The History of Granite - Dr. Mike Ackerson

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[00:00:00]

 Hey.

Chris Bolhuis: Jesse Reimink.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Hi,

Chris Bolhuis: the heck are you?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: you know, we just, we just got done doing one of my favorite things in the world, which is talking about science and philosophy with Dr. Mike Akerson. Full disclosure, him and I are pretty good friends. one of my closest scientific, not really collaborators, we haven't collaborated on a [00:00:30] lot.

but we, you know, we talk a lot. Uh, we overlapped at

Chris Bolhuis: really interesting. So I did not really know this. I didn't know how tight you guys were,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well,

Chris Bolhuis: but that's like, truth be told. I don't remember meeting him before either. So

Dr. Jesse Reimink: it's true. Chris's memory banks are full. If anybody's interested, they're full. New

information

kicks out old information.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Well, that's true. That does happen. I'm like, that's a whole different story. But I think that when he was with us, when we, [00:01:00] saw the reactors, Bowen's reactors, then everything else just blotted out. Like, I think I might've blacked out,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: totally,

I get it. I mean, the tour around Carnegie is just, it's so unbelievable with the history of science, the, history

of our science, uh, it's just unbelievable. yeah. Mike, we go back a bit. I mean, he, grew up near where we grew up, you know, I don't know, 20 miles down the road or something like that, but we never knew

each other.

Um, he did his undergrad at Michigan state university, and then he did a master's at North Carolina, University of North [00:01:30] Carolina. And then he did, ended up doing a PhD at a place called the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is a small technical college. It's a sort of a engineering school. that had one of the most I don't think this is arguable, Bruce Watson was his PhD supervisor, who's probably the best experimental petrologist of his generation, um, and just established this amazing research group there, and Mike did his PhD there, and then Mike and I overlapped at Carnegie, where we did our postdocs together, so we overlapped for several years there, and we became kind of close, [00:02:00] because it was at the beer hour, and I showed up, and I'm meeting people, and Mike, Cytle's up he's got a big beard.

He's got a bald guy and he's kind of like, Oh, hey, what's up? Well, you know, where are you from? And I'm like, Michigan. He's like, Oh, me too. Where in Michigan. I was like, Oh, you know, west side. southwest corner. He's like, Oh, me too. I'm from Grand Haven. What's it? Where are you from? Oh, Hudsonville. And then we go through it and like, his parents are both teachers.

My parents are both teachers. had geology in high school. I had So we had this like many shared experiences and kind of, you know, scientific overlap. So [00:02:30] anyway,

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Jesse, this interview really, I think hits all the bases. we, we talk about research, we get into the weeds on granites and, bowens and so it has like, this is weedy for people that want that.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: me say this. We get literally as far into the weeds as you can, we talk about where the limit of knowledge about granites actually is. that's as far as you can go into the weeds, right? You can't go deeper

Chris Bolhuis: exactly. but then we got philosophical. We, we talked pedagogy in terms of [00:03:00] education or, and we talked pedagogy with research and we talked about, to me, one of the coolest aspects of this interview was really me kind of moderating you two in terms of the process of scientific discovery. And, The risks that are taken and how science is not it's not the end all be all it's, it's, you two and everybody else is doing the best with what they have. And it's going to change, it's going to evolve, and this is [00:03:30] something that is important for outsiders like me to understand and appreciate and understanding that science is not black and white, it's a ton of gray, and just evolves, it's an evolving system, and it's a beautiful system.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I agree, Chris. And I think it's, it's just so fundamentally important to have a society that. gets that and has a pretty clear eyed view of what science is and isn't what is good [00:04:00] about it? What is what what the human aspects of the scientific endeavor are. And we talk a little bit about that.

Like, you know, we're all, we're all human and we have our emotions are involved and we have to, figure out how to deal with those. And I think it's really important to understand how this works and to be honest about it, because there are people who say, oh, all science is hypotheses, and therefore they're wrong.

You can never prove every, you know,

Chris Bolhuis: It's theoretical.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, exactly. And then there's

Chris Bolhuis: Oh, oh, okay. It's theoretical. end of

Dr. Jesse Reimink: so therefore [00:04:30] it's useless, right? Some people say,

all hypothesis, so therefore it's useless. And some people say it's science, therefore it's true. And neither of those is accurate. know, the answer, as in most things, is somewhere in the middle.

And it's a really important thing. And I love to, I frankly love talking about that aspect too. So selfishly, it was fun for me in that aspect. But Mike is also a curator at the Smithsonian Museum. as he says, you know, in charge of our nation's rock collection, which is, you know, a cool

Chris Bolhuis: of the coolest job titles that we've ever, you know, [00:05:00] had, we've had some cool ones and this is up there.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: This is up there. I mean, we interviewed the

director of DARPA. That's a cool job.

Um, but also, so is being in charge of the nation's rock collection.

Chris Bolhuis: or as Jackie Faherty says, unlocking the secrets of the

universe. That's her job title,

you know? So that's a pretty cool one too. Me, I teach.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, yeah. Well, that's a cool job title too. That's a

very cool

job

title. I just think it's a, it's an interesting discussion. Mike's very thoughtful. He's very open and honest, and I think it's [00:05:30] just a, it's a great interview.

So Chris, before we get to it, if you like Planet Geo, if you like this podcast, we just appreciate it. If you kind of support us, there's two ways to support us. Go to our website there, there's a support us link on our website. And That's planetgeocast. com. You can click on that support us button and support us there.

Actually though. What we would like is if you go to the Camp Geo app, and on the Camp Geo app we have tons of free content, basically audio, podcast style, conversational style stuff with images, Almost the [00:06:00] full physical geology book on there in Camp Geo form. We

don't have the, it's a work in progress.

We're still working on it. We also have the geology of Yellowstone, geology of Grand Canyon and Earth's climate, as well as some old podcast episodes that are organized sort of more thematically. So download the Camp

Geo app. It's free. and and more to come. Exactly. and so download the Camp Geo app, check that out, let us know what you think about it.

It's the first link in your show notes. You can send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail. com. If you have any questions, Mike [00:06:30] Akerson, let's get to it. Dr. Mike Ackerson. Hi, buddy. How you doing?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Good, how you guys doing?

Chris Bolhuis: great. It is so nice to meet you, by the way, Mike,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: hold on, Chris, Chris, Chris, you keep forgetting this,

Chris Bolhuis: what,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: met.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: met Mike before.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: At Carnegie, yeah, we met at Carnegie.

Chris Bolhuis: I have no recollection of this. Like, are you serious?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: you, you, we saw Norman Bowen's stump, when you and Jenny

came [00:07:00]

and visited at the, at Carnegie, Mike toured

us.

Chris Bolhuis: a

second.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Norman Bowen's stump!

Chris Bolhuis: Oh, that's right. I'm sorry. Everything else was blotted out of my, because it started to glow like the Holy grail. And

Dr. Jesse Reimink: humans, humans became insignificant.

Chris Bolhuis: That's really bad

to

say.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That two and a half hours that Mike toured us around the Carnegie Experimental Petrology Labs are wiped

out in Chris's [00:07:30] memory because

Norman

Chris Bolhuis: gone. All I focus on. I still tell the story, but Mike is left

out of it. I

tell the story to

my

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That

Dr. Mike Ackerson: The stump just appeared out of nowhere, yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: That's right. Mike, were you bald back then

too?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah, I've been bald since, uh, since I was in my early

20s, which, yeah, pre puberty, yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: I know. I was

Dr. Jesse Reimink: He actually just,

he actually just never grew

there. So, uh, for the listener, Mike, we go way back the funny story. We met at Carnegie, we were [00:08:00] postdocs, you know, sort of in the sort of early stages of our careers, but, we also grew up like 20 miles away from each other and never knew it.

Um, and we're sort of similar age. so that leads us into. our traditional opening question, which is Mike, how, how did you

get into the

Chris Bolhuis: Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. I have another question first.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay.

Chris Bolhuis: Mike, you went to Grand Haven, right? Is that correct?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. Okay. I have to ask, did you have, you had earth science in high

Chris Bolhuis: school then, right? Earth science. And I think a [00:08:30] geology course was Jason Hunter, one of your

teachers.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Uh, I love Hunter. He's a great guy. he came in after I'd taken the geology courses. But both of my younger siblings Jason Hunter. I, I went to a brewery with him a couple, years ago when I was back in Grand Haven. So,

awesome guy. Yeah,

Chris Bolhuis: All right. I've been waiting to ask this

question. So,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: he was one of, uh, one of our great crew of science coaches as well.

So,

Chris Bolhuis: Awesome. So I went to college with Jason. That's

why I asked the question and he's

Dr. Mike Ackerson: way! [00:09:00] Yeah, Yeah, he got out of the game.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. He's

out. He's

Dr. Jesse Reimink: so Mike, you had geology in high school. Was that the, the initiation for you?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah, we had Earth Science. I did Science Olympiad, uh, which is, a great program for people who want to be a science nerd out of, out of school hours. so that was, so I, I did all the Earth Science events and that, that's what really got me into it. Um, like they had Dynamic Planet, rocks and Minerals, Fossils.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, really? So it was science Olympia that got you into geology specifically? Like you were kind of [00:09:30] interested in science generally, but that was the,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, so that's what really, I mean, we would go on, my parents are both K 12, public school teachers, retirees.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Another thing we share in common.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: it's the, the,

the,

Chris Bolhuis: three of us. Oh my

gosh.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: All three of us. I know, yeah, yeah, that's right. We're cut from a mold here. From a weird part of West Michigan that for some reason produces a lot of igneous

petrologists.

