PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
Think Like a Rock Star - It's a Good Time to Be a Geologist
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Join us as we delve into a thought-provoking discussion on whether geologists truly think differently. From contemplating the scale of tectonic plates to grappling with deep time and dealing with complex, data-rich scenarios, this episode digs deep into the elements that shape a geologist's unique perspective. Featuring intriguing anecdotes, our class exercises, and even a claim about biologists that's bound to cause some tectonic shifts. This episode rocks! 🌍🔍
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Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we're talking about our amazing planet, how it worked, and why it matters to you. Please do. Yes. You lazy bum. Yeah. Oh, Christopher. Yes. Um I uh how you feeling about this? It's a good time to be a geologist thing that we started. I mean, we started a while ago recording these things. Um, how you feeling?
SPEAKER_00I feel good about it. Um, I I really do. Yes, I do. I absolutely do. I think about this a lot because uh I don't want to steer anyone wrong, and I have I have good relationships with my students and past and former or uh current and former. Current former, and and I have a lot of them that are you know graduating right now and and they're shipping off to various universities throughout the country, and a lot of them are going into geoscience, and I'm excited about that.
SPEAKER_01So uh Chris, on the we're at the um at the time of recording, we're kind of have seniors decided on their college path. It's the springtime-ish, early spring, but uh yeah, they've they know where they're going. How many are going to geology space like places or geology degrees, do you think? Of your current students that you have right now, who are seniors graduating?
SPEAKER_00I would say maybe almost ten.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That's a lot.
SPEAKER_01Where are they headed off? Any dependency?
SPEAKER_00All over the all over the place. Uh nobody I had you know this, we talked about it. I had one student that um got accepted to Penn State, but she can't afford to go.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the out of state, yeah.
SPEAKER_00The out of state tuition that absolutely got her. So anyway, um I've but all over the country. I have um a student going to school of mines in Colorado. I have one going to Colorado State, and I have a couple students going to Montana State and Michigan Tech and Grand Valley, and it's yeah, so they're they're spread out all over the place. Kind of cool. Yeah, that's very cool. Very cool.
SPEAKER_01Going places doing an exciting time. Exciting time for you. It is uh and for you. Um this episode in our series is uh I don't know what the title is gonna be, but it's about okay, the origin of this idea. And I think this is not a new idea. This is this is there's a deep literature on this, but this struck me, this idea that geologists just think differently, that the the geological training you get in just you don't need advanced degrees, just an undergrad geology degree trains people to think differently and uniquely compared to other sciences. That struck me actually a couple years ago, when um I was at uh a friend's wedding, and there was somebody else there who was a geologist, and so being the only two geologists at the wedding, you know, we got into the mother of the bride, like was grabbed me as like, Oh, you're a geologist, I gotta go bring you to meet Uncle So and so. And so I met Uncle So-and-so, and turns out this guy runs some massive hedge fund or some financial entity that he started, but he's a geologist by training, and so we're kind of talking about this, and he's like, I love hiring geologists, they just think differently. And I was like, Oh, this is an this is amazing. You know, he got his undergrad degree, he got his master's in geology, went and worked in the oil patch in the North Sea, then went back to get an MBA at like, you know, Stanford at the perfect time to get an MBA at Stanford and got into Silicon Valley, you know, venture and all that kind of stuff. And and did not do geology stuff anymore, but was like, I love hiring geologists. And so that kind of always that just stuck, you know, it was one of those earworm things, like, oh, that's interesting. You know, we talked about why. And he was just saying that geologists just think differently. And this this idea has been mirrored by many of our alumni who go out into non-geology things, and many of them entrepreneurial, as we'll talk about in later episodes, but come back to this idea that geologists think differently, that the training trains you to think differently, and maybe there's some self-selection that people who think differently are kind of attracted to this field. Um, but there's a couple, yeah. I'm curious on your your your take on that.
SPEAKER_00Okay, I have one. I think the title should be hot takes with Chris Bullheis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this this should be a like a weekly series in your classroom, Hot Takes with Mr. Bullheis, where you kind of sit down and pull out the microphone and give a hot take on something. I would love that.
SPEAKER_00That's a that's a good idea. Um well, I think the title should be Do geologists think differently? Because I don't know, honestly, I don't know if I'm a hundred percent sold. I don't know if it's our training that makes us the way we are, or whether it's just that our the way we were born and and we kind of like migrated to this direction because our mind is wired that way. I don't I don't know. I don't know.
