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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, and welcome back to Earth on the Rocks, the show where we get to know the person behind the science. I'm your host, Shelby Rader, and joining us today is Doctor. Doug Edmonds. Doug, thanks for coming on the show.
Doug:It's my pleasure. Thanks, Shelby.
Shelby:So as we get to know you today, what is your drink of choice? Or non choice, if you have something that you don't ever want to have again.
Doug:Well, you know, I'm from the Midwest, and I feel like culturally, the drink I have to claim is bourbon because that is the drink of of the region, if you will. And I have family from Kentucky, so for me, it's bourbon on the rocks. If I can get it, preferably something 12 years old, but that's harder to find these days.
Shelby:It is. It is. But I I share the sentiment that that is an excellent drink of choice. So, Doug, if someone were to come up to you and ask what sort of scientist are you or what do you do, how would you classify yourself?
Doug:That's a great question. For a long time, I used to call myself a geologist. But now I've adopted the name Earth scientist, and so that's what I lead with. Because every time I'd say geologist, somebody would ask me, have you been on any digs lately? Yeah.
Doug:And then I would have to explain that I'm not a paleontologist. And so now I really just call myself an Earth scientist, mainly because that's also how I see myself.
Shelby:And under that Earth scientist umbrella, what areas would you say that you specialize in?
Doug:So digging deeper than Earth science, I identify myself as a sedimentologist. And so for me, what excites me, what kind of science questions perk me up are things about sediment. How is sediment transported? Where did it come from? Where does it go?
Doug:How do sedimentary environments form? And how do they change through time?
Shelby:And so for folks who maybe are hearing some of these terms for the first time, how is sediment formed? And what are some of the dominant ways that it can get moved around?
Doug:In Earth's systems, have certain parts of the Earth that generate sediment, if we wanna call those sources of sediment, places that are uplifted like mountain ranges. So that's mainly where sediment is produced. Then it's conveyed down the continent, usually by river systems, but also by air, other means of transport. And then it's farther down that system where I start to get interested, places where sediment gets deposited. You know, I'm talking about broad regions.
Doug:So rivers that are predominantly made of sediment in the lowland part of the continent. So I tend to study places near coastlines or river systems that are primarily composed of sediment rather than banks of bedrock or solid material.
Shelby:And so when you're alluding to this idea of sediment versus bedrock, sediment is just loose, unconsolidated material that's
Doug:sourced Yep. From somewhere Sediment is all the stuff that's broken up off bedrock. It's been disaggregated, pulled apart, broken down either by bouncing around on the stream bed or just by sitting in place and being subjected to weathering forces on Earth. That could be as simple as just heating up and cooling down day after day, breaks apart the rock and disintegrates it. And then eventually, it becomes smaller and makes its way into river systems.
Doug:And then it gets small enough and forms really nice, you know, kind of sugary beach sand if you're down on the Gulf Coast or on the East Coast Of The United States or or wherever you might be.
Shelby:And so for folks that are listening, maybe they're thinking, like, why is sediment so important other than it makes these nice beaches in some areas? So what are some reasons that you in particular are interested in sediment and how it's getting moved around?
Doug:It's a great question. So places where sediment is deposited, what people in my field would call a depositional environment as opposed to an erosional one. So mountains would be erosional environments and let's, for an easy example, call coastlines, mostly depositional environments. And these sediments are so important because one, they form a lot of the land surface on which humans have settled. So they're really important places for human habitation.
Doug:A lot of humanity has grown up around River Deltas. A lot of humanity continues to thrive on river deltas. Many of the mega cities on planet Earth are located in river deltas. And a river delta is just a big pile of sediment at the mouth of a river. And so these piles of sediment, these depositional environments are just first and foremost ideal places for human habitation.
Doug:Then as a geologist, there's also an important aspect that sedimentary environments have. So there's air in between all the little grains. There's pore spaces between the grains. Those pore spaces, when they're buried deeper into the earth, can get filled with resources. Those resources can be water.
Doug:So most of our water come from aquifers. Or it can be other resources, natural gas, oil. And so sedimentary rocks, sedimentary environments are incredibly important really across a broad range of industrial resource driven applications as well as just as societal needs. These are great places to live. They create fertile flood plains, easy access to resources.
