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Is Geology Getting Worse? · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you're just a big, big old ball of idiot over there sometimes.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know that, Chris?
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: But it's good, right?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: A big old bedraggled bedraggled.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, oh no.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: I forgot the word again.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: I went and I talked to my mom.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: It was not a science word.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: You talked to her on Friday last week?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I did.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: How'd the conversation go?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: You want me to call her right now?
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's get Joyce on the line.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna call her right now.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get the word.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: A guest calling.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: This is like back to who wants to be a millionaire.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Phone a friend.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Can you hear or not?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a little bit.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Joyce live.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: I think she'll answer.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: She won't answer the phone.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: No, I don't, because she'll call me right back because they never have their phones like I don't know what the deal is.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a parent thing to not do to not answer your phone.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Unbelievable.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm expecting her to hey mom.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: How are you?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: I'm doing well.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: How are you?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing well too, thank you.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, just to let you know, you are on speakerphone and uh Jesse and I are recording.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, so hey, you're on Planet Geo, Mom.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to know that I listened.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um Well I gotta get my glasses.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you have to get your glasses, Mom?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: Where this is a phone call.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: You you don't need your glasses.
• 1:43
  unknown: Okay.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Mom, all right, I have a question though, because uh I I know what we talked about it on Friday.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: What was the word from a long time ago that you were impressed by?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: Perseverate.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, perseverate.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's what it was.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: Perseverate.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: Remember that, Jesse?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's what it was.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Perseverate.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: You thought it was a feldspar or something like that.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, you're right.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: Perseverate.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Perseverate.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: There we go.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: Joyce is the first one.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: And now Jesse just worked in bedraggled again to to today's episode.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: So that was the other word of the day for you.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: So And yesterday I listened to one of the uh one of your latest, uh probably not the latest, but um it was also very good.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And and I was gonna comment on that, but I never got it now.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: What what was the episode about, Mom?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um mom.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: What was the episode about, mom?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, garnets have eyes.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there we go.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Garnets have eyes.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: I want to know the word her favorite word out of that episode.
• 2:50
  unknown: Excellent.
• 2:50
  unknown: I love it.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, hold on.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: Jesse had a question.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: Jesse just asked, what was your favorite word out of that episode?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I was just thinking about that too.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm on the spot though now.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: You are on the spot, yes.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: I did have a favorite word though.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: You did.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: I did, but I can't think of it right now.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: Was it garnet?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I just woke up from my nap.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: Well how many naps a day do you take, Mom?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: You're lying, Mom.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: You take you take multiple naps.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: She could send us an email with her favorite or word of the day.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: That would be great.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Jesse said he wants an email with the word of the day for the episode.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: I will, I will, uh, we'll do that tomorrow.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then Jesse will find a way to work it in.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: He's got a to-do list.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's perfect.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: All right, Mom, I gotta go.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'm working.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: I got my hard hat on.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'm working, man.
• 3:45
  unknown: Love you.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: Love you too.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: All right, bye.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: Bye, Mom.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's too good.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: A joyous appearance on the I mean, that's too good right there.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I could not have asked for anything more out of that discussion.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's those ones that have eyes.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: I was really wondering.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: I was actually doubting whether she was going to be able to remember what the episode had been.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: But it you know what, Chris, it was a good one, though.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't really matter.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: It was a good one.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: It was a good one, yeah.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: No memory of it, but it was a good one.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm damn sure of it.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: So funny.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so Chris, this is we're gonna keep it in the family here a little bit.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, we are.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're keeping it in the family.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so this there's a question.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is a listener plural question.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: We got this from Valeria and also from my father.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: So the question really the well, there's kind of very variations on the theme, but the theme of the questions were are geological events getting more common and or worse?
