Who Gets Credit?
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[00:00:00]
Uh, I got, I got something for the cold open here Chris.
Chris Bolhuis: I don't know, I don't like it when you do that because, oh, look at you, you got a black long sleeve Planet Geo
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, it's nice. It's a sweatshirt. It's a long sleeve, like, crew neck sweatshirt. I like it. It's very nice. [00:00:30] Nice fabric. they do run a little small, it's like a slim fit, Chris, for you. So you might need to go sizes up unless, or, or you can get the slim fit that you can squeeze into.
And then Jenny loves to wear.
Chris Bolhuis: Yes.
Yep.
Yep. Jenny likes them oversized.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I do too. I like oversized sweatshirts. I, there's nothing better than I had this, this sweatshirt in high school. No, in college, it was back in the days the style was, let's say substantially different where big baggy was, was in. [00:01:00] And we had these three XL hope basketball sweatshirts. I mean, this thing is a giant sweatshirt right now.
I still have it. It's amazingly well made. But Chris, I was, uh, I was just listening to you. I was just, doing some editing before we jumped on here And I was listening to Chris Bolhuis talk. So I kind of feel like I already been talking to you.
Chris Bolhuis: are your thoughts? Did it like soothe you? Make you
feel good? fuzzy inside?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: mostly nonsense. So,
but no, you know what we did get? we [00:01:30] did,
get some, uh, some very nice comments on our interview with Dr. Rachel
Chris Bolhuis: Yes, we?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: less, uh, which came out a while ago now, but. That was a good episode. She, she resonated. I mean, she resonated with you and I, but she resonated with the the listeners as well.
I think that came across how, just impressive and interesting, she is. So hope people check out her channel from that. So I don't know, Chris, what's going on with you?
Chris Bolhuis: Absolutely nothing is going on with me. Um,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay.[00:02:00]
Well, that's, I guess that's good. I don't know. Is that
Chris Bolhuis: is, is good. It's good to, it is, that's a good thing. Hold on. Okay. I don't know what's going on in my
throat today. I
woke up with this like gravel in my throat.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: got the frog throat, huh?
Chris Bolhuis: yeah, no, it's a good thing to just to not have anything like pressing that, that I
have on right now. I Like it
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Do you feel Chris that you are, um, a creature of habit? Or what is the period that you get bored of a routine? Like how long does it take for you? Cause I find a [00:02:30] routine is very soothing for a couple of months. And then it's like, okay, we need to change up the routine here.
Chris Bolhuis: don't think that I've ever used the word bored with me. Like, I don't, feel like I ever get bored. Does that make sense? It's just
a part of, that's not how I'm built.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: but you do, I mean, you guys, especially like the fall school year and you're coaching cross country, you, you settle in, there's a routine, that's maybe nice, but at some point you're probably like, okay, I need to change it up a little bit
Chris Bolhuis: No,
because it all, just happens as the year goes on because then cross [00:03:00] country's done and,
know, I've always got something that I can be doing. I have something I should be doing. Um, so when it like bites at me for too long that I'm just, I gotta get it done.
You know, that's, that's all that it is.
Like I have another project
with my tractor that I got to do. And, um, I've,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Of course you
do.
Chris Bolhuis: got a bunch, of crushed limestone dropped off and, and
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh,
Chris Bolhuis: I have some landscaping I have to do.
heavy
lifting with the tractor.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Uh, I was, I could have used Chris's tractor yesterday. It wasn't [00:03:30] a big job, but I, uh, I did spread about a half a yard of big river stone in our,
um, in, I mean, it
wasn't a, there's no, I didn't, I didn't really need a tractor. it was, you know, 10 wheelbarrow loads or something like that.
but you know, by the time you dig it out and lay the paper down and put the rock in and wash it all in the back of the truck and everything, you know, it's, it was a four or five
hour job, but
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: It would have been more fun if I had
tractor.
Chris Bolhuis: Oh, well, we would have had fun with
that for sure. I would have been bossing you around. I'm [00:04:00] on the tractor telling you what to do.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. I'm just the hired deckhand with the shovel on the ground.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right.
Well, Jesse, I'm really interested in what we're going to get into in this episode, because,
we came up with this idea about let's, let's do something like, kind of like a historical perspective of some big discoveries in geoscience and who got the credit for it and who didn't get the credit for it.
And when we started putting this together, I just, I couldn't help, but think of you. And [00:04:30] so that's kind of the way want to do this episode, Jesse, is I want to talk about some examples, like famous examples scientific discovery and geoscience, and then a little bit of the backstory on that. And then if you can just kind of jump in and maybe offer your perspective Like you've had experiences with writing papers
and getting dismissed, or somebody else beat you to the punch and gets the credit for it.
I don't know. I just,
this is all about, kind of like scientific breakthroughs [00:05:00] and who got the credit and who didn't get the
Dr. Jesse Reimink: And
Chris Bolhuis: perspective offered by
Dr.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: right. Well, you're going to get my take on that for sure. How long do we have? but I, Chris, I really like your title for this one. Who gets the credit? Because I think this is, one of our goals, certainly, but one of, one thing that I'm really passionate about is getting, People to have an understanding of how science actually works.
Like let's look behind the curtain and how does this work? We have in even at college level science classes, even amongst the [00:05:30] professoriate, I think there's this like
Chris Bolhuis: You just dropped a big word. I've, I don't think I've ever heard that word before. Say it again.