SPEAKER_01I'm not a not a hundred percent convinced. I agree with you completely that this there could be a lot of this is like nature versus nurture. There's a lot of I'm not sure which one's which, because there might be a bunch of self-selection here that you kind of people who who have this kind of mindset are attracted to the field of geology. But I do think that the field of geology, Chris, you and I teach the intro college level, the first intro level class. I talk about a lot of these topics we're gonna cover in a way that I know other sciences, their intro-level classes, don't touch on these really mind-bending themes that we we kind of beat into students from the first class and keep talking about for all the other classes.
SPEAKER_00Uh that's true. Uh so I have two things that I want to say. First of all, we're gonna approach this from you know what makes geology, a geoscience, study in geoscience different. And we're gonna talk about scale, we're gonna talk about deep time, we're gonna talk about the complexity with some of the things that we have to tackle in the field. We deal with rich, very complicated data sets, and then our decision making is is different as well. And we have to deal with things are not black and white often in geoscience, and so we have to deal with this uncertainty and make decisions under that umbrella. And then we think, at least like, and the you're the first one that brought this to me, and I I had never really thought about it this way that that we kind of think humans tend to think discontinuously, but geoscientists think continuously, and and we're gonna talk about what we mean by that. Yeah, so and that's kind of where we're heading in this episode.
SPEAKER_01And this, Chris, I just want to preface this that uh we're totally open to being wrong about this or having disagreement and and continue this is an evolving conversation. Um, I think these are thought-provoking ideas that are these are not new, but we're gonna frame them in a way that I think is is important because the geosciences, as we're talking about, are a really in-demand skill set and are gonna be valuable to society, newly relevant to society in a way that they maybe haven't been for a generation or two. And I think this is a really important time to attract people who think along these lines, who are and who are open to tackling who who want the challenge of tackling big societal problems in creative and new ways. And I think geoscience is a great way to do that if you like thinking along these lines, right?
SPEAKER_00And so I have I'm sure you see this all the time too. But I have some students that are very intelligent, they're good at school, but they s really struggle with geoscience as a as a topic, as a as a course, because they think black and white, they think in this oh man, very regimented kind of way, and uh it's very uh it's an interesting thing that they like really struggle with a lot of the things that we get into, not from a philosophical standpoint, it's just like they have a hard time processing this. Yeah, they they cannot wrap their minds around it.
SPEAKER_01Chris, this is one of the great struggles for me. And I talk about it in the first lecture in class, I talk about the second lecture, I talk about it almost every single day in class, and the students probably get sick of me talking about because I get a lot of engineers who take my geoscience class for accreditation, and so I a lot of it I say, listen, in geology, there are rules of thumb and rarely rules, because I cannot give you an equation that solves this world, this planet, perfectly. And I think a lot of the things we're gonna talk about here have to do with okay, let's let's start going through this because this is a good time. The scale, the scale that we deal with. I'm gonna turn to image number one here, just an image. This is an image of the West Coast of the United States. You can see Vancouver Island there. We're looking up the cascades. Love it. It's amazing, right? The scale. This is the reason we chose this image, is because we are looking at a subduction zone system here, which we talk about in the intro level class. You probably talk about it in your ninth grade Earth Science class, a subduction zone, right?
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, that was that's why we did the whole series on so you think you know plate tectonics. Exactly right. I began the unit, and a freshman rolled his eyes at me and said, Oh, I know everything about plate tectonics. Oh, wait, what? No, you don't. What are you talking about?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. This thing is thousands of kilometers long, and this is a small one, right? This is we're talking about tectonic plates moving across the surface of the earth and diving down into the mantle. The scale is enormous. And Chris, we cannot replicate. I think part of the difficulty and part of what makes geology unique, and this is not a new thought. People have talked about this before. It's a historical science, it's a descriptive science. We can't replicate in a lab. We cannot isolate an experiment that can replicate plate tectonics in the lab. We can't do it. We don't have the ability, we don't have the scale, we don't have the a time to do it. We'll talk about that next. We just can't run a model and do a we can't do a control experiment, you know, a control group, a testing group. We can't do hypothesis testing in like the classic, you know, seven steps of the scientific method or whatever you whatever gets taught, you know, in the in the basic scientific methodology. We can't do that. And actually, it's too complicated for our even our supercomputer simulations can't really simulate plate tectonics that well, even at a really fundamental level. Like the models are okay, but they're certainly not right. They're nowhere close to being right when it comes to the scale of the things that we deal with in geosy.
