Demian Saffer

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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 Carl Brenner by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2024 Decembrer 13, Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C., USA. [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is December 13th of 2024. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius, historian of science at JAMSTEC. I’m at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, in Washington, D.C., with Demian Saffer. Thank you very much.

Demian Saffer (DS): Thank you. Happy to be here.

BMR: Thank you, I know this is a very busy week. Can you please say first your name, your affiliation, and current position?

DS: Demian Saffer, I’m at the University of Texas (UT), Institute for Geophysics, where I am the director of the institute; and I’m also a faculty member in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UT Austin.

BMR: For how long have you been the director of the Institute?

DS: Five years. Before that, I was at Penn State, Pennsylvania State University, where I started as assistant professor. I was there for 15 years, and then became the department head, at the time that I moved. So, 15 years in Pennsylvania, 5 years so far in Texas.

BMR: How is it like being the director of a research institute?

DS: I knew what I was getting into, yeah. I find it exciting. It’s a lot like being a co-chief scientist on a drilling expedition. You have a team of people who all have their own scientific programs, projects, and research. And part of my job – again, just like being chief scientist on a drilling expedition – is to put those people in position to be able to execute that science; and to empower them to pursue funding, to have the most impact in their science, and to give them the tools they need. So, it’s something I really enjoy.

BMR: Do you still do science?

DS: Oh, yeah. So, my position, that’s a full time administrative, like directorship role. But, in detail, my time is maybe 60%-40% administration and research. So, I have a laboratory and graduate students; and I’m not teaching right now. So, mainly, the time I would be spending teaching if I was a kind of normal faculty member, that’s doing administration, and the research stays the same.

BMR: I can see that you kind of like the organizational side of things, as well as doing the research. I’m aware you’ve been in a lot of committees, co-chief, organizing cruises…

DS: Yeah. I enjoy helping to facilitate collaborations, and getting people together, to be able to do something bigger than they would do individually.

BMR: So, let’s start chronologically.

DS: Okay.

BMR: And the first question is, where are you from?

DS: I grew up outside of Portland, Maine, in a small town called Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Funny story – it’s actually the same town where Sean Toczko grew up. It’s 7000 people. We were not at the same time. He’s a couple years older than me, but we learned this early when we intersected in IODP, and thought it was really funny. So, I grew up there, and then went to university at Williams College, which is in Massachusetts. Then a PhD in California, at the University California, Santa Cruz. And that was my introduction to the Ocean Drilling Program and marine tectonics and research. From there, I was assistant professor at the University of Wyoming for four years, and Pennsylvania, at Penn State, for 15 years and then Texas. So, kind of interesting moving around the US.

BMR: How did you get interested in Earth sciences, in geology?

DS: I knew I wanted to be a scientist when I was an undergraduate. Probably even in high school. I thought I wanted to be an astrophysicist. Then, I took my first geology class, and I realized – for somebody who can’t decide what science they like, if you like biology, and chemistry, and physics, and astronomy, planetary science and Earth science is perfect because you can bring all of those things together. You don’t have to decide (laughs). So, that’s kind of how it how it happened.

But really, I was still interested in physical processes. I was a geology major, Earth sciences, but my interests were really the mechanics of earthquakes and faulting. So, trying to bring physics and material behavior to that part of Earth science.

BMR: Was there something in particular that led you to introduce in the study of earthquakes and subduction zones?

DS: I think I always found it fascinating. My interest is really in kind of the physics of it. How materials behave… And then, I took a structural geology class as an undergraduate and, you know, we had lectures where you just take notes and take tests; but then, as an undergraduate, we did some seminar-style. We read some papers, and some of the papers we read were about the San Andreas fault. And there was this – it’s still kind of a paradox, but at the time it was very much one of the huge questions in earthquakes and tectonics is, are these plate boundary fault zones really weak? Are they really slippery, or are they strong? This was a raging debate in the 1980s and 1990s.