What is
it?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: if You, want to be fancy, we call ourselves the professoriate, the
Chris Bolhuis: you guys, you, you
people, oh my gosh.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I know it goes way back to, uh, the ancient days of liberal arts education anyway, but if you want to, like, there are people who, who have this vision of the scientific process as like this pure reasoning. And I, you know, one thing for me is let's [00:06:00] open up the doors and see like, how does it actually work?
why does in your, you've written, you know, Alfred Wegner, how does Wegner become famous? What was the, the lead up to the publications and how does this get entrenched? How do ideas get entrenched and how do ideas die? How do ideas go away and change? It's really important. It's really messy.
And I think we have to acknowledge how messy it is because that's kind of the point of the scientific process. So this is a really interesting topic because of that, I think like a window in the messiness
Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Right.
That's, that's awesome. And I can't wait to hear some of your [00:06:30] perspectives on this, but I want our listeners to know though, this is really not about plate tectonics, but a lot of our examples are going to go back to discoveries in plate tectonics
because that was this unifying principle and it's like easy to pull examples of who got the credit for these ideas.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. And a lot of the textbooks, I mean, a lot of the geoscience educators have kind of decided that teaching the history of plate tectonics is a really good way to teach plate tectonics. And so, uh, many, many, many textbooks [00:07:00] and many online free textbooks, anything you find online, this is a, a thing that is, is covered a lot in different ways in different textbooks, basically the history of plate tectonics.
Chris Bolhuis: but some of the names that we're going to talk about today, if you've taken an intro level geology class, you've probably never heard of the names
that we're going discuss because they're, they just completely are left out of the story.
You know, and that's kind of what this is all about.
So should we just go ahead and jump in and
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Jump right into Chris. What story? I mean, this is going to be Chris, like a [00:07:30] lot of storytelling, right. We're
going to tell the story of
Chris Bolhuis: it's going to be like me giving you examples and then you give in the perspective of kind of like me interviewing Dr. Jesse Reimink today,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, okay. Here we go. Let me get, uh, let me get
Chris Bolhuis: And then.
I'll jump in because I can't help myself. So, all right, Jesse, what name is associated with Continental Drift? Everybody that's ever taken an intro level geology class
knows name. So
Dr. Jesse Reimink: the.
Chris Bolhuis: here's a little bit of the backstory. Alfred Wagener gets the credit for the discovery of continental drift, [00:08:00] which of course was like, laid to rest for about 50 years.
You know, cause he couldn't provide a viable mechanism for this. And we'll get into a little bit of that later, so 300 years before Wagener. Published his work on Continental Drift, guy by the name of in 1620, Francis Bacon, he noted these similarities in the jigsaw fit kind of, of, Africa and the East coast of South America, but he didn't develop the idea very much.
He didn't, he just kind of like made [00:08:30] a note of it almost as an afterthought, but this was
300 years before let's jump forward. to 1910. And there's this American geologist F. B Taylor, an American geoscientist published this paper on what would later be called Continental Drift. and this was a full two years before Wagener published
his findings. So. this is what I'm really interested about why Jesse did. Taylor's papers get kind of dismissed? I mean, that's, [00:09:00] with the digging that I did, that's what I found happened. He didn't get traction. Now, does that mean that in
the vetting process, that the people that review this, because you do this and you get your papers reviewed, sometimes they're just ripped apart.
You think that's
what
happened with, with FB Taylor.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: You know, it's a tough one because we're going back to, you know, like you said, 1910, 1912, the way science was disseminated back then is so different from today. a lot of the stuff that happened that [00:09:30] people gave talks not more frequently, but talks were more had more prestige associated with them.
So the talk, you submit a talk and you go, in this case, F. B. Taylor gave a talk at Geological Society of America meeting or whatever, writes an abstract that's like two paragraphs. That would today count as a publication. you know, it's a new idea. It's a discussion that would be cited today, in the modern publication world, we rarely cite abstracts of talks.
It has to be peer reviewed and published as a paper format for [00:10:00] really people to cite it. So there's been a massive, that's a huge shift in how this works. So I'm not sure that the peer review process would have like filtered out FB Taylor's ideas in this way. so I'm not really sure. On this one, but it's really interesting point you bring up.
Cause it's a geologist who proposed this idea two years before Wegner
which Wegner was like a meteorologist.
So coming from an outside field.
Chris Bolhuis: Absolutely. But interesting thing to me is that he didn't just write a paper or two pages. He wrote 10 papers on this [00:10:30] idea. That's not a small amount of work
and it was still just kind of dismissed.
and we don't think by the way to do and digging on this, that we don't think that Wagener was aware of what F.
B. Taylor was doing. So it's not like he ripped it off and like advanced the ball down the field a little bit more. I don't. That's not what we're suggesting at all. it's odd, you know,
I've never read about FB Taylor in any intro level geology class before. So he's really not even a part of the [00:11:00] discussion from a historical standpoint.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: the idea of continental drift was called this Taylor Wegner Wegner Taylor hyphenated name, which sometimes happens. So there's two points to this, Chris, that I, I find really interesting. I agree. This is really interesting. And, and I like probably should talk about F.
B. Taylor more in these stories. I think what it shows us though, what we can learn from this is that it's incredibly rare that one single person. comes up with a new idea out of thin air. I view it as like, uh, [00:11:30] if there's some change happening, like let's, um, I don't know what's a good change.
Plate tectonics is probably a good one for sure. It's a good example, but there was many research groups around the world that were kind of circling this problem. They were realizing the flaws in the current model, this sort of expansion of earth model. At the same time. And so they're kind of circling the problem and, you know, Princeton, Columbia university, a couple of places in Europe, they were all circling plate tectonics kind of the same time.
