Discovering Diamonds: The Story of Canada’s Diamond Rush with Kevin Krajick

Kevin Krajick Long

Jesse Reimink: [00:00:00] Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.

Jesse Reimink: Chris Fer. What's up, man?

Chris Bolhuis: Not a whole lot. How you doing? Dr. Reimink?

Jesse Reimink: It's been a week, man. I tell you what, it's, What is it now? Wednesday. It has just been a week. I don't know why. Just been one of those weeks,

Chris Bolhuis: No, it's been a good week for me. Uh, the weather has been absolutely perfect. Uh, I love fall. It's just got this, it's not summer. It's warm, but it has a different smell. The, the wind is different. I just love it.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Falls

Chris Bolhuis: been a good week.

Jesse Reimink: I think that's probably it. We've had some pretty rainy days here at, at uh, Penn State and State College here, the last couple.

Chris Bolhuis: you getting some, Hurricane ian leftover.

Jesse Reimink: No, not yet. I think that's gonna come in a little bit, but we haven't gotten any of that yet. Um, it's just been kind of rare, just a little bit raining injury. But I did have a colleague who was visiting who gave [00:01:00] our departmental colloquium seminar on Tuesday, which was really fun. So

Chris Bolhuis: Colloquium. That's a big word for you.

Jesse Reimink: uh, seminar, Yeah, I try and pull it off. I think I pronounced it

Chris Bolhuis: Colloquium some. What does that mean? I don't even, Oh,

Jesse Reimink: I don't know. Fancy word for big, long talk

Chris Bolhuis: Oh

Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Anyway, I'm annoying,

Chris Bolhuis: right. You're a real piece. You are? Yeah.

Jesse Reimink: I mean, we, we just had a really good conversation though, so it's been a week, but this was really fun. We had the. Great pleasure to interview Kevin Krajick, who is the senior editor of Science and News at the Columbia Climate School. He, the reason we interviewed him though is cuz he's written a book that I love and Chris you've read recently as well. It's called Baron Lands and Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic. And oh, it's so fun. It's just such a great blend of amazing characters, really cool geology, a bunch of different aspects of geology and. You know, finding massive diamond deposits, which who doesn't love that, right? It's, it's super cool. But Kevin, [00:02:00] let me just read through some of his accolades here. he's the finalist for the National Magazine Award for Public Service, Two time winner of the American Geophysical Union's Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Scientific Journal. His work has been featured on National Geographic Newsweek, the New Yorker, Science Smithsonian Magazine, like all over the place. And many of those articles have won, uh, Best American Science and Nature Writing Awards. So it's a very, very well known and very prolific science writer who also wrote this book called Baron Lands that we love. And this was a fun conversation, right, Chris?

Chris Bolhuis: it was, It's called Barren lands, like you said, but it's an epic search for diamonds in the North American Arctic. So everyone needs to understand the kind of process that you and I go through. You know, we come up with ideas and then we pitch him to each other. And you pitched me this and , uh, you were really, really excited about this, because you've spent so much time in the Northwest, her tour. So you [00:03:00] had a tie to this that I didn't have, and so I was skeptical at the, at the beginning. Then I read the book and it read like a novel. It's not a novel. He did not take liberties with conversations that happened. There's a lot of personal dialogue in this. the main central characters to people are amazing. They are so entertaining. They're geniuses in their own way. I would like. Chuck Fike is one of my favorite people that I've never met in my life. I, he, he

Jesse Reimink: Yeah,

Chris Bolhuis: tops the list of people I'd love to have a beer with. Um, I mean, he just, I, I laughed so many times

Jesse Reimink: From reading the book, Chris, it doesn't seem like you'd be able to just have one beer with him. I think you'd

Chris Bolhuis: No. Oh, I would not want to. No. Uh, yeah, Yeah, it would, it would be a long night. Um, but I guess what I wanna say is read the book. It's very good. This isn't a, like, we're not trying to plug that or anything like that, but I really enjoyed it [00:04:00] and you had to sell me on it. I mean, this was not an easy, like, Oh, okay, let's do that. You had to sell me. We've already done diamonds, you know? So, that was by the, go back and listen to our earlier episode on diamonds as a refresher about things like kimberlites, how diamonds form these rare volcanoes that come from very, very deep down, in the mantle. And, and, you know, go back, be a good primer, and then, maybe listen to this episode.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, absolutely. And so we'll get to this interview here coming up, but really quickly Chris, a couple weeks ago we launched our Camp Geo product, uh, which is a web app you can go to. It's a conversational textbook if you like Planet Geo, but you want something a little bit more structured and you wanna learn the basics. Go to that. The link is in the show notes. You can click on that log in. You have access to all sorts of interesting content about the geosciences, so go to that.

Chris Bolhuis: yeah, that's right. Jesse Camp Geo We cover everything that you would get in a typical Intro Geology [00:05:00] College course. It's complete. Well, It will be complete. But what I mean is this content is thorough It's enhanced with images. You need to help the content. Make sense? It is. We're so excited about this. Been a blast to make. It's gonna be a blast for you to learn this way. Just a cool thing.

Jesse Reimink: And if you like Planet Geo, remember, leave us a rating and review those. Help the algorithm. Go to our website, planet geo cast.com. You can subscribe there, you can learn about us, you can support us and, uh, share Planet Geo with your friends, right? All right, here is Kevin Krajick coming at you? Enjoy.

Chris Bolhuis: enjoy.

Jesse Reimink: All right. Welcome to Planet Geo. Today we have the great pleasure of having Kevin Krajick along with us, who is a science writer, uh, extraordinaire. I would say, as you heard in our introduction, Kevin, welcome [00:06:00] to Planet.

Kevin Krajick: Delighted to be here. I'm glad to meet you guys. We have some things in common, I think.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, we're totally excited. So you've written a book that I love, uh, about diamond mining in Northern Canada where I did my research. Well actually Diamond Prospecting. But this book is a great exploration of searching for diamonds in the sort of modern world. The book is called Barron Lands, an Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic. And that, I think that'll kind of center our conversation a little bit. But you know, Chris did a deep dive on you as he loves to do, and found some articles that are super interesting. So we'll probably talk about a lot of different stuff, but we always like to kind of frame the interviews as we start of like, how did you get into this? So how did, what inspired you to get into writing generally journalism or, you know, more specifically the, the sort of geoscience field that you've been writing about for a long time.

Kevin Krajick: Yeah, I mean, it started back in high school. I was interested in journalism. Um, so much so that I helped run the [00:07:00] high school newspaper. , and also a competing underground newspaper, cuz I thought the, uh, the, the, the official one didn't have enough hard edges.