Chris Bolhuis: Oh my gosh. Yes. It's, it's, it's a good thing though. There's something in the

water.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: it's [00:10:00] called a lack of igneous rocks growing up. I mean, see drumlins if you're lucky, you know.

Chris Bolhuis: Yes.

We w we've gone through withdrawal. So Jesse, we, You tried to hijack my question. I'm

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, yeah,

Chris Bolhuis: this question. So, all right, Mike, what got you, you may have already alluded to it, but I want specifics. What got you into geoscience? Cause we, Jesse and I, we have our moments.

We have our aha, like this is it. What did it for you?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: yeah, I didn't really have, I would say, a single [00:10:30] aha moment. because, you know, as we just were talking about, I, I was really interested in the earth sciences because of, Scott Stanley, Jason Haunder, the other science teachers that I had growing up. when I got to college at Michigan State, I was, a pre med basically and then I went through Orgo 1 and Orgo 2.

I know, well I was in the geology club and you know, so my, my freshman year I walked into the geology club and I was automatically hooked. I mean they're the fun, [00:11:00] creative, relaxed people and those are different than the kids you're taking biochem with in a lot of significant ways.

And, and

Chris Bolhuis: so true.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: no, No.

offense to the doctors out there,

but, but, uh, yeah, the, but the geology, it's true. The, the sort of geology department is, uh, it's the artistic science and it's reflected in sort of the social dynamics, I think.

Chris Bolhuis: that's right. And there is a saying that there is no such thing as an unhappy geologist.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's right.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: I've never heard that, but I completely [00:11:30] agree with that statement. but you know, for me, I mean, after I took Orgo 2, and I was like, wow, this is, this is what it is just all this kind of memorization stuff. And it took me kind of coming to the I guess the aha moment for me was Realizing that following your passions is more important than anything, and then that'll lead you in a good direction.

And that was, that was the aha moment for me. You know, why am I struggling [00:12:00] to try to be engaged Orgo when I can just be a geologist?

Chris Bolhuis: Right.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: you know, cause when you do stuff you're, you're passionate about, you work hard at it and therefore you are good at it.

And, and I mean, I think that's really

Dr. Mike Ackerson: It makes it easy, it makes it easy to work really hard when you care deeply about something on like a philosophical level, yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Mike, you know, we, well, for the listener, we were at postdocs together. We were applying for faculty jobs together for many [00:12:30] years. And we kind of went through this, this system a bit and, you know, kind of together. And I remember at a time, you're a curator at the Smithsonian now.

And I remember when you were, you had other options. Let's put it that way at the time you were debating this. And, and I remember when you made the decision to take the job at the Smithsonian, you, you used a beautiful turn of phrase. You said, dude, I have the chance to be in charge of our nation's rock collection.

How could I turn that down? And I dunno, as a rock collector that just like, I got chills right now, just [00:13:00] saying that. I mean, what a turn of phrase. So can you maybe describe not like what you do, but more like what it means to I don't know, the emotional side of it, maybe, because I know that, you know, that's a big driver, maybe.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: first of all, I've got to comment on the fact that my eloquent quote started with Dude!

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Dude, yeah, dude, it's just

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Dude, it's the National Rock and Ore Collection!

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, yeah, yeah,

Yeah,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: yeah.

you know, when we get you guys out there, and [00:13:30] um, see the rocks and talk about them, get a good first hand experience of the importance of something like the National Rock and Ore Collection. It's A repository of the history of our respective fields in, geology.

It's collections that are extremely hard to access, or impossible to access in some cases. Some of the locations we have no longer exist. They've been mined out of

Dr. Jesse Reimink: You, you, mean locations to go to? The

sample

Dr. Mike Ackerson: go to

Dr. Jesse Reimink: at the [00:14:00] Smithsonian is accessible,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: yeah,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: the locations are

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So

it's not only a repository of the history of our field, it's also an active resource for colleagues across the globe.

So, you know, if you wanted to study the Mid Atlantic Ridge, you can't just go to the Mid Atlantic Ridge, but you can come to us and you can get samples from north of Iceland all the way to the very bottom of the Mid Atlantic Ridge for free. [00:14:30] So the ability of us to enable science now and in the future in perpetuity is, it's an incredible opportunity to be in charge of that stuff.

Chris Bolhuis: So Mike, you. Allow research scientists to have, a certain amount of samples to study this, to do research. Is that what I

understand?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Absolutely every single sample that we have on the Rock and Ore Collection is there for the purpose of research. You could do research on any [00:15:00] sample that we have.

Chris Bolhuis: So what's the bar?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: for this?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. you know, we can't necessarily evaluate. if somebody's research is going to be amazing and spectacular and quite frankly, that's not really the point of it.

we evaluate whether, The sample requirements that they have can be fulfilled with the samples we have. For example, some people will want to do some sort of rare isotope and they'll say, I need a kilogram of that rock. Well, if we only have 200 grams of [00:15:30] it, it's, it's not going to work. so the bar, I mean, I guess in that sense, the bar is pretty low.

it's not my job to say. Whether I think research is valuable, it's my job to say, do we have the samples, given what they've told us, will they be able to do the research they want to with the samples, and then we provide them, you know, it's, we're, we're not gatekeepers, we're custodians.

Chris Bolhuis: Okay.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: a, I like that. That's a, that's a nice turn of

phrase. Yeah.

it feels weighty. That [00:16:00] feel, that feels like a, a weight. I would imagine I would be stressed out by that

a

Dr. Mike Ackerson: wouldn't. No, you wouldn't. it's fun. And it's not just me. there's two other curators. I'm one of three curators. We have an amazing collections manager and collection staff. You know, it's not me sitting around being the arbiter of what samples come in. It's a community of people that are working together to, to discuss.

what samples we can take, you know, I think there's also a conception, a misconception of the Smithsonian [00:16:30] as this endless repository and font of human knowledge. But we do have to be very selective on what we take because we're resource limited in terms of the human capital because Every rock that comes in is painstakingly catalogued and put into our collections because 300 years from now somebody might want to use that rock that, you know, Wasserberg used some of the, great giants of our field collected these rocks in remote [00:17:00] locations and so we have to be very selective on, on the samples that we take, uh, just by virtue of a resource limiting.

So,

Chris Bolhuis: Can, can we talk about that? how does that work with you taking? Rock samples on like a year to year basis. Do you take a lot every year? are you growing the collection every

single year?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Oh yeah, yeah, we, we grow the collection every year. We're in a constant state of accessioning rocks the National Rock and Ore Collection. So we, we've got a backlog of samples that we taken [00:17:30] on from scientists that we're actively working through. one of my, academic heroes is a Carnegie scientist named Jill Boyd.

and he had just an absolutely massive collection of rocks from the Earth's mantle. And those were, donated to our collections, um, a time ago. We're still We're still actively getting those samples from boxes cataloged into our collections. So, it takes quite a while to do this because we're extremely thorough with the documentation [00:18:00] of getting samples into the collections.

But that means then that, somebody 300 years from now who uses the, Same type of machine that I use that Joe Boyd created can say I can use the rocks that Joe Boyd Collected one of my academic heroes from 300 years ago I can use the same rocks that he was using to understand the composition of Earth's mantle.

It's just crazy

Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's so cool. That's so cool. Okay,

we got to do it. We got, we gotta, Chris, we gotta go down to the Smithsonian. We can do A

live [00:18:30] podcast episode from like, you know, the collections and look through them and pick our favorites and, you know, ooh and ah over it

Chris Bolhuis: A

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That'd be so cool.

So good. percent, a hundred percent.

so Mike, we, we've been, um, a slight shift here.

Let's talk petrology and science, and we're going to get into the weeds here, uh, people who are, enjoy sediments. Mike, we've gotten some emails from people who want to hear more about sediments, and that's not really You know, christenize passion, so we're going to, we're going to do yet more on Igneous Metrology here with Mike.

we've been talking about [00:19:00] Bones Reaction Series, we've got a couple episodes where we kind of talk about, uh, I don't know, the vagaries of Bones Reaction Series. I've seen you give a lot of talks, and you give a really good history of the field, Bowen's time, the history of the field of Igneous Petrology, could you give us a

short rundown, what was going on when Bowen's reaction series was kind of established, or when Norman Bowen and Tuttle and all these people were kind of working on those fundamentals, what was the, What was the state of the debate, maybe, or the

state of [00:19:30] understanding, if

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: rambly question, but

Dr. Mike Ackerson: No, it makes total sense. I know, I know you're, you're, you're guilty of that on this podcast from what I can

understand. Well, Well, if you thought that was a

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: answer.

Chris Bolhuis: Yes. All right.

Yeah,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Starting with, uh, Neptunism versus Plutonism. No, I'm [00:20:00] just kidding. But, but,

um,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Hmm.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: you want to go, I mean, I mean, I, you know, the history of geology is intimately related to granites. mentioned jokingly Neptunism versus Plutonism, but I think, you know, It's important to understand for all of us, those of us doing science, those of us who are just trying to learn about science and the scientific process that our knowledge is never fixed, right?