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Those were kind of the two themes.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it makes sense, right?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: You you read the news, and especially if you're a listener who's listening to this podcast and you're not a geologist by training, and you're maybe like newly interested in geology, when you're newly interested in something, you start to read more about it and pay attention to more to it.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so you might all of a sudden the volcanic eruption stories online might stand out, or the algorithms of Facebook and whatever might feed you more stuff like that.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: So you might be seeing more news stories about volcanic eruptions or earthquakes, or I don't know, Chris, what other stuff has happened that might be.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: No, that's actually a really good point.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think maybe if you start reading stuff about geological events or you maybe double click on some things because you have this maybe new interest in geoscience, then you get more of it.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like you said, the the Facebook or Instagram algorithms are gonna funnel that stuff your way.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's freaky, but that's a really good point.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a good, I mean, I've noticed this myself.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: I typically I don't really scroll news, I guess.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like I read a few news sites that I subscribe to that I go to regularly, like every day.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: But recently I've been just kind of passively letting Google show me news uh things.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I did that is because I had searched a couple things that were geology related, and then I went onto the Google News site and just kind of clicked intentionally on geology, especially like critical minerals kind of things.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like a really curated geology news site for me, this Google thing.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then forget I was doing, you know, you as you over time I kept going to it, and then I clicked on non-geology news things, and now it's not all geology news, it's kind of driving me crazy because I like want my really curated algorithm that totally changes what you see.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: I know I totally I I understand what you're saying, and it's it can be really annoying.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: Just because you click on something, then all of a sudden now that's what you start getting, and you get less of what you really want.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: I want to like revert back or I want to have my I kind of want to have my algorithmic geology news fed to me because I was really interested.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was like mining news, it was a very niche subset of news that I was interested in reading only at certain amounts of time.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: It you know, it wasn't giving me current events, but it was had a single purpose for my life, and now it's been diluted by all this other stuff because I clicked on it.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: But anyways, so Jesse, let's frame this discussion in terms of what constitutes a geologic or geoscience-related event, like a disastrous kind of thing or something that affects a lot of people?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: We're talking about really maybe four or five things, right?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and but I wanna so the these like disastrous things, but I also want to ask you what do you think if you are looking at geology news, let's say broadly news, what categories of stuff are in there?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, certainly the disastrous stuff, which we'll talk about, the four or five categories.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Are there other things that you either would see in your newsfeed or you would want to see in your newsfeed that are geoscience news that are aren't disasters, I guess.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you might see something biologically related, right?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that's something you and I don't want to see.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: Get that out of there.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: Jockey.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: Why would you?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: You know, just like you know, we're actually though, since since COVID, you're gonna see more of that kind of thing with infectious diseases and you know the bird flu or all these kinds of things, right?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: So you you're gonna read about that.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the other thing, there's not gonna be a lot of chemistry-related stuff per se.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't see that, but outside of the geosciences, which there's a ton of, then you see, I think a lot of space and astro-related stuff, right?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: What about do you agree?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: I I agree completely.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like space, and uh the other thing I think I might say is that we do see a lot of, or another way to ask the question, Chris, like do you see a lot of scientific discovery news?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Do you in your your channels do you s get get the oh geologists discovered some new phase at the Cormantal Boundary?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: And here, you know, these sort of pop science news press releases.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Do you does that come across to your I do?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because that to me is like a different category.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's still geology news, but it's a different category than like, you know, some volcano erupted somewhere.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: I just got one uh today, so as an example, is uh this new huge volcano that is recently discovered on one of Jupiter's moons.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, right, okay, yeah.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's hey, that's geoscience, definitely.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's geoscience, it's planetary geology and it's astro related too, so it's it kind of like fits a lot of different uh disciplines, but I guess.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: Volcanoes, yeah, but they had like before and after pictures, which were like fascinating, seriously.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: But the articles, those kinds of things though, are skin deep.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, they totally are.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Which we've kind of talked about before.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's a frustration at times because they only go skin deep.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: Some some of them, not all of them, some of them are a little buzzwordy.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Many of them, depending on the site you're going to, are not buzzwordy and are actually kind of deep, at least take a crack at going deep and accurate.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: But many of them are.