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Plants and Meanders - How to Read a Geoscience Paper · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:01
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
0:13
SPEAKER_01: Christopher Jameson Bullheist.
0:16
SPEAKER_01: What's up, man?
0:17
SPEAKER_01: Um, that's not my middle name, but it should be.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: It'd be a sweeter middle name than the one I have.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: Let me think here.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: Hold on.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: I know your middle name.
0:26
SPEAKER_01: Um it's like Colonel or Colonel.
0:33
SPEAKER_01: Or something from the 1930s.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: Christopher Colonel.
0:36
SPEAKER_01: Christopher Kernel.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: Christopher Colonel boys.
0:38
SPEAKER_01: Christopher Michael?
0:40
SPEAKER_01: Christopher.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: No, my dad and my brothers all have the same name.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: I know it.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: I can't think of it though.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: What is it?
0:46
SPEAKER_00: It's Arlen.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: So this is really weird.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: So Jenny and I went to school together in the seventh grade.
0:53
SPEAKER_00: She turns around because we always set it in alphabetical order, and her last name was right before mine.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: So she was always right in front of me.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: And she turned around, she's like, Crisple Heis, what's your middle name?
1:02
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Oh, you will never guess.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: Right out of her mouth.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: She says, Is it Arlen?
1:10
SPEAKER_00: And like I I was blown away.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, she guessed it right off the bat.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: She didn't know that before?
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Crazy.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: She did not know that before.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, how, how?
1:21
SPEAKER_00: It's on her side of the family.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: A bunch of guys are that's their first name, Arlen.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was meant to be.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: I never heard that story before.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:29
SPEAKER_01: See, you learn something new.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: You learn something new every day with a podcast with Chris Bullhouse, man.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Christopher Arlen Bullhouse.
1:35
SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's uh that's a great one.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: I'm happy I know that now.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: Jenny's pretty quick.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: She is.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: She's a quick one.
1:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, all right.
1:42
SPEAKER_01: Speaking of quick, what are we doing today?
1:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know how quick this is gonna be, but I'm really interested in this.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: I've been looking forward to it all day long because I really don't know where this conversation is gonna go today.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: I have a rough idea as to how it's gonna go, but honestly, though, you came up with this idea.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: What we're talking about is let me just cut to the chase.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: We're talking about how to read a scientific paper.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: And you threw this out a while back, and I thought, hmm, what an interesting idea, first of all.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: And then as the more I thought about it, because I wasn't right, I wasn't sold right away on it.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and to just refresh, we like kind of pitch each other on topic ideas, right?
2:21
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it's easy.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: You pitch me stream meanders the other day, one of our recent episodes, and I was like, Oh yeah, done.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: Okay, easy.
2:27
SPEAKER_01: We can we can crank that.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: That's a great topic.
2:29
SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's not as smooth as that, let's say.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: And we fight, we maybe break up every once in a while.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, we've had a few of those.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, um, and so I wasn't sold on it right away, but then I thought about it and I'm thinking, wait a minute, reading a scientific paper is is tough stuff.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: Like you threw me a paper today or yesterday, I don't know.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: Remember a couple days ago.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: And it ties into what we just got done talking about in the last episode with Stream Meanders, because this one is called The Impact of Vegetation on Meandering Rivers.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: And so we thought, well, all right, we'll tie these two in together, and that's kind of what we're gonna do today is you're gonna really talk about how you read a scientific paper, but we're gonna also talk about this article and kind of weave the contents of the article into this whole discussion as well.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: At least best we can, right?
3:19
SPEAKER_00: That's the idea.
3:20
SPEAKER_01: So let me maybe if you allow me, Chris, I can kind of do the pitch a little bit here, give you a listener the pitch that I gave Chris is well, there's really two things here that I want to kind of get the point across and why I think this is important.
3:32
SPEAKER_01: First of all, I think it it can be pretty intimidating picking up a scientific paper and trying to read it, but it really should not be.
3:39
SPEAKER_01: Good papers should not be intimidating to read.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: There's terminology that's obviously confusing.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: There's jargon that you know people won't know, that you just have to learn, you have to spend a career learning it.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: But the ideas and the concepts should be tractable for most people.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: So it should not be intimidating.
3:56
SPEAKER_01: That's the first thing.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: And the second thing is that I think it's a really valuable skill set.
4:01
SPEAKER_01: Like you tend to, people tend to think that published work is right.
4:06
SPEAKER_01: Then a bunch of people also think published work is just completely wrong, and neither is true, right?
