Super_Volcanoes: Dr. Robin George Andrews

Jesse Reimink: Welcome to PlanetGeo the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works and why it matters to you. Great. Hey Chris, you're looking more bald than usual today.

Chris Bolhuis: That's actually not possible.

Jesse Reimink: You freshly shaven.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah this morning.

Jesse Reimink: Nice. Okay. There we go.

Chris Bolhuis: Yep. I have a routine,

Jesse Reimink: you know, I'll never forget one of the things you taught me in class. had nothing to do with, geology or rocks or anything. It was you telling a story about you actually shaved off a mall off the top of your head. At one point

Chris Bolhuis: it was the first time I ever shaved my head.

Jesse Reimink: I'll never forget that story. I think we were dying in class. That was very funny.

Chris Bolhuis: I, it bled like a stuck pig. Like it was gross.

Jesse Reimink: Oh my goodness. What a first of all stuck pig. What are you 80? I mean, come on man. Oh my

Chris Bolhuis: like, sorry. It bled like crazy, Jesse. Is that better? It bled a lot. It bled a lot. Um, Yeah. I, um, had no idea. It was while I knew it was there, but I like, I just, I didn't tell anybody what I was doing. This is the first time I ever shaved my head and they didn't tell Jenny, didn't say, Hey, do you think this is a good idea? And I just did it. And then it just I'm like, oh my gosh, I have skin in my razor. It was gross. And it just wouldn't stop bleeding. So then finally I got it to stop. And then I walk out and Jenny is in the living room and I'm like, just walk in there. I am. And she's like, shit,

Jesse Reimink: you, she thinks you've gone crazy.

Chris Bolhuis: Well, did you just do cause I'm now Balt,

Jesse Reimink: no bald and bleeding everywhere. So what a fun, what a fun change.

Chris Bolhuis: Even at that point, it took a while.

Jesse Reimink: Well, I mean, we're not here to really talk about your bald head, but that's just something that stuck with me for sure. We're here to talk about. Dr. Robin Andrews, who we're interviewing today. Dr. Andrews is a science author, science communicator, PhD geoscientists did a really cool PhD project, you know, blowing up things, trying to simulate these Mar volcanoes, but has written a book recently that we're going to sort of base our conversation on a little bit, but does a lot of science writing on the side as well as written for the New York Times Scientific American is the 2022 recipient of the European geosciences union chrom ward for successful reporting of earth and geoscience topics generally, I suppose. So a really, you know, sort of new, very accomplished writer and really interesting perspective on volcanoes, which was just made for a really fun.

Chris Bolhuis: It really was a fun conversation. he has, uh, a great sense of humor. Um, so some of the things that he said during our interview just made me laugh and, and those were legitimate. Oh my gosh. He just said that, um, loved him. it was a, it was such a good book to read. I couldn't wait to interview him then. and the interview then lived up to the expectations. It was great when I picked up the book, I thought it was going to be one thing and it wasn't that, and it was about super new word volcanoes.

Jesse Reimink: It was really cool. I mean, our conversation, you know, just reinforced how interesting volcanoes are first of all, but also that there's some really interesting volcanoes that don't get as much sort of public,, credit as they should. I mean, I was really. Taken by the underwater volcanoes chapters and discussion we had about it. And, you know, Robin's clearly very passionate about volcanoes and has found his purpose calling interest here in this sort of science communication space. It was really interesting conversation. So, yeah, we hope that you enjoy our conversation with Dr. Robyn Andrews,

Chris Bolhuis: hold on. Stop push, pause everybody right now and go and give us a rating and a review seriously. If you'd like this, that's what we need. Um, it helps searchability, it just, it's so helpful to us. And then also don't hesitate. To reach out send us an email with a question or a comment we'll get back to you.

Jesse Reimink: Absolutely. We love that stuff and follow us on all the social medias. We're at planet geo cast and our social media intern. Give a little shout out to Olivia Leone right now, doing a great job and, uh, we got some great content on there. So follow us at planet geo cast with a C.

Chris Bolhuis: Hey, should we do this? Let's go. Let's get to it, Robin. Andrew's coming at you. Here we go.

Jesse Reimink: Well, welcome to planet Jill. And, uh, we're very happy to welcome Dr. Robin Andrews, Dr. Andrew. Thanks for joining us here. This is really exciting. So we're going to kind of frame a bit of the discussion about a book you just released you're an award-winning science writer. You're a PhD in geology and volcanology, I think what we're going to kind of touch on that a little bit, but you just released a book that we're going to kind of frame our discussion around called supervolcanoes what they reveal about the earth and the worlds beyond. And this was a great read. This was super interesting. And thanks both Chris and I have a lot of questions about it.

Chris Bolhuis: I have a lot, I have a lot of want to ask.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah, that's good. Sounds good. Sounds like it did it

Chris Bolhuis: just like Jesse said, I'm so grateful that you're willing to spend this time with us and I can't wait to, to get into this.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah, no, it's good questions. The question is always nice. It kind of, if I felt like if I spoiled the everything about volcanoes in one, go, then I would run out of articles. to write So, you know,

Chris Bolhuis: Jesse you ready? What do you think? Should we dive in? Let's do it. All right, let's go. Um, so Robin, I have, uh, a question that we, well, we always ask this when we interview people on our show. Um, how did you decide to get into geoscience and specifically like volcanology was there? Cause I have this with me. Like there was a really clear moment in my life where I'm like, oh my gosh, this is it. I'm going, I'm all in. Did you have that?

