER_02: Uh, I love Hunter.
8:35
SPEAKER_02: He's a great guy.
8:36
SPEAKER_02: He came in after I'd taken the geology courses.
8:39
SPEAKER_02: But both of my younger siblings had Jason Hunter.
8:42
SPEAKER_02: I I went to a brewery with him a couple years ago when I was back in Grand Haven.
8:46
SPEAKER_02: So awesome.
8:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
8:48
SPEAKER_03: I've been waiting to ask this question.
8:49
SPEAKER_03: So okay.
8:50
SPEAKER_03: He was one of uh one of our great crew of Science Olympiad coaches as well.
8:54
SPEAKER_03: So awesome.
8:55
SPEAKER_03: So I went to college with Jason.
8:57
SPEAKER_03: That's why I asked the question.
8:58
SPEAKER_03: And he's retired now.
8:59
SPEAKER_03: So yeah.
8:59
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, he he got out of the game.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's out.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: So he's out.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: So, Mike, you had geology in high school.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: Was that the the initiation for you?
9:08
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we had Earth Science.
9:09
SPEAKER_02: I did Science Olympiad, uh, which is a great program for people who want to be a science nerd out of absolutely out of school hours.
9:17
SPEAKER_02: So that was so I did all the Earth science events and that.
9:20
SPEAKER_02: That's what really got me into it.
9:22
SPEAKER_02: Um, like they had dynamic planet, rocks and minerals, fossils.
9:25
SPEAKER_02: Oh, really?
9:26
SPEAKER_00: So it was Science Olympiad that got you into geology specifically.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: Like you were kind of interested in science generally, but that was the the Yeah, yeah.
9:33
SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I mean, so that's what really I mean, we would go on.
9:35
SPEAKER_02: My parents are both K-12 public school teachers, retirees.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: So we had another thing we share in common.
9:41
SPEAKER_02: I know.
9:42
SPEAKER_02: It's the the the all three of us.
9:44
SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh, all three of us.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: I know, yeah, yeah.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: We're cut from a mold here from a weird part of West Michigan that that for some reason produces a lot of igneous petrologers.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: It really does, yeah.
9:55
SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh, yes.
9:57
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's it's a good thing, though.
9:58
SPEAKER_02: There's something in the water.
9:59
SPEAKER_02: It's called a lack of igneous rocks growing up.
10:02
SPEAKER_02: I mean, you see drumlins if you're lucky, you know.
10:05
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, um we've gone through withdrawal.
10:07
SPEAKER_03: So, Jesse, you tried to hijack my question.
10:10
SPEAKER_03: I'm the one that asked this question.
10:12
SPEAKER_03: So, all right, Mike.
10:14
SPEAKER_03: What got you?
10:15
SPEAKER_03: I you may have already alluded to it, but I want specifics.
10:18
SPEAKER_03: What got you into geoscience?
10:20
SPEAKER_03: Because we, Jesse and I, we have our moments, we have our aha, like this is it.
10:25
SPEAKER_03: What did it for you?
10:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I didn't really have, I would say, a single aha moment because, you know, as we just were talking about, I was really interested in the earth sciences because of Scott Stanley, Jason Haunter, the other science teachers that I had growing up.
10:41
SPEAKER_02: When I got to college at Michigan State, I was a pre-med basically, and then I went through Orgo 1 and Orgo 2.
10:49
SPEAKER_02: I know.
10:49
SPEAKER_02: Well, I was in the geology club, and you know, so my my freshman year, I walked into the geology club and I was automatically hooked.
10:57
SPEAKER_02: I mean, they're the fun, creative, relaxed people, and those are different than the kids you're taking biochem with in a lot of significant ways.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: And and it is so true.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: No, no offense to the doctors out there, but no, but uh, not at all.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: But the geology, it's true.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: The the sort of geology department is uh it's the artistic science, and it's reflected in sort of the social dynamics, I think.
11:23
SPEAKER_03: That's right.
11:23
SPEAKER_03: And there is a saying that there is no such thing as an unhappy geologist.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
11:28
SPEAKER_02: I've never heard that, but I completely agree with that.
11:32
SPEAKER_02: But you know, for me, I mean, after I took Orgo 2, and I was like, wow, this is this is what it is, just all this kind of memorization stuff.
11:42
SPEAKER_02: And it it took me kind of coming to the I guess the aha moment for me was realizing that following your passions is more important than anything, and then that'll lead you in a good direction.
11:56
SPEAKER_02: And that was that was the aha moment for me.
11:58
SPEAKER_02: You know, why am I struggling to try to be engaged in biochem and orgo when I can just be a geologist?
12:05
SPEAKER_02: Right.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: And do you know, because when you do stuff you're you're passionate about, you work hard at it, and therefore you are good at it.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: And exactly.
12:12
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I think that's really it makes it easy, it makes it easy to work really hard when you care deeply about something on like a philosophical level, yeah.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: Mike, you know, we well, for the listener, we were at postdocs together, we were applying for faculty jobs together for many years.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: We kind of went through this this system a bit and you know, kind of together.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: And I remember at a time, you're a curator at the Smithsonian now, and I remember when you were you had other options, let's put it that way, at the time you were debating this.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: And and I remember when you made the decision to take the job at the Smithsonian, you you used a beautiful turn of phrase.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: You said, dude, I have the chance to be in charge of our nation's rock collection.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: How could I turn that down?
12:55
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, as a rock collector that just like I got chills right now just saying that.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what a turn of phrase.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: So can you maybe describe not like what you do, but more like what it means to you?
13:06
SPEAKER_00: Uh like and how I don't know, the emotional side of it, maybe?
13:10
SPEAKER_00: Because I know that, you know, that's a big driver, maybe.
13:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, first of all, I got to comment on the fact that my eloquent quote started with dude.
13:18
SPEAKER_02: Dude, dude, dude, it's just so good.
13:21
SPEAKER_02: Dude, it's the National Rock and Ore Collection.
13:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
13:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
13:27
SPEAKER_02: You know, when we get you guys out there and um see the rocks and talk about them, you'll get a good firsthand experience of the importance of something like the National Rock and Ore Collection.
13:39
SPEAKER_02: It's a repository of the history of our respective fields in geology.
13:46
SPEAKER_02: It's collections that are extremely hard to access or impossible to access in some cases.
13:52
SPEAKER_02: Some of the locations we have no longer exist.
13:55
SPEAKER_02: They've been mined out of existence.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: You mean locations to go to, the sample specifically accessible, but yeah, the locations are.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
14:04
SPEAKER_02: So it's not only a repository of the history of our field, it's also an active resource for colleagues across the globe.
14:13
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, if you wanted to study the mid-Atlantic Ridge, you can't just go to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, but you can come to us, and you can get samples from north of Iceland all the way to the very bottom of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge for free to use to do cutting edge research.
14:30
SPEAKER_02: So the ability of us to enable science now and in the future in perpetuity is it's an incredible opportunity to be in charge of that stuff.
14:40
SPEAKER_03: So, Mike, you uh allow research scientists to have a certain amount of samples to study this to do research?
14:48
SPEAKER_03: Is that what I understand?
14:50
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
14:51
SPEAKER_02: Every single sample that we have in the rock and oar collection is there for the purpose of research.
14:58
SPEAKER_02: You could do research on any sample that we have.
15:01
SPEAKER_02: So what's the bar?
15:02
SPEAKER_02: How do you where's the cutoff for this?
15:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know, we necessarily can't necessarily evaluate if somebody's research is going to be amazing and spectacular.
15:12
SPEAKER_02: And quite frankly, that's not really the point of it.
15:15
SPEAKER_02: We evaluate whether the sample requirements that they have can be fulfilled with the samples we have.
15:21
SPEAKER_02: For example, some people will want to do some sort of rare isotope, and they'll say, I need a kilogram of that rock.
15:27
SPEAKER_02: Well, if we only have 200 grams of it, it's it's not gonna work.
15:32
SPEAKER_02: So the bar, I mean, I guess in that sense, the bar is pretty low.
15:36
SPEAKER_02: It's not my job to say whether I think research is valuable.
15:41
SPEAKER_02: It's my job to say, do we have the samples given what they've told us?
15:45
SPEAKER_02: Will they be able to do the research they want to with the samples?
15:49
SPEAKER_02: And then we provide them, you know.
15:51
SPEAKER_02: It's we're we're we're not gatekeepers, we're custodians.
15:54
SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's I like that.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: That's a that's a nice turn of phrase.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: It feels weighty.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: That feel that feels like a weight.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: I would imagine I would be stressed out by that.
16:04
SPEAKER_02: No, you wouldn't.
16:05
SPEAKER_02: No, you wouldn't.
16:06
SPEAKER_02: It's fun, and it's not just me.
16:08
SPEAKER_02: There's two other curators.
16:09
SPEAKER_02: I'm one of three curators, and we have an amazing collections manager and collections staff.
16:15
SPEAKER_02: You know, it's not me sitting around being the arbiter of what samples come in, it's a community of people that are working together to discuss what samples we can take.
16:26
SPEAKER_02: You know, I I think there's also a conception, a misconception of the Smithsonian as this endless repository and font of human knowledge, but we we do have to be very selective on what we take because we're resource limited in terms of the human capital, because every rock that comes in is painstakingly cataloged and put into our collections because 300 years from now, somebody might want to use that rock that you know Wasserberg used, or some of the the great giants of our field collected these rocks in remote locations, and so we have to be very selective on the samples that we take uh just by virtue of a resource limiting.
17:05
SPEAKER_03: So we talk about that.
17:08
SPEAKER_03: How does that work with you taking rock samples on like a year-to-year basis?
17:14
SPEAKER_03: Do you take a lot every year?
17:16
SPEAKER_03: Are you growing the collection every single year?
17:19
SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, yeah.
17:20
SPEAKER_03: We we grow the collection every year.
17:22
SPEAKER_02: We're in a constant state of accessioning rocks into the National Rock and Roar collection.
17:27
SPEAKER_02: So we we've got a backlog of samples that we taken on from scientists that we're actively working through.
17:33
SPEAKER_02: One of my uh academic heroes is a Carnegie scientist named Joe Boyd, and he uh had just an absolutely massive collection of rocks from the Earth's mantle.
17:43
SPEAKER_02: And those were donated to our collections a long time ago.
17:47
SPEAKER_02: We're still we're still actively getting those samples from boxes cataloged into our collections.
17:54
SPEAKER_02: So it takes quite a while to do this because we're extremely thorough with the documentation of getting samples of other collections.
18:01
SPEAKER_02: But that means then that somebody 300 years from now who uses the same type of machine that I use that Joe Boyd created can say, I can use the rocks that Joe Boyd collected.