4:11
SPEAKER_01: Like there is published work that's correct, there's published work that's been proven to be incorrect, and there's published work that we don't really know.
4:17
SPEAKER_01: The jury's still out on.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: And I think kind of being able to plug into that is really valuable for those of you who are listening to this are interested in the geosciences.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: You probably get geoscience news articles and you read those things.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: There's always a paper behind that.
4:31
SPEAKER_01: And actually picking up and reading the paper is a really valuable thing to do, although it's intimidating.
4:36
SPEAKER_01: So see above point number one, it shouldn't be intimidating.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: So, like just kind of understanding the process is, I think, a valuable thing.
4:43
SPEAKER_01: And this is something we work through with the undergrads in my research lab and the grad students when they're especially early on in their graduate school careers.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: It's a learned skill.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: So, what does that look like?
4:52
SPEAKER_00: Is that a structured kind of thing?
4:54
SPEAKER_00: Is it like a mini class or is this just a few meetings where you talk about this kind of thing?
4:59
SPEAKER_00: What's what does that look like?
5:00
SPEAKER_01: We kind of tend to take it, it's like many things, you know, it's easier to learn by doing.
5:04
SPEAKER_01: And so we tend to take, as a research group, take a paper or two, or take, you know, four throughout a semester or six throughout a semester and read them together and then discuss them.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: And someone will kind of take the kind of like a journal club, then.
5:17
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: It's a small journal club where in journal clubs it can be a little bit intimidating.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: Like there are high-level journal clubs.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: When I have a journal club, quote unquote, with my professor colleagues around a beer, we don't talk about how to read the paper, we just talk about the science ideas, right?
5:31
SPEAKER_01: But this is a little bit more, you know, half how to read the paper, half the science in the paper or the ideas in the paper.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: Um so that's the pitch for like why this is an important thing for everybody, I think, to at least break down that barrier between sort of you and reading science.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: But why can't then our listeners just read a summation that somebody else did, like a Maya Wehaas, who we interviewed much earlier, she reads the articles or she's spends time with the scientist that did the research and then writes an article for National Geographic.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: Like, why is that?
6:06
SPEAKER_01: It's a great question, Chris.
6:08
SPEAKER_01: I think my take on this, and there are people who do a really good job, like Maya Way Haas is an excellent science writer and science communicator.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: There are other ones that are not that great.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: And I think those types of articles, like when you're writing a popular science article that's based on a research paper, typically what's interesting and what gets clicks and what people are interested in is the new idea.
6:35
SPEAKER_01: And people are less interested in like the counterpoints to the new idea or like the reasons it might be wrong or it might not be quite the full story.
6:43
SPEAKER_01: Like that's less interesting, and so that's not focused on as much.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: And so reading things critically is an important part of this as well.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: And you know, sometimes that happens.
6:53
SPEAKER_01: Well, often it happens, but it's like a couple lines at the end of several paragraphs of an article that are like, you know, paper discovered uh that plate tectonics started 3.8 billion years ago, and then there'll be you know 10 paragraphs on that, and then a couple lines at the bottom that say, This is not totally accepted by the community, so and so says that this might not be right because of this reason.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: And that's that's kind of it.
7:15
SPEAKER_01: But you have to like go and read the paper to get the full richness of what they did, probably.
7:21
SPEAKER_01: So both are are great.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think going to the primary source is is interesting sometimes too.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: So how do you s how do you see this happening then uh in most in most situations?
7:33
SPEAKER_00: Do you think that somebody reads a paper in a popular, you know, journal or popular magazine or whatever, right?
7:40
SPEAKER_00: And then they're like, oh, I I think I need to go read this paper.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: How do you think this goes usually?
7:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a good question.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: And there's different types of papers out there.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: In the paper we read, The Impact of Vegetation on Meandering Rivers, this is written by a colleague, friend of mine, Alessander Alepi, who is a very good writer and a sedimentologist.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: So this is outside of my field as well, but this is a review paper.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: So this is something that kind of reviews the last maybe five years to decade of research on vegetation and meandering rivers, which is kind of a new field.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: And so that is a type of a paper which more people will read, a review paper.
8:15
SPEAKER_01: If I study the details of some weird rock terrain up in northern Canada that not many people really care about, very few people are going to read that paper necessarily.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: So there's published papers and there's published papers.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: There's like different categories of them.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: So what I think, I don't know, Chris, I guess maybe I'd flip that around.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: Like, when do you read papers?
