Charlotte Pizer

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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 Charlotte Pizer by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2024 November 21, D/V Chikyu (Japan). [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is 21^st of November of 2024. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius from JAMSTEC, and I’m onboard Chikyu, in IODP Expedition 405. Can you tell me first of all your name, affiliation, and current position?

Charlotte Pizer (CP): My name is Charlotte Pizer. I’m a postdoc at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria. And onboard the Chikyu, for expedition 405, I am a sedimentologist.

BMR: Let’s start from your current research, and then we’ll go to how you got into that. What is your research subject or interest?

CP: My research interest is paleoseismology, that would be the study of past earthquakes. The point of doing that would be, specifically, I’m interested in past earthquakes at subduction zones. We need to study them because these large earthquakes, like the 2011 Tohoku Oki earthquake, they happen so infrequently that we can’t study many occurrences of them within the historical record. So, we want to look at the prehistoric record of that type of earthquakes, to build a picture further back in time to help predict how they may happen similarly in the future.

BMR: That was very clear. How did you get into earthquake research? I keep asking this to people who doesn’t come from an earthquake-prone country.

CP: My background is actually in physical geography. That was my undergraduate degree, which I did in the UK. But in my undergraduate degree, I did a year abroad in New Zealand. A lot of that work was focused on sea level change. I brought that back to Durham with me, and created a project in the UK looking for tsunami deposits. And then, from that work, in my undergraduate, I wanted to continue in science, and wanted to go back to New Zealand. So, I tried to put these things together: New Zealand, sea level reconstruction, earthquakes and tsunamis, together in a project. I approached a scientist completely randomly. Kate Clark at GNS Science, and said, “do you have anything I’d be interested to do a project with you?” And she said, “yes”. Then, I ended up doing this research master’s from Durham in the UK, but was placed in New Zealand for the whole time. And they liked me, and liked what I did for my master’s, and kept me for a PhD. So, I completed my PhD at the University of Wellington in New Zealand. And… Now I’m here.

BMR: Cool, I totally relate to this way of putting together your research interests (both laugh). So, where are you from? Let’s start from that.

CP: I’m from Nottingham in the UK. I love it because it’s where I’m from but, to me, the mountains and the ocean have always been where I want to be. That’s why I think I was drawn to New Zealand, and why I’ve now been drawn to these kinds of more dramatic landscapes around the world (laughs), and how I’ve ended up in Japan and in Austria.

BMR: Yes, I understand it. So, is there someone in your family in science or engineering, or some sort of similar career, that influenced you?

CP: I think, similar to what you were saying earlier, my parents never put any pressure on me to guide me down a particular career path, or education, or anything. My mum is a biomedical scientist, she works in pathology. She looks at thin sections of different types of cancers. And she has worked in the same hospital for a very long time, or had done, and… I always remember, as a child, I went to visit her at work, and her laboratory was in the basement of a hospital. And I just thought that was so grim, to work in the basement of a hospital, studying cancer… I thought, “I’m never going to do anything like you, ever in my life!”. And then, ended up that a lot of my research is looking down microscopes, in like basement laboratories, just for a completely different reason (laughs). So, looking at rocks and looking at sediment, but spending lots of time on the microscope, which I vowed that I would never do. So, I guess she influenced me in a way, but the paths that we took to get to that were very different.

BMR: It’s interesting, because you had the model of a female researcher, which many kids don’t have, but it wasn’t something attractive to you. Most of the times, actually, we’ll tend to do the opposite than our parents do.

CP: Yeah, exactly.

BMR: So, why did you choose Earth Sciences?

CP: I think I chose Earth Sciences because I like being outside. And, mostly, I think deeper down, I always had questions about why things look a certain way. Like, being on holiday and being like, “Why is this mountain range here?”, and “Why is the valley that shape?”, and “Why is there an ocean there?”. I’m just asking these questions and being like, “I’d like to know the answer”. So, I guess that’s where my Earth sciences passion came from.

BMR: You first got a bachelor in physical geography. How did you transition to geology? Especially because I think that physical geography has a strong component of social sciences rather than hard sciences.

CP: Yeah. I think there’s also a component of where the lines between physical geography and geology are, which can change quite a lot around the world. So, during my undergraduate degree, the curriculum covered earthquakes and landslides, and very much geology-type processes. Whereas in New Zealand or the US, maybe those would have been classified into geology. So, I think there’s an element of maybe my physical geography education was some type of geology, but there are definitely things in geology that I have never touched on. I don’t think I have ever actually studied earthquakes as a process. I’ve just studied the sediments that have formed as a result of them, which sometimes puts me on the backfoot situations where I have to interpret things (laughs).

