Forming Earth’s Ocean - Office Hours
Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:00:00] Welcome to Planet the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
Chris Bolhuis: You're a funny guy. I like that. That made me laugh. I need a pick me up. Of all days, I need a pick me up today. Yeah. I am recording. Are you recording?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'm recording, yeah. Now I am.
Chris Bolhuis: Hold on, [00:00:30] let me play with my microphone.
You like it when I... Can I do that? Does
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, tap tap. Scriggle your beard against your microphone, that's always the best. Really, uh, just an appealing sound.
Chris Bolhuis: I can see why it would be.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah.
Chris Bolhuis: Alright. Hey Doc, how you doing man?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: The good doctor's in the house, Joyce. The good doctor's here.
Chris Bolhuis: Oh, this will be a good test. I'll see if she's actually
Dr. Jesse Reimink: if she's listening.
Chris Bolhuis: it's too early for her to be napping. Alright? You know, cause usually... So, I [00:01:00] go to my parents house on Fridays as often as I can. to just visit, have a beer, sit on their back deck, you know, yeah, after I'm done with the cross country practice, I'll go over there.
Jenny's not home yet. So I got a little bit of time and more often than not, when I walk in, my mom is sleeping, listening to us.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Ha ha ha. That's great. We are, just great to go to sleep to.
Chris Bolhuis: Yes. Oh, you know what Jenny has started [00:01:30] doing? This is, can't believe this. So she's really into audio books, right? She loves that. And I love it when we travel. It's such a good thing. You know, I listened to a lot of podcasts. and then we'll also get into like a, an audio book. Like, uh, one of the most recent ones we did was, the one by Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, okay. I haven't,
Chris Bolhuis: Really? I loved it. It was so good. anyway, so Jenny now is going to sleep. She'll set her timer. on [00:02:00] her audiobook. So she'll just put it by her, uh, shoulders.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: by the pillow.
Chris Bolhuis: So here I am, here I am, I'm trying to go to sleep, right? And she's got her audiobook, so she can doze off listening to that. And
Dr. Jesse Reimink: familiar with this problem. Definitely. Oh, yes. Gotta go upstairs, gotta find the freaking phone that's making so much noise, blaring, whatever, and turn it off so I can go to sleep. Yeah.
Chris Bolhuis: I thought this
Dr. Jesse Reimink: know. No, no, no. This is a, I think it's a, it's a common problem. We just need some like headphones up in this place or [00:02:30] something.
Chris Bolhuis: That's crazy.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: to our neighbors actually. And, uh, he does this. So, it's the inverse problem. He is always like, yeah, he's always falling asleep with this thing blaring, just playing
Chris Bolhuis: That's so funny. Like, wait a minute. How is this okay? How, you know, I'm trying to go to
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I know. It's wild.
Chris Bolhuis: got this. This guy talking in a funny accent about a book that I know nothing about. I mean, what, and that you just so distracted, your mind starts to think about this book that you're not even into.
And that's the way my mind [00:03:00] just kind of flits
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So Chris,
On this episode, we're going to have one person who better not fall asleep. Cause this is a question that was raised from a listener.
Chris Bolhuis: that's right. Kathy, you better not fall asleep.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: You can't fall asleep during this one. Cause, cause we are addressing the question and the question was really around, well, essentially what came first oceans or atmospheres. But I think really the question was kind of, uh, there's a few questions kind of around how did oceans come to be was. Maybe a simpler way to phrase it.
So how did we get our oceans? And I think Chris, [00:03:30] the structure of what we're going to talk about is probably something along the lines of just a general history of oceans on earth. Like what we know about the oceans, what we kind of don't know about the oceans perhaps, and how they formed. is that accurate, uh, sort of
Chris Bolhuis: right, but then in the end, and this is going to be more like your realm, Jesse, but she also wants to know the role of plate tectonics in oceans in terms of like, did they have a part in, you know, getting plate tectonics going, I
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, for sure. It's such an interesting question and such a [00:04:00] deep question. I mean, we could go for our, we, Hey, we could start a new series on, on just this topic. It's so deep that it's so rich. I, so I suppose with, information or, or sort of so many different, uh, rabbit holes we could go down or big paths that we could go down as well.