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it's so catchy and grabby that it was like snagged from somewhere, and then you so you try to like pick out key words that you can do a more in-depth search or find out what is maybe a little bit more about what's happening, and that can be very difficult because it's so new.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's right.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: There haven't been you know papers published on this yet.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: This is just uh just something that was tossed out and the headline grabbed.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, that's that's exactly right.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, okay, sorry, interrupted.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Back to your back to your initial point.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: If we're talking about geological events that hit the news, we're usually talking about some kind of disasters.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: What categories would you typically find in that?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: So I would think that okay, earthquakes, obviously, uh, volcanoes, landslides, and mass wasting kind of events.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: And then fourth would be climate science, global warming, climate change, you know, more extreme weather events.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, hurricanes, typhoon, yeah, extreme weather.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: I would agree on that.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so when you think about like, is there another category?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like, there's nothing that really jumps to mind with anything else.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: The only one maybe flooding, but that's kind of related to climate and weather.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna say flooding.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: I guess you could maybe make an argument that like tsunamis are a different beast, but they're they're usually related to an earthquake.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: But those are seismic, yeah.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but there's sometimes discrete events where the the earthquake doesn't really matter, it's the tsunami that matters, and we have repercussions.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I just saw one about as a seismology discussion, but it was some tsunami or sea shwave up in Greenland was like detectable by seismometers across the world for like a week straight or something.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: A landslide and a fjord happened.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, uh the yeah, that kind of thing.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, but four or maybe five categories.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe you could throw in their water crises and like uh groundwater depression and stuff like that, to droughts, and but again, that has big time overlap with what's going on weather-wise and climate-wise.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: No, I agree.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, weather we would have landslides or mass wasting, we would have volcanoes, earthquakes, and then maybe a couple other accessory ones, but but those would kind of be the the big categories.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: So, of those four, let's just ask the question.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: Of those four, I would say the short answer to the questions from your dad and Valeria is no, they're not getting worse.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: But but two of them definitely probably not.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: And we're going to talk about the math and the statistics behind that.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: And then two of them quite possibly yes.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: So earthquakes and volcanoes, those are the categories of things that we would say, no, they're almost certainly not getting worse.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll go through some of the statistics over the last 35 years in earthquake data, global earthquake data.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: We can then take the understanding of statistics that we use there, you could apply that to landslides or extreme weather events, which would have the same underlying statistical principles.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: And this would inform how climate scientists or landslide experts go about studying the impacts of, let's say, climate change on extreme landslide events or on extreme weather events, and how you would say, okay, is it getting worse or not?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: You'd have to check a couple of boxes in the statistical world of to say with confidence these are getting worse through time.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I think this will be a helpful exercise.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Even though there's gonna be a bunch of numbers, we're gonna throw numbers at you.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna try and keep them straight here.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, let's try to keep them like straight and let's not overdo the numbers side of it.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: But we're gonna use earthquakes as our main focal point.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: And again, remember that earthquakes and volcanoes, we're lumping them into the same category of are these events getting worse as time goes on?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: And the short answer is no.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: But and we're gonna use the statistics of earthquakes to prove this point or to talk about this point.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason we're gonna use earthquakes is because you get a lot more data points with earthquakes as opposed to volcanic eruptions, a lot, a lot more data points because there are we're talking about on the order of 20,000 earthquakes that happen each year all over the world.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, that's a that's a staggering amount.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, 20,000.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's massive.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: That's yeah, over 55 earthquakes per day.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I I actually do this in my geology class.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think I've talked about this before, Jesse, that I have this 9x13 wall map.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: I have this large wall, and I've pasted an entire world map on it, and then my geology students every Thursday morning, uh, one group and then they'll rotate through groups will come in early and plot the earthquakes that have happened all over the world.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: Now, just because I can't have them plotting like several hundred earthquakes each week, I set the parameters at 4.5 and above all over the world.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's still probably a lot of earthquakes that they have to plot.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they're plotting between, I would say, 80 and sometimes 130 earthquakes a week.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, okay.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: All over the world.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's a lot still.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: So what we're gonna do, Chris, because again, that's so there's a lot of information here.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna focus on large earthquakes and uh we're gonna put the the the filter above a magnitude seven.