18:14
SPEAKER_02: One of my academic heroes from 300 years ago, I can use the same rocks that he was using to understand the composition of Earth's mantle.
18:22
SPEAKER_02: It's just crazy.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: That's so cool.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's so cool.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: Okay, we gotta do it.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: We got we gotta, Chris, we gotta go down to Swissone and we can do a live podcast episode from like, you know, the collections and look through them and pick our favorites and you know, ooh and ah over it all.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: That'd be so cool.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
18:39
SPEAKER_03: 100%.
18:40
SPEAKER_03: Good deal.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: So, Mike, we we've been um a slight shift here.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: Let's talk igneous petrology and science, and we're gonna get into the weeds here.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh, people who are in enjoy sediments, Mike.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: We've gotten some emails from people who want to hear more about sediments, and that's not really you know Chris and I's passion.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna we're gonna do yet more on igneous petrology here with Mike.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: We've been talking about Bowen's reaction series.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: We've got a couple episodes where we kind of talk about uh, I don't know, the vagaries of Bowen's reaction series.
19:06
SPEAKER_00: I've seen you give a lot of talks and and you give a really good history of the field going back to like Norman Bowen's time, the history of the field of igneous petrology.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: Could you give us a a short rundown?
19:17
SPEAKER_00: What was going on when Bowen's reaction series was kind of established, or when Norman Bowen and Tuttle and all these people were kind of working on those fundamentals?
19:25
SPEAKER_00: What was the what was this the state of the debate, maybe, or the state of understanding, if that makes sense?
19:31
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
19:31
SPEAKER_00: That's a long, rambly question, but no, it makes total sense.
19:34
SPEAKER_02: I know, I know.
19:35
SPEAKER_02: You're you're you're guilty of that on this podcast, from what I can understand.
19:38
SPEAKER_03: Oh, he is still guilty of that.
19:41
SPEAKER_02: Long-winded questions.
19:43
SPEAKER_02: Well, if you thought that was a long-winded question, strap in a knuckle crack, here comes uh here comes an answer.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: Go, yes, all right.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: You're ready for the full history of igneous petrology with Mike Aggerson.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: Three and a half hours.
19:56
SPEAKER_02: Starting with uh Neptonism versus Plutonism.
19:59
SPEAKER_02: No, I'm just kidding.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: But but um Well, no, I mean, yeah, let's start.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: What let's go back.
20:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's so interesting.
20:05
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I mean, I you know, the history of geology is intimately related to granites.
20:11
SPEAKER_02: I mentioned jokingly Neptunism versus Plutonism, but I think it's important to understand for all of us, those of us doing science, those of us who are just trying to learn about science and the scientific process, that our knowledge is never fixed, right?
20:27
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that to me is the most fundamental aspect of any scientific endeavor, is that the observations you are making at your point in time are the best observations that you can make and the best interpretations of that data.
20:41
SPEAKER_02: But you are not right.
20:43
SPEAKER_02: You are doing the best you can with what you have.
20:46
SPEAKER_02: So if we go back a couple hundred years, the argument uh de jour was Neptunism versus Plutonism.
20:54
SPEAKER_02: And the Neptunists believed that uh pretty much every rock that you see was a chemical precipitate of a global ocean.
21:03
SPEAKER_02: So the idea was there was a large ocean and the ocean receded, and as it receded, rocks precipitated.
21:10
SPEAKER_02: And you can kind of see that the structure of the idea was that okay, granites are the first rocks that precipitate out of this ocean, and then it goes stratigraphically up.
21:20
SPEAKER_02: But you know, you know if you've been in the you know if you've been in the field, or if you look at geologic maps, that granites really are kind of the bottom of the stratigraphic unit of Earth.
21:31
SPEAKER_02: So that that kind of makes a certain amount of observational sense.
21:34
SPEAKER_02: But then other people came along and said, well, that doesn't really work when you know granites are intruding the rocks that you think are are younger than them.
21:42
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, that was kind of one of these big arguments that was happening a couple hundred years ago, which to modern geoscientists or casual listeners would say, that sounds crazy.
21:51
SPEAKER_02: But it was based, it was based on serious scientists making observations.
21:56
SPEAKER_02: And then if you you know fast forward to the time of Norman Bowen.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: The arguments that were what is that time?
22:02
SPEAKER_00: Can you put numbers on that real quick just for people who don't aren't familiar with generally what are we talking about?
22:06
SPEAKER_00: Just generally.
22:07
SPEAKER_02: I mean 200 years.
22:08
SPEAKER_03: I'm getting yeah, 150 years maybe, I think, yeah.
22:11
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
22:11
SPEAKER_02: So yeah, fast forward to Bowen in the early early 20th century.
22:15
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
22:16
SPEAKER_02: And the argument that was happening then was whether granitic rocks were formed from cooling and crystallization of a magma chamber.
22:25
SPEAKER_02: And spoiler alert, if you're listening to this podcast, you guys talked about Bowen's reaction series a couple times.
22:31
SPEAKER_02: So most of us believe that granitic rocks have a primarily magmatic origin.
22:35
SPEAKER_02: So they're derived from molten rocks that cool and crystallize.
22:39
SPEAKER_02: But the opposing view was the idea of granitization, where basically you can create granitic rocks through water, hot water, coursing through bedrock and changing the composition toward a granitic composition.
22:54
SPEAKER_02: And one of the reasons, again, to a modern somebody taking a modern igneous petrology class, you basically would never hear this granitization theory.
23:03
SPEAKER_02: It's basically been debunked.
23:05
SPEAKER_02: But people were making these arguments based on sound field observations.
23:10
SPEAKER_02: One of the primary ones being what you may have heard of as the space or the room problem.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
23:17
SPEAKER_02: So basically, if you look at a granitic rock, a huge blob of granite.
23:22
SPEAKER_02: I also heard you guys I listened to your Yosemite podcast.
23:25
SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
23:26
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
23:26
SPEAKER_02: Um, but you know, Yosemite is a massive blob of granite, which if I recall, Chris thought was the most boring part about Yosemite, but um it's the most interesting.
23:37
SPEAKER_02: Give him a hard time.
23:38
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
23:39
SPEAKER_03: Tell him it's not.
23:41
SPEAKER_03: That's not true.
23:42
SPEAKER_03: That is not true at all.
23:44
SPEAKER_03: You misunderstood what I was saying.
23:46
SPEAKER_03: Roll back the tape.
23:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:50
SPEAKER_03: But anyway, I know this is long-winded, I apologize.
23:53
SPEAKER_03: But that's okay.
23:54
SPEAKER_03: No, no, no, no.
23:55
SPEAKER_03: Keep going.
23:55
SPEAKER_03: Like you're setting the stage.
23:57
SPEAKER_02: So if you think about how a large batch of granitic magma could get into the crust, if you follow uh the idea that granites are formed from magmas, you have to make room in the crust to get that magma into the crust.
24:12
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't just magically form a gigantic blob of magma in the upper crust.
24:17
SPEAKER_02: Something has to give.
24:18
SPEAKER_02: You have to create space.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: One of the main-try to the core, the earth is the movie The Core, the Earth is not filled with you know diamond cavities down.
24:27
SPEAKER_02: Gigantic amethysts at you know, the 660 discontinuity or something.
24:32
SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
24:32
SPEAKER_02: But you know, you have to make room for granites.
24:35
SPEAKER_02: So one school of thought was that you could actually you don't have to create room for granites, you could make them in place through fluid alteration of the bedrock.
24:45
SPEAKER_02: And so that was the that was the the scientific debate of the day when Bowen was doing his experiments and developing Bowen's reaction series.
24:54
SPEAKER_02: So that was a lot, sorry.
24:56
SPEAKER_03: No, no, no, that's that's good, but I want to I wanna take that to the next level then.
25:01
SPEAKER_03: So how is Bowen's then, with what you just said and the you know the history that you laid out for us, how is Bowen's applicable today then?
25:10
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I mean Bowen and the work of all of his colleagues is is absolutely fundamental to the work we we do today, you know, you know, and I mean sense.
25:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
25:19
SPEAKER_02: So a lot of the work that they did, you know, Bowen's reaction series is the most famous thing that everybody learns in their geology 101 class, which is good.
25:28
SPEAKER_02: It's it's an important way for people to kind of conceptualize how magmas can change and evolve in time and space.
25:35
SPEAKER_02: But a lot of the work they did was fundamental to how, if you get really in the weeds as an igneous petrologist, how we are able to interpret the compositions of rocks and minerals.
25:48
SPEAKER_02: So you talked in your podcast about Bollinger's reaction series about the continuous reaction series or the discontinuous reaction series.
25:56
SPEAKER_02: Well, the continuous reaction series is if you look at any slice in that series, if you look at the plagioclase feldspars, there's hundreds of experiments that went into developing diagrams that we use to this day to interpret how magmas form and evolve.
26:14
SPEAKER_02: I I can't think off the top of my head of like, oh wow, this is the one thing that Bowen did because the work that Bowen and Tuttle and Yoder and all of my uh academic heroes from the early 20th century did, it's just fundamental.
26:28
SPEAKER_02: It's just the the observations upon which most of what we do is built.
26:33
SPEAKER_02: It's kind of like you know, the Linane classification system for species, you know, they they did the they laid the groundwork for us to do all the work we do.
26:42
SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah, I can't think of a better way to say it than that at the moment.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: So can can I can I interrupt real quick, Chris, and just go back because I think the Bones Reaction Series and the experiments.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: This was an experimental petrology sort of the he was an experimentalist, and so he kind of answered the question, right, about granitization.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: Like he he sort of answered that question for the community for the most part.
27:03
SPEAKER_00: Would that be sort of accurate?
27:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he he he made a strong case with his experiments and comparing those to granites and volcanic rocks, that you can produce the compositions of rocks that we see on Earth with magmas.
27:19
SPEAKER_02: And before they had done that, nobody could demonstrate that, you know, hey, I put a little piece of rock in an experimental apparatus, and I can actually show you how the compositions match the compositions that we see in nature.
27:32
SPEAKER_02: So that was the big contribution that they did that kind of ended the granitization versus magmatism debate.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, Chris, I interrupted there.
27:40
SPEAKER_03: No, no, that's okay.
27:41
SPEAKER_03: Are are you good, Jesse, with that?
27:43
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
27:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, no, I want to ask a thousand more questions, but uh, yeah, I know me too for now.
27:48
SPEAKER_03: Me too.
27:48
SPEAKER_03: Mike, Mike, I'm as an educator of just introductory level geology, you know, we we talk about Bowen's reaction series.
27:54
SPEAKER_03: I'm interested to hear your take on the shortcomings of Bowen's reaction series.
