Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Discovering Diamonds: The Story of Canada's Diamond Rush with Kevin Krajick

Transcript

Discovering Diamonds: The Story of Canada's Diamond Rush with Kevin Krajick · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Christofer.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: What's up, man?
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Not a whole lot.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: How you doing, Dr.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Rymick?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a week, man.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: I tell you what, it's what is it now?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Wednesday.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: It has just been a week.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know why.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Just been one of those weeks.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's been a good week for me.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um weather has been absolutely perfect.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I love fall.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: It's just got this, it's not summer.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_03: It's warm, but it has a different smell.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: The wind is different.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: I just love it.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, fall's great.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Every week.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's probably it.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: We've had some pretty rainy days here at uh Penn State and State College here the last couple days.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: Are you getting some Hurricane Ian left over?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, not yet.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's going to come in a little bit, but we haven't gotten any of that yet.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's just been kind of rare, just a little bit rainy and dreary.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I did have a colleague who was visiting who gave our departmental colloquium seminar on Tuesday, which was really fun.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: So Colloquium, that's a big word for you.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Seminar, yeah.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: I try and pull it off.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think I pronounced it right.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_03: Colloquium seminar.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: What does that mean?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: I don't even uh I don't know.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Fancy word for big long talk.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I'm annoying.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: You're you are.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we we just had a really good conversation though.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been a week, but this was really fun.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: We had the great pleasure to interview Kevin Krychuk, who is the senior editor of Science and News at the Columbia Climate School.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: He the reason we interviewed him, though, is because he's written a book that I love, and Chris, you've read recently as well.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Barren Lands, An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And oh, it's so fun.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's just such a great blend of amazing characters, really cool geology, a bunch of different aspects of geology, and then you know, finding massive diamond deposits, which who doesn't love that, right?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's super cool.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: But Kevin, uh, let me just read through some of his accolades here.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: He's been the finalist for the National Magazine Award for Public Service, two-time winner of the American Geophysical Union's Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Scientific Journalism.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: His work has been featured on National Geographic, Newsweek, the New Yorker Science, Smithsonian Magazine, like all over the place.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And many of those articles have won uh Best American Science and Nature writing awards.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a very, very well-known and very prolific science writer who also wrote this book called Barrenlands that we love.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this was a fun conversation, right, Chris?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: It was.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's called Barren Lands, like you said, but it's an epic search for diamonds in the North American Arctic.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: So everyone needs to understand the kind of process that you and I go through.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we come up with ideas and then we pitch them to each other.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: And you pitched me this, and uh, you were really, really excited about this because you've spent so much time in the Northwest Territory.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: So you had a tie to this that I didn't have, and so I was skeptical at the at the beginning.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: Then I read the book and it read like a novel.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's not a novel.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: He did not take liberties with conversations that happened.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of personal dialogue in this.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_03: The main central characters, two people are amazing, they are so entertaining, they're geniuses in their own way.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: I would like Chuck Fipke is one of my favorite people that I've never met in my life.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: I he he he tops the list of people I'd love to have a beer with.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I mean, he just I I laughed so many times from reading the book that happened.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't seem like you'd be able to just have one beer with him.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think you'd probably be here for 20 minutes.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_03: It would it would be a long night.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but I guess what I want to say is read the book.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's very good.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_03: This isn't a like, we're not trying to plug that or anything like that, but I really enjoyed it, and you had to sell me on it.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, this was not an easy, like, oh, okay, let's do that.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_03: You had to sell me.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_03: We've already done diamonds, you know.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_03: So that was uh by the way, go back and listen to our earlier episode on diamonds as a refresher about things like Kimberlights, how diamonds form, uh, these rare volcanoes that come from very, very deep down in the mantle.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_03: And and yeah, go back, it'd be a good primer, and then maybe listen to this episode.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so we'll get to this interview here coming up.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: But really quickly, Chris, a couple weeks ago we launched our Camp Geo product, uh, which is a web app you can go to.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's a conversational textbook.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you like Planet Geo, but you want something a little bit more structured and you want to learn the basics, go to that.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: The link is in the show notes.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: You can click on that, log in.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: You have access to all sorts of interesting content about the geosciences.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: So go to that.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's right, Jesse.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: Camp Geo, we cover everything that you would get in a typical intro geology college course.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's complete.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it will be complete, but what I mean is this content is thorough, it's enhanced with images you need to help the content make sense.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_03: It is, we're so excited about this.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_03: Been a blast to make.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's gonna be a blast for you to learn this way.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: Just a cool thing.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And if you like Planet Geo, remember leave us a rating and review.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Those help the algorithm.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Go to our website, planetgeocast.com.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: You can subscribe there, you can learn about us, you can support us, and uh share planet geo with your friends, right?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right, here is Kevin Krychuk coming at you.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: All right, welcome to Planet Geo.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Today we have the great pleasure of having Kevin Krychuk along with us, who is a science writer uh extraordinaire, I would say, as you heard in our introduction.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Kevin, welcome to Planet Geo.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_04: Delighted to be here.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_04: I'm glad to meet you guys.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_04: We have some things in common, I think.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're totally excited.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you've written a book that I love uh about diamond mining in northern Canada, where I did my research.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, diamond prospecting, but this book is a great exploration of searching for diamonds in the sort of modern world.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: The book is called Barren Lands, an epic search for diamonds in the North American Arctic.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think that'll kind of center our conversation a little bit, but you know, Chris did a deep dive on you as he loves to do and found some articles that are super interesting.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll probably talk about a lot of different stuff.