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah. So there are a couple of moments, but the one that was kind of instrumental early on was, so I was interested in video games when I was very young. , thanks, mom and dad. And, um, I, and they've bothered. They've ruined like card games. Some people are like, Hey, you wanna buy a card game? And when you've been, when you've someone handed you a game, boy, when you're like four. I mean, it doesn't combat the impatience levels, but yeah, I am. I love the legend of Zelda games and I, the first one I ever played was one called the Ocarina of Time on the, on the Nintendo 64 and I was about 10 years old like, at the time it was like this giant 3d world you could explore. And it had all of these kinds of things you could go and adventure into. And there's a volcano there called death mountain. It's kind of a staple of the series. And it's like, obviously totally absurd. There's like monsters in there. It's kind of hollow mostly on the inside, but the larva has some sort of sentience and things. But as like a 10 year old, I was like, holy crap, like, this is a thing like, this is these things. This is this a thing. And as soon as I could Google what volcanoes were, I was like, wow, these were everywhere. And that kind of even cooler, like in real life and no monsters will eat you. So that's kind of nice. Um, but I kind of remember thinking. That's really cool up to that point. I was thinking I was going to get into like astronomy or something like that. And I still am. I still love the stars and things, but you can literally go to these volcanoes and stand on them and poke them. and that seems more satisfying to me. So that was like the thing that really made me. This seems sort of weird. I'm sure someone does this as a job. So

Jesse Reimink: that's a unique way into geology or geo-science is, you know, through volcanoes on a, Zelda. Right? Was that it? Yeah, that's really cool. That's amazing. I

Chris Bolhuis: I've never heard Dr. Andrews, you win the award for the most surprising answer to how you got into science. That we've not had that yet. Yeah.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Well that combined with some very supportive, uh, geography teachers and parents, and they're just like, yeah, it sounds great. Go for it. It sounds crazy. go for it. And

Jesse Reimink: yeah, it's annoying how much those teachers have an influence over you. Right. So I know it's so annoying having a great, you don't

Chris Bolhuis: even want to go there. You want to talk about annoying. You don't want to go there. Dr. Andrews follow-up to that. so in your book you talked about like, you got to this point where you realized that you really didn't want to do research that you wanted to do something else. Can you talk about that? What, like, what was this moment or this pivotal time? What happened?

Dr. Robin Andrews: I kind of having been raised partly on video games. Let's treat you in everything a bit like a video game. And I was like, what's like of the first video game series in academia, what's the final boss of this. And I was like, well, PhD seems to be a pretty awesome pointing at to, to be like, I'm a doctor of volcanoes, which sounds crazy. So I was like, that's it, you know, I really, that was genuinely my like plan. and I thought, I was like, yeah, I'm going to really enjoy this. And Bubba and I did like enjoy aspects of the end of PhD. Like I enjoyed the research. The experiments is a very experimental thing. There was like explosives involved. , I got to see a few volcanoes, all around the world as a result of, and I did enjoy it, but I just didn't like, I'm quite impatient and that's one thing. And so academia is like, you know, you need to go through the grind of certain things. I'm just like, ah, and every now and then I tried to like use sort of flowery language and like writing academic papers. And my supervisor was like, no, don't do that. And I was like, but it makes it sound more interesting. And I just, I really hated writing academic papers. I hated it. And I hate the idea of just like applying for grants. I was just like, you know what, I, I think I enjoy telling stories about these things more than I do researching these things, cause it's just feels more kinetic.

Jesse Reimink: You would get along very well with my wife. She has the exact same opinion about my job. She's like, you don't actually ever do anything. You just think about doing things and it takes forever to get anything done.

Chris Bolhuis: And there's a lot of truth to that.

Jesse Reimink: Yes, absolutely. I mean it's yeah, yeah. It's a very frustrating process in many ways, but so I could kind of glean this from the book a little bit that you did an experimental petrology PhD, but what was that path like how did you sort of evolve throughout that process? I mean, maybe just sort of back up and =, go through your academic journey a little bit more because, you know, I changed a lot in my interest throughout my PhD and even still today, can you kind of guide us through how your interest shifted and were you doing experimental studies on volcanoes or where you're doing partial melting generations of magma, but what were you working on?

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah, so, um, my undergrad was a master. Uh, in London at Imperial, and I really enjoyed that. And the thing I enjoyed the most about it was for the third year, I got to go to Vancouver for like a year abroad. And that's where I was really introduced to a very beautiful city. I mean, I love London, but Vancouver was fantastic. But also there's a lot more volcanology going on there. Then there was the Impero Imperial kind of lied to me about that. They sort of were like, oh yeah, we do. We teach the sort of stuff and no, not really. I went to, I went to Vancouver and basically just did all the volcanology courses I wanted to do. And I was just geeking out about there. It was great. Or the field rep was great.

Jesse Reimink: Well, yeah, the volcanoes are right there. You just look up, look up, to campus and they're right there. Yeah,

Dr. Robin Andrews: yeah, just right there. part of, uh, one of the sort of courses involved, some experimental stuff, and it was like, I got to use. You know, I got to melt rocks and one of those special ovens come of being impartial mounting things. I was like, this is cool. I wonder if like, and then I sort of learned the experimental stuff was kind of a big component of this, you know, when you it's, it's good to sit, try and simulate these things like physically as well, not just numerically. So I kind of was looking after that. I, I was looking for a PhD that was kind of like that. And one just randomly popped up in New Zealand. I don't even remember how I, saw the ad. I think someone might have sent it to me, but the PhD was like, yeah. So your, use like TNT, explosives to simulate these science, magma water interactions. And I was like, I'm sold. Yeah. So I made her read past the second line. I was like, sold that's great. Great. Um, I, like I said, there are aspects that are really good. I really loved doing the experiments. A lot of them took place in the U S and Germany and stuff, and New Zealand, like already beautiful place, but it was just a combination. Yeah. You know, I was like, mm, after the experiments are done, then there's a lot of like, sort of make a PhD out of this. And there's like, uh, and, and I just, I didn't enjoy that. It wasn't like, it wasn't quite the sort of detective type thinking. And there was just a lot of back and forth and a lot of I dunno, I understood why things are there, but also it just felt, I don't know, everything felt, I felt very confined and.

Jesse Reimink: You don't need to feel like you need to validate a PhD in this crowd. Chris knows I'm educated. He knows both of us are overeducated. And that's what I was

Chris Bolhuis: just going to say, Robin is you just described Jesse's life and nobody wants that, you know, it's it's okay. I understand. Yeah. I mean, it was,

Dr. Robin Andrews: I'm really glad I did it, but I wouldn't do it again.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: Robin, I do have a question and this is a hundred percent serious. How does a crazy high school teacher get his hands on one of these ovens? I need to know like, oh no, my gosh. That sounds like so much fun.

Dr. Robin Andrews: If I told you you'd have to, you have to avoid arrest. I think because it would involve one of those old heists way. You'd have to break in at night. You have to unscrew it really carefully and it's really heavy. And if someone's just use, it's really hot.

