Welcome to Earth on the Rocks, a show where we get to know the person behind the science over drinks. Each episode will highlight a new scientist in the earth and atmospheric sciences to learn more about their journey, what interests them, and who they are outside of their science.
Host: Shelby Rader
Producer: Cari Metz
Artwork: Connor Leimgruber
Board Operator: Kate Crum, Betsy Leija
Funding for this podcast was provided by the National Science Foundation grant EAR-2422824.
Hi, folks. Welcome back to Earth on the Rocks, where we get to learn about a new person each week over drinks. I'm your host, Shelby Rader, and with me today is Dr. Julia Kelson. Julia, welcome.
Julia:Thanks, Shelby.
Shelby:Since we're getting to know you over drinks, what's your drink of choice?
Julia:Oh, it's usually a a nice crisp piney IPA, But this week, it's apple cider since it's kinda seasonal.
Shelby:Yeah. Today is a good day for apple cider. Do you have a favorite IPA?
Julia:Well, my favorite is called Pliny the Elder. Mhmm. It's an IPA from the Russian River Brewery. It's like a nice balanced IPA, and I think part of it is that I started to enjoy it when I was first drinking beer when I turned 21. So it's sort of an old favorite.
Shelby:Yeah. It's good to have some sentimental Yeah. Memories with those sorts of things. So, Julia, you do a lot of really cool work. And so, if someone were to ask you what sort of scientist are you, how would you classify yourself?
Julia:Well, I don't often start with geologists because people associate that with hard rock geology, and I'm very much not motivated by studying rocks, but I use rocks to study climate. So depending on who I'm talking to, I might say, I'm a climate scientist or I'm a geoscientist are common terms. But if I'm speaking to somebody more in my field, I'll you can get narrower. I can call myself either a stable isotope geochemist or a paloclimatologist, which are fancy words that explain the types of tools that I use to study ancient climates.
Shelby:So what what do you do for your work? What sorts of things are are you interested in learning more about?
Julia:Broadly, I'm really interested in using, the rock record, so things like sediments that preserve information about ancient climates. And I use the chemistry recorded in those rocks to learn about natural variability in climate. And this gives us a longer perspective of how Earth's climate might change and how it might change in the future by looking by extending our record of climate beyond the historical records. We look at periods of Earth's climate where it's changed either more rapidly or more dramatically than our current climate change event to get a sense of what might we expect in terms of our system variability.
Shelby:And what sort of timescales are you you looking at when you're talking about these sort of changes in climate? Is this the last few years, the last few decades? How far back can you go?
Julia:The deepest time that I've worked on is about 50000000 years. It's a long time ago. That is a long time ago. Yeah. But it's sort of short from a geologist's perspective.
Julia:Many folks work on things like 1,000,000,000 of years ago. 50000000 years ago for me is an interesting period because it was, period where we know that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide were quite high, but the continents were all in about the same location on the globe as they are today. So it gives us a way to study what we call hot house or high c 02 climates at at least a period of time when the Earth was physically somewhat similar to to what it looks like today. But I'm also interested in studying climate much much more recently in the past, and so this is something like 10 to 20000 years ago, which is still a long time if you're if you're a human being who only has about a 100 years. But the reason to look at those more recent climate variations is that, again, the climate state is even more similar to today's, and so those variations might be more applicable to what we might see in the future.
Julia:And then also those climate changes that happened 10 to 20000 years ago have shaped the landscape that we live on and that we move about today. And so many ways, that sets the basis for our survivability and how we move about. I'm interested in those time periods as well.
Shelby:Yeah. For geologists, both of those timescales may seem like fairly recent, but for anybody else that's listened to this, that seems really, really long. So it's very cool that you can do that at all. What are some of the tops of samples that you collect to be able to understand more about Earth's past?
