PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
The Answers Are in the Rocks - It's a Good Time to Be a Geologist
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In this rock-solid episode, we dive into Part 3 of their exciting geology series! 🪨 We discuss why it's a golden age to be a geologist, focusing on how the answers to many of today's challenges are literally set in stone. From contact metamorphism to the fascinating world of serpentinites, we explore how these natural processes are crucial in addressing climate change and charting a path towards the future. We even touch on the possibility of harnessing geological hydrogen as a sustainable energy source. Don't take this episode for granite—rock out with us and discover how geological processes could transform our future! 🌍
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Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you. That's right. Those are the days. Those are the days, man. Chris, today we are part three. We're part three here of uh a many part series. We could go on and on and on, but it's a good time to be a geologist. And there's a couple very explicit reasons why. And we're gonna talk about the reason number three here is that the answers are in the rocks, which you this is one that I know you're passionate about. I'm super passionate about. It just strikes close to home. Like we like rocks. I don't know. What what is your favorite category of rock? And I don't mean igneous metamorphic sedimentary, but like what is your favorite, like you know, sub subgroup of of rocks, would you say?
SPEAKER_01Well, you put me on the spot right now. Holy crap! Like that's that's like uh asking me who my favorite child is right there. It's like are you serious? Oh my gosh, you know. I think I know.
SPEAKER_00I think I know. Do you want me to lead to the room? What do you what do you think? Yeah, yeah. What do you think? Yeah. I think your answer is going to be contact metamorphic rocks.
SPEAKER_01Um or pigmatite rocks.
SPEAKER_00I but I only think I would say that because those are the ones that you and I have like gone chasing after the most. Yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_01We have, yeah. And I love uh like contact metamorphism is such a cool thing. You know, I always think of when I think of uh contact metamorphism in the field that is just shockingly obvious, is like Glacier National Park, when you have this this massive sincline that goes through all this the hell in a limestone, and you can see it's this diorite intrusion, really, really thick. And you know, limestone is is really not a very exciting rock to me. I hope I don't offend too many people with that statement, but it just doesn't do it for me. I don't you gotta whisper it back, it just doesn't it's you know, but I have to describe it limestone is this rock that has so many looks, it's like the Katy Perry of the rocks, and to me anyway, because I can I can never I can never spot Katy Perry. But you see this limestone, then above and below the intrusion, you have this beautiful bleached marble, it's amazing, and and it is a really cool thing, but I you know, Jesse, I think I'm gonna go with my favorite is being pegmatites for sure, and regionally metamorphose rocks.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Schists and granulites and amphibolites and things like this. Absolutely. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's a good one. Contact metamorphism is frankly, it's on my mind a little bit right now. Why is that?
SPEAKER_01Hold on, why is that?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's just a uh um there's a lot of it in eastern Pennsylvania when the the opening of the Atlantic has happened. There's all these dikes that intruded in, dye-base dikes or dolerite dikes, they intruded in and they altered a lot of the rocks around them, turned you know, uh limestones into marbles and turned schists into very much more hydrothermally altered schists. And it's a it's a process that's really interesting and very dramatic. Actually, it created a lot of the original iron ore formations that kind of fueled the industrial revolution in eastern um in eastern North America.
SPEAKER_01What's the scale of some of this contact metamorphism?
SPEAKER_00What what are we talking about? Yeah, it's incredibly variable, and they're not huge, like the deposits that get formed are not huge ones by any means. They're not, you know, giant ore deposits, but they were enough to be a resource, you know, in uh in the industrial revolution time. So the scale is is hundreds of meters, probably at most, around some of these, and it gets bigger around some of the bigger intrusions, but not far. Uh, you know, you can one of the the famous marbles, well, it's actually this really cool conglomerate, uh Brecia marble. There's columns of it's called Potomac marble or calico marble. Um anyway, you can go through areas where it's really marble, and then some parts where it's much more like a limestone matrix, it falls apart like crazy. Um, and so it's really variable, the the scale of this stuff. So anyway.
SPEAKER_01However, that said, Jesse, I feel like that's not your answer. Is it your answer? Is contact metamorphism?