Doug:So, cities have grown up around these places.
Shelby:Yeah, I mean, sounds like the way you're describing it, sentiment really is sort of integral to our way of life. I would imagine a lot of folks that maybe are listening to this hadn't considered that before, but it's really an important aspect of what we've come to know as our day to day.
Doug:Yeah. A lot of people have studied this maybe in more detail than I have. When it comes to looking at the anthropological connection between sediment and and humans. I'm just an outsider looking in, but but it's not hard to understand that, you know, these kinds of environments near the coastline, let's say river deltas again, they don't have a lot of topography. So it's easy mobility for people to settle and build and get access to things.
Doug:There's plenty of nutrients from the river and from the sediment itself that create these fertile flood plains, so great place to grow crops and grow other resources. The usually, the waterways provide easy transportation, especially if we're talking about early civilizations. And so we all learn about how civilizations grew up around the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, but we're not really told that these are actual river deltas. And and it's really the river delta that holds all the important ingredients to help this civilization thrive. And and there there is pretty substantial evidence that most of the early civilizations, certain aspects of civilization started emerging around seven thousand years ago when a lot of the river deltas on Earth started forming because sea level rise slowed down coming out of the last glaciation.
Doug:So it's kind of a cool it's it's it's kind of a cool story.
Shelby:Yeah. That is a cool story. I mean, I've I've worked with you for a few years now and and know you, you know, study sort of sediments in this way, but had never really thought about the implications for yeah. Like, how critical these sorts of environments are for how human life has evolved. That's that's a fun, very applied way to look at some of this stuff.
Doug:Yeah. Yeah. It is cool.
Shelby:And so what sorts of questions are you specifically interested in?
Doug:Yeah. So for me, I mentioned earlier that I used to see myself as a geologist. You know, I was trained as a geologist. I still see myself in some ways as a geologist. And so for me, I come at all this with a geological viewpoint but take a decidedly modern approach.
Doug:And what I mean by that is I'm interested in how depositional environments form and change through time. So I'm interested in how rivers form, why they might migrate, how they might wiggle around in response to floods or meander. So that's the change part I'm referring to. I'm interested in understanding how coastlines, whether it's barrier islands or river deltas, how they might prograde or retrograde in response to sea level rise and fall. I'm interested in all those questions about how they change and how they form.
Doug:And when I say I take a decidedly more modern approach, so the geologists in me got interested in how these environments change because that's geology. These environments change. Over time, they leave their sediments behind. We read the record, and we make an inference. Inferences are tough.
Doug:As any geologist knows, it's difficult to infer what happened based on limited evidence. And so the more modern approach that I take is I'm really interested in how these environments change on more human time scales. So the time scales that interest me are something that's more observable. So let's say century to maybe a millennia because we we do have some observations going quite a ways back. And so that that's fundamentally what I'm interested in, how these environments change on human time scales.
Shelby:And sort of what sorts of changes can you see on that time scale? Or what's the sort of magnitude of change that you can expect?
Doug:Yep. That's a great question. So it spans a wide range, as you might imagine. There's the typical observation that I think a lot of people are probably familiar with that rivers move around. We can look at the state boundaries, especially along the Mississippi River.
Doug:And you can see that the boundary of the state no longer lines up with the river, but it clearly used to trace the river. That's because the river moved. So that's a movement that's happening probably on a decade to century time scale. So those are the kinds of things my group and I look at. We're really interested in how meandering rivers move, why they move, what controls that movement, and how that might change in response to different stresses looking into the future.
Shelby:And what sorts of stresses might that be that could impact this sort of river movement?
Doug:So, like, let's change the amount of water flowing through a river. That's gonna have an effect whether you increase it or decrease it. The other job a river has to do is it has to move sediment. And so like any job, it gets harder when you provide more of the thing you have to do. So if we put more sediment into the river, that makes the river's job harder and it responds in somewhat predictable ways.
Doug:Same thing if we take away sediment. So that balance of sediment and water is really important in trying to figure out how it moves. That's one scale of movement that I think people are familiar with. Another kind of scale of movement that we're becoming more familiar with because now we live in a world where sea levels are changing more rapidly than we thought is what happens to the coastline? Why does the coastline prograde?
