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The Geology of Asbestos · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, Christopher.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Hey.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: How you doing, Jesse Ramink?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, man.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I uh I just went down a deep dive here on this one.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: This episode.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you did.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: So let the backstory here, Chris.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: And this is uh one of our quote unquote themes, where I don't know how many of the themes we'll get to.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: It might take four years to get through this theme, but I think you called me one day.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, when you call me in the middle of like the work day.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: I call you every day.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you do, yeah.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: But when you call me like in the middle of a school day, usually there's like an idea percolating somewhere.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: So you're like, okay, Jesse, I was looking through the textbook that I teach this intro to geology class with, and there's these little insets, you know, these little like summary highlight insets that cover sometimes a societally relevant topic or something, you know, kind of at a at a very, very general level, like here's why you need to know it.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's a bunch of these that I think would make cool podcast episodes.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And this episode, asbestos, was one of them.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And was this the was this the kindling for the fire?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Was this like the one that gave you the idea, maybe?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: It absolutely was.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: I have Jesse, I have a whole notepad full of ideas about what we're gonna do for season four of Planet Gosh.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let me interrupt you real quick, because I remember having this discussion, I think a couple months into like planning before we even launched any episodes here.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think both of us were like, is there enough content in geology?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: What do we do once we've covered plate tectonics?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, that was that was our our ignorance there at the beginning when we were like, you know, that we thought, oh, there's not enough co there's just not enough content, not enough topics to cover that are interesting in relevant.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: What a ridiculous thought that was.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: I know, I know.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, granted, don't don't get me wrong, we glided through that first year in terms of, oh, this is easy, let's do this next, right?
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is so relevant, this is so important, it should matter to everybody, let's do it, right?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now things are different, but we don't have a problem with coming up with uh new content, good stuff.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely not.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: So let's go back to to this one that you you put this script together, you said, okay, hey, I'm gonna just put some thoughts on paper on asbestos, and it's taken me a while to get to it.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember you put a bunch of notes together, thoughts together, and you're then you're like, I think you added a comment.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, you get doctory right here, and I didn't get back to this for like a month and a half.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: I I let it sit for too long.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then I got into it, and it was, I don't know, last week or two weeks ago.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh I gotta be careful what I ask for.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: I really do, because you got you got doctory.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: I it I did it because I got into it.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's all good stuff, though.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's all good.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's some things that that I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna put the stop button on you with a little bit here.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: But no, it's all good though.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: I yeah, I like your additions.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: You did a good job, Jess.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Look at you.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the structure was there, it was easy, it was easy to just plug into.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: I have some news off topic.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Can I go?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Can I tell you?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Go ahead.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hold on.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Go ahead.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Check with the producer.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, yep, you're good.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Producer Watson gave you the thumbs up.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Watson is a good boy.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so Jesse, I don't know if you'll be excited about this, but I am super excited.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Jenny and I.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I wish.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, that'd be great.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: But this is better.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is better.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to Iceland.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, three weeks.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wait.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: The summer.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, exciting.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: We are going to backpack the Laga Vegar Trail, which is very good.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's a 35-mile trail, but we're going to tack on another day, another 15-mile day at the end.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh, so this is your your like you and Jenny trip that you're gonna do?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: So you know Steve Maddox, Dr.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Maddox, right?