Jesse Reimink: Oh, cool. What was it, what was the underground one

Kevin Krajick: yeah. Uh, the gesture, the gesture, just stupid name. This is in the 1970s

Jesse Reimink: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. . That's

Kevin Krajick: So, uh, you know, after high school I managed to drop outta college for a while. Uh, but I did go back and, uh, got a pretty useless degree in comparative literature. , I shouldn't say it's totally useless. Taught me a lot about language and structuring, uh, structuring long form narratives. , but anyway, um, I do have a practical streak. I decided to go to journalism school because I did wanna make a living as a writer. and it turned out to be a pretty good investment. Uh, Columbia Journalism School, nine months and out. Um, got a fabulous job, uh, straight outta school, uh, covering police prison. And crime across the United States with a couple of magazines that, uh, covered those issues. And, uh, so I've [00:08:00] been in the back a lot of police cars and in many more horrifying prisons than even the most hardened criminals. so that was a, you know, a real adventure and it sort of brought me outta my shell. I'm kind of a shy person, so that was kind of my, uh, aim as well. and

Jesse Reimink: would get you outta your show. Wow.

Kevin Krajick: uh, yeah,

Jesse Reimink: pretty intense

Kevin Krajick: Yeah, so I mean, I bounced through a bunch of jobs, uh, after that and, and did cover a lot of crime stuff as well as, immigration and medicine and other things. But the crime stuff, you know, it's a depressing beat. There are really no news stories as far as I'm concerned. After having covered that for a while. People are just gonna keep committing crimes. The cops are gonna keep beating them up and the prisons are just gonna keep being horrible. but it did occur to me, um, oh, I don't know, sort of in the early nineties that. what some people I knew who were writing about science, like they were doing something really quite different. They were writing about new discoveries. Science is is about finding stuff out. there's new stuff all the time and it's [00:09:00] not depressing. And besides, um, scientists, especially geoscientists, go to the most exotic and wild places. So one advantage is just to follow them around. you know, that's what I did. I, you know, I just started to, to think about, uh, science ideas when I started reading Science and Nature that you do the leading journals and just reading up on, on various scientific topics and then coming up with ideas. So I had a long, a long tenure as a freelancer. After that I was, I had been working at Newsweek for a while as sort of a low level editor. Uh, but that's, that's where I sort of started the, uh, the science.

Jesse Reimink: Wow, that's really cool.

Chris Bolhuis: Was there anything in, particular, Kevin, that got you into science? Was there, um, something that you read and experienced that happened that you're like, This is the direction I want to go?

Kevin Krajick: Yeah, this, it was actually the, the book that I eventually wrote, um, in 1994. I've read that, um, some geologists had found diamonds in the far north of Canada, this place called the Baron Lands. [00:10:00] And, um it was portrayed as this place. It's just nothing but, you know, thousands of miles of rocks and, permafrost and wild beast. Sounds like another planet, right? So now who would, who wouldn't wanna go there? I guess most people would not wanna go there, but I wanted to go there. So I thought up a magazine story. Um, the narrative at that time was sort of about the finances and the riches of this, uh, this diamond strike. but I was more interested in how did they do it? How did they get up there into this incredibly far away place? that was kind of my first real science story. And I just, it just sort of took from there.

Jesse Reimink: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, I, you could tell from the, the writing and especially from the barren lands. Chris, if, you'll let me off the leash and I can talk about the Barron Lands now.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. I think we can go,

Jesse Reimink: Okay. All alright, good. Um, you, you get into some pretty deep science, which I hope we we'll kind of talk about a little bit here. so as a backdrop to this, I did my PhD in, Canada and I was working up in what's called the slave craton. So I've been to Yale, I a whole bunch, but [00:11:00] I went up, I started going up there in 2009, which is, a decade and a half after the diamond mining really started, or all this diamond exploration and the town is well developed and there's some definitely like, well healed parts of the town now because of this big diamond industry. So you, when you were going up there, it must have been a bit more of a rough and ready sort of exploration town than it is now. But you kind of described how this, the, where the inspiration came from, but how do you start a book like this? Like how do you say, oh, there's new diamond minds being explored up there, being found and installed. Like what do you do first when you decide you wanna write a book about it?

Kevin Krajick: Well, first of all, you don't decide to write a book straight off. , the way I started it was a, um, no, it's, this is true for many people. Everybody has their own way of working, of course. But, um, I conceived of it as a magazine article. This was for Discover Magazine. So they sent me up there to write this long story about how these guys did it. And then I got a [00:12:00] couple of other stories., I got another story about from Natural History Magazine to write about the wildlife up there and the, the ecology of the Baron Lands. And then I got, you know, another, I think another couple of magazine stories, , just to talk about the politics of it. And then, realized, you know, I could really expand this into a book. So that's where it begins. It begins small and then you just kind of keep, keep digging.

Jesse Reimink: Okay. So you've been up there. So I, when I was looking, I typed in Baron Lands, first of all, to Google when I was trying to find, I can't remember what, I was trying to find something about the book though. And, uh, I realized that when, you know, typed something into Google there's actually a map location, kind of like a restaurant review that you would find for the barren lands. You, Barren lands has like a rating. there's reviews and there's three reviews, and the average is 3.7 stars out of five, which is astonishingly high. I thought for the Baron Lands, like of the three people who reviewed

Kevin Krajick: do you rate, Like, like you say, the,

Jesse Reimink: I mean, [00:13:00]

Kevin Krajick: were delicious.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I, I, I like didn't see anything. I saw known life. I saw some birds. Maybe the fishing was great, like, I don't know, maybe they're all fishermen. But the Barron lens, it's, You said it before, it's kind of a desolate place and you really describe it well in the book. But I guess long-winded way to get to my question is how much time did you spend up there? It seemed, from reading the book, like you spent a lot of time with these people and potentially a decent amount of time with them up in the barren lands and at the minds,

Kevin Krajick: well, mines became active later. Um, well, they actually opened up sort of at the end. this research I was doing, it was going on for five or six years, off and on. I went up there many times. think my first trip I went to ke British Columbia to meet a couple of the people who had discovered, these sites to their stockholders meeting. So I started, you know, getting to know them there and, and getting to know their families and then, They invited me to come up [00:14:00] to the Barron Lands, and of course the only way to get around there is by float plane and helicopter. So I would just hitch rides with these geologists. Some of them were private geologists, some of them were government geologists. I bet some of the native people there, you know, they would take me to, to certain places that they knew. So it was just something that developed over a period of years, spent quite a bit of time in Yellow Knife and then, getting out into the, into the wild there.