28:01
SPEAKER_03: Uh, you know, as you said, it's what everybody learns in an intro-level geology class, but it doesn't work as you progress through in the way that you think it's gonna work when you first learn about Bowen's reaction series.
28:18
SPEAKER_03: Does that make sense?
28:19
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
28:19
SPEAKER_02: I I think if Bowen was around today and and saw that his legacy is Bowen's reaction series, he'd probably be like, hmm, okay, interesting.
28:27
SPEAKER_02: Interesting you guys chose that one.
28:29
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay, right, right.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: That that's that's a funny way to sort of put it.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: This is oh, that's the one that you named for me.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: Well, I wouldn't have picked that one.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
28:38
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, not the albine anarthyte phase diagram.
28:41
SPEAKER_02: Come on, guys, give me some credit here, yeah.
28:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
28:44
SPEAKER_00: No, that's an interesting point.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, because in and Mike, we talked about this in an episode previously about how to paraphrase.
28:50
SPEAKER_00: We you gotta lie to students when you're teaching the inter introductory basics, you or you gotta present a simplistic version of you know the idea, which is inevitably, especially in geology, wrong in many instances.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: But you have to give them something, right?
29:04
SPEAKER_00: And so thoughts Yeah, no, yeah.
29:05
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I agree.
29:06
SPEAKER_02: And you know, the fact that we're having this conversation is exactly proof of that point, because my answer to that question of, you know, what is Bowen's reaction series missing is okay, well, let's talk about what a phase diagram is, and let's talk about what all the data that's behind the curtain of Bowen's reaction series and and where the shortcomings are really fall into a deeper level of knowledge that I don't necessarily think you're missing with something like Bowen's reaction series.
29:31
SPEAKER_02: You know, it's a really elegant way to understand the chemical evolution of rocks from a basalt to a granite in a very simple diagram.
29:41
SPEAKER_02: And if you peel back the layers on that, it gets really complicated really fast because you're not considering things like the space component, the vertical component through the crust, or the effect of pressure, which I know you guys talked briefly about in your second Bowens discussion.
29:59
SPEAKER_02: So it gets really complicated extremely fast.
30:03
SPEAKER_02: And I don't know that that's necessarily the level that an introductory student needs.
30:07
SPEAKER_02: I don't want to scare kids away from igneous petrology, I want them to try to learn more, you know.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:13
SPEAKER_03: Hey Jesse, maybe we should ask Mike where we messed up in our second Bowens reaction series episode.
30:18
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
30:19
SPEAKER_00: Correct uh, correct us there, Mike, or add some color to that.
30:22
SPEAKER_02: I would dare you guys you guys nailed it.
30:25
SPEAKER_02: You guys nailed it absolutely.
30:27
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, some people in the field describe igneous rocks as fundamentally metamorphic rocks.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: And the reason being, and I know you both know this, but for the listener, the reason being that when a let's take a granite, when it crystallizes, we think it's around 680 degrees when it's fully crystalline, like it's no longer melted.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: That's a metamorphic temperature, and so those minerals are at and they they have to cool down to like to well to to surface level if it's to Walumy intrusive suite or something uh in the in Yosemite, those existed for a long time in metamorphic conditions, and with presumably maybe fluids around.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: So is that debate that you referenced about the sort of granitization topic, you know, this sort of fluids versus magmas, is that debate still in the field a little bit, Mike?
31:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
31:19
SPEAKER_00: Valid in some small way?
31:20
SPEAKER_00: Like, is there a gradient?
31:21
SPEAKER_00: I guess maybe a better question is is there a gradient between these things in your view, I guess?
31:25
SPEAKER_02: I would say that would be a generous to the granitizers to say that that might still be a part of the debate.
31:32
SPEAKER_02: Because that the explanation for that was that basically there's no magma, it's all waters moving through these rocks to create granites.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: So they necessarily kind of set up a binary argument that the sort of granitizers, there is no magma here, and and we know, so it's not a spectrum between them necessarily.
31:48
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
31:48
SPEAKER_02: But you do bring up discussions are often framed in terms of A or B.
31:54
SPEAKER_02: This is a real kind of a human thing.
31:56
SPEAKER_02: We want to say, you know, good and evil, right and wrong.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
32:01
SPEAKER_02: This or that.
32:02
SPEAKER_02: And and really, I think all of us, when you're sitting in a conference or looking at data, everything mainly resides in the gray.
32:09
SPEAKER_02: That's where the actual science is.
32:11
SPEAKER_02: And so what we can say now that we couldn't say in the past, one of the relics of this binary approach to doing science is that it propagates ideas that people don't think through fully.
32:24
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, Bowen's magmatic origin of granitic rocks, what that led directly to was people saying, Oh, well, if you go to Yosemite and you look at the Tuoline Intrusive Suite, that was a gigantic stewing pot of magma all at once.
32:42
SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, the granitizers were thinking, well, you can't really do that.
32:46
SPEAKER_02: There's no space to just put a big blob of magma there.
32:49
SPEAKER_02: And that was kind of a consequence of that discussion in my head.
32:52
SPEAKER_02: Maybe others would disagree with me, but that to me seems like a very strong, there's a very strong lineage between magmatic origin and what is pretty much wrong is the idea of you have a huge vat of magma circling and stewing in the crust.
33:08
SPEAKER_02: What we know now is that the room problem can very easily be accommodated by small volumes of magma over long periods of time in the crust where the crust is also helping to create space.
33:20
SPEAKER_02: So we have a much more nuanced idea now.
33:23
SPEAKER_02: Okay, I think we need to explore that a little bit more.
33:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I agree.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: So go go go, Chris.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna do the same thing.
33:28
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Mike, I need you to paint a picture of what you just said because I think that that's a critical point.
33:36
SPEAKER_03: How is this space created for you know this toolomy intrusive suite?
33:40
SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's it's massive, right?
33:42
SPEAKER_03: How does that happen?
33:43
SPEAKER_03: Can you go into that?
33:44
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: So And what is the evidence, I guess, Mike, as well.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: Like, can you can you add some color to the sort of evidence for it?
33:50
SPEAKER_02: Um of the more conceptually simple ideas with the lines of evidence, if you put a huge vat of magma into the crust at once, we know the temperature that that magma would be at, more or less, and we know how fast heat can dissipate away from that magma chamber.
34:10
SPEAKER_02: So you can come up with really good constraints on how long that could be hot in the crust, and it's on the order of maybe a million years or something like that.
34:19
SPEAKER_00: Um before it it sort of got cooled down by the country rock around it, like you just didn't have the heat to stay molten, is that yeah.
34:25
SPEAKER_02: So so you can do pretty accurate thermal models and say, hey, I put a huge Tualimeme truce of suite sized chunk of magma in the crust, and it cooled, you know, in a million, million and a half years or something, based on thermal modeling.
34:41
SPEAKER_02: But if you go and actually you can do some high precision dating of those rocks, and this is Jesse's area of expertise with zircons, what we see in these rocks is that they actually crystallize over nine to ten million years, so ten times longer crystallization history than would be expected if it was a huge vat of magma.
35:02
SPEAKER_02: So that helps us to kind of better understand that maybe this wasn't one gigantic vat of magma that came into the upper crust at once, but instead a series of sequentially injected smaller volumes of magma that were keeping the system active for nine, ten million years.
35:20
SPEAKER_03: Does that make sense?
35:21
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
35:21
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it does.
35:23
SPEAKER_03: So what did that magma quote unquote chamber look like then?
35:27
SPEAKER_03: It wasn't just this idealized blob of magma, it was probably mostly solid most of the time, right?
35:34
SPEAKER_03: That's a hot topic.
35:36
SPEAKER_03: You've you've you've hit on a hot topic, yeah.
35:39
SPEAKER_00: Nice that was a nice segue, Chris.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: Chris wins the segue award here.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: I think that's a nice segue.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: Like, I sort of want to ask what don't we know about granites?
35:47
SPEAKER_00: Like you you kind of framed what we do know and what the problems with sort of the uh magmatist kind of idea were and and how that's kind of shifted a little bit, but what what don't we know?
35:57
SPEAKER_00: Where's the debate?
35:58
SPEAKER_00: Where's the hot topic?
35:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, and you really kind of started this conversation about talking about people saying that granites might be metamorphic rocks.
36:08
SPEAKER_02: Uh, because you you know, you you put it in the crust and then it sits there at what's effectively very high grade metamorphic conditions for a long time and they stew in their own juices.
36:20
SPEAKER_02: So I think really where debate and interesting discussion is happening right now to me is how we can pry apart the igneous and the metamorphic histories that are retained in these rocks, because that'll help us really to better understand what these granitic rocks look like.
36:38
SPEAKER_02: Because another component of this that we have not talked about yet is the fact that granitic rocks, when they're forming, when they're hot stewing blobs of magma, they're sitting underneath a volcano.
36:52
SPEAKER_02: And periodically, magma is being extracted from these bodies and forming volcanic eruptions above it.
37:00
SPEAKER_02: So it's really not just an esoteric discussion for us to be having about granites, it's really connecting this whole the atmosphere and volcanism and granites.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: The whole the sort of sort of plumbing system, I mean, from the deep earth to the surface.
37:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
37:15
SPEAKER_00: And that's where the debate is, or where that's where our lack of understanding, that's where the limit of our knowledge is at the moment.
37:20
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think we've got a lot of really cool and interesting tools that are coming out, being developed right now that are helping us to kind of piece together the igneous and the metamorphic histories in these rocks.
37:32
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's where the fun debate is.
37:34
SPEAKER_02: Because, you know, for example, since we're talking about the Yosemite granitic rocks, there are potassium feldspar crystals in some of those rocks, which you know I think you've both seen.
37:47
SPEAKER_02: Some of these potassium feldspar crystals can be the size of softballs.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, huge, huge single, single crystals.
37:54
SPEAKER_00: Well, they're they are they've got inclusions in them, but effectively single crystals.
37:58
SPEAKER_02: And this is a great example of what I'm talking about because some people contend that these are crystals that formed in a in a magma, in a maybe crystal-rich magma, kind of stewing in its juices for a long time, and other people think they're effectively metamorphic or almost quasi-metamorphic crystals.
38:17
SPEAKER_02: To me, that's a really open, interesting debate.
38:20
SPEAKER_02: There's great arguments on both sides, but these are such an enigmatic part of granitic rocks.
38:26
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we don't have a good idea.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: Anybody can see these.
38:28
SPEAKER_00: If you walk around a city, you've seen these, maybe not these ones, but things like this.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: I mean, a lot of buildings have what we call K Feldspar megachrystic granite, where it's big Feldspar grains in a granitic background, basically, or matrix.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: And you know, that there's tons of places in the National Mall that are, I forget what, I think even the Martin Luther King Jr.