SPEAKER_00You're absolutely right, Jesse. You think about the mechanisms for plate tectonics, and in any intro-level textbook that you may dive into, you're gonna see that the main mechanism for plate tectonics is convection. And there's something really wrong about that, you know. It's like I I I can't put my thumb on it. I just it's not the whole story, it's not even maybe most of the story. It just doesn't do it for me. Um, and and you're right.
SPEAKER_01Wow, and uh and it's an interesting thing, you know. Like, okay, think about okay, how how does a how does the lithosphere break? We have tectonic plates with broken lithosphere all over the place. How does that happen? It doesn't happen spontaneously in models, right? People have to, you know, when you're making a model, you have to induce a weak zone and say, put a weak zone here and then it'll break. But you so the the that that's not a that's not a dig on people who do these geodynamic simulations. It's just the it's the scale of the thing, it's a the scale of the thing problem. So we end up being this historical science, which is descriptive. We look back, we collect data, and then we tell stories about that data. It's very hard to do hypothesis testing in the way that is outlined in like you know, your seventh grade science class that says here's the seven steps of the scientific method or whatever, right? So that is a strength, not a weakness, I think, sometimes. Um, is one of the things.
SPEAKER_00All right. This is I don't know if you're gonna latch on to what I'm saying here or not. You have no idea what I'm gonna talk about.
SPEAKER_01Because that's not unique to this conversation, but uh yes, that's true. Okay, but I love I love when you start out with Jesse, I gotta say something here. It gets me it perks me up, it gets me fired up.
SPEAKER_00Well, when you think about scale, how many times have you been in the mountains? Like deep into the mountains, and you look up and you you you think you see your path. Where do you gotta go? And then you get a little bit further down the road, a little bit further down the path, or a little bit further up the mountain, and everything changes. So I'm just like when I think about scale, I think of that too. You know, when you're when you're in the mountains and you look and and you know, something seems like it's so close, like you can just reach out and put your palm over it, and then you can't. It takes you an hour and a half to get there, you know, and then it looks totally different when you do get there. The scale of geology and geoscience is is I think of that too when I think of scale and wrapping your head around all of it. It's the scale of the planet, which is a big thing.
SPEAKER_01Um, and it's a difficult thing, it's a complicated thing. I really like that. It's a good analogy, you know. You know, oh that mountain. I remember, I mean, anytime you drive out around big mountains out west, you're like, oh yeah, we'll just we always do this when we're together. Do you remember this? Is that mountain any closer than when we talked about it three hours ago? No, it's not. Do you remember with this?
SPEAKER_00We were sitting, we were in my truck and we're driving through, we're driving into Colorado, and we put five bucks in a pot, each of us, and we're like, How long do you think it's gonna take us to get to that pass? That's five minutes, ten minutes, uh 30 minutes, and nobody none of us were right.
SPEAKER_01I mean, we were all off by like an order of magnitude about that. That was the toughest part. We're like way off. Oh man. So, yes, the scale is is the first thing. And again, we talk about we start in on this intro-level class. The other thing is time, and Chris, this image does not really convey time immediately, but these rocks are complicated rocks. There's billions of years between in the formation age time difference between the three. I mean, you can see three or four rock units here. You can see this banded nice on the bottom, this pink one that's squished in the middle, and then a kind of a folded sediment-looking one with pigmented folding. Yeah, very toothpaste. There's billions of years of history between different time differences between these rocks, and they're all in one outcrop. And so that hurts, that still hurts my head. When I go to the city, but it hurts it in such a good way, though.
SPEAKER_00Like, I don't I think you're giving that a negative connotation. I do not like that.
SPEAKER_01Well, I do feel negative about it sometimes. I'll be honest.
SPEAKER_00Like, sometimes, like, this is painful to try and think about, and yeah, but there's pain in a good way, you know. Um, and I think about deep time that way. Sometimes when you are, you know, contemplating this and and you get a hold of it, just or at least the best we can. Your your mind grapples with this and and it does turn your stomach a little bit, but I think it does it in all the right ways. I just I love that when I can when I can touch it, you know, like mentally. It doesn't happen all the time.
SPEAKER_01I do agree with that. It is a it is one of the it's one of the pleasures of the job and of being a geologist at the same time as it can be frustrating at times. But the the time involved, Chris, I mean I don't know what is when was the first time you like had trouble with the ages involved? Because I think for me, we often gloss over time, like the numbers, you know, oh 1.0 billion years. Okay, sure, go move on. And then trouble in what sense?
SPEAKER_00Hold on. Are you talking like a religious standpoint? No, no, no.
