Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Gems, Museums, and Minerals: Interview with Dr. Gabriela Farfan

Transcript

Gems, Museums, and Minerals: Interview with Dr. Gabriela Farfan · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:03
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
0:14
SPEAKER_01: Oh I think Google is slow, but I also think you might be this world's slowest typer I've ever seen.
0:21
SPEAKER_01: What is this strange thing with buttons and letters on it?
0:28
SPEAKER_01: What is this thing in front of me?
0:30
SPEAKER_01: How does one use it?
0:35
SPEAKER_00: All right, Chris.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: Hold on.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: I alright.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: I am doing great.
0:39
SPEAKER_01: How are you doing, Jesse?
0:40
SPEAKER_01: I'm doing well.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: What did you do?
0:41
SPEAKER_01: Just put down a beer or what do you got?
0:43
SPEAKER_01: What do you got?
0:44
SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's coffee.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: It's coffee.
0:45
SPEAKER_01: Oh, all right, all right, all right.
0:46
SPEAKER_01: Fair enough.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: Hey, this was a great interview.
0:50
SPEAKER_01: It really was.
0:50
SPEAKER_01: We just had the great pleasure of interviewing Dr.
0:53
SPEAKER_01: Gabriella Farfan, who is the Coralin Whitney curator of Gems and Minerals at the Smithsonian National Museum in Washington, D.C.
1:01
SPEAKER_01: And she's an expert at minerals, for sure.
1:04
SPEAKER_01: And she has, I mean, she got her bachelor's degree from Stanford University.
1:10
SPEAKER_01: She got a PhD from MIT in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: I mean, top flight.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: Mineralogist here, right?
1:17
SPEAKER_01: And she has some really interesting things to talk about about mineralogy and really drove home the importance of mineralogy for the geosciences to me in a way I hadn't really appreciated before.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: Right, I agree.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: You know, because that was one of the things that when we were getting ready for this interview, we were talking about just how the field of mineralogy is struggling in college departments.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: And many programs are dropping it.
1:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's right.
1:42
SPEAKER_01: It's one of these sort of old fields that was very important and maybe is less important now.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: She has an incredible answer to, you know, why that's short-sighted.
1:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's right.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: And we got into a lot of discussions about what a curator at the Smithsonian does, you know, the beauty of the national collection of minerals and gems.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: I mean, totally cool stuff.
2:02
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, here is our interview with Dr.
2:05
SPEAKER_01: Gabriella Farfen, curator at the Smithsonian Institute.
2:09
SPEAKER_01: Enjoy.
2:13
unknown: Dr.
2:14
SPEAKER_01: Farfen, thank you for joining us on Planet Geo and welcome.
2:18
SPEAKER_03: Thank you for having me.
2:19
SPEAKER_03: It's great to be here.
2:20
SPEAKER_03: Hi, Jesse.
2:21
SPEAKER_03: Hi, Chris.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: Hi, nice to meet you.
2:23
SPEAKER_01: We are excited.
2:24
SPEAKER_01: This is uh this is fun.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: You have like one of the coolest jobs in geoscience, I think, coming from a nerd who likes rocks and minerals and stuff.
2:33
SPEAKER_01: You are a curator of mineralogy at the Smithsonian Museum, which is sort of the national museum in the United States, right?
2:40
SPEAKER_01: We have a friend who's a curator in the of rocks, basically, and he described his job to me once as he was in charge of our nation's rock collection, which I was like, it blew my mind.
2:50
SPEAKER_01: I was like, that's the most amazing job description that you could possibly have.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: Like, how cool.
2:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
2:56
SPEAKER_01: So what do you do?
2:57
SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is this is something that like Chris and I, I think, kind of have an idea because we we we live in this space, but for the average person, I don't think people know like what a curator does, especially at the Smithsonian Museum, which is in Washington, D.C.
3:09
SPEAKER_01: Like, what do you do?
3:10
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so I agree.
3:11
SPEAKER_04: This is for me, this is the coolest job in the whole wide world.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: Is it a dream job?
3:16
SPEAKER_01: Like, first of all, is it?
3:17
SPEAKER_04: It is my dream job, absolutely.
3:20
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
3:20
SPEAKER_04: I've been wanting to have this job since I was 16 years old.
3:24
SPEAKER_04: So I am so honored that I'm now at the Smithsonian.
3:28
SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's amazing.
3:29
SPEAKER_04: So so I'm like what we call a research curator.
3:32
SPEAKER_04: So it's a little different from other curatorial positions at other museums, in that at the Smithsonian, we do both research and curation work.
3:42
SPEAKER_04: So approximately half of my job involves doing scientific research, specifically on minerals.
3:50
SPEAKER_04: And the other half is to actually curate the National Gemma Mineral Collection.
3:55
SPEAKER_04: So, in terms of the research, it's very similar to what a professor would do, where you have a research program and you also train students and postdocs.
4:03
SPEAKER_04: And my research, I study biominerals and their crystal structures and chemistry.
4:08
SPEAKER_01: So, biominerals, this is just like what's the bio part here?
4:12
SPEAKER_04: Like these are the biopart are any uh organisms that make minerals.
4:17
SPEAKER_04: So it could be bacteria or even us human beings.
4:20
SPEAKER_04: We're biomineralizing organisms.
4:22
SPEAKER_04: So covers a whole gambit.
