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Gaia - The Earth As a System with Dean Lee Kump · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Chris.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um Wow, Jesse.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: All right, I'm just gonna I'm gonna start this off, Jesse.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, you paused, and so I'm gonna take advantage of this.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um we we just got done interviewing Dr.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Lee Cump or Dean Lee Cump.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: He's the dean of your department, and um he's the boss of your boss, you said.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I wanted to hug him.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I can't because he's in Pennsylvania, I'm in Michigan.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I like I I thoroughly enjoyed this interview on so many levels.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: So many levels.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: So I I agree completely.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: He's a scientist, uh, you know, that's how he, you know, he made his name as a scientist.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: He then he kind of moved into administration and we asked him about that.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I just uh what I want to say is for everybody, make sure you stick around to the end to one of our last questions when we ask him about what led him into administration.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: I it's a powerful answer, and um it's the it's just I think it got both of us choked up.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god, yeah.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's the best answer you could possibly give for a reason to get into administration, I think.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it it it I I I had a hard time not getting choked up.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: I had goosebumps, you know, listening to it.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: And and he has this background as an amazing scientist, was one of the founding members of this entire field, kind of created this field of earth system science.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I have to run through his his resume a little bit here because it's so impressive.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: So you're right, he's the dean of right now at the the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State University.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: So there are five departments in the College of Earth and Mineral Science, he's the head of that.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, there are any you know, dozens, hundreds of faculty members in those five departments, so many undergrads that go through, so many graduate students, and he's kind of the in charge of the full thing.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: Lee got a PhD from the University of South Florida.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: He started at Penn State in 1986, as he said, and was around and really one of the founding members of this brand new field called their system science, which he goes to uh which he gives a really good description of, and I think has uh we have a lot of appreciation for.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: He's a fellow of the Geological Society of London, Distinguished Service Awards.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: He's won research awards, he's a member of the National Academy of Sciences, which is the premier institution in the United States.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's like the the award you can get.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's it's the capstone award you can get is being inducted into the National Academy of Sciences here.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: He has published over 130 papers, he has over 20,000 citations, he's got an amazing resume, amazing research record, and in my opinion, has done an amazing job and is widely regarded as a really, really, really, really good dean of our college here at Penn State.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I think this interview kind of shows you why.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think it absolutely does, Jesse.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you need to count yourself very fortunate to have an administrator like this.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: I I think this this is the exception.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Lee Cump is not the rule.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: No, I I think I I you're exactly right.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: And um we hope he keeps doing it for many more years to come.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he's he's uh an amazing interview, and I I really liked our discussion of the future of geoscience education.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what's the value of geoscience and how that might be shifting from his chair, from his his he's got the long view and the high view.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he's a he's a dean now at the at a premier institution with a bunch of different colleges in it, but he also has that long view, he's seen it evolve in really interesting ways over the last 30 years, 40 years of his career.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I I thought his perspective was really unique and original on this, and that I really liked it.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I agree.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, let's get to it, Jesse.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Lee Cump.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: All right, uh, Dean Lee Cump.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's a real pleasure to have you here.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'm excited for this conversation.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, thanks so much for having me.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: I've been looking forward to it myself.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this is uh this is gonna be great.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess maybe for the record, you're at Penn State, you're the Dean of Earth and Mineral Sciences, the college.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm in the Department of Geosciences, you used to be in our department, you're now the dean.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't know what the org chart looks like, but you're my boss's boss or something like that.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah somewhere along the line, you're you're there's a lot of Penn State talk.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so so watch the questions you ask, right?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: This is exactly right.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly right.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Jesse, his office is way bigger than yours.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, yeah.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, way exactly.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: I don't even know, Lee, if your office did what what what office did you start in in our building?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember where yeah, room 210.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's the you know the smaller faculty offices there.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, nice.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm I'm two floors above you right now in the fourth floor, small offices, small starting faculty offices.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one progresses in their career to bigger offices.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, it doesn't matter anymore.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: We used to have file cabinets full of reprints and books, yeah.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Things that you just don't you don't amass anymore.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know what uh people want laboratory space, I think now.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: I I guess that's right.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, lab space and storage space for rocks.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's yeah, development traits.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what your that's what your uh basement at home is for.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Basement garage, exactly hang them on the wall behind me.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: All right, Chris.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really excited, Lee, to hear your answer to Chris's first question here out of the gate.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: This uh I'm excited about this.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Lee, it's so good to see you.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's been I think two years since I saw you.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: We we ran into each other at I think GSA or AGU.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember which one.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I can't remember either either one after our first video introduction.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: I forgot.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the video introduction.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: Chris uh Chris got the Earth and Mineral College of Earth and Mineral Sciences Inspiring Educator Award, right?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Or something is that yeah, he he's our uh in the first class of in our educator hall of fame.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: Educator Hall of Fame, that's right.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was great.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: And Chris, you didn't know it was coming.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you're scared the crap out of me.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: I thought I was getting fired.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: Superintendent and the principal walked in here.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, oh, jump on the jump on video because you're getting an award.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: That was great.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I forgot about that.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: That was a couple years ago.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: That was awesome.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, hey, Lee, let's go ahead and jump in.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so we always ask this question.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's our leadout question to everybody that we have on our show.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: What got you into geoscience?