Chris Bolhuis: Kevin. How did you get wind of this then? Because you kind of got ahold of this early on. I mean, I can see how this would've happened after the fact. Right? This turned into a huge deal. You came on really early. how did that happen?

Kevin Krajick: Well, it, it was 1993, I believe, when I read a piece in the New York Times, the Science section, by Bill Broad, I believe, that was just talking about this, This diamond strike and the landscape, as I mentioned earlier, you know, got me interested in it, uh, then I decided to just, to go a lot deeper than, than he was able to do. , it was just very fortunate because [00:15:00] all the characters, , they were totally cooperative. and, you know, I spent not only a lot of time in the field, but a lot of time on the phone, uh, with people who had scattered around, from the various stages this exploration. And really it took them about 10 years of, of work to get to work themselves up from places in the United States that they were prospecting all the way up to the far north.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I mean that was one of the really cool stories, I think was how you had a great history of, okay, I guess maybe you could summarize this for us, of diamond exploration in North America, I guess, and all like the really, you know, weird discoveries where people found that, that I found fascinating and I never knew that, that diamonds were discovered kind of one-offs everywhere. Can you kind of give us a short summary of that process and how you, where your research took you?

Kevin Krajick: sure. Um, you know, I originally was just gonna spend a few weeks just getting some background on diamond exploration around the world. But then I started, digging into the Columbia University of Geology Library and the New York Public Library and some other [00:16:00] sources. And I was finding news clippings and old journals and rare books that, talked about all these people who, over centuries in North America had found diamonds or thought they found diamonds or told other people they found diamonds could sell them the claims.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah.

Kevin Krajick: Uh, there's a lot of that. and it wasn't, it wasn't written down in any place. You know, the, the diamonds before this had really only been found in any quantity in India and Brazil. That was it. , but then, you know, I discovered even going back to the 15 hundreds, people were thinking about this, starting with Jacque Cartier even going up to St. Lawrence River in 1530 something. so, was able to, to find through all sorts of scattered sources that real diamonds actually started appearing in the 1830s. The gold strikes of the early 18 hundreds, you think about California, you know, there's gold in thar hills. , the guy who said that was Dr. Mf Stevenson, he was not, um, talking about [00:17:00] California. He was talking about Georgia where he was from. There was a lot of gold, a lot of gold panning going on in Georgia, in Alabama. and that's where the first diamond started just turning up by accident. People were looking for gold. And then, you know, the same damn thing happened when they went to to California. People were just tearing apart every stream, bed everywhere. They found a lot of gold, but then occasionally they would find diamonds. Nobody knew where they came from. A lot of weird stories. Um, you know, little boy looks down at a well in North Carolina and sees this little glittering stone. It's a diamond. Another little boy in a farm field in Wisconsin picks up a diamond, which is immediately confiscated by his father. Sold for 50 bucks. Uh, but I mean, you know, a lot of the finders were, were children. It makes sense because they're very close to the ground and they're always kind of like picking stuff up.

Chris Bolhuis: Kevin were the diamonds found with a higher quantity of gold too, where they associated together in the same deposits

Kevin Krajick: I'm not a geologist of course, but I don't think the, the diamonds were there because there was gold. The [00:18:00] diamonds were there because people were sifting through vast quantities of sediments and picking up whatever heavy thing settled to the bottom of their pans or their sls. Both diamonds in gold , are heavy minerals, so they would end up in the same place. It's not that they originate from the same place, it's just, I know you guys know this. It's just that they are found by the same methods. Yes.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's good. That was a great description. Yeah, for sure.

Chris Bolhuis: I was getting after whether or not these were placers too, you know, so the gold is definitely a place or deposit where they finding the diamonds in those same

Kevin Krajick: Yes, Yes. As they were panning for gold, they would find diamonds. And like I say, that they'd just be found by the same method, basically. But nobody knew where they came from. In fact, nobody knew what the aura of the diamond was.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that was really interesting. And then you have the, the guys going around and like taking some micro diamonds and then like salting the area, spreading diamonds in some anthills and then are, I think they're anthills, right? And then, and then saying, Oh look, we found [00:19:00] diamonds here. And then, Oh, do you wanna buy this land? Oh yeah, it's really beautiful land. You can buy it. And then, uh, it's just a crazy story of all this wild stuff going on. It's really like the wild, wild west you imagine of, you know, gold mining towns and stuff like that, except it's with diamonds. It's really crazy. so , I guess you spent a lot of time with some very interesting people, let's put it that way. Like prospector types, people who go around chasing massive deposits. May or may not exist. Their whole life is a really interesting mindset. Can you, I thought your descriptions of the people like Chuck Fike, who did this, who discovered diamonds up in Northern canada,

Kevin Krajick: That's the sexual character. Yeah,

Jesse Reimink: the central character, I mean,

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, Chuck and,

Chris Bolhuis: Chuck and Stewart, they, they made this book read like a novel actually. Can you, I'm serious. It was, it was such a good read. Jesse was all in from the beginning [00:20:00] because of his ties to, you know, Yellow Knife in the Northwest Territories. When I started reading this, I was immediately drawn. These people are, they're amazing. , your descriptions of them. Can you just spend a couple of minutes, Kevin, and tell our listeners about the two main characters? Stuart Bless and Chuck Fit please.

Kevin Krajick: so Chuck 50 is a, is a geochemist and geologist and, um, he's spent quite a few years working for other people, um, looking for, for all kinds of minerals and New Guinea and places in South America. I forget where else, but he was a very savvy guy, very savvy businessman, and also a very good scientist. in that he, um, he founded a lab, in British Columbia that was able to separate all sorts of minerals from each other , and use those minerals to sort of track things that you wanted to find. Um, he's also sort of a wild man, you know, kind of a hard drinker, big a adventurer, absolutely boundless [00:21:00] energy and also I found just a very honest, genuine guy. You know, he was just so much fun to be around. , he's had so much enthusiasm, even after he had struck a rich, you know, he was still sort of the same guy. he and his partners St. Lesson, Um, they had sort of an uneasy relationship at various times. Uh, St. Lessen came from a sort of different background. He worked for the Geological survey of Canada and was sort of this very hard, bitten guy who spent an awful lot of time in the wilderness of the Yukon. And other places, , not necessarily looking for riches, but just doing basic geologic mapping, but also like a very savvy, tough guy. And Sue Plus, and by the way, also was able to fly a helicopter, which kind of , helped them out as well as being a geologist. so he was a real, you know, a real survivor of all kinds stuff. And I, I think they really just sort of came together by, by chance. There are a lot of other subsidiary characters that, that play into this, but they were the, the sort of two [00:22:00] leaders who, who got into this and, and, you know, were able to follow a trail for thousands of miles.

