Volcanoes Revisited: Part 1 - Dr. Diana Roman
Volcano ReRelease Diana Roman
Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:00:00] Welcome to Planet Go, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay. Christopher ba, BHU
Chris Bolhuis: What'd you stop? Would you stop doing that? Like
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I, well, you know what, Chris?
Chris Bolhuis: up on you every time you do
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I know, but you know why I do it is because I, you know, I drive a lot in Pennsylvania back and forth, , every week and whenever I call you, I've got my phone, you know, I've got one of those like car mounted, magnet holders. So I just slap my phone, it's got the magnet in the back, slap it up there so I can see gps and I, my car, like Bluetooth button takes forever for Siri to communicate. And so when I'm driving, I just press the button on my phone and I say, call Chris Bais. Text Chris Bais and Siri says, what would you like to say to Christopher?
Chris Bolhuis: Ha. So you have to say it that way. You can't say bull heights. You have to say
Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:01:00] other, yeah, I have other Chrises in my phone that sometimes it gets confused with, so I have to be really explicit with Siri. It's uh, it's great.
Chris Bolhuis: so I just got one of those things, right? Those, the devices that, you
Dr. Jesse Reimink: an iPhone
Chris Bolhuis: like,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: You just got a smartphone,
Chris Bolhuis: no. I, oh my God, no, I got the, I have the smartphone, but I have the device that you put up on there, you know,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh yeah, yeah.
Chris Bolhuis: my son was home for Thanksgiving and he looked at that and he's like, seriously, dad, you are so. I'm like, what? What the, it's just convenient. So, Jesse, you are now old. Okay. Apparently I don't get it. It's convenient. It's good to have, I don't understand.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's so good. It's so good. Yeah, we got 'em on all of our
Chris Bolhuis: I felt so insulted.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that is insulting
Chris Bolhuis: that I've ever been afraid of being old, but like really that's what the criteria is for being old, is you have one of those iPhone holders, , so whatever the hell, I don't,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Right Chris. [00:02:00] Well that's enough of nonsense. Um, we're on holiday break. I guess that's maybe why we're full of nonsense right now is we're taking a little break from recording, uh, new episodes for a little while here over the holiday season.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, that's right. And you know, we had a lot of discussions about this. What were we gonna do? That was a really cool thing to look back, Jesse, at the almost three years of stuff that we have put out and it is like, I was amazed. What do you think? Like were you, did it hit you the same way? Like, oh
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Yeah, it was kind of fun. It was kind of fun. And it was also kind of funny because, you know, I, I think people have tuned into this now that we often debate what we're gonna do. And, uh, we also came at it with two very different ideas about what to do here, of different themes to put together.
Chris Bolhuis: Yes. So talking about that, and I was, I was talking to my kids about my students, I'm sorry, about Camp Geo and how, you know, like it's, Hey listen, if you want to do this because of the content we're [00:03:00] covering, do it, it's great. It's, it's got all the images you need and all that, right? , that go along with the content that you're learning. And this can be helpful for studying for tests. So go. But we don't get anything out of it. It's free and go ahead. Right. But the thing that was really interesting, I described then Planet Geo to.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah.
Chris Bolhuis: And I said, we're all over the map. We're doing this, we're doing that, and we, our process is we have to pitch each other and we have to convince each other. And I got pissed as I'm sitting there in front of my students, I'm like, wait a second. Like, Jesse doesn't, he doesn't trust me. Like I pitched an idea. He's like, oh, Chris, you're full of shit. And I'm like, wait, a, you know, no, that's not the way the process works. I need to pitch an idea and you need to just accept
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, that's not the way pitching works. I know that's what you want it to be, but that's not the way this works. Oh goodness. You just want a bunch of Yes men around you,
Chris Bolhuis: I do so anyway. All right. We did settle though on my [00:04:00] pitch. I'm gonna throw that out there,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Just a little. Just leave that hanging.
Chris Bolhuis: we're gonna run a series on Vulcan. We have great, world class volcano that we've interviewed. And then you and I, in the middle of this whole thing are gonna just give our little rundown of volcanoes. So this is gonna be a four episode release, is that right? Jesse? Four.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that's right. Four episode re-release. So we're, we're going way back to some of our, actually our first interview today with Dr. Diana Roman. She's great. she's actually changed positions since we, well, not positions really, but titles since we interviewed her initially. She's the ho Wood chair of Seismology at the Earth and Planets Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington, DC where I did my postdoc. And Diana for me. Is one of these individuals who, I just respect her opinion all the time. Like if she was to pitch me an episode topic, Chris, I'd probably accept it and just trust her for it with it
Chris Bolhuis: Oh [00:05:00] gosh, that hurt
Dr. Jesse Reimink: but seriously, she's, she's
Chris Bolhuis: that hurts less because you compared me to Danny Roman and like, you know,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So that's okay. So I went to her for a lot of career advice when I was a postdoc there and applying to faculty positions and started negotiating with Penn State at the startup, um, package. And, uh, so she's just great in all aspects and particularly good in vulcanology. so she was a professor in the Department of Geology at the University of South Florida. She has a PhD. She was also a financial analyst for Barclay's Global Investors before her PhD in geology days. she's got an undergrad degree from Cornell University and just all around exceptional volcano. And I'm actually really excited to re-release this episode in this interview cuz it's,
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, it was one of our early episodes that we did when we first started this podcast, and it was amazing. I remember prepping for it. I absolutely loved it, and I loved the interview
Dr. Jesse Reimink: And let me interject real quick here. It was an early episode, so our audio [00:06:00] is not as good as it is now. So, you know, you might hear a bit of an audio difference. Yeah, there's a little bit. Uh, we, we weren't quite as good back then. It turns out we've learned something along the way, uh, over the past couple years, which is a good thing, I guess. So anyway,
Chris Bolhuis: but the content remains the same,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, absolutely it does. Very exciting stuff. So today is the first of four in our Vulcanology re-release, and Dr. Diana Roman coming at you. But before we get to that, Chris, please check out Camp Geo. The link is the first thing in the show notes. It's really cool we're calling conversational textbook for geology. It's everything we teach. Chris and I teach in our geology classes delivered to you in a sort of a mobile friendly form. So check that out. You can follow us on all the social medias at Planet Geo Cast. You can send us an email, planet geo cast gmail.com. Go to our website, planet geo cast.com. The link is in the show notes there. You can support us, you can learn about us, and you can listen to all the past episodes.