Chris Bolhuis: So you're saying I can't buy one.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Um, I think you should try and make one and then report back and see how it

Jesse Reimink: goes. Yeah. Look out Hudsonville, public schools, the high school is going to be X. There's going to be an explosion in their health and safety standards. They're

Dr. Robin Andrews: just give out hard hats to people and don't explain why.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, exactly. So

Chris Bolhuis: Dr. Andrews, we want to jump right into this because everybody that knows me knows I'm a huge fan of yellowstone.

Jesse Reimink: Huge. like a little bit over excited about Yellowstone.

Chris Bolhuis: is that possible.

Jesse Reimink: Chris wants to die when yellowstone to go there and, you know, have the Ash hit him in the face. This is what he said.

Chris Bolhuis: He stopped saying that I don't want to die.

Dr. Robin Andrews: I like quiet way to go. But you know, it was, yeah. So you'd have to have someone recording from very far away.

Chris Bolhuis: That's right on. All right, Dr. Andrews, if you had like 5 minutes to tell someone about volcanoes or Yellowstone, what would you say?

Dr. Robin Andrews: The first thing I'll say about yellow sign is it is not going to bring human civilization crashing down, which I think is the main thing normally erupts with no warning. So it's one of these things that's just like, it's honestly made out to be nature's weapon of very massive destruction somehow. And I think like, solo documentaries are kind of to blame for this, like over-engineered documentaries, but also tabloids in UK are obsessed with Yellowstone. I'm obsessed for some weird reason. Well,

Chris Bolhuis: yeah, the, the BBC wrote that TV movie thing, right?

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah. Yeah. That was like, it was like a BBC discover thing. It was like a drama sized version. And even though there's some bits were okay, it was, the worst possible scenario, but it really is. I think tabloids are the thing that keeps up. The social media age, really because every now and then you just see an article and oh, I think a bear sneezed in Yellowstone. And that only means one thing in a yellow going to run. My favorite one was the, the article that implied that the culling of the bison in the park was related to an eruption. Like they knew something and they were taken out door and it's just crazy. right from the offset and be like, it is not going to kill us all or bring civilization down and the chance of it engaging in an epic eruption is so small, on any given day and in the near future, you know, it may never do what it's done in the past again. So Yellowstone is like beautiful and amazing and really cool for so many reasons, you're more likely to die falling into one of the hot Springs, which people do really regularly, somehow.

Jesse Reimink: Shockingly. Right. So, so a field course, I mean, it's basically a geo-science field course for, uh, 25 auto Chris', 25, 26 students, 26 high schoolers that they, put in big buses and drive across the Midwest out to Western us. And they go to Yellowstone every time I went on this as a, as a kid in high school and, you know, Yellowstone is like the huge, it's a crazy cool geologic feature. Right. So it's very kind of, it's a good hook into volcanoes, I suppose. But, I mean, you talk in the book about, you know, how there's sort of many major eruptions. I don't know, Chris, maybe you can explain this better, like, cause you've been to Yellowstone a lot more times, like the sort of typical understanding of Yellowstone geology, and then you kind of reframe it Robin in your book a little bit. .

Chris Bolhuis: I think what Jesse referring to Robin is that, you know, there are these three massive eruptions from Yellowstone, but you did a great job of framing this differently that this was not one event three times, this was more drawn out than that. So does that, do you remember explaining to our listeners?

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah. So eruptions often thought of as like one big thing that happened either like lava just keeps coming out or there's a massive explosion, then you kind of, I think mounting heavens eruption in 1980. Part of why people think of that like singular explosion. Cause there was like a giant explosion in may, 1980 and it was like crazy big and, then everything just stopped sort of after that for a while within that, but it kind of kept erupting, but in a really slow casual, like calm way. So I think people always remember that giant explosion for good reason. So I think that's where the idea of, oh, if there's going to be an eruption, it'll be like a giant explosion. And yeah, like if Yellowstone engaged in like the worst possible case scenario where, you know, evacuated all of its giant city sized, magma chambers, it would be like terrible for like the region, for sure.

Like it would not be good, but I think what's kind of, even if it was like a moderate eruption, if that continued for years, that would cause so much problems. So, you know, it's, it's kind of like. Sort of in a relatively unpopulated area. Like I always think of Auckland's and it's got like volcanoes 60 volcanoes in the bay.

And if one of those erupts with like one or two years, all that Ash like ruin their electrical circuitry or like smother any kind of any crop. So there's not really that kind of thing there. It would block up the sewage for years. I couldn't believe that. Yeah. That was a crazy thing.

All I could think of as the Shawshank redemption scene, but everyone is doing it and it was just like, it's just like, so, the geological evidence shows that these really big eruptions, it all, just one big explosion they're done. There's like a big ramp up of activity. And then there's a really big explosion.

Ash goes everywhere around the country and then. That kind of ramped down then go up again and, you know, there's, they're like rollercoasters that go on for a long, long, long time, except roller coasters, everybody hates sort of thing. So yeah, like now for months, years,

Chris Bolhuis: well, said Robyn that these may have actually gone on for even longer than maybe a human lifespan, right?

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah. It's crazy. The thing that

Chris Bolhuis: is crazy to think about. Yeah.

Dr. Robin Andrews: there's like gaps in between. I mean, it's, it comes down to, how do you define when interruption ends? for a human it's like, well, when it's, when stuff stops, getting destroyed generally for a fairly low, like for a few weeks, It's a volcano doesn't care. Like there's no, it doesn't have a schedule that, so what, so a pause between those things or is it all considered one big eruption? Like no one can, it's kind of arbitrary my nature doesn't care. It's just going to do what it wants or thing. So it's like, when you say, where does space begin? It's nature is care can be wherever you want. You know?