Julia:I mostly work on soils or rocks that used to be soils. We use the word paleosols or fossilized soils. And so there tend to be something like a mudstone or a siltstone, which are terms that refer to the the grain size within the sedimentary rock. And these materials were, at some point in their history, they were on the surface of the Earth and they were there for 100 to 1000 of years. And while they're hanging out at the surface of the Earth, they're recording information about the climate above them, both the atmosphere and then the water sort of percolating from the atmosphere into the soil surface.
Julia:And so I use those soil horizons or those ancient preserved soil horizons as a basis to get it both information about ancient atmospheres and information about ancient water.
Shelby:So something that might be a fun fact for some of the listeners, I think a lot of people hear the term geologist and assume we look at rocks, which we do. But sometimes we also chew on rocks, and so deciding if you have a mudstone or a siltstone, which visually look very similar, one of the best ways to do that is to to literally take a little bit of it, put it in your mouth, and sort of chew it up. And siltstones are silty, and so they're they're sort of granular and mudstones don't have that grain size, and so you don't really feel the grittiness. So, yes, occasionally, we also will will chew on rocks. We don't usually eat them, but that is sort of a useful diagnostic.
Julia:I've been discouraging my students from putting the soils in their mouth. You never know. You have to be pretty sure that it's a non contaminated soil sample, and we were working just the other week. We were working out in the research teaching preserve. I was sort of like, I don't know what's going on here.
Julia:Yes.
Shelby:If you are one of doctor Kelson's students, please disregard everything I just said. It is much much wiser to not, chew on those rocks. So when you are looking at these samples, you do a combination of field and lab work. So can you walk us through what field work means to you? We've heard a little bit about different forms of field work for some others.
Shelby:And so what does that mean to you and your students?
Julia:Yeah. So for me, that means that I'll typically get on a plane or on in a maybe in a car with a bunch of equipment, like a shovel and a rock hammer and maybe an auger. And we'll we'll head out and then we'll approach an outcrop, which is where the rock meets the surface of the earth. And we'll make observations about what that rock looks like, information like the grain size, like the silts versus the clay content. We'll look for other minerals.
Julia:One of my favorite mineral to work on is calcium carbonate because it's a useful recorder of the climate variables that I'm interested in. So we'll look for calcium carbonate in the samples, and we'll try to document where it is and what it looks like. And then we'll I mean, generally, my field work is pretty simple. We put the rocks in bags. We put the bags in a suitcase, and then we we take it home.
Julia:Sometimes I also do things like collect water samples and modern soil samples in addition to the rock samples because information about how soils and water are moving through the present inform our interpretations of those ancient soils. So 7 names all come home with, vials vials of water and also transporting modern soils is a little bit more or can require more permitting than rocks because there's concern about, moving soils across state lines depending on the agricultural business within the state. So that requires a little bit of permitting from the USDA. Yeah. The field work is it's pretty simple.
Julia:Go out, look at rocks, collect them in a bag. It could be pretty fun. And at sometimes we're sometimes we're camping, like, staying in tents if that's what's most convenient to the samples. So, for example, one of my sites is out in the Mojave National Preserve, and the closest place to stay is sort of a seedy motel an hour away. And so for me, I'd I'd prefer to sleep in a tent more or less at the same length site.
Julia:So for that, I've slept in slept in tents. Sometimes I've stayed at research stations, where there'll be, like, a some sort of dorm setting specific for scientists to stay in. Those can be really convenient. Sometimes we're staying in hotels if that's if that's what we need to.
Shelby:And where are some of the places that you've done fieldwork?
Julia:Yeah. Recently, the Mojave National Preserve is a place that I've gone to, I think, 8 times in the past 3 years. So but and that's that's sort of fun because I'm flying into Las Vegas with field equipment and people are like, what are you doing? That that's fun. I've also been doing field work recently in in Southern New Mexico in a place called the HORNATA Basin where it that's got soils preserved from about a 100000 years ago to present.
Julia:And I've also done work in Big Bend National Park in Texas for my PhD work. That's where I went. So mostly the Southwest US.
Shelby:Yeah. Yeah. The Southwest is a good place to be.