And there's multiple people working on different [00:12:00] things independently. And then sometimes they talk to each other or hear about each other, working on stuff. And this goes on all the time. So I, it's nice for storytelling to say, Alfred Wagner came up with this idea and, you know, he, he died, uh, seeing his ideas recognized, even though he was right, that's good storytelling, but it's not true because there's multiple people, multiple groups that kind of circle these new ideas, kind of
frequently. And then the other point is that, kind of who gets the credit. This is a bit cynical, but I'll say it anyways. [00:12:30] It's often the loudest person who gets the credit. So the person who, writes the most papers, who says it the loudest, who gives the most talks on it, um, they kind of end up having the bigger legacy for it, I guess.
I would say unfortunately.
Chris Bolhuis: that is what Wagener did. I mean, he went to enormous lengths to further this idea and to provide the evidence for Continental Drift, right? That's something that F. B. Taylor did not do. the [00:13:00] other really interesting thing too, is that from, Maybe this is me interjecting my own thoughts into this as I dug into this topic, but Taylor seemed to like distance himself from Wegener also, he didn't
want to be tied to the ideas of a meteorologist.
I think there was a little bit of like, Hey, I'm the geologist in the room here. and he actually even famously kind of said that, Wegener's ideas, many of his ideas are very different from mine.
You
Dr. Jesse Reimink: and
I think that's, you could also see how that happens, right? You, you might massively [00:13:30] projecting here, but one potential thing going through FB Taylor's mind is exactly that. Like, I don't want to be tied. think my ideas are right and I don't want them to be tied to some kooky meteorologist. So I don't like the hyphenated name. I want it to be the Taylor hypothesis, or I want it to be judged by geologists, not because this kook over there likes it too. And then ends up. That we all talk about Wegner because he, like you said, kind of went to great lengths and was louder about it maybe and so there's, there's all sorts of, there's all sorts of human political things [00:14:00] at play here.
Human emotions are deeply entrenched in this stuff. Like we can't remove the human element of scientific discovery. And I think that's important. I don't think we should. I think that's important to note, you know, that these things happen.
Chris Bolhuis: Another really noteworthy thing about this whole story is both of them, Taylor and Wagener proposed mechanisms for
how continents were moving. Taylor's idea was that the gravitational pull of the moon of the very close moon was somehow pulling the continents, closer to the equator.[00:14:30]
And that was. Quickly dismissed as not viable. And I'm sure that didn't help the cause,
Right.
I dunno, it's interesting to me that they were only separated by a couple of years, but Wagener seemed to rock the scientific community and Taylor seemed to just be dismissed by it,
which find
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing because, and again, the scientific community kind of left both of them by the wayside for a couple of decades and then came and then revisited the ideas, right? So you never know what, [00:15:00] might've been picked up later on, like maybe because of this moon theory that Taylor liked and Wagner was, was less dogmatic about, or, or had some other mechanisms.
Maybe, you know, 40 years later, people looking back on it said, Oh, Wagner's clearly more in the right path than Taylor, who kind of lost the thread at some point and proposed a model that doesn't work. So therefore Wagner's stuff, not Taylor's stuff or something along. I mean, this is pure conjecture again, but like you could see how these, sort of, biases get, get imposed [00:15:30] onto who gets the credit.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. You get the Segway award though, because let's go ahead and jump ahead to what brought it back,
what brought continental drift. And now we're to evolve this into what would later be known as plate tectonics. That started in the early sixties and it really kind of, again, here we get into this, like who gets the credit for it, but Harry Hess gets the credit.
he was a professor at Princeton, and he is called the father of seafloor [00:16:00] spreading. You know,
that's actually in the book that I use with my geology class, my high school geology class. And
that's a quote out of that book, actually. Um, it's not that cut and dry, is it
Dr. Jesse Reimink: no, no. And then I, I think that term, well, okay. I want you to tell the story, Chris, but that term, the father of whatever, or the mother of whatever field, I just don't think it's ever accurate. In very, very, very rare instances, somebody, one unique individual comes [00:16:30] up with some idea, but I just don't think it happens very much.
So, anytime you hear that, that, that should be like the bells should be going off and saying somebody's not getting credit here, and, but it's good storytelling.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, that's right. That's
right. So I don't know. Harry Hess he was a commander on a ship during World War II, but you couldn't take the science out of him. And I love that about it, this story is because like when he was a going from a one battle to the next he left the sonar going all the time, [00:17:00] day and night, the sonar was on and he was trying to like, get an idea as to what using sonar, what does the bottom of the ocean actually look like? Now he wasn't able to analyze this data, but he was collecting it. during the war. And, after the war, then he starts looking at all this data and he comes up with this idea that the ocean floor is spreading, you know, and he comes up with seafloor spreading. He writes papers on it. But Jesse, what about this? He just kind of like [00:17:30] mailed these papers to colleagues instead of trying to get it published. that doesn't happen today, does it? Like
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Uh, less frequently for sure. I mean, back then the scientific community working on plate, just the entire scientific community was much smaller. So, knew everybody in the field. I don't know everybody in the geochronology field. I don't know everybody in the zircon geochronology field.
Like, I don't know everybody in the zircon geochronology of
North
America field. Like the
Chris Bolhuis: everybody knows you though, Jesse, but everybody,
[00:18:00] yes,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that guy Chris Bolhuis? Aren't you his little sidekick? And I say, yeah, I'm his,
I know Chris Bolhuis. I'm
Chris Bolhuis: Oh, Hey,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris Bolhuis.