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: So anything seven or above is what we're gonna deem as a major earthquake, quote unquote major.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the benefit here is you said that number 20,000 earthquakes each year are detectable.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now, our seismometers, we talked to Diana Roman like three or four years ago on this podcast.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Our seismometers, the things she used, they have gotten way better and they continue to get way better, meaning more sensitive, but they've always been able, for as long as we've really had seismometers, they've been able to pick up a magnitude seven earthquake.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: So these have been detectable for the last 35 years.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: So we're not like increasing our sensitivity to these big earthquakes.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why we're gonna focus on the big ones, the magnitude seven or above.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: That brings up an interesting thought.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, Jesse, Watson is clicking around in the background there.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: Your dog is walking around making all kinds of noise.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: The dog needs to learn when we're working here.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's a that's right.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: Lay down because um, but it makes me think, though, that there are more and more and more seismometers that are like strategically placed all over the planet.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, look, you look at what happened in Yellowstone this past summer, this hydrothermal explosion, and then what resulted from that.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, a lot more seismometers were moved.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: They wanted to try to figure out what was going on groundwater-wise and so on.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: But that begs the point of like why do people sometimes think that maybe geologic events are getting worse is because we're just more aware of all of these events than ever before, right?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you have more equipment, you have social media, so it spreads faster.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that plays into this idea or maybe perception that things are getting worse.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, that I think that's exactly right.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly right.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so these big earthquakes have always been, I mean, these are big events, these are earth-shaking events that that send reverberations around the planet that seismometers have been able to pick up for at least the last 35 years and more like the last 50 or 60 years.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: So what we're gonna go through is 1988 to 2021, the number of earthquakes that have happened in a year that are larger than a magnitude seven.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: So seven and above.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so, Chris, the the average here, if we look at all of those 35 years is hold on, hold on, Jesse.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: Nope, nope.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: Think about that a second.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like we gotta put we gotta push pause on this.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, okay.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you're right.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: So what do you think, our listeners?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think the average number of massive earthquakes would be anywhere in the world on any given year?
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: What would you have said, Chris?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: What would you have so would you have said lower or higher than this number?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: I would have said lower.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: I would have said lower.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: I would have said lower too.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking in the like handful.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's what I would have guessed.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think that there's a reason for this, though.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: I would have too, because you know, I typically don't see when we plot earthquakes in my geology class every Thursday morning, there aren't many sevens and above that we'll plot during the course of a year.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: We're not plotting 16 of these, you know.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that what what happens is when you have these really big earthquakes, let's you know, 2011 Japan earthquake that causes tsunami, 9.2.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you're gonna get a lot of earthquakes then that are seven and above that are tied to that one event.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, right, yeah.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_02: So you're gonna get these clusters.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe that's why the number is higher than what I would have thought.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, let's go into it.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: So the the average here is more or less 16, is the average.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's a lot.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: And this this is actually 16 is the average over the last 50 years, and we're only looking at the last 35 years of data.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: So our average of the data we're gonna go through is 14 and a half.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: So close to 16, not quite.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: But that's the number.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about more than a dozen is the average.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Chris, I don't think it's really effective.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe it is.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'll read through 10 of these numbers and just so that it gives you an idea of the range that we're dealing with.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Not every year has exactly 16.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna go from 1988, there was six, nineteen eighty-nine, there was seven, nineteen ninety, eighteen, ninety-one, sixteen, ninety-two, thirteen, ninety-three, twelve, ninety-four, thirteen, then twenty, fifteen, sixteen, twelve, eighteen, fifteen, sixteen, thirteen, fifteen, sixteen, eleven, eleven.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: So you get the you get the idea.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's a range.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Six on the low end, all the way up to twenty-four in twenty ten.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's twenty-four of these big earthquakes.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a big range in these things, but sixteen's the average.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know, Chris.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: This was was this a surprising amount of variation year to year, do you think?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: To you, or do you think your your students, if you presented them this, would would it be surprising amount of variation?