38:50
SPEAKER_00: Memorial is built out of some of this stuff.
38:52
SPEAKER_00: Beautiful.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: It's all over.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: Um it's beautiful rock.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: But I I find that fascinating that we really that seems fundamental to me, that we don't understand how these formed.
39:02
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's that seems like pretty it's maybe not intro-level geology, but it's certainly the second year class you would take.
39:09
SPEAKER_00: Like it's pretty, it's pretty basic, I would say.
39:11
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, Chris.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: What weigh in on this.
39:14
SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
39:14
SPEAKER_03: I I would love to weigh in on this because I want to bring this down to a maybe a simpler level if we could do that.
39:20
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, just sorry, sorry.
39:22
SPEAKER_03: No, no, no, no, no.
39:22
SPEAKER_03: No, that's not what I meant at all.
39:24
SPEAKER_03: Um, my mom is asleep right now, so uh we need to we need to wake Joyce back up.
39:29
SPEAKER_03: Uh come on, come on, Joyce must go.
39:31
SPEAKER_03: Um, so all right, Mike, in any intro-level geology class, students are taught, okay, granite, slow, intrusive, cooling, coarse-grained, fanriddic crystals, right?
39:44
SPEAKER_03: How is that wrong?
39:45
SPEAKER_03: Can we talk about that?
39:47
SPEAKER_02: I I don't think that it's necessarily wrong to say that granitic rocks cooled slowly relative to a volcanic rock in the crust, and that's how you get some of these larger crystals.
40:00
SPEAKER_02: I don't think that's necessarily wrong.
40:02
SPEAKER_03: Um you don't okay, but no.
40:05
SPEAKER_03: But a magma chamber doesn't look like how we say that it looks.
40:10
SPEAKER_03: You know, where you just have the diagram, yeah, right.
40:13
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know, where you have just the earth exactly, this upside-down teardrop that is just full of molten juices that are just slowly cooling and crystallizing.
40:25
SPEAKER_00: And I want to maybe I'll add to that, Chris, because we I mean we did this in the in the Camp Geo thing where we're talking about we're talking about intermediate rocks, andesytes.
40:33
SPEAKER_00: That andesytes have two grain sizes, and therefore, when you have two grain sizes, it means two cooling rates.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: One where the crystals are growing down in the magma chamber, and then one when they're erupted out and you form kind of glassy or fine-grained stuff when it comes out the magma chamber.
40:47
SPEAKER_00: And there's so there's two cooling rates, but that doesn't map on to granites, which have these two different grain sizes.
40:53
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it is that there's a tension there, clearly, but what Yeah, well, and the idea of having a large, relatively molten magma chamber, so primarily melt, molten magma chamber sitting around in the crust, you should be able to see that with geophysical observations.
41:10
SPEAKER_02: You know, sound waves propagate much differently through liquids than they do through solids.
41:16
SPEAKER_02: And there's no geophysical evidence for large batches of magma that's primarily liquid sitting in the crust.
41:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, even Yellowstone, like the sort of quote unquote magma chambers that get imaged, it's like 4% melt or five, you know, 7% melt, maybe, which is not what we visualize as a magma.
41:34
SPEAKER_00: It's mostly crazy.
41:35
SPEAKER_03: That seems to be counterintuitive then to just this long, slow cooling that gives you consistent phaneritic crystal sizes.
41:44
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's that's the part that's a good question, Chris.
41:47
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, I think like a lot of granites look very similar to one another.
41:51
SPEAKER_00: And so if the magma chambers are kind of like so different and take so long and they're these little things, why are they not more different, I guess?
41:57
SPEAKER_00: Is that kind of what you're alluding to a little bit?
42:00
SPEAKER_03: Well, I guess I'm trying to wrap my mind around how we get this like consistent grain size in an igneous rock, or granite, I should say, but it doesn't look like the idealized diagrams that we all show to our intro geology students because as soon as you get to petrology, your professor stands up and for says, Hey, you need to forget everything you you know you basically learned in in intro geology.
42:25
SPEAKER_02: So yeah, you you really feel lied to in these upper-level geology classes, don't you?
42:30
SPEAKER_02: What are you talking about?
42:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
42:33
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
42:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
42:34
SPEAKER_02: But uh, but you know, I mean, again, sorry to bring it back to the Tuangnee Intrusive Suite again here, but you've walked those rocks, Chris.
42:41
SPEAKER_02: If you've walked the rocks by Tanae Lake and Tuangnee Meadows, they do not actually look that similar.
42:49
SPEAKER_02: If you just hiked for about a mile across the Tuangnee Intrusive Suite and you took the time to look at those rocks, they changed dramatically over the tens of meters to hundreds of meters length scale.
43:04
SPEAKER_02: That's I think a function of kind of these stewing magma crystal rich magmas sitting around and then being altered by near solid and liquid-rich problems.
43:16
SPEAKER_02: It's extremely complicated, is the answer.
43:19
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, again, like to bring it back to Bowen's reaction series, and you're not lying to your students to say that there's magma chambers in the crust.
43:28
SPEAKER_02: It's just the magmas that we are actually looking at are probably a little different than this conceptual model of a big stewing juices of liquid with a couple little crystals.
43:40
SPEAKER_02: But that model tracks much more easily in the mind with Bones Reaction Series.
43:48
SPEAKER_00: Right.
43:48
SPEAKER_00: You know, and I think that's the you know, that that's the visual because I do this, Mike.
43:52
SPEAKER_00: I you know, I teach in a big lecture hall that has a little vent above it, like right in the center of the room.
43:57
SPEAKER_00: There's 200 students in it, and I always use that as the magma chamber.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: You know, I say, okay, imagine this is the magma chamber.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: Crystals settle out in the bottom.
44:04
SPEAKER_00: The magma changes composition.
44:05
SPEAKER_00: If you take olivine, they settle.
44:07
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to get them to understand how the magma changes when you remove some fraction of crystals from it.
44:13
SPEAKER_00: You know, this fractional crystallization and understand these basic processes.
44:16
SPEAKER_00: And I always feel bad because I know I'm lying to them.
44:19
SPEAKER_00: But it's such a it's just a good teaching visual that I stick with it.
44:24
SPEAKER_03: You know, and Jesse, that surprises me.
44:27
SPEAKER_03: I'm surprised that you are that you don't want to do that because you've always been really open to, you know, we just don't have this all figured out yet.
44:36
SPEAKER_03: And you actually are much better with that kind of stuff than I am.
44:40
SPEAKER_03: I'm so much more black and white.
44:42
SPEAKER_03: But that's not the way geology works, you know.
44:45
SPEAKER_03: And you know, over the last four years and my evolution working with you is uh, you know, I'm I'm I'm coming around.
44:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm you've become a lot less, a lot more, uh excuse me, a lot less stressed out about the uncertainty.
44:57
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
44:57
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
44:58
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
44:58
unknown: Yeah.
44:59
unknown: Yeah.
44:59
SPEAKER_02: But this is this is it's kind of a pedagogical discussion that we're having, though.
45:03
SPEAKER_02: This is not this is drifted from being a scientific discussion to a pedagogical one because which is great.
45:09
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we're all in the world of education.
45:12
SPEAKER_02: How do you help relate concepts to students on a first-order basis that helps them to go deeper?
45:19
SPEAKER_02: I used to be really jaded about these magma chambers and stuff, and I'd be going around and people are they don't know what they're talking about.
45:26
SPEAKER_02: This is not what a magma chamber is.
45:28
SPEAKER_02: But you know, I mean, wow, what a what a way to be exclusive to people coming into a field.
45:33
SPEAKER_02: Oh, we you know, everything you learn is rambled.
45:36
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's it's helping them build a conceptual framework to help them go deeper.
45:41
SPEAKER_03: You know, that's right.
45:43
SPEAKER_03: I yeah, I do the same thing.
45:44
SPEAKER_03: I I teach freshman level earth science, right?
45:47
SPEAKER_03: And we when we talk about plate tectonics, I'll I'll just basically I'm lying to them when I say that you know, when an when an oceanic plate subducts, it melts and and it rises up and it you get volcanism and so on, you create magma chambers.
46:00
SPEAKER_03: And then when they get to geology, I I do have to say, well, okay, let's here's what you were taught as a freshman.
46:06
SPEAKER_03: Now that's not right, but it it it was good enough at the time, you know.
46:10
SPEAKER_03: Now let's go into other things and let's talk about how magmas actually generated and and so on.
46:17
SPEAKER_03: So you're right, it is it's just pedagogy for sure.
46:20
SPEAKER_03: Don't don't don't beat yourself up over it, Jesse.
46:22
SPEAKER_03: It's yeah.
46:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh, you know, I don't think that deeply about it, but they you know, after 15 minutes for 15 minutes after class, I'm like, okay, how could I explain it more accurately and still get most of it people to come along, you know what I mean?
46:36
SPEAKER_00: Like get them to understand the concept.
46:37
SPEAKER_00: And I I just you know, after 15 minutes of thinking about it, I realize, yeah, okay, no, I'm just gonna keep doing what everybody else has done because they probably know best, you know, pedagogically here.
46:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but uh so maybe we could bring it back to this sort of science, how science works a little bit, Mike.
46:53
SPEAKER_00: And because you published a really provocative paper, actually about Tuali Mia, about the Yosemite National Park rocks a while ago.
46:59
SPEAKER_00: And uh I have insider knowledge of this because this was while we were at Carnegie.
47:03
SPEAKER_00: But this is a really I'll say provocative because you presented some interesting data and interesting ideas, and a lot of people disagreed with them, and a lot of people found them really interesting and have followed them up, like pursued them and pursued the hypotheses you kind of put forward.
47:19
SPEAKER_00: So could you give us, if you're willing, like a the elevator pitch on that work?
47:24
SPEAKER_00: Because it's this is about granites and how they form, and we're kind of at the limit of knowledge about granites here in that discussion.
47:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I need to start by saying it's your fault that that paper got published the way it did, because I gave you a copy and you were like, you gotta try to publish this in a bigger journal than you're trying to go for.
47:40
SPEAKER_02: This is really provocative stuff.
47:41
SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I don't want that kind of heat, Jesse.
47:44
SPEAKER_00: For the listener, uh, you know, the journals, different scientific journals have different like readership, and the ones, the short format ones like nature or science, they get a lot of press, they're short format, and they're kind of designed for provocative ideas, you know, things that are as Rick Carlson puts it, you know, interesting idea and it might even be right.
48:02
SPEAKER_00: It's those kind of things where it's like good ideas and and they need to be tested, you know.
48:07
SPEAKER_00: And and this was this was it.
48:08
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I think you had submitted it to a longer journal or something like that.
48:13
SPEAKER_00: And a couple of us.