Chris Bolhuis: Didn't Stu Lessen have a, an encounter with a big bear, a brown bear in one of his excursions?

Kevin Krajick: Yeah, one of the chapters starts with him, like staring into the mouth of a bear, which is on, on top of him, and he's able to fight this bear of, and, you know, like push him over a cliff. If I remember right, doesn't, I mean, the bear just sort of tumbles down a slow, not off a cliff. , but yeah, they, and, and there's this one thing after another with him, you know, helicopter crash. He's somehow able to survive that. Unfortunately some other people in the story are actually killed, by helicopters and other, other means, including bears. But these two guys survive and they triumph.

Jesse Reimink: mean, it's a, it's an incredibly raw place up there. And, and it's fairly, you know, it's fairly dangerous, frankly. I mean, it's, you're so far away from everything and, and so far from help that you kind of gotta be a particular type of self-sufficiency, [00:23:00] uh, to function up there with any, over any amount of time really. and I just think that these people, Can you give us some insight into, uh, like maybe from the, the point of the, the writer of, of you being the writer and writing this story, it makes complete sense how you would make the characters central to it, because there's such an integral part of the actual story. But how much, I don't know how many people were focused like you were there during this time. It seems like there was a lot of people really focused on diamond mining or diamond exploration. Was that the case? Was it just a. A ton of press and a ton of people around and loads of mayhem everywhere or, Or was it a little bit calmer than that and sort of came outta nowhere? You know what I'm kind of getting at? Like, did everybody kind of know there was something serious happening or was it kind of random?

Kevin Krajick: well, I think as early as 1991, blessing in 50 and, and the company that they allied themselves with, BHP Australian Company. you know, they needed a senior partner. Um, To bring in millions of dollars just [00:24:00] exert all the technology that you need to really zero in, in these deposits. So this became public, as soon as their interest in this area was revealed publicly, all these other, uh, outfits began rushing in and everybody was competing for, land. Uh, in, Canada, you can just stake out, so-called Crown Land can stake out, uh, mineral claims. So it's the equivalent of federal land here. people just rushed in, they staked that millions of acres explore. So I was there in the summer of 1994 at first when a lot of this, after a lot of the stake had taken place, and then people were now, um, drilling and taking mineral samples and trying to find other promising deposits. And by that time, you know, it seemed like a pretty good chance that, the Fge blessed Diamond mind was a go. but it's so expensive to operate up there and diamonds are so rare, even in just a good deposit that they had to figure out if it was really economic. So that was really the stage that I came in on, and it was really only a couple [00:25:00] years later as I was finishing the book that they opened the mine.

Chris Bolhuis: Kevin, real quick, , what kind of money are we talking about? Um, from what I understand, Chuck and Stu are very, very wealthy individuals. What kind of money are we talking about?

Kevin Krajick: I haven't really

Kevin Krajick: kept,

Chris Bolhuis: did any of that trickle down to you?

Kevin Krajick: no, no sort of, sort of the reverse because the book world doesn't work that way.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah.

Kevin Krajick: no, they, I think, uh, if I remember correctly, they were both, I forget how many hundreds of millions or maybe billions of dollars they were worth. stoop Busen gave a lot of his money away to the University of British Columbia and some other, Causes. I think he, he founded a, some sort of science center there. , Chuck Fike has, has a whole lot of resources.

Chris Bolhuis: lot of

Kevin Krajick: I don't know how much money they have. It's a lot.

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. It's

Jesse Reimink: I mean,

Chris Bolhuis: I saw that. Stu gave way over a hundred million. It's amazing. Jesse, you're blurry here. What's going on with

Chris Bolhuis: you over there?

Jesse Reimink: Okay. Um, I,

Jesse Reimink: It's the type of [00:26:00] thing.

Chris Bolhuis: better that way.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, good one.

Chris Bolhuis: to the blurry please. I like that.

Jesse Reimink: Um, the, uh, it's the kind of thing like everybody, anybody on the margins got rich too. You know, the float playing pilots, the people supplying wood. I've heard these stories going up there a bunch. I mean, we came across, you know, the old staking post that had marked 1993 on, I forget whose name was on it, but it's the little, like one and a half inch by one and a half inch steak wooden stake. And if you were like the supplier of wooden stakes, if you had wooden stakes in 93, you like made a killing, you just like crushed it. You could retire on me or like wooden stake supply. Right. I think you, said it in the book, Kevin, that it was the largest staking claim in history

Kevin Krajick: I, I think it was. . I think K must has been, I mean, there's no place else that has that much, uh, area. Uh, and, and you're right. I, I talked to the, these guys they're called expediters, the people who slip by the stakes and, you know, charter the planes and so on. Yeah, they did very well. , I spent a lot of time with, with those guys as well and, you know, was able to, to learn a lot of [00:27:00] just really interesting and funny stories from them. I just tried to chat, tap every possible source. Anybody who knew anything.

Chris Bolhuis: Well, Kevin, you're doing something wrong. If none of that trickled down to you, I gotta say

Kevin Krajick: Oh, well

Kevin Krajick: the book is still in print. No, no. You can still go by the book. It's, so, it's, it

Jesse Reimink: That's right.

Kevin Krajick: of thousands of copies. That's pretty good for

Jesse Reimink: Yeah. It's, I mean, it's an

Chris Bolhuis: right. I'm just kidding. Kevin, I'm sorry,

Jesse Reimink: buy the book. It's awesome. But so I,

Chris Bolhuis: Jesse, can I interrupt a second? I just burned as this. Kevin, what did st.

Chris Bolhuis: And. Chuck have that nobody else had. They beat everybody. What? What's their major contribution here?

Kevin Krajick: Well, we could get technical or we could just be,

Chris Bolhuis: Technical. We can do that.