And, for example, before this expedition, I’d never looked at Smear slides and tried to categorize minerals. I’d never prepared samples for XRF and XRD. There’s so much new stuff and so many things that I come across, and people are like, “How do you not know this?”, and I’m like, “Well, I’ve never studied it. That’s why” (laughs). Because I changed around location so much, throughout my education, I never completed a full curriculum in any institute, so I’ve missed big chunks. And yeah, sometimes that’s annoying. It makes me feel like I should go back to school.

Charlotte during fieldwork. Photos by Charlotte Pizer.

BMR: But at the same time, you have the opportunity to learn it as you need it. And I know that here onboard you are doing Smear slides, so. How did you learn about scientific ocean drilling, for the first time?

CP: My first entry into scientific ocean drilling… So, during my PhD, I was studying past earthquakes from coastal deposits. Looking at when the coast goes up and down in an earthquake, and maybe even when a tsunami is inundated as well, we can see that in the coastal record. But what we found from that was, basically, the situation in my study area in New Zealand was that lots of different faults could cause the same type of signatures onshore, and we couldn’t come up with an answer as to whether these were the big earthquakes or whether they were local ones. So, we needed to bring in kind of another component to try and figure out that question. And that led us to the submarine paleo-seismology realm. So, using evidence of kind of underwater landslides and turbidites, to try to link this to our onshore deposits, to try and help interpret where and how big these earthquakes were. This wasn’t under IODP. This was just a New Zealand program that collected those cores. But it gave me a background in marine science, I guess, which then led me to apply for the job in Austria.

So, when I moved to Austria, my postdoc in Innsbruck, is using cores collected from IODP expedition 386. But when I entered it, the expedition was over. People had been working on it for a year. So, my first experience was just this massive data set, and I just thought it was so overwhelming for a long time. Really amazing, because I came from a background where I had had to generate every single data point myself, and I’d stepped into this IODP world where like, there’s so much information! (laughs). So, that was really cool.

But then, when I came, I got the opportunity. Expedition 386 was in the Japan Trench which, obviously, kind of promoted an interest in expedition 405 coming back to the Japan Trench, kind of for a different reason. So, the cores that I’m working on from 386 are only the top 40m from the trench, whereas these cores that we’re drilling in 405 are much longer, but still in the same subduction zone. So, understanding this directly will contribute to my work.

But when I came on board for 405, I kind of realized that this huge database that I was looking at every day for 386 was not created by robots. It’s created by humans (laughs). And the database for this will be created by me. So, it was kind of this shift in perspective of like, “Oh, this amazing database… Every point is perfectly curated’. And then, you get there and it’s like, “Oh no, that’s sleepy scientists that actually do this work”. And there might be mistakes, but, yeah.

BMR: Scientists that get few sleep and feed on chocolate.

CP: Yeah. The robot is made of humans and not really humans at their finest, maybe (both laugh)

BMR: I guess it’s very cool, this kind of realization that you are now the scientist who is curating this data that people will look at in the future, excited about the super detailed database of 405. So, was there someone in Austria related to that expedition, 386?

CP: My cores are from Expedition 386, in the Japan Trench. Just piston coring, so just the HPCS (Hydraulic Piston Core System) cores, and it was along the whole trench. Like 600km of these short cores. One of the co-chiefs onboard was Miki Strasser, at the University of Innsbruck. He made a call for this job, to come and work on the cores from 386, after they’d all been taken. So, I entered the group, which included Piero [Bellanova] and Morgane [Brunet], who are on board, like last year, basically. And I’ve had one year to try and get up to speed with where they’re at. That’s where the connection came in.

BMR: You are working with Miki Strasser.

CP: Yes. He is my supervisor, mentor.

BMR: And how about Morgane and Piero? They are in different institutions, right?

CP: Yes. They’re in other institutions, and I they’re in the 386 project. But because I came in afterwards, they very much had their own research project set up within 386. And, sure, if an opportunity for collaboration came up, we would. But it’s not directly linked to the work that I’m doing on 386.

BMR: So, essentially once you started in this project in Austria, you kind of got into the community of scientific ocean drilling. Why did you apply to this specific expedition?

CP: When I moved to Austria, I sat down with Miki for the first time in Innsbruck. And he said, “Welcome to expedition 386 worlds! IODP stuff is crazy”… And, “There’s actually a new call for sedimentologists for this new expedition that’s happening next year”. And I said, “yeah, I’ve seen it, but it’s a really long expedition, right? It’s two months. So, I just would not enjoy doing that. I don’t want to apply”.