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so to me, it's not surprising that there's this variation.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh maybe I would have expected more variation in this, actually.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I don't know.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's an interesting thought.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: I never never really uh never occurred to me to ask them about this.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'd be curious about the sort of knee-jerk, the gut reaction.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, okay, the average is 16.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: It can't be lower than zero and it can go pretty high.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think the variation is?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: How much how much does it oscillate around 16?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think my instinct here, Chris, is the same as yours.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like, well, I know the answer, but the there's a way to assess this.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: There's a statistically rigorous way to assess what the variation, how much it should bounce around 16 is.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And your gut is exactly right.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's about an appropriate amount of variation.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Your gut is exactly right, and we'll go through the statistics that these kind of check out here.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I'd be curious what your students think.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like it, you know, if if I I'll ask.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: This is now two episodes in a row, Jesse, that I have a homework assignment that I start to bring because of this podcast.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: I gotta I gotta bring it into my classroom.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: Your students are getting a lot of busy work from this podcast.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: No, Jesse, here's no, they're not, it's not busy work at all.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: Neither one of these things are.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: But here's the thing is Jesse, I have a harder time as I get older and more experienced and and I know more stuff, I have a harder time getting through all my material.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: This is getting ridiculous.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna it's gonna be geology one and geology two.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: Why are we still talking about rocks and minerals when we're on week 39?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, right, right, right.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: Move on, man.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's funny.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh, you just get more eye rolls from the students.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's okay.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I know.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: But that's a rule.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_02: They can't eye roll me.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: I don't like eye rolls.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, no.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, no.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: So now they do it just to just to push my buttons.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Of course.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's good to do.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: See if they can get a get a reaction out of me.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, okay, so Chris, out of those 35 years, like I said, the mean of these is is 14 and a half, roughly.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, Chris, there, if you'll allow me to go into little statistical weeds here, is that that okay to just briefly?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely it is.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Keep me out of it though.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: So we're talking about extreme events here, these earthquakes, and we're counting extreme events, so zero up to some number.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: And And the statistics here, we use these all the time in my world, Chris, of mass spectrometry, where we are detecting ions, and actually detecting an ion in the back of a mass spectrometer is considered a rare event because we we detect somewhere above zero, zero to several billion per second.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: So the statistics are the same here.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a generally accepted rule that the standard deviation, and the standard deviation here is okay, we've got a mean of 16.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: The standard deviation is every measurement that I make every year of those 35, what's the average distance from the mean?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: On average, how much deviation is there?
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: What is the standard deviation in that population of 35 measurements?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: So how far is it the difference from the mean or the median?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: The difference from the mean.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can calculate them versus the median too, but the standard deviation is from the mean, typically, we refer to it that way.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, good question, though.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: So we're dealing with the mean, and there's a whole bunch of assumptions about it being normal distribution and all this stuff.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: But so if we assume that there's a generally accepted rule for how you calculate the standard deviation, and the standard deviation is just the square root of the mean, of the number of events.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: So if we have 16 large earthquakes, the standard deviation should be around about the square root of 16, which Chris, what's which is four, which is four.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: There we go.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but but like it's perfect because if you look at the data that you just rattled off, you know, over the 35 years, the standard deviation is 4.1, right where it should be.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right where it should be, right?
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: So okay, what that means is this population is is behaving as we think it should, if it's a rare event, a measurement of a rare event.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Either the event happened or it did not happen.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: Either an earthquake above seven happened or it did not.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: Either we counted an ion or we didn't count an ion.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's just a happened or did not.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: And these are the statistics.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: So if we had, if the mean was 100 earthquakes above seven, then the standard deviation we would expect a variance around that of around 10.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: The square root of 100 is 10, so that's the kind of variance we would expect.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the good news so 90 to 110.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: 90 to 110, that would be the average range.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so that's good.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: That the population, there's scatter in it, and the scatter is as much as we would expect.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: So now to the question of is it getting worse?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so the way that people do this differs in different communities.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you pay attention to like physics news, if people are trying to detect, I don't know, I'm gonna get the words wrong here, but they're trying to find some boson or something, like the Higgs boson discovery or whatever, they usually need a measurement that is like five or seven standard deviations away from a non-measurement.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: So they need something that's an extreme probability, like their data has to be extreme outlier to say we detected a Higgs boson or something like that.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: If we use that to say is the population is like 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, are we moving in a positive direction?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is it five standard deviations away from the mean?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: The way that math works is we just take 16, our average, and say five times four, four is the standard deviation, five is five standard deviations, that would give us sixteen plus five times four is thirty-six.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we did that, that's the high end, the low end would be sixteen minus twenty, which is zero.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the range we look for, and none of our data are even close to zero or not even close.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: So different communities would would kind of narrow that.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not entirely sure what the like climate change landslide community uses or the extreme weather event community uses, but you could use three standard deviations, and the range there would be two or twenty-eight.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: And again, none of our data are outside of that three standard deviation range.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so, Chris, a question for you.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: I made a little plot down here that we're both looking at of the the number of earthquakes greater than seven versus year, and just the knee jerk.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is like, do you think there's a trend in that?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like, because I no, absolutely not.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking at it right now.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: You could draw a best fit line straight across.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, completely straight across it, right?