Chris Bolhuis: And please share our podcast with [00:07:00] somebody else that might like it. That'd be awesome.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Diana, how are you? I'm doing
Dr. Diana Roman: great. Good to see you both.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, it's great to see you too. We are excited to have you here. Welcome to Planet Geo. So before we get into the interview, I just wanna give a brief introduction to you. You are a staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC and that is a job title that, uh, people may not be familiar with, but we'll get to that later on. You were a professor at the University of South Florida before joining the Carnegie Institute, and you're a ologist. You study volcanoes. You've published around about 50 papers on volcanoes. You've won several awards for your volcano. And we're just super excited to talk about volcanoes. You also have a really interesting career trajectory, so we're gonna get into that at the end of the episode. All right, Chris, so where are we gonna start?
Chris Bolhuis: Well, hey, you wanna start getting into some volcano analogy stuff then?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Uh, let's do it. Let's do it. All right. D, give us the elevator [00:08:00] pitch for your research. Like what is the one or two sentence pitch to convince me that this is
Dr. Diana Roman: interesting? Well, so I study how volcanoes work, and this is really important because volcanic erupt. Affect all of us, whether we know it or not. They might affect you as you're flying in an airplane. They might affect the climate we live in. So it's really important to understand, a, how they work and B, what they're likely to do on a range of time scales. So my research is basically focused on understanding not only how eruptions happen, but also what's going on under the ground in between eruptions. And that turns out to actually be very interesting and very, I.
Chris Bolhuis: All right. So Diana, can you tell us what you do? What do you actually do on a day-to-day basis?
Dr. Diana Roman: So the main thing I look at is actually seismic data. So earthquakes,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: is that what si When you say seismic data, this is just earthquake data. What? What are we talking about with seismic data?
Dr. Diana Roman: What does that mean? So seismic [00:09:00] just means vibrations in the ground and that can be. Manmade traffic produces seismicity, nuclear explosions produces seismicity, but natural processes, which is what we tend to think of first, produce seismicity and volcanoes, produce seismicity. So that's my main tool of looking at how volcanoes work. So what I actually look at are tiny, tiny earthquakes. You certainly wouldn't be able to feel them even if you were standing right on the volcano. But my. Can record them in quite a lot of detail.
Chris Bolhuis: So you use seismometers then, and you put 'em in buckets, if I understand correctly. And you dig a hole in the ground, right? Yeah, I'm a good,
Dr. Diana Roman: tell us about that. I'm a good Home Depot customer. So actually, Hey Diana,
Chris Bolhuis: I've seen pictures of you in a hole,
Dr. Diana Roman: right? Usually upside down in a hole. Similar, but, um, we got, we got new instruments, so we don't need the buckets anymore. It's actually been fabulous. So, yeah, tell us about that. So [00:10:00] what we used to have to. Make little, little vaults for our instruments in the ground. So we'd have to dig a hole and pour some concrete, let it set, come back, eat a day later, and then make a little house for the instrument where we basically take a 10 gallon bucket from Home Depot. You know those orange buckets? And we, we just flip it upside down and we set our instrument on the concrete. We set the bucket on top of the instrument, and then we, we bury the whole thing.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: The concrete is just to stabilize the instrument then?
Dr. Diana Roman: Is that the, yeah, we didn't wanna put it in the dirt and it kind of gives it a little bit of better coupling. So, you know, again, we're trying to look at tiny, tiny vibrations, so it just kind of helps the instrument. Physically connect to the ground a bit better. So
Chris Bolhuis: do you, how many pounds of concrete are we talking about here? ?
Dr. Diana Roman: Um, you know, not
Dr. Jesse Reimink: all. Yeah. Chris wants to, says mom backyard. He's, he's trying to budget it out here. I'm angle here.
Chris Bolhuis: Diana, I will lug the concrete up the mountain for you. Well, the flip side is you
Dr. Diana Roman: just have to take me with you. The flip I always told my grad students like, okay, at least you have practical [00:11:00] skills. You know how to mix concrete if the whole science career doesn't work out. You know, it's not a whole lot where maybe one bag's worth, but usually like a 40 pound
Chris Bolhuis: bag. Yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Oh my gosh. You're gonna have to get into training there. Christopher , . No, no, I'm
Chris Bolhuis: good to go.