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: He sent me an email with a link, it's a YouTube link, and he said, wait till you get home, watch it with Jenny on the big screen.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Turn the volume up.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: So we watched like 20 minutes long, and it was this really unbelievable backpacker that has he's a photographer, and he did just an amazing job of photographing the journey on this trail.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's supposed to be one of the top 10 trails in the world.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it's amazing.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: I should send you the link.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, do that.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh that sounds like amazing like February doldrums uh watching, you know.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: It is all Jesse.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: I am so excited.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: I uh Iceland's on my geological bucket list for sure.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: I've never been, and um, I get a lot of sort of crap for it from colleagues because you know, I work on these old rocks in Canada and they have a lot of we we've always my thesis work, we kind of proposed that Iceland or an Iceland-like setting was analogous to the formation of these four billion year old rocks.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: So something akin to modern Iceland formed these some of the oldest rocks we know of on earth.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: That was one of the conclusions.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so I take a little bit of heat for not have ever been to Iceland or looked at the Icelandic rocks.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: So now I get what you're saying.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: I thought you were gonna go the other way because you want to go to Iceland, but there's no there are no old rocks in Iceland, nothing over 25 million years old.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's true too.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's it cuts both ways that anyway.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's on my bucket list for for several reasons there.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool, man.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: That I'm excited for you guys.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: It is super cool.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And you know what, too.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: I I love uh you know this about me.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a planner and I love this part of it.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: It this is curing my my winter blue.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: This is my don't worry about it.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is the thing, Chris.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is in part, this is why we need to travel together more.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: I do not like this part, and you love it.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: So this would be great.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Pick a destination.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Chris has got it sorted.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Team, we're doing it.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like, this is why No, I got it all figured out.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is why when you're done with the summer science trip teaching high schoolers, you should run a guided service of this, you know, just run it for adults.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you'd be amazing at it.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: I would love it.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: I would love to do that, actually.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and Jenny and I have actually we've we've teased this out, we've talked about it.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hey, if you're interested in that, uh email us planetgeocast at gmail.com.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh just title it with Chris, please guide me on the Yellowstone trip.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Or anywhere else that was.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Or wherever.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, wherever.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: I got it.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man, that's uh that's exciting.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, cool.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's super exciting.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: So there's my news.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's the good news.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have anything nearly as exciting to report about the summer there.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: So although you're heading to Denver, you know.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the kind of the usual, the usual stuff.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: We got a big, big summer that remains to we don't know exactly how it's gonna fall out yet, but anyways.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hey, Jesse, back on topic.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Can we do that?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: How about this, Chris?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: What stood out to you about the little inset box?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think everybody can kind of picture what these are.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: In your textbook, you'll have a whole bunch of content and images, linked to the text and stuff, and then there'll be these little offset boxes that are like, here's why it's important, here's the three bullet points you need to know about this.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: What struck you about asbestos?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Lead us in here.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: What struck me about it is I'm old enough to remember the panic.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the you know, when asbestos became evil and it needed to be really purged from anything, you know, like every school, every building.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we just really went into a panic on asbestos.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that because I'm old enough to remember that, and then I I just read about this, and and it's an interesting little box.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: I have my kids read it, it's a part of one of the chapters that they have to read.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what did it for me is because I remember all of the hubbub that kind of surrounded asbestos.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so I, you know, I guess too, and I think you feel the same way, as I wanted to dive into it then and kind of like answer the question, you know, was this worth it?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Was it worth the panic?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I have some thoughts on that.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, I've uh run into this at Penn State, you know, as we're setting up our lab, we're like renovating stuff, right?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like going into an old room, picture an old lab space that has like chemicals and beakers and unknown stuff in the cabinets that you gotta sift through and be like, okay, well, the chemical people come in and take out all the bad chemicals, and then there's like we don't have the cupboards where we want it.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: We we have these chalkboards uh in that needed to come out because we want to put other stuff on the walls, we've got to hook up instruments to the walls and stuff.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things was these chalkboards on the walls, and we'd say, Oh, we want to take that one down.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, uh, no, you probably don't want to take that down because it's probably got asbestos behind it.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you leave it, it's fine.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: But if you'd want to take it down, it's gonna cost 50 grand to take that thing down because you got to do all the asbestos remediation, and you know, everybody's got to get kitted up for the asbestos removal.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: So we're in this space of like, if there's asbestos there in the tile or behind the wall, you just leave it because it's not a problem that it's just sitting there.