Julia:Lots of rocks.
Shelby:Lots of rocks. Yeah. Lots of of good outcrops. Mhmm. So when you bring these samples back, now you're you're in the lab.
Shelby:Can you sort of walk us through what you do with those samples, what things you're measuring, and and how you can use that?
Julia:Yeah. The the preparation will depend a little bit on exactly what the sample is that we've collected. So sometimes we collect these things called called a nodule, which is like a technical mineral of sort of a chunk of calcium carbonate that formed in this either a modern or an ancient soil. And for a nodule, the first thing that we would do is actually cut it open with a rock saw. And so I have this sort of very tiny rock saw because the nodules are about, I don't know, 5 centimeters thick.
Julia:They're they're pretty small, and so you need to very carefully cut them open. And then you look at their insides and you look for evidence of recrystallization, so any kind of fluid that might have gone through that rock and changed its chemistry in between when it was originally deposited and now. So you wanna make sure that the information that you're reading is actually about the ancient climate and not about a volcanic eruption that caused fluids to go through. So we do a little bit of observation looking at that, either first just in plain light, and then we would take a very thin section of the sample, which is called a thin section, put it under our microscope, and look at the more look at more detailed for textual evidence of recrystallization or or secondary alteration that would, again, not be recording the climate information. So we'll do that.
Julia:If I'm collecting something like a more like a bulk soil, then we have to potentially sieve the sample, homogenize it.
Shelby:Can you, can you tell us what sieving a sample is?
Julia:Yeah. So sieving a sample is sort of like straining your pasta through pasta water. You've got a you've got a calendar with just the right size openings, and you're separating grain sizes of grains of different sizes. So we separate, again, clay from silt, from sand, because those potentially have different information recorded. So we separate all of those.
Julia:And then once we've once we've separated those with sieving, we're gonna homogenize within each of those size fractions. We wanna make sure that we're getting a representative sample because then what we're ultimately gonna do is we're gonna measure out a tiny, tiny amount of that sample. So something like milligrams of that material, which is how you visualize a number of grams.
Shelby:A a gram is about the same weight as a paper clip. And so, milligrams would be very small portions of a paper clip. Yeah. So very, very tiny.
Julia:Yep. And sometimes it's micrograms, which is like it looks like the tip of a pencil type of powder. So we're gonna measure a really tiny amount of that sample, and we're ultimately gonna turn it into a gas so that we can put it into an instrument that will allow us to measure its isotopic composition. And those instruments require the sample to be a gas so that we can separate their ions based on mass.
Shelby:And how do you turn it into a gas for some of these things?
Julia:Yeah. So for most of the samples that I work with that are, again, carbonate or calcium carbonate, calcite, the way we turn it into a gas is where you put it in hot acid. It's like putting vinegar on baking soda. That that material starts to fizz, and then we actually collect that gas. We use an acid called phosphoric acid that's highly concentrated and reacts completely with the sample to produce, in this case, we're reacting CaCO 3 with phosphoric acid, and it produces carbon dioxide or c02 gas, and then we move that into into the instrument.
Shelby:Yeah. Folks have never seen that process even on a small scale. So we also, as geologists, will use acid in the field, and we'll see if if minerals or rocks fizz or react to that acid to tell us if there's these carbonate groups in them. It's pretty impressive how quickly some of these things will react and especially when you're using, you know, portions of a paper clips where you could you could really dissolve that pretty quickly. So this work, how did you sort of get into this?
Shelby:I mean, I think in some ways, maybe you might say you were born into the field a little bit. So what was that journey like for you? Where did you get your interest in in geosciences? So
Julia:both of my parents are geoscientists, which I actually made me not wanna be a geologist for a very long time. My mom my mom and my dad actually met in their undergraduate program. They both were geology majors at UC Santa Barbara in the 19 eighties.
Shelby:Yeah. Now you're aging them.