So I don't know, Chris, I have a hard time thinking about where to start. Yeah. This kind of conversation in your mind, when you read this question or these questions, uh, what did you think? Where did you think, Oh, we got to start here.
Chris Bolhuis: Um, I guess my mind automatically went, this is the [00:04:30] way my mind operates. I, I want to just answer
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris's stump grinding service. Is that what you were thinking about?
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. I automatically am like, what comes first? Right. And. And so that's kind of where my mind went, but that's not a really good way to frame an episode. And, but, the atmosphere has to come first because the atmosphere gave birth to the oceans.
And so we're going to kind of walk through that process of early earth in
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. And I think that's a good, a good way to start, like go from, go back in the beginning and then sort of [00:05:00] walk forward. And the important concept here is, is remember earth was super hot. Earth was a magma ocean where the entire outer part of the planet, the rocky part of the planet was liquid.
So it was this magma ocean, just as the name implies, which is super hot. And, it's hard to imagine an ocean sitting right on top of that, right? On top of liquid magma it would be evaporated and it would be in the gas phase at that point. So the earth is really hot to start with.
So unlikely to have. A nice calm ocean, [00:05:30] you know, right on top of a magma ocean planet.
Chris Bolhuis: yeah, right. Because that would be similar to like putting maybe a, a pat of butter on a hot skillet, right? I mean, it's just not going to work. It's going to boil off. And so that's,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Exactly.
Chris Bolhuis: so
let's. get to just some stats. Okay. And then we're going to talk about maybe what's inside the earth and use that as a launching pad to talk about how that is thought to have led to the formation of the atmosphere, or at least how it changed the atmosphere.
Okay. So first of [00:06:00] all, oceans. They make up 71 percent of the entire surface area of our planet. Okay. So that's a lot, right? but they make up 97. 2 percent of all the water on our planet. So that's what makes this such a good question, right? Because this is very, very important.
Mm
Dr. Jesse Reimink: the oceans are it when it comes to water. I mean, we talked about glaciers, water vapor super important, climate, super important, but as far as volumetrically, it's the oceans. they dominate the water budget of the surface part of the earth.
[00:06:30] Now there's a really open question and we'll kind of come back to this at the end of the episode, I think, where we talk about the history of the oceans, but we know there's water. We've talked about this before. We know there's water down in, sort of trapped in minerals, bound up in minerals in the interior of the earth.
And we know this from a bunch of different pieces of evidence. We talked about diamonds. There's inclusions in diamonds that are from the mantle transition zone. So four to six hundred kilometers deep in the earth. And we know that there's some amount of water down there. We don't know how much. And some of the [00:07:00] calculations would suggest you could put like six oceans worth of water down there.
So that's like potential storage, but we know there's a little bit down there. We don't know how much.
Chris Bolhuis: Okay. So first of all, you said the mantle transition zone, the MTZ this is the boundary that separates the upper mantle from the lower mantle. this has actually garnered a lot of headlines in the research world recently because there's a recent paper that's come out that has really shined a light on the amount of [00:07:30] potential water down in that zone, right?
Now, this is though, hugely variable. I mean, this is not constrained very well at all.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So let me sort of frame this just briefly because transition zone, what the transition part is, referencing is it's a seismic transition zone. So we can see with seismic waves passing through the mantle, we can see that there's some kind of boundary there because seismic waves change energy, they kind of refract.
There's one at around 440 kilometers and [00:08:00] one around 660 kilometers in that ballpark range. So it's a kind of a couple hundred kilometer thick layer in the mantle where seismic waves do weird stuff. What we know happens there is that we have a mineralogical change. So as you go down in pressure, if you take a piece of the mantle, the mantle Up in the upper mantle has olivine and two different types of pyroxenes, those types of minerals in it.
And those minerals undergo transition, they become unstable in this transition zone, they become different minerals. Ringwoodite and Wadsleyite are a [00:08:30] couple different of these high pressure phases of those minerals. And those phases can hold water in their structure, whereas olivine and pyroxenes, they don't really hold much water.
