Alberto Malinverno

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This transcript is based on a video-recorded interview deposited at MarE3, JAMSTEC (Yokosuka, Japan).

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Interview of Alberto Malinverno by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2025 April 30, International Center Vienna (Vienna, Austria). [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is 30th of April of 2025. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius, historian of science at JAMSTEC, and I am at the Vienna International Center with Alberto Maliverno. Thank you very, very, very much.

Alberto Malinverno (AM): Sure.

BMR: Can you please say your name, affiliation and position?

AM: Yes. Alberto Malinverno; I am a Lamont research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. It’s in Palisades, New York. It’s about 20km or so north of New York City.

BMR: What have been your research interests, broadly speaking?

AM: I’ve done many different things. If I have to sort of say what’s the overarching, I’ve always been really interested in applying some kind of quantitative method to the earth sciences, to the solid earth sciences. That’s where I’m coming from. That’s kind of been the common thing. I started in geology; I have a sort of a classical geology education. Then, I got more interested in this quantitative side, so when I finished my degree in Italy and I went to study in the US, I turned more towards geophysics, especially with statistical applications.

So, if I have to say in a few words what I am, I guess I’m more of a marine geology and geophysics person – that’s my general background.

BMR: What sparked your interest in earth sciences, in the first place?

AM: When it was time to decide what to do at the university – in the Italian system, when I was finishing, it’s quite different, say, from the US system where they have liberal arts schools – I had to decide right away what you want to do. I think it’s the same in other European countries. I was really interested in many things: I was interested in philosophy – I love that – but my only references for philosophy were the teachers in my high school. And I thought, either you become a real star or… I don’t know that I want to do that.

But, by chance, one of my classmates was – is, and he’s still a good friend – was the son of Maria Bianca Cita. One day Maria Bianca came to the school with a movie. It was a 16 millimeter movie of the Glomar Challenger; you can actually find this movie on YouTube, it’s still around. And I remember – it’s not that I walked out of that thinking, “Oh, this is what I want to do”, but it planted a seed, right? When you plant a seed, then it may grow.

As I grew up, I was always fascinated by exploration. I am of the generation that saw a lot of the Jacques Cousteau stuff and things like that. So, again, when it came time to think of what to do, I wanted to do something scientific, something technical, because I figured that if you know something like that, you have something, you can make a contribution, and so on. Then I thought, “geology sounds good!”, and I had the example of Maria Bianca in mind. When I went to the university, I started working with her – and the rest is how I got here, basically.

BMR: Can you just remind where are you from?

AM: From Milano, in Italy, and Maria Bianca was at the University of Milano.

BMR: Has your family any relation to science?

AMB: No, no. My father was a civil engineer, so I think he would have loved if I had studied engineering. But engineering felt a little too dry for me. I don’t know why. But also, my idea was that if I studied geology, I would see the world and I… Yeah, I definitely got my wish.

BMR: So, how did you come to work with Maria? Was it because of your friend?

AM: Well, she knew about me through my friend. Honestly, I don’t remember exactly how, but I remember her giving me a strange task – it was strange for me – which was to pick foraminifera, and this was over the Christmas holiday. It was either my first year at the university or my second year. So, my job was to pick out a few benthonic forams [foraminifera] out of a sample. And these forams were then sent to Nick Shackleton, to do some of the first studies on stable oxygen isotopes. I discovered that because Maria Bianca was great at always acknowledging people, so I found the paper that she wrote with Nick, and I’m in the acknowledgments as one of those who helped.

I remember, I hardly knew what a foram was, right? So, I said that to her, “I don’t know what to do”. And she basically said, “Oh, just pick the big ones”. (laughs) except for the Orbulina. These are perfectly spherical ones, and these are planktonic and can get pretty big. And I remember going home during the Christmas break with this microscope, one of those in a bell-shaped container, right? I put it on my desk at home and I started picking; I just did the best I could. At the end, she was happy with the results – she checked everything.

I think it was the way she worked. She would give you challenging tasks. And this is something I learned from her, that this is how you actually build confidence in your students: not by telling them exactly what to do, from A to Z, but rather tell them, “Do this. Do the best you can. If it doesn’t work, we’ll figure it out. But just do it”. And then, when you realize that you can do it, that’s exactly what gets you somewhere and, again, builds confidence. And you become curious. You say, “Well, if I could do this, then I could do something else”, and so on and so forth.