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I think what you're talking about is 20 years ago or 15 years ago or 30 years ago, people were pulling it out because they thought it was a problem of it just sitting there.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, schools were revamped.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they would go in and remove this stuff where, like you said, if you just leave it alone, it posed no danger.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: But that was not the approach, especially like early on.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I think later on in the episode we'll talk about this too because it did affect my own classroom.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse, actually, I think let's go ahead and start with the asbestos panic that began basically in 1986.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh shall we do that?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're gonna have to lead off on this one because I wasn't quite born at the onset of this yet.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was I was but a twinkle.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh way.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: I was but a twinkle at this time.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm one of those Wait a minute.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: When were you born?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was I'm an 87er.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: So oh my gosh.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: That is oh sad.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: All right, I think we have to leave now.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: We have to end this.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's the thing.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: I was in uh I've told this before, but I started feeling old like a couple years ago when I heard overheard some undergrads who were working in the Penn State bookstore, and one of them, there are two people at the checkout, and one of them was like, you'll never believe this.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: There was this thing, everybody was worried in the year 2000, everybody thought all the computers were gonna go like just explode or something, and they called it Y2K, and everybody was like freaking out.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the other girl was like, No way, that didn't really happen.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Are you kidding me?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: I was overhearing this being like, Oh, wow, I very vividly remember Y2K.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like, yes, yes, absolutely.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I could see I could see this going in that thought process going on in your head right now of this.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyways, asbestos panic in 1986.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I guess I better talk about it because you weren't even like a thought at the moment.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I that it all started, like we said, in 1986, okay, and this really came from health concerns that were related to asbestos minors.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there were certain things that were starting to show up more with these people that had higher exposures, things like asbestosis, which is this lung scarring from the the fiber inhalation, taking this stuff in.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll talk about the fibrous nature of it next.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: We'll get into that in a little bit here.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Another thing that showed up is mesothelioma.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is this cancer of the chest and the abdominal cavity, and then of course, lung cancer.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so these minors were there was a much, much higher death rate from these things and related issues, and that kind of led to this asbestos panic and and that began in 1986.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna talk about a couple things.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Let's introduce these terms now.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about well, let's introduce asbestos first.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Asbestos is just a general, it's really an industrial or commercial term.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's a term that's been adopted by geologists, but it's not a mineral.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Asbestos is not a single mineral.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's a couple different minerals that are in the group, the category what we think of as asbestos, and they basically have a really long, thin nature.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: So think of like a long needle shape.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: They're really a fiber, like a long, thin fiber.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's a couple categories.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: We call them brown, blue, or white.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's a bunch of different categories of these, different types of minerals that have this fibrous nature to them that are asbestos, and we have really amphiboles, are one, and then we have part of the serpentine group, which is the mineral chrysotile, and that's white asbestos, and the other ones are more amphiboles categories, different categories of amphiboles that are the the blue or the brown asbestos.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: And sorry, Jesse, that distinction is super important because you said you have the white asbestos, and that's the chrysotile.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: The white asbestos is easily the most common kind, but it's different because it's more curly than the brown or blue asbestos, which you said come from the amphiboles.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think most people are familiar with the mineral horn blend, which is a kind of amphibole too.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: The brown and blue asbestos is really, really long and straight.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so what it does is it can pierce the lungs and then it stays lodged there.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it won't dissolve.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing happens to it.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is very exciting.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna there's a reason why it's straight and the other one's curly, and it has to do with the mineralogy that we're gonna come back to when we talk about these.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: We've got to cover some.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: This is where you got doctory, and I'm gonna I'm gonna put the tamper on you.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, but not too much, because it is interesting.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: No, not too much.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: It is pretty cool.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, absolutely.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you're right, we have to make this distinction.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about the the amphibole asbestos, which is the black or brown or green, they call them different colors, but non-white ones basically, and then white asbestos is the mineral chrysotile.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's a important note that there's not much asbestos production anymore.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, after this panic, which was uh over 35 years ago, the current production of asbestos is a couple hundred tons and they're fairly local, regional, like small-scale operations.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of asbestos out there in the walls and in the tiles, but not much active production going on.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but it is really important to note that 90% of all the asbestos that was used industrially was the white asbestos.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: So there has never been a distinction between the white asbestos and then the brown and the blue.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was just lumped in as asbestos.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's a good point.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there's a let's start to talk about why it's useful.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: What is the structure of this stuff?