Julia:Right. How old are they? And my my mom, as her career was a ended up being a high school geology teacher. And so she taught geology at my high school, which means I absolutely did not take a geology class, and it was to be avoided. And my my dad was working as an environmental consultant identifying fault hazards in the San Francisco Bay Area, like, sort of shortly after the a major earthquake, the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 that caused major infrastructure damage.
Julia:And so his career was initially identifying fault hazards. So all this to say, I sort of grew up in a family where geology seems like a reasonable career, but also it was kind of annoying because my we would go for a family hike and my dad would be talking about the faults. And he would be looking at the rocks and, you know, like, typical child, like, oh my god. Yeah. I do.
Julia:Dad, can you please shut up.
Shelby:I was wanting to ask you what what family vacations were like because I could imagine with 2 geologist parents, they were very different from most people's vacations.
Julia:Yeah. There is a lot of a lot of hiking and a lot of talking about racks. Often, I should say my mom would rein in my dad. Keith. Nobody wants to hear about this. And so it wasn't until I was an an undergraduate that I took my first geology class. I was a sophomore and had sort of bounced around. I didn't come into my undergraduate career with a declared major. And then I decided that I wanted to study the natural environment and that I I took a geology class and basically just loved it.
Julia:I was like, oh, okay. And I re actually remember talking on the phone with my parents. I I I think it was both of them on the line. I was, like, in the basement of one of these buildings, and I had sort of I was trying to decide between an engineering degree and an earth sciences degree, which are pretty different tracks.
Shelby:Yeah.
Julia:One of them requires a lot more math and physics, and the other one sounds like a lot more fun. And I I remember saying, like, I just wanna study the natural world. Like, I wanna know the basis for for, like, how you can even build a bridge. Like, I don't wanna build a bridge, but I wanna understand, like, why you're gonna build a bridge there and what sort of resources we need to do that. They were like, okay.
Julia:How about you study geology? So I so I fell into it, I guess, despite my parents, but maybe also because of them. And so I majored in geology. I also minored in Italian, which was very fun. Yeah.
Julia:And then I didn't immediately go into graduate school. I took a year off and worked in environmental consulting, and then decided that I wanted more of an academic challenge. And so I applied for a PhD program and ultimately decided to go to the University of Washington in Seattle to pursue a PhD. And that I started that program thinking that I would work on geomorphology, which is a study of sentiments and how they move on the land surface, which isn't it's not that far removed from what I do, but sort of one step away. And I was I was actually gonna work on a project studying mega floods in Tibet was how my adviser lured me to a Seattle.
Julia:And then when I got there, I I ended up learning about this stable isotopegeochemistry technique called clumped isotopes that lets us measure temperature through ancient geologic time, and it just really captured my interest. And so that's what I ultimately did my PhD in and have since become an expert in and building a lab on it.
Shelby:The rest is history. Right. When when you took that geology class that sort of got you thinking maybe this is what I wanna do, was there a specific, like, moment, or was it something about that class or the instructor? What was it that sort of ended up ultimately drawing you in? Even though it sounds like for a while, you were really trying to find it.
Julia:Yeah. I don't know. I think it was I I probably had already caved by the time I had enrolled in that class, to be honest, and then learning about it was sitting in that class and sort of feeling like I was home, like this was my topic. Everything that he was talking about was, like, yes, I wanna learn more. I don't know that there was ever a moment, but Yeah.
Julia:Certainly by the end of that class, I was like, okay. Yes. This is my major. I'm hooked. Yeah.
Shelby:And so you said you took a year off between undergrad and grad school and were in environmental consulting. What did that entail? How was that experience different from your time as a student at other level?
Julia:Different from a student in that you're paid to work 40 hours a week. One thing that drove me nuts was that you had to account for every 10 minutes of your time because you're billing a client, and I'd like to have more flexibility about where I am and what I'm doing, which is part of what I love now as my job at faculty is that you have a lot to do, but it you do it on your own terms. And I I really did not like that about environmental consulting was that you'd get a call 4 o'clock and be like, Julia, could you be at this worksite at 7 AM the next morning? And you're like, well, this isn't really a choice. Yeah.