8:36
SPEAKER_01: Because you've read a lot of papers in your day.
8:38
SPEAKER_01: When do you find yourself reading papers most frequently?
8:43
SPEAKER_01: Or when do you not read them too?
8:45
SPEAKER_00: Okay, good question.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh so I'll answer the first thing first.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: When do I find myself reading papers?
8:51
SPEAKER_00: When I am trying to get ready for something or trying to wrap my mind around something, that's kind of the way I am, and you know this about me when I write scripts for this show and so on.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: So I'll just I'll end up in a rabbit hole and I'll spend time that I really don't need to spend.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: But then again, I have this like need to understand something at a really deep level before I feel like I can communicate that to people.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: And so I will read something like that, then I'll go to the original paper quite often.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: If I if I don't feel satisfied, or quite often when you read these summations, you know, uh like you said, maybe they're not well written or they're just there are gaps, there are holes, and sometimes you don't understand it.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: And so I have to go to the original work to to wrap my mind around it.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: It happens all the time, actually, especially doing this podcast.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: Find myself doing this all the time.
9:45
SPEAKER_01: That's where I see this fitting in to you, the listener's life, is scratching that itch, right?
9:51
SPEAKER_01: Like you gotta, you really wanna understand stuff.
9:53
SPEAKER_01: And we've had people email us, so many of you have emailed us and said, Hey, I read this paper, or hey, I saw this article about this paper, and I read it, and you know, what's going on?
10:01
SPEAKER_01: And so people are reading papers more than I, you know, would imagine.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: For me, it's my job.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: Like it is my job to read papers.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: I also find myself reading papers a lot, Chris, when I'm exploring other areas, like when I'm going to New Hampshire, or I was just looking at the geology around the uh Washington, DC, because I'm going down there, I'm gonna do a little stop and check out some rocks.
10:21
SPEAKER_01: I was reading papers from like 1979 where they were mapping, you know, the area and looking at the original rock descriptions just this morning.
10:29
SPEAKER_01: But that's like a little bit more for fun and not necessarily for work, right?
10:32
SPEAKER_01: And so I end up doing this more than than I would have otherwise, just for work.
10:39
SPEAKER_01: And I'd imagine a lot of people are kind of the same way.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: So the you made a really good point, though, that I just want to I want to emphasize two things right out of the gate here.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: The first thing is that papers, although many of them are behind paywalls, you can always find a way to get them.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: There's this website called ResearchGate, where you can usually download PDFs.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: You can always email the authors, and the vast majority of people, if they are still active and working, have PDFs and they're more than happy to send them to people.
11:06
SPEAKER_01: When people email me, that's very interesting.
11:08
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I always forward a PDF to anybody who emails me, Professor Remick, I'd like this paper.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: I always forward it.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: Bar none.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: That's good to know.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's really good to know.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: So you can get them even if they're behind a paywall, is my main point.
11:21
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: What what was your second question?
11:22
SPEAKER_00: I think I only answered the first one.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: What was the second part of that?
11:25
SPEAKER_01: One more point.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: Point number two that I was just about to make, and then I'll ask you the second part of the question because I think it might pertain.
11:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, papers, I would say, break apart into two categories, well, really four categories along two axes, like rows and columns here.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: There is good science, and there is, I would say, not as good science, and then there's good writing and not as good writing.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: And so you can have a paper, and I think we just read one, that's great science and great writing, and you can have a paper that's great science and bad writing, and you can have one that's bad science and bad writing, and you can have bad science and great writing.
11:59
SPEAKER_01: I'll leave it at that and we'll come back to this point, probably.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: But my question for you, Chris, was when do you not read a paper?
12:04
SPEAKER_01: Like when do you see you and say, Ah, I'm not gonna read that?
12:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, if it reads like a foreign language, I'm done.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: That's what it is for me.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: If the vocabulary is just too far out of my realm, I can't wade through it.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: A lot of the you see, these papers are not short, you know.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: This usually they're lengthy, they're in depth.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: And even the you know, the one that we read here on Meandering Rivers, it was heavy.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: You know, it was I find myself, you know, rereading a lot of parts of it, sometimes multiple times.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: So it takes a long time to get through it.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: So I'll give up on a paper if it is just too heavy.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: You know, I I have a you know, a deep background in geology, and these things are so niche sometimes that it's so far beyond me that I'm like, oh, forget it, Don.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
12:52
SPEAKER_01: So I would agree.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I do that too all the time.