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a story that's involved?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a particular aha moment?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: Just, yeah, kind of what got you going?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it's a good question.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, it's a question that I ask other geologists myself because it was my hypothesis that it's it was uh K through 12 educator who got them interested in science and perhaps in in geology.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I like many of my colleagues was interested in rocks as a kid, although I didn't really care about figuring out what they were, naming them and classifying them, you know, what minerals were.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: I just like them because they were pretty, I think.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably not a good thing for a for a professional geologist to say, but but um but I also love being in outdoors hiking and and so kind of preconditioned to to this uh area.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, like I said, it was uh an eighth-grade first science teacher who who got me interested in this, Ms.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Rodehaver.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And she was willing to let us do experiments to she took us on field trips, those of us who are interested in doing that.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: She opened up, brought up the telescope at night and let us, you know, she taught us about the planets and and the constellations and stars, let us burn a little section of grassland behind the the n was uh she was.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we we actually got the fire department to sit there while supervise that experiment.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that but what really got me hooked, so that got me interested in science and experiments and field work, but but what really got me hooked was uh lecture by a guy named Peter Wiley, I don't know if you know that name, famous petrologist.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: He was at the University of Chicago at the time when I was a senior in high school, and I went to Chicago on a recruiting visit, and he gave a lecture on the way the earth works and talked about plate tectonics, and this was the you know the mid-70s, and so plate tectonics as a theory was just being developed.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: So everything was really excited, and he just conveyed that excitement.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I I really I mean it stuck with me to better understand the way the earth works.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, so I went to the University of Chicago, took the first introductory geology class from him.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was just amazing.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: He taught it from a kind of a popular science book that he had on on plate tectonics.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was really his his influence, you know, together with those earlier experiences that got me hooked in the sciences.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that kind of sold the deal right there, then, huh?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: So does he have a question, Lee?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Does uh does Ms.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Roden Rodenhaver does does she know what she knows?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean I um I gave her credit in my dissertation and I sent her a copy of of that.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I also nominated her for this class of for our educator hall of fame.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so really I put together the Hall of Fame because I wanted to recognize her, but then I realized talking to faculty in the department like Jesse and people at AGU and GSA that so many of them had been influenced by K through 12 teachers.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: And most often it was an earth science teacher they had in in middle or or high school.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we just don't recognize that we we don't pay it back typically.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: We certainly don't don't recognize it typically long long after we graduated.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Although I've you know I was glad to hear that you and Jesse had stayed connected and and turned out that that many of our faculty nominators uh had stayed in touch with their with their high school or middle school science teachers.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: So so it it was that was very that was nice to be here.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very cool sorry Chris.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: Can I can interrupt with a really quick one?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Go ahead.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Lee, where did you what state did you grow up in that you had Earth Science in eighth grade?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Minnesota.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: Minnesota.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I was in a suburb of Minneapolis.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, gotcha.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so you're allowed to burn the grasslands, at least at that time.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: We had never had been asked, but uh we were learning about succession, and then we thought, hey, let's see if we can visualize some of that ourselves.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's very cool.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, what a that's crazy.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, creative educators.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's uh so valuable.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, Chris, I interrupted.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I forgot my question, so it's okay.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay, good.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, um, Lee, was it a direct line then for you in your sort of educational pathway?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: You uh did you go to University of Chicago?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: You were on a recruiting.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: And was it were you kind of like I mean, you you heard a great talk by a patrologist.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: University of Chicago was the home of experimental patrology for a long time in this time period.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: How did you manage to go there and not get into that, I guess?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: And how what what was the rest of your trajectory like?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, you know, the well, so I I did one on every field trip that they offered, and many of those were being led by uh a guy named Fred Ziegler, who was uh paleogeographer paleontologist.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so we took these field trips that were really focused on paleontology and sedimentology, and so I got really interested in that.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, Peter Wiley, when I was a junior, I think he offered me a job uh you know just 10 hours a week.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I worked in a lab and did experiment, did experimental petrology on carbonatites.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: I still remember that.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: I actually really well.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: So they had a valuable graduate student who they didn't want to risk losing by putting them in in a lab where things were blowing up high pressure in these little salt bombs.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so they and so they chose me to to, you know, they paid me$10 an hour as an employee to run the risk of you know loading these uh expensive.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: He's a let's take Lee.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: He's expendable.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Let's put him in there.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: That was my my theory anyway.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: So then the following year, I wanted to do an honors thesis and Peter Wiley.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we called him Dr.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Wiley, of course.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Wiley, you know, he approached me with a project and I turned him down, and he was really shocked by that, you know.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: To your point, I just experimental petrology wasn't resonating with me.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I can understand if you're just you know the person in the lab who's expendable.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: I could see how he would turn you off now.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, now I'm becoming valuable, right?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that uh previous year, um, and I I seemed to know what I was doing in the lab.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, anyway, so um, but I actually uh had taken a graduate level geochemistry class uh from a guy named Bob Aller, who's now at uh Stonybrook.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: But he was willing to I had gotten some done some interesting things on a field trip and he helped me do that.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I was actually looked looking at it was a crossover.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was looking at the I want to look at the at the preservation of ash layers and sediments.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: It just struck me as odd on the field camp.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: We were we were out um in um Northern California in the Mount Shasta area.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: And Chris loves Mount Shasta.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: Don't start talking about Shasta you're gonna start a whole tangent here.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, so we were there in the summer of 1980, and we had actually gotten booked or helicopter trips up to Mount St.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Helens because it had erupted in May of 1980.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're we're there in September, and we're gonna go up and tour Mount St.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Helens, which we did on foot, but there was heavy fog and they had to cancel our helicopter flight.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I so I collected some volcanic ash there.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: I had a collection of Mount St.