Emanuel Söeding

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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 Emanuel Söding by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2025 April 30, Vienna International Center (Austria). [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is April 30th of 2025. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius, historian of science at JAMSTEC. I am with Emanuel Söding today. We are at the Vienna International Center – thank you very much. Can you please say your name, your position, and your affiliation?

Emmanuel Söding (ES): My name is Emanuel Söding. I’m working for the Helmholtz Association in GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany. I’m working as a data steward or a data researcher on Helmholtz data systems, to make data systems harmonized and blend into the global data structures.

BMR: How did you start in data management and processing?

ES: That’s an interesting question. I started data processing during my PhD work, where I was doing backstripping sedimentological models based on seismic data, seismic survey data, and we correlated the seismic survey data with the existing DSDP and ODP data, at that time. So, we took advantage of the existing DSDP-CD set – there was a DSDP-CD set, and ODP-CD set, and we downloaded that data and correlated with the seismic and basically built sedimentological models from that. So, we were calculating backwards plate tectonics, sedimentology… All the processes that we could derive from that data.

BMR: Where were you based during your PhD?

ES: Also in Kiel. I was in Kiel.

BMR: It surprises me that you were involved in the DSDP and ODP from Germany so early one. What year was that?

ES: My PhD supervisor was Bill Hay, at that time. He’s a dinosaur in ODP, and I think he sailed on DSDP in some of the earliest DSDP legs – I don’t know exactly which ones, but it’s single digit, I guess, and he was JOIDES director, at some point.

So, there was a previous project that was doing similar things, and it was just basically expanding that writing software to analyze the data and to do forward calculations. At that point, not many people were actually doing models or calculations like that, or building databases like we did for DSDP and ODP data. So, basically, I was the only person doing that. That’s why gradually I learned how to manage the data, how to describe the data… Take a look at the way the folks at the DSDP and ODP were doing; and they were doing an excellent job, I must say, with the techniques that they had. And then, we were translating everything like that interpretation of databases.

BMR: How digital was that? I’m asking because I don’t know how was data processing and managing before. I don’t even know what kind of computers you were using.

ES: Right. There were actually very few standards existing. The interesting thing that I learned was that, for example, the DSDP-CDs, the data sets, were highly structured and that was actually extremely helpful. They were highly structured. But they had like separate files that describe these structures. For example, they written names for ages. They never gave an age number, so we didn’t have any numbers for the ages. We just had the names of whatever – Miocene, Oligocene, and so on. So, could use that, but we had to make our own age models, to actually adapt that, to combine that with the other data that we had, to actually be doing our calculations.

So, yeah, within themselves, the data was actually very that harmonized. And there were very few other datasets that were out there, that we could actually compare to. So, in the end, it took me a lot of time to analyze the stuff and also to write software to interpret what is in there. Because, for example, we were doing micropaleontologic stratigraphy, and not all of the names of the fossils are correct in these databases. So, we were trying to search through these, fix the names, adjust the models and so on; to get accurate models for the different holes.

That was actually quite interesting, because, they were really pioneers in this. And remember, the RAM of a personal PC was like, I don’t know, probably ten megabytes or so. So, we were talking megabytes. We’re not talking gigabytes. That’s 100MB in a single file was almost unhandable (laughs).

BMR: How did you learn all these things? You mentioned that you were coming from the geosciences, and now you were working with data and computers, which I would have assumed it’s something more for an IT-person.

ES: Yeah. I was always interested in computers, and I was also interested in fieldwork, actually. But I felt that… I was fascinated by calculating stuff. So, after my diploma, or what we call master’s thesis nowadays, I turned into programing for a while. I was just doing commercial programing for a while, mainly in C and later Perl – which is not very much used anymore. But anyway, I was looking at that and then, I learned from Bill and also from one of his students, Chris Wold, to how to build these models.

Actually, it was not that complicated. If you could do programing and you understood a little bit on how the geology works, it was relatively easy to set up these programs. The difficulty was to combine the different kinds of information that you get, like the seismic information, to interpret the seismic information and then to integrate all the sedimentological information. So, we wrote a model for plate tectonics in the 90s, which is still running, interestingly. So, it was a big game in the end, with lots of different aspects. And some of them worked out fine and some of them never materialized to anything. So, it’s like a PhD I think should be, like exploring the world. That was exploring the digital world.

