Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Communicating the Earth Observatory: Author Kevin Krajick

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Communicating the Earth Observatory: Author Kevin Krajick · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Hey all, this week we are excited to release a part of our interview with science journalist and author extraordinaire Kevin Krajik.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Kevin is a senior editor for science news communications at the Columbia Climate School.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: He's uh author of State of the Planet.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: His work has been featured across a wide range of publications, including National Geographic Newsweek, The New Yorker, Science, The Smithsonian Magazine.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: He's the winner of multiple awards for excellence in science journalism.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he's also the author of the book called Barren Lands, an epic search for diamonds in North American Arctic.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we're going to talk about next week.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: This week, we talked to Kevin about science communication generally in the university setting, especially at the Columbia Climate School, which is a preeminent climate research institute.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Before we get to Kevin, though, a quick reminder about our conversational textbook called Camp Geo that we just launched recently.
• 1:09
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• 1:22
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• 1:26
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• 1:30
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• 1:33
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• 1:38
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• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy Kevin Krajik.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Alright.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Kevin, welcome to Planet Geo.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: Delighted to be here.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: I'm glad to meet you guys.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: We have some things in common, I think.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're totally excited.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you've written a book that I love uh about diamond mining in northern Canada where I did my research.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, actually, diamond prospecting, but this book is a great exploration of searching for diamonds in the sort of modern world.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it is an incredible story, um, which we're gonna get into that in a little bit, Jesse.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: You need to calm down.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: I know I'm getting worked up here.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm too excited.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I wanna, yeah, I want to go into a little bit uh more of the background, though, Kevin, before we get into your book, The Barren Lands.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, what is the Columbia Climate School and what's your role?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think a lot of people have heard about this specific thing.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Columbia has always been a leader in in climate science.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: Starting in the 1950s, people there were figuring out how did natural climate swings work.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, the most obvious one being the waxing and the waning of ice ages, which is tied to planetary motions, basically.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Later on, they started looking into unnatural climate swings.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, it was a Columbia scientist who first used the term global warming in a scientific paper.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that was in the 1970s, and and people have ever since been developing uh in all sorts of directions various aspects of climate science.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: More recently, the mega drought in in the Southwest that's going on now, not just the Southwest, but the West in general, was predicted 20 years ago there.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, they sort of f figured out the physics and and the the past climate swings that indicated this was going to happen again, and indeed here we are.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: So the it's a place that has a lot of seminal research.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: Now they've started moving into more climate education in the last couple of years.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: My role there is basically the nexus with the with the press.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: If there's a big study coming out, I'll write up the press release.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: And that's important because a lot of scientist writers now just rip off the press release and rewrite the headline, which is uh too bad.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: They're not paid enough to do anything more.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I had to do a good job with the press release.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's going to be the basis.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Is that how how um you know I'm one of the researchers who every one once in a blue moon I have researched that is worthy of a press release?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: It hasn't happened often in my career, but I know for a fact I'm not good at writing for the public, and people in your role are extremely good at it.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you find that interaction with the researchers who can't really communicate it very well, and and you know, the the public or the press who are interested in very well communicated studies, I guess, or summaries of studies.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: It seems to me that your job is hard, I guess is what I'm saying.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: But it's fun.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um well, first of all, you've got to figure out like what are you gonna write about?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: Because there's there's a couple of studies or or maybe more coming out every week, just from Columbia.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: So most of them don't make the grade.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: You want to know that they have some news value, that the public is gonna want to hear about this, should hear about this.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's something that changes the paradigm.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: How do we understand one phenomenon or another?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: If it has some really interesting backstory or weird characters or a locale where you can take photographs and create wonderful images, that's a plus.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: So all those all those things kind of feed into it.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Do you get to pick the stories that that you do, or does somebody tell you, hey, follow up on this?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm fortunately left I better not say this.