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: What is asbestos, which helps guide us to why did humanity use this stuff in the first place?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a really important thing.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: What purpose did it serve?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so, asbestos, again, it's an industrial term.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: So now you're saying we're getting back on topic, Jesse.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're back, we're yeah, we're flowing now.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start to get in the weeds a little bit.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Back to the plan.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into the weeds.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, all right.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: So this is I I would describe this, Chris, and tell me if this is a fair description, Chris.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: I would categorize this as a morphological category.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like, is asbestos really a morphological category of minerals?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is like you know and you teach that crystal shape is a terrible way to identify minerals because quartz can have that beautiful, like six-sided pyramid, or it can be just a raw hunk of quartz with no crystal shape to it, or it can have sort of bulbous crystal growth.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Crystal growth shape is not indicative of a mineral.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: So Jesse, Jesse, you just offended every mineralogist out there, I think, walking.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: They are no longer subscribing to the code.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Good thing is there's not that many out there anymore.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, my college mineralogy professor would would not be happy with your comment right there.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like he loves crystallography.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Crystallography is different than like the shape, how we view it with our eyes.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like the interior structure is really important and really key, but the the outer shape doesn't really matter.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: And in in asbestos here, they're classified by this outer shape.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: So they're long, what we would call like acicular or needle-like, and they have a length to width ratio.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: So how long is crazy?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: How long is the needle versus how thick in diameter is the needle?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Think of a sewing needle.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: How long is that thing versus the diameter of that thing?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's either 20 up to some can go up to thousands of times longer than they are wide in diameter.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: So these are really needles.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: The extreme version of that, absolutely.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's important because they can be like spun together.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: These sort of needles are like fibers like cloth that can be spun.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Jesse, you've alluded to it, but you didn't really say it because you got all professorionis and all that.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: But the bottom line is these are all silicate minerals.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: The asbestos group of minerals are silicates, which is silicates collectively, are the most abundant mineral group on the surface of the planet anyway.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um But what's important about them?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why were these so widely used?
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one really important is that they're very fire retardant.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're they're not combustible at all.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: They have this high thermal stability, they're really resistant to biodegradation, so they don't break down.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: They're chemically inert, right?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: They're non-reactive things, and they also have a very low electrical conductivity.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: So these are some of the properties that made it really useful.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll come back to this in a little bit and talk about some of the specific uses, right?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, they're really strong, they're really, really flexible, they can kind of be spun, right?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: And and used and and woven in to certain things.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, Chris, I think what let's talk uh let's kind of talk about how these things are used.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: What is this mineral group useful for?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why are these big, long, super strong fibers, what are those useful for, right?
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: And um Okay, well all right, well, Jesse, hold on a second.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm looking at the script here and I I see a bunch of numbers, um, like pounds per square inch, and then you you have some chemical equations going on here.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Jesse, I honestly I have no idea what you're doing here, and I I I think this is a little bit over the top.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: What can you please explain this to me?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: What do you have going on?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think uh what we'll stay out of the weeds, but the point is that they're really strong.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: These fibers are really strong because they're silicates.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, remember you and I recorded, we spent a lot, a great deal of time making a minerals chapter with a whole bunch of episodes in it in our Camp Geo content.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: So if you go to the mobile app, Camp Geo Mobile app, you can listen to the minerals chapter where we talk about the silica tetrahedron and we talk about the strength of SIO bonds.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: And these things, these asbestos group minerals, are built on SIO bonds.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: So they're very strong in that they're strong when they're heated as well.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like most things, they get hot, they break apart chemically, and they get weak.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: These SIO bonds remain strong up to, in the case of chrystatile, like 500 degrees centigrade.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: They actually get stronger as they're heated in some cases.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: So this is why it's useful for humanity.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: We have these fibers we can spin, but they remain strong, and they're great insulators, and they remain strong when they're heated.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, like if you want to build a furnace, you want to put asbestos in it, right?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of cheap's wool.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is this is the value of this stuff.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um well, yeah.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Jesse, like it was used in my classroom, right?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: We had these tile floors and they had asbestos in them.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you know what?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: They were scratch resistant.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you could drop rocks on them and nothing happened to them, right?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: My lab tabletops had asbestos in them, they were bomb-proof, these things.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, then all this happened.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: So this was really early in my career that I didn't start teaching until 97.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: But it took time for this panic to take hold and then remove everything, right?
