Elemental Geology 1 - Radon (ReRelease)
[00:00:00] Dr. Jesse Reimink:
[00:00:04] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you. Well, hey there, listener. It is just us today. Chris is off, I'm sure getting into trouble somewhere. So it's just you and me. we at Planet Geo are still on a break and we're about to finish off season two by re-releasing several of our episodes on the geology of. Critical elements. This is one of my favorite themes. And, uh, so Chris isn't here to defend himself, I can tell you that he hasn't quite seen the vision yet, but we'll get him there. Don't worry. I love talking about this type of stuff. And so what we're gonna do today is we are gonna re-release our episode talking about the geology of radon, which is an element that we should all think about and, uh, and maybe worry. And we're gonna re-release several episodes in the same theme. And then we are gonna end this re-release sequence with a new episode on the geology of Neodymium. One of my favorite elements out there, so look forward to that. One last thing, please check out our Camp Geo conversational textbook. The link is the first link in the show notes, and you can actually also check out a rock shop that my wife and I run. We run it through Etsy and we have a variety of bookends and coasters on there that you can purchase. We've been running this for about three years now and you know, it's really what I like to work on when I have some free time or I just need to escape the family for a few hours. Guys happened in the last couple days. You can search j r r Stonework on Etsy, or you can click on the link in the show notes and use the promo code planet G 10 for a 10% discount just for being a listener. As always, let us know if you have thoughts or questions. We are planet Geo cast@gmail.com. Follow us on all the socials at Planet Geo Cast and visit our website, planet geo cast.com. Hope you enjoy the episode.
[00:01:54] Chris Bolhuis: You like it when I start recording, then I start doing this.
[00:01:58] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, it's so that's what I'll do. It's the best. Hey, Jesse Reimink. Hey, Christopher Boys. Oh, he's got the sexy voice on today. Wow. Thank you for calling. What can I do for you, ? That is a voice for radio right there, . I got the
[00:02:16] Chris Bolhuis: phase to go along
[00:02:17] Dr. Jesse Reimink: with it.
[00:02:17] Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'm good. Oh man. Let's go. Let's go Chris. You've got an interesting shirt on today. All I can see is beards. It's in the top half a t-shirt. What? What's going on there? What do we got? Let me, let me sit up a little bit straighter. And you see Oh, beards Brewery. Beards Brewery. Oh, it's a brewery. Nice. With a hop leaf.
[00:02:35] Chris Bolhuis: With a hop cone coming down as the beard, you know? And it kind of like it fits my beard, right? Because it's kind of cone shaped, you know? And I got that triangular look
[00:02:43] Dr. Jesse Reimink: going on. You really do. I was gonna mention it. Your beard is looking particularly flush today. the top of. Less so, but the, you know, the bottom part of your face is pretty flush with hair.
[00:02:54] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah,
[00:02:54] Chris Bolhuis: I know. I, I know I, I do need to, it's getting a little outta control. I gotta take care of
[00:02:58] Dr. Jesse Reimink: it. It's looking good though. I, you know. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. Thanks. I'm, I'm proud to be doing this podcast
[00:03:03] Chris Bolhuis: with it. Well, you know, you, I think if you would try to grow facial hair, it would look, you'd look like a teen wolf.
[00:03:10] Chris Bolhuis: I think I'd Splotchy ,
[00:03:13] Dr. Jesse Reimink: totally. Teen Wolf. I cannot. Facial hair for, for shit. I mean, it looks real bad. . One time I, you know, Tess was like, oh, you know, don't clean shave cuz a little bit of, uh, you know, gruff is good, it's man style, but then she's like, but you, you have to keep it trimmed. Like you have to keep it really tight because it looks pretty grim,
[00:03:36] Dr. Jesse Reimink: However,
[00:03:36] Chris Bolhuis: nobody can grow a disgusting neared like, That's true. Oh my gosh. You can grow a neared like none other.
[00:03:46] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yep. Award-winning. I think it is. Award-winning.
[00:03:48] Chris Bolhuis: It's, Hey, let's, uh, let's get into this. You ready?
[00:03:52] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Let's do it. Man, this is, I'm excited. Are you excited? I'm
[00:03:56] Chris Bolhuis: always excited. So that's kind of a dumb question,
[00:03:58] Dr. Jesse Reimink: so Fair point.
[00:04:00] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Fair point. Yeah. Yeah. I'm
[00:04:02] Chris Bolhuis: ready to go. Well, heck yeah.
[00:04:03] Dr. Jesse Reimink: This was your. Well, yeah, in part because when did you guys buy your house that you're living in now? Have you been there for decades?
[00:04:11] Chris Bolhuis: Almost, almost 10 years. Yep.
[00:04:13] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay. Yep. So Tess and I just bought a house in, uh, in Pennsylvania and cuz the crazy housing market, we kind of had to wave inspections.
[00:04:24] Dr. Jesse Reimink: I mean, we looked at the house and walked through it and it looked in pretty good shape. So we were a little bit comfortable waving inspections, but raydon is something that often gets inspected if you don't have a radon system in your house, which ours actually has. So, And we're gonna talk. It's like fundamentally linked
[00:04:39] Chris Bolhuis: to geoscience.
[00:04:40] Chris Bolhuis: What minute what? You have a radon system. What does that mean?
[00:04:42] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Like what? Well, it's just like, uh, uh, the radon pipes that, that sort of vent underneath of the, the floor. So it's just a, a vent system basically that gets rid of radon. Do I have one of those? You might, I don't know, some, some houses do, some get installed.
[00:04:58] Dr. Jesse Reimink: They're relatively simple, but we'll get to that, like how to, to sort of get rid of 'em. And I can talk about what mine actually looked like in the, in the house, but I feel like
[00:05:06] Chris Bolhuis: that's something I should know, but I, I really have no
[00:05:08] Dr. Jesse Reimink: idea. Well, So we're gonna talk about radon cuz this is like geoscience.
[00:05:13] Dr. Jesse Reimink: We get to cover a lot of cool geoscience stuff here with radon. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:05:17] Chris Bolhuis: And you know it is important there, there are billboards you see like have you had your home tested and there's a phone number that you can call and have people come out and do it. I've seen those before and one of the main reasons is because it is radioactive and radon is a gas.