Dr. Diana Roman: We're we're done with the concrete. It's, uh, so, so
Chris Bolhuis: what is the new, what's the new stuff like then? What do you, what
Dr. Diana Roman: happened? Well, it sounds really simple, but basically we can just bury them now. Um, they come in much better cases that can withstand being stuck straight in the dirt and we just stick 'em right in the ground. Like a, like a flower bulb and we pack 'em in and that's it.
Chris Bolhuis: Does each one measure three senses of motion
Dr. Diana Roman: then? Most of them do. Yeah. Um, there are still some that only measure one, but it's really important for us to get those three.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: The, the, the three senses of motion. What are we talking about here? Up, down, left, right.
Dr. Diana Roman: Up down east, west, and north, south. I mean, there's basically just three three that are perpendicular to each other. And from from [00:12:00] that, we can resolve anything. We can. Right. Okay. Press the signal around.
Chris Bolhuis: So when you say tiny, tiny, how tiny are we talking
Dr. Diana Roman: about? Well, my instruments can measure things that have a negative magnitude down to maybe negative magnitude one. And that sounds a little counterintuitive. That's because the magnitude scales are calibrated for larger earthquakes. And so, and for earlier generations of
Dr. Jesse Reimink: instruments, negative magnitude. Okay. I must admit, I've never heard of this negative. So what is this in movement in like real
Dr. Diana Roman: movement? We can, we can do that. Um, You know, you wouldn't be able to see it if you were watching the ground very closely. It's, it's really something that only the instrument can pick up. One of my colleagues at one point, we calculated the volume of energy and all of the earthquakes, and he said that's actually about one Snickers bar's worth of energy.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's a great calibration point. Wow. I love that. That's amazing. Okay, so this is where you get, you get your data from these seismometers, you put 'em around a [00:13:00] volcano, you know, what are you doing with this data? Well, so we're
Dr. Diana Roman: looking for earthquakes. So we basically record continuous data and there aren't earthquakes necessarily happening all the time. So one of the major first steps, and actually a lot of my time goes. Pulling those events out of this continuous signal. So first I have to find the earthquakes in this stream of noise, continuous stream of noise, and then I have to measure them. And so when did they arrive on different instruments? You know, did they push the ground up or down first? These are the sorts of things that we actually look for in the data.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: And the questions are, okay, we're using our earthquakes around volcanoes, and what do they tell us? Well, so
Dr. Diana Roman: actually it's surprisingly simple. One of the biggest things we wanna know is how many of them are there? How fast are they occurring? So one of the first things we always do is we just analyze. The continuous data and we wanna try to count when are the earthquakes happening and how many per hour or how many per day, and
Dr. Jesse Reimink: what numbers are we talking about? I mean, you're talking about like a hundred an hour. Are you talking about like two
Dr. Diana Roman: [00:14:00] an hour? You know, it depends on what the volcano's up to. Some volcanoes are very quiet. Some volcanoes have a lot of seismicity in. Their background states when they start to move into eruption, we see that the number of earthquakes goes up and also the, the nature of the earthquakes changes. So that's actually a lot of what I try to study and understand. So we try to look at things like where are they located? So are they, you know, right under the surface, or are they a few miles down? Look at how big they are. So again, what is their magnitude? And we try to add. You know that energy and figure out how much is being released. We look at, again, things like how is the volcano pushing on the ground? Is it pushing in a direction? That sort of suggests that there's maybe some magma being intruded somewhere. We can see that in the earthquakes.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Wow. So you're getting this kind of view, using it to get a view underneath the earth and see what stuff is moving around and when it might potentially. If at all. Yeah,
Dr. Diana Roman: we're trying to [00:15:00] just figure out how the ground is breaking as magma moves through it. So
Chris Bolhuis: Diana, I've heard you talk before about the pitch of a volcano, like the noise. Can you talk a little
Dr. Diana Roman: bit about that? Right. So another thing that we look at is, Basically what is the frequency content of a little wiggle that represents an earthquake? And so by frequency, which I'm gonna use interchangeably with pitch here, we just mean like how frequent are the waves coming across the instrument? So how rapidly is the ground vibrating and and one of the neat things about volcanoes is that earthquakes from volcanic processes have a pretty big range in frequency or pitch, and that is actually meaningful. So that's one of the reasons that Ologists are very focused on understanding, you know, is this a high frequency earthquake or is this a low frequency earthquake? Where is the energy, where are the strongest vibrations in kind of a, a frequency spectrum? So I
Dr. Jesse Reimink: think I remember this talk, Dan, you had a really beautiful [00:16:00] analogy for high frequency and low frequency with a comparison to sort of vocalists. So can you, can you run us through that again? Yeah.