I mean, that to me is the most fundamental aspect [00:20:30] of any scientific endeavor is that the observations you are making at your point in time are the best observations that you can make and best interpretations of that data, but you are not right. you are doing the best you can with what you have.

so if we go back a couple hundred years, the argument du jour was Neptunism versus, Plutonism. And the Neptunists believed that pretty much every rock that you see was a [00:21:00] chemical precipitate of a global ocean. So the idea was there was a large ocean and the ocean receded, and as it receded, rocks precipitated.

And you can kind of see that, the structure of the idea was that, okay, granites are the first rocks that precipitate out of this ocean, and then it goes stratigraphically up. But, you know, you know if you've been in the, you know if you've been in the field. Or if you look at geologic maps, that granites really are kind of the bottom of the stratigraphic [00:21:30] unit.

So that kind of makes a certain amount of observational sense, but then, other people came along and said, well, that doesn't really work when, you know, granites are intruding the rocks that you think are younger than them. so, you know, that was kind of one of these big arguments that was happening a couple hundred years ago, which to modern, Geoscientists or casual listeners would say, that sounds crazy, but it was based, it was based on serious scientists making observations.

and then if you, you know, fast forward to the time of Norman [00:22:00] Bowen, the arguments that were

Dr. Jesse Reimink: and what is that time? Can you put numbers on that real quick just for people who don't aren't

familiar with? generally what are we

talking about? Just generally? I

Dr. Mike Ackerson: 200

years, I'm getting, yeah,

150 years, maybe. Yeah. So Yeah.

fast forward to Bowen in the early, early 20th century, Yeah, and the argument that was happening then was whether granitic rocks were formed from cooling and crystallization of a magma chamber. And spoiler alert, if you're listening to this podcast, you guys talked about Bowen's reaction series, [00:22:30] couple times. So most of us believe that, rocks have a primarily magmatic origin, so they're derived from molten rocks that cool and crystallize.

but the opposing view was the idea of granitization, where basically you can create granitic rocks, through water, hot water, coursing through bedrock, and changing the composition toward a granitic composition, one of the reasons, again, to a modern, somebody taking a modern igneous petrology class, you [00:23:00] basically would never hear this granitization theory.

Basically been debunked, but people were making these arguments based on sound field observations. One of the primary ones being what you may have heard of as the space or the room problem.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: What can you can you

Dr. Mike Ackerson: yeah, yeah, yeah, So basically, if you look at a granitic rock, a huge blob of granite.

I also heard you guys I listen to your Yosemite podcast. Awesome.

Um, but you know, Yosemite is a massive blob of [00:23:30] granite. Which, if I recall, Chris thought was the most boring part about Yosemite. But, um,

it's the most

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. give him a hard time. Tell him, Tell him, it's not.

Chris Bolhuis: That's, that's not true. That is not true at all. You misunderstood what

I was

saying.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: back the tape!

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: but, anyway, I know this is long winded.

I apologize.

Chris Bolhuis: That's okay. No, no, no, no. I'll Keep going. Like

you're setting the

stage.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: so if you think about how a [00:24:00] large batch of granitic magma could get into the crust, if you follow idea that granites are formed from magmas, you have to make room in the crust to get that magma into the crust. It doesn't just magically form a gigantic blob of magma in the upper crust.

Something has to give. You have to create

space.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: because contrary to the core, the earth is, the movie The Core, the earth is not filled with, you know, diamond cavities down.

down.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: amethysts at, you know, the

660 [00:24:30] discontinuity or something.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: right, right, right.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: But, you know, you have to make room for granites. So one, The school of thought was that you could actually, you don't have to create room for granites, you could make them in place through fluid alteration of the bedrock. so that was the, that was the the scientific debate of the day when Bowen was doing his experiments and developing Bowen's reaction series.

Chris Bolhuis: So Mike, then no, no, no, that was, that's good. But I want to, I want to take that to [00:25:00] the next level then. so how is Bowen's then with what you just said in the, you know, the history that you laid out for us, how was Bowen's applicable today then?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Oh, I mean, Bowen and the work of all of his colleagues is, is absolutely fundamental to the work we we do today. You know, you know,

and I, and I, yeah. so a lot of the work that they did, you know, Bowen's reaction series is the most famous thing that everybody learns in their geology 101 class, which is good.

It's, it's an important way for [00:25:30] people to kind of conceptualize how magmas can change and evolve in time and space. but a lot of the work they did was, Fundamental to how, if you get really in the weeds as an igneous petrologist, how we are able to interpret, the compositions of rocks and minerals.

So, you talked in your podcast about Bollinger action series about the the continuous reaction series or the discontinuous reaction series. Well, the continuous reaction series is if you look at any [00:26:00] slice in that, series. If you look at the Plagioclase feldspars, there's hundreds of experiments that went into developing diagrams that we use to this day to interpret how magmas form and evolve. I can't think off the top of my head of like, Oh, wow, this is, the one thing that Bowen did because the work that Bowen and Tuttle and Yoder and all of my academic heroes from the early 20th century did, it's just fundamental. It's just the [00:26:30] observations upon which most of what we do is built.

it's kind of like, you know, the Linnaean classification system for species. You know, they, they did the, they laid the groundwork for us to, do all the work we do. yeah, I can't think of a

Chris Bolhuis: so,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: it than that at the moment.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: can I, can I interrupt real quick, Chris, and just go back? Because I think, the Bowen's Reaction Series and the Experiments, this was an experimental petrology, sort of, he was an experimentalist. And so, he kind of answered the question, right? About granitization, like he, he sort of answered that [00:27:00] question for the community, for the most part.

Would that be sort of accurate?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. He, he, he made a strong case with his experiments and comparing those to Granites in volcanic rocks that you can produce the compositions of rocks that we see on earth with magmas and before they had done that, nobody could demonstrate that, you know, Hey, I put a little piece of rock in an experimental apparatus and I can actually show you how the compositions [00:27:30] match the compositions that we see in nature.

So that was the big contribution that they did that kind of End of the Magmatism debate.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Sorry, Chris, I interrupted

there. Yeah. Sorry about

that.

Chris Bolhuis: you good, Jesse, with

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Mike.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: to ask a thousand more questions, but,

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, I know. Me too. Me too. Mike, Mike, I'm as an educator of, just introductory level geology. You

know, we, we talk about Bowen's reaction series. I'm interested to hear your take on the shortcomings of [00:28:00] Bowen's reaction series.

There, you know, As you said, it's what everybody learns in an intro level geology class. It doesn't work, as you progress through in the way that you think it's going to work when you first learn about Bowen's Reaction Series. Does that make sense?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: absolutely. I think if Bowen was around today and And saw that his legacy is Bowen's reaction series. He'd probably be like, okay, interesting, interesting. You guys chose that one.

Chris Bolhuis: That's

Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:28:30] Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. that's that's a that's funny way to sort of put it. This is, Oh, that's the one that you named for me. Well,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Oh, great. Thanks. Yeah, not the Albite Anorthite phase diagram. Come on, guys. Give me some

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Yeah.

yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's an interesting point. I mean, because in, in Mike, we talked about this in an episode previously about how, to paraphrase, we, you got to lie to students when you're teaching them the introductory basics, or you got to present a simplistic version of, you know, the idea, which is inevitably, [00:29:00] especially in geology, wrong in many instances, but you have to give them something, right?

And so,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. No, yeah, I mean, I, I agree. And, you know, the fact that we're having this conversation is exactly proof of that point, because my answer to that question of, you know, what is Bolhuis reactions here is missing is, okay, well, Let's talk about what a phase diagram is and let's talk about what all the data that's behind the curtain of Bowen's reaction series and where the shortcomings are really fall into a deeper level of knowledge that I don't necessarily think you're missing with something [00:29:30] like Bowen's reaction series.

You know, it's a really elegant way to understand. um, The chemical evolution of rocks from a basalt to a granite in a very simple diagram and if you peel back the layers on that it gets really complicated really fast Because you're not considering things like the space component the vertical component through the crust or the effect of pressure, which I know you guys talked briefly about in your second Bollens.

Discussion.

So it [00:30:00] gets really complicated, extremely fast. And I don't know that that's necessarily the level that an introductory student needs. I don't want to scare kids away from Igneous Petrology. I want them to try to learn

Chris Bolhuis: Love it. yeah,

Right. Hey, Jesse, maybe we should ask Mike where we messed up in our second Bowen's reaction

Series

episode.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, Correct, correct us there, Mike, or

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: I

wouldn't

Chris Bolhuis: Where did we mess up?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: guys nailed it. You guys nailed it. absolutely.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: you know, some people in the field describe [00:30:30] igneous rocks as fundamentally Metamorphic rocks. And the reason being, and I know you both know this, but for the listener, the reason being that when a, let's take a granite, when it crystallizes, we think it's around 680 degrees when it's fully crystalline, like it's no longer melted.

That's a metamorphic temperature. And so those minerals are at And they have to cool down to like, to, well, to, to surface level, if it's Tuolumne intrusus suite or something in the, in Yosemite, [00:31:00] those existed for a long time in metamorphic conditions and with presumably

maybe fluids around. So is that debate that you referenced about, The sort of granitization top, you know, this sort of fluids versus magmas.