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: I hope so.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: But we always like to kind of frame the interviews as we start of like, how did you get into this?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, how did what inspired you to get into writing generally, journalism, or you know, more specifically, the the sort of geoscience field that you've been writing about for a long time?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, it started back in high school.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_04: I was interested in journalism um so much so that I helped run the uh high school newspaper and also a competing underground newspaper, because I thought the uh the nice the official one didn't have enough hard edges.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, cool.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: What was it?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: What was the underground one called?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, uh the gesture.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_04: The gesture.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_04: It's a stupid thing.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_04: Nice.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_04: This is in the 1970s.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_04: So uh, you know, after high school I managed to drop out of college for a while, uh, but I did go back and uh got a pretty useless degree in comparative literature.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_04: I shouldn't say it's totally useless, talking a lot about language and structuring, uh structuring long form narratives.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_04: But anyway, um I do have a practical streak.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_04: I decided to go to journalism school because I did want to make a living as a writer.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_04: And it turned out to be a pretty good investment.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_04: Uh Columbia Journalism School, nine months and out, um, got a fabulous job uh straight out of school, uh, covering police, prisons, and crime across the United States with a couple of magazines that uh covered those issues.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_04: And uh so I've been in the back of a lot of police cars and in many more horrifying prisons than even the most hardened criminals.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_04: So that was a you know, a real adventure, and it sort of brought me out of my shell.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_04: I'm kind of a shy person, so that was kind of my uh aim as well.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that would get you out of your shell.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's pretty intense.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so I mean I bounced through a bunch of jobs uh after that and and did cover a lot of crime stuff as well as immigration and medicine and other things.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_04: But the crime stuff, you know, it's a depressing beat.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_04: There are really no news stories as far as I'm concerned, after having covered that for a while.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_04: People are just gonna keep committing crimes, the cops are gonna keep beating them up, and the prisons are just gonna keep being horrible.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_04: But it did occur to me, um, oh, I don't know, sort of in the early 90s, that some people I knew who were writing about science, like they were doing something really quite different.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_04: They were writing about new discoveries.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_04: Science is is about finding stuff out.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_04: There's new stuff all the time, and it's not depressing.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_04: And besides, um scientists, especially geoscientists, go to the most exotic and wild places.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_04: So one uh advantage is just to follow them around.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_04: You know, that's what I did.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_04: I, you know, I just started to think about uh science ideas and I started reading science and nature, the two of the leading journals, and just reading up on uh various scientific topics and then coming up with ideas.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_04: So I had a long, long tenure as a freelancer after that.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_04: I was I had been working at Newsweek for a while as sort of a low-level editor, uh, but that's that's where I sort of started the uh the science beat.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, that's really cool.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_03: Was there anything in particular, Kevin, that got you into science?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_03: Was there um something that you read, an experience that happened that you're like, this is the direction I want to go?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, this it was actually the the book that I eventually wrote.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_04: Um in 1994, I read that um some geologists had found diamonds in the far north of Canada, this place called the Barrenlands.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_04: And um, it was portrayed as this place, it's just nothing but you know thousands of miles of rocks and permafrost and wild beasts.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_04: Sounds like another planet, right?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_04: You know, who wouldn't who wouldn't want to go there?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_04: I guess most people would not want to go there, but I wanted to go there.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_04: So I thought up a magazine story.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_04: Uh the narrative at that time was sort of about the finances and the riches of this uh this diamond strike.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_04: But I was more interested in how did they do it?
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_04: How did they get up there into this incredibly faraway place?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_04: That was kind of my first real science story.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_04: I just it just sort of took from there.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, for sure.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it I you can tell from the the writing and especially from the Barren Lands, Chris, if you'll let me off the leash and I can talk about the Barren Lands now.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think we can go, Jesse.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: Let's go.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: All right, good.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um you you get into some pretty deep science, which I hope we'll we'll kind of talk about a little bit here.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, as a backdrop to this, I did my PhD in Canada and I was working up in what's called the Slave Kureton.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been to Yellow and F a whole bunch, but I went up I started going up there in 2009, which is a decade and a half after the diamond mining really started, or all this diamond exploration, and the town is well developed, and there's some definitely like well-heeled parts of the town now because of this big diamond industry.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you when you were going up there, it must have been a bit more of a rough and ready sort of exploration town than it is now.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, you kind of described how this the where the inspiration came from.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: But how do you start a book like this?
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do you say, oh, there's new diamond mines being explored up there, being found and installed?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what do you do first when you decide you want to write a book about it?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_04: Well, first of all, you don't decide to write a book straight off.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_04: The way I started it was a no, it's this is true.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_04: Um for many people, everybody has their own way of working, of course.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_04: But um, I conceived of it as a magazine article.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_04: This was for Discover magazine.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_04: So they sent me up there to write this long story about how these guys did it.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_04: And then I got a couple of other stories.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_04: I got another story about from Natural History magazine to write about the wildlife up there and the ecology of the Barren Lands.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_04: And then I got, you know, another, I think another couple of magazine stories just to talk about the politics of it, and then realized, you know, I could really expand this into a book.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_04: So that's where it begins.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_04: It begins small, and then you just kind of keep keep digging.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you've been up there.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I when I was looking, I typed in Barrenlands, first of all, to Google when I was trying to find I can't remember what I was trying to find.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Something about the book, though.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I realized that when you know, type something into Google, there's actually a map location, kind of like a restaurant review that you would find for the Barren Lands.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: You could Barrenlands has like a review.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's a review, there's reviews, and there's three reviews, and the average is 3.7 stars out of five, which is astonishingly high, I thought, for the Barrenlands, like of the three people who reviewed it.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_04: What do you rate?
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_04: Like, like like I don't necessarily the lichens were delicious.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: I I like didn't see anything.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: I saw no life, I saw some birds, maybe the fishing was great.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't know, maybe they're all fishermen.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: But the barren lands, it's you said it before, it's a kind of a desolate place, and you really describe it well in the book.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: But I guess a long-winded way to get to my question is how much time did you spend up there?
