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National Geographic and Geoscience Writing - Dr. Maya Wei-Haas · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:02
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
0:14
SPEAKER_02: I'm recording.
0:15
SPEAKER_01: Check, check, check.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: Check, check.
0:21
SPEAKER_02: It's always good to see you, and it's always funny to see you, too.
0:24
SPEAKER_02: I don't know why, but you just make me laugh looking at you sometimes.
0:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, Professor Remink.
0:30
SPEAKER_01: I don't know what to say to that.
0:31
SPEAKER_01: I'm not funny looking.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: I'm actually very good looking.
0:36
SPEAKER_01: Just to ask you.
0:38
SPEAKER_02: What's up?
0:39
SPEAKER_02: Today I I'm super excited, man.
0:41
SPEAKER_02: This is a great interview.
0:42
SPEAKER_02: We just finished it.
0:42
SPEAKER_02: We just wrapped it up.
0:43
SPEAKER_02: Dr.
0:44
SPEAKER_02: Maya Wei Haas, just an exceptional.
0:46
SPEAKER_02: This was a great interview.
0:48
SPEAKER_02: She is a science journalist for National Geographic.
0:52
SPEAKER_02: She has a particular affection, as she says it, for rocks and reactions.
0:56
SPEAKER_02: She's got a hell of a resume.
0:58
SPEAKER_02: Um she's won the AGU's Award for Excellence in Science Journalism recently, another Excellence in Journalism Award in 2021.
1:06
SPEAKER_02: She was an American Academy for the Advancement of Science Fellow, which is a very prestigious fellowship in 2015, has worked for the Smithsonian Magazine and now at National Geographic.
1:15
SPEAKER_02: And really has this interesting view of our science, I think, in our field.
1:22
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
1:22
SPEAKER_01: Like, I mean, who gets this perspective, right?
1:25
SPEAKER_01: You're in the weeds all the time.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: Totally, totally in the weeds.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: You know, you're doing your research and and so on.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: I'm in the classroom teaching very basic stuff.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: She's really at the middle of this kind of thing, and she gets to look at it from both sides.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: She gets to interact both ways and then try to bring our science, what's so near and dear to our hearts, down to everybody.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's just awesome.
1:48
SPEAKER_02: It's so cool.
1:49
SPEAKER_02: And it was really fun to dive into those types of questions with her.
1:52
SPEAKER_02: And you know, things like how do you pick a topic to write about, what's interesting to her.
1:57
SPEAKER_02: And she has some amazing answers.
1:59
SPEAKER_02: Uh it was inspiring answers, in fact, for me at least.
2:03
SPEAKER_01: And I thought too the the process that she has to go through to get an article, you know, uh the the pitch that she has to go through, you know.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: I just I learned a ton about that.
2:12
SPEAKER_01: I found it very interesting.
2:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I will always read, you know, National Geographic articles differently now after this conversation.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: Won't you?
2:19
SPEAKER_02: Totally.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: I agree.
2:20
SPEAKER_01: I agree.
2:21
SPEAKER_01: Um and then if you stick around to the end of the interview and she talks about her best day as a geoscientist, um, I think like it just it gave me some warm, fuzzy feelings.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: Because like we're talking to a diehard geoscientist here.
2:35
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
2:36
SPEAKER_01: I loved it.
2:36
SPEAKER_02: Uh totally.
2:37
SPEAKER_02: Just that perfect, perfect answer.
2:41
SPEAKER_02: All right, you are Chris Bullhois, nationally recognized earth science teacher, my former high school teacher.
2:47
SPEAKER_02: You teach field geology, you teach uh college level geology, you teach earth science at the ninth grade level and astronomy.
2:54
SPEAKER_02: Um we've known each other for a long time.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: We have, and you're Dr.
2:58
SPEAKER_01: Jesse Rymank.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: You're one of the best students that I've ever had.
3:01
SPEAKER_01: Oh, shucks.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: You are though, you are.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: And so if somebody is gonna be one of those people that that's gonna get into the weeds and you know, get into these things that most like normal humans can't think about and and begin to comprehend, it it's gonna be you.
3:17
SPEAKER_01: So a lot of respect for me going your way and uh and a lot of respect for both of us going to uh Dr.
3:24
SPEAKER_02: Maya Weihas.
3:25
SPEAKER_02: This is Planet Geo.
3:26
SPEAKER_02: Let's get to it, huh?
3:27
SPEAKER_02: Let's do it.
3:42
SPEAKER_02: Hey, welcome to Planet Geo.
3:44
SPEAKER_02: And today we are extremely excited to have Dr.
3:47
SPEAKER_02: Maya Wey Haas, science writer extraordinaire and science journalist for the National Geographic right now.
3:53
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for having me.
3:55
SPEAKER_02: We are very excited to talk to you, and and this is kind of a new space for us, the sort of uh science communication and sort of heavy-hitting science communication.
4:03
SPEAKER_02: So we're very I'm very excited.
4:05
SPEAKER_02: I I've been uh excited for the whole week.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: Oh, awesome.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: Well, likewise.
4:10
SPEAKER_01: I do want to start off asking you though, Maya, you got your PhD from Ohio State?
4:14
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
4:16
SPEAKER_01: Damn.
4:18
SPEAKER_01: I'm from Michigan, and I don't know how I feel about that.
4:22
SPEAKER_02: Oh no, Chris is a diehard U of M fan.
4:25
SPEAKER_01: So we're together.
4:28
SPEAKER_01: Oh, all right.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: Well, we'll we'll struggle through the interview, Jesse.
4:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right, right.
4:35
unknown: Yeah.
4:36
SPEAKER_01: All right, Maya, I'm gonna go ahead and get us started then for the first question that we have for you today.
4:40
SPEAKER_01: So you have a PhD in earth science.
4:42
SPEAKER_01: Specifically, I think it's environmental chemistry.
4:44
SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
4:45
SPEAKER_01: Environmental chemistry.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: It's a yeah, it's an earth science with an environmental chemistry focus.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: So, how did you get into the geosciences?
4:53
SPEAKER_01: Was there like this aha moment for you when you just I mean, I I have that moment for me, and I don't I don't know if Jesse really has a moment, but I definitely do.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: What what was it like for you?
5:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think my aha moment was kind of stretched across the whole class.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, but it was really in in my freshman year of college.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know anything about genome scientists, to be perfectly honest, until I took a first-year seminar at I went to Smith College.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: And they require you taking these first-year seminars, which are supposed to be fairly heavy in the writing realm.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: And so I saw this course called Geo in the Field or Geology in the Field, and I was like, what in the world?
5:32
SPEAKER_00: That sounds awesome! And at the time, I was not a very good writer.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: I really didn't like writing hilariously.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: Um thought that if I paired it with this class that got me out of the classroom and outside, it would be fine.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: It wouldn't have to, I wouldn't have to worry about writing so much.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: And I just, I absolutely fell in love with it.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: It sort of studying geology, just like it opened up this whole new way of looking at the world around me.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: And I just, it was remarkable to be able to sort of understand the deep history of the landscape where we were standing.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: The basis of that class is every week we went out to different sites around the area and learned about the geologic past.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: And our like final project was piecing together the history of a particular area with these really interesting rock units.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: There's sort of sedimentary layers that had been folded in really interesting ways.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: And so we were to study them and come up with hypotheses about how they formed.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: And so I just the idea of being able to sort of read layers of sediment, like pages in a book, just like I was obsessed.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so from then on, I was decided that I wanted to be a geology major and I picked up a chemistry minor later on, but that was sort of it for me.
6:47
SPEAKER_02: Um that's very so Smith College, that's in the Northeast, right?
6:50
SPEAKER_02: It's one of these, is it the Seven Sisters like historical was is that the group of officers?
6:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, the women's colleges.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
6:58
SPEAKER_02: I mean, Smith has produced some unbelievably good geologists.
7:01
SPEAKER_02: They have an amazing geology program.
7:02
SPEAKER_02: But what where is it?
7:03
SPEAKER_02: Is it Massachusetts or Northampton, Massachusetts?
7:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:06
SPEAKER_02: Okay, cool.
7:07
SPEAKER_02: Cool geology up there too to learn.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: Super cool geology.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: It was a lot of fun and really just like it was super interesting to to learn about all of the various processes because that's that area is really complex.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: And so it was just a lot of fun.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't hurt to get to be outside though in the northeast in the hall.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: That's right, that's right.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: So pretty.
7:29
SPEAKER_01: So to be clear though, when you went into this and you decided that this is the direction you wanted to go, writing wasn't a part of that yet, right?
7:37
SPEAKER_00: It took years.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: Years.
7:40
SPEAKER_00: So I'm dyslexic.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: So reading, writing were not things that came easy to me.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, and this is partly actually why I went into science in a very strange way, because for me, it was less about the words.
7:53
SPEAKER_00: It was an entire other language almost, and I could make sense of it.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: And it didn't have to be ordering words and pages and paragraphs, because in my brain, the way my brain works, it that just never made sense to me.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: And I struggled a lot with that.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: And so in geology, so much of it is visual pictures, and so being able to tell the stories and pictures, it was just that was exactly what I was looking for.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: I I agree with you a hundred percent.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: Geology is all about the visuals.
8:21
SPEAKER_02: So then you went to Ohio State and got your PhD there, and since that point, you've kind of been a science communicator or you know, writing a science writer, really.
8:30
SPEAKER_02: And I'm really very interested in your view of this because, from my view, I'm assuming you have this amazing view of science.
8:38
SPEAKER_02: Like you get to like look at all the top-notch science that's being done and kind of pick and choose what you want to do deep dives into.
8:44
SPEAKER_02: So you must have this like really amazing sort of 30,000-foot view of science, whereas I'm in the weeds all the time in the sort of you know, my little random nook and cranny of science.
8:56
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't know.
8:57
SPEAKER_02: Can you sort of riff on that or tell me like, is that true?
8:59
SPEAKER_02: What do you think of that?
9:00
SPEAKER_02: Is that like a fun place to exist?
9:02
SPEAKER_02: It looks from the from my view, it looks very fun to have your job.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: It has its moments, it has its harder moments for sure, but it also is really fun.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's sort of the the 30,000-foot view of science is partly why I got into journalism or communication, because throughout my entire PhD, I always, my attention was constantly straying to other topics.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: It was always like, oh, shiny, that's cool.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: And my advisor is constantly hand slapping, no, we need to narrow, narrow, narrow.
9:33
SPEAKER_03: That's great.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: I just I really struggled to exist in the small little like speck of dust in the bigger realm.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to know about everything else.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: I really wanted to be able to dabble in so many other fields.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: I was constantly trying to look at what was going on everywhere else and see what ties there are between fields.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: I loved existing between fields.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: The idea of biogeochemistry to me was like such a cool concept.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's funny to think about like, what is this, what where is the field going or where has it been?
10:07
SPEAKER_00: I feel like my my view of it, while zoomed back a lot, I'm still, I don't know.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: I I would like to think I'm fairly young at this point that I haven't been in it for so long.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: But even in the time that I have, on the analysis side, one of the things that I've been really excited to see, and this sounds kind of lame because this is like all of science, but I feel like for geology, it's huge to have incorporation of these really cutting-edge technologies.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: Like a lot of geology methods are very sort of like they're observational.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: You look at it, you study it under a lens.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: Some of the tools are actually quite simple, which I think in and of itself is exciting because it provides kind of a low barrier of entry for a lot of analyses.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: But then there's sort of this whole other side of things that I don't think I really existed until I really started writing.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: And the sort of the capacities that supercomputers are opening in terms of modeling.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: I've been looking at some of these volcano models that are just spectacular, some of what we're being able to try to figure out from seismic records of the subsurface structures.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: I've been doing a lot of reading recently about like rewinding a little bit.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: So there's these like big kind of blobs basically right above the core.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: There's a large one under the Pacific, large one under Africa, and like they've been studied for decades.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: And we the fact that we don't know what they are still or how they got there, we may think they're vaguely tied to volcanism at the surface, but a lot of people argue either way.
11:40
SPEAKER_02: It's just yeah, they have the most unoriginal name in science, I think.
11:43
SPEAKER_02: LLSVPs, large low shear wave velocity provinces.
11:47
SPEAKER_02: It's like the worst name in the entire world.
11:50
SPEAKER_02: But they're super uh those are totally cool, they're totally interesting.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: They're cousins, I realize that are well sisters, cousins, brothers.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: The things that that lie just on the edges of them that are actually like they think healthy, I believe.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: And sorry if that's butchering the science.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: That's my understanding of it, are even more boring of a name.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: The ultra-low velocity.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh cool.
12:17
SPEAKER_02: It's like uh, you know, that's not a low barrier of entry because you have to understand what shear wave velocity, like all this random stuff.
12:23
SPEAKER_02: I think, you know, partly why Chris and I, we talked about this before.
12:27
SPEAKER_02: Um, we're really excited to talk to you because you kind of live in this intersection actually between Chris and I a little bit, you know, like he's an amazing communicator and educator, and you know, I I do some of that, but mostly do a lot of the research.
12:38
SPEAKER_02: And so you you kind of live in that intermediate space, which is I think a really interesting space.
12:44
SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, that's that's really cool to hear what you're excited about in the geosciences from the research perspective.
12:50
SPEAKER_02: That's totally cool.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: I have to say though, the other thing, I mean, stepping back a little bit from research, the other thing that I've been really exciting to see a big push for is more diversity and representation in geoscience.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's a huge challenge when we're talking barriers to entry.
13:06
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I guess that's sort of a different concept of a barrier to entry, but I think it's something that is long overdue to be addressed.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: And in just the last couple of years, it feels like it's finally being talked about.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: And as an undergrad in grad school, all of that, I feel like it, and it I'm sure the conversations were happening, but I was unaware of them.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: And it um I am Chinese and a woman.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: And so just I still remember my very first like AGU meeting.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: I remember going to a networking event there, and I was so excited, like unbridled enthusiasm going into this mentor session.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm gonna find my mentor that's gonna take me on to the rest of my career.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: And I walked up to this um person who worked at the USGS, and I told him it was my ambition to work at the USGS.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: That was what I wanted to do at that time.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: This was back in college.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, and he looked me up and down.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: And honestly, I've I've blocked out his exact words, but essentially it was you need to be much older and a white male to ever make it in this world as a geoscientist.
14:14
SPEAKER_03: Wow, God.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: And I just remember being heartbroken.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: And I know it's like one ignorant person, but he represents a more people, I think, than I want there to be in the field of geoscience.
14:28
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, yeah, you don't totally that's amazing to me.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: You don't seem old enough to have you know had something like that said to you.
14:36
SPEAKER_01: That's that's astounding.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
14:39
SPEAKER_01: That seems so old school.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was, and I've run into more of them than I would like to admit, I think, throughout my time in the sciences and even now.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think it's just it's hard.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: I experience a lot of the same things as a woman journalist because it's just sort of the world we live in.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: But I I think that it's really important for this conversation to finally be happening for geosciences because it just it's it I think for a long time it just wasn't really spoken about out in the open.
15:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, as an aside, we typically don't ask that question because some people are not comfortable with it, but we're very much in line with that.