So, we read some papers, some very high-profile papers, in my undergraduate class about this problem. And I just suddenly thought, “This is cool. This is what I want to study”. So, I did an undergraduate project on the same topic, and I went to graduate school and I thought, “I want to study earthquakes, faulting and the strength of the crust”. I kind of fell in love with the topic. Through my career since then, I’ve danced around that. There are lots of interesting questions that relate to that, but that has been and is still a central thread.

BMR: And how came the connection with scientific ocean drilling?

DS: That was all part of my graduate school experience. The University California Santa Cruz is one of a handful of schools where, again, at that time – this was in the mid-1990s, when I went to graduate school. There were a few universities and a few faculty members who were really excited about the question of subduction zones, and using ocean drilling to study the area near the trench, shallow earthquakes, the materials that are there, and the story they could tell. So, I arrived in graduate school thinking, “I love the San Andreas fault, I want to study earthquakes and the strength of the crust”.

And my advisor said, “Cool. Why don’t you work on this project? That’s kind of related to that, which is how fluid in the sub-subsurface is related to faults in the area of the Nankai trough, offshore Japan”. So, in my first project, I just kind of got plugged into this computer modeling study of fluids moving through the subduction zone, trying to understand the plumbing and the pathways of the fluids. He basically took my energy and channeled it into this direction where – at the time I didn’t realize, but looking back I now see – my advisor understood, “this is a cutting edge problem in an exciting area where you’ll have opportunities”. And yes, he could have said, “Just keep working on the San Andreas”, and then I would be kind of like the 10th person to do the same thing that everybody else already did. And he put me in this position, to take that interest and apply it to the subduction zone problem.

So, that first project was not going to sea, but it was diving into work that had been done in previous drilling. Then, I had the opportunity – because I had done this computer modeling study, I was sort of one of the people who had helped to develop some of the figures and some of the pieces of a proposal to go drill offshore Japan in the Nankai Trough. And so, I was in a good position when I applied to sail as a scientist. I was also young, and they like to have grad students and postdocs go, to give people opportunities. And so, I had a really good pathway, to get involved.

BMR: Who was your supervisor, then?

DS: It was Casey Moore. He was really, for me, a terrific mentor. I think of him as a spirit guide. He and I actually did not co-author a paper together as part of my PhD, but he was always there. He was my advisor in the truest sense of the word, giving me suggestions, and advice, and discussing science; but he was not territorial. Just very supportive. And then, we worked together when I was a postdoc; but when I was a graduate student, he was my advisor. And he encouraged me to work with all these other people.

BMR: Of course, I’ve heard about Casey Moore from several people, and I can see that he was a key person, a mentor for many of the scientists now involved in studying subduction zones.

DS: Absolutely. And I think in this study of, particularly subduction tectonics, fluids, and faulting, a lot of questions that now we think of as kind of fundamental questions, at the time that they were conceived, he was behind a lot of that. He was the kind of creative voice and the one who saw these as important questions. And he didn’t do all of the detailed work, right? That required a huge number of people. But he was always there, kind of driving that. So, yeah, I think his legacy is really impressive. When you look at the people who worked with him, as collaborators but also students, and the students of those students, like a family tree… He’s definitely one of the kind of forefathers of this branch of the science.

BMR: You can see it with JFAST and JTRACK. You can trace the family tree, as you say.

DS: Right now, the people on JTRACK, as scientific participants or co-chief scientists, for example, were Harold Tobin’s students or my students, including current students and former students – like, Patrick Fulton was my first PhD student, and I was one of Casey’s students… And so, you can trace it back pretty quickly.

BMR: Now that we are talking about the research you did as an undergraduate – it kind of sounds familiar to me, because it’s similar to what Patrick (Fulton) explained me (both laugh). How did you continue developing this research with your students? And I’m asking for the connection with JFAST, this idea of let’s drill in a subduction zone after a big earthquake.

DS: So that particular problem, right? I started working more on fluid flow, and connection between fluids and the mechanics of how subduction zones work, the strength of the materials or the fault zones. But I was always deeply interested in not just the long term – was the crust strong or weak? – but the problem of earthquakes, and why the earthquakes happened in some places but not on other places. And this, again, was something that Casey Moore was a big part of… First, of asking these questions.