Doug:In other words, why does it move into the ocean in some places? And in other places, why does the shoreline retreat? Why does the ocean encroach on land? And I think a lot of us are familiar with simple bathtub models. If we just fill a static bathtub with water, we can imagine, especially if the bathtub is sort of a bowl shape, that the coastline's gonna grow outwards.
Doug:And so you might think it's the amount of water that causes the shoreline to encroach, and that is correct to some extent. But in places where sediment is being deposited, you have to consider the mass balance. You have to consider that sediment could also be deposited there. And if I deposit sediment at the same rate that sea level is rising, then my shoreline is going to stay in place. So it's this dynamic balance between the two.
Doug:And then when you throw in the fact that rivers are moving around and we're changing how much sediment's coming down and we're changing how rivers move and where they can deposit sediment, it becomes quite a difficult problem to understand how shorelines are responding now and what they're gonna do in the future. That first movement you asked about river migration, pretty you know, then their shoreline changes. Then there's sort of a longer scale process where we think of rivers as maybe somewhat static. Right? They're kind of in the same position.
Doug:Right? Go look at a map of the state boundaries. The river is still close by where it used to be. It's not in the exact same position, but it's still close by. There's another phenomenon that my group works on a lot, is called river avulsion, or rivers basically jump course.
Doug:So they jump to an entirely new position somewhere else on the floodplain. So that would be as if there was a river that once was there, and now it's entirely gone. There is no more river there, and it's located maybe tens of kilometers over in some other direction.
Shelby:So a huge, very large magnitude jump.
Doug:This is a huge jump compared to the wiggling around that we might think of that I would call meandering. And so that's another change. That happens on a longer time scale, usually hundreds to thousands of years. So that's another thing that we're really interested in. And then there's all the other sort of smaller time scales like the micro time scale as well, maybe.
Doug:What about how much sediment gets deposited or eroded during a single flood? Because over time, that's what's causing bank erosion, and that's what's causing migration, and so on and so forth.
Shelby:Yeah. So it's I mean, it's a lot of moving parts that you all are working with, and so I can imagine it could very easily get pretty complicated to try to disentangle some of those things. So what are some of the methods that you and your group use to try to understand some of these processes that you just described?
Doug:First and foremost, I think primarily because of exactly what you said. My first scientific love is numerical modeling. And what you get in numerical modeling really is for me, it's what I get to leave out of the model. So I strive to make models that are simpler than the real world because the real world is unbelievably complex. Yeah.
Doug:I don't want to have everything in my model. I want only the ingredients that I think are absolutely essential. And then that allows me to test a simpler environment, if you will. And so an example is, like a lot of times in our models, we don't include things like vegetation, especially in river systems. But as anybody knows, vegetation can matter.
Doug:If vegetation grows on the bank of a river, those roots of that vegetation can actually stabilize the sediment and actually may, slow down river migration. And and there's evidence to suggest that's true. But maybe as a starting point, we don't wanna add that complication. So we leave as many things out as we can in numerical modeling to try to focus on the essential detail that we want. So that's one thing we do, is we do numerical modeling.
Shelby:And with these models, are you all building them from scratch? Are you all sort of using some pre existing models that you're then customizing? What does this look like for folks that maybe don't don't have experience with a numerical model, especially for an application like this?
Doug:It can be both of the things you suggest. So we we build a lot of models and we use pre existing models. Science is a lot like anything else. If something is already built that's suited for the job you want to do, my feeling is why not use it?
Shelby:Why reinvent the wheel?
Doug:Yep. Why reinvent the wheel? Now, occasionally, that's not the case. And then in that instance, we build our own models. I don't know how often we do one or the other, but we really do both.
Doug:And what I'm saying, there are models that are commonly available that solve equations that represent water flow and sediment transport. Because you can imagine, this is a pretty important field, especially for engineering. So you want to put in a bridge somewhere, that bridge spans a river. You have to know how the river's going to respond. And so there are commercial software available to help you in that task.
Doug:I mean, engineering firms are doing this, you know, all over The United States. So it it's a pretty common kind of practice.