4:25
SPEAKER_04: Um, and then on the curation side, I actually work with a team of other curators and collection managers, and we make sure that all of the specimens in the collection are properly cataloged and stored so that they'll be available for many, many generations to come.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: Uh, Gabriella, how did you get into geoscience?
4:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, I have a kind of an aha moment that I had.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, what's your background?
4:49
SPEAKER_00: What did you have that kind of moment when you knew, yes, this is the direction I'm gonna go?
4:55
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, I actually did.
4:57
SPEAKER_01: Um, I love these stories.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: It's exciting when people have these stories.
5:01
SPEAKER_04: I think a lot of us geologists have had have had that moment.
5:05
SPEAKER_04: So um I had actually been interested in geology since I was a very small kid.
5:11
SPEAKER_04: So I actually grew up with two biologists as parents.
5:14
SPEAKER_04: So it was very difficult.
5:16
SPEAKER_01: Gabrielle, you are among company.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: My my father and Chris's father are both high school biology teachers.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: So you're in good hands here growing up with biology, you know, as the evil science of our parents.
5:29
SPEAKER_04: Well, now you understand why I somehow got back into biomineralogy.
5:32
SPEAKER_04: Right.
5:33
SPEAKER_04: Of course I had to, right?
5:34
SPEAKER_01: Yo, there you go.
5:35
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
5:36
SPEAKER_04: Um but yeah, it was very hard to escape science in our household.
5:38
SPEAKER_04: I was very lucky.
5:39
SPEAKER_04: My parents were very, very supportive.
5:41
SPEAKER_04: But my aha moment happened when I was about six years old, and my family had moved to Madison, Wisconsin.
5:49
SPEAKER_04: And my dad worked in the zoology department at the University of Wisconsin, and down the street was this small natural history museum.
5:58
SPEAKER_04: It was the UW Geology Museum.
6:01
SPEAKER_04: So during lunch, my dad would take me down there at times, and of course, I immediately gravitated towards the mineral display.
6:09
SPEAKER_04: And so one day I was there looking at the crystals, and like any six-year-old, I was just really excited about the colors and the shapes of the crystals.
6:19
SPEAKER_04: And around the corner, this old man walks towards me, and it turns out that it's the director of the museum.
6:26
SPEAKER_04: He's this older German gentleman, his name is Dr.
6:29
SPEAKER_04: Klaus Westfall, and he came up and asked me whether I liked minerals.
6:34
SPEAKER_04: And at the time I was a very shy kid.
6:37
SPEAKER_04: So I don't know if I just nodded at him or if I maybe responded and said, Yeah, but he could just tell that I was so excited about minerals.
6:46
SPEAKER_04: And he gave me my first quartz crystal.
6:48
SPEAKER_04: And so that really set everything in motion for me, where I realized I could start my own collection.
6:54
SPEAKER_04: And so I started visiting our local Bernie's rock shop.
6:58
SPEAKER_04: I would go there almost every weekend.
7:00
SPEAKER_04: And we also, my dad and I joined the Madison Gemma Mineral Club, and everyone there was just so supportive and so enthusiastic.
7:09
SPEAKER_04: And so it really became my family.
7:12
SPEAKER_04: And, you know, it's really easy to get excited about a topic, but it's much harder to continue that enthusiasm unless you're surrounded by other people who are equally as enthusiastic and supportive.
7:24
SPEAKER_04: So I've been very lucky that growing up in that environment, I had so many people that encouraged me to pursue mineralogy and eventually it became my career.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: That's incredible.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: You have really been preparing for the Smithsonian job your whole life.
7:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean, do you so do you still have the little quartz crystal?
7:42
SPEAKER_01: Like it was it little like pyramid, you know, kind of clear quartz crystal with the you know, the well, I forget what the pyramid, uh what it's what's it called?
7:49
SPEAKER_01: Why am I blanking on this?
7:52
SPEAKER_01: With the pyramid with like with the top on it, what's it called?
7:54
SPEAKER_00: It's not that difficult.
7:56
SPEAKER_04: It's like a termination, like a nice little termination.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: Termination, that's what I'm looking for.
8:01
SPEAKER_01: Yes, thank you.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: Okay, there we go.
8:03
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I don't actually know if I could pinpoint the exact crystal at this point.
8:08
SPEAKER_01: That is super cool.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: Gabriella, did you ever go in terms of like maintaining that enthusiasm?
8:14
SPEAKER_00: Did you go through a phase in your life like middle school or early high school when it became uncool when it stepped away a little bit or not?
8:21
SPEAKER_04: No, I was a huge nerd, so I just keep going with it.
8:25
SPEAKER_04: Um, it actually got more and more intense as I got older.
8:28
SPEAKER_04: So we started taking family vacations to mineral mines around the country.
8:34
SPEAKER_04: So it just got more and more involved.
8:36
SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
8:36
SPEAKER_01: I just knew you you're among kindred spirits here.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: And Chris, hold on.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: It it never became uncool because it wasn't cool.
8:42
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know this from a long history of being uncool.
8:45
SPEAKER_01: Like being a geologist is not cool.
8:47
SPEAKER_01: Okay, you know that really well.
8:50
SPEAKER_04: Well, but now it's cool.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: It is.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: Uh no, I don't actually know that, Jesse.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm the coolest guy I know.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, we rock.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: There we go.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: There we go.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: Got to get a good pun in here.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, all right.