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, my lab tabletops, my flooring, it was all ripped out.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: The insulation and the ceiling, which was it was great for that, right?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: If asbestos makes a great insulator, one for its insulating properties, but also because it's a fire retardant, too.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: So all of this stuff was removed and then replaced with really inferior products.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if you were gonna build uh the comparison of like cotton or wool or something, right?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you're gonna insulate stuff with wool, you don't want to insulate your house with wool because that's flammable.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: So you want to insulate it with stuff that doesn't burn, and this stuff doesn't burn.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the use of these things.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they are formed, these long acicular, needle-like minerals are often formed.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: You need space to grow something that long, right?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: You need a need, you need Okay, hold on.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now hold on, let's be clear here, Jesse.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: You're talking about geologically now.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: Geologically, yes.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: When the asbestos mineral formed.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I just wanted to set this down.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Go ahead, that's a really good point, Chris.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do we form these long needle-like structures?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And there's two ways.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: The white asbestos, we'll come back to that because it's a more common one and probably maybe more interesting.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: If we focused on the amphiboles, Chris, you mentioned horn blend.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Horn blend, do you remember the horn blend chemical formula, Chris?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I know it's ridiculously long.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: I never had to memorize it.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thank goodness.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Did you have to memorize that?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, uh not that I remember, and if I did, I probably got it wrong.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: But it's something ridiculous.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's got every element, every major element you can possibly think of, can substitute.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: It has a ridiculous number of valence sites, like spots to put cations, and so you can put all sorts of different cations in different spots and they fall into different categories.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's just an utterly complicated mineral structure.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: And amphiboles are big group of minerals, so you can substitute all sorts of stuff.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: But these amphiboles, they're a double-chain silicate, so they have this nice hold on, hold on.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, I gotta interrupt, Jess, because you got to go back to the part where you were talking about they need space and they need room.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: We need to back out of that.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, that's a great okay.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to keep you out of the weeds, Jesse.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I gotta bring you back to where you were talking about the how they need space to grow.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's talk about that because I'm actually really interested in what you're gonna say here.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let's move on from the complexity of horn blend that nobody remembers.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, please.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, but hornblende, Chris.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: I remember in your lab looking at hornblend, we Do it in Penn State's lab, there's a big piece of hornblend, and it's blocky.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of long, but it's big and blocky.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's not needle-like.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so the way to think of these amphibole group minerals, this is a bit of an imperfect analogy, but they need to be kind of spun out, like drawn out in fibers.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you start nucleating the crystal, and then it's kind of getting stretched as it's getting grown.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then because this structure, just a chemical structure, can accommodate all sorts of different elements in there, you can kind of bend the crystal structure really nicely.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: It can kind of grow with defects really easily, and that makes it structurally stable in this long needle-like structure.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: What would cause that then?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: You have this kind of seed crystal that's growing.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: What would cause the stretching as it's growing?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like geologically, what would do this and where would we see this?
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a great question.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think maybe the listener should think about this a minute.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Chris, where do we get space?
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you generate space in rocks?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: Where are two parts?
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Joints and fractures.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Joints and fractures in faults.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a fault that's sliding slowly, one side slipping past the other slow enough that minerals are growing, you can generate these long acicular, needle-like structures in there, and you got fluids around, so you have all sorts of elements that can accommodate.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: So the amphibole structure, I think just to kind of summarize, when the amphibole asbestos group minerals are forming, they need to kind of be stretched out.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're usually formed in faults or in joints where there's minerals precipitating.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: And Chris, you and I collected some of these.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: We did.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: Spectacular.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't quite asbestos, I wouldn't think, but they were they're long needle-like actinolite.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: Are you talking about the actinolite that we collected?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: We also did though, Jesse.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we collected serpentinite as well.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: Was that that's true?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: Does that have asbestos in it?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like the true variety of like the white asbestos?