Interestingly, I was in a geoscience institute. Everybody else was going on ships, they were having great cruises, you know? And folks like me sat at home at their computers. That was not very well received, funnily enough, but with the onset of the early 2000s, the data management became more important, and nobody knew much about it. Folks like me were hired to build the databases and to structure the data; also go on board to calculate the maps, location maps… Things like that. GMT, for example, is one of the tools that was very popular at that time, I think. So, we went on cruises, drawing maps, taking care of the data, and building data structures for projects. That’s how it picked off like in the early 2000s.

BMR: Can you tell me a bit about your supervisor? You mentioned he was a big figure in scientific ocean drilling.

ES: Bill Hay passed away in 2022, I think. He was a professor in Boulder, Colorado, for his last years, and he was at GEOMAR – partly Boulder, partly GEOMAR, for probably 20 years or so. And he studied in Vienna. I mean, he was a really global citizen. He studied in Vienna, he was everywhere.

 So, as I said, he was in DSDP in the early times. DSDP was run by the Joint Oceanographic Institutions, by Scripps… well, the oceanography institutions. And… While running this drillship, these institutions were legally responsible for anything that happened during the during the cruises. So, if anything, any disaster had happened, the institutions would have been directly liable for any kind of incident that would have happened.

And that was the case for, as far as I know, most of the DSDP part. So, Bill was a director, I think probably the first director of JOI –maybe we should confirm that. But he was one of the first directors of JOI, the Joint Oceanographic Institutions, and the story he once told me was that they had a meeting somewhere, probably in [Washington] DC, or in Miami, or wherever, with JOI, and he met one of his lawyers. And the lawyer said, “Do you have anything to do with these guys?” And he said, “Yes, I’m the president of JOI”. And he told him, “How quickly can you get out of that?” (laughs) Because the lawyer immediately saw that there was a big risk associated with the program as a whole. That’s when they founded the JOIDES, the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sciences, that was the legal body for the whole of the ODP at that time. Probably you should get some second information on that, because that’s how Bill told it to me at that time.

So, he was doing micropaleontology with the DSDP and ODP, and was probably one of the main drivers of coccolith stratigraphy, at that time. So yeah, we worked a lot with his expertise, with his people, with his folks; and he introduced me to many of the big people in ODP, at that time.

BMR: And how did you come to his PhD student?

ES: Oh, I just went there. I’d read a couple of his publications. He was doing that computational work, and I thought, “This looks great!”. He was in Kiel, so I didn’t have to go far, and I met his other PhD student, Chris, and we just, picked that up.

Bill later, in between 1999 and 2001, we had the JOIDES Office. That was the scientific office from the ODP in Kiel. And that was the first time that I really got in touch with the ODP, at that time, ODP administration. The office handles the proposal management, the proposals, all the panels, all the scientific advisory structure – that’s what we called it. I was just a young postdoc, so we also we had two science coordinators, one was Warner Brückmann and Jeff Schuffert, and they were basically doing all the management work. And my task was to publish the JOIDES journal, first of all – to collect the articles for the journal, proofread that, just make sure that it appears stack every half a year… That was the contractual obligation.

We were kind of digitizing some part of the administration. For example, the JOIDES directory. in the old times, there were no databases where you could look at people. So, they had a book there every other year; they published a book with everybody who had a role in scientific drilling. So, basically, we digitized it. I built a database, I put everybody in there, and so they could print that basically on demand, and they could edit the data set.

So, we were starting to digitize the ODP administrative structure. That was into the 1999, 2001.

BMR: How was the collaboration with the US like? In the office as well as during your PhD times. Were there exchanges of data…?

ES:That was excellent. At that time, and probably still, the main databases, in marine data –partly in Boulder, in NGDC, National Geophysical Data Center, where you could go and take a look at seismic records, for example. So, we derived most of our seismic records from NGDC. And I always envied them because the US has a policy that every data that is created with public money has to be published through the Library of Congress or other means. And we didn’t have that here. That allowed us to actually gather a lot of data, and have access to a lot of data, that was very useful for us.