Shelby:And, you know, we've had folks on the atmospheric science side on this podcast that also do a form of modeling, which is a little different than some of the modeling that that you're describing in some ways. So can you talk just a little bit about, for your group, what does that process look like of using these models? Are you, you know, inputting information and then trying to check how the model compares to some real world data that you've collected? Are you using it as a predictive tool, as some combination?
Doug:For me, for me and what I try to encourage students in my group to do is maybe a little bit different, but come back to the point you made about the real world is complex. It's hard to untangle all the various competing processes. So, I mean, I always tell my students, I just tell them, like, look. I'm not that great at being creative and coming up with hypotheses. You know, maybe
Shelby:I think many people would disagree with that, that you are pretty great at it, but but good thing for being with us.
Doug:I you know? Yeah. I mean, kinda my point is it's hard to come up with a really interesting hypothesis for how the world works. So for me, the numerical model is the hypothesis. I build a simple model and I interrogate it.
Doug:You know, I so what does that mean? And so it's simple and it's generic. Generic mean I'm not so if I'll use the example of a river, I don't want to model a particular river. I just want to model river in general.
Shelby:And like the dynamics of that.
Doug:And the dynamics of that. And then I want to interrogate it and see, well, what happens when I turn up the amount of sediment? What happens when I add vegetation? How does the river respond? And then through a bunch of experiments, that leads me to hopefully a compelling hypothesis.
Doug:Like, wow, I didn't expect adding vegetation would have this much of an effect. Then from there, we can actually go out and do field work and look for that effect. And what the modeling does is it helps sharpen your focus of what to look for. Without that modeling, first of all, you may not have ever thought that effect was real or you may not know exactly how to look for So that's really what I like to do with numerical models. And there's an entire class of people who do numerical models.
Doug:Sometimes the atmospheric scientists, and this isn't a knock on it or anything, but where the objective is to recreate the real world. And that's an important objective for a lot of models. But for me, if I have a model that recreates the real world, all I have now are two things I don't understand the real world and my model. So for me, it's about understanding. The whole purpose is simplification.
Shelby:Right. And so this numerical modeling approach is one of these tools in your toolkit. And like you said, maybe one of your first loves. And then you'd also mentioned fieldwork now, which is another aspect of how your group tries to answer these questions. Can you talk a little bit about what does fieldwork look like for you all?
Doug:Absolutely. So we do all kinds of fieldwork, really. I mean, one, we we go out and we do classic geology. So again, coming back to this notion that geology, think, is really hard. It's hard to infer what happened.
Doug:Right? We're you know, as geologists, we look at rocks, that's the product. For me, as a sedimentary geologist, that's the product of what happened over thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. It's spotty. It's incomplete.
Doug:And I have to try to make sense of that. So my way of making sense of that is starting with a model. So I might simulate something, and that might help me understand something about the stratigraphy. So then we might go out and look at some rocks. For instance, I've had students go out and look at various formations in the Cretaceous of Utah and trying to see if the thing we see in our models, we can see in our rocks.
Doug:So we're trying to learn more about the rocks than maybe the rocks are willing to tell us right away. Oh, so that's one kind of fieldwork we do. The other thing is we're always bumming around modern systems. So I spent the first half or the first long part of my career working on coastlines and river deltas. And I've worked down in the Mississippi Delta for ten years and on all those little systems down there.
Doug:But now my group has kind of shifted focuses, They're focused more up to river systems upstream. And so we're all the time getting out on river systems. We have boats. We have all kinds of equipment to measure. For instance, the amount of water in a river.
Doug:That's a really important thing, it's not exactly easy to measure. You wanna measure what the bed topography looks like because that's also important, how it changes.
Shelby:So the shape of sort of what's underlying the water in a river.
Doug:Yeah. That's right. Everything under the water. Obviously, that's hard to see. The water is silty and muddy.
Doug:Can't can't see through it. And so we have to measure it with with different tools. And then the big thing we do a lot of now is we have a drone that we can fly that gives us the surface topography. And so that's really cool because, you know, when a river floods, sometimes, maybe frequently, it brings with it sediment and deposits that sediment overbank. And where that sediment goes, how much accumulates, so what's deposited, what's eroded, these are really fundamental questions about the way these systems work that's hard to answer without a drone where you can get a nice sort of synoptic view of where the sediment went after a flood.