48:14
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just me, but it was a couple of things.
48:15
SPEAKER_00: You and Steve Shirer, yeah.
48:18
SPEAKER_00: Dude, go for it, man.
48:19
SPEAKER_00: This is totally cool.
48:20
SPEAKER_02: Um I'm giving you a little bit of crap.
48:24
SPEAKER_02: It's because that actually really helps me to understand a big lesson in science is that we can't be afraid to be wrong.
48:31
SPEAKER_02: Because if you're afraid to be wrong, you're just gonna do the same old stuff and you're not gonna learn anything new.
48:37
SPEAKER_00: And you can't push the limits if you're not gonna be wrong.
48:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, exactly.
48:42
SPEAKER_00: A large fraction of the time, actually.
48:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you for sure.
48:44
SPEAKER_03: That's a really interesting thing that you just said that both of you are actually like admitting to.
48:50
SPEAKER_03: It's a that's uh I think a lot of people would find that astonishing, actually, but I think refreshing.
48:57
SPEAKER_02: But you know, if we're all right all the time doing science, then science would be dead in like five years, you know.
49:06
SPEAKER_02: Oh, we got that paper done.
49:07
SPEAKER_02: All right, ignorance petrology, next.
49:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, solved you know, you know, Chris, you and I have talked about this a lot because uh we get a lot of uh listener questions specifically about you know studies that are published, some news articles are they get into the science daily or any of these sort of science news things, and there's write-ups about them.
49:26
SPEAKER_00: And I I think it's fundamentally important to society that people understand how this scientific thing works because there's two main tendencies.
49:36
SPEAKER_00: One is to say science is never right, so therefore it's all wrong, to take what we just said and say all science is wrong, but there's also the tendency to say, oh, it's science, therefore it's right.
49:46
SPEAKER_00: It was published and therefore it's right.
49:48
SPEAKER_00: And neither of those is a sound approach to sort of build a society on, I don't think.
49:52
SPEAKER_00: And and so I I don't know, I feel strongly that this this discussion maybe that we could have, Mike, is it's important, I think, to kind of understand how this works at the deeper level.
50:03
SPEAKER_00: I you know, feel free to disagree with me on this.
50:05
SPEAKER_00: I um, but it is something that I feel.
50:08
SPEAKER_02: Um it's certainly true for all science that it's incremental and you can't grow in science unless you have discussions which could be wrong or right.
50:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sorry.
50:19
SPEAKER_00: J uh for me, there was a time in graduate school where uh a faculty member who actually was running the field school, a planetary scientist, published a lot of like quote unquote fancy papers, these short format provocative papers on Mars.
50:31
SPEAKER_00: And he said, Oh yeah, you know, I published one paper, and then the next year I realized I got more data and I realized I was wrong, and I published another paper that was diametrically opposed to what I said a year ago.
50:41
SPEAKER_00: And that's fine.
50:41
SPEAKER_00: And he was like, Yeah, that's fine.
50:43
SPEAKER_00: You know, I know more now than I did then, and we improved it.
50:46
SPEAKER_00: And I've uh that struck me as like, Whoa, this is really this is cool.
50:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's important.
50:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I I loved that in some way.
50:55
SPEAKER_02: Well, and people have a deep trust in science.
50:58
SPEAKER_02: Some people have a real deep trust in science, which I'm grateful for.
51:02
SPEAKER_02: Medicine is the primary example of this, where you'll read one pop news article that says, Oh, drinking red wine is good for your heart, and then you read the next one, and it says, Oh, drinking red wine is gonna give you congestive heart failure.
51:14
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and then and then so you know, people don't know where to go from there with the science.
51:21
SPEAKER_02: And the real nuance is that you're not giving a bunch of people red wine for 30 years to see if they die early.
51:28
SPEAKER_02: Science and scientific study is difficult, and with new data comes new interpretations.
51:33
SPEAKER_02: That's kind of what we we do with that that paper, yeah.
51:35
SPEAKER_03: I think about what you said at the top of the episode, Mike, that you know, scientists, you go back in history 200, 300 years ago, they were doing good science, working with the knowledge that they had.
51:46
SPEAKER_03: And now we look at it, you know, 300 years later and we're like, really?
51:50
SPEAKER_03: You know, that's what that's what we thought back then.
51:51
SPEAKER_03: But yeah, but it's a powerful point.
51:54
SPEAKER_03: I mean, think about when plate tectonics first came back, you know, in the 1960s and the debates that happened, and now we look at it and say, really, why were they debating this?
52:04
SPEAKER_03: But they were doing the best at the time with what they had.
52:08
SPEAKER_03: And that is a I think that's a powerful takeaway.
52:10
SPEAKER_03: And it makes me think about what are we doing today educationally that people 50 years from now are going to look back on and say, Whoa, that's crazy that they taught that, that they believed that that's what they thought was going on.
52:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, how how will our textbook, Tro to Geology textbook, be different in 50 years, right?
52:27
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it it's a really interesting uh I hope it'll be very different, but yeah, yeah, totally.
52:33
SPEAKER_00: Hope we we learn a lot more.
52:35
SPEAKER_00: So, okay, Mike, back to the paper.
52:36
SPEAKER_00: Elevator pitch for the paper.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: What was the point?
52:39
SPEAKER_02: Hold on, hold on, hold on.
52:40
SPEAKER_02: One more on this topic of Earth Science textbooks.
52:42
SPEAKER_02: We haven't talked about this yet.
52:43
SPEAKER_02: I'm sure you guys have talked about this in the podcast before, but what I want Earth Science textbooks to be when we're retiring is the capstone class of science in high school.
52:54
SPEAKER_02: Because the more you know biology, the more you know chemistry, the more you know physics, the more of an accurate understanding of the geosciences you can have.
53:02
SPEAKER_02: Because we're not all just sitting around going, oh, that's a normal fault.
53:05
SPEAKER_02: That's a reverse fault.
53:06
SPEAKER_02: Let's go out in the field and do some law of superposition exercises.
53:10
SPEAKER_02: We're chemists, we're biologists, we're physicists, we're mathematicians.
53:14
SPEAKER_00: I love that idea, Mike.
53:16
SPEAKER_00: I've never uh we've not had this discussion, but I love that before.
53:19
SPEAKER_00: Because hearkening back to your comment about granites and calculating the amount of heat that is in a granite body and how fast that dissipates out into the country rock, and therefore that's a that's a physics problem, right?
53:31
SPEAKER_00: That those are geophysicists who do those calculations.
53:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, or people who know that those techniques and tools.
53:37
SPEAKER_00: And I like that.
53:38
SPEAKER_00: That's uh there we go.
53:40
SPEAKER_02: So that that's that's what it should be, you know, these camp geo things.
53:43
SPEAKER_02: Let's turn that into a capstone uh senior year geology class.
53:47
SPEAKER_00: AP geology is the king of all the AP classes at that point.
53:51
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
53:51
SPEAKER_02: What all the pre-meds want to take AP geology.
53:54
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
53:55
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
53:56
SPEAKER_00: I love that idea.
53:57
SPEAKER_00: That's totally, yeah, for sure.
53:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, okay, so so back to this provocative paper.
54:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm stalling.
54:03
SPEAKER_00: Well, I know, but I want to talk about it.
54:05
SPEAKER_00: I and and we could we could talk about the paper as well, but also like I want to know from you, I want to talk about the story of how the science works through this very personal example for you.
54:15
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I mean, we've talked about bones, so let's bring them back.
54:19
SPEAKER_02: Um if you start with a hot magma that's completely liquid, and you start cooling it, eventually it starts to crystallize.
54:28
SPEAKER_02: And as you continue to cool it, it continues to crystallize.
54:31
SPEAKER_02: And there is a point as you continue to cool where there's no mouth left, it's all crystalline.
54:39
SPEAKER_02: And that temperature is what we call the solidest.
54:42
SPEAKER_02: And you alluded to this earlier, Jesse, this kind of 680 degrees number that all granitic rocks are crystalline at.
54:49
SPEAKER_02: And that that's basically been a thick line in the sand for igneous petrology for close close to a hundred years, yeah.
54:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
54:59
SPEAKER_02: Because we, you know, trust and value the hard work that Bowen and others did.
55:04
SPEAKER_02: And it's really groundbreaking experimental work.
55:07
SPEAKER_02: But you know, they weren't doing that work with modern experimental apparatuses and electron microscopes and all the fancy tools that we have now, so we have the ability to look at these things differently.
55:18
SPEAKER_02: But anyway, so that line in the sand, that solidness line, uh something that we all hold dear as the end point of igneous petrology.
55:28
SPEAKER_02: That's where igneous petrology ends and metamorphic petrology begins.
55:33
SPEAKER_02: And so we just looked at some of these quartz crystals in the granitic rocks.
55:38
SPEAKER_00: Let me just real quick, Mike, interrupt.
55:40
SPEAKER_00: We we say that that ends because if you think about Bowen's reaction series as this Y down at the bottom, quartz, potassium feldzbar, muscovite, those are the minerals that are the last to crystallize.
55:50
SPEAKER_00: And so, Mike, you're saying that 680 is the bottom of Bowen's reaction series.
55:53
SPEAKER_00: So quartz, K-feldspar, muscovite, those are the last ones.
55:56
SPEAKER_00: So if you know that temperature, you kind of know where the bottom of Bowen's reaction series is.
56:01
SPEAKER_02: That's exactly right.
56:02
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
56:03
SPEAKER_02: The bottom of Bowen's reaction series.
56:04
SPEAKER_02: The bottom of that Y.
56:07
SPEAKER_02: So anyway, so but if we have all these new tools that we've been developing with experiments and other various methods that we can actually apply to rocks to see if they actually crystallized at or above this temperature.
56:22
SPEAKER_02: So what we did in that paper was simply we applied a couple of interesting techniques, new techniques, and we applied it to the quartz crystals.
56:30
SPEAKER_02: And the observations we made were that the quartz looks to have crystallized below this canonical wet solid the solidist temperature.
56:38
SPEAKER_02: And so that was that was this big splashy part of that paper, is that it looks like a lot of the quartz crystallizes below where we thought possible.
56:46
SPEAKER_02: But not to throw a number at that.
56:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
56:49
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, that was exactly where I was going, Chris.
56:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so our our paper, that initial paper, I think we said somewhere between 470 and 560 degrees Celsius, so potentially like 200 degrees below Bowen's solidus.
57:02
SPEAKER_03: All right.
57:02
SPEAKER_03: So what were some of the new techniques, or what were the variables that are different from what Bowen did and came up with the 680?
57:10
SPEAKER_02: So these are techniques I'm describing are techniques that we can apply to natural rocks.
57:15
SPEAKER_02: So we have these tools that we call geothermometers.