So, there's this like sweet spot in the middle, this sandwich layer, where the minerals could potentially hold water. We don't know if they do though. we know that like one ringwoodite we've ever measured that came up in a diamond inclusion, we know that that had water in it, but it's like one tiny, tiny inclusion in this huge layer of earth that, it's unknown.
Chris Bolhuis: Okay. So we need to talk about why this [00:09:00] is important and that leads us into this whole discussion about the atmosphere coming first and where the atmosphere came from and how the atmosphere got changed. So let's go back to what you started with know, first of all, let's just say it outright.
The oceans formed a long time ago. We're talking billions of years ago. Like what Jesse 4. 1 ish billion years ago. There's a variance in this.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: so 3. 8 billion years ago, we have sedimentary rocks that formed 3. [00:09:30] 8 billion years ago. So we know that there is rocks formed under the ocean 3. 8 billion years ago. So we know there's liquid water then. Older than that, we have some zircons, which, we can look at.
The oxygen isotope chemistry of the zircons, and it kind of tells us that the granites that formed the zircons interacted with water, low temperature water, probably liquid water or steam. So, that goes back to like 4. billion years ago.
Chris Bolhuis: Now, prior to this, we know also, and this is one of your [00:10:00] fields of study and looking for the oldest rocks on the earth and when plate tectonics began, we know that early earth was exceedingly hot. Like you said, it was this kind of magma ocean on the surface, right? So what was happening due to this like magma ocean?
first of all, a couple of points that we need to make is that in these conditions, only water vapor could exist.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: think of how hot you have to get a rock to melt it, Chris. You have to get 800 degrees, at least up to 500 degrees, depending on the rock type. So,[00:10:30] water is going to be vapor at that temperature, it's not going to be liquid water.
Chris Bolhuis: So, a couple things then that were going on, right, is that the atmosphere, both the atmosphere and the surface, had to cool down immensely. in both the atmosphere and the surface, it would have been way too hot. Only water vapor could exist. So we had to cool this whole thing down to below the boiling point.
Now that doesn't mean the boiling point was a hundred degrees Celsius because there could have been different atmospheric pressures, which would have changed things and so [00:11:00] on. But the atmosphere had to cool down below.
Okay, now, let's talk about how water would have been added to the atmosphere, where was this coming from?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, this is a very open question. how did Earth get its water and other quote unquote volatile species? And [00:11:30] one question is, where did it come from? There's a couple potential culprits and one of them is the rocks called carbonaceous REITs, which have a lot of carbon in 'em.
They have a lot of volatiles in them, and so the earth might've formed during earth formation, we had this episode, we, what'd we call it, Chris, how to build a planet, I think was how we call it. But we sort of talked about how does a planet form. It's got a bunch of meteorite impacts, a lot of heat, it's this magma ocean stage, that's kind of boiling off water, as you've described, and [00:12:00] probably losing it, so So, there's kind of two culprits for water, like where did the ocean water come from?
And one is, it was added later by these meteorites, so these meteorites kind of brought water in and they, after the earth kind of solidified and had a solid crust, it started to cool down and these meteorites came in and added water to the
Chris Bolhuis: and this is during the heavy bombardment era, correct?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that would, it would be like the first couple hundred million years of earth history.
Yep.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, we're getting smacked a lot. Not like these very sporadic, you know, meteor [00:12:30] impacts that we have going on. Now we were getting hit a lot.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: a lot, and by big ones too. These big, they'd form, like, like, look at the moon, there's big impact basins on the moon, and it's that size. Big, big, big, meteorites bringing this material in. The other one is outgassing from the mantle. if water could be trapped in this, crystallizing magma ocean, as the mantle solidified, some of the minerals might soak up some water and trap it in there, and that could, Traps and volatiles in the mantle that then degas gradually over geologic time they out gas into [00:13:00] the atmosphere and then into the ocean
Chris Bolhuis: Now, let me ask you this then. so as the water's being added to the atmosphere, and it's not just water, it's carbon dioxide, it's carbon monoxide, all these other, kind of gases that we associate with volcanism today are being added to the atmosphere. This must have affected the time that all of this took place, right?