SPEAKER_00I think it is at the moment, it is at the moment. Okay, I'll tell you, I'll tell you. Yeah, just because they're they form such pretty, you know, amazing, beautiful rocks. And Chris, the point here in this we've been talking, where'd we come from? We came from a couple episodes where we talked about, you know, this sort of buy low, sell high idea that it's a good time to be a geologist at baseline just because there are less geologists being trained right now. You know, it's not a pop, not as popular as it was before as a as a skill set. So that means it's And we think we're heading towards a peak. Yes. And then part two, we're heading towards a peak. We are gonna have another, we as geoscientists are gonna be in demand in the future. Last sort of episode in the series, we talked about one reason we think that is, is that the solutions are at depth. A lot of the solutions to the climate change events, a lot of the problems are at the surface, but the solutions are at depth. And when we get to depth, we need geoscientists and geologists to think about these things. And there's a lead-on part to that, which we're going to talk about today, which is the answers. A lot of the answers that we talk about to climate change are in the rocks themselves. And not only in the rocks, but in the rock record, which I think is a really important thing. Like Earth has done the reactions that we want to have happen. We just need to look closely at the rock record and look at what has happened in nature, and and we can do this again, uh, or or sort of think about possible solution sets.
SPEAKER_01Something else, Jesse, that I thought about after we got off from our last episode recording this. I didn't call you to we haven't talked much the last couple days. We were talking about copper porphyry. Yeah, I missed you.
SPEAKER_00I've missed you, Chris. I've missed you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I know. I I can imagine. I know, I'm sorry. Well, if we go like a day without talking, it's an odd day. It just feels just off. Like, what's the matter with you, Chris? I didn't talk to Jesse today. Pissed. Um I didn't have my red. So uh, you know, Jesse, one of my favorite places on the planet is on top of Avalanche Peak in Yellowstone National Park. And that, you know, it when you go off the other side of Avalanche, uh heading east, you go you leave the park right away and you're in Shoshone National Forest. And it's just it's all of this like andesite porphyry, this porphyrytic andesite. And Jesse, it is loaded with copper, this porphyry. Like, okay, I mean, it's just so I I just uh that occurred to me after we got off recording, and I was like, man, why didn't I bring that up? I because it's one of my favorite things. It's you know, in fact, it's so prevalent you can actually see like raw copper in the rock. Oh, really? It hasn't all oxidized out. Yeah, it's it's amazing stuff, yeah. Very pretty, it's yeah, very abundant. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, so anyway, Chris, the um the answers in the rock thing, I think let's we should hearken back to our episode that we did. We've done several episodes. There's actually one of our visual podcast series on the Camp Geo Mobile app, first link in your show notes, is on Earth's climate. And we talk a lot in Earth's climate about climate cycles and the fact that the greenhouse effect, we should be very happy that the greenhouse effect is here, right? It makes Earth habitable. Um, and actually Earth has what's that? We're a fan.
SPEAKER_01Yes. We we like the greenhouse.
SPEAKER_00Big fan of the greenhouse effect. Um and Earth has these climate cycles, right? There's these long-term feedback loops that we talked about, the long car carbon cycle, um, the you kind of bounce between different thermostat settings. The earth has this internal thermostat, and the thermostat is controlled naturally by things like weathering and by interesting reactions that occur between the atmosphere and oceans and rocks, and all those things require geology. Sorry to interrupt you, Jesse.
SPEAKER_01Go for it. I uh sorry, Jesse. I I gotta interrupt you because I I just had a a question today from a student who always asks very insightful questions and he gets lots of jolly ranchers from me. Um wait a minute.
SPEAKER_00No, do you give it a question job?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I do go, I do. I'm the I'm the gatekeeper of good questions, and if they get ask a good question in class and it could on topic, off topic, they get jolly ranchers. So I'm dispersing this. So anyway, he always is he's always good for it. And he asked me today, and I don't remember why we were on this topic because we're we're way past this, but he said, So, Mr. Bullheis, if plate tectonics was uh stopped for some reason on on Earth, would we be able to like stay here? Would we be able to survive that? Oh and my answer was no, actually, we would not, you know, it would it would take a while. I mean, you know, I mean, geologically it would it would take a bit, but you know, we would lose our ability to cycle carbon, and uh, you know, so I I went into all that, but I just got that question today, which I thought was really insightful.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Chris, this is uh we're we're gonna pick up, I'm gonna show, let's go turn to image number one here a minute so we can kind of start talking about what we mean by this. Answers are in the rocks themselves. This is a chart. We've talked about this, we've shown this image in our Camp Geo content. The first, you know, class you'd take in a in a college-level geology program would be physical geology. You talk about metamorphism. This plot right here is metamorphism, and it's all it is is showing the different fields that we as petrologists think about metamorphism as. And basically what it is is there are different spots in pressure-temperature space. Metamorphism is pressure plus temperature, you're heating up and squeezing the rock, and at different pressure and temperature conditions, different things happen to the rocks. And so we kind of map these out into what we call different faces or different fields. That this chart pressure is going up as you go down in the y-axis, so it's kind of like the surface of the earth is at the top, and as we go down, it gets deeper, higher pressure, and temperature is going from zero to 800 degrees on the right side. So as you go down into the right, you're getting higher temperature, higher pressure. All I wanted to make, I think, or all we should really make on this, is that we we left off talking about geothermal energy last episode or last episode in the series, and how you know we're getting down to 200, 300, sometimes even 400 degrees in these enhanced geothermal systems. This is a metamorphic reaction space now. Like we're a couple kilometers down in the crust, we're at many hundreds of degrees. Reactions are occurring in rocks, and these are metamorphic reactions. And Chris, I don't think it'd be interesting to know from our listeners how many people have heard the term prenite pumpelite faces before. Because I mean, yeah, that's sure. I I there's no way I even bring that up in class in my intro-level class. Do you talk about this in your class? Prenight pumpelite.