And then, obviously this led also to the ODP onboard databases, to appear — they were accessible, so we could download data from there. So, the data sharing was actually excellent. The data was excellent quality. They were really nitpicking (laughs). They were very precise with their stuff, which was really great. I mean, that really encouraged me, I must say, to do some things, and to work with that. So that was great.

BMR: So, to get it clear, did you get the data from the people onboard?

ES: No, I didn’t. I got it from the databases. So, the science party, in the late 90s, already fed the data into the JANUS – the database changed its name a couple of times. I think it was called JANUS at that time. So, they already had structured data that you could download through HTML. Relatively simple interfaces. I’m not sure if that had API’s at that time, where you could automatically address the data. So, I think but mostly it was HTML. But you could write programs that could download the data, and then analyze and aggregate data. That was not so difficult.

It was very easy to address them. You could call them, go there to talk to them… It was much easier than in Germany (laughs). Much easier. You could combine that. There were other databases from other American sources, like bathymetry data, sediment thickness data… Everything came on CDs or you could just call these people. Downloading was not so difficult, at least for large datasets, because simply the internet was not fast enough.

BMR: So, essentially what you and your team were doing was gathering all these data from different sources in one single database.

ES: Exactly. It was not a database as such. It was more like directory, at that time. But then, it was party relational databases, party files, and directories. But then we were writing programs that could access these different kinds of data. And we were calculating, for example, paleo-bathymetric maps. We were calculating how deep was the ocean 100 million years ago. We were publishing that kind stuff.

BMR: Are you aware of how that virtual directory evolved?

ES: My directory? It did not evolve (both laugh). At that time there was… I must admit, viewed from today’s standards, I was a very bad researcher, probably, because I did not document my workflows, for example. Also, I never published my software that I used. I wrote it myself, I checked it, but at that time and even nowadays, writing software or even producing data is not considered a scientific achievement. So, yeah, people cared about that at that time, but that’s an engineering task. It’s not a scientific task. The scientific task is to interpret what you get, and draw conclusions for either future or past.

But, at that time, people were not that interested in software. So, what I did, as I said, I was writing plate tectonic models. Bill introduced me into some kinds of plate tectonics. We were using a book called Cox and Hart (1986), that had all the formulas in there. We built tectonic models, we also adjusted them partly to working on these models, and then, I wrote a web page where you could just enter a number of million years and it would calculate – it would give you a map, where you could see the plates constellation, even maps of the whole world… Or you could choose map projections, everything. So, you could produce paleo-geographic maps with IODP, ODP and DSDSP holes plotted into the map.

That stuff is actually still existing, and people are still using it for publications, funnily enough, even though it’s almost turns 30. In 2027, it’s 30 years. And it looks 90s (laughs).

BMR: I think I’ve seen them, with red dots.

ES: Really? With the red and green dots. It used to be quite popular. It runs on a normal PC. At some point, at GEOMAR, they took the site down because they didn’t want to maintain it anymore. So, I had a computer at home and somebody came and said, “Oh, well, we could need it”. And then I set it up on the computer at home – on my wife’s computer, actually – as a virtual machine (laughs). And now it runs on my, network, hard disk. So, it doesn’t even have a computer. It just runs there. And yeah, occasionally I get emails from people who are using these maps and request permission.

BMR: So, you continue connected [to IODP], somehow!

ES: Yeah, yeah. Whenever I try to take it down or it’s offline, then people write me and say, “Oh, where is it? We can’t find it. It’s gone”. Which is funny.

BMR: I actually did something similar for the site that was hosting digital copies of all the EXCOM and PCOM [Executive Committee and Planning Committee] meetings of DSDP and ODP. It went down at some point and I contacted the US Science Support Office, which hosted the site, and say – hey, do you still want to maintain this? That’s my primary source of information for my research! (laughs)

ES: Oh right! That would be cool to run this through large language models, because technically, once the models know that, you can ask them any question you want. Because there must be all these threads of the proposals in the system.