SPEAKER_01You say trouble, like what do you mean? Just like um, you know, a deep recognition, or trouble meaning like thinking, oh, this is really hard to contemplate. Like I need to I need to think about this more, or something along those lines is kind of what I mean by trouble. Being struck by it.
SPEAKER_00I don't know if I can put a finger on the the first time that I had this, but I I can say this though that being at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I had that. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Well, okay, the one that stood out to you then. That's great. Yeah, yeah, that that's perfect.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Okay. Um and sometimes you know, sitting out in a field in the Tetons in in the valley, and looking at Mount Moran, and looking at you know, the flathead sandstone sitting on top of the granitic gneiss, it's beautiful. And then you just you contemplate that and it's I I'm with you on that one, Chris.
SPEAKER_01The time thing, I it's more um I've definitely thought about it and you know been worried about it sitting on the oldest some of the oldest rocks in the world, the Acasa Nice complex.
SPEAKER_00But that's such an interesting way to put this, Jesse. Sorry to interrupt you, but worried, what do you like? I I mean I don't know what you mean.
SPEAKER_01Trying to grasp what four billion years is. It's a hard thing to grasp, makes the mind hurt. It's a uh yeah, it's a spiritual um it takes a bit of guts to try and consider that, I think a little bit. You know what I mean? Or at least it's and so uh but it but it's more impactful for me, Chris. It not you know, sitting there on a rock, uh really boring gray nice thinking, wow, this is really old. It's more impactful thinking like the Appalachians, you know, standing on a ridge and looking out and thinking about the the folded rocks that I'm standing on and when they were folded and then when they were deposited, you know, 300 million years ago. It doesn't matter the the time the numbers involved, it's just all of it's super old, all of it's kind of beyond the grasp of of human record. It's like thinking about what does a million dollars look like? I have no idea.
SPEAKER_00I mean, you know, it's hard to try. I try to right. I try to do this. I try to come up with analogies or or like comparisons, I should say, maybe. If you stack a billion quarters, how how high is that stack? Or you know, you want to string a billion paperclips. How long is that string of paper clips together? You know, like I do this individual. I try to do this with me. It it maybe helps me realize just you shouldn't throw around words like a billion flippantly, which we do all the time. And was that a pointed comment at the younger generation, Chris?
SPEAKER_01That might be. That might be maybe. Yeah, yeah. That was fun. I do that. Oh, how many were there? I don't know, a billion of them. Oh, really? A billion? Okay, yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_00I'm sure there were day. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Uh so I you know, but I do I do try to I do things like that with with my students and and my own contemplative exercise. So exactly.
SPEAKER_01Okay, back to our point. You're doing this, you're you're you're pushing your high school students who are taking high school of geology to think about deep time in this way, to actually think about it and actually try and visualize what that means. So, again, geologists think differently from the outset. Well, again, I want to emphasize this. We start this really early on in the process. The other thing that we do is okay, so we've gone through the scale of the thing. We're talking about tectonic plate movements, we're talking about time that's in millions, tens of millions, billions of years. We are also dealing with a lot of complexity, and the complexity here, Chris. This is an image from my field work up in the Arctic coast, and this is a toothpaste rock, right? You walk across these things, and you and I have walked across glaciated, ice-scoured rocks before. We've also walked across, you know, moss-covered, lichen-covered rocks where you can't see anything, and you're kind of like scrounging for a good outcrop. And every once in a while, Chris, most of my scientific life has been scrounging around glacially scoured uh scrounging around lichen-covered rocks, looking for a little window into the outcrop. And then we go up to places like the Arctic coast here, which they're all ice scoured, and you actually are like, ooh, I'm like, oh, cover that back up. I don't, I want to be able to ignore this complexity. Like, this is too complicated to think about. And it's a nightmare. It is in high school when you're exercise on Lake Superior. That's right. Yeah. Where you, I mean, looking back, it's not that complicated of an exercise. Like, you can work through this stuff, but it strikes you as like, oh, this is I'm seeing too much here. It's laid bare. I I but you're right.
SPEAKER_00I mean think about that, Jesse. You got 18, 17 year, 18-year-old kids on a on an outcrop on a beach in on Lake Superior. There are probably 10 to 12 different things going on there, all different ages. That's a that's a lot. That's a lot of stuff.
SPEAKER_01And it's big. It's a lot to work out, and that's actually one of the simpler outcrops you'll find in the world. I mean, it's not it's not that simple, but it's my point.
SPEAKER_00Well, I wouldn't take them here, Jesse. Like, I mean, my gosh, you do that, everyone run kicking and screaming.