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Helens volcanic ash.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: But the reason I was interested in that, um, I'd already become a certified scuba diver, so I was trying to figure out a way to work scuba diving into my senior thesis.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so I talked the faculty member there and the TA, who also happened to be a scuba diver, into letting me go diving in this lake and core it and look for the history of eruptions of Mount Shasta in the ash lake that I thought must be in this mud.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: How deep did you go?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was only like 25 feet deep.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it was pretty easy uh scuba dive.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we ended up with these cores that had ash layers in them.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And these ash layers are these really distinct, you know, centimeter thick layers in a sediment that in the upper uh like 12 centimeters, 15 centimeters, thoroughly bioturbated by one of these worms that puts her head down in the mud and eats and then has this long body and they poop out the top, and they're churning like 10 to 12 centimeters of sediment.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: But there are these ash layers in there that that were a centimeter thick and really distinct ash layers.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I was trying to understand how you preserve ash layers when you're stirring the sediment over 12 centimeters.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Why didn't the ash get stirred up in the mud?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so I went back and I was asking this guy, Oler, about it because he studied bioturbation at Long Island Sound muds and and you know the chemical uh changes that take place in in sediments associated with bioturbation, stirring of the mud by organisms.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he was in that.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: So we set up some like ant colony experiments where we put in mud and then we put in these ash layers, and then we inoculated with tube effects, which is the worm that lived in this lake, and also happens to be abundant in the Chicago River because it loves contaminated environments.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's a it's a macrobenthic indicator of a polluted environment.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so I convinced Bob to go down there with me and and go mucking around in in uh Chicago River to collect uh tube effects, which we did.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, it turned out to be too slow of an experiment for my senior thesis.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I ended up looking at geochemical evolution of Long Island suns, but we kept the experiment going anyway.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And just to finish that story, it turns out that as you might guess, tube effects worms don't eat ash.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's glassy, it's sharp, and it has no nutritional value.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: So when they got down to the ash layer I buried in in the sediment at about five centimeters, they bioturbated down to that, they penetrated through it and started eating below it and actually excavated a hole underneath the ash layer.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: But that cut and so the ash layer got buried eventually, you know, just through avoidance by really.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: I've said nobody's ever published anything on that that I know of.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Still out there.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's really cool.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Was this from the last eruption, like 105 years ago or 100, I don't know, seven, eight years ago now?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Of yeah, well, we we we had that layer in the Mount St.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Helens mud, plus there were some deeper ashes too from from the earlier eruptions.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: We could get sedimentation rates and that sort of thing with the ash layers as as markers.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: I've never really thought of that.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I teach the G Sai One, which as you know, we goes out and looks at the in the uh along 322 here, looks at the bentonites in the cloud.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: I've never actually considered the preservational aspect of that.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: But so how how do you propose that the a because the ash would fall on top, and how do they not why do they not work it in at the initial depositional stage?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I can see why they avoid it once it's in the layer, as you described, but when it's deposited.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, but you know, but I think well, uh you know, and there's different kinds of bioturbation, and if we're back in the Ordovician, so I I mean so it's a really good question.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: What about different styles of bioturbation?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this this upside down feeding.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: You could kind of imagine that that in a case like that or in in Castle Lake there that that they get buried in that, but they but they still have their heads down down below the ash, and they just they're they're turning that when the ash gets to their head layer, then they then they would retract and they see and eat above it.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um like you know, in the in the cable division, what did the trilobites do when they got buried in ash and maybe they died and then had to repopulate after some sedimentation covered up this ash layer.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's really interesting.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: I never thought about that.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's cool.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse, this is one more example of biology messing up our geology.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: It just gets in the way.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: We haven't never talked about this one before.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: I I know that's a long-running theme.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Both our both of my dad and Chris's father were both high school geology or uh high school biology teachers, excuse me.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: So we have this long-running kind of family debate about what's more important biology or geology.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And well, right.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And and for most yeah, for field work, biology just gets in the way if you've got to be.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's our main point.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: All this likeness, all these trees covering up the stupid rocks.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, come on, you know.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, sorry.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: No, go ahead.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: This leads really nicely into the next the thing I I want to kind of bring up, which is this thing called Earth System Science, I guess.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: And and Lee, I have a I don't think I've ever told maybe never anybody at Penn State, but when I got the Penn State job offer, I had colleagues in University of Alberta who were I'd become friends with when I was there in graduate school, and this was long after I'd left there, but they're like, Oh, wow, dude, congratulations, that's amazing.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, Yeah, thanks.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: This is great.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, wow, this is so cool.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: The the what did they the school of Earth System Science is what they called it.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, Oh, what do you mean?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: Because this isn't my field, and so I didn't really under, you know, I didn't really know what they meant by this.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, dude, Cump, Castling, Brantley, like they invented the field.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: They wrote the book, they invented the field, and you know, we have you're among them, but we have some very prolific, very famous scientists from that you all worked together in the 90s and created this this field that is it by by my understanding of it, kind of not only you guys, but but we're we're certainly instrumental in the development of the field of earth system science.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: So could you give us like the the elevator pitch on what earth system science is?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then I want to ask about the history and the development of it.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um, you know, I think it it gets back to to Wiley.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's a study of of the way the earth works, but it's um not just the solid earth, which is what Wiley was focused on, but it's all the components of the earth system.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it's the solid earth, the oceans, the atmosphere, the cryosphere, that frozen part of the world, and also the bio the biota, how life interacts with all of these components of the earth of the earth.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it's treating the earth as a system of interacting components.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: These components are you know the oceans, atmosphere, life, the solid earth, and they're all interacting in in ways that ultimately can do some really cool things like stabilize the climate system over long periods of time and and other environmental conditions, you know, the acidity of the oceans.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's it's an approach to studying the earth that focuses on how it functions, how it can be sustained over, you know, all timescales, including billions of years.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: How did the earth remain habitable as our sun became brighter and brighter over billions of years?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: That involved a change in the atmospheric composition that also included processes like the alteration of the crust, weathering of the crust.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's a study of of how these components interact, ways that sustain life and the viability of the planet.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: So is this a major then?
