Clive Neal

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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 Clive Neal by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2024 December 11, Walter E. Washington Center, Washington, D.C. (USA) [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is December 11 of 2024. I’m Beatriz Martinez-Rius, historian of science at JAMSTEC. It’s a pleasure to be here with Clive Neal. Can you please say your name, your affiliation, and current position?

Clive Neal (CN): I’m Clive Neal. I’m professor of lunar exploration at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. I have been there for almost 35 years, now.

BMR: What are your research interests?

CN: Well, that’s a bit of a story, there. When I did my PhD, I was looking at mantle petrology and geochemistry that were brought up from the mantle. My field area was in the Solomon Islands, where there are pipe-like bodies that brought up these mantle materials. And they’re there because the crust is over-thickened. And the reason it’s over-thickened is a large igneous province. So, I started to get interested in the Large Igneous Provinces.

I came to America to do a mantle petrology postdoc, but 20% of that was also to look at Apollo Moon samples. That’s how I got into Moon samples, and kept doing my mantle studies. I did a four year post-doc, then moved to the University of Notre Dame in 1990, and started to get into Large Igneous Provinces. I got a four-year NSF funded project to do fieldwork in the Solomon Islands, mapping out, on land or sub-aerial, the Ontong-Java plateau lava flows. So, I did that for a few years. Co-PI was John Mahoney, from the University of Hawaii, who unfortunately is no longer with us. But he is the one that suggested I apply to go on my first Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) expedition to the Kerguelen Plateau in the southern Indian Ocean, to be an igneous petrologist on the science party, to study that large igneous province. That was in late-1998, and it went through to 1999 [note: ODP Leg 183]. So, that’s how I got involved in ocean drilling. It was my interest in super volcanoes, if you like. And then, mantle petrology got me to the location for my PhD fieldwork, but I went back there three times afterwards, to do mapping of the actual crust that those pipe-like bodies were intruded into. So, very convoluted way of how I got involved in ocean drilling. And it was to study super-volcanoes.

BMR: Going a bit backwards in time, how did you got interested in Earth sciences, in the first place?

CN: Oh, I was five years old when I knew I wanted to be a geologist, and that was just from collecting rocks. When I was a kid, I lived in a country I could find a lot of rocks. So, I was in infant school, and I told my teacher at the time, “I want to be a paleontologist”, and she got me a book on it. And I said, “Oh, this is great!”. And I got into rocks and minerals, and she’s like, he’s going to go to university to study paleontology. The first paleontology lecture I had was so boring. I just went, “Oh my God, I can’t do this. This is terrible”. And then, the young professor, who is igneous petrologist – Mike Norry at the University of Leicester in England – he was giving these wonderful lectures about volcanoes and igneous petrology. I said, “I want to do that”. So, that’s how I got involved in igneous petrology, geochemistry, mantle petrology… It was through him. And then, did my PhD with Peter Nixon, University of Leeds, who was ‘Mr. Mantle Petrology’, at the time. Sorry – ‘Doctor Mantle Petrology’. So, yeah, there was a crossroads in my undergrad:  paleontology – no!; so, I went to igneous petrology, instead.

BMR: Was there someone in your family who was a scientist, a geologist… some kind of influence in that direction?

CN: My cousin, who’s six years older than me, is a geologist. He was ahead of me and he wanted to be a geologist, too. He was a field geologist for oil and gas exploration. I went a very different route. So, it was fun. But he and I were first generation university in our family.

BMR: May I ask you what your parents did for a living?

CN: My dad worked in a factory, and my mum was a housewife that cleaned houses to get more money.

BMR: So, you opened a new pathway in your family.

CN: Oh, it was pushed by my parents. My parents wanted me to do better than they did. I found something I liked, I told my folks, and they encouraged it. So, I was always allowed to collect rocks no matter where I went. That blossomed into a career. So, as I say, I really haven’t worked in my life. I really have not worked in my life, because this is what I love doing. If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. And when I retire, it will be when what I do becomes work! I don’t like to work! That’s how that happened.

BMR: If I got it right, it was during your postdoc that you went into scientific ocean drilling.