And this was the first conversation I’d ever had with him face to face. I knew he was this big, like, you know, amazing scientist. And he was like, “You should really think about applying. It would be really good for your career”. I was like, “Okay, fine”. I applied just because he suggested it. And then I was accepted. I was like, “Oh, no! Now I actually have to go!” (laughs). I think leading up to it, I was focused on all the things that could go wrong, and spending all this time away, and I worried about it so much… And doing the helicopter training (laughs)…

But then, you get on the boat and it’s like, “Oh, it’s just like being at work. But you do like cool new stuff every day”. You just kind of adapt to a different job. I just wasn’t expecting that. But yeah, it’s been a really cool experience so far.

BMR: Following up with why you applied, why do you think your application was accepted?

CP: I guess my experience with being within the expedition 386 community already, probably, helped. But also, I think, because usually this type of expedition focuses on the deeper cores – so, the rotary coring that aims for much deeper than the piston coring, maybe there was kind of this need for people that had experience in the shallow coring as well, which I guess I have, and Piero and Morgane who were also involved, could kind of bring that experience and that kind of knowledge into the group. And especially as sedimentologists, that a lot of the detail in describing things can be quite different between the shallow and the deep part. So, yeah, I think it’s been useful to have us on board (laughs).

BMR: I see. And also, how big is the community of sedimentologists studying paleoseismology?

CP: I think paleoseismology, in general, is quite small. But I think it’s just a coincidence that all three of the five sedimentologists that are on board are all interested in paleoseismology.

BMR: Is this a community very much related to scientific ocean drilling?

CP: I think it is connected, but I think the idea of using marine deposits for paleoseismology has been kind of debated for a long time. And now we’re getting to a point where we are able to get the data to try and prove whether this works as an idea. In terms of studying past deposits from past earthquakes in this type of environment. So, I think it’s taken a long time to build that kind of trust in the, “this is useful”.

BMR: What impressed you the most, when you first came to Chikyu?

CP: I think the sheer size of it. I remember seeing it on the helicopter, and I saw the supply boat, and I was like, “oh, it’s quite small, way smaller than I thought”. And then, the helicopter panned around this massive drillship. Yeah. I mean, I knew it was a big ship, but I didn’t expect it to feel like a floating office building.

I’m very surprised how comfortable I feel on the ship. I had sailed previously on much smaller boats, and had been quite nervous of being sick, and not being able to do my job properly, because I was worried about how I was feeling. But yeah, I’ve not had that on Chikyu. It’s just so perfectly designed to be like efficient, and not only for the drilling operations, but for the scientists as well, in terms of the cabins, and the library area, so you can have your office, but you can also have your laboratory. Just it has everything that you need. And you don’t have to do your own washing (laughs).

BMR: Nor cook or do the groceries. Now that you mention other cruises. You said before that you had a lot of concerns in your mind, before coming onboard. What were those?

CP: I think the biggest one for this trip was just the length of time. I’ve moved around a lot, and I feel I could only just get to Innsbruck, and just settled. And then, I was suddenly going to go away for two months. And postdoc contracts are quite short. So, if you stick a whole two month chunk not doing the work that you’re supposed to be doing, that’s like quite significant time to be away.

And I’m terrified of drowning in a helicopter that I’m trapped in. So, having to do the HUET training was kind of like a big thing for me. But I did it, and it was fine! I don’t know, I just tend to worry about all the things that could go wrong before they happen, so that when I get here, then they’re like, “it’s so good!”, right? (both laugh).

BMR: Well, there’s a positive side to it! Maybe you already mentioned this a bit before, but what kind of things did you had to learn onboard, in order to do your job?

CP: I was with the first group of scientists from Window 2. So, we overlapped the most with the Window 1 scientists. As soon as we got on board, I think within like 30 minutes, we were chatting with Window 1 about what they were doing, and what people’s roles were within the sedimentology team, and how they were negotiate doing that, and straight into the lab, “Okay, this is how you use the bull mill, this is how you make a glass [?] for XDR… And I didn’t know any of these things. So, the first few days on board, I think I filled half a notebook of like, writing detailed instructions from what the Window 1 scientists were telling me. It was quite intense straight away. And, like I said, I hadn’t made a Smear slide before. I hadn’t analyzed them. I had never described a core of hard rock, only soft sediments. I hadn’t prepared any of these samples for XRD or XRF. So, there was just so much learning straight on, from the beginning.

And then, two days later, the Window 1 scientists left, and I had to teach this to the rest of the Window 2 scientists. So, suddenly I had this responsibility that I, you know, didn’t feel was justified (laughs). But you just roll with it, and I think it’s gone okay, so far. But yeah, lots of learning. And learning skills that are not only applicable to being on the boat, in this specific situation, but like skills that I can take away, as well. So yeah, it’s been really valuable from like the first 30 minutes of getting on board.

BMR: Yes, this is fun because it also comes back to what you just said about the dataset. People learning by doing. So far, you’ve been almost four weeks onboard. What are the things that, so far, you have enjoyed the most or valued the most, and the most challenging ones?