At the time, we had very little data so, the questions were very simple. We had this idea that the out near the trench, everything was creeping. Aseismic. No earthquakes. And then, there’s some critical depth where it becomes more like a rock, and it’s because of pressure and temperature. That’s called the seismogenic zone, and that’s where all the earthquakes happen. Of course, that’s completely oversimplified, but it was the spark that basically said, “Okay, so we need to drill and collect the materials and put instruments into the Earth to study what controls this”, right? What is the physics? Can we make predictions? Not like, tomorrow there will be an earthquake; but predictions about regions where we expect earthquakes, in regions where we don’t.

So, this idea of predicting, again, not predicting in the short term – will there be an earthquake? – but understanding kind of the regions of higher vulnerability or higher probability, and what we would look for. Is it related to the materials? Is it related to the temperature? What is it? And so, I got interested in kind of the rock mechanics side of this. So, collecting samples and then torturing them in the laboratory, doing different kinds of testing, to measure the properties that might explain nucleation of earthquakes. At the same time, I built up a laboratory, a rock deformation laboratory, to study different aspects of the materials: fluid movement, understand how pressure can be generated, understand the friction and the earthquake problem… And so, that’s kind of where I was.

I was also still doing some of this computer modeling stuff. And then, Emily Brodsky – who I think you’ve talked to – Emily and I, we knew each other pretty well and had thought about a lot of the same problems from very different directions. She’s kind of a seismologist who studies the earthquakes after they happen and what they tell us about the Earth. And I was studying the rocks, and how they might relate to the earthquakes. But there’s kind of big space between us. We both worked on the San Andreas fault. We both thought about the question of, are faults weak? Are faults strong? And Patrick was in the right place to be studying the San Andreas fault and the question of, “is that weak? If it’s slippery, if it’s weak, what’s causing that?” And so, that was his PhD. Then, Emily and I had a devious plan (laughs). We were always interested in this question of, well, one way to test whether faults, whether earthquakes, are high stress or low stress systems – what’s the physics of earthquakes? – is to go drill into an earthquake after it happens, and be able to say something about the stress that was on the fault, and how much heat it generated when it slipped.

So, Patrick had a postdoctoral fellowship that involved… – again, in retrospect, it makes me smile, because there was no earthquake yet. We were kind of preparing for the idea that maybe there would be an earthquake. And if there was a big earthquake, and if we were able to drill into it, we wanted to make some predictions to ask the question, where would we go drill? What would we look for? Could we see it? And how fast would we have to get in there to see it? One week, one year? Could we wait three years? Patrick did a really nice study asking that hypothetical question. And at the same time, Emily and I, together with Jim Mori and Rob Harris – who are two other collaborators on this idea – organized a workshop on rapid response drilling. The title of this report is called Rapid Response Drilling. Past, Present and Future. On the cover, if I remember correctly, there’s kind of a bunch of photographs and a mosaic, and one of them includes a little thermometer. The idea is, you can measure the temperature of the fault. And so, this is a big part of what we were saying, is a kind of a science plan that you could take as soon as there was a big earthquake and go use it.

And fast forward four years, Tohoku earthquake happens. And so, we were saying, Emily and I joked about this, “We were ready” (laughs).

BMR: It’s incredible that all came together so smoothly.

DS: Yeah. And you know that rapid response drilling didn’t have to be in a subduction zone. There was, for example, the Denali earthquake in 2007 in Alaska, it was a magnitude seven class earthquake. And we had some discussions with the US Geological Survey about whether we could get there fast enough to do some drilling and rapid response. It turned out that, because that was a smaller earthquake and a very difficult place to get to, to drill it, the idea just surfaced and then it kind of faded away. It just wasn’t the right place and time.

BMR: When you were talking about the planning, organization, and the research you were doing with Patrick and Emily, what was the situation in Japan like? I mean, I know you had a lot of collaborations, and I was wondering if there were people studying equivalent things. Did you have interactions with the Japanese, before the workshop?