Jesse Reimink: do

Chris Bolhuis: We can do both. Yeah. Let's do

Kevin Krajick: Okay. So, so just to back up a little bit, uh, we haven't talked about how diamonds form or how they get to the surface. Uh, they form about, I don't know, ninety, a hundred twenty five miles down. Below the [00:28:00] crust, well below the crust. And occasionally, very occasionally there'll be some sort of deep seated volcano that somehow penetrates to this layer and just brings them up and come. They come up quite rapidly, It's believed, and, uh, as they get fir closer and closer to the surface, the, the pressure of this eruption just, um, Gets canceled out. And so when you get to the top, it just blows out this big, , massive stuff from the deve Earth. it's a deposit called the Kimber Light. Nobody's ever seen one of these things erupt. I think that the most recent one we know are maybe 80 or 90 million years ago. , when the diamonds come up in this very special rock called Kimberley, , they're quite rare. , but they, there are other minerals that come up along with them that also only form in the diamond forming zone. Some of them are, garnets. Maybe some of you have garnet earrings or garnet ring or something. Uh, chrome dioxide, which were these little greenish minerals, and they're just peculiar to the deep earth. So if you can find some of [00:29:00] these things, you know that there has been an eruption from the deep earth and they come up in much greater quantities than the diamonds themselves, and they spread over. Much greater area. So that's what you're looking for. That's sort of the basic explanation of how a lot of modern prospecting happens. Those are called indicator minerals. Yeah. So they were able to get onto a train of those, but you know, they, they had to troopers thousands of miles to, to reach the sort of tail end.

Jesse Reimink: This is a really interesting point because in order to be successful in this, you had to integrate so much geology into it. You had to think about the indicator minerals as you beautifully described, these Kimber light eruptions, these Kimber light eruptions are also quite small. So the, the surface representation is usually a pipe that's, I don't know, a couple hundred meters across, maybe a mile wide. Like they're not very big. These are not huge volcanoes. but then they also have to figure out where the glaciers went. So you spent a lot of time talking about like ESCOs and glacial deposits. Can you tell us how they integrated the, what you mean by an indicator trail [00:30:00] or train

Kevin Krajick: Yeah. So, yeah, so I mean, if you find some of these minerals you have to figure out , where did they come from? And, uh, fortunately Stu Lessen was an expert in, glacial geology as well, and they were able to sort of recreate the movements of glaciers across the Northwest Territories where these, these things were found. And they just sort of followed it backward, you know, they found sort of the furthest point where the indicator minerals. Had been moved that they had to trace it backwards to where these things came from and that, that was a matter of hundreds of miles. But then, you know, even then you can't find the kimberlite unless you have other methods including, a magnetics and ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity. It's a whole suite of geophysical, , methods that have to come in there to really zero in on these, these features, cuz they're, they're covered over by water and sediments.

Chris Bolhuis: So, just for, let me, Kevin, correct me if I'm wrong, I wanna try to summarize what you just said. They found these indicator [00:31:00] minerals, not necessarily the diamonds, right? Just these indicator minerals that were moved by glaciers. Then they had to backtrack the movement of the glaciers to try to find the kimberlite pipe. Is that what you're saying?

Kevin Krajick: exactly.

Chris Bolhuis: That's incredible. Unbelievable. Jesse, you were, I'm sorry, interrupted.

Jesse Reimink: No, , that's fine. , I just wanted to, mention, I don't know if, did you see this, uh, Kevin just recently, I think it was last week, a Kati announced that they found a very big yellow, fancy diamond. I think it was like 70 carrots or something like that, just came out of the, a Kati mine just recently. So they're still finding like the really big, really valuable stones in this thing. you know, that puts you in the black for like the year basically, if you find one of these monster stones. Anyway, it's kind of interesting, I saw that in the news and I forgot to mention it, but, um, that this intersection of geology, so back to kind of Chris's. Question of what did these guys have that other people didn't, you know? Is that the science answer? The combination here, and what's the emotional, spiritual answer to it, I guess?

Kevin Krajick: No, they had, for one [00:32:00] thing, they had very good luck. They just had very good luck. But they were also very, very persistent. And they also had help. You know, they had, they, like I say, they did make a deal with this big company to bring in the, all the other expertise that was needed,

Chris Bolhuis: That's interesting that you say that, Kevin, because my take in the book was these two are, are brilliant in their own ways. so St was the classic geologist. Right. And, Chuck, from what I understand, his massive, contribution separating the indicator minerals. Is that, is that?

Kevin Krajick: that that was part of it. But I mean also just his drive to accomplish this find. and yes, he did, he did the geochemistry and the separation of the minerals,

Chris Bolhuis: Can you talk about that, the separation? Like , what that looks like? Why is that so important, I guess for our listeners?

Kevin Krajick: Like I said, diamonds heavy minerals, so is gold. So are these indicator minerals? they all sort of, end up more or less in the same spot, although, No. Exactly. Um, [00:33:00] all, all the exact ways of separating these minerals. I'm not too much up in the technical stuff of that, but, you know, there are certain chemicals you need to use to separate them out. Uh, there are some magnetic minerals called manites, which they use magnets , to get those out. but Chuck had, he had this enormous lab that, it's just amazing how he, assembled the expertise to, to do all this stuff as just a small businessman, really, , without any real backing until, pretty much the very end when they were really just pretty much on top of what turned out to be the mine.

Jesse Reimink: that's such an interesting story. I just love this, the, the entire story of it, and these guys just work so hard. You have a very succinct and very excellent summary of this junior exploration company industry that I've, I never really fully understood despite living and working in Canada for a long time about like, you have so many little companies that are trading for like penny stocks that never actually go anywhere. like one in a couple thousand that makes it big, like [00:34:00] ends up being Ekati diamond Mine or something like that. You gave a really good summary, but can you give us like your sense of that you went up there in the nineties when things were going wild and then you've probably paid attention to it for a little bit at least after that and like how this boom bus cycle works in industry? I don't know. It's very interesting

Kevin Krajick: Oh, it's kind of a traditional Canadian thing. , it's been going on for many, many decades. but a lot of these little outfits, I think the people who run them are, they're geologists like you, and they want somebody to pay them to go on a permanent camping trip, so they, they know they're not gonna find anything. They're probably not gonna find anything, but they're raising

Chris Bolhuis: We, we've been outed right there.

Jesse Reimink: That was a

Chris Bolhuis: us.

Jesse Reimink: Oh man. How do I do this?

Kevin Krajick: do you go back to class

Chris Bolhuis: You go back to,

Kevin Krajick: your students?

Jesse Reimink: that's,

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. You can't do that, Kevin. You can't just sell us down river. Like that's not okay.

Jesse Reimink: That's a

Chris Bolhuis: Wow. That hurt a little bit. [00:35:00] I just

Kevin Krajick: Sorry, sorry,

Jesse Reimink: that's good.

Chris Bolhuis: you're not. So.