9:03
SPEAKER_01: So that's like, you know, half your job is the minerals and stuff.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: Uh, what the other half is this research?
9:07
SPEAKER_01: So I want to, I'm curious about you know, the biomineralization, like what you're doing in detail.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, but can you give us like the high-level elevator pitch for why we should care?
9:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm not a mineralogist, I don't really understand a lot of it, to be honest.
9:21
SPEAKER_01: So, like, what's you give us the elevator pitch?
9:24
SPEAKER_01: What why should why is your research interesting and important?
9:26
SPEAKER_04: So, I usually I like to start with stepping back in a way from my research and just start with you know, minerals.
9:33
SPEAKER_04: So, I would argue that minerals are some of the most important things that we can be studying.
9:39
SPEAKER_04: They're literally the building blocks that make up every single rock, right?
9:43
SPEAKER_04: Rocks are made of minerals, and so they are the foundation of geology.
9:46
SPEAKER_04: And they happen to also be the foundation for a lot of material science and other fields in science.
9:52
SPEAKER_04: And so we know that by the definition of a mineral, minerals are solids with defined crystal structures and defined chemical compositions.
10:02
SPEAKER_04: So, in mineralogy, that's what we do.
10:05
SPEAKER_04: We study the crystallography and chemistry of minerals.
10:09
SPEAKER_04: And there are many, many subfields in mineralogy.
10:12
SPEAKER_04: So we ask questions that range from the very what is the very core of our earth to the mineralogy of the outer reaches of our solar system.
10:21
SPEAKER_04: And for me, I was interested in studying something that had direct relevance to our biosphere and to our day-to-day lives as people.
10:31
SPEAKER_04: And so I quickly gravitated towards biomineralogy.
10:35
SPEAKER_04: And these are minerals that formed are formed by living organisms.
10:40
SPEAKER_04: So, like I said earlier, it can be bacteria or it could be human beings, a cow, uh, corals.
10:47
SPEAKER_04: And so I mean, I really love to tell people that you know, you are a biomineralizing organism.
10:52
SPEAKER_04: Your skeleton is made up of the mineral bioappetite, and without it, we would just be blobs of jelly.
10:58
SPEAKER_04: So you can thank minerals for you know your health and happiness.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: Can you explain that a little bit further?
11:04
SPEAKER_00: Because I really think that's that's a really interesting thing.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: You said bioapetite.
11:09
SPEAKER_04: Bioapetite, yeah.
11:10
SPEAKER_04: So it's the mineral.
11:11
SPEAKER_04: I mean, if you were to take a bone and grind it up and put it on an X-ray diffrectometer and look at the crystal structure of bone, the mineral is appetite.
11:24
SPEAKER_04: And it's bioappetite because it's formed by an organism.
11:27
SPEAKER_04: So there's there are slight nuances in a lot of biominerals where they're not exactly like their geological counterparts, but for all intents and purposes, they're about the same thing.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: Really?
11:39
SPEAKER_00: I did not.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: Jesse, did you know that?
11:41
SPEAKER_01: No, and in fact, I'm thinking back to, you know, I'm just teaching this intro to geoscience class, and I think I just taught the mineral section and said that, you know, part of the definition of a mineral is that they're abiotic.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: That it, yeah.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: And so now you're making me, you know, second guess uh the definition of a mineral, actually.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: And this is so this is why you say they're biominerals, is because our our sort of geologist traditional definition would say that they can't be produced by life, right?
12:04
SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: That's a really good point.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: Do you have to qualify it with bio?
12:08
SPEAKER_04: I would say so.
12:09
SPEAKER_04: I mean, so that is still part of the definition has to be inorganic.
12:13
SPEAKER_04: Um, but we're we've been revisiting that as a mineralogy community.
12:18
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
12:19
SPEAKER_01: That's really cool.
12:19
SPEAKER_01: So, what what's the most like interesting thing you're studying right now?
12:22
SPEAKER_01: Like, can you give us a little bit of, I'm not sure I'll understand it, but can you try and get us to understand like what's a cool project?
12:27
SPEAKER_01: Like, what are you working on?
12:28
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, tomorrow or something that you're excited about.
12:31
SPEAKER_04: My day-to-day research focuses mostly on marine and aquatic organisms.
12:37
SPEAKER_04: So I do research on corals and mollusks at the moment, and I look at how they build their skeletons and shells, and they use minerals such as aragonite and calcite, which are both calcium carbonates.
12:51
SPEAKER_04: So very, very common minerals on the surface of our planet.
12:55
SPEAKER_04: And I'm interested in how they make their skeletons and shells.
12:59
SPEAKER_04: But my overall guiding research question is how do the environments that these organisms grow in actually impact the mineralogy of their skeletons and shells?
13:11
SPEAKER_04: And what does this mean for the material properties of these uh creations and the health of these organisms ultimately?
13:21
SPEAKER_04: So, for instance, if you're undergoing rapid climate change or changes in salinity, how is this going to actually impact the shells and skeletons on an atomic scale?
13:33
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's pretty cool.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
13:35
SPEAKER_00: What have you found in terms of their ability to adapt to climate change and ocean acidification, things like this?
13:43
SPEAKER_04: This is a really interesting topic, mostly because it's very understudied so far.
13:48
SPEAKER_04: So I went out, I set out to answer these questions, and it turns out there's a lot of background work we have to do first.
13:56
SPEAKER_04: So I've actually done some work looking at corals um growing under different environments.