15:16
SPEAKER_02: So if you want to add more personal stuff in there, we don't want we don't want people to feel uncomfortable with personal stuff, but if you're willing to and interested and you can we can keep going and add things like that.
15:25
SPEAKER_02: So that's great.
15:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that it's really important to talk about because I think for me at least, this has been it's been a huge part of me trying to find my way through geoscience, through science in general, to be honest, even through journalism.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: And I think that the fact that it's so many people are uncomfortable talking about it is it's um I totally respect that a lot of people don't want to because it's a really touchy subject.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: But like I think it's I I think it's really important to be talking about the things that make us uncomfortable.
15:55
SPEAKER_02: Uh on your journalism note, I I don't know many journalists, but what I've heard is that it's similar.
16:00
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it it's it's not more welcoming, let's say.
16:04
SPEAKER_02: Is that have you in the in your experience, has that been true?
16:07
SPEAKER_00: It depends on the circles where where you are, really.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: There are places, there are pockets of people that are really working hard to increase diversity, to increase diverse voices.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: On the flip side of that, I think it's also journalists' responsibility to do the same.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: Something that I am consistently trying to do, and sometimes I achieve it and sometimes I don't because we're working on deadlines and at some point the story has to be done.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: But having more local voices, if an earthquake happens in a particular place, trying to find scientists either who studied in that area or are there now, like local scientists, local voices.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think all of that is is really important to be featuring and highlighting, right, bringing up because I think as journalists, we have that responsibility to be highlighting um diverse voices.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: And I think on the flip side, it also helps in, I would like to think, um, in their their scientific path.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: So having them featured gives them some sort of um hopefully uh helping raise the voices up.
17:12
SPEAKER_02: Things like National Geographic.
17:13
SPEAKER_02: It does not hurt your career to be sort of quoted National Geographic, I would imagine, if we put it that way.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: I would hope.
17:20
SPEAKER_02: Definitely.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: So, Maya, you have a PhD, you've done top-tier research, but you reached a turning point, and I think you referred to it as a crisis.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: You actually called it a crisis somewhere along the way.
17:34
SPEAKER_01: So, can you talk about that?
17:35
SPEAKER_01: Like what changed your path from going the academic path?
17:40
SPEAKER_02: Especially from the point of you hated writing before.
17:42
SPEAKER_02: That's that's astonishing to me, actually.
17:44
SPEAKER_02: You know, like that's a great evolution.
17:45
SPEAKER_02: I want to hear more about this.
17:46
SPEAKER_00: I mean, candidacy?
17:49
SPEAKER_02: Oh, really?
17:50
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: I that was sort of when I really feel like I hit breaking point.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: And it was, I mean, candidacy is hard for good reason.
17:57
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think let me just interject here for people who don't know, candidacy is oh, yeah, yeah.
18:02
SPEAKER_02: It's usually, well, for me, it was a three-hour oral exam with I don't know, five professors just asking you whatever they wanted to, basically.
18:09
SPEAKER_02: And it's sort of a it's sort of a bar you you you must get over to move into becoming a PhD candidate.
18:16
SPEAKER_02: It's halfway through PhD or somewhere around that thing, but it's a a PhD event.
18:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
18:21
SPEAKER_02: It's a big exam halfway through that is extremely stressful and horrible, and it's horrible for me.
18:25
SPEAKER_02: I I hated it.
18:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
18:26
unknown: Yeah.
18:27
SPEAKER_02: I don't know anybody who loves it.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in addition to the multi-hour long oral exam in front of all of your uh all of the professors, each one of them also gave a written exam in mind.
18:37
SPEAKER_03: Oh wow.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: Oh so I had the week leading up, I forget how long each one I had for they all had varying rules for their written version of the exam.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: And then at the end of that was the oral.
18:49
SPEAKER_02: Oh, that is brutal.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: It was, it was it was hard.
18:54
SPEAKER_02: Oh goodness.
18:55
SPEAKER_02: No wonder I would have turned uh yeah, that's a huge turnoff.
18:58
SPEAKER_02: But but you got through it.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: Well, so yeah, I did.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: And it was, but I think that the thing that candidacy made me do was really think through what I wanted.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: What was this really the path I wanted to go down?
19:10
SPEAKER_00: Were these things the really what I wanted to spend my life doing?
19:14
SPEAKER_00: What do I enjoy doing?
19:16
SPEAKER_00: And am I am I getting away from it?
19:18
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's funny because my boyfriend at the time, like I was in crisis mode.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: Like I was, I'm a little stressful normally.
19:24
SPEAKER_00: And then you give me like a month off from everything else to just focus on the fact that I'm about to take what felt like the big biggest exam of my life.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: Um, I was falling apart, and my boyfriend at the time, he's now my husband, asked me.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh he was saying, you know, I think you need to do some art.
19:41
SPEAKER_02: Um that's what I tell my wife when she's stressed out.
19:47
SPEAKER_02: That's great.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's funny.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: It's true though.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I did.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: I I I don't know why I really stopped.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: At some point, I did though.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: I used to do a fair bit of art actually in as high school.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: That was sort of I was like part of one of my focuses back then.
20:05
SPEAKER_02: I mean, anybody wants to see some cool geoscience visualizations, go to Maya's website, click on the visualizations tab.
20:11
SPEAKER_02: They are awesome.
20:12
SPEAKER_02: Well, they are they are so cool.
20:14
SPEAKER_01: No, they are it is that where that comes from, then yeah.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: So that was that period of time, really.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: So I, being the type A kind of person that I am, decided that I wanted to not only do art, I was gonna find a scientific illustrator.
20:26
SPEAKER_00: I found a scientific illustrator in Columbus who was willing to let me study with him with a focus for scientific illustration.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: So once a week at night, I would go in secret for a while and study scientific illustration.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: And I loved it.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: You know, I knew that there were people behind those images that you see in textbooks and you see on websites and things.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: I just never really thought about that as a career path.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: And so it was really very cool to learn about what he did.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: And um, the person that I studied with actually is kind of an old school scientific illustrator.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: He has all these stories of being in the operating room when they were doing surgeries because he was sketching the like process because photography at the time and digital kind of art at the time really wasn't good enough to show what they wanted to highlight.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: And so it was it was wild.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: And so um, yeah, and I just I loved it.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: And so at that point, I decided that I just was gonna find as much opportunity as I could for visual communication as I like anything.
21:33
SPEAKER_00: So I volunteered to make um a lot of papers for, I mean, I know you know, but for for the audience who might not know a lot of papers these days request um scientific papers request images that sort of is like a visual version of the abstract.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: And so I made those for some of my colleagues or helped them with theirs.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: I made presentations for people.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: I helped people with their posters for conferences when they were presenting at conferences, and I Through everything I had whenever I made my posters, I just like tried to make them as visual and exciting as possible because I just wanted to figure out ways to really communicate things in a much more exciting kind of way.
22:12
SPEAKER_02: So I have two side questions here, really quick.
22:14
SPEAKER_02: Do you do your own visuals for your articles in National Geographic?
22:19
SPEAKER_00: I wish.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: I wish.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
22:22
SPEAKER_02: And do you still do the visualization thing like freelance or something on the side?
22:26
SPEAKER_00: So I when I was at Smithsonian, I did a few, I I believe one of them was on my website.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: I did a few small ones for Smithsonian, which was really fun.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: Um I did like an explainer about food waste and how much water you're losing.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: And so we were trying to show, like with one tomato, this is how many bathtubs of water, like that sort of thing.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, which was it was a lot of fun.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: I unfortunately, my contracts with Nat Geo are such that I can't take on sidework.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: Um and they have a very high bar for the types of graphics.
22:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have such a fantastic graphics department, and I can't even feign to say that I can do what they do.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: So, but I have had a lot of opportunity collaborating with them.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: They've been very generous in letting me work directly or like talk with them about how things should be presented and what things should look like, um, which is a lot of fun.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: I actually do have, I believe one of them a while back gave me a credit on one of the diagrams.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: I believe it was in an article about an early human species called the Denisovans.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: And we were making this plot showing um human, they've intermixed with humans, mated with humans quite a few times throughout our history.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: And so we were trying to track that through genes, and so it kind of shows uh where those points of mixing happened uh geographically and also through time.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: And so I think I think they gave me a credit on that one because we worked really hard on trying to figure out how to make it.
23:53
SPEAKER_02: That's cool.
23:54
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, okay, we've taken a massive deviation individuals, but I'm gonna go back to like the writing.
23:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
23:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: So it the writing transition is just sort of like it's strange though, because it just at some point it was sort of I realized that I don't have this intense of a visual background to immediately jump into visuals.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: But I did throughout my time as uh in my PhD and through Smith, really, uh college was a huge part of me really learning how to put words together, make sense in a story.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: And geology, I mean, I had to write papers along with those visuals, and so it really helped me think about what I was trying to tell in the visual and then lay that out in a story.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: And so I gradually had gotten better at writing.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: It was still not my favorite thing to do, but um, it was not quite as insurmountable as it once seemed.
24:49
SPEAKER_00: So at the end of grad school, I actually applied for a AAAS Mass Media Fellowship, which is this fantastic program directed at scientists that give them an opportunity to spend a summer at a media outlet across the United States.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: They have a variety of ones they collaborate with.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: And at that time, I was actually placed at National Geographic, and it was very much a throw-your in, sink or swim kind of situation.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: And it was terrifying but thrilling.
25:15
SPEAKER_00: And I that summer I decided that I didn't want to turn back.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: That was it.
25:18
SPEAKER_02: That's a great story.
25:20
SPEAKER_02: I love it.
25:20
SPEAKER_02: That's cool.
25:21
SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
25:21
SPEAKER_01: Jesse, I'm gonna finish up this real quick.
25:24
SPEAKER_01: What's been your best field experience so far in your career?
25:29
SPEAKER_00: So I haven't gone out in the field quite as much as a journalist as I may have liked, um, but I did quite a bit of field work during grad school.
25:36
SPEAKER_01: And that counts.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I was about to say, okay, because if that counts, I mean, I think honestly, one of my favorite field experiences was my first big field experience, and that was um in Svalbard.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: It was with one of these programs.
25:49
SPEAKER_00: It was a research experience for undergraduates or an RU program.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: And I did it, I think it was right before my senior year.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: It was my honors project.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: And it was just, I just remember it was so incredible.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: The landscape there is it's so far north that there are very little plants.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: The tallest plants are these little shrubby guys, and so like all the rocks are just out so you can see them, like the mountain ranges, you can just look up and like see these beautiful folds and and see these glacier deposits.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: And so every morning we had this sort of like we called it our commute.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: And so we get up, we were staying in a little um, I think it was like a little inn, it's the only place you can stay on the island.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: And so it was right near this lake, and we'd pack up our packs and we trundle over the lake, and then we'd take this little rubber boat across the lake, and this it would be normally around sunrise when we would get out because you wanted to be um well, actually, towards the end of that, there was a lot of sun because it was in the north, but anyway, um, it felt very early, like low on the horizon.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm not remembering time, but you know, it would be it's just early, and we take these little rubber boats from one side to the other, and then we would just hike and collect samples.
27:01
SPEAKER_00: We were collecting rocks to do various projects trying to figure out glacier movements.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, so we were collecting rocks to do some dating.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: Exposure, one of the um students was doing exposure dating, and I was studying um lake sediment.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: So I took cores of the sediments of this really deep um glacial lake, and we would load our packs up.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: We would spend extremely long days out in the field, load our packs up so we could barely carry them, and we would hobble back with these all of our samples, and it was just every day.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: And I just I loved it, it was so great.
27:32
SPEAKER_01: That sounds so good.
27:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, hauling rocks, yeah.
27:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a good field experience right there.
27:37
SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
27:38
SPEAKER_02: So I wanna I have so many questions to ask you about your job and how your interaction, but we only have time to kind of skip around a little bit.
27:46
SPEAKER_02: But how do you decide what to highlight?
27:49
SPEAKER_02: I mean, there are so many papers published, even in my little very niche field of science.
27:54
SPEAKER_02: Like, I can't even keep up by reading all the ones that are relevant.
27:56
SPEAKER_02: Like, how do you covering all the breadth that you cover, how do you decide like what's interesting to write articles about, basically?
28:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
28:06
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
28:06
SPEAKER_02: Just can you walk me through that decision-making process?
28:08
SPEAKER_00: That's a good question.
28:10
SPEAKER_00: I wish that I had a like a thought tree.
28:14
SPEAKER_00: That would be really organized of me.
28:16
SPEAKER_00: Honestly, it's things that catch my attention.
28:19
SPEAKER_02: So I've and how do I just, you know, I I guess I'm trying to think of like the types of things I mean, looking at your publication list, it looks like everything catches your attention.
28:29
SPEAKER_00: I there's no there's like you you've you've written about so much interesting stuff, which I hope we get time to cover a little bit, but yeah, I mean, I think that there are so many good stories everywhere, and I think that that's one of the most exciting things.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: And so part of what actually, I mean, it is something that I struggle with, honestly, because I want to write everything.
28:47
SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of the time I end up pitching a lot of things, and then I have to kind of walk back and it's like, okay, what's realistic for you to do?
28:53
SPEAKER_00: What's realistic for our team to take on?
28:55
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I always feel bad because I um uh sometimes scientists will send me studies, which I so very appreciate when a scientist I've worked with in the past, or even out of the blue, just emails me work that they have coming up.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: It helps me not only, if I don't write about it at that particular time, it helps me keep on top of the field, but it also just is I it's fantastic.
29:16
SPEAKER_00: And so, but I always feel really bad because a lot of the time they're fascinating things.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: It's just like at the time we just don't have it's not the right moment.
29:24
SPEAKER_02: So um you kind of have something that interests you, and then you go have to go pitch it to the editorial staff.
29:28
SPEAKER_02: And and do those get rejected frequently, or do you kind of have a high success rate with your pitches?
29:33
SPEAKER_02: Uh like how how does it work?
29:37
SPEAKER_00: On the season, um, you know, there are times where I get a few, like I just went through a I think I just pitched like four or five and they all were accepted.
29:46
SPEAKER_00: Like, and I was like, oh wow.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, but then I go through periods where like nothing's accepted.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: So, you know.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: Um Have you ever had a time when you had an idea that you wanted to write about?
29:56
SPEAKER_01: You had an article, a topic that you want to write about that you knew this is good and it got rejected.
30:02
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: You care to share.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: Um well, there are you don't need to if it's uh go for it.
30:12
SPEAKER_01: You don't need to.
30:13
SPEAKER_01: I'm just curious.
30:14
SPEAKER_01: If so, if you can, I'd love to hear it.
30:15
SPEAKER_00: But I guess I can share the one actually that's out now.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: So there was a team in the White Sands doing work in the White Sands National Park.
30:24
SPEAKER_00: And I talked with them two years ago, two years ago, maybe three years ago.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: The pandemic has made time nonsensical.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: So maybe it was three years ago.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: But so I talked with them a while ago.
30:35
SPEAKER_00: They had some fantastic research at the time studying these footprints.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: The longest trail, continuous trail of human, early human footprints, I believe, is all the right things to make that superrelative correct.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: But it's it's they're beautiful footprints in the sands there.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: And the the White Sands National Park is pretty amazing because these gypsum sands, they have the salts that kind of loose, they bind them together in these beautiful prints, but they also get destroyed very quickly once they're uncovered.