Chris Bolhuis: real quick too. So you're coming to town,
in a little
while. Right. And, I haven't talked about this with any of my students, but a lot of my students have been coming up to me and said, Hey, at this, event, I see that Dr. Jesse Reimink is going to be there, will we be able to meet him?
So you're going to have a [00:18:30] little, you're gonna have a
groupies running around there I don't, I don't know.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, you, when you.
Chris Bolhuis: to tell him it's not, he's not,
that impressive.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's
not that interesting, lower your expectations. That's the way I like to operate, just low expectations so that you can always, you know, achieve them.
Chris Bolhuis: that's right.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: so this Harry Hess thing, I, yeah, the, the, the mailing of manuscripts or the mailing of stuff around, it doesn't really happen, like, you don't, we kind of let that happen in peer review much more now.
and I don't know why [00:19:00] that is, I mean, maybe publications have been diluted a bit because, you know, we publish more now. we write, you know, a professor in my position writes way more papers than happened in this time period, you know, that we're talking about 1960s. So anyway, okay. why the
debate?
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. There's a couple like things that are swirling around this. Like you said, there were many people working on this kind of same idea at the same time. So here's another example is a guy by the name of Robert Dietz from Scripps published a paper in nature. so Jesse, [00:19:30] back then was nature still the, like a top tier journal
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, nature is always, I mean, it's, it's one of the first nature and science were kind of the first. So they've
always maintained that.
Chris Bolhuis: Okay, good. So he published this paper. It's called continents and ocean basin evolution by spreading of the seafloor. And this is right around the same time, maybe a little bit after Hess, but around the same time, he publishes this paper, you know, he wasn't mailing it out. He actually went through the [00:20:00] process and got this done. so he doesn't get any of the credit. Like I've never heard this backstory on seafloor spreading before, but they both came to the same conclusion, you know, basically at the same time. the credits given to Hess. And it's just, I don't know. It's interesting to me. Like why, you
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, in that I think Chris might have, well, I've got a story on that aspect on this sort of how you should behave maybe in this type of instance, like if you're Dietz and you are [00:20:30] like, publish this great paper you think is transforming and you're like, Oh, crap, somebody else circulated something that I didn't see a couple years before.
that's a tough pill to swallow, probably to turn to be like, Okay, yeah, you know, they, they got there first. I think in the modern era, because of publication, In the modern era, we treat peer reviewed papers, because we don't circulate pre written stuff, I mean, this is all changing and this gets complicated, but I think the world is a little bit of a different place than back then, so, anyway, I have [00:21:00] some thoughts on that, but I think we should probably bring in here, Marie Tharp as well, who is a
Chris Bolhuis: can we, before we do that though, Jesse, there's a, one other thing I want to say about the whole Dietz Hess thing
is that. In a textbook by Arthur Holmes in 1944, he had some of the same ideas that Hess had in
a book that was from World War II time. So this is 20 years before
Hess and Dietz came on the [00:21:30] scene. so I had never heard of this, but. I looked into the book buying this textbook, right?
And, and on Amazon, 1944, absolutely. for the edition that I would want to buy, it was 336 for, for the book. So I, I didn't buy it,
but I, I would like, I, it's, uh, I, I don't know, as I started digging into this and I fell down a little bit of rabbit hole on Arthur Holmes and holy cow, this, he was really amazing. [00:22:00]
way way ahead of his time,
you
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Totally.
Chris Bolhuis: Um, so I think it'd be a really interesting read.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah. So two things. If you're looking to buy Chris a present, there you go. That's the one. And if, um, and I, but I think this is the way it happens too, right? Like The people who come up, quote unquote, come up with an idea are very rarely just coming up from from zero to a hundred, the idea, they're pulling in different threads of different other people's work.
Science is this, we are building a mountain, and you don't just build it with one person overnight. You kind [00:22:30] of build this in in fits and starts and you aggregate different information to build the mountain. It's people like, you know, maybe Harry Hess who looked at this data and, and then aggregate it with other people's ideas and combine them in creative and unique ways to come up with this idea that eventually became seafloor spreading.
But, it's not just one piece of data, one idea that transforms the entire world. It takes more than that. You gotta think through all the other previous ideas that have been published. So it takes a lot of time. And Tharp real quick? Just a little side note on this. Marie Tharp [00:23:00] has.
I think rightfully so become name that more people recognize now and is being recognized as one of the original women who was not taken seriously at the time, um, unfortunately, because she was one of the very few women functioning in science at that time, because of all the societal things that have, we're improving upon, let's put it that way, but, um, Marie Tharp was working with Bruce Heeson, and they were kind of doing the same thing, mapping the symmetry of the seafloor, and what she really worked out, what the major [00:23:30] contributions were, which funnily enough were, were kind of Infamously dismissed as quote unquote girl talk initially, but producing maps, she discovered rift valleys at the middle of a mid ocean ridge, discovered that there's this like rift valley there in the middle of the ocean floor.
And actually her maps are in the library of Congress now. And they're beautiful maps to look at online, look at some images, but. We don't often hear about Marie Tharp, in part because she was one of the few women functioning at that time. We hear even less about Bruce Heason, [00:24:00] but they worked together for their whole careers, basically.
And I think that one of the reasons we don't hear about them is they had this unbelievable data set. She came up with rift valleys and produced a lot of the data that ended up being used. being incorporated into seafloor spreading, but they also, her and Bruce Thiessen, they both kind of hung on to the idea of Earth's expansion, explaining this, longer than the community did a little bit.