14:01
SPEAKER_04: And so hopefully that paper will come out soon.
14:04
SPEAKER_04: But we just even the basic questions of well, what happens when you put in this element for calcium?
14:11
SPEAKER_04: How does that change the structure?
14:13
SPEAKER_04: Um, those are still open-ended questions.
14:16
SPEAKER_04: There are a lot of questions that have to be answered before we can get to the fun stuff.
14:20
SPEAKER_04: But the basic answer is that I do think that you're going to be seeing changes with ocean acidification, especially on an atomic scale.
14:30
SPEAKER_04: So I did do a project looking at deep sea corals, which are corals that live below the photic zone.
14:36
SPEAKER_04: So they're, you know, 50 meters deep into the ocean.
14:40
SPEAKER_04: And it just so happens that a lot of these corals are growing very close to the acid horizon, which is where the aragonite saturation state of the mineral that makes their skeletons is below one.
14:54
SPEAKER_04: So by definition, they should start dissolving if they are growing below that zone in the ocean.
15:01
SPEAKER_04: And so we actually did see that the mineralogy of these skeletons was changing as you got closer and closer to this horizon and sometimes even going slightly below the horizon.
15:14
SPEAKER_01: So these organisms are living like right on the razor's edge of ability to make their shell.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: Is that that kind of saying?
15:20
SPEAKER_01: Like that you change the you change the chemistry a little bit and they can't actually build their shells anymore?
15:25
SPEAKER_04: In theory, yes, but because they are organisms, they're also controlling things internally.
15:31
SPEAKER_04: So that's what makes biomineralogy so complicated and so exciting for me, is that there is that biological component where we still don't know how much control these organisms have over the making of their skeletons.
15:45
SPEAKER_04: Like how much of it is inorganic chemistry, how much of it is it uh catalysts in the form of organic molecules?
15:52
SPEAKER_04: You know, are they pumping out ions in this place and pumping in other ions to you know create a saturation state that's higher compared to the surrounding waters?
16:02
SPEAKER_04: So there are a lot of open-ended questions.
16:04
SPEAKER_01: All right, Gabrielle.
16:05
SPEAKER_01: I I man, it's super cool, but you're just giving my family you're just giving them ammunition in our debate about what's cooler, biology or geology.
16:13
SPEAKER_01: Because that's that's that's a cool, that's a cool thing.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: Really amazing.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: So you're finding basically that they can adapt there or they are adapting right now to the changing ocean conditions.
16:24
SPEAKER_04: Uh some people would say yes and some people would say no.
16:27
SPEAKER_04: It's still a very hot topic.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: All right, interesting.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: Fair enough.
16:31
SPEAKER_00: Fair enough.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: Gabriella, so these marine organisms, is calcite more common for their shells or is aragonite more common?
16:41
SPEAKER_04: It depends on the organism.
16:43
SPEAKER_04: So right now we are living in what we would call an aragonitic sea.
16:48
SPEAKER_04: And so if you look over geologic history, the ocean has changed in terms of its chemistry to swap back and forth between calcitic seas and aragonitic seas.
16:59
SPEAKER_04: And the difference is the actual concentration of magnesium in the seawater.
17:05
SPEAKER_04: Now we don't know exactly why this is the case, but if you have uh ratios that are higher than a certain threshold, you get aragonite.
17:15
SPEAKER_04: And if magnesium concentrations fall, you'll get calcite.
17:19
SPEAKER_04: And so currently we're living in an aragonitic environment.
17:23
SPEAKER_04: And so corals stony corals, so sclerotinian corals predominantly produce aragonitic skeletons.
17:30
SPEAKER_04: But there are also organisms that are still using calcite, and it's likely that a lot of these organisms um evolved during times and periods of geologic history when calcitic seas were prominent.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
17:46
SPEAKER_04: There's a lot of work being done on a paleo from a paleontological perspective as well to answer that question.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: Can you outline the difference between aragonite and calcite?
17:56
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
17:56
SPEAKER_04: So they are both the same, have the same chemistry, but they have different crystal structures.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: So basically the atoms stack together differently in calcite and aragonite.
18:08
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they're they're pretty similar if you look at the unit cell structure.
18:12
SPEAKER_04: So the unit cell is the smallest possible tessellation for a crystal.
18:17
SPEAKER_04: Um, so they all have carbonate groups, which are essentially triangles of carbon and oxygen surrounded by larger calcium atoms.
18:26
SPEAKER_04: It's just how they're arranged can be can change a little bit between the two.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: Very cool.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: Jesse, did you know that that most marine organisms use a red or are made of oreganoite?
18:38
SPEAKER_01: No, I didn't.
18:38
SPEAKER_01: What you're trying to call me out for being an idiot.
18:40
SPEAKER_01: I mean, who knows?
18:41
SPEAKER_01: I no, I didn't know that.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: And and Jesse, do you know what tessellation is?
18:46
SPEAKER_00: She used a big word there.
18:47
SPEAKER_01: I do know what tessellation is.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: Do you know what it is?
18:50
SPEAKER_01: Are you asking?
18:51
SPEAKER_01: Are you testing me?
18:52
SPEAKER_01: I'm tested you.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
18:55
SPEAKER_01: All right, let's move on.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: This unit cell discussion kind of brings up a question.