CN: I would say when I was an assistant professor at Notre Dame, because 1998 was my first expedition, but I’d been working with John Mahoney on a large igneous province project in the early to mid-90s. We had a couple of big papers come out from that. That was a lot of fun. But then, he said, “Oh, you need to look at ocean drilling because they drill oceanic LIPs, Large Igneous Provinces. So, let’s get you on this [Leg 183, Kerguelen Plateau] expedition, you need to apply…” So, I did. I loved it. Then, I sailed to the Ontong-Java plateau, and then the Emperor seamounts. And the last time, I was the chief ‘RAT’. We had a RATS team, which is the Reason and Assessment Team of Scientists, when the JR [JOIDES Resolution] had its refit in Singapore. We sailed from Guam to Honolulu to check out all the systems, to make sure that they worked. And they didn’t but we got them going!

BMR: What do you find so interesting or attractive about Large Igneous Provinces?

CN: It’s the fact that they can affect the entire planet. You look at the volcanic emissions, can cause global warming or global cooling, depending upon what they are emitting. So, a lot of CO₂. You look at the biggest extinction, the Permo-Trias (Permian-Triassic, P-T) extinction, and everybody’s been looking for an asteroid because that’s what happened to the dinosaurs. But, at the same time there was the asteroid hit, there was a large igneous province going off in India. And that was stressing the environment, and dinosaur populations were already going down. Then, you had Chicxulub. Boom! In the Permo-Trias, the Siberian Traps erupted through coal measures. So, they evaporated a lot of carbon back into the atmosphere, and that was the biggest mass extinction we’ve seen. And yes, there have been some impacts that have been suggestive of being at that time, but we know the Siberian Trap large igneous province was going off at that time, and we know what it erupted through.

BMR: So, a large igneous province is created through a phenomenon that happens only within the Earth.

CN: Within the Earth, you’ve got different layers: the core, the mantle, and the crust; and between the core and the mantle there is a boundary. There’s a lot of heat in the core compared to the mantle, and it heats up that lower mantle, and it comes a point where it becomes buoyant, and a big plume of material will come up. Rocks are brilliant, because they hold on to the heat, they don’t lose it to the surroundings. So, you’re lowering the pressure as you’re raising this plume of hot material, and then you get massive amounts of melting. [But plume volcanics are seen on the Moon, Venus, Mercury, and Mars][CRN1] 

BMR: Now I see.

CN: So, when it hits the crust, the crust is rigid – well, the lithosphere is rigid. And so, it spreads out. And that’s what can initiate ocean spreading. If you look at – Iceland is the remnant of a plume that has erupted basalts in Norway, and also in Greenland. Then, you go down south, there’s a number of different hotspots in the southern Atlantic, where you’ve got Paraná Large Igneous Province. And they’re the same lava flows that have now separated by the Atlantic Ocean, because that plume head initiated rifting of the continent. But, is it the fact that the plumes rise and create ocean spreading? Or, is it the fact that the ocean spreading has lowered that pressure, and there’s a pathway of least resistance, that then focuses the plume? Plume head and plume tail. We don’t know.

BMR: Is this a progressive or a catastrophic event?

CN: Catastrophic. When a plume head hits and starts to erupt, it’s about 1 to 2 million years. Which sounds like a long time, but that’s geologically short… And that’s the other thing. Our records are very coarse. So, there may be significant pulses. And we’ve started to see, in some of the new data that’s come out, there’s significant pulses such that you average that flux over. There’s a 2 million year time period, but most of it came out in 50,000 years. So, that would really stress the environment.

BMR: How scientific ocean drilling has contributed to the development of this field of study?

CN: Because we can get samples of oceanic Large Igneous Provinces. As that material is coming up, it passes through the lithosphere, but there’s no continental crust there to contaminate it. If you look at the ones that erupted on land, they always contain a signature of continental crust – they’ve melted the crust and incorporated that. So, they blur the signatures of what was down there. That’s why ocean drilling is important, to get to the ocean crust where those Large Igneous Provinces now sit, so that we can get uncontaminated material.

BMR: Going back to your first expedition, how did that ODP leg shape your career path, what came afterwards?

CN: Uhm… Well, it made me write proposals to get funding to study Large Igneous Provinces. [I] Tried a couple of drilling proposals, which didn’t work. I am on an Ontong-Java plateau drilling proposal that was approved, but the program finished and we didn’t get it drilled. So, hopefully we can get there one day. It also gave me an avenue to get into service. I chaired IODP committees. I was chair of the JOIDES Resolution Facility Board. I was on that facility board before I became chair. So, it’s given me a lot of opportunities to sort of give back and shape how things go. And that has been wonderful. A good experience, for me.