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: It seemed from reading the book like you spent a lot of time with these people and potentially a decent amount of time with them up in the Barrenlands and at the mines.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_04: Well, the mines became active later.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_04: Um, well, they actually opened up sort of at the end.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_04: This research I was doing, it was going on for five or six years, off and on.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_04: I went up there many times.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_04: I think my first trip, I went to Kelowna, British Columbia to meet a couple of the people who had discovered these sites to their stockholders' meeting.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_04: So I started uh, you know, getting to know them there and and getting to know their families, and then they invited me to come up to the Barren Lands.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_04: And of course, the only way to get around there is by float plane and helicopter.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_04: So I would just hitch rides with these geologists.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_04: Some of them were private geologists, some of them were government geologists.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_04: I met some of the native people there, you know, they would take me to certain places that they knew.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_04: So it was just something that developed over a period of years.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_04: Spent quite a bit of time in Yellow Knife and then getting out into the into the wild there.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_03: Kevin, how did you get wind of this then?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_03: Because uh you kind of got a hold of this early on.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I can see how this would have happened after the fact, right?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: It just turned into a huge deal.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: You came on really early.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: How did that happen?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it it was 1993, I believe, when I read a piece in the New York Times, the science section by Bill Broad, I believe, that was just talking about this this diamond strike and the landscape, as I mentioned earlier, you know, got me interested in it.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_04: And then I decided to just to go a lot deeper than than he was able to do.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_04: And it was just very fortunate because all the characters, they were totally cooperative.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_04: And, you know, I spent not only a lot of time in the field, but a lot of time on the phone uh with people who'd scattered around from the various stages of this exploration.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_04: And really it took them about 10 years of of work to get to work themselves up from places in the United States that they were prospecting all the way up to the far north.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, that was one of the really cool stories, I think, was how you had a great history of I guess maybe you could summarize this for us, of uh diamond exploration in North America, I guess, and all like the really you know weird discoveries where people found that that I found fascinating, and I never knew that that diamonds were discovered kind of one-offs everywhere.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, can you kind of give us a short summary of that process and how you where your research took you?
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, I originally was just going to spend a few weeks just getting some background on diamond exploration around the world, but then I started digging into the Columbia University Geology Library and the New York Public Library and some other sources, and I was finding news clippings and old journals and rare books that talked about all these people who over centuries in North America had found diamonds or thought they found diamonds, or told other people they found diamonds, so they could sell them the claims.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_04: There's a lot of that.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_04: And it wasn't it wasn't written down in any place.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_04: You know, the the uh diamonds before this had really only been found in any quantity in India and Brazil.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_04: That was it.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_04: But then, you know, it discovered even going back to the 1500s, people were thinking about this, starting with Jacques Cartier, even going up the St.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_04: Lawrence River in 1530-something.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_04: So was able to find through all sorts of scattered sources that real diamonds actually started appearing in the 1830s.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_04: The the gold strikes of the early uh 1800s, you think about California, you know, there's gold in the Dar Hills.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_04: The guy who said that was uh uh Dr.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_04: M.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_04: F.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_04: Stevenson.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_04: He was not um talking about California, he was talking about Georgia, where he was from.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_04: There was a lot of gold, a lot of gold panning going on in Georgia, in Alabama, and that's where the first diamond started just turning up by accident.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_04: People were looking for gold.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_04: And then, you know, the same damn thing happened when they went to California.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_04: People were just tearing apart every stream bed everywhere, and they found a lot of gold, but then occasionally they would find diamonds.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_04: Nobody knew where they came from.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of weird stories.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, a little boy looks down in a well in North Carolina and sees this little glittering stone, it's a diamond.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_04: Another little boy in a farm field in Wisconsin picks up a diamond, which is immediately confiscated by his father, sold for 50 bucks.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_04: Uh but I mean, you know, a lot of the finders were were children, it makes sense because they're very close to the ground and they're always kind of like picking stuff up.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Kevin, were the diamonds found with a higher quantity of gold too?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_03: Were they associated uh together in the same deposits?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not a geologist, of course, but I don't think the the diamonds were there because there was gold.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_04: The diamonds were there because people were sifting through vast quantities of sediments and picking up whatever heavy thing settled to the bottom of their pans or their sluices.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_04: Both diamonds and gold are heavy minerals, so they would end up in the same place.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_04: It's not that they originate from the same place.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_04: It's just I know you guys know this.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_04: It's just that they are found by the same methods.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_04: Yes?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, perfect.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's good.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: That was a great description.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_03: I was getting after whether or not these were placers too.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so the gold is definitely a placer deposit.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_03: Were they finding the diamonds in those same placers?
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, yes.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_04: As they were panning for gold, they would find diamonds.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_04: And like I say, that they would just be found by the same method, basically.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_04: But nobody knew where they came from.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, nobody knew what the ore or the diamond was until quite late.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that was really interesting.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have the the guys going around and like taking some micro diamonds and then like salting the area, spreading diamonds in some anthills, and then or I think they're anthills, right?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then saying, Oh, look, we found diamonds here, and then oh, do you want to buy this land?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, it's really beautiful land, you can buy it, and then uh it's just a crazy story of all this wild stuff going on.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's really like the wild, wild west you imagine of you know, gold mining towns and stuff like that, except it's with diamonds, and it's uh really crazy.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess you spent a lot of time with some very interesting people.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Let's put it that way.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like prospector types, people who go around chasing massive deposits that may or may not exist their whole life, is a really interesting mindset.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Can you I I thought your descriptions of the people like Chuck Fibke who did this, who d discovered diamonds up in northern Canada.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_03: That's the central character, yeah.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: The central character is it, I mean Chuck and Chuck and Stuart Plus.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_03: They they made this book read like a novel, actually.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_03: Can you I'm serious?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_03: It was it was such a good read.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: Jesse was all in from the beginning because of his ties to you know yellow knife in the Northwest Territories.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_03: When I started reading this, I was immediately drawn.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: These people are they're amazing.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: Your descriptions of them.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: Can you just spend a couple of minutes, Kevin, and tell our listeners about the two main characters, Stuart Blesson, and Chuck Fipke, please?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_04: So Chuck Fipke is a is a geochemist and geologist, and uh he spent quite a few years working for other people um looking for for all kinds of minerals in New Guinea and places in South America, I forget where else.