Like the movers and shakers in the late [00:24:30] 60s were talking about plate tectonics and they were still talking about expansion, which ended up being this, wrong model for how to explain seafloor spreading. So it kind of is like, you gotta be right. In a bunch of different ways. And you, you gotta be right, right, right.
And then you can't deviate off to a wrong interpretation and still get credit for what you did. I mean, you still get credit for what you did before, but like, you gotta be on the right path and it's hard to know what the right? path is because nobody knows what the answer is at that point in time. so
Chris Bolhuis: So you're, cog in the wheel basically. Or [00:25:00] you're
a, you're a sprocket, you know, you're one of these little things that that, helps turn the process, but you know, and then somebody else comes along, aggregates all of it
then they get the credit, you know,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, yeah, exactly. That, unfortunately, I think that's part of it. Right. And, and the people who aggregate these ideas into something new, we also have a tendency to look back and try and elevate people when actually it's just a bunch of cogs and wheels and it wasn't one transformative person.
It was a whole bunch of people, a bunch of different communities contributing to plate [00:25:30] tectonic
Chris Bolhuis: all right, Jesse. So. Continuing on with the plate tectonics, massive discoveries in this
holy cow, there's a lot happening in a very short period of time.
1963 paleomagnetism comes onto the scene and we're talking about ancient magnetism recorded on the ocean floor. And
we've talked about this before. It's this kind of like, barcode. pattern that you get on [00:26:00] each side of a mid ocean ridge in a spreading center.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, go to our Camp Geo audio book. We have a whole chapter, a whole episode on this, on the value of paleomagnetism, but a quick story, Chris, I did my postdoc at the Carnegie Institute's, what used to be called the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. And it was named that way because, they had the SS Carnegie, which was a ship that they drove around in the 1900s, 1915, 1916, that kind of era in MAP, Earth's Magnetic Field.
Um, They still had people on staff who were doing [00:26:30] magnetism by this time, the 1950s, 1960s, and the story goes that the director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, was like not convinced That paleomagnetism was really useful, or rock magnetism was really useful.
So went around, interviewed the staff scientists and said, okay, what are you doing? And why are you doing it? And apparently one of the paleomagnetists gave the wrong answer. It wasn't a compelling enough reason to do paleomagnetism. So they got let go and Carnegie, the department of terrestrial [00:27:00] magnetism did not focus on paleomagnetism and therefore missed out on the plate tectonic revolution because.
the people there, they had people making measurements not exactly like this, but working on rock magnetism. And, they got let go because it wasn't interesting and important enough science, and this was right before the plate tectonic
revolution came on the
Chris Bolhuis: Wow.
That's, um, that's a really cool story. I didn't know any of that backstory, Jesse,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, an interesting one. and not everybody knew that this was like a, a data set that was going to be unbelievably [00:27:30] useful.
Chris Bolhuis: right. I mean, holy cow, this, I think of it as, as the smoking gun of plate tectonics. This
paleomagnetic record is it's that important. And so in 1963, these two people, Vine and Matthews, they published a paper that linked seafloor spreading. to paleomagnetism. this barcode pattern that you get where you have normal magnetism and then reverse magnetism and so on and so on and so on, as you go kind of perpendicular away from a spreading center. Nine months before [00:28:00] this, before that paper, a Canadian geophysicist named Morley, he tried to publish a very similar paper and it was rejected. And so, kind of like your story,
where this person goes around and gets the wrong answer and it gets cut. A reviewer of this paper, he said this, he said, such speculation makes interesting talk at cocktail parties, but it's not the sort of thing that ought to be published under serious scientific, uh, what, like, [00:28:30] wow.
That's amazing.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: so this is, I mean, this is where we're getting into the, the randomness of peer review perhaps. And because, yeah, you could try and publish a transformative paper. And if you get the one or two reviewers who think it's complete lunacy and it gets rejected, then ultimately, you know, the world is missing out on that idea that might possibly be correct.
However, at the same token, there are many papers, and I've been a reviewer of papers and some of them ultimately get published, that I think [00:29:00] are pure conjecture and not based on facts. on any kind of sound reasoning. there is stuff that comes in that is not solid.
So like this is where it's, it's really hard. I mean, it's really hard. Do you just say, yeah, we publish everything. Some people would argue that some people would say we shouldn't ever have peer review. There's this big movement in, science publication to have preprint things where you an idea, you write up a paper before you submit it to a journal, you post it on some server somewhere and therefore it exists and anybody can look at [00:29:30] it.
And it's not peer reviewed, but anybody can look at it. And then there's other people who say, yeah, peer review is a really powerful and useful tool for filtering out good ideas from bad ideas, et cetera. and there's examples on both sides of this debate. And this is one where like, yeah, sucks to be morally because you got the bad reviewers, whereas Vine and Matthews had some reviewers that were like, okay, it might be wrong, but publish it
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, I had a question as I was putting this together that, is this the most significant discovery or advance in [00:30:00] the history of geoscience to ever get denied?
You think?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'd have to think about that. That's a very good question. I'd have to think about that one a bit. Um,
Chris Bolhuis: Okay, well, while you're pondering that question, then I have a, another backup to this.
Is that, do you think maybe that Morley just didn't write a compelling paper,
to Vine and Matthews? Is that maybe
what you're saying?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: well, possibly,
or,
Chris Bolhuis: haven't, we, yeah, but.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: there's all sorts of, of biases that have been proven in peer review, where you can submit the same [00:30:30] paper with different author names, different author genders, etc. Submit the same exact text, and it gets reviewed very, very differently.