Is that debate still in the field a little bit, Mike?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. No,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: in some small way? Like, is there a gradient? I guess maybe a better question is, is there a gradient between these things in your, view, I guess?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: I would say that would be a generous to the izer to say [00:31:30] that, that might still be a part of the debate, because that, the explanation for that was that basically there's no magma, it's all

waters moving through these rocks to create granites,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: So they

necessarily kind of set up a binary argument that the sort of granitizers there is no magma here and we

know, it's not a spectrum between them necessarily.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. exactly. But you do bring up, discussions are often framed in terms of, you know, A or B, this is a real kind of a human thing. We want to say, you know, good and evil, right and [00:32:00] wrong,

uh, this or that. And, and really, I think all of us, when you're sitting in a conference or looking at data, everything mainly resides in the gray, you that's where the actual science is.

And so, what we can say now that we couldn't say in the past, one of the relics of this binary approach to doing science is that it propagates ideas that people don't think through fully. So. You know, Bowen's magmatic origin granitic rocks, what that [00:32:30] led directly to was people saying, Oh, well, if you go to Yosemite and you look at the Tuolumne Intrusive Suite, that was a gigantic stewing pot of magma.

All at once. And so, you know, the granitizers were thinking, well, you can't really do that. There's no space to just put a big blob of magma there, and that was kind of a consequence of that discussion in my head. Maybe others would disagree with me, but that to me seems like a very strong, there's a very strong lineage between magmatic [00:33:00] origin and, What is pretty much wrong is the idea that you have a huge vat of magma circling and stewing in the crust.

What we know now is that room problem can very easily be accommodated by small volumes of magma. Over long periods of time in the crust, where the crust is also helping to create space. So,

we have a much more nuanced idea now.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: this is a really interesting.

Chris Bolhuis: to explore

that a little bit more like,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: go Chris. I was going to do

Chris Bolhuis: so yeah, Mike, I [00:33:30] need you to paint a picture of what you just said, because I think that that's a critical point. How is this space created for, you know, this Tuolumne intrusive suite? I mean, that's, it's massive, right? How does that happen? can you go into that?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Sure, so,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: what is the evidence, I guess Mike as well. Like, can you,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: yeah,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: color to the sort of evidence

for it?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: yeah. one of the more conceptually simple ideas with the lines of evidence if you put a huge vat of magma into the crust [00:34:00] at once, We know the temperature that that magma would be at, more or less, and we know how fast heat can dissipate away from that magma chamber.

So, you can come up with really good constraints on how long that can be hot in the crust, and it's on the order of maybe a million years or something like that.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: before it sort of got cooled down by the country, rock around

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Exactly.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: have the heat to stay molten.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah, so, so you can do pretty accurate thermal models and say, hey, I [00:34:30] put a huge to Wyoming intrusive suite size chunk of magma in the crust, and it cooled, you know, in a million, million and a half years or something, based on thermal modeling.

But, if you go and you can do some high precision dating of those rocks, and this is Jesse's areas of expertise with zircons. What we see in these rocks is that they actually crystallize over nine to ten million years, so ten times longer crystallization history than would be expected if it was a [00:35:00] huge vat of magma.

so that helps us to kind of better understand that maybe this wasn't one gigantic vat of magma that came into the upper crust at once, but instead, series of sequentially injected smaller volumes of magma that were keeping the system active for, nine, 10 million years. Does that make

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Yeah,

it does. so what did that magma quote unquote chamber look like then? It wasn't just this idealized blob [00:35:30] of magma. It was probably mostly solid most of the time, right?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: that's a hot topic.

You, you've, You've, hit on

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay. Nice. That was a nice segue. Chris, Chris wins the segue award here. Cause I think that's a nice segue. Like I sort of want to ask what don't we know about granites? Like you, you kind of framed what we do know. And with the problems with sort of the, uh, magmatist kind of idea were, and how that's kind of shifted a little bit, but what, what don't we know?

Where's the debate? Where's the hot topic?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. [00:36:00] Well, and you really kind of started this conversation about talking about people saying that granites might be metamorphic rocks because you, you put it in the crust and then it sits there at what's effectively very high grade metamorphic conditions for a long time and they stew in their own juices.

So I think really where and interesting discussion is happening right now to me is how we can. pry apart the igneous [00:36:30] and the metamorphic histories that are retained in these rocks because that'll help us really to better understand what these granitic rocks look like. Because another component of this that we have not talked about yet is the fact that granitic rocks, when they're forming, when they're hot stewing blobs of magma, they're sitting underneath a volcano.

And periodically, magma is being extracted from these bodies and forming volcanic eruptions above it. [00:37:00] So it's really not just an esoteric discussion for us to be having about granites. It's really connecting this whole, the atmosphere and volcanism and

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, the whole, the sort of plumbing system. I mean,

from the deep earth to the surface. yeah. for sure.

 that's where the debate is, or that's where

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Well,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: of understanding, that's where the limit of our knowledge is at the

Dr. Mike Ackerson: well, I think we've got a lot of really cool and interesting tools that are coming out being developed right now.

They're helping us to kind of piece together the igneous and the [00:37:30] metamorphic histories in these rocks. And I think that's where the fun debate is because, you know, for example, since we're talking about the Yosemite granitic rocks, there are Potassium feldspar crystals in some of those rocks, which, you know, I think you've both seen some of these potassium feldspar crystals can be the size

of softballs.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah. Huge. Huge. Single, single crystals. Well, they're,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: yeah,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: inclusions in them, but

Dr. Mike Ackerson: yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: crystals.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: and this is a great example of what I'm [00:38:00] talking about because Some people contend that these are crystals that formed in a, in a magma, in a maybe crystal rich magma, kind of stewing in its juices for a long time. And other people think they're effectively metamorphic or almost quasi metamorphic crystals.

to me, that's a really open. debate. interesting debate, there's great arguments on both sides, but these are such an enigmatic part of granitic rocks,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I mean, these

and these things, anybody can see these. If you walk around a [00:38:30] city, you've seen these maybe not these ones, but things like this. I mean, a lot of buildings have what we call cave feldspar megacrystic granite, where it's big feldspar grains in a granitic background, basically, or matrix.

And, you know, there's tons of places the National Mall that are, uh, I forget what, I think even the, the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial is built out of some of this

stuff and it's all over. Um, it's beautiful rock,

but I I find that fascinating that we really, that seems fundamental to [00:39:00] me, that we don't understand how these formed.

I mean, that's, that seems like pretty, it's maybe not intro level geology, but it's the second year class you would take. And like, it's pretty, it's pretty basic. I would say, I don't know, Chris, what, I don't know.

Weigh in

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. I, would love to weigh in on this because I want to bring this down to a, maybe a simpler level if we

could do that and, and just say, all

right, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what I meant at all. Um, my mom is asleep right now, so, uh, we need to, we need to wake Joyce back up. Um, [00:39:30]

come on, mom, let's go.

Um, so, all right, Mike, in any intro level geology class, students are taught, okay, granite, slow intrusive. uh, cooling, coarse grained, fan ridded crystals, right? how is that wrong? Can we talk about that?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: I don't think that it's necessarily wrong to say that granitic rocks cooled slowly relative to a volcanic rock in the crust and that's how you get some of these larger [00:40:00] crystals.

I don't think that's necessarily wrong. Um,

Chris Bolhuis: You don't. Okay. But, but a magma chamber doesn't look like how we say that it looks, you know,

where you just

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Like the diagram, space,

Chris Bolhuis: right?

You know, where you have just this, exactly this upside down teardrop, that is just full of. Molten juices that are just slowly cooling and crystallizing.

And,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: And I want to, maybe I'll add to that, Chris, because we, I mean, we did this in the, in the Camp [00:40:30] Geo, thing where we're talking about, where we're talking about, intermediate rocks, andesites, that andesites have. you know, Two grain sizes, and therefore, when you have two grain sizes, it means two cooling rates.

One where the crystals are growing down in the magma chamber, and then one when they're erupted out and you form kind of glassy or fine grain stuff when it comes out the magma chamber, And,

there's those two cooling rates. But that doesn't map on to granites, which have these two different grain sizes, I mean, is that there's a tension there, clearly, but what,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. Well, and, the idea of having a large, relatively [00:41:00] molten magma chamber, so primarily melt molten magma chamber sitting around in the crust, You should be able to see that with, geophysical observations, you know. Sound waves propagate much differently through liquids than they do through solids.

And there's no geophysical evidence for large batches of magma that's primarily liquid sitting in the crust.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I mean, even Yellowstone, like the sort of

quote unquote magma chambers that get imaged, it's like 4 percent melt or [00:41:30] 5, you know, 7 percent melt, maybe, which is not what we

Chris Bolhuis: but that, but, but that, seems, to be counterintuitive then to just this long, slow cooling that gives you consistent fanatic crystal sizes. You know, it's, the part

that,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's a good question, Chris, like, you know, I think like a lot of granites look very similar to one another. And so if the magma chambers are kind of like so different and take so long and they're these little things, why are they not more different, I guess?

Is that kind of what you're, Alluding to a little [00:42:00] bit.