12:55
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's why I kind of wanted to bring this up is if you, Chris Bullheis, cannot plug into the nomenclature or the jargon in a paper, that's a poorly written paper.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: Even though the science may be great, that's a poorly written paper.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: And so this is the one thing that I really belabor with, you know, the undergrad and grad students in my research group, they're probably sick of me saying this, is that you can't get intimidated by this thing.
13:17
SPEAKER_01: If you can't get it, you sitting in this room, you're all smart people, you're very interested.
13:21
SPEAKER_01: I care more about you being interested than being smart, but like you're clearly interested.
13:25
SPEAKER_01: If you can't read it, it's the paper's fault or the writer's fault, not your fault.
13:30
SPEAKER_01: And it takes effort.
13:31
SPEAKER_01: Like sometimes it takes effort.
13:32
SPEAKER_01: I have reread in this paper reread.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: This is not my field.
13:35
SPEAKER_01: It took a while for me to plug into it.
13:37
SPEAKER_01: And I know Ale, he's a very good writer, but he does write at a fairly high level.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: And it I had to read many paragraphs over again to kind of really understand exactly what was uh what was going on.
13:46
SPEAKER_01: That's natural.
13:47
SPEAKER_01: So, like it's for me, I kind of belabor that point that that's natural.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: All right.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, John to move this along then.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: Let's let's go ahead, Jesse.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: Let's start with how do you read a scientific paper?
13:59
SPEAKER_00: What do you tell your graduate students?
14:01
SPEAKER_00: Let's go.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: I uh so I'm gonna answer this with two keys or two strategies that I don't really follow anymore.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: And I'll be curious on on how you did this, Chris.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: I'd be curious on like, for instance, this paper, how did you start it out?
14:16
SPEAKER_01: But really, what I say is try and get a summary first.
14:18
SPEAKER_01: And the summary comes from reading the abstract, and you don't have to really understand every word in the abstract.
14:24
SPEAKER_01: You just read the abstract, it'll give you an overview.
14:26
SPEAKER_01: That's the point of it, and then figures.
14:28
SPEAKER_01: So abstract, figures, conclusions.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: And I like to work through the figures, read the text on the figures, and read the captions.
14:36
SPEAKER_01: And basically, what I tell people to do is get an overview, get a summary, and try and figure out where you can most easily plug into the paper and where you're gonna need to spend more time to understand it.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: And so if you can look at the data sets and you think, okay, I understand kind of the main point of that data-rich figure, good.
14:57
SPEAKER_01: Okay, if there's a schematic that I don't quite get, then you need to maybe dive into that part of the paper where they reference that figure first.
15:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm a really visual person, and so I use the figures as like entry points into the paper.
15:12
SPEAKER_01: And then part two of that.
15:13
SPEAKER_01: So get an overview, reading the abstract, look at the figures and the captions, read the conclusions, then you'll have like this high-level overview.
15:20
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, that's exactly what I did, and what I always do.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: I read the abstract and I get an idea as to what's going on, and then I go right to the diagrams, figures, pictures, and their explanations, and I study those.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: And I did that quite a bit with this paper.
15:36
SPEAKER_00: Some of the diagrams were very interesting, and so I really spent a lot of yeah, and I want to talk about these here.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, we're gonna go ahead and link.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: Can we do that?
15:45
SPEAKER_00: Can we link this in the show notes?
15:47
SPEAKER_00: Then okay.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: So after I got a handle on the the diagrams and graphs and data, the images, then I went straight to the conclusion.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: And then you go back, and then what I find myself doing is as I go back and I start the article and and work my way from beginning to end, I'll find myself being able to skip sections of it then because I don't know.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: My mind is constantly like curating, I guess, the curating the information I'm taking in.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: And so I'll skip a section of it and I'll I'll hop to the next one.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: So that was my approach.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: That's usually the way I approach these things.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: You know, my my second thing I tell, especially undergrads and and early graduate students, is you know, usually don't worry about the methods for the first part.
16:30
SPEAKER_01: Like there are parts of the paper you don't really need to care about for most papers, unless it's super, super close to your field and you need to understand literally every word in that paper.
16:40
SPEAKER_01: The methods don't really matter too much.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: It's really the the intro, regional geology kind of background discussion, and then the discussion and conclusions.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: So you kind of work uh sort of a reverse sandwich.
16:51
SPEAKER_01: You eat from the top and the bottom at the same time in this paper till you hit the middle section.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: The middle section is kind of the meediest and usually the most in the weeds.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: Usually you might abandon the middle part of the sandwich.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: So um, interesting too.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: One other thing that I want to bring up when I'm reading this is um I always go to the date.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh, when was this published?