SPEAKER_01No, in fact, that was uh I think this is no, heck no. There's there's something that is worth like going over, spending maybe a minute or two on this diagram here, because you know, you you got green schists and amphibolites and granulites and blue schists and eclogites and all these things. All right, if you take an intro-level geology class, they basically know none of these terms.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's true. Right. I think that's yeah, I think that's gotta change. I think there's that be in part because of this conversation we're having right now, like this is gonna be relevant, we think. This is our pitch. It's gonna be this is gonna be newly relevant to society in a way that it wasn't, you know, 20, 30 years ago, maybe. However, sorry, continue. I interrupted you there.
SPEAKER_01No, no, I I guess like uh let's let's run through some of these. You know, what what is a green schist? What's an amphibolite? What's a granulite? Can we put those in context? I think a lot of our listeners have uh, you know, some varying degrees of background in geoscience, but you know, a lot of them probably have not, they're not really intimately familiar with some of these rocks that we're talking about or or or hosts of rocks.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the the name the names are confusing. Uh we're geologists, so we don't have a consistent naming seam. We just gotta make it up on the fly. The names come from the name of the rock that is produced if you take basalt and put it at these conditions. So if I take a basalt and heat it up to 400 degrees centigrade, put it at four kilobars, which is about 12 kilometers or 15 kilometers in the crust, it's gonna be a green schist because that's the name of the rock that the basalt turns into. It we've talked about green schists before. It turns into chloride schist, right? Yeah, chlorite, sometimes actinolite, it's this very deep, dark forest green kind of color. That brings back memories, Jesse. I know it chases. Actinolite.
SPEAKER_01We can hide the land, hide the land. That's right. Um yeah, you're right. Um you know, so I use I show green schist, I just don't use the term green schist, you know. Um right, right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and then for sure. Because it's a deeper, I mean, you know, this is something you'd hit in your our 200-level classes on you know, rocks and minerals, start to talk about this stuff.
SPEAKER_01So if you take that green schist and you subject it to higher temperatures and pressures, then it turns into what's called amphibolite. So what's the difference between amphibolite and green schist?
SPEAKER_00Amphibolite just says it's the same recipe, it just has transformed a bit.
SPEAKER_01And amphibolite, we will have plagioclase and horn blend, will be the two minerals in the calcium-rich plagioclase, mostly kind of one of these darker colored plagioclases.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because it started from a basalt. We're still keeping the same recipe, and then that that amphibolite, um, if you keep heat, sometimes you'll have garnet in there, and if it's deeper pressure, you'll get more garnet. You can have a garnet amphibolite. If you keep heating it up and keep putting it under pressure, eventually it'll start to melt. And once it melts, the melt leaves, and what's left is a granulite, which has little water in it, it has lost all the goodies to the to the melt phase, and that's a granulite. You can go the opposite direction, you can you can put it deep but cold or cool, and you can have a blue schist, which is a very common subduction zone type of rock, blue schist and eclogite. So it's just different pressure temperature conditions, take the same rock recipe and make different minerals out of it. All you're changing is prepared.
SPEAKER_01So Jesse, can I uh like um most students are familiar with rocks like the the various uh degrees of schist, you know, uh a mica schist, uh, you know, muscovite biotite schist or a garnet schist or a solimonite schist or a kyanite schist, right?
SPEAKER_00Uh you mean as you kind of get hotter and hotter and hotter, you go.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Those the they index different conditions, but the so the only real difference between those rocks and the rocks that we're talking about here, because the rocks I just said are I think more familiar to everybody else, right? Is that a fair statement?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, totally. Yep. Right. Yep.