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Is this a series of classes?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I actually once got invited to to the state of.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hawaii, and I thought I was just going to give a lecture, which I did, but then I met with their with the dean at the time.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: This was many years ago, and they said, Well, what we really have to be here for is we're thinking about having a major in earth system science, and we want to know how you've done that at Penn State.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I had to admit that we don't have a major inner system science, and we still don't have a major in earth system science.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, we have the textbook and we practice it.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's tension around these interdisciplinary fields, though, that that um there's a sense that you ought to become an expert in one of the areas that are contributing to the interdisciplinary area, and then do the interdisciplinary work at at a higher level, like in graduate school.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um I challenge that, but I've but I think that that's still a prevailing view.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: And and it it's you know, even oceanography, most schools prefer students to study biology, chemistry, physics, or geology as undergraduates, and then do oceanography or system science at the graduate level.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um we don't have majors, but we do have the ability to build that coursework into your degree program in in geosciences or or or in meteorology.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you're developing that broader understanding of of how the earth works as a system.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: So when okay, this time I mean, I don't know what time stamp to put on this.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: Is this the 80s?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: Is this kind of the 90s, broadly this era?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: What was the what was the change?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: Was it a a recognition for how powerful some of these feedback loops are in the earth system way of thinking, or was it like all the fields had to be developed on their own such that you could get the high-level view of the earth as a system?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like what what was what led to this kind of thing?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, you know, I uh there were two things really I think that I would trace it back to.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: What really influenced the development of of Earth System Science at Penn State was participation by um some of our faculty members at the time in a NASA effort.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um and NASA, I think NASA's Earth Science group was starting to do satellite remote sensing, and they're looking at Earth as a planet.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, we went to the moon and we looked back on this uh blue and white ball, and we were thinking, and and so they had this.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: So NASA researchers had this perspective of the Earth, and they're looking at the dynamic Earth.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: And and Francis Brotherton is often credited with there was the Brotherton diagram, maybe the first Earth system science box diagram of all the different like components.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that was one thing.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think the other part of this that became very important, especially in terms of bringing in life into it, was the work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who were the originators of the Gaia hypothesis.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: They this view that we should be thinking about the earth like a living organism.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: These components I were discussing, you know, the the rivers are like the bloodstream, and the planet is breathing because we have photosynthesis at the global scale that's releasing um that's releasing oxygen and carbon dioxide.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that this the interaction of the physical and non-living and the living world is is capable of regulating planetary temperature and ocean pH.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it was those two things, kind of this view of Earth from space that that demanded sort of integration of the disciplines to really understand what was controlling that dynamic planet and then bringing in life through the Gaia hypothesis.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: These were all things are happening in the late 70s, early 80s.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: We of Penn State were fortunate that that the deans at the time, Charlie Hossler and John Dutton, who have been, they they're both meteorologists, but deans of our college, and and they had been participating in this NASA effort.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: They said we need to get ahead of this game.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so they launched what uh was to be called the the Earth System Science Center, one of the first global change institutes at Penn State, hired Eric Barron, who became dean and then ultimately president of Penn State, uh launched this and and then hired a bunch of us um in the early days.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was fortunate my Tommy was just right, came here in 1986.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, interesting.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so it was kind of uh sorry, go ahead, Chris.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Lee, I'm really, really interested in in uh what you're saying here.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a question then.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like in an ideal world, do you think that this is the way that you know under level uh uh young students and undergrad students should be taught about geology as Earth as a system like this?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: I I do think so.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: And and even our local high school now teaching earth science as an earth system science.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think uh part of that is that it teaches us that everything is interdependent.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we're dealing with issues like climate change today and and environmental disturbance, pollution at a global scale, and things that are happening uh on the other side of the planet are influencing us just as much as if they were happening here in in uh State College.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I think that you know, for us for everyone to um, you know, to fully appreciate the capacity of human activity to disturb the planet, the all these interconnections or teleconnections, it you know, really uh argues that this ought to be an integral part of of secondary education, maybe primary education, rather than just teaching the disciplines as inner as independent subjects to be studied, focus on the on the interconnections.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: So what's the roadblock, you think?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, you know, I used to say it was a traditional um traditional education of the people who were having to do the educating.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's right.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it could still be true.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um but and I think that might be part of it.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think you know, high school curricula slowly evolve, college curricula obviously slowly evolve, um, and probably for for good reasons.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we don't want to be following every fad as they come down, come down the path.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: We thought maybe having a textbook would, you know, in you know, back in the days when textbooks were essential.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Every class had it had to have a textbook that anchored it.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: There were no textbooks in our system science.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: So actually it was John Dutton who came to me in my like third year at Penn State and says, Lady, the the field needs a textbook in our system science.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Penn State needs to be the one to write that textbook.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: If it's not the first one, it's got to be the best one.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you're the one to do that.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Oh, right.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have tenure.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone told me what the worst thing I could do is to write an introductory textbook.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's the one thing that you have to go look at tenure.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Oh, he said, if you get anybody tell you that, send them down to my office.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I started looking at the textbook.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: It actually took us about 10 years.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I had long gotten tenure by the time the book, the first uh book was published.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: So okay, I gotta ask, do you still have the book?