I mean, because in other words, I would think it slowed it down. is that a good assumption that
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that the atmosphere slowed it down
Chris Bolhuis: slowed down [00:13:30] the cooling of the planet?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, for sure. This is a really interesting, calculation that a few people have started doing recently is to say, okay, look at a magma ocean, study a magma ocean planet and, put together these big simulations of how it might crystallize. Does it crystallize from the top down? And this is an interesting question or interesting point.
Pressure, as you mentioned earlier, has a lot to do with when stuff crystallizes. So when we think of a mantle that's 2800 kilometers thick, that's a lot of pressure variation [00:14:00] across this molten magma ocean, and so we don't really know where the crystallization started. There's suggestions that it started crystallizing on the top and then crystallized downward.
Some people would suggest the crystallization start on the bottom and works its way to the top. Then we have these middle out and outside in type of crystallization models too. So we don't really know, but one thing we do know is that if you put an atmosphere around that, it's like a blanket.
You slow down the cooling of the planet, of the magma ocean stage.
Chris Bolhuis: It's kind of like [00:14:30] going camping and on a clear night You know that it's gonna be a cold night and you don't have that blanket of cloud cover just lose heat more rapidly and the atmosphere acts as that blanket. So, We have then two sources, probably worked in conjunction for adding water to the atmosphere, this degassing from what is now the mantle, and also getting smacked by these meteors and particularly Massive big [00:15:00] comets.
Okay. During the heavy bombardment era, both of those have lots of water. So this whole thing then cools down below the boiling point, whatever that happened to be at the time due to the pressures involved and it begins to rain. And like this must have, Jesse, are there estimates on this that this must've taken millions of years?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, it's a really hard, calculation to, to, it's really, it's really hard to figure out what's happening in the first, like, hundred million years of Earth's life. And this is the other [00:15:30] complicating factor of Earth is that we have a moon and we know the moon formed by a giant impact that basically reset the planet.
We don't know when the moon formed. Some people would say 4. 35 billion years ago is when the moon formed. Some people would say 4. 55 billion years ago, and that's 200 million years age difference. So you, we could have had this planet that got started and had an ocean and had all these things happening to it.
And then all of a sudden it got smacked by the moon forming impact and [00:16:00] completely reset itself again into a magma ocean stage. And then you had to start this process over. So we really don't have a very good idea of what was going on in that first, let's say 200 million years of earth. It's really tricky to figure out because the models get really complicated and there's feedback loops in these things.
Chris Bolhuis: it is safe to say that we had to fill the ocean basins and the ocean basins were filled from condensation and precipitation from the early formed atmosphere.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: exactly. So as [00:16:30] that you can imagine this as you put a Okay, so imagine a magma ocean a ball of magma and you've got a water vapor Atmosphere around that what happens pretty quickly is you're losing all the atmosphere is losing heat to space pretty quickly And so you're forming pretty soon that it gets cool enough where you'll have a crust, like a solid thin layer.
And I always think of a a lava or pahoehoe lava, you know, this really ropey kind of lava texture where if, uh, [00:17:00] a lava flow is flowing, you rarely see just. pure magma or pure lava. Like you don't often see that it often has a little crust on top of it. That crust forms really quickly.
Yeah. This, so this thin skin, that would happen on a planetary scale too. So you'd have this thin skin and that can start to cool down. Then the atmosphere cools down. And as soon as you get below, condensation point of water, then you start to.
Chris Bolhuis: and we didn't have continents at the time.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:17:30] Well, it depends who you ask on that, but yes, in my opinion, continents are, uh, we didn't have huge amounts of continents, certainly not 4. 5 billion years ago. Some people would argue 4. 4 billion years ago we've got continents, but
Chris Bolhuis: Oh, so are we looking for then in the near future for Dr. Reimink to find a 4. 4 billion year old zircon crystal? Is that what you're saying right there?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: would be very good.
Chris Bolhuis: we'll see you on the tonight show then.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yes, exactly. Uh,[00:18:00] I don't think that's going to happen because I'm not, um, I don't really think continents were a huge component of the, the Haiti and earth, but some people would argue with that. So,
Chris Bolhuis: So, there's also something else that's important to note is that Earth is a little bit different from other nearby planets in that, you know, we're big enough to hold on to the vast majority of its water.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: What do you mean by big enough, Chris? Well phrased.