Julia:Yeah. Okay. So so this job was a was a lot of, construction inspection type work where folks are building new car dealerships, new homes in the San Francisco Bay Area. And before they build, they need to ensure that the ground that they're building on is secure. So we do things like measure the firmness of the ground, and then when it got exciting was when we were doing things like identifying fault and landslide hazards, which is also generally when the client was upset.
Julia:Yeah.
Shelby:Because we're Yeah. They don't wanna hear about those things.
Julia:They don't wanna hear about them. We tell them they were trying to build their housing development on a giant landslide block that had been there for 200 years and was likely to move again. They weren't too happy about that.
Shelby:Yeah.
Julia:But it was very, I didn't find it to be particularly challenging because you were and your your scope is much more narrow because you you can't explore these findings. So you learn about this cool landslide, but your job is essentially to tell the client that it exists, and that's where the work stops. And often, I I would be curious, like, well, you don't wanna know more about the landslide? How how old is it actually? When is it gonna move again?
Julia:And so that realization made me think that it was time to go back to graduate school.
Shelby:Yeah. I think that's a fair evaluation. Yeah. When you were in California and in that area, did you experience some of those hazards yourself personally?
Julia:Jiggle. Oh, a few jiggles, but Yeah. A few small earthquakes, but nothing nothing worth noting. Yeah. I think Bloomington had as big of an earthquake as I've experienced growing up in the Bay Area.
Shelby:Really? That is very surprising. Yeah. Yeah. We have one every now and then, but but, yeah, for it to be sort of equivalent to what you had out there, I wouldn't have expected that.
Shelby:So your your parents are are geoscientists. You're a geoscientist. Anybody else? Anybody else? Yeah.
Julia:My sister is the freshwater ecologist, which isn't you know, as far as anything in the world goes, it's sort of related. She also has a PhD, and she worked on looking at how fish migrate in California. But she set up these little traps in streams to watch fish. She would tag the fish and then watch them cross and go upstream and downstream. And now she works in consulting predicting flows and providing flow recommendations, especially in the light of dam removals in Northern California.
Julia:So she's she's sort of in the realm. We've always we sort of hoped that someday we could actually work together in in some kind of project. It hasn't happened yet, but we'll see.
Shelby:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe eventually it will. So during your your sort of whole career from from being a student to now, have there been moments that have sort of stood out to you as really memorable for different reasons? You know, like, particular field experiences that were really rewarding for for one reason or another, places that you were able to go, or or things like that that have sort of been formative and and sort of keeping you interested in the field?
Julia:The field work is a is a big part of it even though it is really only 2 to 3 weeks per year. I think it's it's less than one might imagine, but it's always a really meaningful time to go out, look at the rocks, be in nature. You're usually someplace beautiful, sometimes you're not. But it it makes you realize that what we work on most of the time when we're in computers in the lab is is something that's that's real, and I think those experiences keep me coming back.
Shelby:Have you been able to take students out in the field?
Julia:I've taken a lot of undergraduate students out in the field. When I was a post doc recently at Michigan, I took, I think, 5 undergraduates, not all at once, but sort of through the course of a project. I took them out with me in the field area. Yeah. It was always fun to watch them experience the field learning too, especially these students were coming from the Midwest, and they had never seen a rock before.
Julia:And we go out to Nevada, and it's all rocks. So it that's that's always really fun.
Shelby:Yeah. I can remember when I was a a student and I, you know, had grown up in Kentucky and then moved to Arizona. It's a totally different landscape in the southwest, and and, like, seeing that for the first time is sort of awe inspiring. But, yeah, it would be really nice to to be the one that got to take somebody else to those areas and sort of open their eyes to some of those things.
Julia:Yeah. Absolutely. I think I I should say that my original interest in the geosciences is sort of rooted in the natural environment and nature. But I've been really surprised at how much I love the lab work, and that keeps me coming back too. There's something really fun about being able to make a quantitative measurement in real time while you're watching it.