And part of that is there are biases in society. Like we all kind of know that everybody has their own biases, but also part of that is the randomness of reviewers. Like if I sent one paper written by me to three reviewers and they reviewed it, and then I sent it to three different reviewers, I'd get a very different review process just because they're different people and they have different takes and they have different standards, et cetera, et cetera. [00:31:00] So I have no idea. I mean, it could have been just. Got some cranky reviewers and that's unfortunate. but the good news is, is that like in the modern publication world, if it gets rejected somewhere, what we do in our research group, and we had this happen, I just had my first PhD student's paper published, his first paper published, it got rejected initially at geology.
for what I think were kind of unfair and unfortunate reasons, but, you know, re take some of the good comments into consideration, revise it, make it more [00:31:30] robust. Now it's just been published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. So, you know, it was only, it took nine months of extra time, but now it's published in a different way.
A different journal, basically, longer format journal, different reviewer set, you know, so, this happens, but you just kind of kind of stick with it. You know what I mean? You stick with it. If you think it's a worthwhile idea, you, take the reviews into consideration and revise it and then resubmit it.
so I'm curious. why that maybe didn't happen with Morley back then. Maybe there weren't that many papers or journals to publish this stuff. [00:32:00] So, it's a really interesting question though.
Chris Bolhuis: Jesse, I'm all tensed up right now. When you
talk about this, seriously, I am,
my legs, I can like, I'm all tensed up right
now because I can't put my finger on it. There's
something about this process that really bothers me.
Um, And maybe also that I'm, I'm being defensive of you.
And I'm like, wait a minute, somebody had the, somebody did that. Like,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: so
Chris Bolhuis: a minute,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: this is about to go rumble. Somebody who's being mean to Jesse's
Chris Bolhuis: That's a [00:32:30] possibility,
but, um, but there's no, there's something that really bothers me,
I think about this process, but
I don't know what
it is.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: okay, so maybe, let me tell a couple quick stories, and they'll be
brief. I'll tell a couple stories
from my little world of the geosciences here, about publications and how this happens. Then I'll give you my perspective on it, like what I tell my research students, my PhD students who I'm supervising.
So, In 1991, late 80s, early 90s, we've talked about thermal ionization mass [00:33:00] spectrometry, basically it's a lightbulb, you heat up ions, and they boil off, and you send them into the mass spectrometer. this was known for a while, late 80s, really revolutionized.
The entire field, we got all sorts of uranium lead, geochronology out of it, all sorts of age information. People realized that there were other isotope systems that they wanted to do this method with, but the elements just didn't ionize very well. And one we're talking about here is rhenium and osmium, and people realized this would be really great for studying shales or for understanding how the [00:33:30] mantle formed.
And so there was decades of work. I mean, people spent years trying to develop mass spectrometers to analyze this thing. 1991 kind of rolls around. There's a paper by Rob Creaser, Creaser et al, 1991. All they did, really, was they flipped the mass spectrometer end for end, meaning they turned it from positive to negative.
So all they would do is they would create negative ions instead of positive ones. And, lo and behold, they could generate rhenium and osmium ions and [00:34:00] measure them very, very, well. And so, basically, I was at the lab, I was at Carnegie DTM, This lab was doing all sorts of complicated machines to try and analyze rhenium osmium.
It had a whole room dedicated to like laser light and bombing it with ions and trying to generate positive osmium ions. And then the staff scientists at Carnegie got this paper, this Kreischer et al paper, the manuscript to review. They were sent it to review, they read it. And so the story goes, they said, holy crap.
That's the answer. [00:34:30] So they called up Creaser et al, who are out California, said, Hey, I just got this paper to review. It's great. I'm going to recommend, acceptance. This is a great piece of work. Great idea. Can I use your method right now? Can I go into the lab today and flip my mass spectrometer over, flip the polarity and do your technique before this paper is published?
They said, Yeah, great. You're going to submit it. as long as the paper is published, we want credit. Great. that's nice, right? so they went into the lab, Carnegie staff went into the lab next day, switched the polarity mass spectrometer, [00:35:00] started making their measurements in rhenium osmium, and then forever cited Creaser et al as the ones who came up with this method that transformed their field, that's the way it should work.
However, there's a substantial amount of debate about how that research group got the idea to flip the magnet, to flip the polarity of the instrument. And, there's discussion about whether this idea was. I've heard at some conference in Europe and it's kind of taken from some chemists who were behind the Soviet bloc and, you know, there's all sorts of like stories [00:35:30] about who came up with this idea.
But again, it's kind of, it is an example of. Multiple research groups working on the same problem. They all know about the same problem. They're all working on solutions. And then the solution kind of gets iterated and passed around over the course of a couple of years. And then boom, there's a publication.
Everybody cites that one publication.
Chris Bolhuis: Okay. So you're saying that Creaser et al got the credit,
but maybe a little bit of controversy that there were other people that were doing the same thing at the
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. That may be, where did the initial idea come from to [00:36:00] flip the polarity of the instrument? But the point is, is that Creaser et al, the first ones to publish it.
Chris Bolhuis: me hop on a plane and get back to the U S and
publish
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'm exactly that. That's, I mean, if you listen to one side of the debate and, and Rob Creaser's at University of Alberta, and I've talked to him about this.
He was, it wasn't on my advisory committee, but You just don't know, like, there's no way to know. but the point is, is that multiple people are working on the same ideas and they all in the Carnegie group has their own like view of how this went down, but basically they say.