SPEAKER_01I know you well, we know you nobody's figured this out. You know, this is gonna take a couple PhD students worth of time to even like start to scratch the surface of figuring out the what's gone on up here, right? And so this is and again, Chris, you're showing your students something complicated like that in high school in geoscience. And and then when we're doing research, you know, PhD student of mine and and two, you know, professors were going up here and banging around looking at these rocks are like, wow, this is really, really complicated. And it takes a lot of effort to work out the geological story here. But that's part again of this complication, does not it doesn't diminish when you look closer. It actually sometimes gets worse when you look closer. Like we just I just uh I 100% agree with that. Yeah. My my PhD students just got zircons out of these rocks here, and we're looking at images of the zircons. These zircons are incredibly complicated. One mineral grain. There's a bunch of different growth zones, there's bright rims, there's altered domains inside of it. So even when you zoom in really detailed, it's still really complicated. And this complexity requires a nimble mind or it trains you to think nimbly to kind of have come up with hypotheses and chuck them away really quickly. Come up with a new hypothesis, throw it away really quickly. And you know, we've talked about this with your field camp experience, right? Like you end up being like, I don't know where to go, come up with some theory about the next outcrop, and come up with a really simple theory so you can throw it away really quickly when you look at the next outcrop, right? And then come up with a new theory. And I think that trains.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I I think that this requires also is taking the big and making it small.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's true. That's a really good point. And taking the complicated and making it simple. We have to simplify it down because we just can't deal with the complexity. And I know there are other scientific fields that do this too. There's no doubt there's other scientific fields that do this, of course. But I think this is you maybe unique in that it happens right away. We kind of throw this complexity at students pretty quickly. Just this is a complicated system with a bunch of different stuff going on. So that's number three is complexity. Another one, Chris, rich data. Rich data, rich data data sets.
SPEAKER_00Everybody loves data. Uh we love data. Except except uh teenagers today, they do not like do not like data.
SPEAKER_01They do not like data. How is the um how is the what was the exercise you're gonna put together? Oh, I know what the yeah. Um phase diagrams, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna I'm gonna do that next year. Here's the deal. I I am running out of like I'm out of time. Yes, we take our exam through GVSU uh in two weeks, and I'm not done. I uh you know, I'm not so I just have to get through stuff right now and make sure that they are ready and know what they're doing. But next year I'm I'm beginning with phase diagrams. I'm gonna incorporate that into my labs. Absolutely. I can't. I'm I'm gonna do it. I I believe in it.
SPEAKER_01What do you think or why? I don't know how to ask this question. Why do they struggle more with data now? Or why do they avoid data more than let's say my generation? What led you to make that comment?
SPEAKER_00Um boy, I think that's a that's a loaded question. Um but I think they're not any less intelligent or any I'm not ripping a L for them. They're they're amazing. But I don't think that they have to deal with it. Everything is um very visual, it's right at their fingertips. They can get I think it comes down to that that they're not exposed to it nearly as often. Like, hey, here's a data set, interpret this. What does this mean?
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay. That's interesting.
SPEAKER_00Okay. For whatever reason, I don't know what that reason is, but it's I think it's a lot like math, uh, in terms of my math background when I was a kid, uh, you know, we had to do everything old school, of course. And but that means that I have a fundamental man. You're dang right. But I do have a fundamental my background is based in I had to do it. You know, I and and kids nowadays they do it differently, and I don't think that they understand it as well. I okay, that makes sense. You know, I don't know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I think there's a visualization aspect too, maybe that is um required for data. So this data, this is a this is I think you're just showing off with this data set right here. This is this is not my data. This is not my data set at all. But this is just something that this is just something that geoscientists deal with. I mean, this is this is drill hole data. So these are, I mean, this is just a resource model for some deposit somewhere, but it's just uh like you can see the little drill hole, the little straws sticking into the ground where there's like I don't know if it's gold concentrations or copper concentrations or something on here. But this is just showing one aspect of a deposit. You can map when we get drill hole data, we get mineralogy, we get alteration type, we get elemental chemistry, but not just for one element. When we get a rock, we measure the chemistry of a rock, we get 10 major elements, and we probably get anywhere between 20 and 50 trace elements in there, and all that from one sample. Every sample, we get that much data, and so we're dealing with this complicated multidimensional data, and that's just geochemistry. Think about seismic data, Chris. I mean, these seismometers collect movement in three axes all the time, and they're collecting massive amounts of movement, and you got a bunch of seismometers put out, they're collecting data from not just one event, but a whole bunch of different events. It gets we are a data-rich field, and that's a good thing because you know, again, we're doing this kind of storytelling. We can't really model the earth, and so we can't do really controlled experiments on the earth, and so it's good that it's data-rich, but it it also means we um, and this is one thing that I try and do in my research group, whether you're an undergrad researcher or getting a PhD in my research group, we try and get into really complicated data because it's it I think it once you can learn how to visualize and manipulate and think about complicated data, then you can just do that over and over. Like then there's no limits to what you can kind of think about or what kind of data you can tackle. And it it for me personally, it took me till the later stages of my PhD where I was actually able to really do that well, um, to my detriment. I I should have learned it earlier, I should have gotten comfortable with it earlier, and I just didn't. So it took me a long time to get to that stage.