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to remember what ours what that one looks like that we found.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it was quite pure chrysotyl, like the asbestos group would be, but you know, it definitely has that fibrous nature to it a little bit.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: So, question, Jesse, then.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: This seems like a really niche geologic setting.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm struck with the idea that how can there possibly be enough to mine if this is the niche setting where it forms in joints and fractures where you actually have actively stretching this stuff out like you would get along a fault.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't seem like it you'd be able to produce enough.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can get settings where there's a whole bunch of faults.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Think of like a horsting grobin structure or like a half groben.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you got a half groben falling down, block falling down, there's a big zone of fracture in there.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, there's a lot of stretching, there's space being made because it's an extensional environment, and you get this block dropping down and a whole bunch of different faults.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Little is one main one, but there's a ton in between.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: Don't think of it like one.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: Why did you say half groben instead of just a groben?
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: Just an extensional environment where you get like normal faults forming, like big tectonic normal faults, I guess.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: You brought up a stat about the sort of asbestos category of minerals.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: The amphibole group was a relatively small amount of the asbestos, like 10% or 20%.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because think of this growth environment.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Amphibole is a really complicated mineral, has all sorts of different elements in it.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's way less homogenous and therefore not as predictable as the white asbestos, the chrysotile one.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're mining this stuff, you'd have some good asbestos, some bad asbestos, like useful, not useful.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's just really unpredictable because it's this complicated amphibole structure.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: We could fit all sorts of random stuff in it.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about that a little bit because this white asbestos, they're basically you and I refer to them as flavors, right?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: There are two flavors of asbestos.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: You have the white asbestos, and then we lump the brown and blue asbestos into this other category, right?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: 90% of it is the white stuff, at least the stuff that was sold commercially was the white asbestos.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: And this stuff is what we find in the serpentines that you and I collected.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it's serpentine is a beautiful mineral, right?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then you have these what you called here, Jesse, and I want to talk about this a little bit, serpentinized ultramafic rocks.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: So can you explain that a second?
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you have this white asbestos associated with an ultramafic rock that has been metamorphosed, essentially?
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Serpentine is a group of minerals.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the whole bunch of categories of different minerals that form the serpentine group.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: And one of them is this mineral christotyl, which is an asbestos.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, Chris, I don't know if you have a sample of christotyl.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have a sample of christotyl in your lab?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: I actually do.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: I actually do.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: You probably are like required to keep it behind glass or something because it's the zeros.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: I do keep it behind glass, absolutely.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: But I think if you've I don't even know if I'm supposed to have it in my room or not.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, just between you and me that you have the christotyle.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: We won't tell anybody.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you've been to a mineral museum, you probably have seen this.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: You'll often get this this sort of chunk, it's pale green and and long fibrous structure.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of looks like you could scratch it and it looks like fluffy, kind of.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a fluffy looking.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it looks like it looks like gray hair.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it does.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: It looks like Crispolize's beard.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um and okay.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is a serpentine group mineral.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Chrysotyl is a serpentine group mineral.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: Its formula is magnesium, silica, oxygen, and water.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so what rocks have a lot of magnesium and silica in them and oxygen?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's ultramafic rock.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: So olivine has those three parts.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: Magnesium, silica, and oxygen.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's basically olivine.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you add water to it, you generate a serpentine group.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: So if you take olivine and alter it, you're gonna get chrysotyl.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: Alter it with water around.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that, Jesse, becomes super important, right?
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: The ability for this mineral to hold on to water.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is a really interesting one.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: Could we go just real quick into the weeds on this, Chris?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's a it's a um okay.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Give me 30 seconds.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Give me 30 seconds.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: And oh, you can't do this in 30 seconds.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: I know you know you.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Three minutes.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh no.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'll I'll do it.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, really quickly, really quickly.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: I just the mineral chrysotyl is a sheet silicate.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: And Chris, what mineral do you think what mineral do you think of with a sheet silicate?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think of micus.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: Muscopite, biotite, flagopyte, you know.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because they flake off in sheets, right?