BMR: I don’t know if there’s a record of the proposals, but there are discussions on the proposals (in the minutes).

ES: Oh, I see. But if you could feed in the proposals – there are probably plenty of cool ideas in there still, that could be tackled. The fun thing is that, later in the JOIDES office, you have a stream of proposals, of ideas, coming in of what people would like to do, and where they would like to do research. That’s a really large wealth of creativity.

BMR: How did you continue your involvement in scientific ocean drilling?

ES: I was at the German office; that was two years. The office rotates, so after two years – I have to think about what did after 2001 – I moved on to a collaborative research project that we have in Germany. This is also kind of large scale projects. We were working on gas hydrates, in the continental margins in this case of Costa Rica and Chile. And we were looking for gas hydrates, at the formation of gas hydrates, subduction zones, fluids, and stuff like that.

I was participating in a couple of cruises, and also doing data management there – without really knowing what data management in today’s sense meant. But there, I came in contact for the first time with what we call “metadata” now, which is data describing data. So how do you describe or document the data that you have? And that was the first time that I learned about that. We were trying to introduce procedures and practices onboard to structurally collect data, because – that was a big surprise to me. I never sailed on an a ODP or IODP cruise; and IODP was highly structured. German research cruises were not at all structured. So, people, they had tasks, they were working groups; but everybody was acting for themselves, so they just packed up their stuff, went on board and nobody was documenting anything. Unless they did it themselves. Not even the stations, not even where you stopped, were necessarily documented. You know, technically they should. Everybody thought it would. But often, it didn’t.

That’s really what we learned and we were starting to structure the cruises, to have station lists, to make sure that the times are properly recorded because, you know, if you’re in the Pacific, the time is different from UTC or from Europe… So, people were writing up all kinds of times… These kinds of things – to learn how do people work, where there were likely mistakes, what are they willing to do, what they’re not willing to do… And trying to fill these gaps to structure, to get this whole system into shape.

From these cruises, from the first part of the Scientific Collaborative Research Center – that’s the SFB – after that phase, I had the opportunity to go to Sapporo. That was the IODP Sapporo Office. IODP was looking for people who were interested in and working with data, and actually combining the data in the IODP program.

The other thing that happened was, before also, after 2001 or 2002, I got in contact, through the age models that we had developed – as I said, we were working on age models, calibrating holes with micropaleontological data. I came into contact with the micropaleontological reference centers that were also from the ODP times, where micropaleontologists got together and talked about how to improve, revise, stratigraphies.

I had built models for them, and I had been invited to Japan probably in 2002 or 2003, to show them the models. Because they wanted to explore whether it would be worth to include these models into the J-CORES system. That’s as an automatic, age modeling system. I met a couple of very interesting people. Aita-san, Kyoma Takahashi, who was the programmer there… These guys – extremely smart guys. And, yeah. We had a number of really good talks and good discussions on how to deal with these with these data. That was basically my first contact to the Japanese IODP, at that time.

BMR: How come that you decided to move to Japan? I mean, one thing is to think, “Oh, that’s interesting”, but taking the decision of moving to Japan is not a small thing.

ES: First of all, I was always curious. I never had any difficulty adapting to other cultures. And when I was with Bill Hay, I was already working in the kind of US environment in Germany. Also, maybe, I don’t know whether that plays a role, but I as a small kid, when I was like 4 or 5 years old, I was living in the US, in San Francisco because my father was doing a postdoc there. There’s lots of Asians in the US, so I also had Asian friends, Japanese friends in school… Whenever they were Asian, I never had any difficulties contacting to other cultures – that was pretty normal, also at home.

So, yeah, Japan was a big adventure. You know, you just go there, you don’t exactly know how’s it going to be… But I had a family. I had three kids, so we were all moving over. I thought that – my oldest son was just second grade or so, so it’s a perfect timing to move over, to have this sort of experience for the kids. And we just dive into that. I was, I think, 40 years old. So, the perfect age to reach out and explore. My wife was not very happy about it (laughs) because we had just bought a house right next to GEOMAR, and she thought she could settle there – but no way. But the advantage was that in the office in Sapporo, first of all, Jeff Schuffert was there –one of the science coordinators from the previous JOIDES Office. And Jeff’s wife happens to be a good friend of my wife. So, the personal thing that makes a lot of things easier. And, yeah, it turned out great.