Jesse Reimink: the three major events in Yellowstone, they're not a singular massive eruption. It's more sort of pulses of eruptions over a fairly long duration. I mean, human timescale based duration then. Yeah,

Dr. Robin Andrews: for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And with, the one, the original really big one, uh, 2.1 million years ago, that was, you know, that could have gone on for like a human lifetime sort of thing. So can you imagine if that was happening today? Again, like there's no evidence that this is going to happen ever again, but like, if that did happen today, it would just cause like people. And this area, we're just accept that there's a part of America. That's just constantly erupting. It's such a weird thought, but that's what it would have been like.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. So you actually said something that I really want you to, you're the expert in the room. Um, and I want you to go ahead, feel free to get scientific on us here with us, but you talked about how this might not ever happen again, there might not ever be a super eruption Yellowstone, want you to explain this because how is that possible given the history of the whole track of the hotspot? You know what I mean? Like dozens eruptions in, these eruptive centers you know, in the last 17 million years. So is it going to do it again? Just maybe not where Yellowstone is now? I mean, what did you mean? What do

Dr. Robin Andrews: you mean? Yeah. So as you, as you mentioned that like, Ben, you have this kind of track, this, like these scars that go across. Kind of the Pacific Northwest. and basically, uh, the yellow stone is powered by something called a mantle plume, which is, kind of like a big fountain of very buoyant superheated material that comes up from like the fringes of Earth's like liquidy heart sort of thing. And these are really not very well understood, partly because they're really hard to see turns out it's hard to see. We're never going to see them with our own eyes. So we kind of have to sort of work out how sound waves bend through them. And it's, it's all kind of, it gets a bit esoteric almost, but, um, these plumes are thought not to move, but the surface of the Earth does. So the tectonic plates move about like jigsaw pieces on like a swimming pool or something. And the north American plate, , which is a combat imagine is when north America sets kind of is moving in a sort of relatively constant direction. So that means that the hotspot is like cooking. align across America kind of thing as time goes on and it's been doing this for at least 17 million years may be like way longer, but the evidence only goes back clearly that long. so like Yellowstone sort of predecessors it's, our ancestors have existed all along, attract, going all the way to, you know, uh, basically the shorelines of, uh, of west in America. And right now the hotspot where the plume is, is under yellow stone, but it's still moving. And eventually the hotspot is gonna move under these really thick mountain reach the north. And it's not clear if it will be able to like create enough magma to even pierce through the surface or a thing. Um, so at the moment, Yellowstone is still being powered by this like mantle plume, which heats the crust, and makes, lots of magma and things, but. Just because there's magma. That doesn't mean it's going to erupt. most magma just sits there and cools down and just never ups. Um, so, so is the

Jesse Reimink: idea that you, sorry, is the idea that the, sort of crust, the lithosphere, the lithosphere root is a lot thicker as you move in board as, as you know, north American plate is drifting across Yellowstone. It's moving to the north relative

Dr. Robin Andrews: to yeah. Towards Canada. Yeah. There's always a Canadian border eventually.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Right. So the lithosphere group is too thick there. So the mantle plume might not be able to punch through it. Is that

Dr. Robin Andrews: what your, yeah, potentially, yeah. It's kind of like if there's extra sort of Rocky shielding that it might not like, it we'll do some melting, but it won't necessarily be able to punch his way through. But even if it does, you're still taking away a heat source from where Yellowstone is. So eventually what we know is Yellowstone supervolcano. at the moment it's magma, reservoirs are like mostly solid. They're like couple of percent molten and you need them to be close to like 50% Moultons, unless that changes you won't, you might get some smaller options, but you won't get anything near like an apocalyptic kind of cataclysmic.

Jesse Reimink: You need 50% molten to erupt basically until like mobilized.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah, it's a bit of a fudge, but yeah, you need, you need the magma reservoir to be at least like half liquid for it to have any chance of like erupting to the surface, but for Magna as it was like this, and it's nowhere near close at the moment. So like there's at the moment it's giving no sign at all that it's gearing up for anything it's asleep basically.

Jesse Reimink: Well,

Chris Bolhuis: that's a good segue into the next thing really is your description of what a magma chamber looks like, which does not fit the model that you see in books all the time. And Jesse gets very excited about this. So I'm going to let you two guys talk about what a magma chamber looks like a second. And, um, I'll just sit back and

Jesse Reimink: listen. Thank you, crystal. Yeah. So I do, I do get fairly excited about this. Um, I guess, you know, the idea that like, you've never actually seen a magma chamber seismically or with any kind of crustal imaging that we can do. I mean, it's an interesting phenomenon. Like how do you generate this 50% magma thing, that candy re-upped right. That's such an interesting question. So can you describe current state of understanding of the magma chambers beneath Yellowstone and how we would potentially tell if these things are getting cut off or if they're sort of getting cooled down such that they're frozen? How do we kind of test this? Or how can we decipher this? I guess?

Dr. Robin Andrews: So the, the science has really helped pay you the way to sing inside the Earth is seismology, which is essentially, you know, the earth makes a lot of noise. You can make it yourself. Um, or it makes a lot of noise, perfectly fine on its own. And earthquakes have make a lot of noise and they release a lot of like seismic energy, which is kind of a different from noise. It releases a lot of energy in the form of these seismic waves and depending on what they go through, they kind of changed speed and directions. So. They go faster through more like rigid material, which has tends to be solid and they slow down when stuff gets a bit more gloopy. Um, if you kind of do this over and over again, you kind of work out what exactly the materials are that they're going through. So when things are really shallow, so if you've got really shallow magma reservoir, it's people don't really think they're like big cabins of just molten rock anymore. It's more like, I think I described it as like the devil's sponges and, um, be able to have up sponges. And you've got this like solid network, um, we're full of holes, which allow the liquid to move through kind of thing. And in this thing, the, the solid is like the crystals that are coming out of the Magna is it's kind of cooled down and, if there's a root to the surface and that lake. Hot and buoyant and gassy, then it will punch through to the surface. So that's kind of what, like seismology and like experiments and labs and simulations are kind of showing, but there are, there are like huge limits to seismology sort of thing , you know, the deeper you go, the lower the resolution is basically. , and do you need to instrument the hell out of something to have any idea where anything is. You can't just put a size moments, I'd be like done, you need like hundreds of things. You want to see it. And you know, so it's expensive and tricky. And,

Jesse Reimink: if the thing was pure liquid, if there's a big, pure liquid blob down there, we would see that like that's dead easy,

Dr. Robin Andrews: like

Jesse Reimink: completely clear, right? Yeah. Like the outer core. Yeah. This

Dr. Robin Andrews: size, but the sentence size, we wouldn't even go through it. It would just be like this big shadows. I really like, I, okay. So

Jesse Reimink: is the difficulty trying to tell what percent of the, cross store, the magma chamber is actually magma and what percent is solid? Like are we trying to figure out, is it 7% or 15% or 50%? Is that that where it gets