57:21
SPEAKER_02: And Jesse's familiar with these intimately with his work as well.
57:25
SPEAKER_02: As my PhD advisor uh cautioned me when I was working with him, he said if you just call it a geothermometer, people are gonna think you're sticking a thermometer on a rock and measuring its temperature.
57:35
SPEAKER_02: It's it's that's a classic brute.
57:37
SPEAKER_02: That's funny.
57:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's funny.
57:38
SPEAKER_02: Um, which is true because you say that, and your initial thought is great.
57:42
SPEAKER_02: So you developed you developed a way to put a probe in a magma chamber and measure the temperature.
57:46
SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
57:47
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that that's not really what we're doing.
57:49
SPEAKER_02: Basically, if you do experiments in controlled environments and conditions, we can look at chemical properties of minerals in these controlled environments and then apply that to nature.
58:00
SPEAKER_02: So the particular tool that we were using is called titanium in quartz geothermometry.
58:08
SPEAKER_02: So, quartz, the little mineralogy lesson here, the subtext mineralogy lesson.
58:14
SPEAKER_02: Quartz is SiO2.
58:16
SPEAKER_02: So it's one silicon and two oxygens in this repeating crystal structure that makes it a mineral.
58:22
SPEAKER_02: Titanium can actually swap for silicon in the quartz crystal lattice in really small quantities, you know, one gram per million grams, 20 grams per million grams.
58:33
SPEAKER_02: So it's really small quantities of titanium.
58:36
SPEAKER_02: But if you increase the temperature that that quartz crystallized at, you can actually put more titanium into the quartz crystal.
58:43
SPEAKER_02: So let's say I measured a quartz crystal and it had 50, the unit that we use is called parts per million, or micrograms per gram.
58:51
SPEAKER_02: If it had 50 parts per million titanium in the quartz, then I can actually come up with the temperature at which that quartz crystallized.
58:58
SPEAKER_02: So that's what we call a thermometer.
59:00
SPEAKER_02: Does that make sense?
59:01
SPEAKER_02: So it's not a probe, it's a chemical probe.
59:03
SPEAKER_02: So we can go to these herrocks that crystallized millions of years ago and measure these titanium concentrations in quartz and get out a range of temperatures.
59:11
SPEAKER_03: So the quantity of titanium can be an index for you in terms of temperature range.
59:15
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
59:16
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
59:16
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
59:17
SPEAKER_00: And I think this come kind of comes up with maybe not assumptions built in, but with there's other variables in the equation, right?
59:23
SPEAKER_00: It's not just titanium equals temperature.
59:25
SPEAKER_00: There's other factors that play into pressure a variable?
59:29
SPEAKER_02: That's a very important variable for for this particular thermometer, yeah.
59:32
SPEAKER_03: So which I also did not didn't play into Bowen's experiments, right?
59:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah pressure was not a yeah, and and and Bowen, you know, the we haven't really talked about experimental petrology yet.
59:43
SPEAKER_02: Maybe that's another episode, but another one.
59:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, when we come to Smithsonian, we can we can tour the experimental lab and uh and do that too.
59:50
SPEAKER_02: But experiments are extremely, extremely difficult.
59:54
SPEAKER_02: You're trying to replicate in the laboratory what nature has millions of years to do, and you've got a couple days, a couple of weeks.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_02: In some rare occasions, people do experiments for weeks or months.
1:00:07
SPEAKER_02: So the ability to try to replicate these magmatic systems in the laboratory is extremely, extremely difficult.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_02: And the fact that Bowen and Tuttle and Shirer and Yoder and all of all of my scientific heroes could do any of it with the tools they had back in the 1900s is absolutely insane to me.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_03: That's amazing.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_03: Jesse, did I gotta ask, did you get your question answered?
1:00:33
SPEAKER_03: Or is Mike uh still you know stalling?
1:00:36
SPEAKER_00: No, I think I I think that I think that's a good elevator pitch.
1:00:39
SPEAKER_00: You know, you looked at minerals and uh found temperatures that were below what we would expect, or or you know, found calculated temperatures that were below what you'd expect.
1:00:46
SPEAKER_00: I mean, not a small amount, but a bunch.
1:00:49
SPEAKER_02: Shockingly off, yeah.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_00: Right, right, for sure.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_00: But but I think that's a good thing.
1:00:52
SPEAKER_00: So hold on, Chris.
1:00:53
SPEAKER_00: Could I ask you a question, Chris?
1:00:54
SPEAKER_00: What do you think of that?
1:00:55
SPEAKER_03: What aspect were you talking about?
1:00:57
SPEAKER_00: You know, Mike's the paper.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_00: What do you think of that point?
1:01:01
SPEAKER_00: Like if you read a news article about that or something and you're like, wait, interesting, not important, not what's your gut?
1:01:08
SPEAKER_03: Well, okay, I had two thoughts.
1:01:10
SPEAKER_03: I had a ton of thoughts actually, but two that stand out.
1:01:13
SPEAKER_00: One is I could see the hamster fell off the wheel.
1:01:16
SPEAKER_00: He was sprinting so fast in there.
1:01:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I know, I know.
1:01:18
SPEAKER_03: It happens.
1:01:19
SPEAKER_03: But what Mike said about the experiment, how difficult it is.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_03: I also have to say that it it has to be exciting at the same time.
1:01:29
SPEAKER_03: There's no blueprint for what you're doing, there's no plan.
1:01:32
SPEAKER_03: You have to make your plan, you have to design what you're doing.
1:01:35
SPEAKER_03: Jesse, we talked about this with mass spectrometry.
1:01:38
SPEAKER_03: You know, you you have to fix the the instruments that you buy for a million dollars.
1:01:42
SPEAKER_03: You gotta, you know, redesign them and retool them to make them work.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_03: And so I thought about that.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_03: That was one thing.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_03: It's like, yeah, it's gotta be very difficult, but also from the outside looking in, I'm very excited about that and that process.
1:01:58
SPEAKER_03: That's gotta be really satisfying for you two to do that.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_03: So I had that thought.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_03: The other thing is you talk about Mike, you started off with in Bowen's Reactors, how you have this vat and and you basically melt the whole thing and you let it cool off.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_03: Well, there's the flaw, right?
1:02:14
SPEAKER_03: Because that's not the way that magma chambers are.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_03: I I guess I don't know.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_03: My mind went there too.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_03: That as you're thinking about this, I have no problem with the line being redrawn, is what I'm saying.
1:02:27
SPEAKER_03: Does that make sense?
1:02:28
SPEAKER_00: Like, I know that was our long rambly answer, but no, no, no, totally, totally.
1:02:32
SPEAKER_00: That was a very Jesse style answer.
1:02:33
SPEAKER_02: But mine was a long-winded answer.
1:02:35
SPEAKER_02: That was very concise.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_02: Joyce just perked back up.
1:02:38
SPEAKER_00: Well, Joyce perks up anytime her son is talking, and that's without a little bit.
1:02:42
SPEAKER_00: That's a good mom, good mom.
1:02:44
SPEAKER_00: Fast forwards until Chris, you know, Chris is talking to you again.
1:02:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, um but uh Mike, I know you know I was around and talked to you a lot while you were you know working on this paper, and I know you agonized over it because you knew it was going to be provocative, and it's like you you sort of went, not am I right, but are my arguments as sound as they could possibly be?
1:03:03
SPEAKER_00: I know you went through that quite a bit because it's redrawing a very fundamental line, or quote unquote redrawing, a very fundamental line that a lot of this community has just assumed is correct for a long time.
1:03:16
SPEAKER_03: Mike, when Jesse says this is provocative, I'm assuming that you had blowback.
1:03:21
SPEAKER_03: Is that right or or not?
1:03:23
SPEAKER_03: Did you get challenged on this?
1:03:24
SPEAKER_03: And and like I'm assuming this is kind of a traumatic thing.
1:03:29
SPEAKER_00: No, that's exactly Chris.
1:03:30
SPEAKER_00: This is exactly where I wanted to go.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_00: So I and Mike, you can make this as personal or not.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_02: I mean, truth be told, like, you know, science can be emotionally challenging as well.
1:03:40
SPEAKER_02: And this is just the part part of what we do, you know.
1:03:43
SPEAKER_02: Some people agonize and agonize over their papers to the point where they never publish them, which is even more dangerous than just putting it out there and knowing that people are gonna say you're full of baloney sausage, and you know, which is which is it it is hard because I mean, I think you guys can probably relate to this.
1:04:04
SPEAKER_02: I don't do this for personal glory, right?
1:04:07
SPEAKER_02: You know, I want to just be a scientist doing my work, and I you just want to solve the problems you're interested in about and think about granites all day, right?
1:04:15
SPEAKER_00: And but I think it's an important again, back to the sort of the way science works.
1:04:19
SPEAKER_00: I think it's an important thing to note that it is we are all humans, we're not good at extracting the human, the human experience out of the publication process and how feelings about how your work is viewed and all those you know complicated things.
1:04:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I always tell my graduate students because when I was a graduate student, even a postdoc and even today, you have an emotional attachment to your papers.
1:04:40
SPEAKER_00: And so if you get critiques about them, it's hard.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_00: And I tell my students to try and separate their work from them.
1:04:46
SPEAKER_00: So if somebody critiques or criticizes their paper or their talk, they're criticizing the talk, not you as an individual, or not you as a person.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_00: And that's that's an impossible thing to completely separate, but you got to try and do it as much as possible.
1:05:01
SPEAKER_00: And and I don't know, I've felt like I've gotten better at that over time.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm still not great at it.
1:05:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you still feel that that pang in your gut every time you get a review back where somebody's like, you're full uh full of it, you know, you know full of it.
1:05:13
SPEAKER_00: You get that really tough, aggressive question at a conference or something, and it you know, it it it feels like a personal attack, even if it's not, right?
1:05:22
SPEAKER_00: And and sometimes it is.
1:05:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, some people go on the offensive personally, and that's not the way to do it either.
1:05:26
SPEAKER_02: But but it's easier to dismiss those people because you're like, Oh, you're just a jerk.
1:05:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
1:05:32
SPEAKER_02: This is this is not a good faith conversation.
1:05:34
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:05:34
SPEAKER_00: That's that's exactly right.
1:05:36
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_00: So your experience, yeah, back to Chris's question.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_00: Like, what what was your experience?
1:05:40
SPEAKER_00: What was your emotions, and and how how did that pull back or push back or whatever?
1:05:45
SPEAKER_00: What did that look like?
1:05:46
SPEAKER_02: I mean, so first of all, like if you publish something that you say is very provocative, you should expect that people are going to challenge that because how crazy would it be if we lived in a scientific world where I published one paper with one object.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_02: Observation and everybody was like, nailed it, done.