I never worked with forams again. She was a great micropaleontologist but somehow, she found for my thesis there — a thesis was part of my course of study — she was able to get a large number of seismic reflection profiles, and that’s what I studied.

BMR: How did you get involved in scientific ocean drilling?

AM:It’s a strange route. I went to study in the US at the place where I’m now, at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. I stayed on, after graduating, for 2 or 3 years as an assistant, associate research scientist, and the like. Then I was offered to work for Schlumberger, the well logging company. They had a research lab in Connecticut, not far from Lamont, about an hour away. At that point, I was looking to do something different – I could never do the same thing for too long. Always, after a few years, I kind of figured I’ve done what I could, and I said what I wanted to say. If I keep doing this, I think I’m just running in circles. So, I want to do something different.

I worked for Schlumberger for about 13 years, but I always had in mind the idea of returning to the academic side. And that’s what I did. So, in 2005, I went back to Lamont. That’s when I started getting involved with the Ocean Drilling Program, IODP at that point, it was one of the first incarnations of the acronym. Lamont had the group that was taking care of the downhole logging, so it was a natural fit to go back to that group. So, for several years, I was supervising the group of logging scientists that went on the ship all the time, and I did also go. My first time out was, in fact, in 2005, on the Cascadia margin, offshore the western US and Canada. It was a gas hydrate expedition. It was really interesting in many ways and it was, again, a really good fit for what I had learned.

Then I started at Lamont and my role changed, and now I’m more of a research scientist in general, not just downhole logging.

BMR: Let me go back to your PhD times. I would have assumed that, because you worked with Bill Ryan, you would have been introduced to scientific ocean drilling during that time.

AM: Right. No, the reason I wasn’t there is that Bill’s career also evolved. He’s very well-known for the Mediterranean, with Maria Bianca and Ken Hsü [Kenneth J. Hsü], for the discovery of the Mediterranean desiccation, and the model for the formation of the big evaporites. But after that, I think he was involved in one more… So that was in 1970 and after that I think he was involved in another leg, but that was well before my time, because I met him in 1978.

BMR: The second DSDP expedition in the Mediterranean was in the 1975, I think?

AM: Yes, but I don’t think he was directly involved with that. After that… Let me get the years straight. In 1978 is when I first met Bill, and I went to sea with him. It was a collaboration, again, with Maria Bianca and was a cruise on an American ship in the Mediterranean, dredging the Malta escarpment – east of Sicily – and then coring on the Mediterranean Ridge. That was my introduction to the practice, really, of marine geology. And the way I found it was very interesting.

After that, I graduated; then, I had to do military service, which was mandatory at that time in Italy. And after that, I went to the US. So, I started my PhD in the US in 1984. By that time, Bill’s interest was really in a different direction. He had developed a very innovative, state-of-the-art sonar system, to image the ocean floor over a very wide swath. It’s a side-looking sonar system. Over five kilometers – you get a five kilometers wide swath. It’s something akin to an aerial photograph. In air, light travels very well, but in the ocean it doesn’t. But sound travels very well in the ocean, so you can use sound as if it was light, in a sense, and you can illuminate the seafloor. It was originally built with funds from Jack Grimm, a Texas oilman millionaire who wanted to find the Titanic. Bill was one of the first looking for the Titanic with this kind of equipment. And they didn’t find it but then, Bob Ballard at Woods Hole found the Titanic, and Bill went back to the data and saw where the Titanic was. And they had not seen it.

But anyway, the good thing of that system wasn’t really the search for the Titanic; it was the fact that now Bill had that system to do some really interesting science on mid-ocean ridges and on continental margins. That was his big activity when I came into his group, rather than ocean drilling.

BMR: I think it will be interesting to talk about what kind of mentors were Maria Bianca Cita and Bill Ryan.

AM: Both of them were really good fit for me. I think that is really a two-way street in many ways. I don’t think there are mentors that are absolutely good for everybody – that doesn’t exist. But, you know, you have to find the person that really works well with you. And both of them gave me a lot of freedom. I had things to do, obviously, but I was never overwhelmed with it. And I loved that. Other students did not like that; they did not like not having close supervision but to me, that was a big plus, for them.