Doug:So we're we're flying drones on rivers, you know, maybe two or three times a year trying to capture trying to get a before and after a flood event. So there was a flood last April on the White River that was a fifty year flood. So was the second largest flood of record on the White River and it went right through our study sites. We went out and got a drone flight like three days before. And then as soon as the water receded, we went out and got another drone flight so we can sort of understand what these flood events do to the landscapes around them.
Shelby:And the timing of that sort of three days before and right after, was that an instance where you all sort of saw the weather prediction and thought, man, we gotta make the most of this and see what we can get?
Doug:Yep. So when you're flying a drone, it's a lot of it's serendipity. You have to have the right weather. You can't just put it up when it's raining or when it's too windy or too cold. And these are really you know, we call it the flying Ferrari because it costs it costs about as much as a Ferrari, and but yet we put it in the air.
Doug:And so we wanna be careful about it. And so three days before is just because the weather cooperated. It's the right time. Everything sort of lined up, we could get out there and then you get out there as soon as you can after the floodwaters recede.
Shelby:And so with this drone work, I think this is something interesting to talk about because a lot of folks have probably never really seen a drone up close. They probably have never flown a drone. What sorts of tools on that drone are you all using to gather some of these data? And then afterwards, I wanna come back and talk a little bit about, like, what does it take to fly one? And what's the training for that sort of thing like?
Doug:Well, there's all kinds of things you can put on a drone, as you might imagine. For us, there's really two main tools. One is just taking pictures. And you can get really inexpensive drones to fly and take pictures, and they do a great job. And those pictures are valuable data.
Doug:It tells us what the surface looks like, and and there are things we can see in the images that tell us maybe where sediment was deposited or not. That's a nice thing to see. But the main thing attached to our drone is a LiDAR sensor, which just LiDAR is just an acronym for light detection and ranging, just like radars for radio detection and ranging. And so rather than radio waves, which is what radar uses, these are light waves. So these are lasers.
Doug:So our lidar shoots out 300,000 pulses of light per second. We have all of its measurements tracked with an internal system. And so those lasers shoot out, they bounce off something, and they come back to the drone. And we can recreate that exact laser path and measure the distance from the drone to where it bounced off of. And that gives us an elevation because we know the position of the drone precisely.
Doug:And this is now the state of the art for how we measure topography on Earth's surface. So it's incredible. So right now, what's just about finishing up, if it's not finished already, is the USGS three d elevation program, which was the goal of that was to get complete lidar coverage for the entire Continental United States.
Shelby:On like what sort of scale? Like every square foot is
Doug:getting Well, think about it this way. Our best our most complete elevation models prior to this effort were probably the National Elevation Database which gave you an elevation point every 10 meters by 10 meters square. So that's like a 30 foot by 30 foot area. You got one elevation point. If you're building roads or doing other things, if you're an engineer, that's maybe not good enough.
Shelby:Yeah.
Doug:LIDAR gives you multiple elevation points, maybe four or five or six, seven or eight per square meter.
Shelby:Wow.
Doug:So the difference in resolution is unbelievable. And now we're gonna have LiDAR coverage for the entire nation. And that's amazing. Yeah. But that's also one snapshot in time.
Doug:And so what the drone allows us to do, we can't ever hope to cover a very large area because we're limited by batteries and flight time. But we can cover small areas repeatedly. We can go out and scan something every day if it demanded it. You can't really do that with something like the USGS three d elevation program because the scale is just totally different. So they serve two very different purposes, I think.
Shelby:And this USGS program, is any part of that crowdsourced? Like, oh, this group is doing LiDAR based work, so can you collect data? It's all No, all
Doug:This is all airborne LiDAR. And so these are all engineering companies and firms that USGS is working with. I don't really know the details of how they're contracting it or how much of the work they're doing themselves. But I think it's a little bit of both.
Shelby:And for your all's flying Ferrari, you mentioned that sometimes you're limited based on flat time and battery life. So what is that battery lifespan for one trip? What does that look like?
Doug:Yeah. So now we have we proudly have an American made drone.