Julia:You're a geochemist. You know this. Yeah. It's really it's really quite fun. You put a material in the instrument and the number comes out, and you've done an experiment, like, you've learned something, and and you can actually watch that scientific process happen in the span of a day.
Julia:And so there's that moment of, oh my goodness, the data, and that's that's always really exciting. And I also I don't I just don't wanna say I love working with broken equipment, but I actually enjoy the troubleshooting that comes with maintaining a stabilized tube geochemistry lab. Again, it can be really fun to get involved and, like, really dig deep and spend hours trying to figure out where, you know, where the leak is. And so, you know, you're always a little frustrated. I I actually think that process is is fun.
Shelby:Yeah. I think I mean, so much of what folks in this field do, it takes a long time to have things feel tangible, like, to see results. But lab equipment, when you have to maintain it, like, you need results pretty quickly. And so, yeah, it can be really satisfying to be the one that finds that leak or can track down that component that's broken and and be the one to repair it. I also agree.
Shelby:I think going from the field, which feels, you know, like you're one with nature and it's this very organic experience to then going back to the lab, especially for some of the work that we do where everything is sort of very well defined. So these are the steps that you take, and these are how you prepare things, and this is how you would put them on the instrument. 2 totally different sides of the same coin. You're going towards the same sorts of answers, but with very, very different methods. And so something about that is just really satisfying.
Shelby:It's like it scratches several itches in the brain all at once. So, yeah, I'm I'm very much a a hard and fast lab girly, and, yeah, I I love being able to do that. And have students in there is a lot of fun too. You know? Like, we get to do a lot of things that a lot of people don't have the opportunity to do and work on a instrumentation that a lot of people have never heard about before.
Shelby:And so to have other people see what that's like and get to experience is is a lot of fun.
Julia:Mhmm. Yeah. To have work that's not just computer and coding, and we do plenty of that too. But Yeah. Have some hands on component when you're in the office is really fun.
Shelby:Yeah. And so so sort of thinking along those lines, if you, you know, were to go back and give your younger self advice or perspective or maybe give advice to folks who are listening to this who may be interested in considering a field in the broad spectrum of Earth and atmospheric sciences, are there things that you might say?
Julia:I think the advice that I got, which I really appreciated, was to pursue your interests, and there's there's a lot of emphasis right now about careers, jobs, what are you gonna do with the skills you're learning, and that's important, but I also think it's really important to to study something that you're passionate about. And if you become an expert in something, you'll find a way to make that be your job. And so don't worry about molding yourself to fit into an an existing opportunity because if you have the expertise and the excitement, you will make your own opportunity. And so I think realizing that that I didn't have to become an engineer. I didn't have to build a bridge, but I could actually study the earth.
Julia:And I didn't know exactly where that path was going to take me in terms of a career, but I knew that it was what I was interested in, and that path and following that would take me somewhere. And if I kept doing things that I was interested in, then I would end up in jobs that I was interested in. And and I thought that was good advice and has served me well.
Shelby:Yeah. I think I mean, we're only a few episodes into this podcast series, but it has already been noted by nearly everyone that's come on. You know, like, people are drawn to this field because when you when you take classes from folks in geosciences, it's so obvious how passionate they are and how much they love what they do. Like, it doesn't feel like you're going to a class that the instructor really is dreading having to show up for. It's it's usually, like, very lively folks who obviously really love being there, and I think that that's really sage advice to folks that, yeah, find what you love and you'll be able to to make a job out of it.
Shelby:Well, to wrap this up, it's time for our yes, please segment. This is an opportunity for each of us to spend a minute sort of discussing something that we are currently passionate about. The only rules are it can't be something related to our work, so it should give us a little bit of a perspective outside of what we do. I'm happy to go first. If you wanna go first, that's fine by me.
Julia:You can go first.