17:10
SPEAKER_00: Because I I tend to avoid things that are older.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: Geology a lot has happened in the last two decades.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: And so if I come across something that's older than that, I'm I'm probably not gonna read it.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: I'll find something else.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, is that good or bad?
17:24
SPEAKER_00: Because that might offend some people, you know.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: I think it's an interesting question.
17:29
SPEAKER_01: Is it good or bad?
17:30
SPEAKER_01: I think that it's hmm.
17:33
SPEAKER_01: I think it's totally reasonable.
17:35
SPEAKER_01: I think that you have a deep appreciation for history and geology, and so I think you would get a lot out of reading the older papers and understanding the history of geological ideas, but that would probably take not reading one paper, you'd probably want to read five papers from 1955 to 2000, and that kind of showed you the history of the ideas of the impact of vegetation on meandering streams or something like that.
18:01
SPEAKER_01: You know, there are 216 references in this paper, and I don't know what the oldest one is, but I bet it's probably pretty old.
18:08
SPEAKER_01: You know, going back and reading the first person who thought about meandering streams and the science of meandering streams, I bet would be super interesting.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: You know, not necessarily super useful, but from a historical perspective, interesting.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: I bet it would.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: You're right.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: But my problem would be if I don't have a deep background on that particular topic, what do you take as truth and what has evolved and changed over time?
18:33
SPEAKER_00: And I'd have a hard time separating that out.
18:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a totally, totally fair point.
18:38
SPEAKER_01: And so most recent equals most relevant, usually.
18:41
SPEAKER_01: I I think that's that's probably pretty true.
18:44
SPEAKER_01: Um not always most accurate though, because a lot of these things will change and science is an evolving state, and uh you know it'll continue to change, right?
18:53
SPEAKER_01: And so that's that's uh a great thing.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: That's another important part for me too, because as you are so apt and quick to point out how old I am.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: Um like it's it's it's really important for me though to to really stay current, and so maybe maybe that's why I react that way to older publications.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: So I don't know.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, hey, let's talk a little bit about this article then.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I want to kind of turn this around a little bit on you, Chris, a minute and say if you were telling your class about this paper tomorrow, your geology class, like what would you tell them?
19:30
SPEAKER_01: What would be your 15-minute summary for the for the kids?
19:33
SPEAKER_01: Like, uh, because there's cool, there's amazingly cool stuff, and I'm interested in what you pulled out as super cool aspects to this.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: So the first thing that I found really interesting is, and this may sound like a a no-brainer, like, how could you not have thought about this?
19:49
SPEAKER_00: But you talk about meandering rivers and the impact that vegetation has on them, and then you go back to a time when there was no vegetation on Earth.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: You go back to, you know, the Cambrian and on forward.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there was a lot of time when our planet looked very different than it does today, and so like that was an interesting thought to me that this process of rivers and meanders and the physics behind it went on a very, very long time without vegetation.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: Totally, me too.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that was the first thing that I thought was cool.
20:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm not a sedimentologist, I study the early earth.
20:27
SPEAKER_01: This thought had not really ever crossed my mind until I started talking to Ale about his science and studying on vegetated rivers.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: I was like sort of like, okay, dude, I mean, why are we studying like modern rivers in the desert?
20:39
SPEAKER_01: And he's like, Well, think about it, man.
20:41
SPEAKER_01: Like 500 million years ago, there were no plants on Earth.
20:44
SPEAKER_01: So the rocks you look at, you see some old sediments, that's the equivalent morphology of rivers back then.
20:50
SPEAKER_01: Oh, wow, that's amazing.
20:52
SPEAKER_01: And so, Chris, I let me make one point here because I think this really nicely links a few episodes we're doing here in kind of a stream series, if you will.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: It's not a long series, but we talked about meandering streams and we're going to talk about levees.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: And one thing that I really found interesting here is that this image, it's figure four for those of you who actually are gonna click on this paper and dive into it based on our recommendations.
21:15
SPEAKER_01: Figure four shows that when there were not plants around anchoring the bed streams, there's a lot more levees.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: Like these dams broke their natural levees a lot more frequently.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: And so I kind of found that really interesting that this kind of bridged several of our topics that we're having in the streams a little bit more, which was kind of cool.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: Oh, and Chris, this was a great word.
21:35
SPEAKER_01: The greening of the continents.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: I love that phrase that that they use to describe plants coming onto the scene.