BMR: I think I told you; I interviewed Jeff back in December.

ES: Right, he knows everything! (laughs)

BMR: Now that you mentioned that your father went to the US as a postdoc, was he also in Earth Sciences?

ES: No, no, no. My father is a physicist, experimental physicist. In the days, he was doing (particle) accelerators.

BMR: How was like the office in Hokkaido like? Especially, I’d like to know – the office had just started, and Chikyu was sort of like a big promise. So how were like, the views on the future, the expectations…?

ES: The idea of the new program, in particular with 2 or 3 vessels – like the MSPs, the JOIDES Resolution and the Chikyu, was a real challenge, I think, to everyone. The transition from one scientific advisory structure to another one – the SAS, iSAS, and whatever the name of the new one was…

BMR: The interim thing.

ES: Yes, interim Scientific Advisory Structure. That was a huge challenge to everyone, because they were trying to improve the old structures, make sure that all the vessels or the interests would be considered, and then move that into a working structure where actually all the activities would come together at some point.

Personally, I think it did not go that bad. It was difficult because many people had expectations that things would continue as there were in ODP, and others had expectations that things could be improved, or would be changed, or would be adapted to the systems of the partners – to whatever partner that was, whether this was European, American to Japanese. And not all of that did materialize, and happen.

It was pretty clear from the very beginning that, of course, the two large partners were the US and Japan, and I, as a European, in addition to the Canadians that we had there in the office – Hans Christian Larsen was Danish – we had to play a kind of moderating role between these implementing organizations. I think that’s what we tried, and that was a challenge, in the end.

BMR: Challenge in the sense of communication, in the sense of different approaches…?

ES: Right. Like, there were science coordinators in the office, like Jeff [Schuffert], Nobu [Eguchi], later Barry Zelt… That they were dealing with the scientific advisory process; but there were technical folks like Bernard Miville and myself, and later Jamus Colier, who were dealing with publications, data… Mainly publications and data. And, yeah, every other parties had their take on that; and basically we were coming from the outside, and we were taking a look at these systems, and there were some things we liked, and some things we thought were a little bit outdated. To express expectations, let’s say, was – I would say not always well-received.

Because, as we know nowadays, if you want to adjust well-established publication and data management systems, it requires that the procedures and processes are changed. And IODP was running systems, and people were not always very well prepared for adapting these changes. It was much more difficult in data; it was much easier in publication, I must say, the hindsight. For example, we were trying to implement the concept of metadata in the data systems. And it was relatively easy for J-CORES, because J-CORES was new; and it was harder for JANUS, in the early 2000s, because JANUS was a running system.

On the other hand, implementing DOIs in the publications was relatively easy, because that was an outside system. The ODP, IODP publication department at TAMU was actually quite cooperative. They were really helpful, I must say. At the beginning, it was hard for them to understand what DOIs are for. We did publish the Scientific Drilling journal where we implemented those, and I think that’s how they learned how to use it, and how to do that. But these were really the very early stages of using PID systems, DOIs, references… The whole publication system was changing. The digitalization of publications was really picking off. It was an interesting time, I mean, really nowadays we are doing things that we already did at that time, and we were experimenting with that. That was really cool.

BMR: Now, talking about data, and these things that are difficult to adapt… Who owns the data?

ES: That’s an interesting question. Actually, if legally, I cannot answer that. I assume that, since it is data produced with US public money, the US society owns it, somehow.

BMR: But also, it was money from Japan, and ECORD, the other member nations…

ES: Right. But I think – also you need to check that – legally, IODP-MI was a US company, and it was contracted out to AESTO. But we were working on US law, and therefore… That’s why we had to publish in a certain frequency and also, we had to fly American, for example – we were using NSF money; even though Europe and Japan, they fed into these systems. On Germany, for example, nobody owns data. You cannot put licenses on data. You can put licenses on data products, but not on data itself. And each country has different systems for that. So, I’m not exactly sure what kind of system the US has.