1:06:03
SPEAKER_02: That is totally right.
1:06:05
SPEAKER_00: We're just redrawing that line.
1:06:06
SPEAKER_00: We've been drawing it here for 50 years or 100 years.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_00: We're just gonna move it over here because Mike said so.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_00: That'd be insane.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_03: The hard part about doing your science is also the absolute necessity of science, the whole vetting process.
1:06:22
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_02: So this paper, for example, I don't think those numbers are necessarily correct anymore.
1:06:27
SPEAKER_02: We've got some more nuanced techniques.
1:06:29
SPEAKER_02: I think the temperatures that I'm getting, if I redo that data with new observations, the temperatures go up a bit.
1:06:36
SPEAKER_02: They're not 470 degrees.
1:06:38
SPEAKER_02: I think it's higher than that, but they're still lower than that 680 degrees Celsius by quite a bit.
1:06:45
SPEAKER_02: Um, so like even for myself, I'm I'm re-seeing my own data, like you were talking about earlier, Jesse, with your professor.
1:06:52
SPEAKER_02: But I mean, it's super stressful, especially when you're early career and you feel like every single thing that you do is going to be looked at by a committee of people who are deciding whether they're gonna take you into their faculty or not.
1:07:04
SPEAKER_02: It really, gosh, I mean, yeah, I mean, I would be lying if I didn't say I would like wake up with like cold sweats at 3 a.m.
1:07:11
SPEAKER_02: every once in a while for like the year leading up to and after that paper came out because it means a lot to you.
1:07:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's true, and you kind of you you put so much time, heart and soul into it in a way.
1:07:21
SPEAKER_00: And you like you said, you you're afraid of being wrong.
1:07:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I must say I've been impressed being on the other side of the table, like hiring professors and you know hiring young professors and stuff.
1:07:30
SPEAKER_00: I've been impressed about the discussions regarding this.
1:07:33
SPEAKER_00: We're not afraid to hire people who are wrong.
1:07:35
SPEAKER_00: We're afraid to hire people who don't have ideas, don't have ideas that might push the community forward.
1:07:41
SPEAKER_00: And as we talked about before, part of that is being wrong, at least ending up being wrong.
1:07:45
SPEAKER_00: But as long as what you're doing is well reasoned, you're not going into it trying to be wrong or trying to be provocative.
1:07:51
SPEAKER_00: But if you have a story like that that you think is well reasoned, and as you said, Mike, like with the data you have and the the understanding at the moment, if you've got the the best argument is laid out and it's provocative, great.
1:08:03
SPEAKER_00: Do that.
1:08:04
SPEAKER_00: Do that type of work.
1:08:05
SPEAKER_02: So so that you know, this paper that we we published, even if it's dead wrong, what's come out of that paper has been a lot more interesting research that's helped us get a better understanding of our field.
1:08:17
SPEAKER_00: That's great.
1:08:18
SPEAKER_00: Can you describe that?
1:08:19
SPEAKER_00: I want to know what that looks like.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_00: Can you just paint like a really short picture about what that looks like?
1:08:23
SPEAKER_00: Because again, this is part of the scientific process, a really important part of the scientific process.
1:08:28
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:08:28
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, we we published that paper, and it's it's just one.
1:08:31
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we're focusing on this paper now, but I mean, realistically, it's one of thousands of papers in our field that are published every year.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_02: So it's just a very small piece of this puzzle.
1:08:42
SPEAKER_02: But other people saw the paper and they thought, well, that's gotta be wrong.
1:08:46
SPEAKER_02: And we can test that it's wrong with by doing X, Y, and Z.
1:08:50
SPEAKER_02: And then so they go and do X, Y, and Z and come up with new data that could interpret the data that we collected in a different way, and that creates a new tool set that wasn't there before.
1:09:00
SPEAKER_02: So I'm very happy for that.
1:09:02
SPEAKER_02: I'm happy that it has that that work that we did inspired other people to either critically approach our data, which a lot of people did, or critically approach their previous interpretations of their data in light of what we wrote, which also happens.
1:09:18
SPEAKER_02: So it's just the way science moves forward.
1:09:20
SPEAKER_02: If you are if you get a bunch of data and you look at it and you sit around and you just stress out about it like I did, I mean, there's no way I would have gotten that data set and published that data set if I hadn't talked to my PhD advisor and my postdoc mentor and trusted colleagues like you who said, Yeah, I mean, this seems worthy of putting into a paper.
1:09:40
SPEAKER_02: I would have like been too afraid to do that, frankly, if I didn't have the people around me saying, Yeah, I mean, you know, you're you're doing what you have to do to be a scientist.
1:09:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've never published something like this that you know going into it, it's going to be provocative.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_00: I I've never been in that situation, but I guarantee I would stress about it in the same way you did, and go around to trusted people and ask, what should I do?
1:10:02
SPEAKER_00: What you know, what do you think of this?
1:10:03
SPEAKER_00: Is this sound enough?
1:10:04
SPEAKER_03: To be honest with you, I I might be afraid if you weren't nervous about it.
1:10:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's right.
1:10:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree.
1:10:11
SPEAKER_00: I agree for sure.
1:10:12
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm at I'm at Tenzig Norgate.
1:10:15
SPEAKER_02: My exploration is not climbing up Mount Everest.
1:10:18
SPEAKER_02: My exploration, your exploration, Jesse, we're pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.
1:10:23
SPEAKER_02: You don't do that without some real hard work and toiling.
1:10:27
SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm just glad I can do it without an oxygen tank.
1:10:30
SPEAKER_02: You know, I can just sit at sit in a sit in a lab and like you know, zap crystals with lasers and stuff, you know?
1:10:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
1:10:38
SPEAKER_00: So fun.
1:10:39
SPEAKER_00: I value that perspective a lot, Mike.
1:10:41
SPEAKER_00: I mean, how just how you're actually encouraging the the sort of challenging and trying to depersonalize it a little bit so so that you can remove the emotions a little bit from it.
1:10:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean it's impossible to do completely, but we're way over time.
1:10:53
SPEAKER_00: So let's sort of play this through to uh the completion.
1:10:56
SPEAKER_00: Where's the story at now, would you say, Mike, uh on this topic?
1:11:00
SPEAKER_00: Is it resolved?
1:11:01
SPEAKER_00: Is it not?
1:11:01
SPEAKER_00: Is it?
1:11:02
SPEAKER_02: Oh no, no, no, no.
1:11:03
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I I think there's a lot of really interesting research coming down the pipe that's related to this topic.
1:11:11
SPEAKER_02: You know, people three options really.
1:11:14
SPEAKER_02: You ignore a paper, you challenge a paper, or you use that data and try to interpret the world through that lens.
1:11:21
SPEAKER_02: All three of those things have happened.
1:11:22
SPEAKER_02: You know, some people are just like, oh, that another nature paper throw in the trash, it doesn't have any value, which I get it.
1:11:28
SPEAKER_02: I agree.
1:11:28
SPEAKER_02: Why not?
1:11:31
SPEAKER_00: Raw store.
1:11:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:11:33
SPEAKER_02: Which is fine.
1:11:34
SPEAKER_02: Like, that's totally fine.
1:11:36
SPEAKER_02: But the people who have challenged it have come up with some really cool, interesting observations.
1:11:40
SPEAKER_02: It's some of the best discussions I've ever had with people is them being like, How the heck do you think that?
1:11:46
SPEAKER_02: What are you talking about?
1:11:47
SPEAKER_02: You know, there's this, this, this, this, and that.
1:11:49
SPEAKER_02: So that doesn't agree with that.
1:11:50
SPEAKER_02: You know, I mean, that's fine.
1:11:52
SPEAKER_02: That's helped me grow, that's helped our fuel to grow.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_02: I hope.
1:11:55
SPEAKER_02: You know, there's also people who have uh been doing some significant work that's kind of coming down the pipeline to really corroborate what we're saying as well.
1:12:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:12:04
SPEAKER_00: And I I I think from my uh slightly out, I mean, I'm completely a biased observer here, but I'm an observer nonetheless.
1:12:10
SPEAKER_00: I've talked to colleagues, metamorphic petrology colleagues, who initially were like, nah, that that's not right.
1:12:15
SPEAKER_00: We know this stuff.
1:12:16
SPEAKER_00: And then now they're like, wait, I've seen it, I saw a paper that was talking about granites, and actually I thought of Mike's work and reframing what they're thinking about the temperature conditions of contact metamorphism, where you know, granite intrudes and it metamorphoses that heat metamorphoses stuff around it.
1:12:31
SPEAKER_00: So it's at least making people think more deeply about their assumptions in some ways, which is kind of the point, right?
1:12:39
SPEAKER_00: And and also it's spawned many PhDs worth of work.
1:12:44
SPEAKER_00: Like many PhD projects are the stuff you're coming, you say is coming down the pipe.
1:12:49
SPEAKER_00: It's not like you working on one paper, it's full PhD projects, multiple full PhD projects, kind of either testing this critically or building off of it in some in some gradient between those things.
1:13:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:13:02
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
1:13:03
SPEAKER_00: Which is cool, which is must be fairly.
1:13:06
SPEAKER_03: Not to oversimplify, but it's kind of like when you enter into a um an intellectual discussion with somebody and you disagree.
1:13:13
SPEAKER_03: I've never had an argument with somebody and walked away and not come through that a better person.
1:13:20
SPEAKER_03: Because when you have this disagreement, then you just sit there and you think about, you perseverate on why do I believe and why do I think what I think?
1:13:30
SPEAKER_03: It makes you a better person for that.
1:13:33
SPEAKER_03: And it's kind of I again, not to oversimplify what you two do, but it's no it's very similar to that.
1:13:38
SPEAKER_00: I think it's very similar to that, Chris.
1:13:40
SPEAKER_00: You know, somebody who challenges you, who you know, challenges you in a in an emotionally honest and and sort of uh, I wouldn't say friendly, but like respectful manner, let's say, or something along those lines.
1:13:51
SPEAKER_00: It makes you rethink when you're sort of somebody challenges you politically or absolutely something in your belief system.
1:13:56
SPEAKER_00: It and I always I do the same thing, Chris.
1:13:57
SPEAKER_00: I always walk away and play it back in my head.
1:14:00
SPEAKER_00: Many times I'll end up being like, they made a really good point there.
1:14:02
SPEAKER_00: I I need to think about that more because what I responded with is probably not right or not correct or not, you know, well thought out.
1:14:09
SPEAKER_00: So and that's the way science should work.
1:14:11
SPEAKER_00: That's a good analogy.
1:14:12
SPEAKER_00: I like that.
1:14:13
SPEAKER_02: What you've brought up is the fact that we've been kind of talking about this whole time, which is that science is human.