DS: Not so much. I mean, the one big connection we did have was Jim Mori, who was at Kyoto University. He was involved in that workshop. I think he was, along with Emily and myself and Rob, thinking about this question of… And he was taking a seismological approach, right? The seismology question is, when a fault is having an earthquake, is it under a lot of stress or is it very slippery? And we were asking the same question from a more basic geological kind of stupid perspective. Less physics, more rocks. So, there was that collaboration, but there wasn’t like a huge flurry of activity on this problem. Really, anywhere. I mean, I think Patrick was one of a small number of people who was working on this kind of detailed question of, what could we see and how big would the signal be? Where is the best place to find that signal? Where would we diagnose? If you think about, like being a doctor, where would you go to? Where do you make your measurement to diagnose the situation?

BMR: This was happening around the mid-200s.

DS: Early to mid-2000s, yes.

BMR: And before that, you were involved in the planning of NanTroSEIZE, right?

DS: No… It was kind of in parallel, in a way. The initial meeting to plan NanTroSEIZE, it started in the late 1990s. The first ideas of this – again, Greg Moore, Casey Moore, were big players in sort of suggesting… And Ako (Asahiko) Taira, of course. This idea that we needed a deeper capability to drill deeper, to get to the zone where earthquakes might nucleate or where there’s co-seismic slip. So, that was happening in the late 1990s. And then, the first proposals for NanTroSEIZE were written in – I think we submitted them 2001. So, it’s kind of very close in timing, but I always thought of those as distinct. The NanTroSEIZE project was really written to test hypotheses about, what are the conditions in the fault? What is the fluid state? What is the thermal state? What are the rocks? What is the fault zone look like? What is its architecture? So, super important questions about sort of the rocks in the context of earthquakes.

The rapid response thing was a completely parallel track. That was this question – much more of a seismological question – of how earthquakes operate. And I, for some reason – because I can’t say no to things – I must have been involved in both of them. But, not a lot of crosstalk between them, really.

BMR: Then, how Chikyu – or the Chikyu-in-project – fits within all that? NanTroSEIZE was planned before Chikyu existed. And the Rapid Response Drilling was also, not specifically aimed for the offshore, but it was planned probably before.

DS: Well, the ideas were germinating before. So, my understanding is actually that the earliest days of designing Chikyu and kind of planning that there would be a riser-based drill ship, were in the late 1990s, I think. And this was Ako Taira; Casey was involved in this, and my understanding – and you probably know better than I do from your time at JAMSTEC and MarE3 –  is that, the idea of the NanTroSEIZE project was very much aligned with one of the main motivations for building the Chikyu, right? To study earthquakes and to be able to drill into the zone where earthquakes happen. And so, that was kind of the NanTroSEIZE project idea. I think was almost contemporaneous with conceiving the big drill ship. Also, of course, the idea of drilling the Moho was part of the Chikyu kind of motivation.

For rapid response, we were thinking about this starting in the early 2000s. Chikyu was already under construction. And we did think about the possibility of oceanic drilling as one place you could do this. And even after the Tohoku earthquake in 2011, we had a planning group that involved just asking the questions: Is it possible to get to the fault zone in Tohoku? The water is very deep. It’s not easy. We talked about using the JOIDES Resolution. So, this was not a purpose-built Chikyu project. We concluded that, for logistical reasons, probably political reasons, and capabilities, that it should be the Chikyu. And one of the biggest drivers was that the JOIDES Resolution didn’t have the right kind of pipe, to be strong enough to drill at such great depths. You know, the water depth alone is almost seven kilometers, and that’s so much tension on the pipe that they needed a different kind of pipe, with thicker wall.

So, yeah, long answer, but basically – again, in a way, it was kind of a convergence of good fortune that Chikyu had the capability. It’s not riser drilling, but because Chikyu was just such a big ship with newer capability and with the thicker wall pipe, it could do the JFAST and the JTRACK. And the J.R. maybe could have done it, but it wasn’t as clear, and it didn’t make sense.

BMR: Should we talk about NanTroSEIZE or about JFAST, now? Because our time today is limited…

DS: That is up to you. I was more involved in NanTroSEIZE, but my students and I – I mean, I’ve worked on JFAST as well, right? So, it’s up to you.