BMR: How did, then, the interest for the Moon and space come up?

CN: Because my postdoc was to look at mantle petrology, but also at Apollo samples. So, I started working on the Apollo samples, and I was supposed to do 80% mantle petrology, 20% lunar petrology. And I asked my boss to flip it. So, I did 20% mantle, 80% lunar, because I really enjoyed the lunar.

BMR: Was it common, at that time, to be studying lunar samples and mantle samples? To make that bridge?

CN: No, no, it wasn’t. But my postdoc boss, Larry Taylor from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, told me, “You can’t just be involved in mantle petrology, because funding is not always constant. You need another life, and you need to diversify your interests” – you know. So, we got funded by NSF to do mantle petrology, and NASA to do lunar petrology.

BMR: Who was an influence or mentor in this in this field?

CN: This was Lawrence (Larry) Taylor.

BMR: Can you tell me a bit about him?

CN: He was a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He was also first generation university. And he offered me a postdoc that I did not apply for. That’s what brought me to America; and it’s because he needed somebody quickly to work on a project. I came in second in Arizona. He got my CV from Mike Drake at Arizona, and then he wrote me a letter, said, “Would you like to come and live in Knoxville for two years?”. And I said, “Uhm, two years in America? That’ll be fun!”. That was 1986; July 2nd, 1986. That’s when I flew to America to take up my postdoc.

BMR: Have you gone back to the UK, since then?

CN: Oh yeah, I’ll be going back here in January. My mom is still alive, my sister is there, and nephews, cousins…. So, yeah. He (Larry Taylor) was a giant in the field of lunar petrology; did a lot of work on regolith, a lot of work on basalts. He’s the one that got me started and enthused about it, and encouraged me along the way. And another person that encouraged me was Harrison Schmitt, who was the only geologist to go to the Moon. He was an Apollo 17 astronaut, and he has been very, very kind and helpful to me over the years. And so, I was working on Apollo lunar samples, andall the basalts brought back by Apollo were from plumes! So, the idea was, why can’t we have NASA-ocean drilling funded expeditions? Why can’t we have co-funded projects? Because we’re studying the same thing, and we bring in these two communities with different perspectives.

That was the session earlier today (note: during AGU 2024), about NASA-IODP research synergies: from Earth sciences you’ve got impacts, you’ve got plume volcanism, habitability, astrobiology, limits of life… And you’ve got analogs. Ocean drilling does all of that.

BMR: Who came up with the idea of bringing them together? You?

CN: Yeah.

BMR: Oh. How was the community’s reaction?

CN: It took four years to get the workshop funded, and the workshop was run in April this year. We had our first meeting today with NSF and NASA program managers, just before the session. So, [I’m] meeting with the NSF program manager again after this, so we can start pushing this forward. But it’s something that Nobu [Eguchi] and I talked about many times over the years, when I was in Japan and when he’s been over here, about how do we bring ocean drilling and space agencies together? I think we may have an opening to do that now. At least in this country.

BMR: With a new program starting (note: IODP³), maybe it’s possible to start building new relations. You can shape the new program to…

CN: That’s right. That’s exactly right. It just makes sense to me that – well, actually two years ago it’d have been better, but it didn’t happen then. But we’ll take what we can get.

BMR: Let me go back to your kind of unique field of study, comparing mantle samples with lunar samples. How this field has evolved since you started?

CN: If you look at the Apollo basalts, they’re all mantle-derived. But there are no mantle xenoliths [accidental inclusions of the mantle source material] that have been recovered from the Moon, as yet. And there probably won’t be, because the lava is not very viscous enough to carry them. So, we need to understand what’s going on. We need to understand the interior of the Moon. So, I have evolved to become a geophysicist – ha! Sort-of. And I’m putting together a proposal to NASA, to set up a ten year geophysical network on the Moon.

BMR: Do you rely on international collaboration for that?

CN: That’s a tightrope, because now if NASA is going to fund it, they want international partners, but they won’t accept any money, and they won’t fund them. They’ll accept instruments as a contribution to a mission. We need to understand the interior of the Moon, to then better understand our modeling of basalt-source regions. And the only way we’re going to do that is for a long-lived, globally distributed geophysical network.

BMR: How difficult is to send geophysical instruments to the Moon, and set a network, and make it provide data…?