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like how many editions of this book were made, first of all?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're in the fourth edition now.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: Just uh published the fourth edition.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, so I have I have actually boxes of the of the materials that went into that first edition.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh, all right.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm things we brought together.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I Jim Casting and Rob Crean and I, the three co-authors of the book, were the ones who were first teaching the class, uh, which was called Gaia, the Earth System at the time.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because I wanted to bring in Lovelock, he had been a mentor of mine, so I brought in Gaia, but it's Earth System Science.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so we taught this class.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, teaching the class is a real challenge because you need to know a little bit of uh biology and ecology, and you need to know, you know, atmospheric photochemistry, and you need to know, you know, plate tectonics, at least at a level to to um to credibly teach these.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really a challenge, too.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so to have a single introduction to that, it's really a problem.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, we we spent the reason it took 10 years is we are also struggling in the classroom, you know, to both bring, you know, to give the students the fundamentals of what they needed to understand so many different disciplines.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: And for that, we we turned to Lovelock, who always said, you know, you got to treat this from the top down.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: What are the global controls on things?
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna understand everything about cellular biology, but what is it about life that really impacts the planet at a global scale?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: So we distilled that, did a lot of backpedaling in the classroom, uh, in our lecture notes year after year, refining this.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I think, you know, with our textbook, and now after 20 years of of refinement and four editions, we've distilled that into that kind of essential material that I think can be taught by disciplinarians who write as well as and be accessible to you know undergraduates across the majors.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we've had you know quite a quite a bit of sales at the high school level as well.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, right.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's right.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: High school science teacher, high school science students.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think it's easier for a science-oriented high school student and high school science teacher to teach this class than it is for an art major at Penn State to understand it.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: But we have art art majors in our class too.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's really interesting.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I I okay, two uh a comment and then a question.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, Lee, thank you for never coming to my office in my third year and saying, hey, you need to write a textbook on something.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: I can imagine that being an incredibly stressful interaction to have had with your dean at that point.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um maybe there's another reason he didn't ask you to do it, Jesse.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, that's right.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: I certainly not qualified to do anything like that.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but there is some some textbook out there that we that we need to write.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: And and I'll be checking when you after, you know, yeah, when it's when when the time is right.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: When the time is right, okay, yeah, sure.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: And then I uh on the on the topic of the education side, I guess.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, okay, I'm curious what your view is from your high-level view here of undergrad education, and maybe specifically, you're the dean of earth and mineral sciences, so there's all sorts of different fields that you're kind of in charge of.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: But maybe cool if we could focus on geosciences specifically.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like I went through and Chris went through at a time when people got into geology because it's cool, like volcanoes, plate tectonics, cool rocks, whatever.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: Like that, it's very that was a really big motivator.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's just cool.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: And now I wonder if it would be better if students got into it because it's important, both from all the sustainability earth systems things you're talking about, let alone the need for more raw materials and this retirement in the exploration and mining industries that we're going up against.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like, so I guess do you do you feel that same way?
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, and and do you think that do you see that transitioning happening amongst the students?
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I um I see it amongst the students and among our early career faculty, that even though you got into it because it was cool, um, and and you know, many of us that's what drew it to us.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if we go back a generation before mine, they got into it because there were problems to solve.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Penn State had a very strong economic geology program.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: And across the nation, you know, why did geology and geochemistry grow?
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was around ore deposits, understanding ores.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: After World War II, uranium geology and geochemistry was a huge national need.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: We needed to understand uranium deposits for, you know, for weapons, for energy.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so there was a period there, the 60s, 70s, where it was very applied.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: The geoscience work was very applied.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: 70s on into the 80s, we kind of moved away from that.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: And both in terms of the work that the economic geologists were doing, one of our ore deposits geologists um moved into studying the rise of oxygen in the Pre-Cambrian.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: He had worked on some rocks in Canada, South Africa, Western Australia that now, you know, instead of looking at them as ore deposits, he was thinking about them as reflective of what the atmosphere was like at the time.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the funding followed that as well, and the student interest.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're coming back around time.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: There are some really serious problems we need to address.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you've mentioned several of them.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and there's a real need for people who understand how the how the earth works, where these raw materials come from, because you know, as they as they say, if you can't grow it, you have to get it from the earth or the ocean.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so we need to understand that um the geohazards are still there too, right?
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, we need to understand those because the hazards are real world challenges.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: We we're trying to manage risks from all these things.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Climate change impacts, you know, we need to understand uh hill slope stability.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so geomorphology is still a real important area, water, water supplies, and the geosciences tend to focus on the subsurface for water supply, and then the and then the engineers are focusing on surface water, but that's not you know, that's not a clean distinction either.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so we we have people who look at modern river processes and erosion.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, so understanding the subsurface, where can we store carbon dioxide?