BMR: We can we focus more today on NanTroSEIZE, and if we need more time or to talk about JFAST, we can meet later via Zoom. So, how was the planning of NanTroSEIZE? I know it was a very long mission.

DS:Right.

BMR: It was not only one expedition; it was a bunch of them. Some of them were stick together… So, I don’t have very clear all the different stages and things that were done.

DS: I don’t have it either, because it’s hard to track.

BMR: What was your role, in the design and development of NanTroSEIZE?

DS: My involvement in that started in 2001. I still very clearly remember this. A small group of us. Many of us were involved in the – again, when I talk about when I was a PhD student, I worked on this computer modeling project of the area offshore Nankai. Not the NanTroSEIZE region but nearby, off of Shikoku Island. It was really that same group – I think it was maybe 8 or 10 scientists, who met in Tokyo for a small workshop for two days, to talk about the idea of deep riser drilling, using this new drill ship that was being built, the Chikyu. At the time, I think that Chikyu might not even been named yet. It was just the riser vessel. And so, that group included Gaku Kimura, myself, Greg [Moore], Casey [Moore], Harold Tobin… Many people who remained involved in NanTroSEIZE. And during the course of that workshop, we discussed, what are the ideas we would test? How would we approach this problem? My involvement started there. Then, it became really clear that Casey and Greg, I think, were like – they were very gracious. They said, “We’re old guys. We want you guys to take over and lead this”. And so, Harold and I in a way put a lot of our blood, sweat, and tears into those proposals. From 2001 to 2004, along with Gaku Kimura, who was still heavily involved, Masa Kinoshita – he’s moved around within Japan, but I think he was at JAMSTEC, at that time… So, it’s kind of the core group that we wrote 4 or 5 different drilling proposals, all aimed at the strategy of a staged approach.

First, are shallow boreholes that get into the fault zones, without using riser technology, at shallow depths to categorize and characterize the faults, collect materials, do some science that’s really important. That was sort of part one. Part two was intermediate depth. Part three was the deep hole. And then, part four, sort of like the icing on the cake, would be installing monitoring observatories, to monitor what I call “the creeks and groans” of the subduction zone. At the time, we thought we would be monitoring the locking up between earthquakes and maybe catch an earthquake. So, this was, that was the whole plan. This included an umbrella proposal that was sort of outlined the whole strategy and then, each section, each stage, had its own separate drilling proposal. So, it was a huge number of proposals that went into the IODP system; got ranked very highly, and then we started scheduling these expeditions.

And then, the implementation got more complicated for lots of reasons, in terms of –everything: from ocean currents and water depth, and all those kinds of technical details, to just budget and timing. We did the shallow drilling and a little bit of the riser drilling, because we realized we need to do more testing of that technology. And then, we kind of jumped ahead to do the observatories in the shallow portion of the system, because we realized that could provide very valuable information. The idea was that the deep borehole would be the final major milestone.

And so, this was ongoing from 2001, when the proposals were first developed, to 2019 (laughs), when the last part of the partially-drilled riser hole was completed. This is a long time (laughs).

BMR: It’s like…

DS: 20 years.

BMR: Yeah. I mean, I was thinking in terms of your career, it’s sort of like three quarters.

DS: Yeah, I mean, in 2001 I was just starting a first job as a faculty member. I had just finished my postdoc. And 2019 was not that long ago. So, that’s a huge part of my career. And then, within that, my role has been as co-chief scientist on a number of the expeditions. But in terms of the science and research, and pieces of deepest interest, have been those observatories. We’ve learned so much about how the subduction zone, and how the earthquake machine, is working from these very high resolution, high precision measurements, that we’re making every – right now, every second, right? I could log onto my phone right now and I could pull up what’s happening in these boreholes off Japan, under the ocean. It still blows my mind.

Then, so many students and postdocs over these generations of 20 years have had opportunities to work with the data, to participate in the expeditions, and develop new collaborations with people internationally, whether it’s structural geology, or sedimentology, or rock mechanics, or fluid geochemistry… It’s really – well, we didn’t achieve all of the targets of drilling that we set out to achieve at the beginning; but when I look back on it, a lot of it does feel like a big success in terms of launching people to do these investigations that are uncovering really interesting and important parts of this, how the earthquake system works, and how this subduction zone works.