Shelby:Nice.
Doug:And the one benefit of this new drone and we got it about a year or so ago is the battery life is quite a bit longer than our old drone. So our first drone, we could usually fly maybe twelve minutes.
Shelby:Wow. Okay.
Doug:That's pretty short. In twelve minutes, you're probably covering an area 500 meters by 500 meters, Maybe. Couldn't cover much.
Shelby:Yeah.
Doug:Now our drone flies about it's about a three times longer. So we get about thirty five to forty minutes, and we can cover just depending on line of sight and and maintaining visibility. Maybe a square kilometer, which would have taken us a lot of flights prior to get that right. So it's a huge upgrade and really changes the kind of science we can do.
Shelby:And what does it take for somebody in your group, for example, to start to fly the shuttle?
Doug:Well, have a pilot. None of our students really fly it that much, though they have in the past. We've had students who have the necessary qualifications. You have to get FAA certified and have different kinds of licenses. Also just be comfortable and competent flying a drone.
Doug:There's a certain kind of skill set. But we have an engineer from geography who flies our drone, Steve Scott, who's amazing. So and he he really helps us make sure that we we keep it safe and we keep everything up to date. You know, there's a whole level of sophistication here about keeping the machine working properly that you can imagine if left to professors would fall to disrepair. Yeah.
Shelby:It's interesting to think of having a pilot for one of these drones, but it does make sense that you would need someone who had the training and who was familiar and comfortable with.
Doug:Well, it's also just the kind of continuity that he provides. And so he keeps all these different logs. Just the kind of detail and and the seriousness he's able to bring to the operation allows us to be successful with the science. Right.
Shelby:And with this drone work, how much does this flying Ferrari cost? Ballpark, what was the was the ticket price for one of
Doug:these things? Oh gosh. I you know, up over a 150,000, maybe between just depending on the bells and whistles and all the I mean, so it's like, I can give you the price of the drone plus the lidar, but then you have to buy all this software. There's just so many other costs into it. So Right.
Doug:You know, it's about 180 ks, maybe upwards of 200 by the time you throw in all the other things you need. You know
Shelby:Yeah. Important to have somebody who's very well trained to operate something
Doug:like And we don't even pay Steve Scott's salary that's paid by IU. So it's an expensive endeavor, but I think it allows us to do science we couldn't do before and allows us to get grants that we otherwise wouldn't get. And so I think it certainly paid for itself in some respects.
Shelby:Yeah, yeah. Some of this work, you mentioned that your group has sort of transitioned from field areas that were maybe near the coast initially to things that are further inland. So where are some places that your group or that you specifically have focused on when you've gone out to the field? Because I imagine it's some of the areas have probably been really beautiful, really interesting. Maybe not.
Doug:Well, so the thing about depositional environments is that they're really flat. And they're not they don't really hold the same kind of beauty as mountains. You know? And I always like to tease my colleagues who study river systems or things up in the mountains because it's just easy to appreciate mountains. That's not hard work.
Doug:But go down to the coast of Louisiana, find yourself deep in a swamp. And there's beauty there. No doubt about it. But there will be times where you'll you'll have to look hard to find it. When you're swatting away mosquitoes, you know, trying to make sure you have somebody spotting alligators in different places.
Doug:I would not say that we look for the most beautiful of environments, but we look for places that interest us. So places we work now, we work on a lot of Indiana rivers. And so most of the field work that my group is doing right now is in and around the White River, the East Fork White River, so the one that flows south through Columbus and that area down through Brownstown farther south. And so we're in and around the White River a lot. And so we're again, you know, we're out on agricultural flood plains.
Doug:And a lot of times, these are locations where there's just been fertilizer spread. So, there's a certain aroma And in the again, you kind of look around, as you're stepping over tires and other things, this is the place I chose to work. And I love it.
Shelby:Do it for the love of the game. So, how did you get into this sort of field? You mentioned that you sort of started off as what you would consider a true geologist. What piqued your interest? Was this something you knew when you were pretty young?
Shelby:Or is this something that developed?
Doug:You mean geology in general? Yeah. Yeah. Well, like any good Midwestern kid, I had a nice rock collection. And that kind of piqued my interest.