BMR: It’s interesting the point that because IODP-MI was an American entity, even though you were working within an international group, the US regulations applied – even for that office in Japan.

ES: Right. I was I was employed on the Japanese contract, but the money came from the US, legally. It was interesting because – I mean, I learned a lot about accounting, because that’s something that nowadays it’s natural, but we were working on two currencies – we were working on the Japanese yen, but also on the US dollar.

Both sides had their security margins. There was a security depending on whether the yen went up or the yen went down. But since both had their security, it doesn’t matter where the yen changed, we had benefit. In the end, there was more money than we needed – not necessarily more money, but we never fell short of money. Let’s say that. Not for the office.

I learned a lot about administration, accounting… Things like that, that actually was good use later in my career.

BMR: Actually, I was precisely going to ask you what was the most important thing you learned during this time in Japan. It can be in any aspect.

ES: There were many things. I was 40, you know? (laughs). I learned to work with people, as I say, to raise expectations and say, “Okay, this is what we want to achieve. How can we achieve that?”. And different work cultures, and different work ethics – that’s very important, because the Japanese and the Americans, they are working completely differently. I mean, we had meetings at TAMU with the Europeans, the Japanese, the Americans… Americans, they make decisions on meetings. Japanese don’t do that, usually.

So, we had situations where some of the Americans were pushing the Japanese to commit to something. And at some point, we just stepped in and said, “No, you cannot do that. Give them a day or two and they will come back to you”.

In particular, at the beginning, there was a steep learning curve. I mean, not so much for us as Europeans, but for the Americans and also for the Japanese, of course. Because I think they never considered that could be a problem. They thought, “Okay, we’re going to set up the programs, we make agreements and everything will be okay”. No. That was that was definitely not the case.

BMR: You are not the first one who told me about this, and these different working cultures, way of handling meetings… It’s also very interesting to understand these kinds of differences; it’s something to be aware when you interact with people from different countries in these international collaborations.

ES: Right. You get to learn what is your own role; what is important for people, what is important for cultures. I mean, in Japan – for me, being with a family, in Germany, family is always first. You’re working, anything goes wrong in the family, you go home and try to fix it. In Japan, work is always first. If anything goes wrong, the neighbors would take care of the family or whoever. Work is always first. That’s very different. But it also means that the team building aspect in the company, with your colleagues is much higher; the commitment is much higher than it is in Europe or the US. So, I still have contact actually to most of my Japanese colleagues, in particular from the [JOIDES] Office. I’m still in contact with them because we really had very, very tight bonds. We were really, basically dragging this thing together – not only with the Japanese colleagues, also with Canadian, European, and US colleagues. This Japanese system made that happen. And that was really a very nice experience.

I still try to employ that, in Europe, in my current job. I think it forms a cozy environment, you get a good team, and you try to push to your limits.

BMR: Did you stay in Sapporo until the end of the IODP-MI (note: 2013)?

ES: No. I stayed there for three years, three and a half years; also, because that was my timeframe. In Germany, you drop out of the social system after five years. Also, I didn’t want to raise my kids in Japan. The idea was to give the kids a base, and we had a base in Germany. So, the plan, from the beginning, was to return or to stay not longer than five years. The idea was: come one year, get to learn everything; enjoy the second year, and then basically phase out the third year.

Then, of course, I had to find a job in Germany. Also, that’s very challenging. Once you’re gone, it’s very difficult to keep the ties back to your base. Fortunately, I managed to do that. I found a job as soon as I told my peers that I was considering to return. It was not difficult to find something… But I advise everyone who goes abroad to think about that, and consider that before you leave, and make sure you’re not cutting the ties, if you want to return. Your network is very important.

BMR: So, for you, it was a three year experience in Japan with the program.

ES: Exactly.