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's sheet silicate.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, those are the obvious sheet silicates.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: Clays are also sheet silicate.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: This one, an asicular, a long acicular fiber, does not make sense to be a sheet silicate.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the thing about this, and this is kind of cool.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: We have these sheets of silica tetrahedrons.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: So think of a little pyramid with four oxygens of silica, and that's a silicon tetrahedron.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: You combine those together into a sheet, and that's a sheet silicate, but you need to put something between the sheets of silica.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the sheets have to be the in between the sheets, it needs a bond.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Something's got to be sticking them together.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have, you know, biotite, you've got some aluminum, you've got a bunch of iron and magnesium that go in between those sheets, right?
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that makes biotite.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: This one, you have a silicate tetrahedron sheet, and then you have a layer of what's called brucite, the mineral brucite, which is MGOH2.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just hydrated magnesium.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: Not important.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't matter, but this doesn't fit right.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: So this stuff, it makes a neutral bond, like it makes a neutral molecule, but it doesn't fit structurally.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: So what it does is that induces the sheet to bend.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it kind of rolls up.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: Think of taking a roll of aluminum foil and like putting another sheet of paper in between it that bends the aluminum foil over and kind of makes a roll.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it rolls this thing into a tube.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a sheet silicate rolled into a tube.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: I just think that's so cool.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's a cool story.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it and there's another reason why this brucite mineral is so important.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason is because you alluded to it before that it it holds water, right, in the form of hydroxide.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that's not important.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: What is important about this is that it dehydrates, it loses its water when the temperature gets cranked up to about 550 degrees Celsius.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so if this stuff gets tanked into a subduction zone, it dehydrates, literally like wringing the water out of the mineral, which then you know this from back when we talked about plate tectonics.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: Go back to that episode or go back to that chapter in our Camp Geo book.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Is that when you add water to rock that is already hot, you can induce partial melting.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: And this then is exceedingly important in generating magma at subduction zones.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we've taken a sheet silicate, a sheet of silica tetrahedron, which we know from muscle hide biotite, is super stable, and we've wrapped it up around brucite, which is again really stable, as you just said, up to high temperatures.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: And this is what makes chrysotyl such a valuable fibrous mineral, is because it's stable to high temperatures, it's got all the values of silicate, it's non-reactive, etc.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: etc.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it's fibrous and it bends.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is the difference between the amphibole ones from health purposes, too, is you can bend this tube in a much different way than you could bend an amphibole that has a double chain silicate, which is a much more solid.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think of double chains as like two pillars, steel I-beams or something.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you have something rolled up, you can bend and flex that thing really quite easily, right?
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, that to me just intuitively makes a bit of sense.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: Can I attempt an analogy here or an explanation of this of like what I think of?
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Check the producer.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, right.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: Watson says yes.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: So how about this?
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever worked with insulation before, Jesse?
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: The like the pink or yellow stuff that you picked up.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: I just put a ton into our our uh attic here to kind of keep it cool.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I hate working with that stuff because then you what happens is that insulation is made up of these little tiny fiberglass, hollow little needles, right?
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: And they really resemble the brown and blue asbestos.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: What they do then is if you inhale these fibers that are kind of like insulation, right?
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: You when you work with insulation, those those little tubes they jab into, they get stuck in your skin, and then you get itchy, and so you scratch it and you go wash your hands.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: And what most people do then is they they put warm water in their hands, which is the worst thing to do because then your pores open up even more and the needles get even deeper in you, and it's just a mess, right?
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the same thing happens with the blue and the brown asbestos is you inhale them and they they're so rigid and so slender, that ratio of length to diameter, that they lodge in your lungs and then nothing happens to them, right?