Chris Bolhuis: know, we're heavy enough to gravitationally hold onto [00:18:30] the H2O. Most of it, anyway. There's very little of it that has been lost. to space. Obviously you have some chemical reactions where, you know, some of the hydrogen has been dissociated from the oxygen and, and therefore lost and so on.
But over time, our water cycle is pretty well kept intact.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yes.
Chris Bolhuis: I don't know, you look at Mars, and, the evidence is so vast that there was a lot of flowing water on the surface of Mars at some time. Um, I'll eat my desk if that's not a correct statement. I [00:19:00] mean, I feel that confident.
I mean, but it's gone, right? And the same thing is true of Venus. the water's gone. I know there are different things at play here. Earth is really in this perfect zone and it's also the perfect size to retain this stuff
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, so there's two important points to that. First of all, we're big enough to hold on to water molecules, water vapor, and other sort of heavier molecules will not get blown away by the sun's radiation or by [00:19:30] cosmic rays. Our gravity holds on to that stuff. But we're not too near the sun that everything boils off, that the entire oceans boil off and then we're done.
So we're kind of, that's what we mean by the sweet spot, there's different ways to define the quote unquote habitable zone. But we're like far enough away, but close enough and big enough. That's kind of the calculation we sort of need to do to think about this thing. but to your point, yes, we have Really good evidence for oceans being on earth basically as old as we have a rock record or a mineral record, we see evidence for [00:20:00] oceans.
So back to 4. 3, 4. 2 billion years ago, we have evidence for liquid water on the surface of the earth. Now, there is something that has changed in earth history, and this kind of comes full circle back to this mantle transition zone water. you might be thinking, Why did we talk about that before?
Because I think that there's a There's maybe not a complete consensus, but there's a big section of the research community that thinks that the early earth was a water world, meaning continents were [00:20:30] not emerged, emerged above sea level. If we had continents, they were below sea level, and we might not have had many continents, so that's why they were below sea level.
But basically, earth was probably a water world, or at least dominantly a water world for that sort of 3 billion years and older time period. So, It brings up many questions that we don't have answers to, like one hypothesis would be we used to have more water on the surface, and continents were there, they were just flooded, and then that water got soaked up by this [00:21:00] mantle transition zone through something like plate tectonics, bringing water down, and then this transition zone kind of soaking it up like a sponge.
That's, one model. Other ones are, oh, continents just grew, and so when you grow a continent, it pokes its head above sea level.
Chris Bolhuis: for my thought, why we began talking about the transition zone and the mantle is also the amount of water that's inside the earth. It degassing of our early planet.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, it, it could, it could give that source [00:21:30] exactly like we don't know how much water is down there, but it is a potential reservoir, like it's somewhere you could point and say, Oh, look, there could have been, or there could still be water in there. It could have been there outgassed and then is regassing in as being sort of pushed down with subduction.
Now, that's one possibility
Chris Bolhuis: Which is still the case today. If you think about, magma chambers beneath active volcanic areas, the majority of the gas that's dissolved in magma is H2O. know, as much as 75%, you know, that's a lot.[00:22:00]
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, you might be thinking like, wait a minute, how does water get all the way down into the mantle that far down in the mantle? And you're right, Chris, that a lot of the water that goes down comes back up in arc volcanoes, like all that gas coming out of Mount St.
Helens or, any of those, those stratovolcanoes, they're always steaming. no matter what they're steaming. And a lot of that's groundwater, but some of it's magmatic water. that water ultimately was sourced from the oceanic plate going down. And it drives off all the volatiles as it goes down, or at least [00:22:30] most of the volatiles, but really cold subduction zones can actually take some water down further.
They can kind of go past the subduction zone and make it into the deeper mantle. these minerals, certain minerals can bring them down really deep.
Chris Bolhuis: So to be clear, are you referring to the waterlogged plate on top of the, the subduction zone that gets brought deep down? So when you say cold subduction zones, you're talking about subduction, subducting plates that are old and cold, right?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. And [00:23:00] what we mean is old cold oceanic crust. So an oceanic plate that's really far away from the mid ocean ridge that it was formed in, that will be really cold. as it dives down into the mantle, it takes a while to heat up. And some of those minerals can hold onto their water longer and make it past subduction zone.