Jesse Reimink: I mean, that's a good description. But you also have these, like every once in a while somebody strikes it rich, and then everybody, like, kinda, it keeps everybody hanging out that there's the possibility of making it big time, like really, really big time. Like, these guys did. And everybody who invested in them did in the

Kevin Krajick: Yeah, so I mean, you know, there are lots of people out there willing to take a chance and buy some of these stocks, and if they strike it rich, they they do, but they're probably not going to. But in any case, most of the geologists who wanna be on the camping trip, they're also really good salesman. They're good at talking up stuff and, you know, throwing out all technical figures and, explaining the chances of this or that. So it's a business. It's, it's a business more than a science, these, these little mining companies. But I did, you know, I met a couple of them. . Some of them seem like charltons, but most of them, you know, genuinely wanted to, to go out and look for this stuff. And a couple of other [00:36:00] people that I met besides Chuck Fike and Stu Blesson did strike it very rich. So There are a couple of other diamond minds up there now that, that people actually did find.

Jesse Reimink: So have you been to the working mines? Have you been up there when, After the mines were installed and working.

Kevin Krajick: Yeah, I went up for the opening of the Ekati mine, which was quite an affair. so basically the, the kimberlite pipe is just sort of this tornado shaped thing. It just sort of widens up, comes up very narrow, and then widens at the, at the end. The mine itself it was buried under a lake. It was a lake. The top of the kimberlite pipe was a lake. . Uh, so they drained this thing and then they started digging. And that's how, generally how diamond mining is done. It's an open cast mine, so it's just this big hole in the ground. , and a bunch of three or four store high dump trucks and giant excavators taking this stuff to the factory to be, um, you know, crushed up and sorted out. But I remember they showed [00:37:00] us, they brought out a whole bunch of diamonds, just put him out in a case. People were able to look at these things. It was a big party afterwards. Uh,

Chris Bolhuis: I bet

Kevin Krajick: I had, I had breakfast with Stup lesson and his wife, the next morning everybody was hung over.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah. everybody.

Chris Bolhuis: This sounds like fun.

Jesse Reimink: time at the party,

Chris Bolhuis: Um, speaking of which, after reading the book, um, Chuck Fike is at the top of my list for people that I would love to have a beer with. found him to be amazingly inspirational. He's a genius. and just a fun, fun person. It's at least that was, that was my take on it. That's what made it read like a novel to me. Anyway. that's how it seemed.

Kevin Krajick: Yeah, and I've been, I've been accused of fictionalizing this because there is dialogue in there and there's all kinds of descriptions about really detailed stuff. But that was exactly is, is what people told me from, multiple sources, is that that's what people said. That's what they did.

Jesse Reimink: I just, my own personal take on it was I, I was in Alberta, and Alberta has kind of become one of the premier diamond [00:38:00] research institutes and departments in the world, really. Um, some really great diamond researchers. And we've been up there, , we've been looking for diamonds in, not for diamond mines, but diamonds in some of the sediments, really old sediments up in the, that part of the world. And we've found some really old diamonds as well. So I've kind of been getting into the diamond research aspect. and the indicator minerals when I started going to grad school were just like this classic example of researchers contributing to, the diamond mind prospects, you know,

Chris Bolhuis: It's a practicality, right?

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, exactly.

Jesse Reimink: People doing this cutting edge research, I think it was in South Africa where the sort of indicator mineral chemistry was really refined to be able to say this type of garnet with this particular chemistry, a lot of chrome in it and certain calcium percentage, is an indicator that there is probably diamonds around or there might be diamonds around. So it was really well explained in your book, Kevin. I, I really appreciated reading that part from the, the sort of history of the indicator mineral part. So,

Jesse Reimink: Chris, did you wanna let

Kevin Krajick: It's, it's fascinating that you're [00:39:00] finding diamonds and sediments. I didn't know about that until I just, I, I looked up your proposal about what you're doing.

Jesse Reimink: Oh yeah. Yeah. It's, so there's, um, there's actually a surprising amount of actual diamond mining from sediments, like in Brazil, some old sediments, , they're mining these, because like you said, diamonds are really heavy, really dense. and so they kind of end up in the conglomerates that really sort of the, the high energy. Ancient sediments. And uh, I think you, you talked about the mining that they do off the coast of South Africa, where these are placer, modern placer, uh, diamond deposits, but they kind of go around the boulders and they sort of hoover up around the edge of the boulder, cuz that's where the diamonds will be. They kind of caught in that high energy stuff right at the base of boulders. And so we were kind of finding them in similar sediments except really, really old sediments. 2.8 billion year old sediments. So therefore the diamonds are old and that's our interest. These are tiny, tiny micro diamonds. They're not, they're not economical, but they're scientifically very valuable. So yeah, it's, it's [00:40:00] exciting. We were just up there this past summer flying around and float planes looking for more sediments and collecting big buckets of samples,

Chris Bolhuis: Hmm.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Bolhuis: Hey. Hey, you. You're not allowed to do that, Kevin. Okay. You're not allowed to. That's, that's what a geologist do. You just outed us for it. Now you're even worse than I am. You just

Jesse Reimink: wants to come too. Join the win.

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Alright. Okay,

Jesse Reimink: Absolutely. I'm

Chris Bolhuis: all.

Jesse Reimink: on a big grid if we

Chris Bolhuis: Hey,

Jesse Reimink: Absolutely. Yeah, that'd be

Chris Bolhuis: Jesse, I gotta ask you. Okay. I had a question for you, Jesse. I'm part serious and part sarcastic on this. Um, I've always called it placer and you just called it plusser. So is this your doctory twist on

Jesse Reimink: No, I, I don't know if it's the English, You know English? English or the British? English? American English. I don't know. Placer. Placer. It's the same thing. I think. Tomato, tomato. Chris, you know,

Kevin Krajick: Is,

Chris Bolhuis: Nobody says tomato, so I don't know about that.

Kevin Krajick: scene or Anthrop scene?

Jesse Reimink: there we go. Good I, [00:41:00] I've always said it. Anthrop scene, but

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah,

Jesse Reimink: Hmm. Interesting. Well, there's so many of these in geology. We just make up words anyways. So Chris, I, let's talk about some of the articles that, the other

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. You wanna skip to that?

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I think we should go there.