SPEAKER_00It's um I don't know, like an analogy, but I I remember climbing Devil's Tower and and I could I couldn't find the handhold. You know, just like I couldn't find it. And I'm standing on a little flake, my toe is just on this, you know, little flake of rock, and my calves are starting to quiver. And you know, I'm like, I can't stay here much longer. And and the move was in front of me the whole time. I just I I needed to look at it just a little bit longer, and data's that way. You just need to you need to just uh be patient with the data, you have to stare at it, and it begins to form, it just begins to make sense.
SPEAKER_01I have two questions. I have actually one question for you, Chris. But first a comment that is exactly right. You just have to stare at it longer. I remember during my PhD, the the moment it kind of clicked for me was I was um I had a bunch of you know trace element and major in trace element geochemistry from rocks that I'd collected in the Acostanice complex, and they're spanning 500, 600 million years of history, so a bunch of different ages, a bunch of different chemistry. And I just started making plots like X versus Y, silica versus vanadium. Doesn't matter which elements, I'll just make plots. And I then I found one that was really there was an amazing correlation, it was like super really well correlated, and I didn't really know why. So I was like, Oh, this is really interesting. So I started thinking about it and I was like, oh, this is really cool. There's like tungsten is correlated to I don't know, something else. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it turns out so it's tungsten versus something else, just in concentration. And I was just like, oh, this is really interesting. Okay, cool. Something I can dig my teeth into a little bit. And it it turns out that it's just a contamination thing. So we crushed all the rocks in tungsten carbide uh thing. And this is very common that, like, if you crush it in a mill, you get a little bit more tantalum and tungsten because they're highly correlated because you just crushed them in this mill. Um, but it took me a while to figure that out, but then I was like, oh wait, that's how I do it. That's how I find real geological correlations is just like plot it, think about it, plot it, think about it. And so on to my question. What we do now in my research group is a lot of coding. I mean, not really coding, but we do high-level coding.
SPEAKER_00Do you have a question coming my way out of this? I do out of all this mess.
SPEAKER_01How much coding, how much coding happens at the high school level?
SPEAKER_00And it depends. Some of them do a fair amount. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's AP computer science and and okay. These kids are incredible. Like to what to what end?
SPEAKER_01Like, what are they doing?
SPEAKER_00Whatever that's a that's such a it's such a broad spectrum of you know to what end they do. I mean, some of these young students are just absolutely incredible and and do incredible things at that level. Yeah. Do you yeah do you do anything?
SPEAKER_01Like data manipulation type stuff and have them manipulate the data or plot, you know, give them data, plot it, and and or not, or do you kind of give them ready-made plots of data?
SPEAKER_00No, I like I I do this with geochronology, actually. It's uh it's an activity that I wrote, but uh I yeah, they have to do uh an isochron plot. Oh, okay. And yeah, and and and normalize the data and and figure out uh how much initial daughter isotope was present in my fictitious sample.
SPEAKER_01Okay, gotcha.
SPEAKER_00But they have to walk it back and tell me, yeah, they have they absolutely, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay. All right.
SPEAKER_00I so I did that. I I I wrote that and uh that's one of the I'm proud of that. Like I you know, like I it was so cre well to me it was creative, you know.
SPEAKER_01I'm not absolutely no to make them do something like that, absolutely. But it's good that they like get their hands dirty with it, because I to me I didn't learn anything until I had to like get my hands dirty with it, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00And and but that's the interesting thing, is is that when if you throw them 10 minutes at this and they're like Mr. Boyce, I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm like, well, you haven't stared at the data long enough. You haven't you haven't, you know, so I'm very hands-off. I'm like, don't talk to me right now. Like, just do your thing, right? And and they have 70 minutes to do this, and by the by the time the it's all said and done, they've worked it out. And it's a really good exercise from that standpoint. Just like be persistent. Scientists, geoscientists requires just flat out dogmatic persistence.