Dr. Diana Roman: By high frequency, I mean like, if you're listening to Mariah. Very high pitched soprano By low frequency, I mean very white though, very low pitched, you know, base voice. So yeah, it's very analogous to human speech or human singing.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: And does each volcano have like a specific range or does it vary, you know, volcano to volcano? I mean, do volcanoes in Hawaii, do they have the same, are they very white or, I
Dr. Diana Roman: mean, every, every volcano has, has the ability, To sing like Mariah or sing like Barry, but what what we tend to see is the, the sequence. So most volcanoes in their background will be kind of doing the soprano thing. We tend to hear much higher pitched or. See much higher frequency earthquakes. And then as we move closer to eruption, Barry White shows up and starts singing. And so that's how interesting. That's [00:17:00] not, you know, and this is one of the things that I, I've studied quite a bit, is this really a consistent pattern, but it's something that, you know, we kind of have as a paradigm that when Barry White shows up, you start getting a little interested because that might mean that you're getting into something, uh, that might culminate an I. That's
Chris Bolhuis: really interesting. Do you also try to, do you try to understand why low frequency Barry White shows up means that, you know, we're getting down to business now. Do you try to understand why
Dr. Diana Roman: that happens? Absolutely. So a lot of research in my subfield of volcano seismology is what are the processes mechanically that are causing these lower frequency events? And we have a lot of ideas, a lot of arguments, but most of the idea. Really revolve around moving a fluid through rocks. So it's, it's kind of analogous to like blowing air through an organ pipe. We tend to set up these lower frequency vibrations. So we're still not sure the exact mechanics, and it probably varies from volcano to [00:18:00] volcano, but we, we think we have a general concept, but understanding that. Okay.
Chris Bolhuis: Um, so do you think it's degassing? Is that what's driving this then, or
Dr. Diana Roman: that's, that's pretty much the primary understanding is that what's happening is you're starting to get magnet to a point where it's losing a lot of gas. That gas is moving through the rock and setting up these vibrations.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Yeah. I guess this brings up a question of, you know, during interruption there must be like lots of earthquakes going on and in the, in the lead up to the eruption, presumably a lot of eruptions going on as well. But what's happening when there's not interruption? I mean, what's the background stuff? Is there a lot of stuff to interrogate in there?
Dr. Diana Roman: Well, it really depends, again, on the volcano. Every one of them had, they're all special snowflakes. They all have, they all have a personality. There we go. I love that. And actually, I mean, a huge question in my field right now is trying to understand. What controls that personality, and B, how can we kind of move beyond that personality to find common processes? It's actually a really challenging
Dr. Jesse Reimink: thing. On that [00:19:00] note of comparing volcanoes to one another, when I was at Carnegie at least, you were using some AI algorithms and some voice recognition kind of software algorithms to understand volcanoes, and I thought, again, this was like super interesting and really compelling. So is that, are you still working on that? Is. Uh, a fertile scientific ground for you. So I
Dr. Diana Roman: need to get back to that. So again, you know, I talked about how a lot of our energy actually just goes into picking these signals out and characterizing them. And so, you know, I'm always trying to think about clever ways to do this. And so this, a few years ago I got Siri on my iPhone and I started thinking about how she worked and thought, okay, let's, let's see if we can use some speech recognition. To pick out these signals. So there are some signals that volcanoes produce that are important, that share a lot of structure with human speech. So I developed an algorithm that went in and looked at the data to find that. So I came up with a very simple algorithm [00:20:00] to kind of pick things out that had a certain structure to them that looked. Human sound and it actually worked really well and I kind of got away from it. But I've been thinking there are some really other neat developments and speech recognition that I think might solve some problems. And one that I've been thinking about for a few years is what's called the cocktail party problem.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay, let's get into this. This sounds fun.
Dr. Diana Roman: All right, so the cocktail party problem is actually, it's what the, it's
Dr. Jesse Reimink: a, it's a, what the hell is the cocktail party problem solving? I just sat up.
Chris Bolhuis: I'm good. Let's go. Okay. Yeah,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah. Chris perked up. I could see him.
Dr. Diana Roman: I thought it was, it was getting a little, little technical. So this is actually, I think, not sure I'm gonna get the field right, but an issue in cognitive neuroscience. So, Imagine yourself in a crowded room with, you know, a lot of different voices talking. You have two sensors, your ears and your brain has the ability to use those two sensors and process their input to kind of hone in on [00:21:00] a single conversation in a very noisy field of sound and, oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. There's been a lot of interest over decades of how does your brain do this? And then recently something called computational auditory scene analysis, which tries to kind of mimic this coning in on a signal that you can pick out some characteristic, like the sound of a particular person's voice and filter all the noise out to get a better, you know, a better hearing what they're saying. So,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I totally know I, I've never thought of this, but I totally know what you're talking about. You can kind of pick up on a conversation across the room and ignore the. That's boring right in front of you, I guess. Right?
Dr. Diana Roman: If you have a little bit of a template in your brain, you can do it. And so, so there's been a lot of work in signal processing and engineering and other disciplines to see how to adapt this as an algorithm. It would actually really be if, if we could make it work, I think it would be really neat to try to apply to some of the harder things to hear the volcano.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So this would be trying to filter through the Mariah caries to get at the berry [00:22:00] whites. Would that be the kind of, uh, what you're trying to look for?