And Maria Bianca – I’m going to say this in a session in memory of her that’s coming up on Friday morning, I think (note: EGU2025); there’re several people who studied with her, and we are going to speak briefly. One of the things I’ll say is that, one of the first things she asked me was, “Ma tu sei bravissimo?”, which means, “Are you really good?” And, I remember… I don’t know what I said, I must have said something like, “I’ll try my best” – what do you answer to that? But then I realized what she was saying, it was a challenge. She was telling me, if you want to work with me, you have to really be there. That was the kind of thing that both, she and Bill, were very good at. They would give you tasks. They would give you things to do that were difficult, they weren’t obvious, you didn’t have full instructions (laughs), and you had to figure it out. And I’ve always loved that.

So to me, going to sea — and if we want to sort of turn back towards ocean drilling — when you are an ocean drilling expedition, or any marine geology, geophysics, or oceanography expedition, whatever, you’re on the ship, you’re in the middle of the ocean, it’s a closed system, and you have to figure things out. And nothing ever, ever, goes according to the plan. You plan, obviously, that’s absolutely essential; but nothing goes according to plan. And then, you have to figure it out on your own – not exactly on your own, I mean, it’s a collaborative thing, it’s not a solitary thing; but it has to be figured out somehow.

To me, that’s always been so fascinating. And again, in a way, your brain has to be wired that way. If it’s wired that way, it’s great. If instead you’re not comfortable with that kind of thing, then then it’s difficult, right?

BMR: This makes me think that having freedom is also something you should learn how to manage, right?

AM: Yes, absolutely. The other thing that they [Maria Bianca and Bill] were absolutely excellent at is they would let you make mistakes. And, when you make a mistake, it’s not a big deal, one way or another. And this is how you learn. They were fantastic at that. I was really lucky to have that good match, my most important mentors.

BMR: So, how was like your first experience onboard the JOIDES Resolution?

AM: It was 2005 and I was one of the logging scientists. It was really good for downhole logging, that expedition, because it’s one of the few expeditions where we also used logging-while-drilling, which is a highly specialized technique. I knew about it, because I had worked for Schlumberger research, but it hasn’t been used very much in scientific ocean drilling because it’s so expensive, basically.

For me, it was really interesting to see that, to be there as the data were being acquired. This is one of the great experiences on ocean drilling, that you go from the very physical, brutal part that is drilling, to the collection of samples or of data for logging. And then, the analysis of those samples with some of the most sophisticated equipment on Earth. And it’s these full, from the hole in the bottom of the ocean, to the science you can do – it’s the full experience, that it’s so good. If you only had a piece of it, it wouldn’t be so good. If you never had been on the on the ship, you wouldn’t appreciate the whole chain, and you wouldn’t really understand all the ins and outs of the process; how good the data really are, what are the weaknesses; you may be missing something, and so on.

BMR: One parenthesis about logging while drilling – I was on Chikyu expedition this winter, and they were doing logging-while-drilling. And, you know, I had read about it but I’d never paid much attention to it. But it’s so incredible! To think that the data is coming up — there’s no cable, there’s nothing!

AM: Yes, there’s nothing. It’s acoustic telemetry.

BMR: It just blows up my mind; we were drilling in seven kilometers of water.

AM: Yeah. I was somewhat used to that in that. On my first expedition in the Mediterranean, we were using transponders, called transponder navigation. This is the late 70s, it’s a while ago, but still it was well developed. It was developed at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and there are these transponders on the bottom, where they’re placed, and you drive the ship around them, you interrogate them – which means you send down a signal at a certain frequency – and they answer back. You have the travel time it takes; you have the distance from each of the transponders. If you have three of them, you know where you are.

So, I was used to that. But the ocean is a comparatively quiet place, acoustically. The fact that you can do this kind of transmission through the drilling column, which is anything but quiet, has always been an amazing thing to me, but they can make it.

BMR: Coming from the industry, and being now on a scientific drillship, what kind of differences did you find?

AM: Well, they are not really different. The people – this is another interesting thing of ocean drilling. You come into contact with the drilling crew, the drillers; the supervisors of the drilling, and so on and so forth. And they’re very practical people, obviously. They do their best to satisfy what you’re asking for, obviously. But those people are the same people. They have great pride in their technical ability, achievements, in their practice… They’re really interesting people, in that sense.