CN: We sent astronauts to do it last time. We had a network up there, but it was too narrow. It was only on the central near side. So, there are four different types of seismic activity on the Moon, one of which could be very dangerous because when the Moon has a, what they call a shallow moonquake – these are thrust faults that move – the maximum ground motion last ten minutes. Not 30 seconds; not 90 seconds as it is on Earth.

BMR: I have no idea about this.

CN: Shallow Moonquake. That lasts 10 minutes.

BMR: Is ‘moonquake’ an official term?

CN: Of course it is – it isn’t from the Earth. It’s on the Moon. But it’s most unlike earthquakes, because there’s no alteration minerals up there, through clays to deaden the energy. So, it just keeps ringing, and vibrating, and moving. If you put a habitat down there, you’ve got to engineer it to last a magnitude 5.5 moonquake for ten minutes. And you can see that on the seismograms, even with meteorite impact seismograms, the maximum ground motion starts to tail off after about ten minutes. It is interesting place.

BMR: It is. How the community of scientific ocean drilling and the community of lunar research has responded to this collaboration? In terms of, is there support?

CN: We haven’t taken it to the to the planetary community yet. That’ll happen. And it’s an opportunity for them to do analog studies down here. It’s why we’ve called the session “Missions to Planet Earth”. Because it’s a lot cheaper to do a mission to planet Earth than it is to the Moon, or Mars, or Mercury, or Venus.

BMR: Just to get an idea, what would be an equivalent in terms of cost of scientific ocean drilling operations, and any kind of operations you will do to the Moon?

CN: The Discovery Mission is the small mission category, and it’s $500 million cost cap. So, you look at something that’s going to cost maybe 10 million…

BMR: What’s NASA saying about this?

CN: I don’t know, I will find out. I’ve got to talk to them. They don’t know about it. They have budget cycles they have to go through. They have decadal surveys that need to be followed. And so, we have to get this idea into their decadal surveys. This morning was very positive. But talk is cheap. Let’s see if action follows that. So, we have to keep talking with them, and making sure that they’re still supportive and can actually start to set up programs to make this sort of stuff happen.

BMR: I know you have a long experience in advisory boards for scientific ocean drilling; but also, you’ve been interacting with other programs. How scientific ocean drilling is similar or different to other programs?

CN: This is much more international. And that, the international aspect, is sort of falling apart, now. We’ve gone off into: US is doing its thing; there’s Europe and Japan doing their thing; China… I don’t know what’s happening with them anymore, but they have a nice, bright, shiny new drillship… I’m sure they’ll be doing things. It will be like the Chikyu. It’s not doing [scientific] ocean drilling all the time, which is what the JOIDES Resolution was doing, when it had the funds to do it. So, a dedicated platform is what we need back in this country, to promote the fundamental and applied science aspects of it. Earthquake prediction is something that has come out of the NanTroSEIZE Project. And how to recognize the signs of plate movement, such that you’re going to end up with an earthquake that’s going to cause issues. So, you get better warnings for that. There’s, you know, tsunamis, another one that come to mind, and volcanic hazards close to my heart. And then, you have asteroidal impacts. We know they happen. I think there’s almost over 200 impact craters mapped on this planet. And they’re the ones that have survived weathering, and erosion, and plate tectonics. So, there’s obviously been a lot more. We’ve been hit hard in the past, and we’ll be hit hard again. That’s one major the thing NASA brings – planetary defense.

BMR: Planetary defense? What’s that?

CN: Planetary defense. They are mapping and monitoring all the asteroids about half a kilometer in diameter or more. And I think they’re down to 100 meters now; I’d have to check that. Planetary defense is something that’s been around now for about 15 years. Then, they had the DART mission, which was to try and deflect an asteroid. The focus was a binary asteroid, and they fired a projectile into the small one to see how they could deflect it. So, it was a test to see that if we have an asteroid collision course and we fire something into it, can we deflect it around Earth?

BMR: Can we?

CN: They certainly deflected this one. But then, if you have a bigger mass of an asteroid coming in, you need a bigger mass of a projectile. So, do you use a nuclear explosion to do that? And then you got to launch it, and make sure it launches off this planet. So, there’s a few issues there. But those are the things that we can study the effects of those impacts on this planet much better than we can with orbital spacecraft on other planets. There’s more of them, but we only get a two dimensional look, whereas here we can use geophysics – so, seismic and gravity – to look at the third dimension, and then drill it, and sample it. One of the big things is, we can get samples of these structures to not only look at the chemical changes, but the physical changes in those samples.