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_04: But he was a very savvy guy, very savvy businessman, and also a very good scientist in that he um he founded a lab in British Columbia that was able to separate all sorts of minerals from each other and use those minerals to sort of track things that you wanted to find.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_04: Um he's also sort of a wild man, you know, kind of a hard drinker, big adventurer, absolutely boundless energy.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_04: And also, I found just a very honest, genuine guy.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_04: You know, he was just so much fun to be around.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_04: He's had so much enthusiasm, even after he had struck it rich, you know, he was still sort of the same guy.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_04: He and his partner, Stu Blesson, um, they had sort of an uneasy relationship at various times.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, Stu Blesson came from a sort of different background.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_04: He worked for the Geological Survey of Canada and was sort of this very hard-bitten guy who spent an awful lot of time in the wilderness of the Yukon and other places, not necessarily looking for riches, but just doing basic geologic mapping, but also like a very savvy, tough guy.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_04: And Stu Plusen, by the way, also was able to fly a helicopter, which kind of helped them out, as well as being a geologist.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_04: So he was a real, you know, a real survivor of all kinds of stuff.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_04: And I I think they really just sort of came together by by chance.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_04: There are a lot of other subsidiary characters that play into this, but they were the sort of two.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: Leaders who who got into this and and you know were able to follow a trail for thousands of miles.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: Didn't Stu Blesson have a an encounter with a big bear, uh brown bear, in one of his excursions?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, one of the chapters starts with him like staring into the mouth of a bear, which is on on top of him.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_04: And he's able to fight this bear up and you know, like push him over a cliff, if I remember right.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, they and and there's just one thing after another with him, you know, helicopter crash.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_04: He's somehow able to survive that.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_04: Unfortunately, some other people in the story are actually killed by helicopters and other other means, including bears.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_04: But these two guys survive and they triumph.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's a it's an incredibly raw place up there, and and it's fairly, you know, it's fairly dangerous, frankly.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's you're so far away from everything and and so far from help that you kind of got to be a particular type of self-sufficiency uh to function up there with any over any amount of time, really.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I just think that these people, can you give us some insight into uh like maybe from this the point of the the writer of you being the writer and writing this story?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: It makes complete sense how you would make the characters central to it because they're such an integral part of the actual story.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: But how much, I don't know, how many people were focused?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like you were there during this time.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like there was a lot of people really focused on diamond mining or diamond exploration.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Was that the case?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Was it just a like a a ton of press and a ton of people around and loads of mayhem everywhere?
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Or or was it a little bit calmer than that and sort of came out of nowhere?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I'm kind of getting at?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like, did everybody kind of know there was something serious happening, or was it kind of random?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I think it as early as 1991, the lesson and Fipke and and the company that they allied themselves with, BHP, an Australian company, you know, they needed a senior partner um to bring in millions of dollars, just exert all the technology that you need to really zero in on these deposits.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_04: So this became public.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_04: As soon as their interest in this area was revealed publicly, all these other uh outfits began rushing in, and everybody was competing for land.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_04: Uh in Canada, you can just stake out so-called crown land, you can stake out uh mineral claims.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_04: So it's the equivalent of federal land here.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_04: People just rushed in and they staked out millions of acres, explore.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_04: So I was there in the summer of 1994 at first, when a lot of this, after the lot of the staking had taken place, and then people were now uh drilling and taking mineral samples and trying to find other promising deposits.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_04: And by that time, you know, it seemed like a pretty good chance that the Fipkey blessing diamond mine was a go.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_04: But it's so expensive to operate up there, and diamonds are so rare, even in just a good deposit, that they had to figure out if it was really economic.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_04: So that was really the stage that I came in on.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_04: And it was really only a couple of years later, as I was finishing the book, that they opened the mine.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_03: Kevin, real quick, what kind of money are we talking about?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um, from what I understand, Chuck and Stu are very, very wealthy individuals.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_03: What kind of money are we talking about?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um I haven't really kept it.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_03: Did any of that trickle down to you?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh that's right.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_04: No, it's sort of sort of the reverse because the book world doesn't work that way.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_04: Um, they I think uh, if I remember correctly, they were both I forget how many hundreds of millions or maybe billions of dollars they were worth.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_04: Uh Stu Blesson gave a lot of his money away to the University of British Columbia and some other causes.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_04: I think he he founded a some sort of science center there.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_04: Chuck Fipke has a whole lot of resources.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know how much money they have.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_04: It's a lot.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_04: Uh a lot.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_03: It's a lot.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I saw that Stu gave away over a hundred million dollars.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's amazing.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: But even the Jesse, you're blurry here.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: My camera came out of focus.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: I need to get it.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: There we go.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's the actually I like it better that way.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I can do that.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: Put it back to the blurry, please.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: I like that.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um the uh it's the kind of thing like everybody, anybody on the margins got rich too, you know, the float plane pilots, the people supplying wood.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard these stories going up there a bunch.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we came across, you know, the old staking post that had marked 1993 on it.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: I forget whose name was on it, but it's the little like one and a half inch by one and a half inch stake, wooden stake.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if you were like the supplier of wooden stakes, if you had wooden stakes in '93, you like made a killing.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: You just like crushed it.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: You could retire on your like wooden stake supply, right?
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think you've said it in the book, Kevin, that it was the largest staking claim in history up there, the biggest staking rush.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_04: I think it must have been.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, there's no place else that has that much uh area.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and you're right.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_04: I talked to the these guys, they're called expediters, the people who supply the stakes and you know, charter the planes and so on.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they did very well.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_04: I spent a lot of time with with those guys as well, and you know, was able to learn a lot of uh just really interesting and funny stories from them.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_04: I just tried to chat tap every possible source.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_04: Anybody who knew anything.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_03: Well, Kevin, you're doing something wrong if none of that trickled down to you.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_04: I've got to say that's well the book is still in print.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: No, yeah, go by the book, go by the book, you know.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_04: It's so it's it's solved.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_04: Tens of thousands of copies.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_04: That's pretty good for any list.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's great.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's an excellent reading.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just kidding.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Go buy the book.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Go buy the book.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's awesome.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_03: But so I Johnny, can I interrupt a second?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_03: I just burn it to ask this.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: Kevin, what did Stu and Chuck have that nobody else had?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_03: They beat everybody to what what's their major contribution here?