Dr. Diana Roman: No, we actually, we still wanna hear Mariah, but we wanna hear her when she's whispering in a, in a noisy room.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay. So that's really interesting that you're pulling things from other fields. And so how does your previous career path in venture capitalism, uh, in entrepreneurship, are you using. Tools you developed there in, in this
Dr. Diana Roman: research? Yeah. Well, so not so much from the the entrepreneurship side of my first career, but actually from the finance side. So applied economics is basically a lot of calculus and statistics and specifically time series analysis. So it's like watching the Dow Jones, right? Everybody's trying to model it and figure out what it's gonna do next. So that actually, it's very fun to
Dr. Jesse Reimink: watch it go up and down and go up more than down. Nobody
Dr. Diana Roman: knows, but actually a lot of. General concepts, or at least that familiarity with time series analysis tools has translated over, you know, is, is still a, a very common theme. I'm basically just looking for patterns in [00:23:00] time. Um, and then we try to model them or understand them, but first we have to identify the patterns. So it is actually surprisingly similar again in a skill set that I didn't know would transfer over. But that
Dr. Jesse Reimink: has, I guess the big question in my mind is, are you a. Volcano because of your advanced economics background? I don't
Dr. Diana Roman: know about better, but I think it, it's certainly the kind of ologist I am. All scientists have a flavor or a personality to the, the way they work, the way they conduct their research. And you know, I like data. I like large data. I like long time series of data. And so that I think is just my style of doing research.
Chris Bolhuis: So Diana, the kind of the direction that you're going with your research is just to predict what
Dr. Diana Roman: volcanoes are gonna do. Well, I don't do any forecasting. So pretty much any country on earth that has potentially active volcanoes has usually a, a federal agency that's in charge of monitoring the volcanoes and making those for. I [00:24:00] don't do that, but I do work with them very, very closely. I work with several volcano observatories around the world, and really what I, I'm trying to do is develop tools for them or develop understanding that can ultimately help that process of, of making those forecasts accurately and quickly, um, and in more detail.
Chris Bolhuis: So then how has the research changed? St. Helens and Mount Pinatubo to now. How have things changed? I
Dr. Diana Roman: told you about my great new size Mos . It's a game changer, man. No more, no more concrete in my backpack. .
Chris Bolhuis: I'm a little disappointed about that cause I'm serious about being your Sherpa
Dr. Diana Roman: so, well, we still have to dig the holes. Okay, there you go. No, but, uh, I mean, in all seriousness, you know, one of the big things is actually the internet has really, especially in volcano seismology, because data streams of, you know, instruments that are on volcanoes now go straight [00:25:00] into a central server that I can look at in real time and I can get data, and that's been amazing. A lot of my research is actually from data that I pull straight off the internet. I never actually set foot on the volcano. And the other thing that's really changed is that now we're trying to combine observations. So while I look at seismicity, I have colleagues who look at how the ground informs or what kind of gas is coming out. And so I think there's been a lot of progress in looking at those streams of information in parallel and really trying. use these different constraints to actually come up with models and I mean like numerical models, computational models of volcanoes. It's very analogous to weather science. So you know, a hundred years ago people were doing pattern recognition and now you have multiphysics fluid dynamical models running on super [00:26:00] computers, ingesting data. That's kind of the direction we're starting to go in.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Let's break that down a minute for weather prediction. That, you know. Oh, on the first Tuesday of November last year it rained. So the first Tuesday of this year, it might rain again. Is that the kind of pattern recognition you're, you're referring to? It's
Dr. Diana Roman: more like, um, red sky at night, sailors. Red sky and warning sailors take warnings. So people had recognized that color of the sky was an indication of what the weather might be like in the next day. So yeah, so pattern recognition and you know, kind of having maybe a conceptual explanation for why, but, and it works, right? But we're still very much in pattern recognition mode. Like I said, there's a lot more attempts to actually do physical. And really tie it to fundamental physical principles. But we're, you know, a lot of what we're doing is looking for patterns and trying to explain them with some simple ideas, and we're really trying to move, move beyond that. We need to, so, it's exciting though. [00:27:00]
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So, Dana, what, you know, let's, let's move into, think about the future. What's, where do you see the future of your field in the next five or 10 years? What's the most exciting here?