CP:I think I have enjoyed learning all of these new things, and then having been given the responsibility, basically. Like, if I don’t set up my microscope, then the data won’t be generated. And if I don’t check whether the samples are in the lab, then they’re not going to be processed. You just get given this responsibility, and yet have to run with it. And I’ve quite enjoyed… I think that has given me confidence, because I know now that I can learn these things quite quickly, and then apply them. And, yeah, that was something that I was worried about.

The other thing that has been really amazing for me to experience, is just the discussions. At the sampling parties, at the meetings… About all of these large scale processes that we are actively researching right now. And the fact that people haven’t done this before. Like, we are the first people to try and do this type of science in this location. So the conversations that we are having are not repeating things from textbooks that we’ve read. It’s like, we are making the science right now, and right here. That’s been quite eye opening. Really, a privilege to be involved with that.

Core on deck! during IODP expedition 405 on Chikyu. Left, Charlotte with co-chief scientist Jamie Kirkpatrick looking at a core that split because of the pressure. Right, Charlotte together with other scientists holding the just-retreived core while the lab technician splits it in sections. Photos by Beatriz Martinez-Rius, JAMSTEC/IODP.

BMR: That’s so nice. Following up on what you just said, how would you explain to someone who doesn’t know about what you are doing here, that we are doing this cutting-edge science?

CP: I guess I would explain it by starting with the 2011 Tohoku Oki earthquake. So, that was one of the first really well monitored subduction earthquakes. So, it gave us an opportunity to not only study the earthquakes as they were happening, but then learn what that means for the process. What that means in terms of how the whole system works, not just how that one earthquake happened. We could monitor where the slip happened, and kind of build a better image of what could be causing it. And to build that image, we need to know what’s down there. So, that is, I think, one of the main tasks of this expedition: to see what’s down there. And, to my knowledge, that hasn’t been done before. People have drilled in lots of different locations, but I don’t think anybody has drove through the fault zone.  And because this earthquake has just happened, we have a better knowledge of where it happened, so that we can go down and we can characterize where and why and how. I think that’s the first time that we’ve been able to do that in such high resolution. Obviously, JFAST – which came before this – was the first to do it, maybe. But the core recovery that we’ve had on this expedition has kind of blown that out of the water, in terms of the things that we will be able to do, because we have a more or less consistent capturing of the rocks from the surface, all the way down to the actual where we think the plate boundary might be.

I guess the second component of that is, where does that rock come from? Characterizing the sediments of the incoming plate will really help us try and understand this system on a bigger level, with this recent earthquake as kind of an analog for understanding as a whole.

BMR: That’s very clear. This is part of a conversation that has been going on for a long time, which is, for people who is not into science, to understand what is the relationship between drilling down into the ocean, and earthquake research.

CP: Yeah. I guess that for the 2011, we know where it happened. So, if we look at the rocks that are in the location where it happened, and we can look at rocks that are in other locations, we can build a picture of whether or not other locations are likely to host similar earthquakes.

BMR: What are your plans, short term, after this expedition? Specifically in relation to scientific ocean drilling – the people you’ve met, the data you are bringing home, the skills you’ve learned…

CP: Directly related to this expedition, my personal research will look at just the top sediments, and particularly on the incoming plate to see if we can find any evidence, not necessarily of the earthquakes happening – like people are trying to do in the deepest sections of core –, but for whether the shaking of earthquakes affects the top layer of sediment. Because, again, we know we just had that recent earthquake. So, I will be looking at those shallow sediments, to try and characterize the history of them and how they’ve been impacted in the last few thousand years, let’s say.

But in terms of broader plans, I guess I will continue to work on the expedition 386 data. I think that has some amazing potential to pull out really long and really detailed records of past earthquakes at the Japan Trench. And bringing in this work from 405 will definitely help that, because now we will have a transect, not only along the subduction zone, but through it as well.

Beyond that, even more, I would like to continue in scientific ocean drilling. I have actually proposed to host a workshop, to bring together scientists from onshore and offshore interested in paleo-earthquakes, so that we can build proposals for future expeditions, and target some more interesting areas based on how this expedition has gone, and how 386 has gone, and what we can learn from that for future scientific ocean drilling.

BMR: That will be really good to see. I hope you get to organize it. And last question before finishing… Where do you see yourself in ten years, from now?

CP: I think I didn’t really know the answer to this before I came on board. But seeing the interactions between the co-chiefs and the crew, and the co-chiefs and the scientists, I would like to see myself onboard a scientific ocean drilling expedition as a co-chief, maybe? I think that would be quite cool. And I think I would quite enjoy continuing this work.

BMR: That would be super cool. And I hope I can be involved to see you becoming a co-chief! Well, thank you very much.

CP: Thank you.