BMR: If I understood it, NanTroSEIZE consisted on a lot of proposals in the IODP system and a series of expeditions that would take several years to complete. How the scientific community reacted? I’m thinking on the community related to scientific ocean drilling but not into earthquake research. The scientific outcomes would be of course very valuable, but I can see that…

DS: It’s not all of ocean drilling, yeah, yeah. I think that’s a really good question. It took a long time and a lot of resources, because it was so many expeditions kind of stacked together. And it required a huge amount of planning, also. A lot of people’s time and traveling to Japan to meet twice or three times a year with the drilling team… And so, really huge effort. But, as you say, it was sort of just one branch of this broader ocean drilling strategy.

I think the broader community had, to be honest, sort of – I’d say mixed review, right? Some people, I think, felt like, “Well, this is important because it’s kind of flagship operations. It helps everybody in ocean drilling because it’s very visible and shows we’re studying this important problem”. And so, that helps politicians and governments see that it’s useful to fund it. But other people of course saw this as, “Well, significant resources being used for science over here. But my science is this other science”.

Because NanTroSEIZE was mostly restricted to Chikyu operations, and that was mostly funded directly through Japanese channels – I mean, there was also some US money involved in those operations – it did not decrease the science operations on, for example, the JOIDES Resolution or Mission Specific Platforms. I think that was a huge help. If we had been using the JOIDES Resolution also to do NanTroSEIZE, then we would have had a kind of mutiny, right? The whole community would say, “This is too much. All of the money is going to your science”. But it was kind of compartmentalized, Chikyu, and the J.R. [JOIDES Resolution], and Mission Specific Platforms. And so, nobody was losing the ability to do their science. I think that was a big reason why it was kind of accepted by the community and appreciated.

BMR: Also, the topic of earthquake research has clear societal benefits, so it’s easy to understand that it’s needed research, especially in a country like Japan.

DS: Oh, yeah. It was not like some kind of curiosity we were interested in understanding. This is a strong motivation to study it. But again, I think, particularly scientists who study say, Earth’s past climate, that they are also working on a super important, highly relevant problem in today’s world; if ship time was being taken away from that to study earthquakes, then there would be more kind of a conflict, right? So, again, I think we were fortunate that we had enough ships and time on ships to be able to still do both of those kinds of things.

BMR: Looking back at the entire NanTroSEIZE project, and what you all learned from it, what kind of decisions in retrospect do you see as good, successful decisions? And which things you’d say should have been done differently? – although of course, at that time you didn’t know the outcomes.

DS: I think a lot of the early stuff that was done, the shallow drilling – it was something we had experience doing in other places – so that was very smooth, and we learned a lot. That is a very logical first step. And I think, in hindsight, we’d do that again.

To me, based on what I’ve seen that we learned, in hindsight, I would have focused more on some of the observatories earlier in the project, and a larger number. Instead of two or three, maybe five, because they have become so valuable in documenting and understanding how the system’s behaving… At the time we conceived this, we were still using the simple model I was telling you about earlier, about – there’s the zone that’s aseismic, and then there’s another [that is] seismic. And we want to have maybe an observatory, one on each side. But now, what we see is a much richer behavior, much more complicated. And this is something that’s universally being seen in other subduction zones, and also places like the San Andreas Fault… So, again, in retrospect, having more instruments to be able to watch and listen, I think would be… We’re learning this now, and we’re doing it later, but having done that earlier would have been huge.