Dr. Robin Andrews: fuzzy? No, but it gets a little fuzzy, but they're pretty reasonably accurate because, you know, if you really sat up a big seismic grid somewhere and Yellowstone. A really decent one and recently had like a really massive one. There's a, experiment they've recently run. Uh, they're still going through the data. Um, but you know, they're really heavily imaging at least a shallow magma chamber, just massive, but then there's one beneath it. That's, I think four times the size of New York city. It's not right. I can't remember now, but it basically is a normal sort of really fast one. Um, and that one's harder to see, but you can kind of broadly estimate like how solid or liquid is. So then I was pretty well constrained if something's really shallow, the trick is you really need really high resolution, like seismic images. Because what you want to know as well. It's like, well, if this does cause a smaller eruption of some sort, where is the magma going to come out? Is it going to come on over there? Is it going to go on my van yellow signs? Like big, I mean, even if it doesn't erupt, if magma kind of somebody intrudes right on the ground and it superheat some water that can create like a hydrothermal explosion. So that's the harder part at the moment. So when you're on a big scale and you make an estimates, but they're pretty good of like melting things, but working out like the pathways, especially if they can keep changing, that's really difficult.

Jesse Reimink: Okay. Okay. Okay. Alright.

Chris Bolhuis: Um, so switching gears, you mentioned in the book, this is a quote that really jumped out at me. And it's a quote, I think it's direct, you said the origin of the planet is volcanoes. Can you elaborate on that? I thought that was a very interesting statement. I loved it. Yeah.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah. So. volcanoes. Don't just look cool. They really like do drive the sort of fates. Well, sometimes define them and, you know, earth used to be like a big magma ocean when it first came into being. Essentially in the violent birth of the solar system. And as soon as that cooled down a bit, you have basically solid bits that colder and hot bets and the hot stuff of always want to come out. So volcanoes were the first thing to appear on earth. And when a volcano erupts, it erupts new lands, um, some of which form like the building blocks of the continents we live in today. Today, the volcanoes erupting create the youngest land, um, on earth. You can see it happening all over the place. , there are gases and liquids that give the planet its first draft, , atmosphere. , sometimes they can really give a find out. Lots of is water. People still can't agree. Is there a surface or largely source from like within the planet or did it get delivered by like soggy asteroids or something? , it's probably a bit of both, but, I mean, volcanoes are like the best landscape architects. Like a planet has, like, they change the surface, you know, if they're underwater, they provide elements and chemical and electrical circuits that help incubate life. They're often seen as like destroyers, but mostly they create habitats and land and atmospheres that if there is life, some life will be like, this is great. yeah, that's they really do make, uh, planets or thing. And if there's, if a planet is still around. That it shows you that the planet it's got like an active, healthy geologic, can't be, but there's a Rocky planet and all its volcanoes, aren't interrupting. Uh, that's not good. That's like a comatose planet, you know, that's not great.

Chris Bolhuis: That's right. That's not a planet I want to be on

Dr. Robin Andrews: Mars or something. You know, you might get an eruption again one day, but really like, it is not as not an irradiated desert. Great. Ideal. Yeah. So,

Jesse Reimink: so We're going to move on. I want to move on to some like non, I guess, well, non-super volcanoes and actually this is an interesting point cause you called the book super volcanoes, but actually Chris and I about halfway through when we were reading it, we're like, actually this seems to be not necessarily super volcanoes, like really, really big volcanoes. Super cool. Volcanoes, maybe yourself. I don't know. That was just our take on it. That's

Dr. Robin Andrews: exactly what I was. Yeah. That's exactly how

Chris Bolhuis: much shit did you take for that?

Dr. Robin Andrews: Um, it depends like, not as much as I thought. I mean, I guess because vocal is just like academic proper, I'm still Southern volcanoes, Vulcan. I just hate the term super volcanoes generally. Um, because it is kind of silly. Like it's basically a supervolcano or one word is, um, technically a volcano erupts more than, 240 cubic miles of matter in one go, which is, as you can tell, it's super arbitrary. It's like maybe there's 239.9. It would be nature. Wouldn't be like, oh, nobody cares about a second. So it's kind of, it's just like, it's a very big eruption. So. But I, I mean, the term has kind of stuck and especially in the minds of people in the UK and America and that like the term Superbowl kind of just has like a sort of buzz to it. And I thought, well, I'll make it two separate words, which isn't the technical thing. And kind of just talk about vault counties. I think it's really cool and stuff like that. And I was debating whether to actually explicitly say, by the way, this isn't all about like Yellowstone world ending blah. But, I thought, you know what, people who get it, get it. But I have received two very angry emails, um, from readers who are just like, I only wanted death and destruction. And like, what are you doing?

Chris Bolhuis: That's unbelief. I wondered about that. Actually, that thought crossed my mind. You know, I thought I was going to pick up a book and read about Yellowstone and Toba and Krakatoa.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah. I mean, crack it's not even that, 1883 eruption, like super famous everyone, even if you know a bit about it, you're like that there was a giant explosion. Last people died. That was, that's not even a super, so it's just like, okay. It's so it's so arbitrary. It's like, yeah. If I had eight chapters on eight recent super volcanic eruptions, I don't think it would be here to read it.

Chris Bolhuis: raised my eyebrow though. I can't believe, like, I didn't even realize that, you know, one word versus two words, you start off. I think you were talking about the 2018 Hawaii eruption. I'm like, huh. Interesting. Okay. And then Jesse, you know, he's like a year, a little slow over there, you know, um, this is about super volcanoes, not super

Dr. Robin Andrews: volcanoes. They say it's a little cheeky. It's a little cheeky, but when my editors were like, so what'd you think what'd you think of the cover? And I'll like, make sure the word super and volcanoes are on two separate lines. So no one can ever ask that. So I was just like, so I've covered my base enough

Jesse Reimink: on the note of, non-super volcanoes, but super cool volcanoes. you have a, sort of weighty chapter on mid-ocean Ridge volcanoes, which we have, you know, we've talked about Yellowstone on this podcast, uh, a decent amount. We have not really talked much about Mid-ocean Ridge volcanoes. So. give us an intro into why these are important to think about sort of maybe a, you know, a couple of highlights that you think are interesting. I mean, for me reading this chapter, I felt like you were particularly passionate about these volcanoes. Maybe that's not true, but was reading between the lines a little bit. Yeah. I