And being in industry or being on the drillship, it’s not really that different. The goals are different, obviously, and the way you treat time, and cost, is different. But in industry, I was also very lucky because I worked in a research lab where I was also given a lot of freedom, which people in academia don’t expect. The way the lab was working is, I wasn’t really told what to do. I had to come up with ideas on what to do. They had to have, obviously, some use for the company, but it wasn’t the company telling me what to do. I had to figure out what to do. And, of course, I liked that. In fact, I was able to develop in a different direction. I was given the time and the basic tools to do that.

At the end, I was managing a small group where we were working on quantifying the uncertainty that you have in interpretation, given that you have different kinds of measurements. That was clearly interesting, because you could show how, if you want to reduce uncertainty, you need more data. It’s the only way to do it. Everything else is… doesn’t really do it. So, again, I was in an environment that was, obviously, industrial research, but that wasn’t that different from academia. I was very lucky there, as well, and that’s why I liked it. That’s why I stayed for it for a long while.

One thing I saw is that these two sides think – there’s always this feeling that the neighbor’s yard is always greener. People that worked in industry thought, “Oh, people in academia, that have it easy!”; “no, no, no, they don’t have it easy. I’ve been there” (laughs). And people in academia say, “oh, people in industry, they’re doing second-rate work” – no, no, it’s not second-rate! From the point of view of how intellectually challenging it was, it was the same. They’re doing different things, but the intellectual challenge, the interesti in coming up with solutions, and how difficult it is, it’s same.

The Logging-While-Drilling (LWD) team aboard the JOIDES Resolution, during IODP Expedition 311 in the Cascadian margin. Alberto appears in both pictures wearing a green jacket. Credit: IODP/JRSO

BMR: So actually, your experience in the industry was enriching not only from a perspective of the skills you acquired, but also in the way of understanding the job. What kind of skills or expertise do you think you brought to the program?

AM: At the beginning, the most important thing was to come in with knowledge of the data that was acquired in downhole logging. I knew about the practice of that; I could understand what each measurement was doing, and so on. I had been trained in Schlumberger to understand the basic physics and what each piece of information was really giving you. That was definitely my contribution, at that point.

And then, if you follow downhole logging, you have to follow the drilling process. If you’re looking at cores, it’s not that you don’t have to, but you’re not so close. In other words, you get the core section and you start looking at it. And how exactly got there, of course, is important, but you can kind of put it to the side. In logging, no, you can’t do that. In logging while drilling, you’re drilling while you’re logging, so you clearly are on top of that. And in downhole logging, even the condition of the hole is really important.

So, at the end, my last work for the ocean drilling program was to be the co-chief in an expedition in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Expedition 402. One of the big advantages was to have had the experience I had on the logging side, which was really experience with the drilling; because we had a lot of drilling problems, we had to deal with that somehow, and that really served me well. I think it helped with the success of the expedition.

BMR: How did how does the perspective on the science team changes, being a member of the science party to being the co-chief?

AM: If you’re a member of the science party, you’re really focused on your job, which is a specific part. I’ve been a member, I’ve been on the JR — one expedition was not for the ocean drilling program, but I’ve been on a total of six. So, in four of them, I was a member of the science party as a logging scientist, and you’re focused on your measurements.

When you’re a co-chief, to me, what you should be focused on – and that’s just how I view it – is on maximizing the recovery of material and data collection. And I think the best way to do that is not to superimpose your own interests on what is going on, but just say, “this is the goal of this program, and we really need to do the best we can to get as much core as we can, to get as much data as we can”. So, that’s the difference in focus. And, again, in some cases, you may have to cut short certain things. You have to make decisions that can be painful. There could be people who are on the ship who are really interested in something, but it turns out we cannot do it for a reason or in other… And you have to manage that.

BMR: How did these 5 or 6 expeditions drive your career, your science? What have been the sort of milestones in your way?