SPEAKER_01You're just you're starting with a different parent rock. You're not starting with basalt necessarily, you're starting with maybe like shale and you're metamorphosing shale.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yes, that's a great point. That's a great point, Chris. So what we've been talking about is take a basalt recipe and subject it to these pressure temperature conditions. The vagaries of metamorphic petrology mean that metamorphic petrologists have defined the field, the pressure temperature area. So the the areas outlined as green shist on this map right here, this pressure temperature map. The name of that field that is now a facies or a fasces. That's a field in pressure temperature space. You could put any recipe rock through that. So you could take your shale and you could subject it to green shist facies metamorphism or granulite faces metamorphism, which just means you're putting it in that pressure temperature space. It's very confusing because you know the field is named after the basalt recipe, but you can put anything into the recipe and put it at these pressure temperature conditions. And the point that's really important here, Chris, is that I think like petrologists, you and I, we what what type of schist is your favorite, Chris? Um boy. I I have I'm really stumping you today with eyes.
SPEAKER_01No, it's like uh I'm gonna say it's it's just gonna sound simple, but it's an absolutely beautiful rock. I have a slab that's the size of a like a small lab table that is just beautiful biotite schist. I mean, it is nothing but biotite, and I love that rock, it's just so shockingly beautiful.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's what I'm going with. Well, okay, that's a good one then, because that's actually a lower temperature, that's a lower grade version of schist, which is more in the green schist faces. And I my point if you if you gave a different answer, I was expecting you to say garnet or soliamonite garnet or garnet kyanite, right? Yeah, but because those are higher temperature, they're bigger minerals, they're really beautiful. Like people are attracted to those types of schists, they're higher temperature. They're also scientifically quite interesting. These higher temperature stuff, there's a lot more interesting reactions that occur when you get to amphibolite and granulite and stuff like that. However, our view of the future is that things like lower green schists, prenate pumpelite, the zeolite grade, which is like pretty low temperature on the metamorphic scale, that's where a lot of interesting stuff is happening. Many of the interesting reactions, the answers are in the rocks. The rocks that have the answers are kind of these lower temperature conditions, which are I think newly interesting, and and that's that's an opportunity when things are like perhaps understudied, let's say. Um that's a huge opportunity.
SPEAKER_01Basically, let's go into a couple examples on this, Jesse. Like uh, you know, how how the answers are in the rocks, and I think we've said this before, I don't know if we have or not, but uh Earth has a playbook, and all we have to do is is understand what's happening in the earth, and and it's done these things before, it's done it without us, these reactions and these really, really cool things, and one of which is the the nuclear reactors. These you know, we did an episode way, way back when on ancient nukes, and what a perfect example of what we're talking about. The answer to what happened has always been right there. Earth did it. This was back in time when you had the critical mass of uranium-235, it hadn't decayed down below that limit yet. And we had ancient nuclear reactors that were occurring on their own, which is just that's such a cool thing. And that's just uh an example of Earth's playbook, if you will.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I agree completely with you, Chris. I mean, it's such an important aspect, it's a perfect example of how these natural nuclear reactors were not discovered till well after the Manhattan Project and and after World War II had ended. And so uh nuclear scientists had proposed and and come up with nuclear reactors before they knew that nature had done it for us. Nature did it like two billion years ago, and they were discovered. It's like, wow, okay, this happened, and we could use it to study and understand nuclear processes, nuclear reactions that occurred in the rock record. It's one of the coolest stories out there. There's a couple really relevant ones, too, here, Chris, especially as we go forward. We've talked again about this this climate thermostat. Earth has this thermostat, and weathering is a really important process in here, right? Like, and this is a picture of this is a serpentinite. So this would be a an ultramafic rock coming out of the mantle, and it's full of these white veins with nice beautiful reaction halos around it. Those white veins are carbonate. And when you hear the word carbonate, you think CO2 sequestered into a mineral. That's what carbonate is. It's magnesium carbonate or calcium carbonate. You basically take a cation, a positive ion, and you mix it with a carbonate or a carbon anion, CO something anion, and you form a mineral. And when we talk about carbon sequestration, carbon storage, carbon capture, really what we're talking about is making minerals from carbon, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and making minerals. And this is an example, this is a photo that shows that this has been done before. Nature does this all the time, and there are companies, many, many, many, many companies that have been spun up in the last decade, two decades that are based on this reaction. You're taking rock, you're altering it, you're weathering it, and you're drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere and locking it up for thousands to many tens or millions of years in this mineral phase. So this is just one example. I think this is a I don't know. I love this example.
SPEAKER_01I do too. It's a totally natural process, right? And and then we've actually talked about this before of like, is there a way to do this at the surface then? Like take these, you know, mafic or ultra mafic rocks and and crush them up as as well as we can and sprinkle them out and just kind of like kitty litter massive parts of the surface of the earth to like speed the process up, add water, let it go, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And you know what, Chris? There are I would say dozens of companies that have been started that are tr attempting to do this at scale. You know, they're taking, well, what do you need? Okay, take some basalt or take some peridotite, some of the bigger. Okay, hold on.