Dr. Robin Andrews: really enjoyed writing about it just because I thought it's, it's kind of, it's sort of absurd to me that like, so earth is obviously a volcanic planet, but most of its volcanoes are under water. And there's a thing that's often said that, you know, we know more about the surface of the moon and you know, what's on the sea floor and it's like, yeah, the sea's in, the way, like, it's really hard to like, you know, it's really oceanographers and vocal. It just like, it's really annoying. There's so much ocean in the way and was like, so how do people explore these underwater volcanic? We don't even know how many there are, which seems like a sort of oversight in our town are like, how does the planet work? You know? And they actually go down to look at these things in like these, in these bubbles this semester was, but I got particularly excited when I was chatting. So I'm able to telling me about not only remote controlled submarines, kind of tethered to a boat, but completely autonomous artificial intelligence, controlled submarines with names like Spock and Kirk, obviously. So good. Um, but that can explore this sort of on these underwater, labyrinths in these sort of bubbly, fiery cauldrons that are full of life, by the way, , all by themselves. And I'm like, this is, to me, the reason I love underwater volcanoes so much is because this is exactly what it would be like to look at them on another planet. Maybe they won't have life. Maybe it will. It's kind of extra terrestrial what's going on down there. , cause it's just so beyond our normal experience or thing, you know, and so little was known about it. I was like, come on. That's who, how can you not write about that? That's cool. That's just fundamentally interesting. You

Jesse Reimink: know, I found the aspects about, potential for economic mineral deposits. That's obviously a big field of interest for exploration geologists, but also environmental concerns as well. It was really, it's an interesting, you know, field, sort of underwater volcanoes. Very, very interesting. Yeah. I love that.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah, thanks. So I read it, I loved writing about it. and on the people that work on these things, so cool. They're so interesting. Just the way they describe things either really casually or just completely full on, you know,

Jesse Reimink: so maybe this hearkens back to your PhD, a little bit to the, you know, using TNT and magma and stuff, but you talk about how underwater eruptions are not as explosive as subaerial or, you know, uh, eruptions above the ocean surface. Can you give us that primer on that? Because I think I understood it. it had something to do with the water pressure, but also something to do with magmas interaction, with the water.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Before you, before you jump into that, just want to say that, like, I appreciated that part of the book, immensely, a lot of people know that when you take magma and water and mix them, that it leads to explosive, like bad things happen. Right. Well then a lot of people then assume that these underwater volcanoes are potentially really devastating and your explanation was something that I'm going to use now, from now on, in my classes. It was great. I loved it. So yeah. Do it. Let's go. Let's talk

Dr. Robin Andrews: about it. Yeah. So obviously as illustrated by the recent eruption in Tonga, if you have a, a volcano that is just underwater, just above it, that is a terrible combination, especially if there's a lot of gassy magma and they're still science all trying to work out exactly what the deal is. It's really hard to. get all the underlying physics quite clear, cause explosions naturally are quite dangerous. You can't freeze them and stick your hand and be like, look at all the other different bits. But it's generally thought that, if you have like magma in a, in a bucket as everyone does, you know, I've just got one over there. If you just dump water in it, a lot of steam will come off, but it won't explode. It will just be like a bucket of steaming magma And similarly, if you pour macro into water or just boil off, they might get bubbles through the micro. But, nothing really happens. It seems to be that you need to sort of have some turbulence where the water gets sort of intermingled with the, molten rock. And if this water gets trapped and then heated, , really quickly, , there's a lot of, kind of different processes, but basically this water expands. So violently that the only thing you can do is like fling all that magma out of the way. It's like a really powerful pneumatic drill almost. , it just sort of blast the magnets or laser countless pieces because it has nowhere else to go. yeah, when you, when you kind of like, like the volume of that, of like little blobs of water can expand by like 3000 times, or I think, you know, it's surprisingly good at like knocking molten rock out of the way. The only thing is if it happens really deep on the water, the overlying pressure of the ocean is so extreme that that bubble is coming up against a lot of resistance. So it has to like really struggled to push all that stuff out of the way. Whereas if it's just below the surface of the water, it's basically like atmospheric pressure. So you're basically giving magma like a supercharged explosive mechanism, , when you have it in like shallow water, so shallow bad, but when it's. That's why we're not constantly running around going, oh crap. You know, there's constantly explaining normally you only see if an underwater volcano erupted because like all this pumice just suddenly appears and then just crashes into Australia. You know, it's a really weird thing. Is this like

Jesse Reimink: a, a sort of, um, oh, sort of a runaway process then. I mean, I'm thinking like, you know, a fishing reactor or something where, you know, water separates and then it breaks into steam and then it separates more and it flings more water and breaks it and it kind of mingles a lot more.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah. It depends. Like it's a runaway if like, so if you just have lava leaking into the, into the water kind of column, you can kind of get this mingling, especially if it's quite aggressively erupting. And that can cause like moderate, explosive activity in the days leading up that giant explosion in Tonga, there was like eruptive activity happening. And that was because, you know, you have magma water mixing, but only small amounts of Magna was involved at some point. It's thought that like this magma chamber it'd be filling up like a thousand years. and, essentially it'd be the magma inside. This volcano was like, doming the surface of the volcano is really straining to get out. And if that creates cracks in the roof, and if that water sneaks into one of these cracks and causes an explosion, you've basically taken that whole cap off magma as well. And that's when you get like a runaway interacted with like all the magma and all of the water, just like violently mingling and exploding. So yeah, within like a heartbeat, you can get like a back kind of cataclysmic explosion. It's great. That that's quite a rare thing.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Yeah. Right. So have a related question to this and it relates to your, of experiments you did in your PhD maybe, or maybe not you, but the field that you're in for your PhD, what are the scale of the. Experiments you were doing like w can you describe, like, one of these you were putting how big of a T and T charger using, like, I dunno, what, I guess the question here is, I've been thinking about the scale of geoscience observations relative to the scale of our interpretations. And, you know, we often do these tiny experiments where we're like observing something really small, and then we extrapolate it to a tectonic plate. I mean, like a huge scale difference. and you, you touched on this, like getting the physics of eruptions right. Is really hard. So I dunno, what are we working with as far as data that we know works well, like experimental data or something