21:42
SPEAKER_01: Like the greening of the continents is such a great uh verb.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, another takeaway actually was the the next figure in this, which is really it's it's a picture showing three different river settings.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: One is with no vegetation, a desert kind of setting.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: And then you have the Humboldt River, which is this kind of in between thing.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: And then you have one that looks like a tropical rainforest, you know, it's really heavily vegetated.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: And then you see these characteristic shapes that the rivers take on in each of these settings.
22:15
SPEAKER_00: So I spent a lot of time looking at that.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: I found it to be fascinating.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: So that would be the second thing that I would talk about with my students.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: So what was a kind of a most interesting takeaway of the difference between unvegetated and vegetated meandering streams?
22:31
SPEAKER_01: Meandering streams in the desert and meandering streams in a forest.
22:34
SPEAKER_01: What was the most interesting takeaway, do you think?
22:37
SPEAKER_00: So for me, it was the sinuosity of the meanders.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
22:42
SPEAKER_01: Just explain, explain the term sinuosity a minute.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: All right.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: Let's see.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: So how do you explain sinuosity?
22:49
SPEAKER_00: The how loopy the bends are is that the bigger one is.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Oh, good.
22:53
SPEAKER_01: That's great.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: How loopy the I love that.
22:55
SPEAKER_01: No, that hits it perfectly.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: Totally.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: How loopy the bends are.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: I like that.
22:59
SPEAKER_01: Where the vegetated, the one with trees all around has much loopier.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: Hold on, hold on.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: You sold it.
23:07
SPEAKER_00: Alright, so you you said it.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: I was just gonna say that'd be a good question for the listeners.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: What do you think, right?
23:11
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: Which ones are gonna have loopier bends?
23:14
SPEAKER_00: Which ones are more sinuous, the vegetated ones or the non-vegetated ones?
23:19
SPEAKER_00: And it to me it was surprising, actually, that the vegetated, the greener earth has more sinuosity, more loopies.
23:28
SPEAKER_01: And therefore more likely to create oxbow lakes, like more likely to create that big full horseshoe, whereas an unvegetated river flowing through a desert, or think of I always kind of think of a glacial stream coming out of the mountains and hitting the valley floor, and then you get this big outwash plane where there's trees way on the edges of the flood bank, but in the middle it's just gravel.
23:52
SPEAKER_01: That's the stream I kind of always envision.
23:54
SPEAKER_01: But that stream just kind of winds back and forth.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: It never makes these big, big loops, horseshoes that get cut off again.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: I found that really interesting.
24:01
SPEAKER_00: That that would really occur.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: Because in our last episode, we talked about the the radius of the curvature, you know, and with non-vegetated rivers, they have a much, much longer radius for their curvature.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: And then the other thing, too, a lot hitting with the same thing in terms of you know, the other takeaway is that, and I think this one is more intuitive by a lot, is that non-vegetated rivers migrate faster.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: You know, that makes sense to me.
24:29
SPEAKER_01: It does, I I agree it does make sense to me as well, that fact in and of itself.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: But to me, combined with the fact that vegetated rivers have this more sinuous nature, these bigger horseshoe bends, those two kind of feel a little counterintuitive.
24:45
SPEAKER_01: That I would have expected that the one with the bigger horseshoes would be migrating faster, meaning the horseshoe is cutting outwards faster.
24:53
SPEAKER_01: But that's kind of the inverse, is true.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: So that that was the aspect that was a little bit counterintuitive about that for me.
24:59
SPEAKER_01: Um and a really interesting point about the river that has trees around it or that has vegetation is that it's mostly about the mud.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: The mud gets caught and held by the tree roots, and the mud actually prevents this bank instability, like putting mud in between sand grades helps stabilize the slopes.
25:19
SPEAKER_01: That was kind of an interesting point that I had never really thought about before.
25:24
SPEAKER_01: Uh not being a sedimentologist and being somebody who's interested in magma zenigneous rocks.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: I I yeah, I agree.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, let me flip this back to you then.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: What are some things that you took away that you want to talk about that I haven't already hit?
25:39
SPEAKER_01: Well, the levy thing was kind of an interesting one for me, and uh we'll probably come back to this a bit in our levy episode about the the utility of levees coming up soon.
25:49
SPEAKER_01: That was kind of an interesting one.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: I think one thing that really uh made a lot of sense to me is that the repercussions of civilization that were getting rid of a lot of the trees around meandering streams.