SPEAKER_01Why basalt? Why these rocks? You know, these these rocks are just they're the most, or I should say, let me say it this way, they're the least stable at the surface of the earth. Yeah. You know, these are they're mafic, these minerals are high temperature, high, you know, minerals. And so what the when they're at the surface, minerals are happiest when they exist in the conditions which they formed. These are not at that, they're far away from that, and so they're they're chemically susceptible to this kind of weathering, to like taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_00What do you need? You need a cation that will bond with carbon to form a mineral. You I think people can kind of think of this. What are very common carbonate minerals? You've got calcite, C A CO3, right? That's a very common one. You've got the magnesium. Version of this or magnesium substitution that can fit in there, right? And you can you can do that in different proportions. So calcium and magnesium, sometimes iron, are the three that we kind of think of that form carbonate minerals really nicely. And so you need rocks that are high in magnesium, calcium, and iron. And those are usually mafic or ultra mafic rocks. And also pyroxines are very easy to break down, olivenes are easy to break down, they weather really quickly. So if you can think of a way to do that, that then there's probably a company that's been spun up already doing that. Whether it's taking basalt, crushing it up and spreading it on farmers' fields and then trying to measure how much carbon is being drawn down by that weathering process, because weathering goes faster if you crush it up more, or people saying, let's find this at depth, let's inject hot CO2 into it. And then this pro this reaction is actually a reaction that does this thing we're seeing in the rocks record in this photo, actually releases some heat too to it and has some volume change. So it could become a kind of a self-sustaining reaction in a way, depending on how you engineer it. So this is a space that geologists, geologists, I want to reiterate that are starting companies in this space. And I don't know, they're not all of them are gonna work, most of them are not gonna work, but some of them might, right? It's a startup company, some of them might, and that's kind of the important thing. And the answer, Earth has done this for us before. We just need to look at Earth. Absolutely, that's a really good point.
SPEAKER_01Hey, I'm a little curious though. You have not really called it out by name. You've you know, there's this carbon sequestration, using mafic and ultramafic rocks, crushing them up and and just kind of sprinkling them out and add water to it and let it rip. This is it's called this process though is called serpentinization. And you have a picture of serpentinite right here as your example of it. And this is a really important process. You know, if we can if we can do this at depth, where you add water to this rock and you create this secondary mineralization, but the oh, Jesse, there's also another really important byproduct, especially if this is done at depth, to the serpentinization. Am I right about this? Like the byproduct of hydrogen gas.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yes. Okay, hold that thought, Chris. I want to come back to that. Let's come back to that because I have one more example of uh the rocks kind of contained. The answers are in the rocks here. Is that if we're gonna talk about gypsum now? Just a brief because you you live you know on top of a gypsum mine, and I grew up in gypsum, too, I think, right? And we're gonna uh we're we're we're gonna um hopefully have an interview with Ollie Yagutz, a professor at MIT, who's who's been involved in this particular use case. But to do this carbon sequestration, you don't necessarily need ultravific rocks, you just need calcium or iron, right? To make it a lot of you need the you need the cations, yep. Need the cations, and gypsum is in one way to get this this stuff. And and you know, these people, it's a patent on MIT and a potentially startup company, and we're gonna talk to talk to Ali about this this process. So we'll go into it in more detail later. But you can look and think, oh, wait, gypsum, that might be easier to break down. Maybe there's there's some biologically mediated ways to to drive this reaction forward. But you just look again, it's looking at the rock record and saying, oh, this happened here in this setting. That's interesting. Maybe we can engineer that to happen more. And it's just it's just a beautiful story of looking at the rock, saying, This has happened. I'm observing it here. I understand the processes that went into it, I understand the implications of this reaction because all we're trying to do when we talk about carbon sequestration is really we're trying to drive weathering faster. That's kind of it.
SPEAKER_01Hey, one quick thing, Jesse. I think we should just point this out that gypsum can be used for this process because gypsum is calcium sulfate. So it has that skipped over that, yes. Got too excited.