Chris Bolhuis: Well, I guess I'm, trying to wrap my mind around how we get this like consistent grain size in an igneous rock or granted, I should say, but it doesn't look like the idealized diagrams that we all show to our, intro geology students, because as soon as you get to petrology, your professor stands up and says, Hey, you need to forget everything you, you know, you basically learned in, in, in intro geology.

So,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah, you really feel lied to in these upper level

geology classes, don't you? [00:42:30] What are you talking about?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, That's right.

That's right.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: But, you know, I mean. Again, sorry to bring it back to the Tuolumne Intrusive Suite again here, but you've walked those rocks, Chris. if you've walked the rocks by Tenaya Lake, in Tuolumne Meadows, they do not actually look that similar. if you just hiked for about a mile across The Tuagny Intrusive suite, and you took the time to look at those rocks, they changed dramatically [00:43:00] over the tens of meters to hundreds of meters length scale, that's, I think, a function of kind of these stewing magma, crystal rich magmas sitting around and then being altered by, near solid and liquid rich problems. It's extremely complicated is the answer.

so, you know, again, like to bring it back to Bowen's reaction series and, you're not lying to your students to say that there's magma chambers in the crust. It's just the magmas that [00:43:30] we are actually looking at are probably a little different than this conceptual model.

of a big stewing juices of liquid with a couple little crystals, but that model tracks much more easily in the mind with Bowen's reaction series,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: right. right. And I think that's the, you know,

that, that's the visual. Cause I do this, Mike, I, you know, I teach in a big lecture hall that has a little vent above it, like right in the center of the room. There's 200 students in it. And I always use that as the magma [00:44:00] chamber. You know, I say, okay, imagine this is the magma chamber.

Crystals settle out in the bottom. The magma changes composition. If you take olivine, they settle, I'm trying to get them to understand how the magma changes when you remove some fraction of crystals from it. You know, this, Fractional crystallization and understand these basic processes.

And I always feel bad 'cause I know I'm lying to them, but it's such a, it's just a good teaching visual that I

stick with it, you

Chris Bolhuis: So Jesse, that surprises me. I'm surprised that you are, [00:44:30] that you, don't want to do that. because you've always been really open to, you know, we just don't have this all figured out yet and you actually are much better with that kind of stuff than I am. I'm so much more black and white, but that's not the way geology works, you know, and, you know, over the last four years in my evolution, working with you is, you,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: you, you've, you've, be, you've become a lot less, a lot more, uh, excuse me, a lot less stressed out about ,

the

uncertainty in geology.

Chris Bolhuis: right.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: but [00:45:00] this is, this is kind of a pedagogical discussion that we're having though. This is not, this is drifted from being a scientific discussion to a pedagogical one because, which is great. I mean, we're all in the world of education. how do you help relate concepts to students on a first order basis?

That helps them to go deeper, I used to be really jaded about these magma chambers and stuff and I'd be going around and people are, I don't know what they're talking about. This is not what a magma chamber is, but you know, I mean, wow, [00:45:30] what a, what a way to be exclusive to people coming into a field.

Oh, you know, everything you learn is wrong. I mean, it's

helping them build a conceptual framework to help them go deeper,

Chris Bolhuis: that's right. That's right. I, yeah, I do the same thing. I, I teach freshman level earth science, right. And we, when we talk about plate tectonics, I'll, I'll just basically, I'm lying to them when I say that, you know, when an, when an oceanic plate subducts, it melts and it rises up and you get volcanism and so on, you create magma chambers.[00:46:00]

And then when they get to geology, I do have to say, well, okay, let's, here's what you were taught as a freshman. Now that's not right, but it it was good. Good enough at the time, you know, now let's go into other things and let's talk about how magma is actually generated and, and so on. So you're right.

It is. It's just pedagogy

for sure.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: don't

Dr. Jesse Reimink: it's hard to,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: yourself up over it, Jesse, it's,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: no. I mean, I, you know, I don't think that deeply about it, but they, you know, I have 15 minutes for 15 minutes after class. I'm like, okay, [00:46:30] how Could I explain it more accurately and still, get most of the people to come along, you know what I mean, like get them to understand the concept and I I just, you know, after 15 minutes of thinking about it, I realized, ah, okay, no, I'm just going to keep doing what everybody else has done because they probably know best, you know, here. but so, maybe we could bring it back the sort of science, how science works a little bit, Mike, and cause you published a really provocative paper actually about Tuolumne, about the Yosemite National Park rocks a while ago, and, [00:47:00] uh, I have insider knowledge of this, cause this was while we were at Carnegie, but this was a really, I'll say provocative, because You presented some interesting data and interesting ideas, and a lot of people disagreed with them, and a lot of people found them really interesting and have followed them, like, pursued them and pursued the hypotheses you kind of put forward.

So could you give us, if you're willing, like, the elevator pitch on that work? because it's, this is about granites and how they form, and we're

kind of at the limit of knowledge about granites here [00:47:30] in that discussion.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah, well, I need to start by saying it's your fault that that paper got published the way it did because I gave you a copy and you were like, you got to try to publish this in a bigger journal than you're trying to go for. This is really provocative stuff. And I was like, I don't want that kind of heat, Jesse.

Exactly.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: different scientific journals have different, like, readership, and the ones, the short format ones, like Nature or Science, they get a lot of press, they're short format, and they're kind of designed for provocative ideas, you know,

things that are, as Rick Carlson puts [00:48:00] it, you know, interesting idea, and it might even be right.

It's those kinds of things, where it's like, good ideas, and, they need to be tested, you know, and, and this was, this was, yeah. I think you had submitted it too. A longer journal or something like that,

and a couple of us, it wasn't just me, but it was a couple of us, were like,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: You guys are guilty of this.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: go for it, man. this. is totally cool.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah, I'm giving you a little bit of crap, it's because that actually really helped me to understand a big lesson in science is that we can't be afraid [00:48:30] to be wrong because if you're afraid to be wrong, then You're going to You're just going to do the same old stuff, and you're not going to learn anything new.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: can't push the limits if you're not going to be wrong. you know,

a large fraction of the time, actually. I mean, you

Chris Bolhuis: That's a really interesting thing that you just said that both of you are actually like admitting to it's a, that's a, I think a lot of people would find that astonishing, actually,

I think refreshing.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: but, you know, if we're all right, [00:49:00] all the time doing science, then science would be dead in like five years, you know?

Oh, I got that paper done. All right. igneous petrology,

next,

Chris Bolhuis: Solved.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: think Chris, you know, Chris, you and I have talked about this a lot because we get a lot of Uh, listener questions specifically about, you know, studies that are published some news articles or they get into the science daily or, of these sort of

science news things.

And there's write ups about them. And I think it's fundamentally important to society [00:49:30] that people understand how this scientific thing works, because there's two main tendencies. One is to say, Science is never right.

So therefore it's all wrong. to take what we just said and say all science is wrong, but there's also the tendency to say, oh, it's science. Therefore it's right. It was published and therefore it's right. and neither of those is a sound approach to sort of build a society on, I don't think.

And, and so I, I don't know, I feel strongly that this, this discussion maybe that we could have Mike is, It's important, I [00:50:00] think, to kind of

understand how this works at a deeper level. You know, feel free to disagree with me on this, but it is something that feel, um,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: it's certainly true for all science that, it's incremental, and you can't grow in science unless you have discussions which could be wrong or right.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, sorry. For me, there was a time in graduate school where a faculty member who actually was running the field school, a planetary scientist, published a lot of like, quote, unquote, fancy papers, these short format [00:50:30] provocative papers on Mars. And he said, Oh, yeah, you know, I published one paper.

And then the next year, I realized I got more data. And I realized I was wrong. And I published another paper that was diametrically opposed to what I said a year ago. And that's fine. And he was like, Yeah. that's fine. You know, I know more now than I did then. And we improved it.

And that struck me as like, whoa, this is really, this is cool.

I mean, it's important. Yeah,

I love that in some way.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Well, and people have a deep trust in science, some people have a real deep [00:51:00] trust in science, which, I'm grateful for, medicine is a primary example of this, where, you'll read one pop news article that says, Oh, drinking red wine is good for your heart, and then you read the next one and it says,

Oh, drinking red wine is going to give you congestive heart failure.

And, and then,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's right.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: And then so, you know, people don't know where to go from, there with the science and the real nuance is that, you're not giving a bunch of people red wine for 30 years to see if they die early, science and scientific study is [00:51:30] difficult and with new data comes new interpretations.

that's kind of what we, we do with that, that paper. Yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: I think about what you said at the top of the episode, Mike, that, you know, scientists, you go back in history, 200, 300 years ago, they were doing good science, working with the knowledge that they had. And now we look at it, you know, 300 years later and we're like, really, you know, that's a, that's what we thought back then.

But, but it's a powerful point. I mean, think about when plate tectonics first came back. You know, in the 1960s [00:52:00] and, the debates that happened. And now we look at it and say, really, why were they debating this? but they were doing the best at the time with what they had. And that is a, I think that's a powerful takeaway.