26:03
SPEAKER_01: And so using the analogy of basically using unvegetated rivers as a way to study some future streams where we've deforested areas or we're building cities around meandering streams, drawing that analogy was a really powerful one that made a lot of sense to me.
26:20
SPEAKER_01: And in my physical geology intro class, I have a lot of civil engineers and mining engineers in there.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: So that point would be well received, I think.
26:27
SPEAKER_01: That would help me sell you know streams to the the class of 200.
26:32
SPEAKER_01: Out of like 220.
26:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the importance, right, to the to the modern civilization.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: Out of like 220 students, I think probably 180 of them are in the the engineering program in some way, shape, or form.
26:44
SPEAKER_00: So I tend to that's a very interesting crowd.
26:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I cater a bit to that uh population just with things like this, tidbits like that.
26:52
SPEAKER_01: So this is so that was something I would totally talk about in this class.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: A little bit off topic though, with that class, I bet the mass wasting unit would be a fun one to get after because that's really what they deal with.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: Where to put the roads and things like this, right?
27:09
SPEAKER_00: And slope stability and you're trying to hem in a river.
27:14
SPEAKER_01: What else, Chris?
27:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, how else I guess put this box, put this paper into two categories for me.
27:20
SPEAKER_01: Like how interesting was it and how well written was it?
27:24
SPEAKER_00: So there is a figure, uh figure four, you just referred to it.
27:27
SPEAKER_00: And you did you say this was your one of your favorite figures?
27:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the one with the two streams, barren and vegetated on either side, the schematic.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate that aspect of it, but I found this particular figure though to be difficult for me because I don't know what crevasse splay complexes are.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's I have no idea what that is.
27:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh unbioturbated sediment.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: I I know what that is, but uh it's it's a it's a mouthful of a word.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: Actually, what I had to do with this figure then is go right to the text where it was discussed in here.
28:01
SPEAKER_01: So and Chris, that brings it full circle, like really back to how to read a paper.
28:07
SPEAKER_01: That is one of the keys.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: Is if you look at a figure, the figure is your entry point into the paper.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: And so doing exactly as you did is just a great way.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: Like you say, okay, I don't quite understand this figure.
28:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna go to the text because that's where it explains it more.
28:22
SPEAKER_01: And if you look at it and you think, oh, I totally get this figure, I understand everything on here.
28:26
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you don't need to go to the text that surrounds that particular figure.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: So uh that's a great way to do it.
28:32
SPEAKER_01: And I do this all the time.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: I did the same thing with this thing because I don't know what a crevasse splay levy broach is either, right?
28:40
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, yeah.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: The I guess the other thing too in writing a good paper, right?
28:45
SPEAKER_00: You talked about good papers and bad papers and so on.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: I it to me, the figures they're a centerpiece of the paper, the diagrams and graphs and things like that.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: And I think that they really need to be explained in detail in the text, and sometimes it's not, it's like it's unrelated almost, and it's very frustrating for me when I see that.
29:06
SPEAKER_01: So I agree completely, and there are a lot of really well-written papers out there in the geoscience world.
29:14
SPEAKER_01: There are an equal number, if not more, of poorly written papers.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: And I'm a bit of an elitist when it comes to figures.
29:23
SPEAKER_01: I am extremely hard on figures and figures students make, papers I'm on.
29:28
SPEAKER_01: I am a big believer in figures and making figures that really tie deeply into the main science concepts and get the point across.
29:36
SPEAKER_01: Even if the figures are kind of complicated and dense, a beautiful figure will save you pages of text.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
29:44
SPEAKER_01: It writes itself.
29:45
SPEAKER_01: And this is an interesting point.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: This is the way I write papers now, too, is I make the figures first.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: I'll make the 10 figures and then I'll write around those because that's how much I believe that the figures are intimately tied.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: And actually, a side point, I'm really excited because there's a few journals right now that are allowing what I'd call active figures, meaning like gifs or little short videos and things, because we all look at PDFs.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: Like nobody buys the print journal anymore.
30:10
SPEAKER_01: So they're allowing videos to be embedded into these PDF figures, which will be really, really great and kind of transform how papers are made.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a good idea.
30:19
SPEAKER_00: That is that's a game changer, actually.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: Totally game changer, right?
30:22
SPEAKER_00: It's incredible.
30:22
SPEAKER_01: Like imagine the schematic was like gifified, like we have on our Camp Geo.
30:27
SPEAKER_01: We make some really cool gifts for our Camp Geo conversational textbook.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: That's the first link in your show notes if you want to see it.