SPEAKER_01Chris, you get the Segway award, man. That was a good this is a good segue into the the fifth the fifth trait or the fifth thing that I think makes geologists or helps geologists think differently is decision making under the face of I'll show this image again, massive complexity. And I think Chris, you just said it like it takes so much persistence and it takes just doing something. Like this decision making thing, I'm gonna I showed this image or we showed this image to to not really this is this is not really a complicated decision, but it just shows what I'm talking about. Like this is this was a I don't know $40,000 field excursion up to the Arctic coast. We landed up here, we had clear weather day.
SPEAKER_00Oh my gosh, Jesse. I think I know where you're going with this. We have what do you take? What do you take stuff back to the lab?
SPEAKER_01And we can only take like maybe a couple buckets of rocks. We have a limited amount of time in the outcrop. We're never coming back here. Probably that's the assumption you work on. I'm never walking across these outcrops again. We spent so much money getting up here. We have so this one grant. This is my this is his PhD thesis. We have to get good samples for his thesis. What do you take? You can't take all of it, right? And and you got to make that decision pretty quickly because you only got a couple hours. And it's also like we landed here, and you also have to make the decision of like, where do I go first? Do I go right, left, or right left?
SPEAKER_00I would do cartwheels on the rock.
SPEAKER_01Well, of course, you at some point you have to be like, okay, we have to stop posing in front of these beautiful rocks. But what samples do you take, right? I mean, and um it's a bit of a silly thing, but I actually kind of mean it too. Like it's not an easy question, but you just have to make a decision. You just have to do something, you just have to you can't get frozen by indecision here. You just have to start grabbing samples, and I think that's really a valuable skill set. I'm curious what your thoughts are on this, Chris, but I think that's a really valuable skill set that again we kind of it it goes to like what outcrops do you look at? You give these students this complicated exercise on the shores of Lake Superior where we get 12 events, and you say you just kind of say, Here's the different things, go figure it out. Students have to decide where do they go look. Do they do they stand right there or probably not? They walk somewhere, but where do you walk? Where do you figure it out? Like those little decisions, you just have to start doing something, and I think that's a really valuable skill set.
SPEAKER_00My take on it is a little well, a lot different, actually. It's uh you know, we have uh geoscientists and uh geologic engineers that are doing they're they're mining and they're taking stuff out of the earth and and that can be a dirty process, it can you know, all that kind of stuff, but there's a lot of uncertainty in that. And my mind goes there, I guess, is what I'm saying, is is that uh they're making decisions under a lot of pressure. You have pressure actually because you have financial pressures, you have um pressure to you know to not make a mistake, to not go the wrong direction, or or to you know, to to not make it dirty and uh you know what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. There's just so much going on with that, uh which is why it's so important to me, Jesse, that I this is not a this is a part of my job that I don't take lightly when these are things that we need to do, we need these resources and so on, but you want to put the best people in those positions, those are important positions, and and so that's a part of my job that I take seriously is that these are young minds or young people that are turned on to geology and they're gonna go out and do important things, right?
SPEAKER_01And I think Chris, the uh it brings to mind um one of my undergrad uh professors uh worked in oil and gas for a little bit before becoming a professor. And I remember saying that you know, you're making, I forget what the numbers were, let's say five million dollars to drill a hole, and uh, you know, the chance of success or the uh the superstars were 10%. One in ten was the superstars of picking the hole, you're right, and so that you know that's worse than baseball. You know, that's like really low chance of success. And so you but you have to make decisions, you have to drill holes in the ground to find more. And uh, and I think you're right, like we need decision makers, but we also can't expect perfection because when you are making decisions up here, we did not at we were collecting these samples, we had half a day, we did not collect the perfect sample set, but we got a good enough sample set and a pretty good sample set, right? So it I think that is part of the process, is like it's not gonna be perfect, but you just have to start doing stuff and making decisions. I think geologists, geoscientists, again, we kind of start training that from an early age. So, Chris, if we can move to this continuous discontinuous mind thing to kind of wrap up this episode, because I think this really framed it to me really well. And in this discontinuous mind, this is this comes from a Richard Dawkins essay. And the title is The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind. And basically the idea is that humans, to Dawkins thinking, humans evolved, and but humans are naturally inclined to think discontinuously, to think in binaries, like on off, yes, no. The savanna, you get up and run or you stay and fight. There's two options, right? You set up camp here or you don't, yes or no. And I think to me, Chris, this is something that came out of a con. I was listening to a podcast episode about this too. That was that was basically the idea was we should teach, instead of teaching calculus in col in in high school for AP calculus or AP, you know, college math, should not be calculus, it should be statistics. Like we really need to understand probability and risk a lot better in our lives. Kind of similarly to this concept, like the human mind, we want to know yes or no, is the water safe or unsafe? When really it's a spectrum, right? And we want yes or no answers. We want high or low, we want safe or unsafe. And and this Richard Dawkins essay was kind of highlighting that and and all the societal problems with that. But I I think all of these things we've talked about makes the geological mind is much more continuous. We are comfortable in this broad range of possible outcomes with different risks and different uncertainties associated with them because of all the things we've kind of talked about. Like we're okay with uncertainty, we're okay with imperfection, at least more okay. I wouldn't say naturally.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but you know what, Jesse? This this makes us this the outcasts of the scientific community. In a bit, in a bitter way, yeah, exactly right.