Chris Bolhuis: I'm, I'm shocked that you're actually gonna leave the bare notes. Oh, I have one other question, Kevin. Sorry. I saw that the first edition of this came out in 2001, and then you had a re-release in 2016. Um, can you tell what changed? What was different about the new release? Yeah, Anything you

Kevin Krajick: Yeah, I mean, there have been four or five additions. Uh, there were a couple in between 2001 and 2016. Basically the only difference was I corrected some of the mistakes that I made. Um, I try not to remember what they were, but there was nothing really terrible. It, there were sort of sort of technical, , maybe numerical problems. Uh, I think one of them was the size of the world's largest diamond. I forget what it was now it's something [00:42:00] in the Smithsonian or was in the Smithsonian. And the curator or somebody who knew the curator complained to me that I had gotten this figure wrong. It was, it was stuff like that.

Jesse Reimink: okay. All right. Well,

Chris Bolhuis: All right. I have, before we leave the Barron lands, Jesse, I wanted to do one thing, Kevin, and, and if you can't, because it's too much detail, That's fine. Can you describe the way that Chuck and Stu met? Like what led up to it? What happened? This is such a cool story.

Kevin Krajick: I don't remember the exact initial part, but I think that Chuck was basically Stew's student intern. , he was hired to go do some mapping up in the Yukon. while Stu was a, the elder guy, he was with the geological survey of Canada. So I think, uh, Chuck was still in school maybe. And, , went up there basically as an intern. And, uh, Stu found him kind of annoying because he was like all over the place. He was like tripping over things and you know, he was supposed to be, uh, um, you know, the way, create a [00:43:00] geological map as you have different colors of various areas to show, you know, what kind of rocks were there. And, and Chuck was just kind of coloring outside the lines literally, and, and.

Jesse Reimink: great.

Chris Bolhuis: But also wasn't, Chuck left out in the field for almost a week up in not a place that you'd wanna be left. And, and then Stu had to either fly in with a helicopter or sent somebody in

Kevin Krajick: Yeah. But I think he was fine. He was like, Hey, this is great. I'm having a good time. Why are you here? Then it was only years later that they kind of reconnected.

Chris Bolhuis: reconnect.

Kevin Krajick: of more equals,

Chris Bolhuis: That part of the story, uh, I laughed several times out loud. Um, because they're just amazing characters. very fun people to be around. I would've, I would imagine so. All right. You ready, Jesse?

Jesse Reimink: for it. Absolutely.

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Um, so Kevin, are you ready to totally pivot then? I wanna talk about a couple articles.

Kevin Krajick: if I remember the articles.

Chris Bolhuis: All right. That's a fair game. Fair enough. [00:44:00] Um, so I read it a recent article and I tried to pick the ones that, as I was looking into you and doing my research, I picked ones that were recent so that it would kind of be more in the forefront of your mind. But the one called Balancing Act can Precariously Perch Boulders Signal, New York's Earthquake Risk. I thought that was one, a really catchy, punchy title. I loved it. It caught my attention right away. can you describe what this is all about,

Kevin Krajick: Yeah. So a lot of people don't know this, but there is a substantial risk of earthquakes in the New York City area. Once in a while there is a magnitude five or six and depending on how far down it is and how close. To you. It is, it could do some pretty serious damage. I think the last one of that size was the 1880 something. but all we know about earthquakes , is from human history and that doesn't go back very far. At least written human history doesn't go back very far around here. So there's a lot of people who have been trying to figure out like what is the biggest earthquake that could possibly occur around New York [00:45:00] City?

Kevin Krajick: Cuz it could do many billions of damage and kill a lot of people. Uh, so I know this, I work with this guy Bill Minky. He's a wonderful geologist and sort of overall explorer of the earth. he's using this method that's been used a little bit in other places where people look at so-called fragile geologic features.

Kevin Krajick: generally they're, they're sort of just precariously balanced boulders that were dropped by glaciers or otherwise just put into place and. What he does. Um, he's zeroed in on a number of these, these boulders, which have dropped by glaciers probably, I don't know, 15, 20,000 years ago.

Kevin Krajick: There's a little bit of, um, dispute about exactly when, uh, just north of New York City and there are these big car size boulders that are just like sitting on these tippy little bases. so the idea is if he can, uh, calculate the amount of force it would take to tip these things over, he can calculate [00:46:00] the largest earthquake that could have happened in the last 15, 20,000 years ago.

Chris Bolhuis: That's amazing. I'm gonna interrupt you one second, Kevin. For the listeners, imagine if I took Jesse and tipped him upside down and dropped him just on his shoulder at a really weird angle, and there Jesse sits for 15,000 years. What would it take to knock him over that? That's what you're talking about with these boulders. I mean, they're not just laying there. These are, like you said, precariously. Perched. They look like they should tip, right. And that's what he's looking at. Okay. I'm sorry,

Kevin Krajick: Yeah. So it'd be, it'd be nice to have pictures of these things, which I, I took a lot of pictures of of Bill man looking at these, these boulders. Uh,

Jesse Reimink: we'll put a link in the show notes to these articles

Kevin Krajick: be great.

Jesse Reimink: to your book as well. So look at the show notes. This article will be there.

Kevin Krajick: Yeah. So what he did was he took a, a student and they took pictures of these boulders from many, many angles and they created 3D model so that they can figure out how much do they weigh, what are the tipping points. what are the [00:47:00] axis on which they could be tipped over? You know, what direction could a seismic wave come from to tip this thing over? And if it's still standing there, they know that whatever force they've calculated would tip it over has not occurred in last 15,000 years. So they're trying to come up with a maximum force, basically

Chris Bolhuis: That's amazing. I sense a follow up coming, right? You're gonna have to, do a follow up article on this when his research is done,

Kevin Krajick: Yeah. Oh no, exactly. I'm sure that he'll come up with some sort of numbers and then, you know, it'll cause a whole lot of debate because there, there are other, there are

Jesse Reimink: That's right.

Kevin Krajick: out, uh, paleo size biology.

Chris Bolhuis: How many pictures did they have to take or does he want to take of each precariously

Kevin Krajick: I think three or 400 or so. They would circle this thing with a camera for hours. It was broiling sun too. I was gonna faint. I thought

Chris Bolhuis: Well, that was another thing that I thought of when I looked at the, Cuz you, you had a lot of pictures that were great. It looked like Dr. Minke was [00:48:00] carrying 95% of the load in the lowly student was, he had a bottle of water. That's all I saw.

Kevin Krajick: say?

Chris Bolhuis: That's what jesse would do to his students too. You know,

Jesse Reimink: I mean, you got to, right? Yeah, of course.