[00:05:31] Chris Bolhuis: And so it is, isn't it? I think this is true. It's the the second leading cause of lung cancer behind.
[00:05:39] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Exactly. If you're a non-smoker, this is the number one cause of lung cancer in, in the US at least. So, well hold on, I
[00:05:45] Chris Bolhuis: think, uh, let's, uh, let's give a little bit of prelude of what we're gonna do. So we've kind of had this chunked up into three sections.
[00:05:51] Chris Bolhuis: We need to get into radioactive decay and how that works. We've touched on it before in previous episodes. We're gonna do it again in this context. So that's the first chunk. Then we're gonna talk about the geology of radon and how it moves and how all that happens. And then the last section today is gonna be, all right, well it's in your house now what?
[00:06:09] Chris Bolhuis: What do you do?
[00:06:09] Dr. Jesse Reimink: And Chris, this is just like, ah, this is just such a cool story and so directly relevant. Like, you know, it's in our houses. You can get your rayon problem in your house fixed for a relatively inexpensive amount, you know, up to a thousand maybe, maybe 1300 bucks or something like that. It's not that expensive, but it's just such a cool story.
[00:06:30] Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's a cool intersection between geology. Chemistry, groundwater, rocks, and our everyday lives. It's just really, really interesting. I think so. Um, so, you know, you laid it out perfectly. We're gonna work through those three things and, and get to the point of the story cuz it's a really cool one.
[00:06:47] Chris Bolhuis: I agree with you a hundred percent.
[00:06:49] Chris Bolhuis: It's an awesome story. Um, and I, to me personally, I love intersections. I love it when science comes together where you have all these multi-disciplines. I, I think that's actually, it's one of the most attractive things to me about geology, is it involves all kinds of intersections all the time, but, This story, we have to get into some technical stuff.
[00:07:10] Chris Bolhuis: We have to get into some numbers and like just, just, I'm just telling the listener, bear with us please. Cuz it does go somewhere in a cool place and we have to do this before we get to that. And it's worth
[00:07:22] Dr. Jesse Reimink: it. It's true. And we are gonna cover some numbers and uh, I love the geochemistry side. We're gonna get a little bit into the weeds of the geochemistry, which is fun.
[00:07:31] Dr. Jesse Reimink: But you're right. You to bear with it, you know?
[00:07:33] Chris Bolhuis: But the reason why you and I are having this discussion is we originally recorded it and my wife listened to it. We're listening back to this episode, my wife and I and , she fell
[00:07:44] Dr. Jesse Reimink: asleep. And I'm like, never a good sign.
[00:07:46] Chris Bolhuis: What the hell, Jen, what are you, what are you doing?
[00:07:49] Chris Bolhuis: And she's like, well, you kind of lost me with all the numbers. So not really that sciencey. And you know, she's, she's getting, yeah, she's doing her thing. And . I'm like, but this is a really. This is why this is important. And I kind of explained to her, she's like, well, why don't you just lead with that? That would've been like, do that.
[00:08:07] Chris Bolhuis: You know? So here we are, you and I sitting here thinking, wait a minute, this is, I think, a really good episode and. We just don't wanna lose people on the front end because we gotta cover some science stuff. But it is a science podcast, right?
[00:08:21] Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's right. So Jenny, don't fall asleep. If you're like, Jenny, don't fall asleep, stick with us.
[00:08:25] Dr. Jesse Reimink: We'll get there. It it, we will get to the end of the story. And it's just a really, really cool tale. We have to get into the weeds of chemistry to start out with. That's right. Get your
[00:08:35] Chris Bolhuis: head outta your Jenny . .
[00:08:38] Dr. Jesse Reimink: So radon is an element, and its chemical symbol is rn. That's, you know, the, the periodic table has all these symbols.
[00:08:46] Dr. Jesse Reimink: RN is radon and it's a noble gas. What
[00:08:49] Chris Bolhuis: does that mean? Explain
[00:08:50] Dr. Jesse Reimink: that real quick. Yeah. Noble gas is, you know, they're on the far right side of the PE table. They have a full electron shell, an outer electron shell, so, Bond with anything really. So they like to exist in the gas tank, right?
[00:09:01] Chris Bolhuis: They're very stable.
[00:09:03] Chris Bolhuis: When something is a noble gas, it's very non-reactive and it's very stable. Now we say that from the standpoint of a full, like, you know, all of its energy levels are full of electrons. However, we're gonna go into now why is it radioactive? Then if it's stable? Now we gotta talk about inside the nucleus.
[00:09:22] Chris Bolhuis: So we're really kind of talking about two different.
[00:09:25] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that's a great sense point, Chris. Yeah, absolutely. Great point. So the electrons and the outer, outer shells that determines chemistry, chemical reactivity, we're talking about the nuclear physics and the in. What happens in the nucleus is whether it breaks down or not, and right on.
[00:09:40] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Is, sorry,
[00:09:41] Chris Bolhuis: nuclear chemistry is what you're talking about when you dive into like radioactive decay. So these are changes that happen inside the nucleus. And so let's get into real quick the what makes certain, because they're not all elements are radioactive. Only certain ones that, you know, you look at Shapira table and only a few of them are radioactive.
[00:10:02] Chris Bolhuis: And what all that means is that the nucleus of that atom is un. . And so it's, it's gonna spontaneously change to be, it's gonna do something to become more stable. Not necessarily like stable, but just more stable than it was.
[00:10:21] Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's right. And the way to think about this, a good analogy is, okay, primer, the nucleus of an atom is the really compact thing in the center that holds all the mass.
[00:10:30] Dr. Jesse Reimink: It has protons and neutrons in it. Those protons and neutrons. You can kind of think of these things as. They're vibrating, they're little springs. All of them are kind of bound to each other and they're all kind of vibrating, right? So they're kind of shifting around. You have this mass of 222 protons and neutrons.
[00:10:45] Dr. Jesse Reimink: They're all vibrating together now, every once in a while at a random instant, half of them will vibrate in one direction to the right. The other half will vibrate to the left, and the Adam will kind of split apart. That's just a, an example of sort of how this happens. These things are a vibrating mass and random.