BMR: Being in Japan now, I think is natural to think that foreigners will come and go, and just a small percentage will stay for long term. I mean, I guess it’s like this in Japan and everywhere else. That’s a more general question, but what do you think that non-Japanese could brought in the Japanese part of the program? I mean, in your perspective, why it was considered important to have non-Japanese in the IODP’s administrative structure?

ES: First of all, as we said, the Japanese together with the Americans, that’s a tough combination. Because they’re both very national. The Japanese try to fix, to solve, everything by themselves. As Europeans, we are used to work across cultures. I mean, Europe is a mix of cultures, and we don’t speak the same languages, we operate differently, we have also very different values… So, we used actually to do that. And yes, we don’t get everything done very quickly, but at least we get a good understanding for each other, and tolerate that.

And that is not the case neither in the US nor in Japan, whatever they say, to the same extent. So, the Europeans’ role, we are a minor partner, but we are moderators, there. And I think that worked pretty well. At least in the IODP-MI. For that reason, I think we were important to run the system – I mean, Canada was part of Europe, at that time (note: in the IODP structure, Canada was a member country of ECORD), which also is funny, so the Canadians were also kind of considered Europeans.

The whole European part of the program was much less funded, but for that reason, much more flexible. So, for example, when we were Bernard Miville, data manager, also myself partly… And we were working on the SEDIS metadata system – Scientific Earth Drilling Information System, that was the name of the SEDIS – we were trying to build a system where you could discover data through metadata. That was something that we contracted out to Bremen not because they were also Europeans but because, first of all, they had no system, so it was much easier for them to think out of the box and connect to these two, J-CORES and JANUS systems, aggregate the data, and then build something new from it. And they had a ton of experience with actual up-to-date, latest development in data management.

BMR: For how long did your relation to IODP continue? In which ways?

ES: Actually, I did not work with IODP data anymore. I did stay in contact with my IODP peers, of course. I did maintain my plate tectonics servers, of course…

The point was, when I left the IODP, I went to the University of Kiel, and we were working on a large-scale, marine science project that basically combined very broad expertise — we had lawyers, economists, marine researchers, social scientists, philosophers of ethics… Even artists, that combined these into a big, marine research projects, that was also tasked to do like political consulting, and stuff like that. So I was doing mainly administrative work. As part of that, we also had booths here at EGU and AGU. We were always trying to team up with other partners, like DFG for example, to actually organize these booths in order to represent Germany, Germany’s marine sciences; but also to attract people to work for us internationally, and so on.

And from organizing these booths, because I knew the ODP and IODP booths from the old times, and these booths, the way that these people – like Patricia Mareujeol, for example – they were organizing these booths more like lounges. So, they were not like counters. They were also counters, but they were not counters that were basically being a barrier to the customers. They were open booths, people could go there; there were sofas, people were sitting… They were basically like a lounge where people could meet and talk. And I always found that that was great.

And so, we built our booths exactly the same way, with sofas… Here at EGU, mainly at EGU, we always had big parties together with IODP because we knew each other and we were having a really good time; but I didn’t have any particular scientific connection anymore, other than the knowing them, and chatting them, and exchanging how to do outreach and organization stuff.

That was really cool. I learned a lot from the outreach department of IODP and ECORD, in particular.

BMR: As you said, later on you continued with your career, being involved in other projects. How does IODP, or what you’d experienced of IODP, compares to other international groups or collaborations?

ES: First of all, it’s probably still one of the biggest programs in earth science that exists. And, at the very beginning, in 1999, people who are doing like program management, they didn’t exist in Germany. Because we did not have any programs that were big enough to actually justify that. So, even large scale programs like these collaborative research projects that had a couple of hundred people or so, they didn’t have any program manager or anything like that. That was something that picked up later within Germany, with the Centers of Excellence – that’s where I went. This kind of people, they only evolved later, and nobody had experience with that.

I learned all of that in the American system first, the US system, then in the IODP system. How to organize projects, how to motivate people; how to pull them together to form teams, to work on the same task, and how to organize that – maybe not to the same perfection as TAMU did in the old times, but we were trying, you know?  We were far ahead of everything that happened in Germany at that time. So, that was good. That was really nice.