AM: My first expedition was on gas hydrates. So, I got interested in gas hydrates, and it was a really good fit, because if you come from the industry side, of course the industry is interested in hydrocarbons. And it turns out that the way to find hydrocarbons and characterize hydrocarbons in logging data is exactly the same as to characterize gas hydrates, because they’re both electrical insulators. So, you can find them measuring the electrical resistivity, for example. They both occupy the pore space in sedimentary rocks. It’s not exactly the same thing but, you see, it’s a similar thing. So, for a long while, I had a strong interest in methane hydrates; and then it shifted from just characterizing, to trying to understand how they form, where is the methane coming from, which has always been a really interesting thing to me — you can kind of go there and say, “Okay, I’ve got a gas hydrate here, and I got gas hydrate there”; okay, sure, but where did it come from? In some cases, it could be migrating from the deep; but in many cases, these are actually made by microbes locally, or deep, coming up. That opened the door towards the deep biosphere. I was always fascinated with – I’m not a biologist in any way, but I’ve always been fascinated by that. That’s where my big ocean drilling-related interest has been.

BMR: I guess you have work with other programs and other international collaborations that are not on scientific ocean drilling.

AM: You mean like [IODP]? IODP is really pretty much a unique animal, in that it’s very hard to find a program that has been so international and on such a scale. I’ve had collaborations with lots of people in the US and outside, for example; but I cannot think of anything close to that.

BMR: Yeah, exactly. I was going to ask, how IODP compares to other types of programs?

AM: You know, one thing that I think we don’t stress enough, that everybody knows it but we don’t point it out enough, is that from day one – now we have all of this wonderful trend towards open science, open publication, data being public… And it’s a relatively new thing, if you think of it; it’s the last decade or so.

But if you think of the Deep Sea Drilling Program, in 1968, from day one – and it wasn’t digital, it was the “Blue Book”; the ones that are actually green, right? (laughs) – the scientific ocean drilling has been an absolute pioneer in open science and, to me, that is a fantastic feature, that was really an inspiration. And the idea that, look, it’s an expensive program. It’s costly. But just because of that, then everything should be available, all the results should be available to everyone. It makes no sense to hide them away.

I remember in the early part of my career, for other marine geology, geophysic-types of expeditions, the data were kept by whoever the principal investigator was. That never made sense to me, but because I had the example of ocean drilling… That’s a tremendous feature. I’m just pointing it out because I’ve never seen it stressed as it should be, this characteristic of open science.

BMR: Actually, I think you’re the first person who mentioned it to me, so explicitly. And I think what’s interesting is, it’s not only the data in the reports, but also the cores.

AM: Yes.

BMR: I’m not sure how many earth scientists know that they can get samples, and anyone can do their studies…

AM: Yeah.

BMR: I don’t know how unique this is.

AM: it’s close to [being unique]. In a way, I kind of see that strongly because I come from Lamont; and Lamont has been a data collection place. Is called ‘an observatory’ – people now and then show up and ask, “Where is the telescope?”; we don’t have anything like that (laughs). We are an Earth Observatory. The name was changed; it was called the Geological Observatory, but because there’s more than geology going on there, the name was changed. It has a tradition of data collection that goes back to the very beginning.

The founder of Lamont was Maurice Ewing and one of the things he did very early on was to – in some way that’s unclear to me how he was able to purchase a ship, the Vema – and graduate students would be sent on the Vema. This is the experience the Bill [Ryan] had; I didn’t have that experience, I was way after that. But they were put on the ship and they were told, “Okay, you’re going from, say, Buenos Aires to Cape Town”, and as you cross the ocean, every day you stop, so you collect sonar data on the way. Every day you stop wherever you are, you take a bottom photograph and you take a core.

And it’s was very different from the way we do things now, where everything has to be super planned and you have to say, “I want to take a core or drill a hole here, rather than there, because it’s very important that you see this rather than that.” No, it was exploratory. Lamont still has the collection of those cores. They are still there, and they are available to the scientific community for further studies. In fact, the first paper that detailed the Milanovich cycles in deep sea cores, was using some of these cores. And when they were collected, nobody was even dreaming about this kind of thing.

This is something that I think we’re missing. There is this sort of idea that, “Yeah, we’re done with exploration”, and I think it’s wrong. There’s a lot to figure out. We could poke the bottom of the ocean on a regular grid, and we would find out things that we don’t have any idea of right now. And it’s a pity that we have moved in a much more “test the hypothesis” – which is good, I mean, there are obviously lots of interesting hypotheses to test, but we kind of lost that exploratory side. I think it’s a loss.

BMR: I see what you mean, but also it can be argued that when you grow in money, in infrastructure, in logistics, in people… You have to give up that flexibility.