1:14:18
SPEAKER_02: Humans doing science until AI replaces us all.
1:14:22
SPEAKER_02: Um science is currently human, you know.
1:14:25
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
1:14:26
SPEAKER_01: You know, that's right.
1:14:27
SPEAKER_02: The people doing the science are humans.
1:14:29
SPEAKER_02: They have thoughts, feelings, emotions, egos, all of it.
1:14:32
SPEAKER_02: And if you don't, if you come at it from the wrong perspective, it's not helpful.
1:14:36
SPEAKER_00: Mike, I think I focus on this this one paper because it is such an interesting idea.
1:14:41
SPEAKER_00: It's made me rethink a lot when I'm going around the field and look at look at old granites and think, okay, when I'm walking across it mapping them, I would say I think of it in the intro-level Pluton perspective.
1:14:52
SPEAKER_00: Like this is a big batch of magma that sat there and cooled.
1:14:54
SPEAKER_00: And this has made me rethink that initial knee-jerk reaction when we were walking across in the field, that like, oh, there's a big K-Feldspar crystal.
1:15:01
SPEAKER_00: That might have a really complicated history, and actually, we don't we don't know what the history of that thing is.
1:15:06
SPEAKER_00: To me, that's really it's reframed how I do the bait, even the basic stuff of you know, walking across a granite rock.
1:15:14
SPEAKER_00: And I think if anybody goes to Yosemite or walks across to granite in their lives, this would be valuable to think about.
1:15:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, hey, my my takeaway from that is um Jesse's been around me long enough, and he still doesn't think I'm absolutely full of crap, which I'll take as a win.
1:15:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, unlike everybody else, exactly.
1:15:34
SPEAKER_03: I think you've had more of an influence on Jesse, um, which I've gotten to see through this whole interview here today.
1:15:42
SPEAKER_03: I think maybe you've had a bigger influence on him than you might realize.
1:15:46
SPEAKER_00: Oh, no, yeah.
1:15:47
SPEAKER_00: No, my Mike has had a massive, I mean 100% reciprocated.
1:15:50
SPEAKER_00: I'll say it, Mike.
1:15:51
SPEAKER_00: I have a ton of respect for you.
1:15:53
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing better.
1:15:54
SPEAKER_00: We talked about this, you guys came up and visited us for before the holidays, but there's nothing better than sitting around with a a drink or several and talking science with Mike Ackerson.
1:16:05
SPEAKER_00: So we'll do this reciprocated, 100% reciprocated.
1:16:09
SPEAKER_00: We'll have to sit around and talk geology, the three of us, you know, over a drink or more.
1:16:14
SPEAKER_00: I'd love to.
1:16:14
SPEAKER_00: And uh, it's just the most fun thing in the world.
1:16:17
SPEAKER_00: And we often get in these philosophical sort of ranges because I I don't know, I find it very fun and very um spiritually rewarding.
1:16:25
SPEAKER_00: Learn a lot.
1:16:25
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
1:16:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's spiritually rewarding.
1:16:27
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
1:16:28
SPEAKER_00: Exactly right.
1:16:29
SPEAKER_03: Well, well, Jesse, I think we're at that time, right?
1:16:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we have to ask our massively over time.
1:16:34
SPEAKER_00: So go for it.
1:16:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we are sorry, Mike.
1:16:35
SPEAKER_00: Get us out of here.
1:16:36
SPEAKER_03: No, no, there's there's plenty of fat to trim, so you guys will still make it under time.
1:16:40
SPEAKER_03: Don't worry about it.
1:16:41
SPEAKER_03: So we need to ask our traditional question, Mike, and it's one of our favorites.
1:16:45
SPEAKER_03: Can you please tell us what your favorite day or experience has been as a geoscientist?
1:16:51
SPEAKER_03: I'm sure you get a lot of people saying, Oh, there's no one thing.
1:16:54
SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, it's just which which is true for all of us, right?
1:16:57
SPEAKER_02: Like the glory of what we do is that you know, you have so many experiences that are all real, you know.
1:17:02
SPEAKER_02: But I I've listened to your podcast enough to know that this is coming down the pipe here.
1:17:06
SPEAKER_02: I was thinking about this, and so when I was an undergrad in Michigan State, I had just an amazing opportunity to go in the field uh as a field assistant for Professor Brian Hampton, who's now at I think New Mexico State.
1:17:19
SPEAKER_02: And we went up to um south of Denali, and you know, we got helicopter dropped into this little cirque where we spent three weeks just camping and hiking and dodging grizzly bears.
1:17:31
SPEAKER_02: I felt like Jack Lundham out there, you know, it was great.
1:17:34
SPEAKER_02: Oh man.
1:17:34
SPEAKER_02: Um, but we were in this little cirque.
1:17:36
SPEAKER_02: It's the you know, these these rounded, tall valleys when you're kind of in this valley, you are in the rocks that you can see around you, and it's it's really cool.
1:17:47
SPEAKER_02: But it in certain ways, you're like, Well, Denali is just like a couple kilometers that way, but we never see it.
1:17:53
SPEAKER_02: In the clouds, we had I mean, we had a couple days where we are stuck in our tents because it was so cloudy, there was so much fog that if we walked out of our tents, we could have like gotten lost, you know.
1:18:03
SPEAKER_02: Wildfires, it was just so fun.
1:18:06
SPEAKER_02: We're just grinding it, and Jesse knows about the tundra too.
1:18:09
SPEAKER_02: When you're laden down with a hundred pounds of rocks trying to climb uphill in tundra, it is just brutal.
1:18:15
SPEAKER_02: It's so hard.
1:18:16
SPEAKER_02: It's just this squishy junk, and like it's like going up sleeping bear dunes with a hundred pounds of rocks on your back.
1:18:22
SPEAKER_02: It's so hard.
1:18:23
SPEAKER_02: So we were out there for a long time, and then one day eventually the the weather broke for us, and we we took this hike up a tell slope and up onto the top of the cirque, and there was denali.
1:18:36
SPEAKER_02: It was just towering over us.
1:18:39
SPEAKER_02: It's this massive granite that you know the pictures don't do justice.
1:18:44
SPEAKER_02: You know what it's like to feel a sense of scale that is so far beyond your ability to comprehend it.
1:18:50
SPEAKER_02: That was what that was for me.
1:18:51
SPEAKER_02: That was the moment, more so than driving from the southeast to the Tetons and seeing them just like explode in front of you, you know, which is also an incredible feeling.
1:19:01
SPEAKER_02: Being out there busting our butts for weeks and then having this really special.
1:19:05
SPEAKER_02: We just basically climbed up there to do field work and we just sat there for hours, just watching Denali just be for me.
1:19:12
SPEAKER_02: Like this is as close to spiritual as I get, being rooted in this experience of overwhelming beauty and majesty, and feeling a deep for me.
1:19:22
SPEAKER_02: The spiritual's connection is the scientific thing, like it's this wonder at this world we're in.
1:19:28
SPEAKER_02: And and seeing Denali with you know, mid-summer sun in Alaska for hours.
1:19:34
SPEAKER_02: God, it was just incredible.
1:19:35
SPEAKER_02: That that really opened that really opened me up, you know, sitting there like crying and stuff.
1:19:39
SPEAKER_02: It was yeah, for sure.
1:19:41
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's so good.
1:19:42
SPEAKER_00: So good.
1:19:42
SPEAKER_00: Mike, well, we won't do do that this summer, but we'll sit on some really old rocks and uh we'll get philosophical and spiritual about it a little bit.
1:19:50
SPEAKER_00: Uh absolutely we're going we're going up to Acosta uh this summer, Chris, for for a little bit.
1:19:55
SPEAKER_03: So the both are nice.
1:19:57
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's awesome.
1:19:58
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
1:19:58
SPEAKER_00: So that that's a that's a good day.
1:20:00
SPEAKER_00: And I think you know, you brought the Tetons, but there's a lot of experiences that people you just gotta like plug into that feeling or that, you know, think about the geology and visualize the mountains, the sediments folding, or whatever it is um that's going on.
1:20:14
SPEAKER_00: I I think that's a pretty accessible experience.
1:20:17
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to be in front of Denali to get hints of that experience in this field and with this geological understanding.
1:20:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, just opening yourself up to feeling experiencing the unknown in a real deep, profound way, you know.
1:20:30
SPEAKER_00: Totally.
1:20:31
SPEAKER_00: So cool.
1:20:31
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
1:20:32
SPEAKER_00: That's a good one.
1:20:33
SPEAKER_00: Well, Mike, I mean, I'm totally biased, but this has been one of the more fun interviews, obviously.
1:20:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we'll we'll have it again.
1:20:39
SPEAKER_00: We'll go to the Smithsonian, we'll we'll go to the as somebody as Chris and I, uh somebody Chris and I go know calls it the Smithomium.
1:20:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh we'll come to the Smithomium and we'll we'll visit and we'll go you know look at the collections and we'll maybe record a podcast.
1:20:52
SPEAKER_03: Jesse, we'll look at the whole nine yards, won't we?
1:20:54
SPEAKER_00: The whole nine yards, the smithsomium and the whole nine yards up there in the Smithsonium.
1:20:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh that'll be a good one.
1:21:00
SPEAKER_02: I apologize for the inside jokes.
1:21:01
SPEAKER_02: No, that's that's Grand.
1:21:02
SPEAKER_02: I hope it wasn't I hope it wasn't you that says it that way, Chris.
1:21:05
SPEAKER_03: No, it was not me.
1:21:06
SPEAKER_03: It was a character, but it wasn't me.
1:21:07
SPEAKER_03: It was Joyce.
1:21:08
SPEAKER_00: So um no, uh uh thanks, Mike.
1:21:13
SPEAKER_00: We really appreciate it.
1:21:13
SPEAKER_00: Sorry for going long, but this is awesome.
1:21:15
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Mike.
1:21:17
SPEAKER_03: Thanks for the opportunity, guys.
1:21:18
SPEAKER_03: Nice to meet you again, Mike.
1:21:20
SPEAKER_03: And we again meet you.
1:21:22
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we we we still left Bowen's log hanging.
1:21:25
SPEAKER_02: Now people are like, what the heck is Bowen's log?
1:21:27
SPEAKER_02: Well, you people, you're just gonna have to tune in for the next time when we talk about Bowen's log hanging.
1:21:31
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
1:21:32
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
1:21:33
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
1:21:34
SPEAKER_00: Oh, awesome.
1:21:34
SPEAKER_00: All right, thanks, Mike.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_00: All right, guys.
1:21:39
SPEAKER_00: Hey, that's a wrap.
1:21:40
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening.
1:21:41
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1:21:52
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1:21:54
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