[00:11:01] Dr. Jesse Reimink: some of them will break off because they all vibrated in one direction and sh and then they, they sort of lose stability. So that's kind of how this happens. And it's a sort of a very fast process that. , he's losing mass from the nucleus. So we are creating two particles from one bigger one. So
[00:11:18] Chris Bolhuis: what I'd like to do, I think, before we get into like how this actually happens, let's talk a little bit about the way that radioactive decay happens, the, you know, what happens in the nucleus, you know, let's keep this as as simple as we can.
[00:11:31] Chris Bolhuis: But there are three basic modes of decay and we say that decay, we we're just talking about how the nucleus is gonna change. And when that happens, it's. called decay. The first one, I think it's the most common in terms of going to radon anyway, is called alpha decay. So what this involves is you have an atom that is.
[00:11:57] Chris Bolhuis: Unstable and it changes by emitting an alpha particle. We call that alpha decay. And an alpha particle is just simply it's, it's one particle that is made up of two protons and two neutrons, which is essentially the nucleus of a helium atom. Like if you take, then, let's say uranium two 30. When we call it uranium two thirty eight, it's atomic number 92, but it has a mass of 238 and the rest of the mass, so you have 92 protons.
[00:12:28] Chris Bolhuis: The rest of it is made up of neutrons. Okay? Yeah. If you take uranium 2 38, it's an unstable atom and it spontaneously just changes. It emits that particle, two protons and two neutrons, a helium atom, and so the new. is gonna have a mass minus what it lost. And it lost two protons and two neutrons, which means it's lost a mass of four units, four mass units, okay?
[00:13:01] Chris Bolhuis: And now you have 90 protons, which is the identity of the element. And so now what you have, instead of uranium, you have thorium two 30. So we started with uranium 2 38. Now we have Thorium 2 34, and that's also gonna be radioactive. It's unstable and it will
[00:13:23] Dr. Jesse Reimink: change two. Absolutely. Uh, you know, this is, uh, this is the key point, right, is that these things are breaking down.
[00:13:30] Dr. Jesse Reimink: And actually the interesting thing about radon is it is not only itself radioactive, meaning it is unstable and it breaks down, and that's why it's damaging to us. But it also is the product of decay. So you talked about 2 38 uranium. Actually 2 38 uranium, it starts to decay once it starts that process, once it kicks out a helium ATM and becomes 2 34 thorium, it goes under this long chain of decay.
[00:13:55] Dr. Jesse Reimink: It decays down for through a whole bunch of different elements all the way till it gets to 2 0 6 lead in radon, the one. That we most often worry about is 222 radon. It kind of sits right in the middle of that process. It is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 steps from uranium to radon, and then another about 10 or 12 steps to get to lead at the end.
[00:14:16] Dr. Jesse Reimink: So not only is radon radioactive, but it also is radiogenic. It is produced by radioactive decay, which is a really important part about the geology of it, which we'll get. That's right.
[00:14:26] Chris Bolhuis: The other common type of decay is called beta. and what beta decay is is when the nucleus of an atom emits a very high energy electron.
[00:14:40] Chris Bolhuis: Okay, now, electrons essentially have no mass. I mean, it, it, it's ridiculously small. So the mass of the new isotope, what we called it, the daughter isotope, that mass is gonna be the same. But I lost an electron. Okay? Now this is something that really is interesting to me, Jesse, cuz with my students, and I'm sure you, I, I bet you, I bet you money, I, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I bet you, your students, it doesn't occur to them.
[00:15:08] Chris Bolhuis: Wait a. Beta decay. We teach this. They know about it. They know, but they learn about it in chemistry class, right? Yep. But they hardly ever ask the question, wait a second, there aren't any electrons in the nucleus. So how does this
[00:15:22] Dr. Jesse Reimink: happen? Where does the electron come from? ? Yeah, that's right. Exactly. . So where does it come from, Chris?
[00:15:27] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Where does the electron come
[00:15:28] Chris Bolhuis: from? Yeah, if you think about them, what a neutron is. A neutron is a neutral particle, so it has no charge and it has a massive. Well, if you take a proton and an electron together and you know, just mash 'em together, you have something that has no charge and it has a massive one.
[00:15:50] Chris Bolhuis: So a neutron is made up of those two subatomic particles. So when beta decay happens, think about this neutron vibrating and all of a sudden just kicks out this electron, the proton stay. , right? So your atomic number will go up by one, because now I have a proton that used to be a neutron, and I lost no mass.
[00:16:15] Chris Bolhuis: So that's how beta decay happens. And this is confusing when you're first getting exposed to this kind of thing because they're like, wait a second, the atomic number goes up, but I lost
[00:16:25] Dr. Jesse Reimink: something. You know? Yeah. It's It's very confusing. It's very confusing in this way. It is, but it's
[00:16:30] Chris Bolhuis: not, if you understand what a neutron is.
[00:16:35] Dr. Jesse Reimink: And so there are two types of decay, like you said. These are the dominant ones. There's a few other ones which are not important for most electron capture, and yeah, yeah, they're not super important. But both of these modes of decay occur from the path from uranium down to lead, and as we said, there's like 16 or 18 steps in that process.
[00:16:54] Dr. Jesse Reimink: So both of these are occurring in this way, and Raydon sits right in the middle of it. So ultimately, Chris, what is the source of Raydon? That makes it maybe into your basement, like where is that coming
[00:17:05] Chris Bolhuis: from ultimately? I'm so glad you asked this question, . Ultimately it comes from uranium 2 38. That is the source of radon 2 22.
[00:17:19] Chris Bolhuis: So can I do this, Jesse up? Just, just bear with me.
[00:17:24] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh man. Okay. Okay. Stop. I, I'm, I feel like I'm always bearing with you, you know? No, I know. So I know what, I'll do it for one more minute and
[00:17:32] Chris Bolhuis: then we're done. Okay. But, but hold on. Before we do this though, we have to also refresh one thing too. What is the half-life?
[00:17:39] Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Oh yeah. Each radioactive development has its own half-life, and all that means is the half-life is the time it takes for half of the atoms that are present to.
[00:17:53] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Let me try the analogy. Let me see if I get your analogy right, cuz it's a great one. It's the shoe. Is this the shoebox analogy? Is this where you're gonna go?