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: If we're trying to sequester it.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: Where are we gonna store hydrogen?
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Where can we store energy in general?
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: We need, if we're using renewable energy to generate, we need we have that problem of storage.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: And and there are batteries, of course, but there may be ways that we can utilize uh the subsurface.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: And to do that, we need to understand the geology of the subsurface.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's it isn't uh sandbox, right?
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so so there's just so many areas in which somebody who understands the earth can contribute to solving important problems for society.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and I think that's what motivates students today.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: They want to make a difference.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's what's motivating many of our of our uh faculty members as well, you know, early career, but also some of the senior faculty members who have spent the last 20 years focusing on curiosity-driven science are saying, Hey, you know, I'd actually like to make a difference.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it must be an interesting thing to watch from your channel.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, Chris.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: No, Jesse, this is so interesting.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: You've never framed this question like this to me.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've never talked about this, but what a really interesting observation.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I first started teaching 30 years ago, I didn't have an answer for why is this important?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: Why is what you're doing and teaching, why should students learn this?
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, my I'm thinking, well, because it's awesome, you know, like really like you know, but I have evolved into this too.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it now I have such an easy answer.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's this is an important thing that we, you know, we need to learn as much about this planet and the way it works as we possibly can if we're gonna take care of it.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I didn't have that at the beginning.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm just shocked that you and I never really had this discussion before sitting on my front porch.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a little pissed, Jess.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we got other things to talk about, Chris.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I think, you know, so so you know, we need to make sure that we are conveying that, you know, these opportunities and making sure that our curricula support that, right?
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so we don't because we tend to get locked into, well, here are the things that I had to do to become a geologist.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: So by God, we're gonna make sure our all of our students have that same thing, and it may not be serving them well.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, so we do need to look at our curricula.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, yes, we'll be hearing I'm as dean calling on all of our departments to really take a close look at our our curricula serving the students of today and the future.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we need to be nimble about this.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, how how how do you how do we balance that?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you you referred to fads.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: We don't want to like you know get caught up in fads, and there's always this kind of discussion and tension.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: I I hear a little bit about the the critical minerals, at least early on, was cons some people thought oh, it's just a fad, it's gonna go away.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_02: It seems like this is here to stay, at least uh from my view, like this is just a rebranding of economic geology and it, you know, it's it's here.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_02: So, how do you when we're thinking about that, and maybe do you have statistics, employer statistics, or like anything, any numbers we can kind of throw at this to make sure we kind of avoid fads while also serving students for the long term?
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, well, because you know, these are emerging needs too.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so, so there is a bit of crystal ball there.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I think you know, you know, that we need to look and see.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's clearly a demand to grow renewable energy, and we sort of know what those limits and there are various limitations on the rate of that growth.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think raw material availability is part of that.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, so we I think we know that there's gonna be increased demand for people to help provide that that source of materials.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I think too, you know, one of the other things that we focused on, we've focused on for many years in the geosciences is not just content knowledge.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's a certain amount of content that's needed, but it's the it's the uh skills, skill sets.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, there are things that geologists are really good at, like 3D visualization, thinking in three dimensions, yeah, visualizing things.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um I mean, it's actually impressive.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: I teach you know, G SI1 to engineers, and it's actually impressive when you get up there and you start describing these things.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: Chris, you have the same experience.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_02: We talked about it ad nauseum.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like you're describing th plates thousands of kilometers wide moving at moving over tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like that is a mental leap.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: That it's it always I forget how difficult that is initially, and like how much of a mentality is.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: Four-dimensional thinking in places in at a scale we can't replicate in a lab.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_02: I always tend to forget that, how how much training it takes to actually think like that.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, problem solving skills, teamwork, these are all things.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, communication skills, you two are doing a great job of emphasizing that through this podcast, how important it is to communicate our science to the public.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: So there are a lot of these uh and data, you know, data analytics skills, uh working with big data sets.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, and geoscientists have always been working with big data sets and developing those skills, working with experts in in data analytics to and working, making sure our students understand that.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's there are a lot of portable skills that you get as a geoscientist.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the proof is in looking where our graduates go, I had a I had a PhD student who graduated and then went to work for British Telecom, helping them optimize routing schemes for phone calls.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, no kidding.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just because he had worked with global data sets and they were really impressed with his how facile he was and thinking about times and and and routing and systems, you know.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so we can't imagine where where our graduates will go, but we need to give them a set of skills.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think a fundamental I think we understand what are some durable things that we think uh define the geosciences around knowledge of the way of the structure and function of the earth that I think serve our students well is um and then there's all the cool stuff there that we can't forget, you know, you know, because we need to first of all we need to draw them into our discipline.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so the minus and meteors and the volcano, you know, volcanic eruptions and things.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: And there's still a lot to learn there, but it's also it's got to be part of our introductory geology uh coursework too.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, yeah, that stuff is kind of you know where we're heading, but let's have some fun along the way and and don't give up on the field field trips and and um that sort of thing.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: That stuff is so important too because it is a hook.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: This is an easy sell, but there has to be more to it than than just that, you know, just the the cool stuff.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's yeah, I love that.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: We we have the best stories, we have the best, like we we've got the best content, especially for that draw-you-in intro level class, you know, the one science class a business major takes in their time at Penn State.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_02: You should be taking one of ours because it's the coolest, and it'll like it'll it'll travel with you the best throughout your life, just like walk around on a path in a stream near nearby your neighborhood.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_02: You'd be like, Oh, I understand how meanders work.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: Whoa, that's cool.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that kind of stuff.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, yeah, totally.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, sorry, Chris.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's okay.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, Jesse, um, we're we only have about 10 minutes left.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: So there are things that I definitely want to get to.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I'm really interested in also, Lee.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: Before we end, I want to know what led you down the road of administration.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just like personally very curious about that.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to make sure we get to that before we so okay.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'll let me ask you a question real quickly.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: That the short we'll keep this short.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_02: What's your you've you've been a part of so many very impressive, very long, very highly cited scientific discoveries.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_02: What's your favorite one and why?