31:02
SPEAKER_00: And so they uncovered this beautiful path of prints.
31:04
SPEAKER_00: And I talked with them about them's work, and I got a sense that there was more there.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: Like when I was talking with them about it, they talked, they kept referencing so many more prints, so many more prints.
31:14
SPEAKER_00: And I got a sense that there was they found something big.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: At the time, they didn't want to say because they were concerned about this coming out.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I pitched it and I said, it's big.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: Like I know it's big.
31:26
SPEAKER_00: I know they have they have this.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: I have examples of other things they found actually that still aren't published, but I gave them the examples, but I was like, but I know that there's even more there.
31:35
SPEAKER_00: And I think that if we get in now, we can send a team out, we can take photos.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: It could be a thing.
31:40
SPEAKER_00: The problem was I didn't have the story.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: And to my editor's credit, they're right, I didn't have the story.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: So it was a lot of, it would have been a lot of money and time to invest in a thing when I didn't have what the big thing was, and I couldn't tell them that at that time.
31:53
SPEAKER_00: So they were totally correct where they were standing, but I have to say I felt a little vindicated when three years later they reach out and say, Oh, hey, by the way, we have this study coming out.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: And what they found were beautiful human footprints that are among the oldest and definitely the most sure, surest dated of this age of human footprints in the Americas.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: So these were dated to the 2000-ish range, and it pushed back the by thousands of years, the last kind of sure dates that we have.
32:27
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm I can't believe you chose this one to talk about, Maya, because I've read it.
32:33
SPEAKER_01: I read your really oh cool.
32:35
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah.
32:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
32:37
SPEAKER_01: Do you do they send you out to locations to do your research?
32:42
SPEAKER_01: Like how often do you get to do that?
32:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm not as often as I would like, but we're I'm working on it.
32:48
SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm picking those stories.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: So I'm still, I mean, I'm still very this is my third, I just finished my third year.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: I guess I'm like three and a half years at NatGEO.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: So I'm still considered a fairly like young, like I'm I'm not, I'm not um sort of senior staff.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: So I I'm working my way up to being able to travel more.
33:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, but it is it is costly and you do have to justify the stories.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: So I have some coming up though, so stay tuned.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm really I'm really trying to get them to send me to Iceland.
33:19
SPEAKER_01: Oh, cool.
33:20
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that'd be awesome.
33:21
SPEAKER_01: I get about one of your articles that crosses my feed about once a month.
33:26
SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
33:27
SPEAKER_01: Is that sound?
33:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
33:28
SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
33:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, is that sound about right?
33:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, right for well, like are are you writing more than that?
33:35
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: I generally write, I mean, it depends a little.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: The pandemic, honestly, has been a bit weird for cadence in terms of how much I'm publishing, because we've we keep switching gears of like, oh, we need this and that, and I tend to hop on like helping out with when there's um when we have kind of immediate things happening with COVID, like we write up short news briefs and things like that.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: But generally when we're talking like full kind of articles, I write like three to four in a month, but occasionally it's more, and occasionally it's less if I'm working on bigger projects.
34:08
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: Cool.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: Okay, cool.
34:10
SPEAKER_01: Uh Maya, um have you had topics that have been disappointing?
34:16
SPEAKER_01: Articles maybe that have been disappointing, maybe from the standpoint of uh you know, people should care about this more than they do.
34:24
SPEAKER_02: I'm assuming does National Geographic get some like tracking or sort of clicks or I don't know, whatever the metrics are.
34:30
SPEAKER_02: Like, are there ones that yeah, metrics?
34:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, of course, metrics.
34:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:38
SPEAKER_00: Um I'm trying to think about this, and I'm not there's so much that goes into whether an article does well or not that um it's tough to say that there are, I hate to say there are entire topics that just don't get read because there are always exceptions to those things.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: And I think thinking about it, one of the things that I think I would really love to see more that I I mean, I don't even get to write these stories though, is sort of like after an earthquake or a volcano or something like that happens, I have trouble getting these pitches through, even the kind of follow-up stories about this is still happening, this is still going on.
35:16
SPEAKER_00: And I think people's attention just diverts to the next thing that's happening, the next disaster.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: And I think that it's really important to continue talking about sort of these events that are are ongoing.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: It's hard because it's it's hard both to know how to cover them and also oftentimes, I mean, they aren't the most hopeful articles really to be reading.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: A lot of these times those situations are devastating, but it deserves more of attention.
35:40
SPEAKER_00: And part of the reason why I I don't write as many of those is because they don't get read as much, and so it's hard for me to justify them to my editors.
35:49
SPEAKER_01: To me, that's really interesting because I love those throwback articles that I, you know, because you write, you you move on to the next thing.
35:58
SPEAKER_01: And I love it when you're brought back.
36:01
SPEAKER_01: I don't I don't know.
36:02
SPEAKER_01: It's just really interesting.
36:02
SPEAKER_02: I guess you're just so old to come across That's true.
36:08
SPEAKER_02: That's true.
36:10
SPEAKER_02: Um kind of touching on that note, are there I guess I don't know quite how to frame this question, but are there things that are very frustrating to you about science communication, either you know, the skeptical generation that is exists in the world today or sort of extreme science skepticism, or things that like you know, from my position that that people in my role can do better, that like should I be doing something better as a a a researcher to improve the situation in some way, you know.
36:38
SPEAKER_02: Like, can you I don't know, can you can you sort of speak to that?
36:41
SPEAKER_00: So science skepticism itself could be kind of its whole other podcast.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: Um just kind of touching on the most shallow kind of part of that though is just having stories read past the first few lines is not always, I mean, like I think it's really tough that the vast majority of people to know that the vast majority of people really only read the headline of a story.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: And then beyond that, the next largest, like if you're thinking about this in terms of a pie slice, the next largest slice are people that are read the first paragraph or two.
37:15
SPEAKER_00: And so the number of people that actually get all the way through or even halfway through, is just a much smaller number.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: And I think that that's it's just just really hard.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: And it's said a lot.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Twitter now has their little thing that pops up that says, Do you want to read this before you share an article?
37:30
SPEAKER_02: Oh, really?
37:30
SPEAKER_02: Okay, I do.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they added that feature in, which I I always it always cracks me up when I'm retweeting someone who's tweeting my article and it asks me if I want to read it because it yeah.
37:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, I've read it a couple times.
37:42
SPEAKER_02: I think I know it.
37:45
SPEAKER_02: That's really funny.
37:46
SPEAKER_02: That's that's amazing.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: But yeah.
37:48
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I I think that that's um that's a tough part, but so can I ask?
37:54
SPEAKER_02: So on that, do you do you like get that granular of data?
37:57
SPEAKER_02: Like, do you know how many people read all the way through your article or how many people clicked on it and just spent a couple seconds looking over the images or something like that?
38:05
SPEAKER_00: Like so, we used to actually have tracking that would show how far it scrolled down or the reader scrolled down in the article, which I thought was really interesting.
38:13
SPEAKER_00: They they switch over to a new system now so that that's no longer tracked, but we do have time on the page, so it gives you a rough sense of how long they spent.
38:21
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then we also have unique, so the what they clicked, um how many people clicked into it.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: And then also we track, I mean, we track a variety of things, but another metric that they often look at is do they immediately click out or do they click into another article?
38:34
SPEAKER_00: So you can tell kind of if you're bouncing into the case.
38:36
SPEAKER_02: Man, I wish I could have that for some of my research articles.
38:39
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the five people who've who've ever read it, I'd be uh that'd be interesting data.
38:43
SPEAKER_01: You don't want those metrics, Jesse.
38:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're gonna have to trust me.