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I'll say it anyway.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: I've pretty much left alone to to figure out.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: Although I do no, my colleagues and I also discuss some people may have a different take on a story than I do, and maybe somebody else will want to run with the story.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: But usually uh the people will come to me and you know uh let me know this the the study is coming up.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: But the other thing that that we do is um, at least in my job, I'll go out in the field with scientists and and take pictures while they're doing field work.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: And they're all over the world, uh, they're every continent, every ocean.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's a lot of opportunity for pictorial storytelling.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: I saw that in a lot of the recent articles that you've written, which are fascinating, and I want to get to those later on today, but and that was one of the questions that I wrote down for for me to ask you.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: You actually go with them, you you you spend the day or the weeks with them while they're doing their research, and you kind of document it, don't you?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it's just a fantastic way to see the world and and and bond with the scientists.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds like a dream job, really.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that that's really, really cool.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a so I I was a little bit well, I needed some clarity here.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: So the Columbia Climate School is the affiliation with Lamont, Doherty Earth Institute.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Are those similar institutes or is there a hierarchy there?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: I saw you worked with colleagues who I know who work at Lamont, and you've written up science articles that that they've worked on.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: But what's the relationship between the climate school, the state of the planet articles that you've written, and then the Lamont Doherty School of Earth Science, I think is what it's called.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: Lamont D'Aharty Earth Observatory.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: Earth Observatory, that's it.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so it gets a little tangled in academic um things, but basically um there was and still is this thing called the Earth Institute at Columbia, which was an umbrella over a whole bunch of different research centers, the main one being Lamont D'Arti.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: Just a couple years ago, they founded the climate school to sort of be the umbrella and expand Columbia's research into climate studies, uh into the arts and architecture and all sorts of other fields.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: And there are a lot more students now.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so it's a little confusing.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: There are several layers of academic terms, but right now the overarching institution is the climate school.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a little bit of a misnomer because we do a whole lot of other stuff, especially Lamont does basic geology, atmospherics, oceanography, not all of it connected to um to climate.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: So is state of the planet then the journal for the Columbia Climate School?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Is that the structure of this?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: If your listeners want to um check out State of the Planet, I don't remember the exact address, but just Google State of the Planet Columbia and you'll come to it.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that's our news site, and it's very well and widely read.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it is very well organized.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is it's very cool.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'd not visited it uh frequently before, uh, but yeah, it's an excellent site.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, go there.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'll tell I'll tell uh our editor that yeah, we we've got to I just love the way it's organized.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's uh classified according to and like you said, they've expanded to a lot of different areas.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just earth sciences, it's not just climate, it's kind of all over the place, but the topic organization is it's perfect actually.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, Kevin, I want can you please, before we jump into the Barren Lands, how much you focused on a lot of the earth sciences and and climate sciences.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: How much geology have you assimilated over the years?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well uh I I never actually took a class in geology or any other thing like that.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the first geology story I did, I bought the geology 101 book.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was the Frank Press Understanding Earth, and uh read every chapter.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: I took the the quiz at the end, went cover to cover.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: How'd you do on the quiz?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: Probably not that great.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: But I mean now I understand the difference between a rock and a mineral.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the first oceanography story, I bought the oceanography 101 book and did the same thing and so on.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing is that you know, when you're a journalist um out in the field or talking to scientists on the phone, you're getting tutored by the greatest minds in their field.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: And most of these people are really overjoyed to talk about their work.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like they're trying to fend you off.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: They're they're trying to explain.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I've had a very good education, I think probably much better than I would have if I had taken those courses in college or even graduate school.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, for sure.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it I you can tell from the writing, and especially from the Barren Lands, Chris, if if you'll let me off the leash and I can talk about the Barren Lands now.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um Yeah, I think we can go, Jesse.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: All right, good.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening, and again, don't forget to support us by sharing Planet Geo with your friends.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Tune in next week for a full discussion of Kevin Krajik's new book, Barren Lands, an epic search for diamonds in the North American Arctic.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great read, and the link is in the show notes.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.