Doug:And then in, I think, sixth grade, I did a science fair project. And buckle up. You ready for the name of the science fair project?
Shelby:This might be the episode, Toddle.
Doug:Yeah. Well, it should be. Maybe not. I don't know. Now, you have to put yourself how old was I in sixth grade?
Doug:So this is in the '90s. Rocks are radical. And I had my rock collection on display. So that was nice.
Shelby:That was the science fair project. Wow. Did you take home the grand prize?
Doug:No. But I did win first prize the next year in my science fair project. So I'm you know, how did I get interested in this? Well, I don't know. Something I've always liked about rocks, I guess.
Doug:I guess that's not hard to believe. A lot of kids are into rocks. But, you know, I I don't know. I was trying to figure out what major I wanted to do for college. And even prior to entering undergrad, I knew that I was more geared towards science.
Doug:I had kind of already made that decision. The business world wasn't really where I wanted to spend my career. And it was my mom who kind of reminded me, oh, you know, you really like being outside, looking at rocks, doing this kind of stuff. Have you ever thought about geology? And so she kind of put that bug in my head.
Doug:And of course, at the time, was like, geology, what? And then I looked into it and I thought, oh, this is really cool. This is a job where you get to be outside and you get to learn about the Earth. That's interesting to me. I grew up in Ohio, so I spent a lot of my childhood mucking around rivers and little creeks and playing in creeks and building dams and dismantling things and trying to, you know, reroute rivers at a small scale and digging you know, just playing in them.
Doug:So there's always some fascination from me with water and sediment, and so geology seemed like a natural fit. Then eventually, I found my way to sedimentary geology, and that's when I realized that for me, really, what it was, it was about the systems that create the rocks, not the rocks themselves.
Shelby:Yeah. It's a full circle moment a little bit.
Doug:Yeah. Well, it's kinda like the sort of reality of it all is I got into geology, really, to be outside in these environments. And then when I realized, oh, there are these everybody's looking at the rocks, and those are really cool, but I'm more interested in the actual river over here. And then to study the river, you need really it's not the only way, but the way that attracted me to it was through math and computation. So I'm not outside much.
Shelby:And when you are, you're in fields that just had freshly laid manure. So maybe not what young Doug imagined
Doug:back Yeah, it's true. But for me, at some point, it changed. I got into the field to be outside, which is pretty common for a lot of geologists. But then I realized that my real passion was actually learning about the Earth, not necessarily being I mean, I like being outside to learn about the Earth. But, like, first and foremost, I wanna learn about the Earth.
Doug:But I was just gravitated towards simulation as a means necessary maybe because I I'm not creative. I can't come up with hypotheses. I don't like to infer. I wanna see it happen. And so can't misrepresent the fact that we we go out in the field for sure, but it's it's not our primary means of scientific investigation, so we're not out in the field as much as other groups.
Doug:But we go.
Shelby:And for folks who are listening that maybe think, Oh, this could be something that I might like to think about or pursue, now that you've sold it so well. What sort of advice would you have for potential students?
Doug:The one thing I try to help students understand is I think I encounter a lot of students who are trying to find a passion or trying to find an interest. And I really kind of feel like that's misguided. I think you're better off just starting to do something that you're interested in, you may or may not be passionate about it and developing a passion. And I think there'd be a lot less anxiety about our career choices and a lot more just sort of trials and failures. And failures, I tell undergrads, I'm like, you know, just work in my lab for however long as you want.
Doug:And if you hate it, that's a wonderful outcome because now you know what you don't like. And there's just probably not enough of that. So I would just encourage students to just whatever is interesting to them to just try it out in whatever way possible. You know, give it a shot and see what see what happens. You may be surprised what passions develop.
Doug:That's sort of how I feel like I came into my career. We probably always give the advice that led us to our own outcome. That's probably pretty typical. But for me, I didn't anticipate enjoying the science that I'm doing for the reasons I enjoy it now. I just didn't.
Shelby:And I think our field is sort of well suited to that potential for exploration within it, which is part of what sort of appealed to me when I was an undergrad. This was not a path that I ever envisioned or that I had planned on or had sort of tracked from a young age. And so when I was an undergrad and folks were encouraging me to think about grad school, was like, Well, you know, I can try this and if I don't like it, there's lots of opportunity within this broad umbrella of geology to try something else and still be within the framework of this training and this degree program that I've been in. I think the idea that you can have some flexibility to see what clicks with you is kind of nice.