AM: Yeah, you have to lose some of it. And there’s a lot more attention to safety, for example, that there wasn’t in the past, and that obviously puts boundaries on how you do things. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any planning, but to make another example, when you write proposals now even for drilling, you say, “We’re going to go there, we’re going to drill in these places, and these are the hypotheses… And if we see this thing, it’s hypothesis A; and if we see this other one, it’s hypothesis B, and if you see this, the third thing is hypothesis C…” Everybody in the business knows that you’re going to go there, you’re going to drill there, and none of those are going to work. That is going to be hypothesis D. Everybody knows it! But we still go through this, and it’s because you don’t know what you’re going to find. And that’s really the interesting part. You have to be careful not to overdo the super-planning, and systematic part; to leave that room. Now, it can always come back and bite you, but I think I would love to have a little more space for that kind of activity.

BMR: It kind of goes with the mindset of our times, that we have so much information that is very easy to have things secured and predictable.

AM: But again, when you go out to sea – this is something we talked about earlier — nothing is going to go according to plan. You need a plan, but nothing’s going to go according to plan. And then, you have to come up with a solution, you have to improvise, you have to optimize what you can do in the time you have… That, to me, is a great challenge. That’s wonderful.

AM: What’s been one remarkable discovery or result that you have experienced in one of these expeditions?  

AM: In the last expedition, we went to drill some of the deepest parts of the Tyrrhenian Sea, and there had been a big seismic campaign in the past, of seismic reflection and refraction. From the velocity structure that they saw, it looked like the basement beneath the sediment cover, which is not very thick, there, it looked like it might have been peridotite. That’s what we expected, but you never know. Once we went there and drilled, we found that. So, that was wonderful.

Even more wonderful was on the in the first hole we drilled, we didn’t find peridotite. We found granite. You don’t expect granite in the middle of a place that’s almost 4000m deep. And now, there was a presentation here (note: EGU2025) about making sense of where the granite is coming from and how it formed; but that was a big surprise. So, we had both: We had the big surprise and we found what we expected to find. And it’s one thing to say, again, “I think we know there’s peridotite here”. And then you come up and there’s a nice lump of green stuff. Those have been highlights, definitely, for me.

BMR: And what has been the biggest challenge or the toughest situation you’ve experienced? Not necessarily on board, but in relation to the scientific ocean drilling.

AM: It was on board, I think. Is when is when you start having really serious drilling problems. You can sit down and make all your plan and say, “It’s going to take me that long to drill through this much sediment”; and then you do it, and the drill string gets stuck, and you try something; and then they try something else, and they try… and you have to cut it off, drill another hole, and so on and so forth. You really have to think, “Okay, how much time do I have? Is it worth our while to insist in this location? Or we cut our losses and go somewhere else?” Those are really difficult decisions. But, again, I’m happy for what we did, especially at the very end.

We were left with something like a day and a half or two days. We presented this very risky plan of drilling down to where there was a really interesting interval, where these granites were. We could just drill down without taking core very, very fast and then start coring. And that would give us maybe 2 or 3 cores; but the material was so interesting that we felt it was worth the risk. And we managed just to take two, I think literally two cores — I can’t remember it was 2 or 3 — and then it was time to go because it was the end of the expedition. You have a hard time; there’s a deadline because you have to be port at a certain date and a certain time. But we managed it, and that was a great source of satisfaction. It could have gone either way, but I think it was the right thing to do.

BMR: Your first expedition was in 2005, and your last expedition has been IODP 402, so very recently.

AM: Last year. We finished in April 5^th of 2024.

BMR: How does it feel to be on board 20 years later? Not only in terms of the people, but also in terms of the science.

AM: The people are actually amazing, and of course they are different people, but they don’t change very much, the people. They’re all very passionate about their work, very competent, and so on and so forth. The ship changes, because when I when the first time, it was before the big refit – the first two times, yes; the first two times I went was before the big refit, in 2005-2006.

It was a lot more comfortable after the refit, I’ll say, and much better planned, all the activities, the lab spaces, the core flow, and so on. So I saw that change, which was certainly for the better. Then, you have changes in instrumentation; everything gets more sophisticated and better working, and so on.