Dr. Diana Roman: Well, today I was just trying to, Uh, signals out of continuous noise. Um, okay. Using an algorithm, but I think doing more but in a more kind of systematic manner. And I think this is something that a lot of us in the field are talking about that really we need to go make our measurements consistently on a lot of volcanoes, you know, different personalities. So I think we're really trying to get standardized and. Not just study an individual volcano, but study a class of volcanoes to understand again, how they work as a system. And I mean, this is still trying to get towards kind of a pattern recognition in data, but at least that will be the basis for us to really make better models. Like again, the the weather forecasting analogy where we can say, okay, these are the conditions. Type of [00:28:00] volcano. Here's some information on its current state, and then we can actually model it forward. You know, that's probably gonna happen over the next few decades, hopefully. So maybe in my, at the end of my career, I'll get to see some, some real progress that's just kind of getting going right now. It's a great direction.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. So this is a question I've always wondered about Vology, uh, and volcano seismology specifically. I mean, gimme like a, a ballpark estimate of how many seismometers are out there today, detect. Volcanic noise or volcanic earthquakes. And how many volcanoes are those sitting on? Well,
Dr. Diana Roman: I, yeah, so I've actually been trying to figure this out. It's not an easy problem because you know, it's a lot of different countries, but I would say the vast majority of Earth's active volcanoes do not have a single seismometer on them and have never had one on them. But a handful of volcanoes, let's say maybe about 10, have what we'd call sort of Cadillac networks where they have dozens of. Mount St. Helen's all, you know, is a very charismatic volcano. So it gets [00:29:00] a lot of instruments. Yellowstone, obviously ea, but you know, there are very interesting volcanoes that in hindsight it's like, oh, we should have had an instrument on that one. But we have, we have no way of, you know, out of the hundreds of volcanoes in the Andes. We have no idea that it was that one that's just been sitting there. So it's a little bit frustrating cuz you know, we kind of make a decision about where to put the instruments and. You know, they tend to go into places where there's already something known or something active. Why do we
Dr. Jesse Reimink: assume that there will be a systematic trend in volcanoes? Why isn't everyone super unique? So
Dr. Diana Roman: here's, here's another good analogy, and, and I'm stealing this one from a, a, an Icelandic friend and colleague. But if you think about medicine, so each one of us as individuals, our bodies are very unique, right? And they, they carry our history, they carry our genetics, but ultimately the field of medicine, Has approaches to sort of see through that individual, you know, to understand it, first characterize it, what is your [00:30:00] family history, what are your, um, lifestyle behaviors, and then to get through to the, the fundamental of the systems, the organs and the, the disease processes. So we kind of feel that volcanoes are the same way in at the end. You know, we understand the process that causes vulcanism on earth and. The same for at least there are a few different types, not that many different ways to make a volcano on earth. So yeah, we have to be able to see through that, um, that personality we have to be able to do it.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, that's a really interesting analogy. And uh, I think my medical doctor fiance will appreciate that one. All right, so let's transition here to talking about your career path, Diana, cause I know you have a really interesting one. All
Chris Bolhuis: right, so Diana, I have to ask because, you know, when I was going through college, there was a clear defining moment when I realized, right, I love geology. Um, this, I'm all in. You came about this in a different sort of way, but was there ever a defining moment for you? [00:31:00]
Dr. Diana Roman: Actually, there really wasn't. I think it was a five year long process in total of. sort of starting the idea and then the, the moment when I kind of thought, okay, it's complete and I can consider myself a ologist.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Your undergrad you, did you, do you have a geoscience degree or undergrad geology degree or something like that? No.
Dr. Diana Roman: So, um, unlike you, Jesse, I, you know, I had two weeks of earth science, I think in the seventh grade and, oh, that hurts me. I know. That's why really hurts to hear. That's why I said my, my life would've been maybe very different, but. You know, so I kind of, kind of forgot about it. I was really into science in high school, but I really grew up thinking I wanted to go into finance. And so my first degree is from Cornell in applied economics with concentrations in financial economics and entrepreneurship and Wow.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So, okay, so let's get this off the bat. You're way smarter than Chris and I. Let's just start from that baseline when we start the conversation there. [00:32:00] Yes.
Chris Bolhuis: Wow. Diana. That sounds really boring to me. So, you know, I mean, you're a volcano artist and you know, every biology person wants to swim with the dolphins and, uh, every geologist wants to see red lava. That's our version of swimming with the dolphins. And, and you do that on a regular basis. So how in the world do you go from finance into where you are
right
Dr. Diana Roman: now? Well, it was really just a series of coincidences, I think. At Cornell, the finance program for undergrads is actually in the school of. Agriculture. So Cornell is the land grant. So along with my major classes, I actually had to take a lot of science, mostly biology. But two years before I finished my degree, I realized I had an outstanding science class that I had to take and it couldn't be biology. So a friend of mine was a geology major and really into volcanoes and made it sound exciting. So I thought, okay, I'll, uh, I'll finish off this credit and take a geo [00:33:00] class and be done. So that was, yeah, that was the start. .
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So what was the class you took?
Dr. Diana Roman: It was actually a field mapping class. It was a class that was run on Saturday mornings and we got to go out. We did, you know, a little bit of stuff in class. During the week, but the main part of the class was actually we, we went out, um, in upstate New York on Saturday mornings and kind of looked, learned geology in the field, learned how to map, learned how to use a brunt and compass, all that good stuff. Lots and lots of shale and limestone .