[00:17:59] Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's, yep. Okay. I, I had used it in class the other day and I wanna make sure I'm get it right here. So basically you take, let me go with it. You take your shoebox, right? Chris Crystal Ice is grabbing his shoebox. Maybe he's got some new, you know, Asics, that he's about to rock out in the retirement home.
[00:18:13] Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'm, I'm an old
[00:18:14] Chris Bolhuis: man now. I've gone to ho. Oh
[00:18:16] Dr. Jesse Reimink: God, that's great. That's really good. That's a good visual right there. So you take your Hoka shoebox, you fill it up with a whole bunch of pennies and you shake it for
[00:18:27] Chris Bolhuis: unknown amount of pennies. Put a hundred pennies in it, or put 50 in it, put it, whatever. It's gotta be a known
[00:18:31] Dr. Jesse Reimink: amount.
[00:18:32] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Let's do a hundred. I like a hundred. That's nice. And even shake it up for five shakes. Five or maybe five seconds, 10 seconds. Then you open it up and you take out all the pennies that have tails facing up. That's what I always would go with. With the heads or tails thing. I'd always go with tails. So we're gonna take out the tails.
[00:18:47] Dr. Jesse Reimink: How many are gonna be left? Half round? About 50. Right. Okay. Is that the analogy? That's one. Half life. And. Put the shoebox back on, shake it up for another five seconds, open it up. You only have 25 left after you take out all the ones with tails in it. So because it's this probabilistic phenomenon, radioactivity camera, right?
[00:19:06] Dr. Jesse Reimink: And
[00:19:06] Chris Bolhuis: the important part about this is that nothing changes the half life of an element. You can't like heat it up or squeeze it a lot with under immense pressure, the half-life is well established. So each element has its own half-life, right? The time it takes for half of the atoms that are present to decay.
[00:19:25] Chris Bolhuis: So uranium 2 38 decays by alpha decay into thorium 2 34 and it's got a half life of 4.5 billion year.
[00:19:36] Dr. Jesse Reimink: That first decay step. Yeah. Yes.
[00:19:39] Chris Bolhuis: Thorium two 30. Will decay by beta decay, so it's going to emit an electron from the nucleus and it has a halflife of only 24.1 days, and that will change by thorium. 2 34 changes into PROTACTINIUM 2 34.
[00:19:57] Chris Bolhuis: No change in mask. All we'd lost is an electron, very high energy electron, right? So Protactinium 2 34 changes also by beta decay back into uranium two 30. Back up to atomic number 92. So I have two more protons that I didn't have before, cuz I went through two bees in a, in a row. Yeah. Now Protactinium has a half-life of 1.17 minutes.
[00:20:24] Chris Bolhuis: Okay. So uranium 2 34 decays by alpha into thorium. Two 30, half life, 240,000 years. So we're, we're back up to a long
[00:20:36] Dr. Jesse Reimink: time. Now we're back to a long half-life. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:20:39] Chris Bolhuis: Thorium two 30 goes alpha decay to radium. 2 26. Now we're getting close. Okay. Thorium two 30 is a half-life of 77,000 years.
[00:20:52] Chris Bolhuis: And then here we go. The final step radium. 2 26 alpha decay changes into radon two 20. and radium 2 26 is a half-life of 1600 years, 1,600 years. Now we have radon 2 22 in your home. Okay? That's what we're talking about. It's a gas, and we'll talk about why that's important, and it's also important to note that that's also gonna change down into other things.
[00:21:21] Chris Bolhuis: All the way down to lead 2 0 6. But it has a half life of 3.8 days, so it doesn't stay long. That's how you go. You asked me and I had to do this, say the ultimate source. It starts with uranium
[00:21:36] Dr. Jesse Reimink: 2 38. It's got all these steps in between, right? And so there's two important points here that we're sort of leading into.
[00:21:44] Dr. Jesse Reimink: The first is, if you've listened to Plenge or if you're familiar with what enriched uranium is, there's multiple types of uranium. Chris, you've been talking about 2 38 uranium, which is the key one for, uh, producing radon, right? But there's 2 35 uranium as well out there. So why aren't we concerned? It's a great question.
[00:22:03] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Why are we not concerned about the radon? Cuz radon is in the decay chain of 2 35. Uranium uranium 2 35 starts to decay. It breaks down all the way to lead. Somewhere in the middle is radon. The reason we don't care about it is because there's very little uranium 2 35 in the world today. Out of 138 atoms of uranium that you find, only one of 'em is gonna be 2 35 uranium.
[00:22:26] Dr. Jesse Reimink: The other 137 are gonna be uranium 2 38. So the vast majority of uranium out there is 2 38 uranium Now. The other reason we don't care about the 2 35 decay chain is because the halflife of radon in the 2 35 version of it, the 2 35 uranium flavor, has a halflife of 55 seconds. That's very short, so that is gonna decay way very quickly.
[00:22:52] Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's there and it's gone. It's there and it's gone. Right? The half-life of 2 22 radon, which is the one in the 2 38 decay chain, has a half-life of, as you said, 3.8 days. Now that's long enough to matter for us. And why does this matter? Like why do we care about the length of the half-life here for this radon step in the decay?
[00:23:12] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Because
[00:23:13] Chris Bolhuis: it's long, it's there long. For us to go down and inhale it cuz it's a gas, we can, we can ingest this into our system. So we have that. That's not good cuz it's radioactive, but then it also changes. It continues to change, you know, and, and it's only a gas in radon. That's the only time that this whole decay series exists in the gas.
[00:23:42] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay, so now we're kind of shifting into the second part of this thing is the geology of radon, the geo. Are we ready to do that? Are we ready to, I think we're, because we're right, we're right on the cusp of it, I think here. You nailed it. . This is the only step in this whole 16 or 17 step decay chain where this uranium 2 38 atom has turned into a gas phase.
[00:24:02] Dr. Jesse Reimink: So radon is the gas, which means it can move. All those other ones, thorium, radium. Those don't move. Those elements are bound in whatever mineral or clay that the uranium existed in originally. As soon as it hits raydon, it doesn't stick to. It does not chemically react. So it can move, it can flow in airspace and that's how it gets into your basement basically.
[00:24:26] Dr. Jesse Reimink: So we kind of gotta step back and talk about like where uranium occurs in, in. Geoscience, right, Chris? Like, like, okay, you know, rayons coming from uranium, but why is the uranium there? What's it existing in? Like, where does this start? How does uranium behave? Yeah. So
[00:24:42] Chris Bolhuis: now we get into the geology of this podcast.