Yeah, we got the paper in review next [00:36:30] day, we gave him a call, said, Hey, can we do it? We flipped our mass spectrometer. Boom. We're making measurements end of story. So I think it kind of just shows how this works. And there's one other story, Chris, real quick in 2001, the early earth community had a revolution.
Chris Bolhuis: You were a freshman in my earth
science in
2001.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: um, so, prior to 2001, people thought that the Hadean Earth, the early Earth, was this sort of hellish like environment, [00:37:00] 2001. there were two papers published in the same issue of Nature, that looked at, the oxygen isotope composition of early earth zircons.
And if you want to know more, go to our
Chris Bolhuis: hold on. Are we, are we talking about 016 and 018 then? Are those
Dr. Jesse Reimink: 018,
Chris Bolhuis: of, okay.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: exactly. If you want to know more details, we have a chapter in our audiobook on this topic. Basically, just exclusively this. You can see some figures and and go to our camp geo app.
You can get that information there. But basically these two papers published, [00:37:30] not exactly the same measurements, but the same style of measurements. These are auctionized measurements of Jack Hill zircons in the same issue. two different journal articles, two different author lists in the exact same issue of Nature in 2001.
So, you know, you kind of think, how did this happen that they're doing at the same time? And again, there's different, stories depending upon whom you ask, but basically the editor at Nature, what likely happened is they got one manuscript. to review, [00:38:00] and they sent it out for review, and then they got very quickly another manuscript that did the very similar things, and they're like, crap, we got two papers doing the same stuff at the same time, we should give them equal credit and equal opportunity, so we're gonna review it.
Publish them intentionally together at the same time. So there's again many stories about who came up with this initially did one group get the paper to review quickly make the measurements quickly throw together a manuscript in a week and then submit it, copy it and try and steal this idea in some [00:38:30] way, shape or form.
Or were they really just two groups working in parallel at the same time? Like many different versions of this story. What happens is everybody cites the two papers. If you're going to cite one of them, you cite both of them. It's Wild et al., 2001, and Moisius et al.,
2001.
Chris Bolhuis: they come to the same conclusions?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Basically the same conclusion that there was liquid water on the surface of the earth by that point in time.
slight variations on that, and some of them were more dramatic about it than others. some were more conservative [00:39:00] interpretations of the data and some were more extreme interpretations, but broadly the same theme. And this has happened. Nature has, has done this a couple of times.
So Chris, I'm curious how. Does that calm you a little bit, like these, these stories of, or is it still unsettling?
Chris Bolhuis: yeah, I'm still a little bothered. I I'm, really I'm upset that I can't place it. What is bothering me about it? But I've felt this way before when we talked about Earth's oldest materials,
when we [00:39:30] put that, visual podcast series together. and we we've kind of circled this topic a lot in our, in previous episodes and, yeah, I don't know.
I'm bothered that I can't also like, Figure out why, does this process bother
me? There's, there's something that rubs me the wrong way on it.
I'm interested, Jesse, if our listeners will send us some emails, if they have
ideas this too, like, what's, wrong with it? Or maybe there's something wrong with me,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: no, I think you're right. I, and Chris, sit back, lean back. I'll give you the spiel I give my graduate [00:40:00] students when they, when they start and inevitably kind of struggle with this with their own data. my view of the world is that credit matters. Especially early on in your career when you're a new student or a, you're a PhD student and, you know, you, you want to have a paper where you're the one who did something and is the first to do something.
Now, we're not talking about revolutionizing the earth sciences with something like plate tectonics. we're talking about much smaller scale, but nonetheless, like credit matters. So how do you get [00:40:30] credit? Honestly, like honest credit, how do you get the credit you deserve? Well, you've got to publish is my view.
so I think you, you got to publish it, but you also have to be reasonable about what credit you deserve, because there are many different research groups that are circling, in my view, the same ideas. Like we just published this paper in Nature, Andy Smy and I, on heat production and formation of cratons.
Within a couple of weeks, we had an email or a couple emails from people being like, Oh, interesting paper. We've been thinking [00:41:00] along the same lines or we've been working on this or, Oh, shoot. You know, I see you guys published that there's there's other people who are coming up with solutions to problems in parallel. I kind of feel like everybody who's working on. Problems has the same ideas. It's just who carries them out. who like does the work and writes it up. That's the main thing. I think, you know, there's a lot of very, there's a lot of people inside. many, many people smarter than I am, who are [00:41:30] very, very smart, very bright, have lots of interesting thoughts and ideas.
The key acting upon them. The key is like, let's go make the measurements and then let's sit down for six months and write the paper. that's the hard work and that's the key work that will make sure you get credit You know what I mean?
So that's what kind of what I tell my students is like, it's actually about carrying out the work, like everybody's got the same ideas. You're going to, my student who just published this, what I think is a really cool paper in earth and planetary science letters. It's a really cool data set, really cool paper.
my [00:42:00] advice is, Hey, go in there, talk about your stuff. there are people who are going to come up and be like, Oh, I had that idea in you gotta be like, okay, good. There's two things here. First of all, I've done it. I've done the work and I wrote the paper.
So it's published now. Doesn't matter if you had the idea in 2008. But also be humble about it because it's, it's also like, Lots of people have these ideas. So you're not like the smartest person in the room because you've published one paper, but you did do the work. So there's like, you, you gotta
work to get the credit you deserve, but also be [00:42:30] honest about how much credit you deserve.
and my opinion is, is there's not that much,
Chris Bolhuis: I think, yeah, I guess like a lot of what's done now, especially in geoscience, you people. You're doing work, but you're standing on the shoulders of
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Absolutely. Absolutely. So that's what I mean by the, be honest about what credit you deserve. Cause you're not, you're not sitting down and coming up with a revolutionary idea out of thin air. we're part of a big community of scientists. and, and that's great. You should be, you should be building out other people's work.