Dr. Robin Andrews: like that? Yeah. I mean, it's getting increasingly precise, you know, basically you kind of run the experiments to try and simulate a they're good at isolating a handful of processes that might be happening rather than try and replicate all of it. So that way you can. Go. Oh, that's why it happened in that order or something like that kind of thing. I won't tell you everything. But, so the experience I was involved in there where they were basically creating, buried explosions, some with TNT, um, creating like, you know, how sized creators and some with just pressurized gas and like ball bearings in a lab cause you can do more of those basically. basically the, the kind of Vulcan is I worked on a called ma Miar and they're really weird because they tend to just explode once. Um, something happens with a macro underground where you get this big explosion and instead of like a volcano, like a mountain shape, you get like a depression crater, and often you get them when you have these shallow magma water interactions sort of thing. But it's really hard to like mingle, magma and water. And cause a giant crater forming exposure of that getting killed. So burying explosives and using slow motion cameras and markers is kind of how you do it. And, the main thing I took away from that was like, well, they're a bit like nuclear weapon craters. If you bury a nuke and blow it up, it looks exactly like this. So I spent a lot of my PhD reading. Ah, how do you bury it? How far do you need to bury a nukes? It caused this on a crab. I must be on some sort of list somewhere, so much reading material.

Jesse Reimink: That's

Chris Bolhuis: great. Is there a well-known example of one of these,

Dr. Robin Andrews: of like a NICU?

Jesse Reimink: Oh, tomorrow?

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah. I mean, New Zealand is kind of covered in them. There's loads in Japan. There are really, there's already one on this. Not in a way that like you have Mount St. Helens on Mount Fuji or Kiloea or something like that. They're often like loads of them in one go, you get like fields of them. So you see them in like volcanic fields. well I feel in Alaska

Chris Bolhuis: does Newberry and Oregon have these kinds of things? Uh,

Dr. Robin Andrews: I, I think so, but I'm not sure, but it seems probable that at some point you'd get these holdings, but they're not like names with the same sort of, it's not prestigious this, you know what I mean? It doesn't have that kind of for that kind of one. I think you get loads of them because you can get loads of them in one go and then they never upped again. They've kind of got a bit of a weird again, like, you know, like you're buried in explosive. It's really weird. They're just weird. Which make them really hard to write about. No

Jesse Reimink: kidding. Okay.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. You talked about, uh, Marie Thorpe and to be honest with you. Pissed off, not at you. I was pissed off at my own education, I guess, in that I had never heard of this person, but what an amazing contribution? I mean, seriously, I called Jesse up right away after I read it. I said, Jesse, what the hell have you heard of this? And he said, yeah, but only recently. And, first of all, let's back out of this a little bit. And can you describe her contribution please? And then, um, I don't know. Why is this not, why is this a secret? I don't understand.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah. And so the whole thing, like, her contribution was essentially to revolutionize the way we, you know, how the Earth's surface transforms and is made and our oceans are made and stuff. It's a pretty big deal. It's not like a small thing, especially as like. She wasn't like coauthored on any papers. She wasn't allowed on research cruises. You know, she was, this was in the, um, in like the fifties and the forties, fifties, and sixties, she was an assistant to her male colleagues sort of thing. And it's all very infuriating and missile, just like, she's obviously better than every one of us, you know, she basically created you know, she was instrumental in creating very big maps of the sea floor, , when sonar was like a brand new thing. She kind of was tasked with a menial, like, can you stitch all these, uh, sonar depth profiles together and see what was there? And she basically then just do that. Like, um, the part, you know, some people I was interviewing for this. She kind of like could Intuit what the sea floor would look like rather than just like lines up and down, like, oh, there are canyons here and crevices and things of that. like a few decades earlier. the scientific community were a gospel when Alfred and, uh, another scientist suggested, suggested that what we all know today is true is that like the F surface drifts around like these jigsaw or pieces, you know, , the continents aren't where they are now sort of thing. Um, and they moved around and people were like, that's heresy, that's, you know, that's bullshit. And, and, uh, basically Marie thought came along, and with a massive contribution, um, she helped cement that as an actual idea and she ha she she's actually discovered what we call mid refs, you know, these, these sort of insights. Valleys within mountains that kind of go through not necessarily the middle of the oceans, but they kind of extend on the water all the way around the world. And they're all interconnected. They're all essentially big lava factories. She did this mostly just confined to a room and told her like, yep, just plot these things out and tell them what you see. And it took ages to convince people, you know, even when her team of her and all the other there'll be other guys, uh, basically she wasn't credited with it. It was like a person she was assisting to, you know, someone's like young man here shaking the foundations of geology and she just got like no recognition for it. For most of her life, really? So, yeah. Yes.

Chris Bolhuis: But I, I think like, even like now, then that should be fixed, but it's, it doesn't seem to be, uh, your, your book, you know, shined a light on this, which I I'm really grateful for it cause I learned a ton about it.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah. And that's the thing, that's the thing about it as well. Like the reason I wanted to bring it up is because, so when I bring it introduced in the book, I say in her own words, um, and literally she is, she's spoken about this herself, like in a massive amounts of detail, you know, I had like a very, a bridge, like the potted, the key hits in a biography kind of thing. And the reason I wanted to include it was, it was partly because it's a really interesting story and people should hear about it. Obviously, but also because it provided such a nice skeleton for this chapter about underwater volcanoes that you could start, okay. At this point in their life story stop, like what did we know about volcanoes at the time and the planet and. Basically it occurred to me that each bit, each major milestone in our life was such a massive educational experience for like geoscientists that you could, just say like, okay, just this bit of, I work alone, let's explore this. Like, what does that mean for oceans being born? What does that mean for earthquakes? What does that mean for volcanoes? She was a great science communicator, a great scientist, you know, it was just a shame that people dismissed her ideas as girl talk at one point,

Jesse Reimink: which is cyber offensive. Right?

Chris Bolhuis: Wow. that's amazing. Anyway, um, that was, one of the best to me, one of the best parts of the book and I appreciated

Jesse Reimink: it a lot. Yeah. It was kind of theme that sort of, I think, ran throughout it, I suppose. So Robin. Next for you. I mean, you've actually, Chris just texted me the other day. He's like, oh wait, I see Dr. Andrews on CNN. Wow. We're

Chris Bolhuis: interested in, but I tell you about this. So it was Saturday morning and, uh, I was watching the news kinda, and I was reading your book. So I had the value mine real low and I'm like, holy shit, Jen, Hey, this is the guy we're going to interview in a few weeks. You summoned me,

Dr. Robin Andrews: must have said my name three times or something. Yeah.