Chris Bolhuis: No, it'd be the opposite with you. You wouldn't carry anything. Um, okay. All right. Well, it's, it's true. it's not mean if it's true, Kevin. anything else about that? Like does he, do you have any idea when, uh, the data is expected to come out or has he already come up with some preliminary

Kevin Krajick: I think they came up with a poster, but I, I don't remember exactly what they calculated. But I mean, this is only on a few boulders. They have to do a lot more to really come up with a meaningful result. So I think it'll be probably a couple of years.

Jesse Reimink: it's such a cool, Yeah, it's such a cool like, idea, you know, and just say, Oh, there's these boulders that look like they should not be there. Um,

Jesse Reimink: and, and so if we had an earthquake, they wouldn't be there. Right. And go test it. That it's just great. It's really, really

Kevin Krajick: but I [00:49:00] mean that's, uh, New York City, you know, is just sort of combed with all kinds of ancient faults. Nobody knows exactly when some of these things were activated.

Jesse Reimink: And there was, there was one in New Jersey, I think a couple years ago, like a fairly sizeable, I mean, not devastatingly bad, but a sizable one in New Jersey. And every once in a while we get these on the East coast and, they're all faults all over the place that will rupture occasionally. So there definitely are stresses in the crust even though it's not a super active convergent margin or a, or a seduction zone system. So speaking of Seductions on systems the other. That I think both Chris and I really honed in on, which was interesting. in part, because I know a couple of the authors we've interviewed Diana Roman, uh, before on Planet Geo, but you're talking about how water content of magmas controls the magma storage depth. So like how deep the magma kind of sits in ponds in the crust. Can you give us a high level summary of, of that article, and Chris, I think you have some, [00:50:00] some excellent questions that you that we had talked about about this article.

Kevin Krajick: you can, you guys can probably describe this article better than I can, but basically they, um, the scientists looked into the water content of magma and, and, you know, tried to connect that to the, as you say, the, the storage depth, , of the magma. , but whether this, and I believe that they found out it's, um, it keeps it down pretty far. But, exactly what that means, I don't think anybody is quite sure, like, is that good news to have more water or bad news? Because water are also, uh, I think makes magma more explosive in the end. and some of these volcanoes can erupt, quite rapidly. The prior research is found. So, I mean, this is just sort of, um, it's part of a suite of things that they're looking into to see if they can predict volcanic eruptions. This is only one component of a whole bunch of other studies that people, Levant and elsewhere are doing.

Jesse Reimink: I noticed some really cool pictures in that article. [00:51:00] Did you get to go along, uh, to the ellucians for this

Kevin Krajick: No, but they, they just had, they just came back actually. Maybe they, actually, some of them are still there. They went to the Ock volcano, which is this extremely, , remote volcano. And, uh, it's thought to be that it'll imminently erupt. So they've got it wired up with all kinds of stuff, like things that show whether the ground is rising or falling. , they're measuring gases coming out of various places. , they're measuring seismic waves. They're measuring in for sound. , so they've got this. This volcano wired up and they're trying to come up with a whole suite of instruments that will help the future, , predict, eruptions there and elsewhere. If they can gather enough data and put all these, uh, different factors together. So I think they're also going down to Nicaragua at the end of the year to do

Jesse Reimink: Okay. Oh, cool. Oh man.

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Yeah, that's amazing.

Jesse Reimink: So, Kevin, we always like this has been a real pleasure to interview and we always like to end by asking our traditional closing question, which is what has been your best day, as in your case as science [00:52:00] writer

Kevin Krajick: oh oh. There are so many best days, but the, I guess the moment that I come back to, and I'll just go back to the Northwest Territories, , I was camped out with a bunch of geologists from the, uh, geological survey in Canada and around midnight, of course it's broad daylight cuz it's summer, it's 24 hour daylight. I heard what I thought was thunder and I looked at my tent and uh, I saw. Hundreds and hundreds of caribou just trotting along a ridge right near us. So of course I got out, I got my camera sort of gingerly tipped over there, and as I got over the edge of this ridge, I could look off into the distance on, up to the horizon, and there was a sort of caribou stretching to the horizon, head south. , so I just sort of hid behind a rock and they kind of went around me. this just kept going on and on. , it was one of the last great migrations on earth and I was so, so [00:53:00] privileged to, to actually see it. it's just an unforgettable experience and it's one of the great things about doing this, about doing this job.

Jesse Reimink: yeah. Uh, that's in, that's incredible. I've, I have seen caribou, but I, we saw them actually this past summer. We saw, you know, the caribou have been historically low levels for the last, um, decade, basically to the point they, they shut down basically all hunting of caribou. , but they seem to be maybe potentially fingers crossed, rebounding a little bit. And we saw groups of caribou in the dozens that were kind of just starting to migrate to the south, coming up from their breeding grounds or from their Calvin grounds. Um, so I, we saw, you know, 12 at a time, Caribou, Uh, but, but nothing like the ancient

Kevin Krajick: Uh, this was, this was the Bathurst caribou herd. And, and the other amazing thing was there were a bunch of wolves just kind of trotting along beside them, not bothering anybody. Uh, probably eventually would bother somebody, but they were all just kind of together there. It was a very weird to see the predators and the prey all, [00:54:00] all just kind of moving together.

Chris Bolhuis: Oh,

Jesse Reimink: It's an incredible place. I mean, yeah, it really like belies the, the Barron Lands term for during the migration. It's, it's not so Barron , um, at the end, isn't it? That's a pretty good day. That's a pretty good day. Not many people get to experience that. Well, Kevin, thank you very much for your time. We're very appreciative of it. Thank you for a great book and for great science articles. Like I said, we'll link to in the show notes, to your book and to some of the articles we talked about, but we're really just appreciative of your time. And thanks for joining us on Planet Geo. It's been a,

Kevin Krajick: Thank you so much, guys. That's really a pleasure to talk to you and I hope we'll do it again.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah. And, uh, I'll get a grant and you can come up and

Kevin Krajick: All right?

Jesse Reimink: little diamonds with

Chris Bolhuis: All right.

Jesse Reimink: It's a deal. All right. Thanks a lot, Kevin.

Kevin Krajick: Yep.

Chris Bolhuis: Kevin.

Jesse Reimink: hey, that's a wrap. Like we said at the intro, you can follow Planet Geo. Go to planet geo cast.com. Follow us on all the social medias at Planet Geo Cast. Give us a rating and review. We [00:55:00] really love that. And if you wanna learn geoscience from us in a really structured way with all of the images you need, go to geo.camp courses.com or click on the link in the show notes. That'll take you to Camp Geo, our conversational textbook for the geosciences. Take care.

Chris Bolhuis: Have a great week cheer.