You should be [00:43:00] talking to people at conferences and there should be, somebody might say something that kind of, fires off a neural connection in your brain. That's like, Oh wait, I could apply that to my data. And that's really cool. But you didn't come up with that just sitting there being quiet in your office.
Like, you're part of a community and that fabric kind of binds the community together. Now, on the same token, there are bad actors. There are people who will steal graduate students ideas honestly just like steal it, publish it, and claim it as their own. And that happens. And that's very unfortunate that that happens.
and [00:43:30] frankly, I think it's BS. and anybody who, who kind of does that should be, Reprimanded massively. It's really hard to prove, but you know, you'll hear stories about that of there are people who will see a good idea and take it as their own. and that sucks. It's not the majority, though. I don't think I think it's a small minority of people, but they often they tend to be loud ones. So
Chris Bolhuis: Yes. Yeah, I bet.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I don't know if
that's that's helpful or still unsettling. He's still
Chris Bolhuis: I don't know. I gotta
think [00:44:00] about this. I I really don't know. Um
I'm not tense anymore.
My mind is going though. I'm going a thousand miles an hour as
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'm curious if you, if you work out what's causing your tension, I'd be curious. I'm very curious to hear
Chris Bolhuis: Okay,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: what you think about
Chris Bolhuis: for sure. But as you were rambling on there, um, did have a thought. I got, I got an email from a former student, who is, she's working on her PhD so it's kind of like along the same line. She wants to, she asked me if I was aware [00:44:30] of any research being done on Jasper Knob. The,
the, the banded iron formation.
and I said, my response to her was, unfortunately, I'm not aware of any. And, you know, she replied back, well, actually that's really fortunate for me. You know, but I said, unfortunately, because. I like to take students there and, there's just a lot that I think we don't know about it yet.
know, we've talked about banded iron formations in previous episodes and you know some people that are doing some cutting [00:45:00] edge
research with them that, you know, um, but anyway, I just, I, that email that I recently got in the last few weeks, uh, just popped into my head as we were just working through this discussion
because it's, it's kind of the same thing, right?
I mean, she's, she's, looking for something that hopefully nobody else is working on and
beat her to the punch, you
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Right, Yeah. It's a tough, it's a tough strategic decision to make. Like, do you want to be working on something that a bunch of people are working on? because that means it's popular and it's important and it's interesting [00:45:30] and it's useful. Or do you want to be working on something that nobody's working on because there's no competition and maybe you've got your first crack at it and, but maybe it's, nobody's working on it.
Because it's not that interesting. So it's a, you know, there's a huge gray area between those
two
sort of end members, but, um, it's a tough one. who gets credit is a, is a big discussion though. And this is something we talk about our graduate students. You know, we have to, there's some number of hours you have to spend on like professional development and sort of, ethics [00:46:00] and things like that.
And this is always one of the discussions, like who gets
credit, how do you
deal with that? How do you think about that? Yeah. Yeah,
Chris Bolhuis: gets the credit
because, because, uh, my skill is I steal stuff from everybody and I use it.
I take the good, nobody gets the credit for the stuff that I, talk I, I take these really good stuff, these good examples. And, I just talk
Dr. Jesse Reimink: You just use it. Yeah.
Chris Bolhuis: the credit.[00:46:30]
So
my world.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So
listener, don't, you know, don't talk about your best ideas around Chris Bolhuis cause he's just going to steal them from you and
run with them.
Chris Bolhuis: steal them. I That's what
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Pretty loud too. So he's probably going to get credit cause he's one of the loud ones. That's funny though.
Chris Bolhuis: That hurt
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I like that
visual. Nobody Bolhuis world. Oh, that's excellent.
I'll be I steal from you all the time, I was just, uh, in class, [00:47:00] I was
using the light, the
No, of course not. No. Heck no. Are you kidding me? I used the lighter over the paper for a mantle plume,
Chris Bolhuis: Oh, yeah. So, hey, there's a new derivative of off from
that, right? And if you take one paper and you, put a lighter underneath it, that's oceanic crust, uh, take a stack of papers and put a lighter over it and imagine like how, the way the heat would have to traverse that stack of
and that simulates like a hotspot beneath, continental crust,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: oh, nice. Okay. For Yellowstone.
Okay. That's a
good
one.
All I'll do that. [00:47:30] Hey, well, this was a fun discussion, Chris. I like it. And I'm, and let me know, uh, how your tension sorts itself out. I'm
curious to know. Wow, that evolves.
Chris Bolhuis: I will.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Cool.
Chris Bolhuis: for a while.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Hey, that's a wrap. You can support us in many different ways.
You can go to planetgeocast. com. There's a merch store. You can get some sweatshirts and hats and t shirts, things like that with Planet Geo. They're pretty good, pretty comfortable. Loving it right now. You can also download our Camp Geo app, the mobile app. It's the first link in your show notes.
There we have visual podcast series for sale, a bunch of free [00:48:00] content as well. So check it out. Leave us a rating and a review in your app store. if you download the Camp Geo app, you can send us an email planetgeocast. gmail. com and follow us on all the social medias at Planet Geocast.
Chris Bolhuis: Cheers.