And it makes me think about what are we doing today? Educationally that people 50 years from now, we're going to look back on and say, Whoa. That's crazy that they taught that, that they believe that, that's what they thought

was going on.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. How, how will our textbook, intro to geology textbook be different in 50 years, right? I mean, it's a really

interesting,

[00:52:30] um,

Chris Bolhuis: very different, but

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, yeah, totally. Hope we we learn a lot more. So, okay, Mike, back to the paper. Elevator pitch for the paper. What was the point? What

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Hold on, hold on, hold on, one more, on this topic of earth science textbooks. We haven't talked about this yet. I'm sure you guys have talked about this in the podcast before, but what I want earth science textbooks to be when we're retiring. is the capstone class of science in high school. Because the more you know biology, the more you know chemistry, the more you know physics, the more of an accurate [00:53:00] understanding of the geosciences you can have.

Because we're not all just sitting around going, Oh, that's a normal fault. That's a reverse fault. let's go out in the field and do some law of superposition exercises.

we're chemists, we're biologists, we're physicists, we're mathematicians.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I love that idea, Mike. I've never, we've not had this discussion, but I love that before. Cause hearkening back to your comment about granites and calculating the amount of heat that is in a granite body and how fast that, dissipates out into the country rock and therefore that's a, that's [00:53:30] a physics problem, right?

That those are geophysicists who do those calculations. I mean, you know,

or people who know that those techniques and tools.

and I like that. That's a, there we go.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: So that, that's that's what it should be, you know, these Camp Geo things. Let's turn that into a capstone, uh,

senior year geology class.

Chris Bolhuis: That's right.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: is the king of all the AP classes

at that

point in time, right?

Chris Bolhuis: It

is.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: meds want to take, AP Geology.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's right. Absolutely. I love that idea. That's totally, yeah, for sure. Um, okay. So, [00:54:00] so back to this, provocative paper.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: I'm stalling.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, I know, but I want to talk about it. And we could we could talk about the paper as well, but also like, want to To know from you, I want to talk about the story of how science works this very personal example for

you.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah, so, I mean, we've talked about bones, so let's bring them back. if you start with a hot magma that's completely liquid, and you start cooling it, eventually it starts to crystallize. And as you continue to cool it, it [00:54:30] continues to crystallize. And there is a point, as you continue to cool, where there's no mouth left.

It's all crystalline. and that temperature is what we call the solidus. And you alluded to this earlier, Jesse, this kind of 680 degrees number that all granitic rocks are crystalline at. And that, that's basically been, a thick line in the sand for igneous petrology for, coast, close to 100 years, yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: because we, you [00:55:00] know, trust and value the hard work that Bowen and others have done. Did and it's really groundbreaking experimental work, but, you know, they weren't doing that work with modern experimental apparatuses and electron microscopes and all of the fancy tools that we have now.

So we have the ability to look at these things differently, but anyway, so that line in the sand, that, solidus line, is something that we all. hold dear as the end point of igneous petrology [00:55:30] ends and metamorphic petrology begins. and so we just looked at some of these quartz crystals in the granitic rocks

Dr. Jesse Reimink: And then we just real quick, Mike interrupted. We say that that ends because if you think about Bowen's reaction series as this Y down at the bottom, quartz, potassium feldspar, muscovite, those are the minerals that are the last to crystallize. And so Mike, you're saying that 680 is the bottom of reaction series.

So quartz, K feldspar, muscovite, those are the last ones. So if you know that temperature, you kind of know where the [00:56:00] bottom of Bowen's reaction series is.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: that's exactly right, yeah. The bottom of Bollinger action series. the bottom of that Y.

so anyway, so, but if we have all these new tools that we've been developing with experiments and other various methods that we can actually apply to rocks to see if they actually crystallized.

At or above this temperature so what we did in that paper was simply we applied a couple of Interesting techniques, new techniques, and we applied it to the quartz crystals. [00:56:30] And the observations we made were that the quartz looks to have crystallized below this canonical, wet, solid, the solidus temperature.

And so that was, that was this big splashy part of that paper is that it looks like a lot of the courts crystallizes below where we thought possible.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: But not

just like five degrees. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. that?

was exactly where I was going,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah, so our paper, that initial paper, I think we said somewhere between 470 and 560 degrees Celsius, so

potentially like 200 [00:57:00] degrees below Bowen's

solidus.

Chris Bolhuis: or what were the variables that are different from what Bowen did and came up with the 680.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: these are techniques I'm describing are techniques that we can apply to natural rocks. So we have these tools that we call geothermometers, and Jesse's familiar with these intimately with his work as well. as my PhD advisor cautioned me when I was working with him, [00:57:30] he said, if you just call it a geothermometer, people are going to think you're sticking a thermometer on a rock and measuring its temperature.

It's, it's, that's a classic

Bruce. Yeah. Um, which is true because you say that and your initial thought is, great. So you, You developed a way to put a probe in a magma chamber and

measure the temperature. Yeah, that's not really what we're doing. Basically, if you do experiments in controlled environments and conditions, we can look at, chemical properties of minerals in these controlled environments and then apply that [00:58:00] to nature.

So the particular tool that we were using is, called Titanium in Quartz Geothermometry. so Quartz, the little mineralogy lesson here, the subtext mineralogy lesson, Quartz is SiO2, so it's one silicon and two oxygens in this repeating crystal structure that makes it a mineral. titanium can actually swap for silicon.

in the quartz crystal lattice in really small quantities, you know, [00:58:30] one gram per million grams, 20 grams per million grams. It's really small quantities of titanium. But if you increase the temperature that that quartz crystallized at, you can actually put more titanium into the quartz crystal. So let's say I measured quartz crystal and it had the unit that we use is called parts per million micrograms per gram, if it had 50 parts per million titanium in the quartz, then I can actually come up with the temperature at which that quartz

crystallized. So that's what

we call a thermometer. Does [00:59:00] that make sense?

So it's not a probe, it's a chemical probe.

so we can go to these rocks that crystallized millions of years ago and measure these titanium concentrations in quartz and get out a range of temperatures.

Chris Bolhuis: So the quantity of titanium can be an index for you in terms of temperature

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Exactly. Exactly. yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: and I think this kind of comes up with maybe not assumptions built in, but with, there's other variables in the equation, right? It's not just titanium equals temperature. There's other factors that

Chris Bolhuis: Is pressure a variable,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: That's a very [00:59:30] important variable for this particular thermometer, yeah. So,

Chris Bolhuis: which also did not, didn't play into Bowen's experiments, right?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. Yeah, and Bolhuis, you know, haven't really talked about experimental petrology yet, maybe that's another episode,

but um, Yeah.

Yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: can tour the experimental lab and, uh, and do

Dr. Mike Ackerson: But, but experiments are extremely, extremely difficult. you're trying to replicate in the laboratory what nature has millions of years to do.

And you've [01:00:00] got a couple days, a couple of weeks, In some rare occasions people do experiments for weeks or months. So the ability to try to replicate these magmatic systems. in the laboratory is extremely, extremely difficult. And the fact that Bowen, and Tuttle, and Shire and Yoder, and all of, all of my scientific heroes could do any of it, with the tools they had back in

the 1900s is absolutely insane to me.

Chris Bolhuis: That's amazing. [01:00:30] Jesse did, I gotta ask, did you get your question answered or is Mike, still, you know,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, I think, I think that, I

think that's a good elevator pitch. You know, you looked at minerals and, found temperatures that were below what we would expect, or, you know, found calculated temperatures that were below what you'd expect. I mean, not a small amount, but a bunch.

Um,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Shockingly, off, yeah,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: right, right, for sure. Chris, so

Chris Bolhuis: think though.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris, could I ask you a question, Chris? What do you think of that?

Chris Bolhuis: What aspect were you

talking about?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: you know,

Mike's. The paper, what [01:01:00] do you think of that point? Like, if you read a news article about that or something and you're like, wait, interesting, not, important, not, what's your gut?

Chris Bolhuis: well, okay. I had, two thoughts. I had a ton of thoughts actually, but two that stand out. One is,

uh,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: the hamster fell off the

Chris Bolhuis: yeah,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: so fast in

Chris Bolhuis: yeah, I know. I know it happens, but what Mike said about the experiment how difficult it is, I also have to say that it, it has to be. you know, Exciting at the same time. [01:01:30] There's no blueprint for what you're doing.

There's no plan. You have to make your plan. You have to design what you're doing. Jesse, we talked about this with mass spectrometry. You know, you, you have to fix the, the instruments that you buy for a million dollars. You gotta, you know, redesign them and retool them to make them work. And so I thought about that.

That was one thing is like, yeah, it's gotta be very difficult, but also. From the outside looking in, I'm very excited about that and that process. That's gotta be really [01:02:00] satisfying for you to, to do that. so I had that thought. The other thing is, you talk about Mike, you started off with, in Bowen's reactors, how, you have this VAT and you, basically melt the whole thing and you let it cool off.

Well, there's the flaw, right? Because that's not the way that magma chambers are. I guess, I don't know. my mind went there too, that as you're thinking about this, I have no problem with the line being redrawn is what I'm saying.