18:59
SPEAKER_01: I think when I took mineralogy, and for sure when Chris took mineralogy, you know, in the 1940s, you know, he probably learned about the unit cell.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: You learn this very true sort of what I would say traditional view of mineralogy, where you learn about the unit cell and the orthoromic or triclinic or whatever.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: That is not kind of the way we teach things anymore.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: Like mineralogy as a sort of foundational class in uh a college, you know, geology program or geoscience program is not that common anymore, really.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: It's going away.
19:32
SPEAKER_01: Is that what I don't know, how do you feel about that change in your field sort of being at least becoming or being perceived as becoming less foundational to geoscience?
19:41
SPEAKER_01: Do you have any thoughts on that?
19:43
SPEAKER_00: That was a really rambling question, by the way.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: That was really rambly.
19:47
SPEAKER_01: If you need me to clarify or rephrase it, I'm happy to try and try and distill that down.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: Gabriela, a lot of departments are dropping mineralogy as a standalone course.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: Um, what are your thoughts on this?
19:58
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, well, unfortunately, it's true that there are relatively few mineralogists still uh working today in the US, especially compared to Europe.
20:09
SPEAKER_04: And that makes it difficult to teach mineralogy courses across all of the universities in the US.
20:15
SPEAKER_04: But I think that universities that drop mineralogy altogether are really missing out in the long run.
20:22
SPEAKER_04: You know, I've seen cases where students who went to really great schools for undergrad that happened to not teach mineralogy had to go back and relearn mineralogy at their new institutions as PhD students, because their PhD advisors were like, you need to understand this in order to understand the basic principles behind petrology.
20:44
SPEAKER_04: And so I think that you know some of these students will really get behind when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of their research.
20:53
SPEAKER_04: And so I think that it's a little short-sighted to get rid of mineralogy altogether.
20:59
SPEAKER_04: What I do think, uh, I do think that we are in the need of some rebranding as mineralogists, right?
21:06
SPEAKER_04: Because I do agree that a lot of people see it as an archaic field, right?
21:10
SPEAKER_04: You think of Jules Verne, you know, naming the lead character in journey to the center of the earth.
21:16
SPEAKER_04: Like that was he was a mineralogist, right?
21:18
SPEAKER_04: So it was very popular back in the day.
21:20
SPEAKER_04: Um, but currently there aren't very many people that proudly call themselves mineralogists like I do.
21:26
SPEAKER_04: So a lot of people think that mineralogy is not relevant to modern-day topics, but this is simply not true.
21:33
SPEAKER_04: I think that you really have to understand how crystals grow, how their structures impact their material properties, how organisms build their skeletons.
21:43
SPEAKER_04: All of these are mineralogical questions that have direct implications on environmental science, on future technologies, and even medicine.
21:52
SPEAKER_04: And so call it what you like, but a lot of scientists are doing mineralogical research.
21:58
SPEAKER_04: Uh, we're just not claiming it as our
22:00
SPEAKER_01: own so that's an interesting perspective I mean so yeah because I agree you know mineralogy is like it's like totally foundational to geoscience in general and it and it has been for a long time so what's the new brand?
22:11
SPEAKER_01: I mean what I mean is biomineralogy the future is you know sort of material science the future like like what is the is there a like a a term that is kind of overarching or or something like how how do you group together all these people who are kind of doing different parts of mineralogy but don't want to call themselves mineralogists maybe well that will be a challenge I think for the next few years but I mean I've been very vocal about being a mineralogist and a lot of times it's just that people haven't heard of that term anymore.
22:40
SPEAKER_04: So I've actually collaborated with a lot of biologists and every time I start talking to them about my research and how I work on biominerals and how I'm a mineralogist at heart and that I can help them solve questions from a unique perspective they're very responsive and they they really love that.
22:58
SPEAKER_04: And so I've actually built a lot of collaborations with people from different fields that you know your typical geologists would never interact with.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: Do you think the problem with mineralogy in at the collegiate level is not having people to teach it I guess I see programs just getting changed.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: Instead of mineralogy as a standalone course they have rocks and minerals instead.
23:31
SPEAKER_00: And when when Jesse and I went through and probably you as well you know mineralogy was kind of like a weeder course it was the your first really difficult geology class that you took and and there was there was some pride that went along with making it through that you know um what do you think?
23:48
SPEAKER_04: Yeah yeah when I took mineralogy it was actually it was a combined course it was earth materials and so it was half mineralogy and half introphetrology.
23:58
SPEAKER_04: And so I think it doesn't really matter you know what course it is as long as people are learning it and getting the perspective that mineralogical research can be really relevant.
24:09
SPEAKER_04: I think that's what's really missing is that people aren't really seeing the relevance.
24:13
SPEAKER_04: They're not seeing the biomineralogy they're not seeing how it applies to environmental science and they're not seeing how it applies to medicine and other fields.
24:22
SPEAKER_04: And so I think that as educators people can do a a really great job in the future of highlighting some of the really great work that is thanks to mineralogy.
24:33
SPEAKER_01: No you're right um I never thought about it that way either but you're solving or you're you're working on solving a really important question in terms of how adaptations take place in the changing oceans and that's really important and yeah and you can think of mineralogy as a tool really all right so I want to go back to the Smithsonian uh you have this beautiful you know picture in your zoom background right now of of the mineralogy in your opinion what is the premier gem I want to focus on the gemstones because there's like this historical aspect to gemstones that's totally cool.