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: Now completely straight across.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: There's no trend up or down.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: There's no trend up or down.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: You could potentially you'd be misleading yourself, but there are two data points.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: The 1988 and 1989, the number of earthquakes there were both anomalously low.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was six earthquakes and seven major earthquakes in those two years.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the very beginning of our plot starts really low.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: And even with that low start, it doesn't look like there's any trend in this data to more extreme values.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really important because there's the phrase, I for I can't never remember who told it.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's there's three things there's lies, damn lies, and statistics.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: And that's good.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: I like it.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna steal that.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a great one, right?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um embarrassingly, I've forgotten who said it initially, but lies, damn lies, and statistics.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of believe in that.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: I I use statistics all the time, and um, there's good use of statistics and there's ways to tell lies with statistics.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so you always got to do that kind of knee-jerk gut check.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a trend in this data or am I really manipulating it?
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer here is no, especially if you plot that mean and the standard deviation on here, everything falls within the band of two or three standard deviations.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's no trend in this thing at all.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: So the answer is no earthquakes are not getting worse.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: This is really interesting because I do uh an exercise that looks a lot like this scatter plot that you have here.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: I do it actually with my freshman, and we look at a lake in Wisconsin, and we plot the number of days that this lake has ice on the lake where you could walk across the lake.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: So it's either ice on or ice off.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: And they've been keeping really detailed records of these days for the last since the 1860s.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh wow.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: So this is days per year, like per winter basically.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: Days days on per year, and it's it's measured during the winter time.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: And and so then if you take these groups and you plot all 100, yeah, 160 years plus now of this data, it's not a flat line.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: The number of days on is less and less and less and less.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's really interesting.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not quite the same, but you that type of data on or off, can you walk across it or not?
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: It should generally follow the same principles of these extreme events, counting statistics of extreme events, what we call.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's fancy words for it, but it's counting statistics, is what we call it in our field of study.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: And and it should apply generally to that.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: You're counting days out of a year, but it's so it's not quite the same.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: But it's I'd be curious to see the scatter.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: So look at the scatter.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is the scatter like roughly approximate the square to the average?
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that'd be kind of interesting to I I don't know.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't looked at it from that standpoint.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't looked at it from a standard deviation standpoint, which I will now, but I'll I'll send you the the plot.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'll send you a little bit of a little bit of a little bit.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's cool.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: So do you do that for a lab?
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, cool.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good one.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: It is, yeah.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'd be interesting to compare that one, which is probably changing due to climate change, I'm guessing.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're getting less ice over days.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: Compared to our earthquake data here, which is showing no change.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Which no change.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: No different, no, no more extreme events, basically.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: So volcanoes are gonna they're they're gonna fit into this category too.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: That was gonna be my question.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: Was your instinct is that volcanoes would follow this this exact trend, basically, right?
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: Large volcanic eruptions, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: And even probably have more scatter because there's fewer, as you said it from the outset, there's like fewer large volcanic eruptions that matter to society, particularly.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, we're gonna be even there's gonna be even more variants or state or the standard deviation is gonna be larger here.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: So gonna be much bigger, yeah, for sure.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: But the other two, I I think climate change is like pretty apparent that that's going to show a trend.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: Things can get worse, you can get more extreme events more often, you know, because of a changing climate.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: But what about mass wasting?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like what a consider, let's say, landslides and things like this.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: Is it possible that these are getting worse as time goes on?
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: And just like think about that for a second.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: What would be the root cause of it?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, you and I both think that yeah, there's absolutely a possibility that those events could be getting worse and worse and worse.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: Now that begs the question, how come, right?
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: Like, can we talk about that a second?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I also want to add an extra layer to that.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: How would you tell?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: So let's say, okay, let's play this out.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Let's say landslides.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Chris, you and I, I can speak for you, I think.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: We would say landslides are certainly possible, that they're getting worse, and here's why.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: More rainfall, more extreme rainfall events would saturate the soil and and you know, precondition it for landslides.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: Also, perhaps permafrost melting up in the Arctic might be make you know conditions up in the north or in cold latitudes more conducive to landslides.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a couple reasons why we might expect landslides to be increasing.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, how would you test it?