Think of the subductions on like squeezing out the sponge and some cold stuff will be really waterlogged the squeezing action won't really wring it out completely. So there'll be a little bits of water that make it [00:23:30] down into the mantle could envision scenarios where the water is being soaked up by the mantle through time.
You can imagine water being outgassed over time, from the mantle to the, to the oceans. And, and so We get into a sort of arm wavy space here where we don't really understand the full history of our oceans.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Good point. just to come back to what you were saying about old and cold, I use this in my intro level geology class. when we talk about convergent boundaries and you talk about like an ocean to ocean convergent boundary, well, Everyone [00:24:00] knows oceanic crust in a convergent boundary is going to be the one to subduct, but when you have two oceanic crusts, which one goes, and I just say, well, the one that is older and colder, it's just a, you know, it's a basic concept.
It's the one that is furthest away from the mid ocean ridge, furthest away from that heat source. It's older, it's colder, and therefore it's denser. And that's the one that dives down. So yeah,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Exactly. Yep. For sure. Yeah. It's a great one. I was just talking about this yesterday in class. Actually, we went over subduction zones and, and, uh, we're just talking about the [00:24:30] angle of subduction and how it's related to the coldness of the slab and these sort of first principles.
So well, we've brought up a lot of questions, I think that we don't know the answers to, but we've answered the fundamental question. And the point here is that the oceans, the history of the oceans is really, really interesting. I mean, Chris, we talked about banded iron formations and how ocean chemistry is completely different way back in time because we were depositing precipitating silica and these banded iron formations.
And we, we don't form those in the modern earth. So ocean chemistry has changed a ton too.
Chris Bolhuis: Oh my gosh. [00:25:00] Well, think about this early atmosphere, right? Getting pumped and loaded with water, but it had no oxygen,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: And was probably had a lot more CO2 than we have today. Like really the earth has changed a lot over time, even though the oceans have remained present for basically all of our geologic record. The question is, is how does it change?
It changed chemistry, did it change volume? Like all those things we don't really know, but we know it was there.
Chris Bolhuis: Mm hmm. That's,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: kind of a
Chris Bolhuis: that's right. I don't know if that was a or [00:25:30] not.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, it's true. It's true. I mean, it's one of these things I think probably, I sort of think non geologists might look at us and be like, why don't you know this yet? Like this seems like a really first order thing to like know the history of the oceans.
Chris Bolhuis: I understand that. However, we are talking about stuff that's very, very old. And in geology, we often get into this trap. I think it's a trap when we throw around these really massive numbers. That's 3. 8 billion years old, or [00:26:00] it's 4. 1 billion years old. Holy crap. that's ridiculous.
You know, we, we throw these around without actually really wrapping our minds around it sometimes. And when you talk about stuff, that's this old. There's so little evidence. It's scant. And so for us to, to know a ton about that. I think is, that's a massive bar to overcome. It's just the sheer age,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I agree. Yeah. And I do, we do tend to throw around these numbers you know, we take 3. 8 billion with a ton of [00:26:30] zeros and we turned into 3. 8 and it feels smaller to us. Right. But yeah, it's a, it's a, I mean, heck, I don't even know what a million looks like, really. I mean, I've never seen a million of something in one spot, I don't think.
So I don't really know what that looks like, let alone a billion. I just can't conceive of it mentally.
Chris Bolhuis: I know. I mean, it's hard every once in a while, every once in a while, if, if the conditions are just right, sometimes your mind can begin to, to untangle it a little bit and then my stomach gets all uneasy and I get unsettled and it,[00:27:00]
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I know. I know. I don't like it.
Chris Bolhuis: have to throw up, you know,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I know. I know. I agree completely. Like there's every once in a while. I remember there was this one time, I think it was like the third, second year, maybe, that I was doing fieldwork up in the Acosta Nice Complex. We're sitting on the four billion year old outcrop, right?
And sitting there, and you're sitting there. And we were having lunch or something and the person I was in the field with had wandered off and I was just sitting there and it kind of dawned on me. I could kind of grasp 4 billion years, like, not really. I wasn't even close to grasping it, but I could kind of like.