25:06
SPEAKER_01: Like what's the premier one in the collection for you and maybe for the public like maybe those are two different questions or two different answers.
25:13
SPEAKER_04: But well I think the obvious answer to this question is the Hope Diamond right this is one of the most famous objects in human culture you know it's up there with the Mona Lisa like everyone has at least heard of the Hope Diamond.
25:30
SPEAKER_04: They might not know what it is but they've probably heard of it.
25:33
SPEAKER_01: So what's the background?
25:34
SPEAKER_01: Give us the short background of the Hope Diamond I mean you you probably get to see this every day at work or something.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean this incredibly valuable piece of human history it's amazing.
25:44
SPEAKER_04: I mean so if you think about it you know a lot of people have diamond engagement rings and everyone makes a really big deal out of it right because it's a very special thing to have a gemstone in your home first of all so imagine a diamond that is almost 50 times the size of your average one carat diamond engagement ring.
26:04
SPEAKER_04: So this is actually it's 45.52 carats so it is a very large diamond for starters.
26:13
SPEAKER_04: But what makes the hope diamond extra special is that it is a deep blue color.
26:19
SPEAKER_04: So a lot of people don't realize that diamonds don't have to be colorless.
26:24
SPEAKER_04: They can have different colors and these colors are due to impurities in the case of the Hope diamond it's due to boron uh which causes the blue color and blue diamonds are some of the most rare uh diamonds out there so it's very very difficult to find them and when they do find them they usually make the news right so they're very very rare and so this one in particular is very famous because it has a very colorful history in addition to its deep blue color.
27:00
SPEAKER_04: So uh it's very old you can actually trace it throughout human history it was discovered in India but we know that it's traveled its way to France to London in the UK all the way to the US and not only that but it was owned by many famous people and some people even say that it's cursed.
27:24
SPEAKER_04: And even though we know it's not cursed um it makes for a great story and what better way to sell an expensive diamond than to attach a great story to it yeah so if you want to know the actual story I highly highly recommend um looking at the Natural History Museum's website.
27:43
SPEAKER_04: There's unfortunately a lot of misinformation about the Hope Diamond on the internet.
27:48
SPEAKER_04: So don't believe anything you read unless you read it from our website or um my colleague Jeff Post recently published a book on our national gem and mineral collection and he did a really great job of giving the most up to date account of the Hope Diamond.
28:04
SPEAKER_00: Oh that's cool.
28:05
SPEAKER_04: All right so what so hold on can you tell us how you acquired it how the Smithsonian acquired oh yeah so the the Hope Diamond was donated to the Smithsonian in 1958 by Harry Winston.
28:20
SPEAKER_04: It's currently set in a Cartier setting and it was actually delivered to the Smithsonian by mail.
28:29
SPEAKER_04: So Harry Winston literally put the diamond in a registered mail envelope and mailed it through the US Postal Service and the actual envelope is in the national collection with the US Postal Museum right now.
28:43
SPEAKER_01: Wow that's pretty impressive all right so the Hope Diamond's the obvious answer what what's the non-obvious one for like the best gem in the collection in your opinion?
28:52
SPEAKER_04: Oh man I don't know if I can answer that.
28:54
SPEAKER_04: I think they're all just so so special.
28:58
SPEAKER_04: I I prefer to just like give a tour like I love pointing out all of my favorites um I don't have a a favorite mineral per se because I just I'm a fan of all of them.
29:10
SPEAKER_04: But right now I would say that if I were to take you to see the gem collection we would walk into the Winston gallery where the Hope Diamond is in the center of the room it rotates on a base so that everyone that crowds around it gets a chance to see it.
29:27
SPEAKER_04: But currently there is a neighbor to the Hope Diamond if you look to the right you'll see a smaller case that has a bright red gemstone and this is the Whitney flame.
29:40
SPEAKER_04: It's a topaz that is bright red and was found in Brazil and it's a rather recent acquisition donated by Coral and Whitney.
29:50
SPEAKER_04: And I would say that is something you should definitely take a look at.
29:54
SPEAKER_04: And so then we would continue into the mineral or the gem gallery and you'll look to the left and there is a very tall gorgeous aquamarine that's cut in a unique way looks like an obelisk and the back has all of these etched facets.
30:14
SPEAKER_04: And so that is the Dom Pedro aquamarine and that is also one of my favorites um it was carved by someone from Idar Oberstein by Bernd Munsteiner from Idar Oberstein and I I just find it very charming.
30:28
SPEAKER_04: They have this this tiny village it was actually two villages Idar and Oberstein in Germany and they melded into one and it's one of the premier places for gem carvers in the world.
30:39
SPEAKER_04: So there are gem carvers that have been working in this industry for like 500 years.
30:45
SPEAKER_04: So generations and generations of gem carvers.
30:48
SPEAKER_04: So this is one of the families that made this and now it's in our national collection if you keep going you'll see Marie Antoinette's diamond earrings there's the Carmen Lucia ruby which is just a phenomenally bright red ruby ring.
31:06
SPEAKER_04: I really like the blue heart diamond.
31:08
SPEAKER_04: So the Smithsonian is probably the only museum that has not one but two big blue diamonds.
31:14
SPEAKER_04: So the blue heart diamond it almost feels like you're wearing a ring pot.
31:18
SPEAKER_04: You know it's this big big diamond.
31:20
SPEAKER_04: I got to wear it once and that was really exciting.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: Oh you did?