And then, there are some decisions more on the technical drilling side, that I think we just didn’t… We didn’t know how difficult it would be to drill into these kinds of rocks, right? These are rocks that are in the Earth’s crust, where the crust is under a lot of stress. It’s an earthquake zone, and the rock is already broken. So, it’s not very stable. This is kind of an extreme challenge for drilling. It’s not like an oil company that is drilling into like a layer cake, where there are still challenging conditions but at least the rocks aren’t that crazy. I think we could have taken a… Maybe a different approach, to making the decisions about how to drill and how to design the drilling. And that would mean closer communication between the scientists and engineers, and drilling operators. So, this is both the kind of like, how do you do the science and have the right team together to talk to each other; versus the engineers come up a plan and they shoot it over by email to the scientists, and the scientists say, “it looks good”. And then, they hand it over like a cookbook to the drillers. And the drillers do it without checking back and say, “Is that the right kind of sugar? Is the right kind of flour? How many eggs? Or this egg is broken, should they still use it?” That was where we missed, I think, some opportunities.

BMR: We have like five more minutes. So, let me ask you a last question. How do you see the evolution of scientific ocean drilling in these 20 years? I’m asking in the sense that your research has gone for a good part hand in hand with the evolution of the program. You can approach this as you prefer, in terms of collaborations, science, support…

DS: I think one the things that’s kind of the legacy, and to me is one of the biggest advantages to ocean drilling, is that you bring together – again, what I was talking about at the beginning of our conversation is that, what I get excited about is, what NASA does or what the European or Japanese space commissions do, right?  It’s teams of people that, when they do something like a big mission, you’re able to tackle some huge question that requires the expertise of a team. And I get really excited about bringing people together and putting them in that position, to do something big. And so, I think that’s one of the biggest legacies of ocean drilling, is that every expedition or set of expeditions is kind of doing that. You need people with all this different expertise, in different topical areas to come together, to answer the question. Or at least to get you to drill in the right spot, to understand the context, to answer the question. So, you never have a drilling cruise that’s 30 microbiologists and nobody else, right?

And the other part of that, that is the longer lasting legacy, is the people. My own career has been strongly shaped by the collaborations, even on that first expedition. In fact, on that first expedition where I was a postdoc, I was partnered on shift as a just a regular little kid, as a scientist, with Harold Tobin. And he and I have been working together for 25 years since then, writing proposals together, including all of the NanTroSEIZE proposals where we were two of the group of maybe 4 or 5 lead PIs. Greg Moore was a chief scientist [on that first expedition]. Ako Taira was the other chief scientist. And so, it’s this legacy of people and collaborations that happens because of this environment. And the idea that it is mission-oriented, as opposed to kind of topic or project-oriented. So, I see that as this super important thread. That has really, strongly shaped my career, and I think the careers of lots of other people, both through the connections that you make, but also that philosophy of how you do science and how you can do big things in science.

I don’t see that as having evolved or changed very much. I think the program has evolved in a way that, in my view, is actually quite healthy. And maybe this is true even more broadly in the physical sciences, at least in the US. Is that, it’s very difficult to convince people to use taxpayer money and to fund science if it’s just curiosity. So, you have to for good reason. You have to explain to people why this is interesting and it can’t be, “Oh, it’s just wondering what’s down there under the ground”. Like, nobody cares, right? People used to think that was just fun. And if you have lots of money, go do that. But it’s become more focused, where you have to actually think about, “well, what are we going to learn? What’s the hypothesis we want to test? Why is that interesting? Why is that important? Why is that relevant?” And I think we’ve seen this focusing of the drilling program, and the way proposals are crafted, and the way they’re evaluated.

And I actually think, and time will tell, but as we look forward to figure out whether we will have a program in the US, and what IODP³ will look like, and what kinds of things will be done… I think that focusing is going to be really important in kind of setting up the community to make a good impression on our politicians (laughs). So, you know, basically over the last five or ten years, that evolution has put us in a position to say, “We’re doing things that matter”. We’re setting problems that – earthquakes, critical minerals, climate change… And that is much more valuable, I think, when you’re trying to get tens of millions of dollars from the government to do science, right? It’s the same kind of thing. We’re not just studying how foxes run around in the wild, but we’re interested in how it affects ecosystems that might support our way of life, right? And that matters much more and is easier argued, to me. So, I think that focusing has been really healthy, and we’ll see. That’s the biggest evolution I’ve seen.

BMR: That was great. Thank you very much. (both laugh)

DS: Thank you.