[00:24:46] Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Here we go. .
[00:24:47] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Here we go.
[00:24:49] Chris Bolhuis: So look, you're the expert on this. Hands down. I bow you on this, okay? But I'll, I'll give it a go and you can interrupt me. All right? But okay, uranium. Is fairly common in certain kinds of rocks on in the continental crust. Okay? It's common in rocks like granite. It's common in certain sedimentary rocks, and it's therefore when these rocks break down, then they form.
[00:25:23] Chris Bolhuis: Chemically, they'll break down mechanically, they'll break down and it forms soil what our homes are sitting in and on. Okay. All right. How did I
[00:25:34] Dr. Jesse Reimink: do? I mean, it's perfect. Yeah. I think that's a really important point because, you know, radon is coming out of the soil. The most homes are built in soil. They're not built in bedrock or anything like that.
[00:25:45] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Right. Like our basements, if you have a basement, it's sitting in soil of some kind that soil. Comes from weathering of a rock. It's breaking down a rock and there's uranium in the rock, and therefore there's uranium in the soil. Right? And the other aspect about. Soil is that it provides all these little air spaces so that when radon is formed, that radon can go into those airspaces and start to move around quite quickly.
[00:26:13] Dr. Jesse Reimink: And so I think we need to touch on a couple of key geoscience terms here with regard to sediments, which is porosity and permeability. Chris, do you think it's time to talk about that, that now? Yeah, I
[00:26:24] Chris Bolhuis: do, because those things help control the mobility of. Once it hits that gas form, it can move. So if you are are talking about a soil or a sedimentary rock that has a high porosity, what we're talking about simply is the spaces between the grains.
[00:26:44] Chris Bolhuis: Like your, you know, your skin is very porous. A sponge is very porous. Okay? It's the spaces between the, the other pieces, the solid pieces, right? It's the.
[00:26:55] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay. And we talk about porosity in a percent. So it's the percent of stuff that's not a mineral, basically, it's the percent error. I, I
[00:27:04] Chris Bolhuis: can, I can maybe give an analogy with this.
[00:27:06] Chris Bolhuis: If you take like a five gallon bucket of loose beach sand and fill it all the way up to the tippy top, right. All right, well, what's the porosity of that? Well, you can measure the porosity by how much water can you pour into that bucket without changing the
[00:27:22] Dr. Jesse Reimink: volume. Oh, that's a good one. Without the water spilling out of the top of the bucket.
[00:27:27] Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's right. That's a good one. Yeah. With loose
[00:27:29] Chris Bolhuis: sand, you pour the water in and you can, with a five gallon bucket full of the tippy top, you can put in about two and a half gallons of water , so that water is pushing out the air. You know, you see it start to bubble as you pour water in. And what that means then is sand has a 50 percent-ish poro.
[00:27:48] Chris Bolhuis: Okay. 50% of the sand is just airspace. Okay, well if that's what you have, you got a soil that has a high porosity, a a lot of air in between the grains, that means then that radon can move through that easily, right? So high porosity favors mobile
[00:28:07] Dr. Jesse Reimink: radon. Yeah, a different, but related term is permeability, which is the ability of stuff to flow through there.
[00:28:15] Dr. Jesse Reimink: So it's the interconnectedness of all those pores. So you could imagine a scenario, Chris, with your, let's go back to your bucket. Sand in the bucket analogy. Cause that's a great one. That sand, if you just pour a bunch of sand grains in there and fill it up, that. Is very permeable because the water can flow all the way to the bottom of that bucket really easily.
[00:28:32] Dr. Jesse Reimink: And if you put a screen on the sand and tip the bucket over the water, it's gonna flow out of there really easy. It's permeable. The water can flow. If instead you take you, you fill up that bucket with a rock that has a big hole in the middle, a single hole that. Is a solid rock with just one big hole.
[00:28:50] Dr. Jesse Reimink: You can still have 50% porosity. There can be one big pore that is two and a half gallons sitting right in the middle, and you can fill that with water and tip it upside down and it's never gonna flow out of that rock enclosure. So think of like a big. Bubble of water locked in a rock capsule. It's not going anywhere.
[00:29:07] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Pour cement in there. Maybe let's make it a cement analogy, right? Like I had
[00:29:11] Chris Bolhuis: no idea where you were going with that
[00:29:12] Dr. Jesse Reimink: analogy, by the way, did it, does it make sense or not? Was this a terrible
[00:29:15] Chris Bolhuis: analogy? Let me give another, go at it and see what you like best. Can I do that? Yeah. You sure? I don't want to hurt your like sensitive soul
[00:29:24] Dr. Jesse Reimink: here.
[00:29:24] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Ah, I'm not feeling that sensitive this week, so I think, okay.
[00:29:27] Chris Bolhuis: Take another drink of wine and sit back and listen. I
[00:29:31] Dr. Jesse Reimink: see you. I'll see you. Let's see how it's done. Watch
[00:29:33] Chris Bolhuis: the master. I don't, I don't have anything. I don't know what's going on. This is, I'm breaking a rule right now. I'm not. I don't have a beer.
[00:29:38] Chris Bolhuis: While we're recording,
[00:29:39] Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'm just gonna sit back here and watch the master at work, Chris. That's what I'm gonna do. Here we
[00:29:43] Chris Bolhuis: go. Five gallon bucket, dumped all the water in it. I can. Okay. And you just got done running a half marathon. You are exhausted. You are, you're dehydrated and you are. . Okay, but you got that five gallon bucket sitting right in front of you with sand and water in it.
[00:29:58] Chris Bolhuis: I give you a straw. Say have it. You stabbed the straw in that sand and you just, you can drink it. No problem. No problem at all. Okay, now next week, same thing. Running half marathon. I come chuckling up to you, you know, moseying on up and I say, Hey Jesse, how you doing? And you're like, oh man, I'm so thirsty.
[00:30:17] Chris Bolhuis: And I hand you a lump of clay. Okay? Now this clay has all the water in it. You could watch. It's got gallons of water in the clay cuz it's got a really high po. I hand you the lump of clay and I hand you a straw. You stab the straw into the clay and you go like that. Nothing's coming out. Cause clay is really, really porous, but it is impermeable.