30:33
SPEAKER_01: But we have some cool gifts on there, and it's a gifts are super powerful educational tools.
30:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they really are.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: Um okay.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: Well, I want to cut to the chase here then, Jesse.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: Uh go ahead and give us your doctor perspective here.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: What is the main takeaway then of this paper?
30:49
SPEAKER_01: I think the main takeaway, and this is speaking from an igneous petrologist reading a sedimentology a sedimentology paper here.
30:57
SPEAKER_01: Uh to me, the main takeaway, and this will be different.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: Everybody who reads this paper will have a different takeaway, but my main takeaway is that there are dramatic differences between unvegetated and vegetated streams, and those are really important when we look both in my field of research, the early earth, and forward looking, understanding how society interacts with the natural world.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: This paper really drove that point home that we need to understand this difference for both of those reasons.
31:26
SPEAKER_01: And I think from the science reading, reading a science paper, kind of the theme of this episode, I think this paper did a really, really good job of the summary and future directions part, which should always be a part of any paper.
31:39
SPEAKER_01: Like any paper should have at least a paragraph or two on where to go next, like what the future looks like in this field.
31:46
SPEAKER_01: And this paper did a really good job of that.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: I thought it had some pretty interesting and thought-provoking future directions and summary aspects to it.
31:55
SPEAKER_01: So I I really like that part about the writing in here.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I agree 100% with your takeaway.
32:01
SPEAKER_00: I think for me, my mind kept coming back to the all right, what's the human impact then on rivers?
32:07
SPEAKER_00: And and I think that's why this is important.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: That's why this kind of research is important.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: Um, we are intertwined with rivers.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: We need to know about how the actions that we impose upon rivers, how are the rivers going to respond to that?
32:21
SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
32:22
SPEAKER_01: I'll be interested in in getting feedback from you know, listener.
32:26
SPEAKER_01: If you have read a paper, if you like reading papers, if you don't, give us some feedback.
32:30
SPEAKER_01: I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this.
32:32
SPEAKER_01: And like I said before, feel free to reach out to authors if you find a paper you're interested in.
32:37
SPEAKER_01: There's always an email address linked in a paper.
32:39
SPEAKER_01: Just ping them.
32:41
SPEAKER_01: Almost everybody who's active will get back to you and they'll actually be very excited that you're interested in their paper.
32:47
SPEAKER_01: That's kind of what I what I how I feel.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna send an email to somebody that that you know is PhD that published a paper, they're gonna be like, uh, who's this person, you know?
33:02
SPEAKER_00: Forget it.
33:02
SPEAKER_00: Uh more of an annoyance.
33:04
SPEAKER_00: And you're saying that's not the case, which is pretty cool.
33:06
SPEAKER_01: I guarantee you that is not the case.
33:08
SPEAKER_01: We get very few emails like that, and the ones that do come in are always appreciated and make you feel like people care about what you're doing.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: And so that's always a nice feeling.
33:16
SPEAKER_01: We we get very little congratulations in our job.
33:19
SPEAKER_01: We get a lot of rejection and not that much congratulations.
33:22
SPEAKER_01: So it's always nice to have that.
33:24
SPEAKER_00: Fair enough.
33:25
SPEAKER_01: Fair enough.
33:25
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, hey, Chris, I hope this was a useful, uh, useful episode here.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: I think so.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: I liked it.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: That's a wrap.
33:31
SPEAKER_01: Hey, if you want to learn more about us, follow us, subscribe, see all of our past episodes, you can go to planetgeocast.com.
33:38
SPEAKER_01: You can also support us there.
33:39
SPEAKER_01: We really appreciate all the support we have received from you, the listener, and keep sending that our way.
33:44
SPEAKER_01: If you would do us a favor, you can follow and subscribe and leave a review and a rating.
33:49
SPEAKER_01: That is really powerful for the algorithm and it helps other people discover Planet Geo.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: The last thing, Chris, we are putting together this conversational textbook for the geosciences.
33:59
SPEAKER_01: We're calling it Camp Geo.
34:00
SPEAKER_01: It's pretty sweet, I must say.
34:02
SPEAKER_01: We're updating the interface probably as we speak when this episode launches, and uh it's looking pretty good now.
34:08
SPEAKER_01: We got a lot of content up there.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: If you want to get all the information that Chris and I teach in our intro to geology classes, it's all there for you with some key images.
34:18
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
34:19
SPEAKER_01: Peace.
34:20
SPEAKER_01: Cheers.