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_04: Well, we could get technical or we could just be you know emotional about it.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: We can do that.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do both.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: We can do both.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, let's do both.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, so so just to back up a little bit, uh, we haven't talked about how diamonds form or how they get to the surface.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_04: Uh they form about, I don't know, 90, 125 miles down, below the crust, well below the crust.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_04: And occasionally, very occasionally, there'll be some sort of deep-seated volcano that somehow penetrates to this lair and just brings them up.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_04: And come they come up quite rapidly, it's believed.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_04: And uh as they get fur closer and closer to the surface, the the pressure of this eruption just um uh gets canceled out.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_04: And so when you get to the top, it just blows out this big mass of stuff from the deep earth.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_04: It's a deposit called a kimberlite.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_04: Nobody's ever seen one of these things erupt.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_04: I think that the most recent one we know are maybe 80 or 90 million years ago.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_04: When the diamonds come up in this very special rock called Kimberlite, they're quite rare, but they all there are other minerals that come up along with them that also only form in the diamond-forming zone.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_04: Some of them are garnets, maybe some of you have garnet earrings or garnet ring or something, uh, chrome diopsides, which are these little greenish minerals, and they're just peculiar to the deep earth.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_04: So if you can find some of these things, you know that there has been an eruption from the deep earth, and they come up in much greater quantities than the diamonds themselves, and they'll spread over a much greater area.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_04: So that's what you're looking for.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_04: That's sort of the basic explanation of how a lot of modern prospecting works.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_04: Those are called indicator minerals, those are those indicator, yeah.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_04: So they were able to get onto a train of those, but you know, they they had to traverse thousands of miles to to reach the sort of tail end.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is a really interesting point because in order to be successful in this, you had to integrate so much geology into it.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: You had to think about the indicator minerals, as you beautifully described, these Kimberlite eruptions.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: These Kimberlite eruptions are also quite small.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the the surface representation is usually a pipe that's I don't know, a couple hundred meters across, maybe a mile wide.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like they're not very big, these are not huge volcanoes.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: But then they also have to figure out where the glaciers went.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: So you spend a lot of time talking about like eskers and glacial deposits.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: Can you tell us how they integrated the what you mean by an indicator trail or train?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so yeah.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_04: So I mean, if if you find some of these minerals, you have to figure out where did they come from.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_04: And uh fortunately, uh Stu Blessend was an expert in glacial geology as well.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_04: And they were able to sort of recreate the movements of glaciers across the Northwest Territories where these these things were found, and they just sort of followed it backward.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_04: You know, they found sort of the furthest point where the indicator minerals had been moved.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_04: Then they had to trace it backwards to where these things came from, and that that was a matter of hundreds of miles.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_04: But then, you know, even then, you can't find the Kimberlite unless you have other methods, including aeromagnetics and ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_04: There's a whole suite of geophysical methods that have to come in there to really zero in on these features because they're they're covered over by water and sediments.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_03: So just for let me uh Kevin, correct me if I'm wrong.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_03: I want to try to summarize what you just said.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: They found these indicator minerals, not necessarily the diamonds, right?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_03: Just these indicator minerals that were moved by glaciers.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: Then they had to backtrack the movement of the glaciers to try to find the Kimberlite pipe.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_03: Is that what you're saying?
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_03: That's incredible.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_03: Unbelievable.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: Jesse, you were gonna-I'm sorry, I interrupted.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: Go ahead.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's fine.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to mention, I don't know if you did you see this, uh, Kevin.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: Just recently, I think it was last week, Akadi announced that they found a very big yellow fancy diamond.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was like 70 carats or something like that, just came out of the Akadi mine just recently.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: So they're still finding like the really big, really valuable stones in this thing.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that puts you in the black for like the year, basically.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you find one of these monster stones.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, it's kind of interesting.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: I saw that in the news and I forgot to mention it.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: But um that this intersection of geology, so back to kind of Chris's question of what did these guys have that other people didn't, you know, is that the science answer, the combination here, and what's the emotional, spiritual answer to it, I guess.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_04: Well, they had for one thing, they had very good luck.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_04: They just had very good luck, but they were also very, very persistent.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_04: And they also had help.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_04: You know, they had they like I say, they did make a deal with this big company to bring in the all the other expertise that was needed.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_03: That's interesting that you say that, Kevin.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_03: Uh because my take in the book was these two are are brilliant in their own ways.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so Stu was the classic uh geologist, right?
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_03: And Chuck, uh, from what I understand, his massive contribution was separating the indicator minerals.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: Is that is that right?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_04: That was part of it, but I mean it was also just his drive to accomplish this find.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_04: And yes, he did he did the geochemistry and the separation of the minerals.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_03: Can you talk about that?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_03: The separation, like what that looks like.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_03: Why is that so important, I guess, for our listeners?
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_04: Like I said, diamonds are heavy minerals, so is gold.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_04: So are these indicator minerals.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_04: They all sort of end up more or less in the same spot, although not exactly all all the exact ways of separating these minerals.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not too much up in the technical stuff of that, but you know, there are certain chemicals you need to use to separate them out.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_04: Uh there are some magnetic minerals called ilmenites, which they use magnets to get those out.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_04: But Chuck had he had this enormous lab.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_04: It's just amazing how he assembled the expertise to do all this stuff as just a small businessman, really, without any real backing until pretty much the very end when they were really just pretty much on top of what turned out to be the mine.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's such an interesting story.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: I just love the stuff the entire story of it.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: And these guys just work so hard.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: You have a very succinct and very excellent summary of this junior exploration company industry that I've I never really fully understood, despite living and working in Canada for a long time, about like you have so many little companies that are trading for like penny stocks that never actually go anywhere, like one in a couple thousand that makes it big, like ends up being a cotty diamond mine or something like that.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: You gave a really good summary, but can you give us like your sense of that?
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: You went up there in the 90s when things were going wild, and then you've probably paid attention to it for a little bit, at least after that, and like how this boom bust cycle works in industry.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, it's very interesting.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it's kind of a a traditional Canadian thing.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_04: It's been going on for many, many decades.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_04: But a lot of these little outfits, I think the people who run them are they're geologists like you, and they want somebody to pay them to go on a permanent camping trip.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_04: So they they know they're not gonna find anything.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_04: They're probably not gonna find anything, but they're raising money.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_03: We've been outed right there.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_03: You just outed us.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: You are out.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's oh man, how do I do this?