[00:30:40] Chris Bolhuis: It will not let the water go. Okay. How'd that do? Uh, what
[00:30:45] Dr. Jesse Reimink: do you think? That's a better one. Uh, I'm, you like it? I'm, yep. I've learned a lesson here today. That's a better one. Please. Never, never disagree with Chris is the lesson I'm taking here. . Okay. All right. Okay, so we, we, we've covered,
[00:30:57] Chris Bolhuis: well hold on now, but hold on.
[00:30:59] Chris Bolhuis: So if you take a rock that is really porous and really permeable, radon can move through that. Totally so it can move through the soil, it can move through the sedimentary rock, and it can move then into your home very easily. Okay? That's the moral of the story, right? If you have rock that's really porous, or soil that's really porous, but impermeable, then it's gonna have a harder time seeping through that and getting into your house.
[00:31:29] Chris Bolhuis: So the geology is gonna help determine what happens in your home.
[00:31:34] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. So let's kind of come full circle here. We've got radon. It's uranium has 2 38, has decayed down to 2 22. Radon. It's produced. It's a gas. It can move now. So we're talking about pro and permeability because that radon has to move from the soil into your home in some way, and there's many ways for it to get into the home, but there's a time aspect to this.
[00:31:56] Dr. Jesse Reimink: It does not have an infinite amount of time to move, because remember, we only have 3.8 days. That's the half-life. So most of the radon. That's produced today, will be gone within about, uh, 16 days or so. Around about six half lives is kind of what we think of for the timescale of going from a hundred to zero basically.
[00:32:16] Dr. Jesse Reimink: So that rayon has to move quickly. So what it means is the source, the uranium source, has to be pretty close to your house if the rayons gonna make it into the basement, or it has to be able to move really fast from further away. And so, Rayons moving through the pores and the permeable rock layers and gets into your basement.
[00:32:34] Dr. Jesse Reimink: But like what other factors contribute to how fast rayon moves into your house and therefore how far away from the uranium source matters? The other
[00:32:44] Chris Bolhuis: big thing is water. So if you have water that's sitting in the space, then water's gonna slow down the mobility of the radar. So really, I mean, it's complicated and we're keep, we're trying our best here to keep this like simplified a little bit.
[00:33:01] Chris Bolhuis: Think about it, three variables and radon, mobility, porosity. Gotta be porous, permeable. It has to be, you know, allow it to flow through it and dry. Not a lot of water in the poor space. If you have that, then you have the potential for very mobile radon gas. Okay. Now can I, one thing, what makes the radon so mobile is actually the decay process, and I think this is so cool and it's worth highlighting because I think it's something that everybody can relate to.
[00:33:37] Chris Bolhuis: It's true, true analogy, a high powered rifle. Has a recoil on it, right? You pull the trigger and it recoils into back into your shoulder, okay? The bullet is going the opposite direction. Well, that's exactly what happens with radon 2 22 when it becomes unstable and it ejects this alpha particle. That's the bullet.
[00:34:01] Chris Bolhuis: When the radium 2 26 decays into radon two 20. It does. So by emitting very forcefully an alpha
[00:34:13] Dr. Jesse Reimink: particle, which is the bullet in this analogy,
[00:34:16] Chris Bolhuis: right? That's right. And the rate on 2 22 then is projected the opposite direction. And that's how it moves. That's, isn't that cool? Like I like that's.
[00:34:27] Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's, it's on the moose.
[00:34:28] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Cool. And so, you know, there are people who model these things, who model these processes. And actually we'll create like a chemical model of, uh, the bonding environment in an atoms. So, you know, imagine a uranium atom sitting there, and it's bonded to oxygens and silica atoms. When that thing undergoes alpha recoil, it blows a massive hole in the mineral.
[00:34:48] Dr. Jesse Reimink: I mean, relative to the size of the uranium atom, like, you know, many, many, like 10 or 20 bonds. Radius are broken in this crystal lattice. So basically this uranium decays to thorium and it breaks a big hole in it. Then that thorium goes to protium Uranium. Uranium again decays to thorium. It blows another hole in it.
[00:35:07] Dr. Jesse Reimink: It goes from thorium to radium. Blows another hole. Radium to radon. By the time we get to radon, there's 1, 2, 3, 4 alpha decays. You have, uh, fired a rifle into your shoulder four times. It could get a little bit sore at that point, right? Like the mineral structure's broken down, and why? Why do we care about the structure?
[00:35:25] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris? What do you mean? What, what, what do you mean radon needs? A broken mineral to be able to get out of it. If uranium's locked in a mineral, a crystal lattice, it can't get out. So it needs like an interconnected pathway of broken crystal to actually get out of the crystal and into this pore space in the rock.
[00:35:43] Dr. Jesse Reimink: So there's this rock structure. Rock scale and mineral scale and atomic scale processes are all linked together in creating radon at your home. It's very
[00:35:54] Chris Bolhuis: cool. Yes, so it is. That's how that recoil effect then of the decay process can propel the radon 2 22, that's now a very mobile gas. It can propel it through a porous.
[00:36:06] Chris Bolhuis: Permeable and relatively dry soil structure or rock that that's existing there and therefore move into your home. One of the things, Jesse, this is one of the things I love about doing this podcast with you, is what you bring to the table is so different than the direction that I would've gone into.
[00:36:24] Chris Bolhuis: Like, you know, you've obviously read papers or, or you've been exposed to this process before where it's blasting a hole in the crystal structure. I'd never heard of that. . Like that's, I learned that then just now with the rest of the listeners by
[00:36:38] Dr. Jesse Reimink: talking to you. First of all, it's really fun. We both, uh, you know, building this script is very fun because we, we learn from each other.
[00:36:44] Dr. Jesse Reimink: We take it very different pathways. It's very, very fun to do this. And sometimes we argue, and sometimes we almost break up and then we get back together, and, you know, it's all, it's all very fun. But I, I'll, I'll, uh, I'll have to find this. I haven't seen it in a while, but there's a great animation that I think would be really useful for teaching, teaching this kind of decay process.
[00:37:01] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, I really want that animation.