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: They don't dissolve, they're very chemically stable.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: The white asbestos tends to be more curly, you know, it's like kind of like curly hair, if you will.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Chris, I think I mean this makes mineralogically this makes a lot of sense.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we should just maybe highlight that the jury is maybe still out on the white asbestos specifically, like although, you know, it it we know that some of the other types of asbestos are for sure really dangerous and the mesothelioma and lung, all the things you talked about before, there's still a a fair amount of I would say discussion about the white asbestos.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say it's completely safe, it's not documented to be completely safe, and and I think there's a bunch of medical the medical community kind of lumps them together often.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so you it kind of depends on who you talk to about white asbestos, but the current, you know, state, as we talked about with what at my lab in Penn State, for instance, and your your room, is if you leave it behind the walls or in the tile, if you don't disturb it, it's not a hazard.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like you really need to be working with this stuff all the time to really pose, you know, a super major threat.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that that's just a good point.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's just a category.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, Chris, how about let's wrap up with some like ways that this stuff was used?
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about insulation and tile and the reasons for that, but asbestos was used in a lot of other stuff too.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: This is a list that we're gonna go through here that is, I think, uh a shocking list of uses, yes, right, for asbestos.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so let's start off.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: One was toothpaste.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's that is wild, Jesse.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's wild.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: But the fibrous nature of this mineral that we've been talking about all episode long, hey, that makes it a great abrasive.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right?
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a great scouring agent in toothpaste.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: Also, tablecloths, towels, if you want fire resistant clothing or fire resistant cloth, you could use this.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, stains could be removed from it.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: These fibers could be spun into a cloth, right?
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: So you could make a cloth out of this, and it's fire retardant and all these types of things.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: This goes back to ancient Greece.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: This has been used in cloth for a long time.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, Jesse, when Chris falls asleep on the couch eating a bag of Doritos, which has been known to happen.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just every just every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, and he gets Dorito cheese on his shirt that is made out of this asbestos spun cloth, right?
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: All you gotta do is take the shirt on the field.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know what?
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is a good throw in the fire.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna we need to we're gonna get you a bib, a white asbestos bib for you to wear while you're eating Doritos in front of the TV at night.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, hey, you know what?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's crazy though.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: You just you take the cloth, throw it in the fire, stain goes away, but the cloth is unaffected.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really this this goes back to ancient Greece.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this was a really clever use of asbestos, totally nuts, to be honest.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: Totally nuts.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: Another one, Chris, cigarette filters.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Again, they're fire resistant, so made it ideal for cigarette filters.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Crazy, wild to think about.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: Wild to think about.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know what, Jesse?
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go, let's round this out.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: But they also used it a lot on film sets because, well, a couple things.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: They it made for great fake snow, the white asbestos did.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's just crazy.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's terrible to laugh at, but um, but you know, I I you're right.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: I oh, you made me feel bad, right?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: I know, but it I was I was like, I'm just laughing at the craziness of it.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, it's just but before we knew what was going on with it, you know.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then also, Jesse, stunt people use this in their clothing where fire was a part of the stunt because of obviously the fire retardant nature of yes.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's uh you could come up with many uses for a fire retardant, flaky fiber, right?
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: And and we did, and we did.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: And now it's sitting in a lot of different places in tile, it has insulation.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's sitting there not really doing any damage if you don't disturb it.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: But when you do disturb that, you need to tear it down.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it is you need to deal with it.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it is not sitting in Crisple Heis's lap.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's not.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's not.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely not.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely not.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Chris, this was a good one.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: I uh locked glass.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: I liked this episode.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: This was a really fun one to dive into, and uh, I don't know, an interesting sort of things you should know, things you didn't know about asbestos.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Geology rules it all at the end of the day.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: Geology is king.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: Queen.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: Geology is king.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's supreme.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: There you go.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: Geology is supreme.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good way to end it.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: Geology is supreme.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, well, that's a wrap today.
• 37:05
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• 37:06
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• 37:08
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• 37:09
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• 37:10
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• 37:13
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• 37:16
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• 37:23
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• 37:36
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• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: Last thing, if you have any questions, we love getting listener questions.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: So send us an email, planetegeocast at gmail.com.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: We're always working on listener question episodes.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes you give us questions that we can answer pretty quickly right away.
• 37:48
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• 37:52
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• 37:54
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• 37:55
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• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Cheers.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Peace.