BMR: You’re probably aware that many people compare scientific ocean drilling to NASA, and asks why NASA gets so much public attention, so much money, and scientific ocean drilling doesn’t? I know we are comparing two different structures, but what would you answer to that?

CN: Money. It’s a much bigger budget. NASA’s outreach – they can’t do education anymore, but it’s outreach.

BMR: Why there’s more money? I mean, I know this is kind of a simple question, but I’d like to hear about it from you.

CN: Well, it’s… Scientific ocean drilling is not considered a national imperative. That’s why NSF has killed it. That’s why they’ve taken away the JR. And they are now making overtures to wanting to build a new drillship. But that’s a competition. Who knows whether one will ever be built. I won’t certainly get the benefit of it. But that’s okay. But if we can merge these two agencies (NASA and NSF), to use not only the facility, but the data that comes from the materials and the actual expeditions… You now have two agencies using the facility, so maybe you can get more done or get it built quicker. Because, you know, they say it’s going to be over $1 billion to get this new drillship. That’s one New Frontiers Mission for NASA. They are about $1 billion cost cap for medium class missions.

BMR: And how often are these missions happening?

CN: Two to every ten years, they’re supposed to. So, once every five years.

BMR: Having a new drillship would equal one of these five-year projects.

CN: Yeah. New Frontiers is a medium class mission for NASA. You don’t get to the flagship missions, where they’re multibillion dollars. So, in the budget numbers, there’s a few orders of magnitude difference lower in ocean drilling. And it’s not part of the national imperative. So, trying to raise it, to be a part of the national imperative, we need to change the way we do ocean drilling. It’s all pure science. That’s not going to drive it. Critical minerals is one way to look at it. Gas hydrates is another one. There are resources that could come in to be part of that, but then that corrupts the pure science aspect of it. But you get great science done, if you’re focused on those issues as well. So, everybody wins.

I think it’s also national posture in terms of leadership – the US has led this program for 50 years, and it’s now abdicated. It just said, “No, it won’t do any more”. I don’t understand why. Somebody, somewhere in leadership, has made a bad decision. Let’s just say it like that. That’s a bad decision for the country. And unfortunately, the person or persons who are making those decisions don’t see it. So, it’s up to us to show them how bad they’ve been.

BMR: It will also be apparent as the years go by. Through scientific ocean drilling you establish collaborations internationally that are also critical for the national science. And it also happens with the people working on the ship; if you lose them and they go to another ship –

CN: Or they go to a completely different area. You lose the community.

BMR: Yeah. The expertise, the know-how… and then you need to train again, and that may take a decade. It’s surprising in this sense that the NSF has given away the leadership.

BMR: Now they have. So, it’s time for somebody else to step up as leader.

BMR: It’s surprising because the leadership point in science is important. Is national prestige through big investments in science. This is very clear in space research, but it’s also very evident in scientific ocean drilling.

CN: I agree. Look upon this as an opportunity for Japan, or an opportunity for Europe to lead. There’s a leadership vacuum, now. And… it’s time to step up. And if you don’t, then by ten years we’ll take it back again! So, (laughs) that’s all you can say.

BMR: The program has been always in this delicate balance of having a budget that allows you to move forward, but at the same time is at the limit of the science that can be done – I mean, more communities involved means more budget that comes in; but there’s a limit on the expeditions you can do in a year.

CN: Oh yeah. It’s been oversubscribed. There are lots of proposals left undrilled that have been approved. As I said, the Ontong-Java one, the one that I was involved with, that’s not going to get drilled.

BMR: How this aspect compares to other programs you’ve been involved in?

CN: It’s not that dissimilar. I mean, scientific drilling is very unique, but it’s along the lines of ‘there’s never enough money to fund everything’.

BMR: Is this the situation in space research?

CN: Yeah.

BMR: That there’s no money?

CN: That’s not what I said. There’s not enough money.

BMR: That’s right.

CN: To fund everything you’d want to do. So, what are you going to fund? You’re going to fund the things that are important to you. And we haven’t done a good enough job as a community to tell NSF why this is important. Because if we had, we wouldn’t be in the situation where we are right now.