SPEAKER_02Yep. Skipped right over it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's got water in it too. It's calcium sulfate.h2O, but it's got the calcium ion, that cation that's very important then in carbon sequestration, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's right. And you could, you know, produce all sorts of interesting byproducts with this as well. You brought up serpentinization and hydrogen production, Chris. This, oh man. There's like this that our our um a dean, Lee Cump, who we interviewed recently, said this in a in a meeting one time. He's like, you know what? That there's this serpentinization, it's the one reaction to rule them all. And I was like, oh, that's a great turn of phrase. One reaction to rule them all. And the question is, why is that? What is serpentinization? Serpentinization is taking ultramafic rock, creating serpentine minerals, serpentine group minerals. And we we've talked about some of these. They're the really greasy, sort of um fibrous minerals that occur in ultramacin. Asbestos like, yes. Great, great point. You take ultramafic rock and you weather it. You put water in there, and it does a lot of these kind of crazy reactions or potentially really useful reactions. So, first of all, we can sequester CO2, we make calcite, we carbonate this thing by adding, you know, the water goes in, it has some CO2 dissolved in it, it reacts with the calcium or the magnesium and forms carbonate veins in the rock. The other thing is it does is it can release H2 hydrogen. And Chris, this is an image. Okay, this is a little bit complicated. I don't think we need to go into all the details of this, but this was this came from a paper published in Science, it's kind of an opinion piece in 2022 years ago. And the title was Hidden Hydrogen. It posed a question that said hydrogen is this like potentially amazing energy source. We can burn it, it does not produce CO2 when you burn it. Basically, taking H2 and making H2O out of it, you know, you you can But it's it's dirty to make, you know, it's like dirty to create because you have to take water and break water apart to make the hydrogen. People are doing that. Uh energy utility companies are doing that with like uh wind farms or solar farms. They'll take the energy from those those renewables, use it to do this electrolysis, produce hydrogen gas, and then ship the hydrogen gas around, which you can then burn in various vehicles, etc. There's a whole sort of economy around that. But the proposal was wait, is there a lot of hydrogen that's being produced in the earth that we don't know about? And this came out in 2023, and it was amazing, Chris. I've never seen an entire the entire geological community start talking about one idea overnight as fast as this happened. Like this took everybody by storm. Every department, people from astrobiology communities to metamorphic petrologists to geophysicists were talking about geological hydrogen for a little bit. And it just kind of every it came on the scene because the idea was there are some seeps where there's a lot of hydrogen coming out of the earth. If there's more of that around, that would be really important to know. And it the realization was like, we don't understand how this is produced, how geological hydrogen is. Stories in the rocks. That's right. That's right. Stories in the rocks, but it does happen. And so this this image kind of shows several different ways by which hydrogen can pre-produce naturally in the in the earth. We can do it by alpha decay, basically, you know, uranium-thorium atoms are decaying away, and those alpha particles hit a water molecule, break it apart into H2 and O and O2, and the O binds with something else. But the main way to do it is the bottom one here where we have iron-rich, what do they call here, mantle rock. They think paritotite or you know, ultramafic or uh basaltic rock. Olivine-rich rocks, yes, yeah. Olivine-rich rocks. And if you take olivine, add water, these reactions, this serpentinization process will produce H2, will produce hydrogen gas. Now, we've always thought of hydrogen as being too it's too small. It'll escape, like it won't get trapped like hydrocarbons. You know, hydrocarbons get trapped because it's a bigger molecule, it can get stored in the earth. Hydrogen, we think, just kind of leaks out everywhere. That's their traditional thinking. But the question is wait, maybe it doesn't just seep out everywhere. Maybe it does get aggregated and concentrated in the earth in certain areas. The other thing is that microbes like to eat hydrogen, it's a very efficient energy source, so microbes kind of eat it. So we need to find these areas where microbes are not eating the hydrogen, and it's actually like we could actually harvest the hydrogen somewhere. Um and so it's just one of these fields that it's wide open to study. These fairy circles. Chris, have you you've heard of fairy circles, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I think do you do you think most people have?
SPEAKER_01Ah no, I don't think so. No, I don't I don't I don't I don't know though. I don't know. Hey, I one I want to go back though to something before we move on to this. I I want to um you know, you talked about like okay, it's serpentinization. Uh you add water to olivine, especially if it's hot and it's salty water. It's it's you know, it's very efficient at doing this. That's doing two things. It's it's removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because it's it's creating carbonates in the veins of the rock. So it's carbon sequestration, but it's also giving off as a byproduct hydrogen gas, H2. You know, and so you got both things that that are exciting to geoscientists going on with the same reaction, right? I just wanted to double-click on that.
SPEAKER_00Like that's that's so cool. And Chris, let's add one more thing to it. Why why would uh you know the dean of our college say this is the one reaction to rule them all? Well, what also happens is that turns out these ultramafic rocks have a lot of nickel in them, they have a lot of cobalt in them. So, what if you could inject a bunch of stuff down there, drive these reactions, produce hydrogen, capture CO2, and also get a bunch of critical minerals out of this stuff. I mean, that's why it's like one reaction to rule them all, because you basically take and there's a whole it's actually very complicated. Like these reactions are not simple ones. You you take a mix of minerals and you react them with water, you produce another mix of minerals and some gases and some byproducts. It gets really complicated, and you produce silica, so you can produce like pure quartz veins in these types of rocks here. You get a lot of magnetite forming, you get hydrogen gas, and so there's all sorts of different reactions going on here. But let's just say the people who study and understand serpentinization reactions are quite popular now because this is a very relevant um reaction to to um that's our future, maybe even, you know, um on this planet.