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_04: How do you go back to class tomorrow and face your Kevin?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_03: You can't just sell us downriver like that.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_03: That's not okay.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good description, though.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that hurt a little bit.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just sorry.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_04: Sorry.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, you're not.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's a good description, but you also have these like every once in a while, somebody strikes it rich, and then everybody like kind of it keeps everybody hanging on that there's uh the possibility of making it big time, like really, really big time, like these guys did, and everybody who invested in them did in the end.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so I mean, you know, there are lots of people out there willing to take a chance and buy some of these stocks.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_04: And if they strike it rich, they they do, if but they're probably not going to.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_04: But in any case, most of the geologists who want to be on the camping trip, they're also really good salesmen.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_04: They're good at talking up stuff and you know, throwing out all kinds of ta technical figures and explaining the chances of this or that.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_04: So it's a business, it's it's a business more than a science, these little mining companies.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_04: But I did, you know, I met a couple of them.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_04: Some of them seem like charlatans, but most of them, you know, genuinely wanted to go out and look for this stuff.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_04: And a couple of other people that I met besides Chuck Fipke and Stu Blossom did strike it very rich.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_04: So there are a couple of other diamond mines up there now that people actually did find.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so have you been to the working mines?
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: Have you been up there when after the mines were installed and working?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I went up for the opening of the Yakati Mine, which was quite an affair.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_04: So basically the the Kimberlight pipe is just sort of this tornado-shaped thing.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_04: It just sort of widens up, comes up very narrow and then widens at the at the end.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_04: The mine itself, it was buried under a lake.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_04: It was a lake.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_04: The top of the Kimberlite pipe was a lake.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so they drained this thing and then they started digging.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_04: And that's how generally how diamond mining is done.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_04: It's an open cast mine.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_04: So it's just this big hole in the ground and a bunch of three or four store high dump trucks and giant excavators taking this stuff to the factory to be um, you know, crushed up and sorted out.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_04: But I remember they showed us they brought out a whole bunch of diamonds, just put them out in a case.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_04: People were able to look at these things.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_04: There was a big party afterwards.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I had I had breakfast with Stu Plusin and his wife the next morning, everybody was hung over.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody had a good time at the party, huh?
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um speaking of which, after reading the book, um, Chuck Fipke is at the top of my list for people that I would love to have a beer with.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_03: Uh found him to be amazingly inspirational.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_03: He's a genius and just a fun, fun person.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's at least that was that was my take on it.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_03: That's what made it read like a novel to me, anyway.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_03: That's how it seemed.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and so I've been I've been accused of fictionalizing this because there's dialogue in there and there's all kinds of descriptions about really detailed stuff.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_04: But that was exactly as what people told me from multiple sources, is that that's what people said, that's what they did.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: I just my own personal take on it was I I was in Alberta, and Alberta has kind of become one of the premier diamond research institutes and departments in the world, really.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, some really great diamond researchers.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we've been up there, we've been looking for diamonds in not for diamond mines, but diamonds in some of the sediments, really old sediments, up in the that part of the world, and we found some really old diamonds as as well.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I've kind of been getting into the diamond research aspect.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the indicator minerals, when I started going to grad school, were just like this classic example of researchers contributing to the diamond mine prospects.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's a practicality, right?
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: People doing this cutting edge research.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was in South Africa where this sort of indicator mineral chemistry was really refined to be able to say this type of garnet with this particular chemistry, a lot of chrome in it, and a certain calcium percentage is an indicator that there is probably diamonds around or there might be diamonds around.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it was really well explained in your book, Kevin.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: I I really appreciated reading that part from the the sort of history of the indicator mineral part.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: So Chris, did you want to let sorry?
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_04: It's fascinating that you're finding diamonds and sediments.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't know about that until I just I I looked up your proposal about what you're doing.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's so there's um there's actually a surprising amount of actual diamond mining from sediments, like in Brazil, some old sediments, they're mining these because, like you said, diamonds are really heavy, really dense.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so they kind of end up in the conglomerates, the really sort of the high-energy ancient sediments.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I think you you talked about the mining that they do off the coast of South Africa, where these are placer, modern placer uh diamond deposits, but they kind of go around the boulders and they sort of hoover up around the edge of the boulder because that's where the diamonds will be.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: They're kind of caught in that high-energy stuff right at the base of boulders.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were kind of finding them in similar sediments except really, really old sediments, 2.8 billion year old sediments.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: So therefore the diamonds are old, and that's our interest.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: These are tiny, tiny micro diamonds.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're not they're not economical, but they're scientifically very valuable.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it's a it's exciting.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: We were just up there this past summer flying around in float planes looking for more sediments and collecting big buckets of the city.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_03: If I I'll hear if I hear you're not allowed to do that, Kevin.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, you're not allowed to.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's what a geologist do.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_03: You just out at us for it, and now you're even worse than I am.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_03: You just what geology writers do.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, absolutely.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm waiting on it to you on a big grid.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: If we get that, absolutely, yeah.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: That'd be awesome.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: Jesse, I gotta ask you.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, um I got a question for you, Jesse.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_03: I'm part serious and part sarcastic on this.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: Oh boy.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I've always called it placer, and you just called it placer.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: So is this your doctory twist on the I don't say the English, you know, English English or the the British English, American English.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: Placer, placer.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same thing, I think.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: Tomato, tomato, Chris.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I don't nobody says tomato, so I don't know.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_03: Is it anthropocene or anthropocene?
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, there we go.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: Good question.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: I I've always said it anthropocene.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but me too.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: There we go.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's so many of these in geology.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: We just make up words anyway.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: So Chris, I let's talk about some of the articles that the other science articles that are really interesting.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think we should go there.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm shocked that you're actually gonna leave the bare non-s oh I have one other question, Kevin.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_03: Sorry.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_03: I saw that the first edition of this came out in 2001, and then you had a re-release in 2016.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um, can you tell what changed?