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: If I gave you a bunch of landslide data and said, here's the number of big landslides that occur in a given year, how would you say is it increasing?
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: How would you like kind of test that, right?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the answer's simple.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of do the same statistical thing we just did.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like look at the mean standard deviation and say, does it start to consistently deviate outside of two standard deviations?
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: And is there a trend line that's positive?
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: However, I think it would be more difficult to get good data on just because uh you can't measure a mass waste in event with seismometers and you know things like that.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it's harder to quantify that way.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_02: But I want to add to your list of possible reasons, though, in terms of why these kinds of events might be getting worse.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: And like that has to do with us and development.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: We over-steepen slopes.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good point.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: We add weight to over steepened slopes, we also add water because we do irrigation for lawns and things like this to over steepen slopes, and so just the the encroachment of humanity to more extreme settings, geological settings where we're going beyond the angle of repose, the steepest angle that a slope can remain stable.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: We keep pushing that and pushing it and pushing it.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, that's totally right.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good point.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: I I hadn't thought through that.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's probably a lot of things that we do that could contribute to big events like this that are getting worse.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: No, uh the in those things in the uh kind of climate change induced category for sure.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know, I haven't um it'd be interesting to pull the the statistics of like hurricanes or typhoons or or kind of big weather events like that, or extreme, yeah, basically extreme weather events that should behave in the same statistical manner as these earthquakes.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're dealing with counting extreme events.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: So it'd be interesting to pull that data, maybe that's another for another episode probably, but to look at that and say, oh yeah, okay, does it get outside of the range that uh the sort of scatter?
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: Does it scatter outside of that range progressively over time?
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: So interesting.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: You know, another idea would be to to like look at the use of lidar where we can see through the canopy down to the regolith of the earth's surface, and you can then see these mass-wasting landslide kind of scars that have been covered up and are invisible, but lidar sees right through it.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: Then we can see where events have happened before.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: I think of the Oso slide that happened in Washington a few years ago, and they went back over this with LIDAR.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: And oh my gosh, you can see these massive slides that are really obscured now.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's really, really interesting.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if we did that LIDAR exercise, we'd have to um back out for the Crisple Heist tractor effects because those are gonna show up like a big red light at Hudsonville, Michigan, all the all the landslides induced by Chris's tractor work.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I did something too.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: So I I wanted to attach my snowblower while the weather's warm, you know, so I don't like freeze my hands on all this steel.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm just so impressed.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: I love my tractor.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: I got my snowblower attached and then detached, and I can I can do it in under 10 minutes.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have like a brush hog attachment?
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: No, but I gotta get one.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: I need a brush hog.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: What attachments do you have?
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: I have an undercarriage, so I have a 60-inch mowing deck on it, and it's a quick connect, so I can drive right over it and connect it, and then I can drive back off it and drop it just like in 10 seconds flat.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: I've got a bucket, I have a ballast box on the back, and I have my snowblower.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: So in the front.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: Those are my attachments.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: I yeah.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then I'm gonna put forks in the back of it on my three-point hitch on the back.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: That's when I'm gonna move wood with in the winter.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna put a big bin on the back of it and yeah, lift it up and down to my forks.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm I got it all planned out.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great thing.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm good to go.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: Just it's like uh what is it?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: You I know you can you can see this.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: Me and my my snowmobile suit, like all done up, yeah, all did up.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: Big fuzzy hood.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: With my cup of coffee in my hand.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, absolutely.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: I can't wait.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, bring it on.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna just be out there bombing around in your tractor.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm excited to see in a couple weeks.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: Come uh come visit and check out this tractor.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, I'll put you in the bucket and take you out to get the mail.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, as long as you give me a beer, I'll sit down with it.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: Put you in the front end loader.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: That sounds great.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's a plan.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, done.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Can't wait for that.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: You and Shep can see it right now.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: We'll be hanging out in the tractor.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Heck yeah.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's the best.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, good stuff, man.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, uh, what do you think?
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: Gotta wrap.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think Ron and Valeria, thanks for the question.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was a good one.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and yeah, it was.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Good question.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
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• 36:34
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