SPEAKER_01So Jesse, I have a question for you in your um your research world and your doctorary world. Um hold on, let me get my finger in the air, Chris.
SPEAKER_00Let me just uh put my nose up while I answer this.
SPEAKER_01I'm trying to think scale. And is there enough room to serpentinize all of these rocks and sequester the carbon and and you know create all this all this hydrogen and then potentially some of the rare earth elements as well, like you just last said. But is fracking a part of this process then? Like uh hydraulically fracturing rock to create more avenues and and space for this process?
SPEAKER_00It's Chris. This is uh this is the key question. I mean, you're I I don't know the answer to this. You're asking the key question, though. And there's a couple parts to it. First of all, we don't know. Like we don't know what the solution's gonna be here. So we we we just don't know. There's a lot of people raising a lot of money to do carbon sequestration at scale, and they're thinking that they could do it at scale. There's a lot of people who argue that it's it's not gonna be possible at scale, that you can't just spread basalt on farmland and draw down the amount of CO2 that we will need to draw down to solve climate climate change. Will it do a little bit? Yeah. Will it do the enough to matter? There are people who argue it will not, but it's it's an open, I think it's a wide open space. So to your question of like doing this at scale, that's like the question. Can you do this efficiently? Can you do any of this stuff we're talking about efficiently at scale in an economical, economically relevant way, is an open question. But I think that's important to consider. But when you comes to fracking-cause that's where my mind goes right away. Yeah, yeah. But if your fracking question is a really good one, and I think usually when we're dealing with these questions at depth, like if we want to take a bunch of peridotite that's down beneath, you know, the the Appalachian Basin or beneath the Michigan basin, Michigan underneath of Southwest Michigan is actually kind of highly prospective for hydrogen because the mid-continent rift basalt stuff is thought to be kind of down believe beneath the basin and in the basement rocks down there. So could you if you're gonna drill down whatever five kilometers and hit the basement underneath of the sediment layer in Michigan, and you're gonna want to drive these reactions, you're not gonna want to just inject it along one vein. You're probably gonna want to frack that rock and get more surface area to do more of the reaction more quickly. I think that's probably gonna be a solution set or gonna be involved in a lot of these potential solutions, if any of them end up really working well, I guess. Um, so so you're you're bringing up like really the question, and there's a lot of debate about this. And there's people on both sides of this aisle, especially when it comes to carbon sequestration and the and the potential sort of for for carbon sequestration to to really make an impact. It's probably gonna be we gotta we gotta throw a bunch of ideas out there, we gotta try everything, and then we'll see what works. Like most of it's gonna fail, and we gotta be okay with that.
SPEAKER_01So we don't know where the answers are yet, you know. That's it is exciting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and to me, that's the super exciting part. And I just like these things like looking at the rocks and these fairy circles, because someone go back to these fairy circles. Yeah, what are you bringing that up for? What do you yeah? So that because if you look at I mean this image, it kind of stood out um in this in this image and in this article about these fairy circles. And I've heard of fairy circles before and and seen them on maps, like to you know, lidar maps or topography. Is this in Africa? This one, uh I believe it is, or is this in the coastal Carolinas? I think it might be in Africa. But basically, the the argument is that in these fairy circles, which are these kind of weird slight topography changes, but vegetation changes, the argument was that these might be hydrogen seeps, areas where higher concentrations of hydrogen are coming out of the ground. And you know, maybe could be just replacing what the yeah, yeah. They're they're kind of seeping out of the soil, and for some reason, you know, it's the the hydrogen's not being consumed in the soil profile by bacteria, but is is actually kind of seeping out and changing the the plant life in that area. And there's a the huge um forget if it's North Carolina or South Carolina, in the coast in the Carolinas, there's these huge areas of ferry circles, they're just really all over the place. And so, you know, one of the arguments was that this might be a way to think about or sort of map hydrogen production at depth and think about where it might be occurring.
SPEAKER_01So is that still an open question? Uh like are these enriched in hydrogen seeping out? I mean, because that seems like that would be an easy thing to answer. Are these enriched?