But otherwise, I was looking at that documentary of the Glomar Challenger and if you’ve been on a drillship and you look at it, it’s astounding. It was done in… I think it was done in [DSDP] Leg 1, because there are some shots where you actually see Maurice Ewing, who was on Leg 1; he was the co-chief scientist. You see the cores, and they’re taken to the lab, and you see the drillers… The drillers are big characters, in this. And you look at that and you say, “Yeah, sure. Now they have a nice computer display and so on to it, but it’s the same thing”. So, just as there’s progress, and change, and so on, there’s also constant things that don’t really change. I mean, it’s an activity that has remained the same in many, many ways.

BMR: I guess that you end up feeling like that’s home, in some ways. You feel comfortable in that space.

Well, comfortable is a big word I’m not sure I would use it. But you feel you know what’s going on. That’s important. The program has done a wonderful job of getting experienced people, and all the way from experienced scientists to graduate students involved. And that’s what happened in the last expedition.

I had experience on the JR before; the other co-chief did not. He had a lot of experience in marine geophysics in general, marine seismics, and so on, but no experience on a drill ship. And really want to have that mix; and that worked out very well for us.

BMR: It’s part of this mentoring process that’s going on…

AM: And just learning, you know, just be curious and try to understand how the whole thing is working, who’s doing what… And if something is not exactly how it should be, how do you go and try to improve I, and so on. Again, it’s an amazing combination of technological change that’s always there, and other things that are just a constant all the way. You’re poking a hole in the bottom of the ocean and that doesn’t change, right?

BMR: Yeah. And that’s pretty impressive work.

AM: That’s amazing.

BMR: When you think that there’s seven kilometers of drill pipe hanging…

AM: yeah, hanging and you’re just whirling it at the top. To me, the one thing that I learned very fast, and was made clear to me, when you do the drilling, the whole thing, the drill column, has to be in tension. You can never put so much weight on it that you compress it. It would break immediately. And so, the way I think of it, you have this really thin – almost a wire; a steel wire, if you wish – and you’re turning it here, and there’s something, a cutting thing at the end, but you can never let the full weight on it. You can only do this. And it it’s just amazing that it works (laughs), but it does!

BMR: (laughs) and it’s been working for over 50 years.

AM: It’s been working for that long, yeah. Another thing that kind of came clear to me: when I talk about the program, I always go back to the history. So, I go back all the way to project Mohole. And one thing that I realized at that point was that at that time, for example, the petroleum industry was not drilling offshore, only in places where you could basically sit on the seafloor. But in deepwater, nobody was drilling. So that was completely at the forefront of the technology. And this has changed with time – that’s a big change because now, of course, when oil companies drill in deepwater in the Gulf of Mexico, they’re doing projects that are much more difficult. They go to much greater depths than scientific ocean drilling goes, and has been going.

So, the technological advantage has gone the other way. Ocean drilling has used some of the new technologies that have been developed for the petroleum industry. And at the beginning, if anything, it was the other way around – which is a big change, if you think of it. So that’s been a big change, I think, within the petroleum industry. I do remember when I was a university student, I remember these advertisements in publications like Scientific American, where oil companies would advertise and they would make the point that they were using the latest technology, that were advanced technology… And this has changed. The industry has gone from sort of a heroic phase where they were really interested in new ideas and so on; and now is really so focused on efficiency and cost minimization. So, that’s a natural evolution of any kind of business. You start trying to find your way, and then you become very focused on the bottom line. And, again, it’s obviously a gain in many ways, but you lose something on the way.

BMR: Looking towards the future, where would you like to see – we can talk about seafloor research more widely, or scientific ocean drilling – in which directions you’d like to see this research doing?

AM: I think there’s still a lot of work to be done in understanding, for example, the whole cycle within the ocean, where you deposit sediments in the middle of the ocean and also continental margins, how they are then subducted, how material comes back… There’s this huge cycle, and the seafloor is this amazing surface that is between the solid Earth underneath and the ocean above. Just like at the surface of the ocean you have this interface between the ocean and the atmosphere.

And if you think of Earth systems, the atmosphere turns over very quickly, the ocean a little slower, but still pretty quick, and the solid Earth is slow. And if you look at the sediment column, we thought that, again, when I started my studies, we really thought, “Oh well, that’s dead. There’s nobody living there”. And it’s not dead!