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: If if you could possibly pick.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: I know that's kind of an impossible question, but I don't know.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: I I I really liked the uh work we did on the N permium mass extinction.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was the largest mass extinction of all time.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we developed a focus, my students and I, around the role that hydrogen sulfide might have played in that mass extinction.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, this this is the poisonous gas that that smells like rotten eggs.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we um proposed, you know, from a theoretical perspective, that the oceans at the time, this is, you know, there's also a huge global warming event.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it ties into everything.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: You had the volcanic eruptions associated with the Siberian traps spewing out toxic substances and greenhouse gases.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the planet warmed, probably the hottest it's been in the last several hundred million years.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: But the oceans also lost all their oxygen.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: And when the oceans lost all their oxygen, then then hydrogen sulfide builds up because bacteria.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: switch to a to a sulfur-based metabolism.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the byproduct of that is hydrogen sulfide rather than CO2.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so the ocean became poisonous.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so we so we did some modeling that would suggest that under those conditions, not only would that kill marine life, but that hydrogen sulfide should escape to the atmosphere.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that explained why the Permian extinction was so devastating to organisms on land and in the ocean that the atmosphere became poisonous, at least episodically.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time we proposed this, we actually didn't know that the planet had gotten really hot.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now now we understand the planet got really hot.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: Back then we didn't have all those temperature indicators.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway this this was it was a lot of fun.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_00: The uh press picked it up because they love the rotten egg you know earth you know kind of thing.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it's probably 12 documentaries.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh really uh yeah I have an IMDB page.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that's great.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you know and and with all the all the most famous of the uh science documentary um uh shows and so oh that's cool and and and part of what they liked is we had a we have a lake up in New York State called Green Lake that's poisonous at depth and I'm a scuba diver and so everyone every film crew wanted me to wanted to film me diving into the poisonous waters which my wife said Lee I'm getting a little tired of watching you on TV diving the poisonous waters.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know at some point you're not going to come back up.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: But so anyway that that was you know that was a lot of fun it it helped it tuned me into the science communication side of things because we had to you know they they started me over many times filming these documentaries because I was getting into jargon um and not recognizing the audience who who is part of you know naked science or or or through through the wormhole or something.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: So do you use this as an do you use the end Permian as um like a lead in and a chapter in your Earth system book then?
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because I mean what you just talked about is Earth as a system.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: Holy cow I mean it's yeah it's um not in the first edition but but uh we did the Cretaceous uh Paleogene master and and um comet in asteroid impacts that because we hadn't done the Permian work but we did bring it into the second or third edition I can't remember yeah but it really is a total earth system thing which is you know which is another reason why I really liked it.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: But you know ended up that we were challenged um well first of all when we first proposed this there was no data in support of it and that was pointed out in an article in The Economist that this is a great idea by a company has no data to support it.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: He's going to do some work in in Japan to to support it.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: In the year that we published our theoretical paper um data came out in science articles by other groups finding evidence for hydrogen sulfide in the shallow ocean in the photo came out in that same year.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: So data supported more sophisticated modeling came out though and showed that our simple model was wrong and that under the conditions that we had modeled within the ocean that it wouldn't have made the atmosphere poisonous in in the in the way we did.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so in a sense in fact I was at a on a field uh trip up in Spitzbergen and one of my colleagues from England who had also worked on the Permian extinction came in to our first breakfast and he said the hydrogen sulfide hypothesis is dead well David nice to see you too you know after you know hours of traveling up there we're in the middle of nowhere and and he's he's announcing to this group of assembled scientists and students that that my hypothesis was dead and then he went to explain that but but I still think it it has it has a role to play it may now we've learned that that temperature has been is probably the more important chill mechanism there.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_02: Oh that's so interesting wow what a story that's a great one I love that yeah and and academics they're not the most um socially competent at all times sometimes you know you get these weird comments where you're like calm down I mean yeah well and and and you know and for and and for many of us all that we can talk about is science right yeah you know it drives drives our spouses crazy you know because can you bring and bring friends home to stay in your house and and they don't talk about the kids or anything else or about your spouse's occupation it's all yeah no that's right that whenever we have a party more it's like we we gotta invite more there has to be less than 50% geologist otherwise you guys just take over and it's terrible.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: So sorry Chris I you have a question about administration you said right well I I just I'm curiously so before we started recording we were talking about how you know you joked that you're not a bona fide uh you know geoscientist because you're you're now the dean of the department and and well I'm just curious because I I have zero interest in ever going into administration like it I just it the thought of it turns my stomach I'm never leaving the classroom when I you know so I'm just really curious as to what led you down that path.