Does that make sense? Like, I know that

was a

Dr. Jesse Reimink: no, [01:02:30] no, no, no, totally, totally, that was a very

Jesse style answer, but, um, yeah, yeah,

yeah,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: concise. Joyce just perked back up.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, well, Joyce perks up.

anytime her son is talking and

then

tunes out for everybody else, wakes back up.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: mom. Good fast forwards until Chris, you know, Chris is talking again,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Um,

but, Mike, I know, you know, I was around and talked to you a lot while you were You know, working on this paper and I know you agonized over it because you knew it was going to be provocative and it's like, you sort of went, not am I [01:03:00] right, but are my arguments as sound as they could possibly be?

I know you went through that quite a bit because, it's redrawing a very fundamental line

or quote unquote, redrawing, a very fundamental line that a lot of this community has just assumed is correct for a long time.

Chris Bolhuis: Mike, Jesse says this is provocative, I'm assuming that you had blowback is that right? Or, or not,

did you get challenged on this? And, and like, I'm

Dr. Mike Ackerson: oh yeah. I

Chris Bolhuis: kind of a traumatic thing.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, [01:03:30] that's, Chris, this is exactly where I wanted to go. So I, and Mike, you Can make this

as personal or not.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: I mean, truth be told, like, you know, science can be emotionally challenging as well, and this is just the part, part of what we do, you know, some people agonize and agonize over their papers to the point where they never publish them, which is even more dangerous than just putting it out there and knowing that people are going to say you're full baloney sausage.

And you know, which is, which [01:04:00] is, it is hard because I mean, I think you guys can probably relate to this, don't do this for personal glory, right? You know, I want to just be a scientist doing my work, and I,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: You just want to solve the problems you're interested in about, and think about granites all day, right? And, but I think it's an important, again, back to the sort of the way science works. I think it's an important thing to note that it is, we are all humans, we're not good at extracting the human, the human experience out of the, the Publication process and how [01:04:30] feelings about how your work is viewed and all those, you know, complicated things.

I mean, I always tell my graduate students because when I was a graduate student, even a postdoc, and even today, you have an emotional attachment to your papers. And so if you get critiques about them, it's hard. And I tell my students to try and separate their work from them. So if somebody critiques or criticizes their paper, or their talk.

They're criticizing the talk, not you as an individual or not you as a person. And that's, that's an impossible thing to completely separate, but you got to try and do [01:05:00] it as much as possible. And, and I don't know, I felt like I've gotten better at that over time. I'm still not great at it.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah, you still feel that, that pang in your gut every time you get a review back where somebody's

like, you're full of, full

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah,

you're full of it, or you get that really tough, aggressive question at a conference or something, and it, you know, it feels like a personal attack, even if it's not, right, and sometimes it is, I mean, some people go on the offensive personally, and that's not the way to do it either, But

Dr. Mike Ackerson: it's easier to dismiss those people because you're like, Oh, you're just a [01:05:30] jerk.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, right, exactly, yeah, you're just an a

hole,

like,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's, exactly right.

That's exactly right. So your experience. Yeah,

Back to Chris's

question. Like, what, what was your experience? What was your emotions and how, how did that

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't, I I mean, so first of all, like if you publish something that you say is very provocative, you should expect that people are going to challenge that because how crazy would it be if you lived in a scientific world where I published one paper with one [01:06:00] observation

and everybody was

like, nailed it, done, that

is totally right.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: redrawing that line. We've been drawing it

here for 50 years or a hundred years. We're just going to move it over

here. Cause Mike said so. I mean that, Yeah,

that

would

Chris Bolhuis: that's an interesting, point that the hard part about doing your science is also the absolute necessity of science. The

whole vetting process.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: exactly. so this paper, for example, I don't think those numbers are necessarily correct anymore. We've got some more nuanced techniques. I think the [01:06:30] temperatures that I'm getting, if I redo that data with new observations, the temperatures go up a bit. they're not 470 degrees.

I think it's higher than that, but they're still lower than that.

680

degrees celsius by quite a bit. Um, so like even for myself, I'm, I'm reseeing my own data, like you were talking about earlier, Jesse, with, with your professor. But I mean it's super stressful, especially when you're early career and you feel like every single thing that you do is going to be looked at by a [01:07:00] committee of people who are deciding whether they're going to take you into their faculty or not.

It really, gosh, I mean, yeah, I mean, I would be lying if I didn't say I would like wake up with like cold sweats at 3am every once in a while for like the year leading up to and after that paper came out because it

means a lot to you,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. And

it's true. And you kind of, you, you put so much time and heart and soul into it in a way. And, like you said, you're afraid of being wrong. I mean, I must say I've been impressed being on the other side of the table, like hiring professors and hiring young [01:07:30] professors and stuff.

I've been impressed about the discussions regarding this, we're not afraid to hire people who are wrong. We're afraid to hire people who don't have ideas don't have ideas that might push the community forward. And as we talked about before, part of that is being wrong, at least ending up being wrong.

But as long as what you're doing is well reasoned, you're not going into it trying to be wrong or trying to be provocative. But if you have a story like that, that you think is well reasoned and, As you said, Mike, like with the data you have and the understanding at the moment, if you've got [01:08:00] the best argument is laid out And, it's provocative, great.

Do that.

that type of work.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: so that, you know, this paper that we, we published, even if it's dead wrong, what's come out of that paper has been a lot more interesting research that's helped us get a better understanding of

our field.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's great. Can you describe

that? I want to know what that looks like. can you just paint like a really short picture about what that looks like? Because again, this is part of the scientific process, a really important part of the scientific process.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. So, you know, we, we published [01:08:30] that paper and it's, it's just one, I mean, we're focusing on this paper now, but I mean, realistically, it's one of thousands of papers, in our field that are published every year. So it's just a very small piece of this puzzle, but, other people saw that paper and they thought, well, that's gotta be wrong.

And we can test that it's wrong with, by doing X, Y, and Z. Yeah. And then so they go and do X, Y, and Z and come up with new data that could interpret the data that we collected in a different way. And that creates a new tool set that wasn't there [01:09:00] before. so I'm very happy for that. I'm happy that it has, that, that work that we did inspired other people to, to, either critically approach our data, which a lot of people did, or, critically approach their previous interpretations of their data in light of what we wrote, which also happened.

So, it's just the way science moves forward. If you are, if you get a bunch of data and you look at it and you sit around and you just stress out about it, like I did, I mean, there's no way I would have gotten that data set. and [01:09:30] publish that data set. If I hadn't talked to my PhD advisor and my postdoc mentor and trusted colleagues like you who said, yeah, I mean, this seems worthy of putting into a paper.

I would have like been too afraid to do that, frankly, if I didn't

have the people around me saying,

yeah, I

mean, you know, you're, you're doing what you have to do to be a scientist.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: mean, I've never published something like this that you know going into it, it's going to be provocative. I've never been in that situation, but I guarantee I would stress about it in the same way you did. and go around to to trusted [01:10:00] people and ask, what should I do?

What do you, what do you think of this? Is this sound enough?

Um,

Chris Bolhuis: you, I might be afraid if you weren't nervous about

it.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, no, that's right. yeah,

I agree. I agree for sure. Absolutely.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: you know, I'm not, I'm not Tenzing Norgay, my exploration is not climbing up Mount Everest, exploration, your exploration, Jesse, we're, pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, you don't do that without some, real hard work and toiling, you know, I'm just glad I can do it without an oxygen [01:10:30] tank, you know, I can just sit at home, in a, sit in a lab and like, You know, zap crystals with lasers and stuff, you

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, that's right. So fun.

I value that perspective a lot, Mike. I mean, how, just how You're actually encouraging the the sort of challenging trying to depersonalize it a little bit so, so that you can remove the emotions a little bit from it.

I mean, it's impossible to do completely,

but, we're way over time. So let's sort of play this through to, the completion. Where's the story at now, would you say, Mike, on this [01:11:00] topic?

is it resolved? Is it not? Is it,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: oh, no, no, no, no. I mean, I, I think, there's a lot of really interesting research coming down the pipe. That's related to this, topic, you know, people three options really, you ignore a paper,

you challenge a paper, or you, use that data and try to interpret the world through that lens,

all three of those things have happened, you know, some

people are just like, Oh, that another nature paper thrown in the trash.

It doesn't have any value, which

I get it. Why not? You know?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: [01:11:30] 470.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah, it's a bunch of BS, you know, yeah, which, which is fine. Like that's totally fine. but the people who have challenged it have come up with some really cool, interesting observations and some of the best discussions I've ever had with people is them being like, how the heck do you think that, what are you talking about?

You know, there's this, this, this, this, and that. So that, that, that

doesn't agree with that. you know, I mean, that's fine. That's helped me grow. That's helped our field grow, I hope. you know, there's also people who have, been doing some significant work [01:12:00] that's kind of coming down the pipeline to really corroborate what we're saying

as

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. And

I, I think from my slightly, I mean, I'm completely a biased observer here, but I'm an observer nonetheless. I've talked to colleagues, metamorphic petrology colleagues who initially were like, nah, that that's not right. We know this stuff. And then now they're like, wait, I've seen it.

I saw a paper that was talking about granites. And actually, I thought of Mike's work and, what they're thinking about the, temperature conditions of, contact metamorphism

where, you know, granite intrudes and it metamorphosis, that [01:12:30] heat metamorphosis stuff around it. So,

it's at least making people think more deeply about their assumptions in some ways, which is, Kind of the point, right? And and also, it spawned, many PhDs worth of work, like, many PhD projects are, the stuff you're coming, you say is coming down the pipe, it's not like you Working on one paper.