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_03: What was different about the new release?
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, anything you can tell.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, there's been four or five editions.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, there were a couple in between 2001 and 2016.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_04: Basically, the only difference was I corrected some of the mistakes that I made.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I trying not to remember what they were, but there was nothing really terrible.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_04: There were sort of sort of technical, maybe numerical problems.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, I think one of them was the size of the world's largest diamond.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_04: I forget what it was now.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_04: It's something in the Smithsonian or was in the Smithsonian, and the curator or somebody who knew the curator complained to me that I had gotten this figure wrong.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_04: It was it was stuff like that.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well you finished that.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_03: I have before we leave the Barren Lands, uh Jesse, I wanted to do one thing.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_03: Kevin, uh and and if you can't, because if it's too much detail, that's fine.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_03: Can you describe the way that Chuck and Stu met?
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_03: Like what led up to it, what happened.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's just such a cool story.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_04: I don't remember the exact initial part, but I think that Chuck was basically Stu's student intern.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_04: He was hired to go do some mapping up in the Yukon.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_04: Well, Stu was uh the elder guy, he was with the Geological Survey of Canada.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_04: So I think uh Chuck was still in school, maybe, and went up there basically as an intern.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_04: And uh Stu found him kind of annoying because he was like all over the place, he was like tripping over things, and you know he was supposed to be uh um, you know, the way you create a geological map is you have different colors of various areas to show you know what kind of rocks are there, and and Chuck was just kind of coloring outside the lines, literally.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_04: It's great.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_03: But also, wasn't Chuck left out in the field for almost a week up in not a place that you'd want to be left?
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_03: And and then Stu had to uh either fly in with a helicopter or send somebody in to go get it.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, but I think he was fine.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_04: He was like, hey, this is great.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_04: I'm having a good time.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_04: Why are you here?
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_04: And I it was only years later that they kind of reconnected, um, you know, sort of more equals.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_03: That part of the story, uh, I laughed several times out loud um because they're just amazing characters, very fun people to be around, I would I would imagine.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, absolutely.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: You ready, Jesse?
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, go for it.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so Kevin, are you ready to totally pivot then?
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_03: I want to talk about a couple articles.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_04: If I remember the articles.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_03: All right, that's a fair game, fair enough.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so I read it a recent article and I tried to pick the ones that as I was looking into you and doing my research, I picked ones that were recent so that it would kind of be more in the forefront of your mind.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_03: But the one called Balancing Act can precariously perch boulders signal New York's earthquake risk.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_03: I thought that was one, a really catchy, punchy title.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_03: I loved it.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_03: It caught my attention right away.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_03: Can you describe what this is all about, please?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so a lot of people don't know this, but there is a substantial risk of earthquakes in the New York City area.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_04: Once in a while there is a magnitude five or six, and depending on how far down it is and how close to you it is, it could do some pretty serious damage.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_04: I think the last one of that size was the 1880 something.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_04: But all we know about earthquakes is from human history, and that doesn't go back very far, at least written human history doesn't go back very far around here.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_04: So there's a lot of people who have been trying to figure out like what is the biggest earthquake that could possibly occur around New York City?
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_04: Because it could do many billions of damage and kill a lot of people.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_04: So I know this I work with this guy, Bill Menke, he's a wonderful geologist and just sort of overall explorer of the earth.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_04: He's using this method that's been used a little bit in other places where people look at so-called fragile geologic features.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_04: Generally, they're they're sort of just precariously balanced boulders that were dropped by glaciers or otherwise just put into place.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_04: And uh what he does um he's zeroed in on a number of these boulders which are dropped by glaciers, probably, I don't know, 15,000, 20,000 years ago.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_04: There's a little bit of um dispute about exactly when, uh, just north of New York City.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_04: And there are these big car-sized boulders that are just like sitting on these tippy little bases.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_04: Uh-huh.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_04: So the idea is if he can uh calculate the amount of uh force it would take to tip these things over, he can calculate the largest earthquake that could have happened in the last 15,000, 20,000 years ago.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_03: That's amazing.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna interrupt you one second, Kevin.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_03: For the listeners, imagine if I took Jesse and tipped him upside down and dropped him just on his shoulder at a really weird angle, and there Jesse sits for 15,000 years.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_03: What would it take to knock him over?
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_03: That that's what you're talking about with these boulders.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they're not just laying there, these are, like you said, precariously perched.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_03: They look like they should tip, right?
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's what he's looking at.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, I'm sorry.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_04: So it'd be it'd be nice to have pictures of these things, which I took a lot of pictures of Phil Menke looking at these boulders.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so we'll put a link in the show notes to these articles.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: That'd be great.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: So look at the show notes.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: This article will be there.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so what he did was he took a student and they took pictures of these boulders from many, many angles, and they create a 3D model so that they can figure out how much do they weigh, what are the tipping points, what are the axis on which they could be tipped over, you know, what direction could a seismic wave come from to tip this thing over.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_04: And if it's still standing there, they know that whatever force they've calculated would tip it over has not occurred in the last 15,000 years.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_04: So they're trying to come up with a maximum force, basically.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_03: That's amazing.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_03: I sense a follow-up coming, right?
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_03: You're gonna have to, you know, do a follow-up article on this when his research is done.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, oh no, exactly.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_04: I'm I'm sure that he'll come up with some sort of numbers and then you know it'll cause a whole lot of debate because there's there are other there are other ways of figuring out uh paleo seismology.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_03: How many pictures did they have to take or does he want to take of each precariously purchased?
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_04: I think three or four hundred or so.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_04: They would circle this thing with a with a camera for hours.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_04: It was broiling sun, too.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_04: I was gonna faint, I thought.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that was another thing that I thought of when I looked at the because you you had a lot of pictures, they were great.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_03: It looked like Dr.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_03: Menke was carrying 95% of the load, and the lowly student was he had a bottle of water.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_03: That's all.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's what Jesse would do to his students, too.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, yeah.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you got to, right?