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah well I mean there was bullying by my um senior faculty colleagues you know they there were two two attempts at that uh Rini Schlingland and Michael Arthur uh are the two people who who um jesse knows who really put the pressure on me to become a department head but um actually that it you know and so I was not a I didn't have a career objective of becoming administrator in fact two it was a bad word for for me as well and I still don't I still kind of cringe when I called me sorry scientists don't like faculty members don't like administrators but but really you know what it was honestly was it was at my dad's funeral and my dad it was a radiologist he had um become the uh chief of staff in the hospital but he'd also published papers in in the journal you know in the AMA journal in the journal the Renkin Ray Society and there's actually a fracture named after him the uh the bump comp you know so he had done research and published on this and um but I was at his funeral and no one was talking about his publication record no one was talking about the research that he had done um but a woman came up to me and she said you don't know me but let me tell you about your dad she said 20 years ago I was X-ray tech and and he was the head of the x-ray partnership there he he was my boss and I was caught at work stoned I had taken drugs and I was barely functioning and my supervisor said well I'm gonna fire you but we have to go talk to the to the head of our unit and so she came in and talked to my dad and and she said he asked me you know why was I taking drugs tell me about your life and I was a single mom I had three kids I was struggling with daycare and it just the stress got to me and I and I started taking drugs.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: I got hooked on them and so he said okay here's what we're gonna do we're not gonna fire you but we're gonna give you a leave of absence we are going to I just have had an offer of an old shopping mall um some space there and we were already talking about that but we're gonna set up a daycare center for all hospital employees and in our practice we'll pay for you to go through drug treatment.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can be successful in all that you've got your job when you come out of treatment.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: And she said so I went through that I got treatment I'm still here 20 years later I am I'm the head of staff for X-ray technician group and it was that chance that your dad you know your dad believed in me and gave me that that chance so no one cared about his bump of clump or his papers and rank and ray but people cared about the way he helped people succeed.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so that you know that that in the end was um what tilted me over to to going ahead and and saying that what I became a department head when he was still alive and you know he was very proud of that.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_00: But it was that sense of having even more opportunities to help people more power as Dean help people that convinced me to stay on this track.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because I was fully intending to go back to being a regular faculty member because that's where my passion and and love I love working with students.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_02: I still teach one class each every other year because it has an embedded field trip to the Caribbean I've I've I've noticed that one I think some as a huge fracture department that manages to go do research in the Caribbean snorkeling around the Bahamas or something too it's it seems like a scam to me but yeah I just um Lee uh I that's the best possible answer that you could have given I I um holy I don't know how you got through that story without getting choked up and emotional about your father.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah I mean I've told I mean I was close and I have gotten choked in the past you know when I first time I told it I really got choked up yeah now you make me feel guilty.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah well but I I mean I have a comment on that because I I I I like you could I got goosebumps I was choked up listening to that story.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's an amazing story and it goes speaks to the power of good administrations and administrators.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know how you like you Lee how you did it during COVID I do not envy anybody in a seat of administrations during that time period.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_02: And everybody as far as I'm concerned at Penn State did an amazing job navigating us through that time period.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: So just you know hats off to you for for taking that on and you know and helping us all survive I mean we're all stressed out but but I think you know we ministry has had an opportunity here to try to minimize the the uh the additional burden on our employees and students and and you know we had good leadership in the average level supportive of of the accommodations that we made so yeah so um it worked out okay we are we're over time Lee uh one last question for you what has been your best day as a geoscientist um today I like it I may yeah I've gotten to talk about geoscience again not not just administrative things no I mean there have been so many great days and there continue to be great days I've you know I've I set my kids up for set a high bar because I've always told them you know I've always I love going into work every day I've never regretted going in because I I've loved my job every aspect of it working with students keeps you young and uh you know being able to participate in this educational enterprise so I could tell you about some of my favorite experiences traveling the world being you know in Spitzbergen or Arctic Russia or Western Australia these are all amazing experiences but but there's just so many of those it's the best job I could imagine people are paying me to do this stuff so yeah so oh that's great well that's that's a great answer it's a lucky man who has every day is one of the best days that's great I mean it's a good a good lesson in that well lead thanks so much for your time this has been a great conversation we have I have a dozen more questions to ask you that we to get all sorts of stuff to get to later on but um thank you very much we really appreciate the time yeah thanks for the good to be on the show appreciate it and thanks for hosting the show and doing all all the work and thanks to Chris for bringing Jesse to us you know by by inspiring him to continue on in in uh geoscience I'm really happy to see you still have that good close connection so that's great.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah yeah well thanks so much Lee uh just to reiterate everything Jesse said um you would be you're the kind of person that I would want to work for out of that we just well maybe we can facilitate that Chris here we go bring him to Penn State you know it's a couple years come on Chris come to Penn State man we'll figure it out I'm I'm I'm friends with your principal I don't want to ruin that that's right all right thanks Lee we really appreciate it okay take care everybody hey thanks for listening there are several ways to support us first of all first link in your show notes go to the Camp Geo Mobile app there you can get all sorts of visual podcast series basically the intro to geoscience the first class you take in a college level geology program which Chris teaches and I teach as well we have visual podcast series lots of images to help you understand kind of what a silicate tetrahedron is for instance we also have other audiobooks that you can buy there Grand Canyon, Grand Tetons, Yellowstone National Park, a whole bunch of series on Earth Soldis Rocks, etc You can also head over to our website Planetgeocast.com send us an email planetgeocast at gmail.com follow us on all social medias Planet GeoCast