Shelby:Okay. So I'll have you tell me. Alright. You can give me a minute, and if you can just give me a visual cue or an audio cue at maybe 30 seconds, 15 seconds, and then 5, then we can go from there. So mine is inspired by the upcoming election season.
Shelby:So my yes, please is yes, please. Let's get more crowdsource designs for things. So, this has given us classics like the Boatie McBoatface naming scheme, but one I saw recently that inspired this is from a a girl in Michigan, I believe, who had designed a new I voted sticker that has, a werewolf ripping off a shirt in front of an American flag with I voted on top, and it ended up winning a design contest because the design was so incredible. And so I feel like having more opportunities for this creative energy is what we need. We need folks to be able to get out of the mold a little bit so we can end up with very ripped, werewolves that have a lot of abs pulling that shirt off and showing the excitement for voting in the process.
Shelby:So I I'm saying, yes, please. Give us more of those opportunities, and don't forget to go out and vote.
Julia:That was 57 seconds. Hey.
Shelby:Nailed that one. Nice. Yeah. Not not as well as the design was. If you haven't seen that sticker, please go out and check it out.
Shelby:It's really impressive.
Julia:I I think it's also an 8 year old girl. It's in elementary school. Yeah. Because I I love it.
Shelby:It is honestly impressive artwork too. Yeah. And very passionate. Okay. Are you ready?
Shelby:Yep. Alright. This is Julia Kelson with her yes, please.
Julia:Alright. This is a slightly different topic. The hobby that I am most excited about these days is this new hobby that I learned called skate skiing. Okay. So there's 2 types of skis in the world.
Julia:First one is downhill skiing. You go downhill fast. It's super fun. The second one is nordic skiing, which you might imagine, like, a flat landscape. Somewhere in Norway, people go on going flat.
Julia:Okay. So when you imagine nordic skiing, you're probably picturing classic skiing, which is like your feet are shuffling along parallel. Then there's a type of skiing called skate skiing, which is more similar to the ice skating motion where your feet are moving in a v, and it's you're also planning your poles in time with your steps. And each when you're skate skiing, each step moves you about 10 feet across the snow. And so it's absolutely fun because with very little energy, you can just move very quickly across the landscape, and it only happens when it's snowing, so it's magical.
Shelby:That is very cool. So you've recently done this, I'm assuming? I It's
Julia:fairly recently. I learned I started to learn when I moved to Michigan, which was about 4 years ago. So, like, as an very much as an adult, like, middle adult, I started to learn how to skate ski, and I felt absolutely fell in love with it.
Shelby:So now that you're in Southern Indiana, how difficult will it be for you to sort of find opportunities to skate ski when you have to travel?
Julia:Sort of a long weekend. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Shelby:Wow. That's really cool. The next
Julia:but if anything, it gives me inspiration that I can always find something. Because when I moved to Michigan, I was like, oh, man. None of my I can't do any of my hobbies. And then I found something that I loved. And so I think it means that I'll find something else in India.
Julia:Yeah. Well Might not be skate skater. We'll have
Shelby:to have a follow-up and see what your new hobby is. You're too. Yeah. Once you're sort of settled with that. Wow, that's really cool.
Shelby:Is that physically exhausting? It sounds like it would. Yeah. It's really exhausting. How, like, how long can you go and do that?
Julia:Like It's sort of like like a run, like, maybe an hour.
Shelby:Yeah.
Julia:Maybe 2 or 3 hours if you can, like if there's a warming hut and you can eat soup in the middle.
Shelby:Yeah. Yes. When I think of skate skiing, I think I want soup. Yeah. Definitely.
Shelby:Alright. Well, thank you very much, Julia. It was great having you on, and join us back next week when we'll have somebody new that we can learn about over drinks. See you then. Earth on the Rocks is produced by Cari Metz with artwork provided by Connor Leimgruber, with technical recording managed by Kate Crum and Betsy Leija.
Shelby:Funding for this podcast was provided by the National Science Foundation Grant, EAR dash 2422824.