Chris Bolhuis: So I'm still. Though, Diane, I'm still a little confused. You worked in finance for a while though, right? Like how did this, how did this happen? You're gonna have to gimme the long version. I'm a little
Dr. Diana Roman: slow. Okay. So I,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I, Chris is a lot slow,
Dr. Diana Roman: a lot slow. So I signed up for this thing thinking okay, I'm just knocking out, you know, another requirement for my degree. And on day one I was hooked. I fell in love and I remember. Kind of walking around campus in a bit of a daze after that first class [00:34:00] thinking, oh no, what am I gonna do? Because I still loved finance, I still loved entrepreneurship, but this was very unexpected. And you know, I was, I was a like a year and a half out from graduating at that point. And I'd spent, you know, Cornell tuition is, Not cheap. So I, I put a lot of time and money into my current then career path. Um, and so, you know, I, I kind of tried to stuff this feeling and interest aside and, um, you know, I thought I still, this is what I've wanted for a long time. I've worked very hard on it. I really need to finish this out. So I, you know, I finished my, my major, I graduated a year and a half later. I managed to stuff in a couple more geology classes here and there. I, I'm known as this weird, I was the weird mascot of the geology department, this weirdo from finance. And I wanted to give, you know, working in finance a shot too. So, you know, I felt like, you know, this is a, this is a very unexpected. Turn in my life and I don't [00:35:00] wanna do something on a whim. So let me, let me stick with it with what I'm doing and see how this plays. and then
Chris Bolhuis: you just decided to
Dr. Diana Roman: jump . So after I graduated, I moved, this was in 1997, I moved to San Francisco and I started working at Barclays Bank as a financial analyst. And this was during the.com era in San Francisco? Mm-hmm. . Yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: What a time to be with It was a lot of fun in San Francisco. That must be amazing. Oh my
Dr. Diana Roman: goodness. So it was a lot of fun. It was a really, I mean, we were basically trying to figure. This new thing, the internet, you know what to do with it. . And you know, a lot of Cornell grads who moved to the Bay Area were computer scientists and engineers, and they were working for, you know, startups and places like Yahoo. Basically, they were trying to fill that, figure out what you know, what to do with the internet. And I was on the finance side trying to figure out okay, where to throw money. Um, and uh, so that was a really exciting time. Oh wow.
Chris Bolhuis: So, hey, look at looking back where you [00:36:00] right. Oh, where you threw the money? .
Dr. Diana Roman: So that's, that's, that's the next part. So about a few months after I, I started working at Barclays. I got together with another Cornell grad, a computer scientist, and we, we decided to start a company. So we, we had a.com startup and I remember sitting in a cafe and, um, , you know, north Beach. And we were kind of kicking ideas around of like, what could we do? And at one point he said, well what about an online travel company? You know, where people can go and buy their plane tickets just through a website? And I said, that's insane. People will never. Trust the internet enough to buy their plane tickets. Let's moving on. Crossing it off the list. So, um, yeah, so that was a big miss obviously.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Wow. What an interesting time. So what was the company you ended up starting? So, um, the company, it wasn't pets.com was it? That's like the
Dr. Diana Roman: famous No, I mean that was, that's the other famous miss That was the year before meme. We were talking about pets.com that night. You know, [00:37:00] this was an obvious idea and it, it fell apart. So the company we ended up starting, um, was basically an online chat, like some at the time, you know, Usenet had been around for decades and, um, , you know, was, was is sort of a grassroots thing. Nobody owns it. Nobody had commercialized it. And so we thought let's, let's try to commercialize Usenet and basically set up a, you know, a forum for people to start discussions and we could bring in experts, uh, do this sort of thing. So basically what we tried to start was, the closest thing right now is Reddit. Um, yeah. Yeah. Wow. So, wow. Very
Dr. Jesse Reimink: cool. It's been very interesting. What an exciting time. I mean, one kind of follow up question to that, that is, do you find any parallels in your, that career path, uh, with your research career path? And, and if so, what,
Dr. Diana Roman: what are they? Well, so here's where it started getting me back to Vulcanology. So I loved having a startup. It was one of [00:38:00] the most amazing experiences, and I realized so. You know, the startup obviously failed. I'm not, you know, running Reddit right now. Um, we didn't , we didn't manage to get our second round of venture capital. Um, so the startup folded about a year in, and I realized at that point that I really didn't wanna work for the bank anymore. I was either gonna. Run my own company again, try again. Or I was gonna just go do this ology thing. In hindsight, I didn't know it at the time, but actually being a research scientist is very much like running your own small business. You have to wear a lot of hats. You have to be in charge of personnel and finance and marketing and product and you know, design and development. And so actually that's been a really neat parallel, um, for.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's interesting. I mean, I've gone through this a little bit. You know, I tell some of my family members, oh, being a new professor at Penn State, you know, you get this startup money to do research. It's kind of a little bit like a startup company. I mean, they [00:39:00] don't buy it , they don't buy the argument.
Dr. Diana Roman: It's a lot like, it's a lot like getting a startup going.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay. The staff scientist position is something people have a hard time understanding. So can you explain kind of what your role is right now at Carnegie in the staff scientist role and how it compares to a professor at a large university like University of South Florida?
Dr. Diana Roman: Yeah, so Carnegie's a really unique and neat place in that we're basically professors, but we don't teach. We don't have students. We have a lot of postdocs like you, Jesse, a former postdoc at Carnegie. Um, so we do, we do a lot of training and mentoring, but basically we just do research. Um, but we run our own labs. We, you know, write grants. Um, we run projects and we kind of do the research side of what university professors do. So, Sort of similar in that sense, but, you know, we have a lot more of our time and energy to put to research.
Chris Bolhuis: So, Diana, I was, uh, I was watching a video on YouTube on you. I was doing my research getting ready for, to interview you, and my wife was next to [00:40:00] me, and so she, you right away caught her attention. So this next question really comes
Dr. Jesse Reimink: from her . Oh boy. This could be a doozy coming from Jenny .
Chris Bolhuis: Um, you know, geology has a reputation for being very male dominated, and you're very prominent female scientist and, you know, so can you, have you had obstacles to overcome?