[00:37:03] Chris Bolhuis: I'll send it to, if you can find that I want to use that. Cause I'll use that in my classes for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Like, I'm always looking for stuff like that. So I think it, it's really All right, well, we need to move on. Okay. So we talked about the mobility. I think we're good.
[00:37:15] Chris Bolhuis: Are you, you agree with that? Like, you know
[00:37:17] Dr. Jesse Reimink: how Yeah, let's, I think, let's transition to the house now. Let's focus on like, you know, the, the actual, how's it get, getting it into your house, right? And this is something that astonished me. I didn't really know this, I mean, Okay. Many houses have foundations, old houses, like the one we have.
[00:37:33] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Foundation is a little bit cracked. It provides an easy way for air from the soil to make it into your basement, right? But you got this basement that's this gap, this ship
[00:37:43] Chris Bolhuis: in the ocean. Well, hold on. A lot of our listeners though, don't have basements like this kind of a Michigan thing, you know?
[00:37:48] Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's true.
[00:37:49] Dr. Jesse Reimink: And we have a lot in Pennsylvania as well. So it doesn't matter if you have a basement or. But basements tend to be high radon locations just because Radons 222 mass units, it's pretty dense, so it'll kind of sink down. But I didn't know that. Most houses, especially new houses, draw only, well, less than 1% of their house air comes out of the soil.
[00:38:10] Dr. Jesse Reimink: The rest is circulated through the atmosphere. In an old house with a cracked foundation, you can draw up to 20% of the air in your house from the soil. That astonished. I did not know that For me, I'm
[00:38:22] Chris Bolhuis: amazed that my. Which is pretty well built, that it would draw 1%. Like that would surprise me that it would draw 1%.
[00:38:30] Chris Bolhuis: Now, my old house, I had a Michigan basement , like I actually had parts of my basement that was dirt. I'm telling you right now. , I should have had that home measured for radon. Like I, some of the problems that I have right now, like maybe my mental status is because of, like, I lived at that house for about 20 years.
[00:38:51] Chris Bolhuis: I, I was sucking in some radon for sure. I guaranteed mm-hmm. . Um, yeah, that house was probably inhaling 50% of the
[00:39:00] Dr. Jesse Reimink: air from the soil. It's an amazing number, right? Like how it. Yeah. How much soil, air you can get into your house. I agree. 1% seems like a lot. And then you talk about 20%. Oh my God, that's amazing.
[00:39:11] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, you know,
[00:39:11] Chris Bolhuis: like even if you don't have a basement, okay, you still have footings. You have a foundation that's dug into the soil. So either way, when a home is put in a place, a hole is dug. Right. And especially this is compounded when you have a basement. All right, so you dig a hole and you build, you put the walls in, so on, you build the home, right?
[00:39:34] Chris Bolhuis: And then now you have this, this area that is. What, two, three feet between your walls and the hole that's dug, they have to backfill it. Well, it never really fills in the way it was when you dug it out, you know it's not gonna be as compact as, so now you have really increased the porosity and permeability of the, all that area surrounding your crawlspace or your basement.
[00:40:02] Chris Bolhuis: That's a really good point. Then now, all of that uranium that is near the wall, That you, or the hole that you dug, when it's near that, now it has an avenue to travel through. Very porous and permeable loose unconsolidated fill, and now it's in your.
[00:40:19] Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's a great point. In the last way that these get into your house, even if you don't have a basement, is through water.
[00:40:25] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Actually, radon can be D dissolved in water, and then when you bring your water into your house, when you agitate that water, it's a gas, so the gas is released. So showers, any kind of pumps, sinks, running water that is agitating the water. The radon can escape from the water. However, this
[00:40:41] Chris Bolhuis: is usually gonna be from people that have well, Good point where it's not like a municipal water supply that gets tested and treated and things like that.
[00:40:51] Chris Bolhuis: So, which like, I have . So again, um, I've got a Well, and, uh, you know, that's a really interesting thing though, when you, you know, so this water has the radon in it and you agitate it by doing dishes and things like that. The radon now is in the air. Yeah. Sitting in your hot tub.
[00:41:07] Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's true. Sitting in your hot tub,
[00:41:09] Chris Bolhuis: Hey,
[00:41:09] Dr. Jesse Reimink: you got that right. Um, you got that. So I, you know, this. Part, I think now it's in our house. You know, we, we've kind of talked a little bit about why it's dangerous, but let's just talk, there's a little, a few sort of things to tidy up here about when Raydon gets into your house. Right? First of all, it's heavy.
[00:41:25] Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's 222 atomic mass units. Most of the air, most of the atmosphere is oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide. These are all far lighter, so Raydon will sink, which means it can stagnate often in your basement. And so that's, People go to measure radon and, and that's where sort of the risk is, is the lower levels of your house typically, cuz that radon will kind of sink down in your house.
[00:41:47] Dr. Jesse Reimink: And it's hard to get out actually because it's so heavy. So that's the point of it. The other aspect is that we've talked about this half-life thing. It's a short half-life. So if it gets into your house, first of all, it's not going anywhere. Second of all, it decays and there's a whole bunch of decays that happen.
[00:42:03] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Remember, raydon is only one step down from uranium to lead. So there are between seven and 10 additional steps of decay, of radioactive decay, and of those, some of them are alpha particles. before it becomes lead. And so basically, you know, once you have radon, you have a bunch of alpha decay going on, this really energetic process, and then it ends in lead, which is not a great element to have around and to have in your lungs.
[00:42:28] Dr. Jesse Reimink: And so, you know, the main risk is inhaling the radon and then it's in your lungs and it decays down and then it's lead and you got lead in your lungs. Um, so that's kind of the dangerous aspect of it, and this is why we need to get tested. Okay, so what
[00:42:42] Chris Bolhuis: do you. Like, do you, is it just an air circulation, uh, solution?
[00:42:47] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. It's actually mostly not an air circulation solution. It's mostly a preventing it from getting into your house. So the, the houses I've seen in, in Pennsylvania and the house we have here has what's called a passive radon system. So you could, basically, what you need to do is you need to take a, a drill, a pipe.
[00:43:04] Dr. Jesse Reimink: You talked about Chris, that boundary, that backfill boundary between the soil and your foundation. What you do is you basically put an air pipe down in there that sucks out the air from the area around your foundation. And so all it is, is taking that gas, that soil gas. Would normally get into your house and it's just venting it up into the atmosphere.