[00:27:30] See it a little bit or start to feel it. And it's so unsettling. I was like, I don't, I don't want to think about that too deeply. Like it gets really unsettling.
Chris Bolhuis: It does. It really scratches the brain. You
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Totally. Oh man. Very unsettling feeling. Oh man. But it's something, you know, we, we, you're right. We have to deal with as geologists. We have to kind of, I think we have to get better at communicating things like that, that it is awe inspiring, but it's also something we can be a little, we can trivialize a little bit
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. I'm guilty of it. I'm sure you are. [00:28:00] Especially you are because you deal with old stuff all the time.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Including my podcast partner, Ho!
Chris Bolhuis: stop. Uh, it was all right. That was a
Dr. Jesse Reimink: one. I'm proud of myself
Chris Bolhuis: was, that was all right. I got you. That was good. That was good. Um, is there anything that you want to add or we should add about oceans and tectonics?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: um, yes and no. I think it's, it's kind of, um. Again, something we don't have a great answer to. We think it's important. We think like the [00:28:30] hydration of the plates can imagine it kind of lubricates plate tectonics and it helps drive a lot of things. So we definitely think it's, it's quite important that an ocean helps plate tectonics continue and helps sort of fertilize the planet for plate tectonics.
so yeah, they're probably intimately linked for
Chris Bolhuis: Okay. But I would you can straighten this out if you, you know, if I'm wrong or off base here, but I think too, that oceans preceded what we know of as plate tectonics. I mean, the [00:29:00] oceans came first.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: a great question. My opinion. Yes.
Chris Bolhuis: Well, and that's why I gave that because like you and I usually on the same page and,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: there would be, I think, decent amount of people who researched the other earth who would, who would argue with that and would say, Hey, We don't know when plate tectonics started, and it could have been 4. 2 billion years ago. My opinion is it's closer to 6 billion years, and so therefore, yes, the ocean was present before that time
Chris Bolhuis: Okay. [00:29:30] Question for you then to follow up on this. So. Are you shifting a little bit in your career, away from like answering that big overarching question and looking at different things because of your interests or this is just kind of a feeling that I get.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, I would say that's accurate. Maybe, Well, it's hard. Um, you I don't want to study... One suite of rocks for the rest of my career, right? that's sort of an unhealthy situation to be in. And unless I go out and manage to find some other [00:30:00] old rock location, it's hard to just say, I'm going to continue studying the early earth.
Right. it's super interesting to me, but I don't want it to be my whole research initiative and agenda. So I'd like it to be. You know, a quarter of my research, sort of profile, and then I'm sort of developing the other ones for sure, so, I'm getting into this critical minerals type thing, and yeah, there's different avenues to go, but you don't want to, I don't want to be just on like a single track, so.
Chris Bolhuis: This is definitely Jesse, a. Crispolis front porch beer in
Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:30:30] It
Chris Bolhuis: that we're having right now.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: We got to sit on the rocking chairs, have a couple beers, talk it through. Absolutely. I look forward to it.
Chris Bolhuis: All right. All right, man. Well, Kathy, I hope we did it justice. Um, I think that's a wrap.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I think it's a wrap. It's as good as we can do for now, at least,
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. That's
Dr. Jesse Reimink: right? Uh, you can find us now on our mobile app, both on iOS and Android.
Just type in Camp Geo into the app store and you'll find us there. You can download it. You can listen to [00:31:00] all of our Camp Geo stuff. You can download all the images and audio files and listen offline. That's a key feature there. and you can also purchase access to our Yellowstone, Geological Guide to Yellowstone National Park in the same way.
And again, download content offline. You can also head to our website, that's planet geo cast.com. There you can subscribe, like, follow us and support us. We really appreciate that. And lastly, Chris, send us an email, planet geo cast@gmail.com. We've been getting a bunch of 'em, a bunch of good questions and we like answering 'em like, you know, things like this come up and we're like, Hey, that's an episode right there.
[00:31:30] Let's, put together, uh, uh, some talking points and just, uh, walk through it. 'cause it's super interesting topic. So keep sending those our way. We love it.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Cheers.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Peace.