Jesse Reimink: So go ahead, Jesse. Uh, you've written for the New York times. You've had cover stories there. You've written a load of different, very cool, science communication articles. What are you working on now? What's next? What's driving you forward for the next several years here,

Dr. Robin Andrews: honestly. Yeah. I mean, like, this is the only thing a sign Shanice is the only thing that I can think of doing, but I don't think I'll be good at anything else. And this is, I, I love doing it so much. My editor is great. I'd love to write another book on something probably different subjects, you know, but, um,

Chris Bolhuis: one word supervolcanoes,

Dr. Robin Andrews: Navy. Nice. It's nice to take a bit of a, you know, this book kind of came together during the pandemic and after like, I know we're still in a pandemic, but, I got to December, this last December passed and I had done a lot of writing and just finished a book and the book had come out and all the navs about review side to go away because people seem to like it. And I just crashed, like in December, I was like, I'm just going to play how your life, that's all I want to do. Like, that's all I want to do. And now I'm getting back into the writing, but I'm kind of, I think now the imposters, everyone has imposter syndrome a bit, but the imposter syndrome for me has kind of gone a little bit quiet now. I've always enjoyed it, but now I'm really going to, like, I'm going to take my time. I'm going to think of big projects I want to work on and actually like revel in the fact that you know what people do think volcanoes the cool. Maybe I'm not that bad at this writing thing. So, um,

Jesse Reimink: you can put the imposter syndrome in a box, you know, that that can go away for awhile. It's a, it's a cool book and very cool. Very cool. You

Chris Bolhuis: know, anybody that's into biology thinks swimming with the dolphins is that's the end all be all right. Well, volcanology is that for the geoscience like field. So everybody's interested in it. Um, Robin, what I want to, I'm really interested in this, cause I have my own answer to this. What is your favorite volcano and why?

Dr. Robin Andrews: Mm, I mean, it kind of, it's like a mood thing. It changes depending on what I'm thinking about, but right now it's, it's Mount Fuji still, even though it hasn't erupted in several hundred years, Th there are personal reasons why I enjoy it so much, but I just think it's incredible that you can climb this like perfectly nature while are perfectly symmetric or cane. I mean, it really is a stunningly. Like it's like someone like an architect built it, you know, it's so pristine and you can climb it during the summer months. And then you go above the cloud layer and you can see the Perseids meteor shower, like as clear as you will ever say it, you feel like you're in space. , especially because if you get high enough, do you need the oxygen to kind of help if you start feeling a bit faint. , and it's just like this wonderful thing that you can do. It's like hard climb, but it's not like impossible. Like if you're kind of relatively fit, you can do it. Um, It just standing a top of this mountain, which is kind of culturally very famous and just standing on the cloud line and seeing like the sun would come up with the specialty, the shooting styles and things. It's just like, this is only possible because of this perfectly placed volcano, but like, it's just safe enough to climb it. This are these summer months kind of thing. So I don't know. Like this throne of magma that you're standing on me. It just seems extraordinary to me. I think it's just so beautiful that it's hard to beat and it's not erupting, which is great. Actually. You don't want that one to erupt?

Jesse Reimink: No, it's too beautiful to, blast itself apart. It's too symmetrically. Beautiful. As you said, it's just a stunning volcano. Yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: That's interesting too. I would love, we don't have time for this , but to hear you talk about Fuji and the geology behind it, because it's kind of peculiar, you know, it's so steep, but yet it's made up of a runny kind of, lava and it just, it's goes against the textbooks, you know? And, and I'd love to hear you talk about that at some point. So yeah. Anyway, Jesse,

Jesse Reimink: well, as Chris says, you mentioned we're kind of out of time here, but we always end our interviews with this last question. And so Robin, what has been your best day as a geoscience?

Dr. Robin Andrews: My best day. Hmm. Ah, it's really tricky. I dunno it depends when you count as being a geo science, but I think the first time I showed my parents what lava was like, how close meant a lot as well, because I've very lucky to have very, very, very supportive parents. They're always like, yeah, you're interested in that. You should pursue that. It doesn't matter how bright just go, go for this thing. And, but they had never seen like a volcano erupting in any manner. So when I, when, uh, took them to a Stromboli in Sicily and was like, look at this, and there's this like giant 500 meter high, like lava fountains, like you're seeing really is believing. It's like, you know, they didn't need convincing. The, I was doing was like psych, but when you see that, you're like, oh, I get it. Like I get and just, you know, It's kind of repaying that support back by showing them the spectacular thing. And it just meant a lot. So I think that was more than any like scientific revelation or epiphany or anything that meant more to me than any other, anything I did during my brief stint in academia. So yeah, I'd say that's awesome.

Jesse Reimink: That's a great answer. Excellent answer, Jessie.

Chris Bolhuis: That might be the common denominator with the volcanologist. Seriously, everyone that we've interviewed has said the same thing they say they want to go into volcanology and their parents have been supportive.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, it's true. It's true. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Yeah. Well, this has been a interview with Dr. Robin Andrews author of super volcanoes, what they reveal about the earth and the worlds beyond Robyn. Thanks very much. This has been really fun conversation. Great read. Very interesting book. And, uh, yeah, this has been a super fun conversation. Thank you for spending time with us. We

Dr. Robin Andrews: love it.

Chris Bolhuis: You are, it's like midnight in London right now. So

Dr. Robin Andrews: late night for you. No, it's still, I, you know, I actually have to write something after this.

Jesse Reimink: It's going to,

Dr. Robin Andrews: it's going to go on, but I I'm, I'm on east, on east coast time, really. Um, but also very, very nice hourly. So, you know, mornings horrible. I'm just like some balls concrete into my brain.

Chris Bolhuis: W we really appreciate, uh, you donating your time for us spending an hour with us. It was

Jesse Reimink: absolutely.

Chris Bolhuis: But don't forget about us. W w when you come out with your next book, have your publicist, send us a copy and we'll have you on again.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Yeah. I'd say it'd be great.

Jesse Reimink: Fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Super good. If there's any interesting volcanoes stuff happening in the world, we'll, uh, we'll hit you out this a bit. It'd be great to do again.

Dr. Robin Andrews: Oh yeah. They don't stay quiet for long. Do they?

Jesse Reimink: That's right. That's right. All right. Thanks Robin. Really appreciate it.