Doug:Yeah. So that's my big advice. But also then my grumpy old man advice is take more physics and math.
Shelby:It's always good advice. So Doug, we end each episode with our Yes, Please segment, where we each get one minute to talk passionately about something that is interesting to us in the moment. And so you wanna go first or do you wanna go second?
Doug:You wanna rock, paper, scissors for it?
Shelby:Yeah. Let's do it. Okay. Rock, paper, scissors.
Doug:One, two, three, shoot.
Shelby:Ready? You won.
Doug:Yeah. I always go rock. I'm a geologist.
Shelby:Yeah. I should have picked up on that. Does that mean I go first?
Doug:That's right.
Shelby:Alright. If you want to time me and just sort of let me know when counting down Okay.
Doug:This will
Shelby:be my yes, please segment. So this actually builds on something that that Doug had mentioned. Yes, please. I think we, you know, like, need to be open to new experiences. What prompted me to come up with this for today is I recently received this, like, kit.
Shelby:I think they make them for every state. So this one is for Indiana and it has all of these cards in it for different areas around the state and it's sort of a scratch your own adventure program. So it has, you know, I think for Bloomington there were two or three cards And one card is, you know, a summer day. Another card is a fall evening. And so you sort of pick what you wanna do, the time frame that you're interested in doing it for, and then you scratch off these events that you can do to sort of explore a new area.
Shelby:And I thought, man, is such a cool way to sort of familiarize yourself with places that maybe you haven't been before or to try something new in a place that you have been. And I think that we all should be sort of open to this idea of of trying new things and seeing what comes of it.
Doug:Cool. I'll
Shelby:have to I haven't explored any of these beyond Bloomington, but I'll it's on my bucket list to just start randomly pulling them Yeah. On on long weekends and see where see where I end up. Yeah, absolutely. Alright, Doug, if you're ready.
Doug:Okay, I'm ready.
Shelby:Please, take it away.
Doug:Okay, yes, please, can we ban cell phones in elementary schools? Because eventually it would be nice for the college students that enter my classroom to be used to not having their phone on them all the time. It a little bit I find it really disappointing and disheartening to walk into any college class I teach now and there's no chatter before the professor arrives. Everybody's on their phone. But I'm really happy that there's a bill in the Indiana Senate right now to actually ban phones in Indiana K through 12 schools.
Doug:They have to go in a pouch before you enter and when you leave. And so my hope is that our Indiana students will be used to not having their phones during school so that when I say, Hey, let's just let's leave our phones here in a basket when you enter the door. It'll just be it'll be normal to them. I look forward to that day. Yes, please.
Doug:Bring that day back.
Shelby:This is gonna age me too. I can remember, you know, I got my first cell phone, which was not smartphones didn't exist at the time. When I was a sophomore in high school and only because I traveled a lot to play sports. And, like, my parents didn't always go to the away games. I'd have to let them know when we were getting, you know, close to being home on the bus.
Shelby:They could show up to pick me up. And, you know, if you wanted to send somebody a text message, you had to to really work at it because to to top a C, you had to hit one of the buttons three times to get to a C. And you know, you couldn't look up things on the internet and so you know, that was sort of doable. But yeah, things now, it's just even me sometimes, it's just second nature to have a phone attached to you and it's nice when we can sort of break free from that for a little bit and be in the moment.
Doug:Oh, man. And phones are phones are really quite poisonous to education. Just having your phone next to you has a measurable impact on your performance, at least in controlled studies, you know, in in certain situations. But so it's you know, I look forward to the day when we finally realize that these are not necessary to be around all the time.
Shelby:Yeah. Yeah. We'll have to see how that that legislation ends up. Yeah. Doug, thanks for coming on.
Shelby:This has been great having you here.
Doug:Yeah. Thank you.
Shelby:And for folks that are listening, we'll see you next time when we have a new guest. 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. Funding for this podcast was provided by the National Science Foundation grant EAR dash 2422824.