BMR: Maybe the question that arises is, how to tell NSF that this is important? And I’m aware that this is a discussion that has been going on for decades, now. How to communicate, and to whom you should communicate.

CN: Well, communicating to the public has been done, and continues to be done by USSSP (US Science Support Program) and other organizations like that. So, it’s having people at NSF that want to listen. Let’s put it that way. They’ve made a decision, and they’ve probably made a decision on the basis of a budget spreadsheet [that’s my speculation!]. And apparently they haven’t looked at the implications of what is going to be lost; and they haven’t looked at the history behind it; haven’t looked at the science productivity that’s happening out of this program. So, they’ve made their decision based on whatever criteria they choose. Our job is to educate them, but if they don’t want to be educated, there’s nothing we can do.

BMR: I’d like to go back to something you’ve said before – that to get funding, it’s not only pure science that we should do, but to also research with industrial applications. For example, in strategic minerals. I’m not sure how to phrase this as a question. Maybe it’s just expanding on this, that challenges the more frequent position of the scientific community. Usually there’s a reluctance to establish a relation between science and industry because of the negative public view on resource exploration.

CN: Well, it’s a way that is called responsible exploration. And that’s how you sell it. We’ve got to do responsible exploration. So, for example – I come back to the Moon. If we’re going to put humans up there, we need to mine resources. Well, you can’t refine minerals on the Moon with water. If you can get waterless refining/beneficiation techniques developed and in use on the Moon, that’s transferable knowledge to act to this planet. I tell my students, in terms of space exploration, the reason we go up there is to make life better down here.

So, why do we do scientific ocean drilling? Just to make life better here. How does it make life better here? Because it gives us knowledge about past climates, to actually then quantify this adverse effect that we’re seeing in the modern climate data that NASA’s been collecting. It puts it in context. I tell people we’ve had twice as much CO₂ in the atmosphere as we have right now in the past. They go, “What? Why didn’t the planet burn up?”. The planet adapted. It will adapt again. You might not like that adaptation, but it will adapt again.

But, in terms of selling it to people who fund, you’re selling it to the government. And very few elected members of our Congress know anything about science. And therefore, don’t trust it. So, how do you talk to them? And that’s where we need communication education for our students. For every PhD student in my department, the last question in their final exam is: you get into an elevator and your elected congress-person gets in next to you. You’ve got 30 seconds to tell him why your research is important and why you should fund it. What are you going to say? And everybody needs to have that elevator speech. You never know, because you have to find a way to make what you do important to the person that funds it. Return on investment. It could be… The new science possibilities, the inspiration, whatever. But you’ve got to have a variety of arguments there, and a variety of tactics, to see which one is going to get traction with your audience. But we can’t just talk science. Science gets funded at the leisure of those elected officials, because it’s not in the national imperative. And it should be. How do we make it that way? Well, you have to develop your elevator speech. Otherwise, they’re never going to know. And we can’t be bashful. We have to go and tell them what we do, why it’s important and why it’d be funded.

BMR: I was going to ask you what’d be your elevator speech, but I think it was this one (both laugh).

CN: I have several; depends on who I’m talking to. I mean, if you look at NSF and scientific ocean drilling, a lot of it is national prestige; but that doesn’t work with the people at NSF. It works better with the elected officials. So, what is what is society is getting out of funding scientific ocean drilling? This School of Rock is a great example of inspiring teachers to inspire the next generation. That is really important, to do that. The data that we get informs about clean energy. It also informs about the past climate in terms of understanding what’s happened in the past, and why it might not be as bad as we think it is, because we’ve had twice as much CO₂ in the atmosphere. So, I mean, it has to be practiced. So, you have to go see NSF officials, you have to go see your elected officials, and develop a relationship with them so that you know what works. There’s no ‘one size fits all’.

BMR: Great. I think we are running out of time, although I’d really like to continue talking. Is there something you’d like to add, just to wrap up?

CN: I think we need to continue evolve scientific ocean drilling. It’s never going to be the way it was back in DSDP days. It’s never going to be as it was ten years ago. But ‘evolve or die’ is what we say in geology. So, we need to evolve and bring in new communities, and have new ways of doing things, and be open to that. As a graybeard, I like to think I’m not set in my ways, and I’m open to that. So, we need to make sure everybody’s open to that. I think international collaboration, cooperation, is certainly a big part of it.

BMR: Well, thank you very much. That was great.

CN: Thanks, I enjoyed it.