SPEAKER_00It's a good question because I I think to me, I think that there's decent evidence that these are enriched, at least a little bit enriched, whether that's the primary cause of the ferry circle feature itself or not. Where the geological hydrogen is is an open question. Like the USGS just produced a I think it was a hydrogen prospectivity map of the United States, and it's at pretty coarse resolution. You know, it's like saying Michigan is kind of prospective, or you know, there's like not a ton of detail to this map because again, it's go back to our episode previously, a lot of the solutions are at depth. We've got a a lot of these reactions are happening down deep in the basement rocks at the bottom of a big sedimentary basin, and so you know, we don't know a lot about what's going on in there. So cool. So it's so it's a very cool, it's very cool stuff to think about. Very important.
SPEAKER_01I yeah, I I gotta say that doing this series that we're talking about right now has really been transformative and and the things that come up in my own classes. Oh, what about you? It's got you gotta be have the same kind of thing, don't you, or not?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm I'm I just kind of I I I have uh there's a new bounce to the you know the the the work day. It's like there's exciting problems to work on, and it's I'm certainly shifting you know what I'm interested in thinking about on a day-to-day basis and researching and talking about and learning about what papers I choose to read are very different now. You know, like I have very limited time to just read papers to learn, like I used to do. So now it's uh much more selective and be like, no, I'm gonna read this one that is about fluid flow in basins because that's actually really interesting now. Whereas five years ago, I would have never read that paper. I would have been reading about the early earth or something. You know what I mean? So yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_01That's right. So that's so interesting the way your career has kind of shifted. Um, I have uh uh like for some reason, my upperclassmen this year going heading to university next year. It's like a bunch of very, very, very good students that are heading into geoscience.
SPEAKER_00Uh okay, you got a nut like a good strong cohort kind of vibe going on.
SPEAKER_01They are just they are just top-notch, and it's exciting to think about you know what they're gonna do because some of these are are honestly, Jesse, some of these are the best that I've ever had, you know, and they're headed in this direction.
SPEAKER_00You know, our friend Andy and I in the same class.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I'm sorry, guys. I'm I'm sorry. You've met a cabon here, huh? Yeah, yeah. They're really, really, really good. In fact, no, you were at the HEF. You were at the HEF thing, getting inducted, and that was really cool. And I just had a thought, you know, one of my students that you were you met her there, Rachel.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah. I I I see I see that in her future, is like just and she's one of many. Uh I you know, I I maybe shouldn't single her out because there are just a bunch of other really awesome students coming out that are top-notch and they're heading in this direction. And I'm excited to kind of see you know where they go and what they do because I they're they're fired up about this kind of stuff. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Yep, yep. Go set the world on fire because it's there, it's open, and and it, you know, there's geology is a great space. I I kind of like the geosciences is maybe I think it it it's maybe not on the same playing field as biotech, but like biotech, right? You we have this idea of like, you know, if you go into advanced microbiology, you're gonna make some money, you're gonna be doing cool stuff, you're gonna be working for these big companies and doing really cool stuff and cutting edge research. And I think geoscience is headed in that direction, that you're gonna be able to have these opportunities, and that's gonna kind of become part of the cultural conversation. That, oh, you're a geologist or geoscientist. That's cool. You must be working on interesting, cool stuff that has some prestige associated with it, right?
SPEAKER_01Wouldn't that be nice to see that to fruition, Jesse? You know what, Chris? Oh, to finally it'll it'll happen just in time for you to die. Thanks. Yeah, thanks.
SPEAKER_00I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. All right. No, I I mean that's it's very that's a very glass half full kind of approach, but um yeah, I don't know. It might be true. It might be true. All right, all right.
SPEAKER_01Well, hey, Jesse, what's coming up next? I I think our to wrap this series up, at least this uh wrap it up for now, because I I don't think we're done, but for now we will be. And we're gonna come out with a fourth episode on just like how how do geoscientists think about the world? It's thinking about the world in a different sort of way. We we do approach things differently, I think. And and that's what we're gonna and kind of just wrap this all up with that idea.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's right. And I'm uh yeah, we'll we'll talk about sort of business creation and entrepreneurship and all that kind of stuff eventually at some point, too. But yeah, for now, the answers are in the rocks. The answers are in the rocks. We need to look at what nature's done for us, and uh that's a good playbook. Follow that playbook. I like that. That's a good place to be. Hey, you can follow us on all the social medias. We're at Planet Geocast. Download our Camp Geo mobile app. It's the first link in your show notes, lots of visual podcast series there to enhance your learning on all sorts of topics from the introductory courses to some geology of the national park series that we have on there. You can follow us on YouTube, leave a like, subscribe, or a comment. If you're on Spotify too, please leave us a comment and a like and a follow. We appreciate all of that. Cheers.