31:23
SPEAKER_01: That's oh that's cool.
31:26
SPEAKER_01: So oh my goodness well that's a beautiful uh virtual tour through the gem museum that's amazing.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: Gabriella um how do you so you talked before about the studying the crystal structure what equipment do you use to study the crystallography of these gems?
31:43
SPEAKER_04: So there are many different tools that we can use.
31:46
SPEAKER_04: I always like to joke that my job uh relies on me shooting x-rays and lasers at things.
31:53
SPEAKER_04: So pretty much that's that's what I do.
31:56
SPEAKER_04: I shoot x-rays and lasers at gemstones and minerals.
31:59
SPEAKER_04: My favorite instrument is the X-ray differenctometer which is kind of the end all be all for figuring out a crystal structure.
32:08
SPEAKER_04: So essentially we use X-rays, we shoot it through the mineral and the X-rays will diffract off of the atoms inside the mineral.
32:19
SPEAKER_04: And then we have an imaging plate or a detector that collects the X-rays that got bounced off of these atoms and then we can backtrack the pathways of those uh X-rays to recreate what the structure was.
32:36
SPEAKER_04: So it's a very simple geometry really and this is a method that has been around for a very long time.
32:43
SPEAKER_04: So mineralogy is a very very old field you know we recently celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Mineralogical Society of America so that gives you an indication of you know it's much older than that.
32:55
SPEAKER_04: And so these techniques have been around for a while.
32:58
SPEAKER_04: And more recently I've also gotten into Raman spectromet spectroscopy sorry Raman spectroscopy which is a tool that uses lasers to probe the bonding environment of atoms within a crystal so essentially we shoot lasers at a crystal or a gemstone it's non-destructive which is great though it doesn't hurt the gemstone.
33:23
SPEAKER_04: Oh really the lasers are non-destructive oh yeah I mean as long as you're not turning up the laser too high.
33:29
SPEAKER_04: Okay, all right so you always test with low power and then you slowly amp it up and make sure you're not going to hurt your specimens.
33:37
SPEAKER_04: What essentially we're doing is we're allowing the laser light the energy to interact with the bonds in the crystal structure and we know that uh atoms will wiggle around so you you add in energy and the atoms will wiggle around and then they will essentially throw back a signal.
33:59
SPEAKER_04: And so I'm not going to get into the details but if you look up Raman spectroscopy it's a fascinating fascinating method and essentially I'm looking at how the atoms dance within the crystal structure.
34:10
SPEAKER_00: What are you trying to learn?
34:11
SPEAKER_00: Are you are you trying to identify what mineral it is or some other thing?
34:16
SPEAKER_00: What are you trying to learn with this?
34:18
SPEAKER_04: So we can do many things.
34:20
SPEAKER_04: The first answer is yes we can use this as a fingerprinting tool because every crystal has a different crystal structure and a different chemistry.
34:28
SPEAKER_04: So it gives so with X-ray diffraction for instance you have a unique fingerprint for every mineral.
34:34
SPEAKER_04: And with Raman spectroscopy it's pretty similar as well although because it's a newer method uh we still haven't figured out all of the details yet so we don't have quite the database that we do for X-ray diffraction.
34:48
SPEAKER_04: Beyond that we can also use it to learn a lot of other things.
34:52
SPEAKER_04: So for instance with X-ray diffraction we can get at that unit cell structure so we can look at the size of that structure and learn about how different elements can incorporate into the structure and change those parameters.
35:07
SPEAKER_04: That's what I was doing with the corals.
35:09
SPEAKER_04: With Raman spectroscopy we can even use it to look at the aragonite saturation state at which the aragonite formed by looking at the width of one of the peaks that we create with our spectrum.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah sure does so that's the only way for you really to tell the difference between because aragonite and calcite are these are amorphous right so you have to use x-rays or some other way to identify them.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: Is that correct?
35:35
SPEAKER_04: They're not amorphous so they have a crystal structure but they have they're polymorphs of each other.
35:42
SPEAKER_04: So yes so you would need to use X-ray diffraction or or ramon to to identify their crystallography.
35:52
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
35:52
SPEAKER_01: So what do you do if you want to I don't know if you want to study the Hope diamond or I mean maybe you can't study that one but if you want to study like one of these expensive minerals in your collection or maybe even some of the gemstones that have this like historical background to them can you do that?
36:07
SPEAKER_01: How do you go about doing that in in your position?
36:09
SPEAKER_04: Do you get the opportunity to study these exceptional pieces of history or yeah we absolutely can I mean this the national collection you know the main reason we have this collection is for scientific research and for keeping this for future generations.
36:25
SPEAKER_04: So believe it or not but scientists at the Smithsonian have studied the Hope Diamond.
36:31
SPEAKER_04: So they've done non-destructive tests looking at the fluorescence luminescence and um and the phosphorescence of the Hope diamond they've also believe it or not have done destructive tests on the diamond.
36:47
SPEAKER_04: So if you look at the back of the Hope diamond there will be tiny tiny tiny little pits that were created by the Top Sims or the time of flight secondary ion mass spectrometer.