Dr. Diana Roman: You know, no, and, but I wanna couch that in saying that, I think, you know, I'm lucky in being able to say that, and I'm also somewhat rare in being able to say that, but I, I really don't feel like I had that many obstacles because I was. Do you work with
Chris Bolhuis: a lot of other female
Dr. Diana Roman: ologists? I work with Ologists. You know, there are a lot of women in Vology. It's, it's one of these sort of interesting subfields in geology that is maybe less male dominated.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I mean, that's interesting. Geology is notorious amongst the sciences for being male dominated and science is already a fairly dude heavy. So I'm, I'm curious. , [00:41:00] you know, what the future looks like in this space. What are things that, you know, people in Chris's position or my position, or your position can be active about, um, in this space?
Dr. Diana Roman: Actually, I, I guess just again, reflecting on, you know, coming to this answer of I don't feel like I had obstacles. I got lucky in that I was in a very male, heavy world, you know, from the very beginning of my career in finance, it was Silicon Valley in the nineties. And you know, I got confident really fast because I got treated like competent equal. So that was kind of the tone that I, you know, I had from the beginning of my career and that was lucky. But then in grad school, I think. Was really important was that I had a female PhD advisor who was very successful, but I also had two very close advisors who were men and um, they were up in Alaska. So I spent time with them every year up in Alaska, which is, you know, [00:42:00] there are a lot of men. Roughly ready, kinda but again, you know, I had this combination of role model in my, um, my advisor, but I also worked with men and developed confidence because they treated me like I was another scientist. And so I think that those two things really, if I, if I can claim any success, I think a lot of credit might go. All right,
Chris Bolhuis: so what is your
Dr. Diana Roman: favorite volcano? Oh, no, . This is like asking somebody who your favorite child is. . Okay. I'm, this time, I, I get this question. I'm gonna name one just because it's, I think it's an underdog and it's a weirdo. Maybe I have the most affection for, I wouldn't say favorite, uh, volcano in Nicaragua called T. where I had a almost decade long deployment of instruments that ended in 2016. And one of the neat things about Taika is [00:43:00] that it actually in, it's when it's when it's just sitting there, not erupting. It's very white and it's very white, loud, like, oh . Really? Lots and lots of these low frequency earthquakes. And then before it erupts, it switches into Mariah. , and then right before it erupts, it gets completely quiet. So it does things backward of most volcanoes. And so we've been very interested in studying, you know, what's going on there. Is that characteristic of the type of eruptions this volcano has? It's been a really fun one just because it's, it's a, a strange little one and it also makes a lot of earthquakes for us to study.
Chris Bolhuis: Like is there something about it aesthetically that you'd love
Dr. Diana Roman: to. . It's not very pretty.
Chris Bolhuis: So which one is your favorite from that perspective?
Dr. Diana Roman: Oh, Fuji Sun. So I was actually, I was lucky enough to be invited to a conference in Japan in January before we all got shut down. And, uh, [00:44:00] they took us out and we had a, for a field trip, and we had the most gorgeous view of Fuji. And I, I never get tired of looking at that volcano. It's so beautiful. I've
Chris Bolhuis: never seen it firsthand, just pictures and it's, it's gorgeous. Yeah. Diana, what is your favorite volcano experience?
Dr. Diana Roman: Oh, this is an easy one. It's, this is much easier than the, the favorite volcanoes. So when I was in graduate school, starting my PhD, my department took a field trip to the big island of Hawaii and we got to go out onto the active flow field and I got to stick a rock hammer in multon lava and like actually pull and what. What was amazing about it was, so magma has viscosity, which is like, you know, water, it's very runny, is low viscosity versus molasses is high viscosity. So that's actually low but low. That's the water analogy. And I just remember sticking my hammer into it and pulling and getting a physical understanding of, you know, how thick and viscous lava is. [00:45:00] And that actually. I think about this a lot. It's actually is a big part of my research. You know how viscosity of, of lavas and magmas affects earthquake? Yeah. That's activities. That was just like one of those, like, it made it real. It was really cool.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, well, I think, you know, that covers all of our questions here. Diana, thank you so much. This has been amazing just sitting down and talking to you and I, to be honest, you know, I'm, I, we've talked a lot over the years when I was a postdoc at Carnegie, but I learned a lot just in this conversation right here. So thank you very much.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, I was, I've been excited all day. Actually all week to talk to you.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So yeah, you has been
Dr. Diana Roman: really have, it's been my pleasure. This, this has been a lot of fun actually. It's, it's great to see you again, Jesse. It's great to meet you, Chris. And this has been a really fun conversation. It's my favorite subject, so, right.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: How could
Chris Bolhuis: we
Dr. Diana Roman: bet, talk, talk to two smart people about volcanoes,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, I don't know about that. I don't, yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: hey, that's a wrap [00:46:00] part one of our Vology re-releases under the belt. We got three more coming at you over the next couple weeks. While we are on a break here, you can follow us on all the social medias at Planet Geo Cast. You can send us an email, planet geo cast gmail.com. You can go to our website, planet geo cast.com, and there you can learn about us, listen to past episodes and support us. And we'd also ask that you check out our Camp Geo conversational textbook. The link is the first link in your show notes. It's best seen on your phone, but you can also access it on desktop computer as well. So check that out and let us know what.
Chris Bolhuis: cheers.