SPEAKER_01What what what what scientific discipline do you think is most similar in this? Because I I almost feel like economists are kind of similar to geologists. Like the economy is such a big, complicated organism. I there's a quote by I think Richard Feynman that said uh something is something about um the economy is really complicated. Just imagine trying to do physics if electrons had feelings, and I was like, oh, that's a really good quote. And um, so I I don't know. What do you think is similar or most similar or most different? I'm not sure which way to go on that one. And we'll ignore biology because that's just the stuff that grows on that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I think I think for sure physics, especially theoretical physics. You get into astrophysics and uh I think it's very similar.
SPEAKER_01I think you're right. The astronomers astronomers deal with very similar the the scale they're dealing with, the complexity, the fact that it's a lot of observables, very few reliable models. I I think that's quite similar in many ways. So yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, and you know, we got to get our friend Jackie Faraday on podcast again and talk to her about. I just saw this thing, uh, a news article. When was it? Something about brown dwarfs, and it made me think of Jackie because she's like a brown the brown dwarf expert.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, they um they just spotted a rogue, a rogue planet.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was it. It was a planet with two brown dwarf stars. It was it was like a Tatooine-like planet. That was yeah, that's right. That's the one I was seeing. Yeah, I know. We're gonna get Jackie back on the podcast. Thinking of speaking of uh continuous minds, Jackie's a continuous mind, that's for sure. She is for sure. Yeah, yep, yep. Um well, Chris, that's kind of a wrap for these ideas.
SPEAKER_00I think so. Uh the so like we need to end uh on this, I think. Do geoscientists actually think differently? Um I I still so I think talking through all this stuff that maybe I talked myself into thinking that we'd actually do. I I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Um if you have a thought, hit us up. Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01Please hit us up. I I I and we're and it this is not a this is not a like we're better than everybody else because we think differently. Take. I uh this is just a this is just an observation. Just an observation, and everybody's you know, it's gonna take all kinds, you know, to to solve some of the problems we have facing our societies. And um, and I don't think the geological mind should be discounted, but it shouldn't certainly shouldn't be propped up above uh, you know, other ways of thinking. It's just it's just an observation about what might make geolog geoscientists unique um and valuable. Might be propped up above the biologists, just a little bit above the biologist at the end, but they're at the bottom of the biggest. Our dads need to they need to get taken down a peg, you know. The scum that that just sits on top of the rocks. Right on. I did did I tell you I had a a student who um in the reviews in my like you know, the yearly the the end of semester reviews or something, left a comment that was like, I mean, I don't know why Professor Ramik's so mad about biology. It's kind of weird because I kept making a bunch of jokes at the expense of biologists.
SPEAKER_00Uh well, if he would have showed up every day, he would have known. I know you're you know that's quite I'm sure you incorporated in that you have a dad that's a biology.
SPEAKER_01Of course I did. But you know, at first I the first day costumes, I was like, all right, what everybody's majors? You know, a bunch of engineers, a bunch of civil engineers, but a few geolog, like gonna be geologists, some biologists, etc. So the biologist raised their hand and I started going into biology throughout the semester. But anyway, I thought that was kind of weird. I don't know why Dr. Rabbik has such a problem with biology. It's a little weird. I don't know. That's good stuff. Anyway, all right, Chris. Hey, that's a wrap. You can follow us on social media, we're at Plant GeoCast. Download our Camp GeoMobile app, first link in your show notes. You can you can get a continuous mind on the Camp GeoMobile app just uh listening to all of our content we have there, Vigo Podcast series. You can leave us a like, review, comment, subscribe, follow us on YouTube or Spotify, and shoot us an email. We have a contact us link on our website, plantgeocast.com. Cheers.