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, of course.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_03: No, it'd be the opposite with you.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_03: You wouldn't carry anything.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: No, of course not.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: Don't be mean.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: Students carry stuff.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's it's true.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's not mean if it's true, Kevin.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, anything else about that?
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_03: Like, does he do you have any idea when uh the data is expected to come out, or has he already come up with some uh preliminary findings?
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_04: I think they came up with a poster, but I I don't remember exactly what they calculated.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_04: But I mean, this was only on a few boulders.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_04: They have to do a lot more to really come up with a meaningful result.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_04: So I think it'll be probably a couple of years.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_04: It's such a cool take.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's such a cool like idea, you know, just say, oh, there's these boulders that look like they should not be there.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and so if we had an earthquake, they wouldn't be there, right?
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: And go test it.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's just great.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's really, really great.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_04: But I mean, that's uh New York City, you know, it's just sort of combed with all kinds of ancient faults.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_04: Nobody knows exactly when some of these things were activated.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_00: And there was uh there was one in New Jersey, I think, a couple years ago, like a a fairly size, I mean not devastatingly bad, but a sizable one in New Jersey.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you every once in a while we get these on the East Coast, and they're there are all faults all over the place that will rupture occasionally.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: So there definitely are stresses in the crust, even though it's not a super active convergent margin or volcano or a subduction zone system.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: So speaking of subduction zone systems, the the other article that I think both Chris and I really honed in on, which was interesting, in part because I know a couple of the authors, we've interviewed Dana Roman uh before on Planet Geo.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: But you're talking about how water content of magmas controls the magma storage depth.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, like how deep the magma kind of sits and ponds in the crust.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: Can you give us a high-level summary of that article?
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: And Chris, I think you have some excellent questions that you that we had talked about about this article.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you can you guys can probably describe this article better than I can.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_04: But it basically they um the scientists looked into the water content of magma and and you know tried to connect that to the, as you say, the the storage depth of the magma.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_04: But whether this and I believe that they found out it's um it keeps it down pretty far.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_04: But exactly what that means, I don't think anybody is quite sure.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_04: Like, is that good news to have more water or bad news?
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_04: Because water also uh I think makes magma more explosive in the end.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_04: And some of these volcanoes can erupt quite rapidly, uh prior research is found.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_04: So I mean this is just sort of um it's part of a suite of things that they are looking into to see if they can predict volcanic eruptions.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_04: This is only one component of a whole bunch of other studies that people, LeBant and elsewhere are doing.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: I noticed some really cool pictures in that article.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: Did you get to go along uh to the Aleutians for this work?
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_04: No, but they they just had they just came back actually.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe they actually some of them are still there.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_04: They went to the Achmach volcano, which is this extremely remote volcano, and uh it's thought to be that it'll imminently erupt.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_04: So they've got it wired up with all kinds of stuff, like things that show whether the ground is rising or falling, they're measuring gases coming out of various places, they're measuring seismic waves or measuring infrasound.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_04: So they got this this volcano wired up, and they're trying to come up with a whole suite of instruments that will help in the future predict eruptions there and elsewhere, if they can gather enough data and put all these uh different factors together.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_04: So I think they're also going down to Nicaragua at the end of the year to do something similar.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, cool.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: The life of uh geologists.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, Kevin, we always like this has been a real pleasure to interview you, and we always like to end by asking our traditional closing question, which is what has been your best day as, in your case, a science writer?
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, there were so many best days.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_04: But the I guess the moment that I come back to and I'll just go back to the Northwest Territories.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_04: I was camped out with a bunch of geologists from the uh geological survey in Canada, and uh around midnight, of course it's broad daylight because it's summer, uh it's 24-hour daylight, I heard uh what I thought was thunder, and I looked out my tent, and uh I saw hundreds and hundreds of caribou just trotting along a ridge right near us.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_04: So, of course, I got out, I got my camera, sort of gingerly tipped over there, and as I got over the edge of this ridge, I could look off into the distance on to the horizon, and there was this herd of caribou stretching to the horizon, heading south.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_04: So I just sort of hid behind a rock and they kind of went around me.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_04: This just kept going on and on.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_04: It's one of the last great migrations on Earth, and I was so so privileged to actually see it.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_04: It's just an unforgettable experience, and it's one of the great things about doing this, about doing this job.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh, that's that's incredible.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: I've I have seen caribou, but I we saw them actually this past summer.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: We saw, you know, the caribou have been historically low levels for the last um decade basically, to the point they they shut down basically all hunting of caribou.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: But they seem to be maybe potentially fingers crossed rebounding a little bit.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we saw groups of caribou in the dozens that were kind of just starting to migrate to the south, coming up from their breeding grounds or from their calving grounds.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I we saw, you know, 12 at a time caribou, uh, but but nothing like the ancient migration.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_04: This was this was the Bathurst caribou herd.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_04: And and the other amazing thing was there were a bunch of wolves just kind of trotting along beside them, not bothering anybody.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_04: Uh probably eventually would bother somebody, but they were all just kind of together there.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_04: It was very weird to see the predators and the prey all all just kind of moving together.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh oh man, it's an incredible place.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, it really like belies the the barren lands term for during the migration.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's not so barren at the end, isn't it?
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's a pretty good day.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's a pretty good day.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: Not many people get to experience that.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Kevin, thank you very much for your time.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: We're very appreciative of it.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for a great book and for great science articles.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, like I said, we'll link to in the show notes to your book and to the some of the articles we talked about, but we're really just appreciative of your time and and thanks for joining us on Planet Geo.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a pleasure.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much, guys.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_04: It's really a pleasure to talk to you, and I hope we'll do it again.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and uh I'll get a grant and you can come up and look for the little diamonds with us.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's a deal.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: All right, all right.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks a lot, Kevin.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, thanks.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, that's a wrap.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like we said at the intro, you can follow Planet Geo, go to planetgeocast.com, follow us on all the social medias at Planet Geocast, give us a rating and review.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: We really love that.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to learn geoscience from us in a really structured way with all of the images you need, go to geo.campcourses.com or click on the link in the show notes.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: That'll take you to Campgeo, our conversational textbook for the geosciences.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_03: Have a great week.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_03: Cheers.