36:59
SPEAKER_01: Wow cool so they actually did that to measure the concentration of boron in the Hope diamond interesting wow that must have been there must have been a lot of paperwork to fill out doing that.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: That's a difficult one wow so have you studied one of these uh one of your your favorite uh gems in the collection or are you still working up to that uh we're we're working on something right now but I can't tell you what we're doing okay oh man you got one of those jobs where it's super secretive I love that that's awesome that's so cool Gabrielle I have a question for you then Jesse and I actually have gone on trips load up my truck and off we go to someplace to to do some collecting um where has mineralogy taken you i because I think one of the best advantages to going into the field of geology is it takes you places you know we have this best excuse in the world to go see cool things where has mineralogy taken you oh it has taken me everywhere I mean besides like Stanford and MIT and you know all the all the festivals in America that you went to right I mean it I mean I feel like a lot of the travel I've done in my life has been tied to mineralogy in some way like I mentioned earlier that when I was very little our family vacations would be to mines in the western US so I've been to every state in the western US and of course you know you'll you'll stop in all the national parks along the way all the wildlife that I've seen has been thanks to these trips.
38:30
SPEAKER_04: So I'm very very thankful to mineralogy in that respect.
38:33
SPEAKER_04: And in school we went on so many field trips.
38:35
SPEAKER_04: I you know spent weeks in rural Nevada mapping rocks and went to Yellowstone with you know two of the scientists that had been studying the geology of Yellowstone for like 40 years.
38:48
SPEAKER_04: It was incredible going with them.
38:50
SPEAKER_04: And then I even went to the Bahamas during graduate school to look at corals and ooids.
38:55
SPEAKER_01: What a scam.
38:56
SPEAKER_01: I mean maybe maybe you know now okay now this biomineralizations thing makes sense.
39:01
SPEAKER_04: You get to go to the Bahamas and go snorkel around so this was while you were at Stanford uh you know doing a lot of these field trips is that what you're referring to for the Stanford and and the Woods Holceanographic institution they were the ones who took in the Bahamas and of course there are geological conferences that happen all around Europe the US Canada so I've gotten to go to a lot of cities um to present my work which has been really exciting as well.
39:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah that's amazing that well you know Chris and I both I think feel this way that having excuses to go to cool places and actually study those cool places that for me like it's the the best thing to you know it'd be cool to go to the Bahamas and sit on the beach but it might be cooler to go study the Bahamas a little bit like that that's pretty cool.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: All right so we kind of wrap all of our uh interviews up with the same question.
39:47
SPEAKER_04: What has been your best day as a geoscientist so my best day was a little over two years ago when I was told that I was being offered the job at the Smithsonian.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: Oh boom great answer that's the that's awesome.
40:04
SPEAKER_04: So it was actually really sweet.
40:06
SPEAKER_04: Um so I'd been my long term mentor and now my colleague Dr.
40:11
SPEAKER_04: Jeff Post and uh the our department chair Tim McCoy you know brought me into the office and they're like so we're gonna offer you the job and it was it was an out of body experience in a way for me.
40:22
SPEAKER_04: Like I had been wanting this for so long and I'd worked really hard and they offered me the job and so I immediately just like went out into the mineral hall like with all these people middling around and I called my dad because he'd been supporting me through so many years and it was it was really really exciting for for both of us.
40:40
SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
40:42
SPEAKER_01: Very cool.
40:42
SPEAKER_01: A great answer and then did you just go celebrate you've you've made it you've got it that's awesome.
40:48
SPEAKER_01: That's so cool.
40:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah yeah that's a great answer.
40:52
SPEAKER_01: Well Gabriella thanks for joining us this has been a real pleasure we've covered a lot and I you know you've really given me some insight into biominerals and sort of you know you've made me rethink mineralogy a little bit because I think I I tended to sort of put it into the old category a little bit that's less important for our undergrads but but you made me rethink it.
41:11
SPEAKER_04: So yeah yeah so glad you know that's my goal my goal is to like make sure people love minerals after you talk to me you should love minerals.
41:19
SPEAKER_01: Well your enthusiasm for minerals is just you know it's contagious I'm excited I want to go look at minerals now.
41:24
SPEAKER_04: Gabriella you don't have a favorite mineral oh I mean I like a lot of them I'm actually quite partial to opals partially because they defy expect or they defy the the general uh view of minerals you know they're not crystalline so they're technically not minerals but they do have uh long range crystal order and so I I find them very interesting.
41:47
SPEAKER_01: That's cool opals are very that that's that's a good one.
41:49
SPEAKER_01: I like opals too that's cool.
41:51
SPEAKER_01: That's cool.
41:52
SPEAKER_01: Well Gabriella thanks for joining us on Planet Geo.
41:55
SPEAKER_01: This has been really fun.
41:56
SPEAKER_04: Yeah yeah thank you so much for having me.
41:58
SPEAKER_04: It was great meeting you and yeah nice to meet you too I hope you guys can visit our national collection sometime.
42:04
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah there we go we've got open again you're open again okay we've got to take her up on it this sounds awesome yeah that's right excellent that's right Chris man that was a great interview yeah it was you know what I what I really liked more than anything else was how she highlighted and really nailed the importance of mineralogy.
42:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah you know she really changed my opinion on a couple things about mineralogy and I think the biomineralization stuff is is really cool and probably has a a really really bright future to it that's that's uh well it's important it's totally important absolutely yeah very cool stuff so well you can find us on all the social medias we're at planet geocast as usual if you have questions comments feedback send us an email planetgeocast at gmail.com and leave us a review we love that stuff really helps us uh get the word out about how important the geosciences are and if you're interested in coming on Planet Geo send us an email hit us up that's right all right take care of