38:46
SPEAKER_01: It could be super depressing.
38:48
SPEAKER_00: You just honestly, I I've been trying to pull myself like when I first started Nat Geo, I was all into like looking at the numbers and like it goes up and you immediately like look at the dash because we used to have this like live feed that shows like immediately how many people are when we were back in our offices, actually.
39:04
SPEAKER_00: In the Nat Geo office in the front, there's this huge screen where they displayed this chart of like uh which articles are top.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: So you have that order of articles and they flip around, but it's because it's live ordered by the number of people on each article on the page and they have traffic on the site and all these other anyway.
39:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:21
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I've been trying to pull back from that because I feel like one, it's just sort of depressing.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: Like it starts if you really fixate on that, it really and the other thing is that I think it gets into my head about what I'm choosing to write about.
39:33
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want that to happen because I think that I um, yeah, I mean, I just I don't want my judgment about what's interesting and would make a good story be swayed by the fact that the last time I posted something in this category, it didn't do so well or something like that.
39:49
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
39:49
SPEAKER_01: That's a really good point.
39:51
SPEAKER_01: I so appreciate that you made that.
39:52
SPEAKER_01: Like you're trying to be honest with your writing and not be swayed by the polls, and yeah, that's great.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: But it's gotta be hard too.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was about to say it's not always easy.
40:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I definitely I feel like so much of writing though I get in my head about various things.
40:07
SPEAKER_00: It's a very like cerebral sort of but yeah.
40:12
SPEAKER_02: So uh to to kind of the other side of the question, just uh the the sort of researchers, like I don't know, are there things that frustrate you about science?
40:19
SPEAKER_02: I mean, scientists, we are a neurotic bunch, and you know, is there something that frustrates you about that or or so maybe let's frame it as something that we could do better?
40:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it might sound silly actually, but one of the things that I often tell researchers to think about when talking about their work is start as if you were as if you were writing it in a tweet.
40:42
SPEAKER_00: Because think about how you would convey the essence of what you're doing in 280 characters or less.
40:47
SPEAKER_00: It's not easy.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: And you have to uh sort of figure out what are like the most sort of important and catchy things about this work, and then go from there.
40:56
SPEAKER_00: And yes, you're not gonna be able to capture the nuance and uncertainties, but that gives you that sort of grabby line that is really the thing that often draws me in.
41:05
SPEAKER_00: So a lot of my stories actually have come from things scientists have put out on social media or reached out to me in an email, and it comes from a line or two.
41:14
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't come from six paragraphs that I I wade through and I, well, sometimes it does, but not always.
41:19
SPEAKER_00: A lot of them come from those just like a couple lines that catch my attention enough that I'm like, huh, I want to know more.
41:26
SPEAKER_00: And I just it's it's that I want to know more.
41:29
SPEAKER_00: This is a thing that we often talk about when we think about headlines is like you want to say a thing that is enough to get someone thinking about it, but not knowing what the answer is.
41:40
SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's interesting.
41:41
SPEAKER_02: Chris, we got to think about this for podcast episode titles.
41:44
SPEAKER_02: I mean, uh knowledge.
41:45
SPEAKER_01: You have big knowledge gaps, Jesse.
41:47
SPEAKER_02: So well, that that that's that's true.
41:49
SPEAKER_02: That's interesting because you know, one of the most famous professors in our department uh teaches a graduate level writing course, and she takes all the grad students to the exercise of like, okay, write out your thesis, you know, abstract or title, and now cut it in half, and and then okay, come back and cut it in half again.
42:03
SPEAKER_02: And she does that all the way down until you get five words.
42:05
SPEAKER_02: So you get five words to describe your PhD thesis, and she's and it's like an amazing exercise to do.
42:11
SPEAKER_02: And so I've started doing this for like paper titles and proposal titles and stuff, is like that.
42:15
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
42:16
SPEAKER_00: It's really yeah, I think it's yeah, I I but I like the idea of cutting it down so many times.
42:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, because that's essentially the same thing.
42:22
SPEAKER_00: It's really you're trying to just capture what is what is that really important point I want to make.
42:28
SPEAKER_00: But then also, like if I'm giving you 280 characters, I think that that's a few more words than five, but like what are what what then go back, take those five words and go back.
42:37
SPEAKER_00: What is the thing that's gonna catch people's attention and add that between the five words?
42:41
SPEAKER_00: And and very cool.
42:42
SPEAKER_02: I like that.
42:42
SPEAKER_02: That's a great answer.
42:43
SPEAKER_02: I I I appreciate that a lot.
42:45
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm actually really interested in your answer to this, Maya, because I it's it's so funny.
42:51
SPEAKER_01: I've you know, when when Jesse floated uh this out with interviewing you, and then I start looking into you.
42:59
SPEAKER_02: And once you got over the Ohio State PhD, first of all.
43:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, once I got over that, I've read a lot of your articles.
43:07
SPEAKER_01: And so what's your favorite article that you've ever written?
43:10
SPEAKER_01: Do you have one?
43:11
SPEAKER_00: Oh people always ask this question, and it's such a tough question because I have I love different aspects of different articles.
43:22
SPEAKER_00: And I feel like it's always like the latest article.
43:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm always like the most the one that's really in my memory the most.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: I think thinking about the things just like even from this last year, one of um the ones that I really enjoyed the most that I felt like I just had the most fun writing was this story about this series of rocks in Maryland that um Oh, okay.
43:47
SPEAKER_02: One of my good friends was the the Oh, really senior author on this, Mike Ackerson.
43:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we we like that Carnegie.
43:52
SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
43:53
SPEAKER_02: This is great.
43:53
SPEAKER_02: I was so happy to see your article come out on the on this paper.
43:56
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, continue.
43:58
SPEAKER_02: No, it's a good idea.
43:59
SPEAKER_02: This is good.
43:59
SPEAKER_02: This is great.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: Well, so it started actually from Twitter.
44:03
SPEAKER_00: So I saw, I don't remember who tweeted it, but someone tweeted, hey, that's cool.
44:10
SPEAKER_00: There's a bit of mantle in Maryland.
44:12
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, huh?
44:16
SPEAKER_02: Hey, that's a great knowledge gap tweet right there.
44:20
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
44:21
SPEAKER_00: They linked the paper and I read the paper.
44:23
SPEAKER_00: And so the researchers looked at this series of rocks that have been studied for decades.
44:29
SPEAKER_00: And often this there's sort of hypotheses that have been flying around.
44:33
SPEAKER_00: And in general, people thought that what the researcher's conclusion was was actually the case, but these rocks have been smashed and squashed and sat out under the rain.
44:42
SPEAKER_00: So it's really hard to tell what happened to them.
44:45
SPEAKER_00: And so the scientists took kind of high-tech way to go back and take another look really closely and really detailed and realize, yeah, you're right.
44:53
SPEAKER_00: But the idea was that this these rocks were part of the mantle underneath the sea floor.
44:58
SPEAKER_00: It's a bit of just like ancient ocean floor that has been ripped up in the process of the continents kind of colliding together and then tearing back apart.
45:07
SPEAKER_00: And and a little piece of that ancient ocean that we don't have anymore.
45:12
SPEAKER_00: It was it was closed many, many years ago, is now up in Maryland.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: And so I had a chance to go out with um two of the study authors, and and they took me around to the sites and we looked at the rocks, and I just, it was so much fun.
45:25
SPEAKER_02: Oh man, that's that's very cool.
45:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I loved it.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, one of my most favorite, I it's like my favorite part of that story, and this is kind of silly to like like a part of the story, but one of my favorite things was that before we drove out to where the mantle was, they were taking me to a few other sites.