[00:43:25] Dr. Jesse Reimink: So that's all it is. And there's an active or passive system. Some of them have a fan attached to them, the active ones where it's actually pumping out the air. Ours is a passive system, and this is really kind of cool. All it does is just a pipe, a series of pipes that are, we have a basement, so it's a series of pipes running under our found.
[00:43:42] Dr. Jesse Reimink: That are taking the air out and it's passive. There's a, a pipe that goes up to the roof, and whenever wind blows across that pipe, it creates low pressure and it sucks all that air out. And so any amount of wind is just sucking air out. It's, it's kind of cleansing the air around our foundation of raydon, which is just a cool, very cool thing.
[00:44:02] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Very similar.
[00:44:02] Chris Bolhuis: It is a very simple thing, but not if you didn't build the home with that in mind, which a lot of homes are not. What do you do?
[00:44:12] Dr. Jesse Reimink: These pipes are not huge, and you don't need to go all the way into the foundation. Usually they can just wrap it around the, the foundation on the sides. So it's, it can, I don't know the ex how expensive it is to get these installed.
[00:44:23] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Um, I think because like I said, the house we have, um, has it in place. Had it in place already, but I think most modern homes will be built with this detection system or with this, um, radon prevention system in place to get it installed. I'm not sure what the price is, but it. Ultra expensive. You know, something you need to get tested.
[00:44:42] Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'm
[00:44:42] Chris Bolhuis: curious how, how did you know you
[00:44:43] Dr. Jesse Reimink: have it? You can see it in the walls outside and, and often it's running in ours, it's running inside the basement. Um, you can see some of the pipes running up. Oh, okay. You saw your
[00:44:53] Chris Bolhuis: basement's unfinished then. .
[00:44:55] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Basement's un fetched. Okay. Yep. All right. Gotcha. Okay.
[00:44:58] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yep. And there's a, there's a pipe, you know, running along the side of the house that up just a PVC pipe that goes up to the roof, and I'm like, oh, I wonder what that is. Oh, it's a rayon system. Okay, cool. But where I'm at in Pennsylvania is a pretty high radon risk area in general. We have a lot of.
[00:45:14] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Carbonate rocks, which are high in uranium, and so therefore the soils are high in uranium. And there's just high uranium background where you're at in Michigan, it's a little bit different. The soil isn't as high in uranium, but you have really dry soils. So I think that's why Michigan might be higher radon.
[00:45:29] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Do you? I'm
[00:45:29] Chris Bolhuis: not sure. Um, so my situation is unique and I think a lot of people are in the situation I'm in. Uh, we are. Okay. Oh, okay. And, and so I'm on top of a hill, but I'm, I'm in clay, and so clay is impermeable, but it's very, very wet. So it, it has, it has the water. Both of these things act to slow it down.
[00:45:51] Chris Bolhuis: However, if there's a lot of uranium on that whole wall that was dug, then you have access for it to get into your house. Um, yeah, I like that. That's a good point. There are a lot of people though, in our area that are in sand. So we have these like, you know, ancient dune and sandy, you know, kind of deltaic, uh, environments that homes are built in, and.
[00:46:16] Chris Bolhuis: They can have an increased problem because, you know, it has, its porous, it's really permeable and it's relatively dry cuz sand has such great
[00:46:23] Dr. Jesse Reimink: drainage. Yeah. And radar's just flying around through sand. So it could just flow really quickly through it. So, you know, I, I think it's important because this is a.
[00:46:33] Dr. Jesse Reimink: A geoscience topic that is immediately societally relevant, but also has health implications. I think we should point out, Chris, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that places you can learn more and places you probably should learn more if you don't know, uh, about your home. In the US at least. The Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA and the United States Geological Survey, the US Gs have maps and.
[00:46:53] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Really, actually great guides that can help homeowners, but it's a very local problem, like houses in the same neighborhood have very different radon risk factors, basically. Cuz some older homes, you know, depending on how the quality of your foundation, it really, a lot of things matter. So getting your own specific home tested is a pretty important thing.
[00:47:15] Dr. Jesse Reimink: Most other countries, I know Canada has 'em, uh, Germany, the, the same sort of governmental agencies will have ra. Resources that, that people should look into.
[00:47:25] Chris Bolhuis: We'll put a couple links in the show notes like the epa, um, radon map. We'll put that in the show notes and so on. So if you're interested, check it out.
[00:47:34] Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's kind of fun to look at the radon risk map too, of the, of the United States. These, yeah. But CHIPS wants to be careful of
[00:47:39] Chris Bolhuis: it, though. That's true. By, like you said, I mean, you can have a neighborhood that's, you know, these, you're in close proximity to the people and, and very, very different raydon levels in the low levels of the.
[00:47:50] Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's a really good point. Yeah, it's, it was sort of fun. I, I looked at the US map and, you know, you see the big color pla splotches pasted all over the map, and then you zoom in on, on Pennsylvania, which I did. And, uh, you know, it, it gets more detailed. Definitely it gets more nuanced for sure, at the county level and at the township level.
[00:48:07] Dr. Jesse Reimink: So it, it's, it's interesting to look at, um, yeah, so. I thought this was fun, Chris, and I think we should, you know, these types of things where geoscience, there's an interesting geoscience story behind a really important process that everybody should sort of be aware of. That's
[00:48:21] Chris Bolhuis: right. That's right. That's what this is all about.
[00:48:23] Chris Bolhuis: Our amazing planet. How it all works, .
[00:48:26] Dr. Jesse Reimink: I know. And how it impacts our everyday lives. That's right. It's so good. That's right. So
[00:48:29] Chris Bolhuis: good. Now you had a good idea. I, it took me a little bit, but once I started digging into it, I was sold. This was fun. I liked learning
[00:48:35] Dr. Jesse Reimink: about, we didn't almost break up over this episode, so No, we didn't.
[00:48:38] Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, that's true. We're, we're becoming more collegial. That's right. All right, man. With that, I think that's a rep. If you enjoy Planet Geo share with your friends. That's by far the most important. Give us a like, subscribe, those matter for the algorithm and follow us on all the social medias We're at Planet Geo Cast.
[00:48:53] Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's right. Cheers. Cheers. See you next week. See ya.