And also, there’s a lot of reactions that happen there. There’s of all sorts of interesting molecules back into the ocean, there’s exchange between the sediment column and the ocean. All of that part, I think we would understand it better the more we look at it. And then, again, tracing how this goes down into a subduction zone; how much of the sediment and hard rock gets stuck in an accretionary complex, for example; how much of it goes down, how much comes back out again from volcanoes…? I mean, that grand cycle, which is part of the Earth system on the long timescales, is still to be understood. That’s where ocean drilling can help, I think, help a lot.

And this mystery of the deep biosphere, where you have these organisms that if you look at the energy that they have available, they should be dead. They should all be dead – but they’re not dead! So how does that work? And what’s the implication for life on other planets, for example? Are they really the first life that ever existed on Earth? It’s very possible, right? Because the surface might have been very difficult at the beginning.

So, all of those things, I think, is where to have a healthy ocean drilling program will be very helpful. And yeah, it’s a pity that that we don’t have that right now.

BMR: My last question actually would be, now we have looked to the future, but looking back and thinking on your career, what do you think has been your biggest contribution?

AM: Well… I never thought of it in these terms you know, you kind of think of day to day what you do, right? There’s one thing I’m sorry about which is, because of my strange career path – I was in academia for a while, then I went to industry, then I went back… I’ve had only very few students. And I’m sorry for that. I think I could have helped a lot more people. I feel like… It’s a regret that I do have but, put that to the side.

 I think that I’ve enjoyed very much changing fields and doing different things. The reason that I’m here, at this meeting now, is actually a studying cyclostratigraphy, which is different from gas hydrates, which is different from the Tyrrhenian Sea, which is different from these… I think I’ve looked at many problems, but I think I’ve done something interesting in all of them. I’m glad of that. Then, time will be the judge of the impact of what I did.

My most quoted work, actually, goes back to my master’s project, and it was about the Tyrrhenian Sea, and there was this idea that, to form the Tyrrhenian — you have this puzzle in the Mediterranean of these young basins, and the Tyrrhenian sea is the youngest, that form between two plates that are coming together. And it doesn’t make sense, right? I mean, the two plates are doing that, Africa and Europe, how do you form those? And then, I was exposed to the idea of “trench roll back”, luckily. The idea that when you have a piece of lithosphere that is going down, if you go in a frame of reference fixed on the plate that’s above, this plate has to be moving that way. And the basic idea is, if these two plates are coming together at the same rate at which the trench is moving back, then nothing happens. If they’re coming together faster, then you’ll have compression, right? They will result in compression. If they come together slower, then you’re going to open up space. And the only way that this can be filled, is if the upper plate spreads out and you form a basin. It’s a very simple idea; it was due to John Dewey. And this was another big stroke of luck which is, when I was visiting Bill Ryan during my time in Italy, Bill said, “Oh, tonight John Dewey’s going to give a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences” – I think it was. We went there and he talked about this idea, and I kind of made the connection. At the time, I was writing my thesis about the Tyrrhenian Sea, and then I thought, “Oh, now it makes sense! That’s how you do it. That’s how you open up that space between two plates that are coming together,” because they were coming together, but very slowly. So, if two plates come together very slowly, but there’s a subduction zone, then what has to happen is, you’re opening up that space and it has to be filled. It’s a bit like Camembert cheese. If you leave it there, it will spread out. And yes, it will extend and make a deep basin. And again, it was a very simple idea, and I guess that’s why it got interesting to lots of people, because it was a very simple explanation.

I think, in the grand scheme, it still works. Maybe that would be my contribution… And again, that was my master’s project at Lamont. We wrote a paper and sent it out, and then I let it go. I said, “Okay, I’ve done that. Now I can do something else”.

BMR: But towards the end of your career, you’ve come back to the Tyrrhenian.

AM: That’s been another strike of luck. I have to say I’m making a long list of lucky breaks. That was another one, to go back to the Tyrrhenian Sea and help people get new data, new ideas, finding something that we definitely did not expect, and so on.

BMR: Is there is something else you want to explain or add that I have not asked you?

AM: I think we went over almost everything. Again, the one thing that… I’m a little sorry about, is that we’re getting out of this exploration mode. Even if you have to do all the planning and so on, is such an important component. And this notion that, “Yeah, well, we know enough”, it’s just not right. There’s still a lot that we can learn.

BMR: I like that you said that. Well, thank you very, very much.

AM: Sure. Thanks for listening.