It's full PhD projects, multiple

full PhD projects, kind of either testing this critically, or building off of it, in [01:13:00] some, in some gradient between those

things, um, which is

cool,

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah.

It's not to oversimplify, but it's kind of like when you enter into a, um, intellectual discussion with somebody and you disagree, I've never had an argument with somebody walked away and not come through that a better person because when you have this disagreement, then you just sit there and you think about, you perseverate on, Why do I believe and why do I think what I [01:13:30] think? it makes you a better person for that. And it's kind of, again, not to oversimplify

what you two do, but

Dr. Mike Ackerson: No.

Chris Bolhuis: very similar to that.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's very similar to that, Chris. You know, somebody who challenges you, who challenges you in an emotionally, honest and sort of, uh, I wouldn't say friendly, but like, respectful manner, let's say, or something along those lines, it makes you rethink when you're sort of somebody challenges you

politically or

something in your belief system.

And I always, I do the same thing, Chris, I always walk away and play it back in my [01:14:00] head. many times I'll end up being like, they made a really good point there. I need to think about that more because,

what I responded with is probably not. true. Right, or not

correct, or not, you know,

well thought out. So

and

that's the way science should work. That's a good analogy. I like that.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: what you brought up is the fact that we've been kind of talking about this whole time, which is that science is human.

humans doing science until AI replaces us all. Um, science is currently human,

you know, um, You know, the people doing the science are humans. They have thoughts, [01:14:30] feelings, emotions, egos, all of it.

And if you don't, if you come at it from the wrong perspective, it's not helpful.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Mike, I think, I focus on this, this one paper because it is such an interesting idea. It's made me rethink a lot when I'm going around the field and look at, look at old granites and think, okay, when I'm walking across it, mapping them, I would say, I think of it intro level pluton perspective, like this is a big batch of magma that sat there and cooled.

And this has made me, rethink that initial knee jerk reaction when you're walking across in the field that [01:15:00] like, oh, there's a big K Feldspar crystal. That might have a really complicated history. And actually we don't, we don't know what the history of that thing

is. To me, that's really, it's reframed how I do the, even the basic stuff of walking across a granite

rock. And I think if anybody goes to Yosemite or walks across a granite, in their lives, this would be valuable to think about.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. Well, hey, my, my, takeaway from that is, um, Jesse's been around me long enough and he still doesn't think I'm absolutely full of crap. Which I'll take as a [01:15:30] win.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, unlike

Chris Bolhuis: Actually, actually, I think, I think you've had more of an influence on Jesse, which I've gotten to see through this whole interview here today, I think maybe you've had a bigger influence on him than you might

realize.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, no, yeah, no, Mike has had a massive, I mean, I have,

um, you know, I'll, I'll say it, Mike, I have a ton of respect for you. there's nothing better, we talked about this, you guys came up and visited us for, before the holidays, but there's nothing better. than sitting [01:16:00] around with a drinker or several and talking science with Mike Akerson.

so we'll do this,

you know, when we come to the Smithsonian, we'll have to do this. We'll have to sit around and talk geology, the three of us, you know, over a drinker

or more. And, uh,

it's just the most fun thing

in the world. And we often get in these philosophical sort of ranges because, I don't know, I find it very fun. and very,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Spiritually

Dr. Jesse Reimink: grow and learn a

Chris Bolhuis: That's

right.

That's

Dr. Jesse Reimink: it's spiritually rewarding.

That's exactly right. Exactly right.

Well, [01:16:30] Mike, we're,

Chris Bolhuis: we're at that time,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, I was just, we're

Chris Bolhuis: our. Yeah, we are. Sorry, Mike. Um, we,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: plenty of fat to trim, so you guys will still make it under time, don't worry about it.

Chris Bolhuis: so we need to ask our traditional question, Mike, and it's one of our favorites. can you please tell us what your favorite day or experience has been as a geoscientist?

Dr. Mike Ackerson: I'm sure you get a lot of people saying, Oh, there's no one thing like, you know, this is which, which is true for all of us, right? Like the glory of what we do is that, you know, you have so [01:17:00] many experiences that are all, you know, but I've listened to your podcast enough to know that this, this is coming down the pipe here.

And thinking about So, when I was an undergrad at Michigan State, I had, just an amazing opportunity to go in the field, uh, as a field assistant for Professor Brian Hampton, who's now at, I think, New Mexico State, and we went up to, um, South of Denali. And you know, we got helicopter dropped into this little circ where we spent three weeks just camping and hiking, you [01:17:30] dodging grizzly bears.

I felt like Jack London out there, you know, it was great. Um, but we were in this little circ it's, you know, these, these rounded tall valleys where you're kind of in this valley, you are in the rocks that you can see around you. And it's, It's really cool, but in certain ways, you're like, well, Denali is just like a couple kilometers that way, but we never see it.

in the clouds. We had, I mean, we had a couple of days where we were stuck in our tents because it was so cloudy. There was so much [01:18:00] fog that if we walked out of our tents we could have, like, gotten lost, you know. It was just so fun. we're just grinding. And Jesse knows about the tundra too.

When you're laden down with a hundred pounds of rocks trying to climb uphill in tundra, it is just brutal. It's so hard. It's just a squishy junk. And like, it's like going up Sleeping Bear Dunes, with a hundred pounds of rocks on your back. It's so hard.

so we were out there for a long time. And, one day, eventually the, the weather broke for us. And we, we took this hike [01:18:30] up a talus slope and up onto the top of the cirque. And there was Denali, it was just, towering over us. It's this massive granite that, you know, the pictures don't do justice, know, what it's like to feel a sense of scale that is so far beyond your ability to comprehend it.

that was what that was for me. That was the moment, more so than, Driving from the Southeast to the Tetons and seeing them just like explode in front

of you, you know, which is also an [01:19:00] incredible feeling, being out there busting our butts for weeks and having this really special, we just basically climbed up there to do field work and we just sat there for hours, just watching Denali just be, and, for me, like this is as close to spiritual as I get being rooted.

And this experience of overwhelming beauty and majesty and feeling a deep, for me, the spirituals connection is the scientific thing. Like it's this wonder at this world we're in and seeing Denali with, you [01:19:30] know, midsummer sun in Alaska for hours, God, it was just incredible. That

really opened, that really opened me up, you know, sitting there like crying and stuff.

It was

incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's so good. So good. Mike, well, we won't do, do that this summer, but we'll sit on some really old rocks and, uh,

we'll

have to

get philosophical and spiritual about it a little bit to,

uh, we're going, we're going up to Acosta, uh, this summer, Chris, for, for,

a little bit. So,

um. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. yeah. So, that, that's a,

[01:20:00] that's a good day. And I think, you know, you brought up the Tetons, but there's a lot of experiences that people you just gotta, like, plug into that feeling or that,

you know, think about the geology and visualize the mountains, the sediments folding or whatever

it is, um, that's going on.

I think that's a pretty accessible experience. You don't have to be in front of Denali to get hints

of that experience, in this field and with this geological understanding.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: yeah, just opening yourself up to feeling, experiencing the unknown in a real

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Totally. [01:20:30] Totally.

So cool. That's a good one. Well, Mike, I mean, I'm totally biased, but this has been one of the more fun interviews, obviously.

we'll

We'll

Chris Bolhuis: absolutely.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: the Smithsonian. We'll We'll, go to the, as somebody, as, Chris and I, uh, somebody

Chris and I know calls it the Smithsmomium.

We'll come to the Smithsmomium and we'll, we'll visit and

we'll go, you know, look at the collections and we'll maybe

Chris Bolhuis: Well, Jesse, we'll look at the whole nine

yards, won't we?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: The whole nine yards, the smithsonian and the whole nine yards up there in the smithsonian.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. [01:21:00] Apologize for the inside jokes.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: that's great. I hope it wasn't you that says it that way, Chris.

Chris Bolhuis: it was not me. It was a

character, but it wasn't

Dr. Jesse Reimink: it was Joyce.

Um, no, uh, uh, uh, uh, thanks, Mike. We really

appreciate it. Sorry for going long, but this is

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: thanks for your opportunity, guys.

Chris Bolhuis: Nice

to

Dr. Jesse Reimink: fun.

Chris Bolhuis: Mike. And we,

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yeah. you.

Chris Bolhuis: you.

so much

Dr. Jesse Reimink: you.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yep, we still left Bowen's Log hanging. Now people are like, what the heck is Bowen's Log? Well, people, you're just going to have to tune in for the next [01:21:30] time, when we

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's right. Well, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, awesome. All right.

Thanks, Mike.

Dr. Mike Ackerson: Yep, alright guys.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Hey, that's a wrap. Thanks for listening. Like we said at the outset, you can support us in two ways.

Go to our website, planetgeocast. com and click on the support us link there. Also, you can find old episodes. You can learn more about us. Our website's got some decent content there. Learn about Camp Geo. You can find the link to the Camp Geo app or go to our app, the Camp Geo app. First link in your show notes.

[01:22:00] That's the other way to support us. Send us an email or planetgeocast at gmail. com and you can follow us on the social medias at planetgeocast.

Chris Bolhuis: Cheers.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Peace.