45:41
SPEAKER_00: And these are things that when they existed on the seafloor, they were sitting above the mantle and they were like, okay, we're gonna drive to the mantle, but what you need to watch, watch the trees as we drive.
45:51
SPEAKER_00: Just look at the vegetation, try to figure out what happens while we're driving.
45:55
SPEAKER_00: And what's crazy is that because of the chemistry of the mantle, the area that they think is is part mantle rocks, um, the a different variety of plant life can survive that has a chemistry that's toxic to a lot of plants or doesn't have the right kind of stuff, nutrients for these plants to thrive.
46:14
SPEAKER_00: So only some kind of more shrubby, kind of rugged plants really make it there.
46:18
SPEAKER_00: And you can really see it.
46:19
SPEAKER_00: And I just I thought it was so cool.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: I was just totally geeking out in the car.
46:23
SPEAKER_02: That's really cool.
46:24
SPEAKER_02: And Chris, we've stumbled upon a real use for biology is to identify rocks.
46:30
SPEAKER_02: We've been looking.
46:31
SPEAKER_02: Chris and I, both of our fathers are high school biology teachers.
46:35
SPEAKER_02: And so we have this long-standing family, you know, battle between biology and geology.
46:39
SPEAKER_02: So this is a use for biology.
46:40
SPEAKER_01: Because we've been, yeah, we we've been looking for the one thing that is like it doesn't just cover up our geology.
46:48
SPEAKER_01: Now it actually helps explain our geology.
46:51
SPEAKER_02: That's actually that's nice.
46:52
SPEAKER_02: I like that.
46:53
SPEAKER_02: I like that.
46:53
SPEAKER_01: I'll let my dad know.
46:54
SPEAKER_02: There we go.
46:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you can tell him.
46:57
SPEAKER_01: Maya, um, so looking into you and your career and reading your CV, it is undeniable that that it like you have a purpose.
47:06
SPEAKER_01: Can you explain like what drives you?
47:09
SPEAKER_01: What how do you see that?
47:10
SPEAKER_02: Or is Chris making this up in his head?
47:12
SPEAKER_02: You know, that it's always possible that Chris No, I'm kidding.
47:16
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, I think I've always tried to live with purpose.
47:20
SPEAKER_00: And I think, you know, it's funny because the pandemic has it's made it's thrown everyone into chaos, of course.
47:27
SPEAKER_00: But I think for for journalism, it's been an interesting time because I think I've started to question what I'm doing.
47:35
SPEAKER_00: It's felt like what I'm doing compared to, you know, I'm writing about rocks.
47:40
SPEAKER_00: People are dying.
47:41
SPEAKER_00: Like I need to be writing about that.
47:42
SPEAKER_00: And I have contributed some to the COVID reporting, and I write about that when needed, but like I really struggled with where my place was in all of this and what I should be doing because partly I'm I'm not super qualified to, I don't have that kind of microbial background or viral background to be able to really dig into immunology and all of that sort of thing.
48:02
SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, I felt like as my duty as a journalist, I needed to be reporting on this.
48:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I struggle, I've I've kind of taken a loop throughout the past couple years, but I've come back to where I think I started.
48:15
SPEAKER_00: And so sorry to the long answer to your question though, but I think my purpose generally is I I want to inspire other people to really appreciate what I call a strange and stunning world around you.
48:28
SPEAKER_02: Like that's a good line.
48:30
SPEAKER_00: There are so many processes that are always taking away.
48:34
SPEAKER_00: And so, like, whether we're talking about tectonic plate movements, things that happen really slow, or things that happen really fast, like volcanic eruptions, like I there is so much happening in every single one of those.
48:46
SPEAKER_00: And I think that it's I want to make people question what they're seeing and ask why.
48:53
SPEAKER_00: I hope, my hope is that if I can get them interested in those kinds of stories, that it kind of can open up more of science to them for people who maybe aren't at all interested in science.
49:04
SPEAKER_00: Because I know a lot of people, you say the word geology, you say the word chemistry, and their eyes blaze over, they they shut down.
49:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but there's so much more to it, and so I think that really is what I see as my purpose.
49:17
SPEAKER_00: And it's even science of the everyday.
49:19
SPEAKER_00: Like one of one of the quirkiest stories I think I've ever written is the science behind a slurpee.
49:24
SPEAKER_00: There's actually a lot of chemistry there.
49:26
SPEAKER_02: Like, um that's interesting.
49:28
SPEAKER_02: I didn't see that one.
49:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was back when I was at uh Smithsonian and we did this sort of history of objects kind of series, and that was one of them for Slurpee Day.
49:39
SPEAKER_00: Um, I wrote about, yeah, the history was fun.
49:41
SPEAKER_00: I tracked down the son of the inventor of the Slurpee, and we we talked about his first the first one.
49:47
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, yeah, I mean it's just there's science everywhere, and that sounds kind of cliche, but it's true.
49:54
SPEAKER_00: There's a science to everything that we do.
49:56
SPEAKER_00: And so I think that you know, trying to make people look a little closer and think twice about things.
50:03
SPEAKER_01: Maya, can I uh Jesse, don't get on me about being a rambly old man here.
50:09
SPEAKER_01: All right, all right, uh, make no promises, but Maya, what you said like um I I really appreciate that, first of all, your purpose and how you view things.
50:19
SPEAKER_01: But I want to uh maybe just put things from or state things from my perspective.
50:25
SPEAKER_01: You have this gift.
50:26
SPEAKER_01: You have this gift to write.
50:28
SPEAKER_01: And you also have this uh you have a uh PhD in geoscience.
50:33
SPEAKER_01: Don't undersell the importance of that because you know, our planet uh it's the only one we have.
50:40
SPEAKER_01: There's no planet B.
50:42
SPEAKER_01: And your gift is to inspire people to appreciate Earth.
50:48
SPEAKER_01: That's pretty damn important.
50:49
SPEAKER_00: Well, I appreciate that.
50:51
SPEAKER_00: I I appreciate that.
50:52
SPEAKER_00: And I guess I I didn't fully articulate, but yeah, I mean, I think after kind of doing my loop, that was sort of that's where I've arrived back at of writing about these things, even if I'm not writing about climate change directly, so much is tied with it, but trying to just make people care about science and care about what's happening.
51:13
SPEAKER_00: Um Right.
51:14
SPEAKER_01: I when you say that you know, you mentioned the word geology and people's eyes glaze over.
51:18
SPEAKER_01: Um I I don't understand that.
51:20
SPEAKER_01: And we need to I think we need to change that.
51:23
SPEAKER_02: Well, you don't understand how people can, but you know that they do.
51:25
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we've I do.
51:27
SPEAKER_01: I yeah, I I absolutely do.
51:28
SPEAKER_01: That I didn't mean that.
51:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
51:30
SPEAKER_02: Chris and I've talked about this a lot of well, you know, why we like doing this podcast.
51:33
SPEAKER_02: A lot of geos geologists and geoscientists know that that happens, and so we're glad that you're out there changing it a little bit.
51:40
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
51:41
SPEAKER_02: Like on that note, you know, you've won lots of uh awards for science journalism.
51:44
SPEAKER_02: You've worked at the Smithsonian, the National Geographic.
51:47
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't know.
51:48
SPEAKER_02: To me, it seems like an amazing job and a dream job.
51:51
SPEAKER_02: Uh what's next?
51:52
SPEAKER_02: Is it a dream job?
51:53
SPEAKER_02: Is there other stuff out there that you want to try and do?
51:56
SPEAKER_02: Like where do you go from here, I guess?
51:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that is a that is that's a question I've been asking myself.
52:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't I I have it's been fantastic working for them, and I see there's a lot of more things that I would like to do there.
52:12
SPEAKER_00: I've been really working towards bigger features right now, being in sort of the regular news grind, I'm like always kind of chasing the next thing, next thing, next thing, and I would really love a chance to dig into something, something bigger.
52:25
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, go ahead.
52:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I just want to understand the National Geographic, like the difference there.
52:29
SPEAKER_02: Because I I I sort of have this vision of National Geographic as the the booklet kind of thing, and that the online version is just is that.
52:35
SPEAKER_02: But is there a difference between news articles and feature articles?
52:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I guess I'm talking about feature as a magazine features.
52:43
SPEAKER_00: Um there's National Geographic digital news, and those stories tend to mainly live on the website.
52:50
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they're pulled into the magazine.
52:52
SPEAKER_00: I've had multiple ones that are kind of they're pulled into what we call the front of the book.
52:55
SPEAKER_00: All of there's a series of pages, and I forget the number at the beginning of every magazine that are kind of like shorts, like a paragraph or half a page kind of thing.
53:04
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I've written some of those or converted some of my digital articles to a much shorter format for those.
53:10
SPEAKER_00: But in general, magazine features they are much more so we assign photographers to take unique photography.
53:19
SPEAKER_00: Um, in general, reporters do kind of field, they go out into the field to do field work for those, and they tend to be have a lot longer lead time.
53:28
SPEAKER_00: So I'm often working for a few days on a story, and that's uh yeah, generally like I'll I'll do reporting maybe for a period of time while working on other things, but when I really like sit down and do it, it's like okay, I have a day or I have two days to write this, and then we move on.
53:43
SPEAKER_00: So really being able to interview and talk to a wide range of people and dig into a topic, I'm working towards that.
53:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, that's sort of the Iceland fingers crossed.
53:55
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I have a couple, I have a couple actually.
53:57
SPEAKER_00: That's that's the most immediate one, but I have a couple that are brewing in the next few years.
54:01
SPEAKER_00: But I've also, you know, it's funny, I have recently really missed, I used to do a lot of volunteer work working directly with students, and I really missed that.
54:12
SPEAKER_00: Like I I enjoy writing, and I I'm there's aspects to that that I really love, but I never actually interact with the readers very much.
54:21
SPEAKER_00: It's I like I get emails, which is lovely sometimes.
54:25
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they're not so lovely, but um, I get emails from readers, and that's about the contact that I have.
54:30
SPEAKER_00: I miss doing the sorts of hands-on, like I used to work in an elementary school like on weekends or evenings sometimes, and we do we do like experiments and things like that.
54:40
SPEAKER_00: And I I've been looking into opportunities maybe to do a little bit more of that here and there.
54:45
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I I think things that are a little bit more hands-on, I would like to kind of start incorporating that.
54:51
SPEAKER_02: All right, Maya, this has been a real pleasure.
54:53
SPEAKER_02: We always kind of end our interviews with this last question.
54:56
SPEAKER_02: What has been your best day as a geoscientist?
55:02
SPEAKER_00: That's a fun question.
55:04
SPEAKER_02: Um we get some fun answers.
55:09
SPEAKER_00: This past spring, I went to Oaxaca, Mexico.
55:16
SPEAKER_00: So I was tagging along with a group of cavers that were working, they they were trying to find pathways through what might be the deepest cave if they can find their way to the base of the cave.
55:30
SPEAKER_00: And and back decades ago, they some people did die tracing, so they dropped dye on the top and traced it where it came out in the bottom.
55:37
SPEAKER_00: And so they found that if they could connect that whole system with a person passing through, it could be considered the deepest cave in the world.
55:45
SPEAKER_00: So they've been they years, they've spent years there.
55:48
SPEAKER_00: So I had the opportunity to go out with them and actually had I trained on the they have a ropes course set up, so you have to learn how to use all the climbing equipment or caving equipment.
56:00
SPEAKER_00: And so I got to actually spend a day in the cave going down in Cheve.
56:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it is just it's like uh uh cathedral is the only thing that comes to the word that comes to mind, it's just massive.
56:16
SPEAKER_00: There are there are caverns in there that are just unimaginably large, but yet you're underground and it's just mind-boggling all the way down, and you're surrounded by rock, like it's a geologist's dream.
56:28
SPEAKER_00: Like there's formations everywhere, and they're beautiful little crystalline things growing, and we at some point descended alongside this water that was coming off of another rock.
56:39
SPEAKER_00: And I there was just a moment in there where I really got in the zone of um working with the equipment.
56:45
SPEAKER_00: So you have to change from rope to rope.
56:47
SPEAKER_00: They're only have so long of segments um for safety reasons.
56:51
SPEAKER_00: And so you you go from one segment and then you change the next.
56:54
SPEAKER_00: And every switch, you there are multiple steps, and it's kind of like a rhythm once you get into it, and you're on this very large section, and each one it clicks open and then it clocks down, and then it clicks open, and then you clock down, and it's like a it's like a music.
57:08
SPEAKER_00: There's like there is definite music, and you're in this cavern, and you hear there's like barely any noise, you can hear water in the distance, and then the only other thing you hear is the echoing of this clicking and clacking and clicking and clacking as you go up.
57:21
SPEAKER_00: And it was just such a meditative, like I remember saying to myself, absorb this, like everything, like check in with every sense right now.
57:30
SPEAKER_00: What are you feeling, thinking, like sound?
57:33
SPEAKER_00: Because that moment to me was just it was so cool.
57:36
SPEAKER_00: It was, I yeah, I was having a hard time, having a hard time articulating how cool it was.
57:41
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I think it's a good idea.
57:42
SPEAKER_02: No, you're doing a great job.
57:44
SPEAKER_02: That's very cool.
57:45
SPEAKER_02: I can't say that would be my favorite.
57:46
SPEAKER_02: I'm I don't caves are really not my thing, but it's the way you described it is uh makes me want to go in it.
57:52
SPEAKER_02: So that's actually really saying something.
57:54
SPEAKER_01: Was this for an article, Maya?
57:56
SPEAKER_00: Um, potentially.
57:58
SPEAKER_00: We're figuring it out right now.
58:01
SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
58:01
SPEAKER_00: It hasn't, it's not um, it's not out as of yet, but yeah, we're trying to figure out uh what its final iteration will be.
58:11
SPEAKER_00: But yeah.
58:11
SPEAKER_02: Well, Maya, this has been a real pleasure.
58:13
SPEAKER_02: Uh like I said, I've looked forward to talking to you for a week at least and even more.
58:18
SPEAKER_02: And uh this is yeah, this has been great.
58:20
SPEAKER_02: I've learned a ton, super exciting.
58:22
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for your time.
58:22
SPEAKER_02: We really, really appreciate it.
58:24
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.
58:24
SPEAKER_00: Of course, thank you.
58:25
SPEAKER_00: I really enjoyed chatting with you about all of this.
58:28
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this is great.
58:29
SPEAKER_02: This is great.
58:30
SPEAKER_02: All right, well, we'll be in touch soon.
58:31
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
58:32
SPEAKER_02: Have a good one.
58:33
SPEAKER_02: Take care.
58:34
SPEAKER_01: You too.
58:34
SPEAKER_01: Nice to meet you.
58:40
SPEAKER_02: All right, thanks for listening.
58:42
SPEAKER_02: As usual, please give us a rating and a review.
58:45
SPEAKER_02: We love that stuff.
58:46
SPEAKER_02: Send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail.com.
58:49
SPEAKER_02: We really like the feedback.
58:51
SPEAKER_01: The most important thing though, share this podcast with somebody that you think might enjoy it.
58:56
SPEAKER_02: Yep, for sure.
58:58
SPEAKER_02: Alright.
58:59
SPEAKER_02: Check in next week.
59:00
SPEAKER_02: Cheers.