There were a couple of colleagues in Bremen that were working at the Bremen [core] repositories. They had some of the experience like I had. And actually, I think, everybody from Germany I know – I mean, there’s plenty of people who had worked for TAMU, or for ODP, or as staff scientists… They all took a lot of knowledge and experience from their time in the US; and of course, also in Japan. People who have sailed on Chikyu… They learned a lot.

BMR: And for sure you’ve heard a lot of stories from Chikyu, but you never managed to sail on the ship!

ES: No, no; that’s funny. I think I was once probably the highest-ranked German in the system, in the administrative sense… I’ve been on Chikyu but before it sailed; it was when it was just built, that we visited Chikyu once, so I saw it. I never even saw the JR… I was sometimes quite close to visiting it, and I was once I think 30 miles away – I was on a German research vessel in the Pacific, and I knew the JR was drilling closely. So I was asking the captain, “If you see the drillship, let me know…”. It was almost! It must have been somewhere on the horizon, but I never managed to see it.

BMR: It’s kind of a paradox, because you were probably one of the people who has touched most of the data coming from these expeditions but you haven’t actually sailed.

ES: Yeah, that’s the fate of the data people. Often, they stay inside, but it’s okay. I mean, I’ve done some cruises on ships… The thing that I think is really important for the community, is the same that you experience on every cruise. That people who are on cruises together, they have certain ties. This really glues people together. They have a common goal, and the common goal is bigger than just the cruise… So, everybody who’s sailed, you’ll probably know most of the people they sailed with for a long time. Basically, probably building careers on these networks. That’s really, I think, something that that the program achieves, that makes the program so strong.

That goes basically across cultural barriers, also. Once you’re on board, it doesn’t matter whether you’re American, European, Japanese – who cares. The goal is the driver. And that’s something I haven’t seen with many other scientific disciplines in the same way. I think that’s why we are doing what we are doing, that’s why we’re collaborating; that’s why we’re way advanced in research and data management, in many aspects… That’s because we know each other. We’ve been doing work on ships together and that’s part of the reason.

It also so happens that that people continue to work on the data far beyond the cruises, as well. So, the so the research doesn’t end with the cruise. The research – actually, it never really ends. We’ve always, with Jeff and others, already in the 90s before the new program, we asked ourselves, “Do the proposals drive the program? Or does the ship drive the program?”. In that sense, it’s an interesting time nowadays, because now the ship is not there anymore. I mean, there is a ship. yes, but Chikyu is limited. There are the MSPs, potentially. Their use is also very tailored to particular targets. But I think we have time to consider where do we want the program to evolve to? What are the next steps? How can we how make more use out of the information that we have gathered? And that is something that I always thought that, maybe I will do that when I retire in seven years. To use to use machine learning and AI techniques on IODP and ODP data – I mean, there must be somebody there already doing that. I hope. Because the data is so well-structured, and it’s so complete, that it’s a tremendous wealth in there that could be exploited, I suspect, relatively easily. Just because it’s so high quality data.

Currently we are working with all these large language models and they’re taking everything there is, and the training data is not necessarily high-quality. So, if you want to address particular targets, ODP and IODP data is the data to use. It has a great potential for all of these applications.

BMR: I think the community would be very happy if you do that. (both laugh)

ES: You don’t know about anything like that? I’ve asked Nobu and he wasn’t aware.

BMR: I feel that everyone is very much focused on their own research – same for me. So, yeah, the program has always grown feeding in people from different fields of expertise. So, it probably will end up incorporating this kind of field.

ES: I mean, they’ve always focused very much on the technical aspects from the ship. That’s why I said the ship drives the system. If you have to keep the ship running, you don’t have time to lean back and say, “Okay, what kind of challenges can we address with new technology? With new techniques?”. At the age of information, that’s what is coming, and we need to address it. I mean, we are currently addressing it, and if nobody addresses it with IODP, then I will do that in seven years (both laugh). But I’m just saying that…

BMR: It’s recorded now (both laugh)

ES: In this business, we are really looking for use cases. So, working for Helmholtz, I’m usually looking for use cases within Helmholtz. IODP is not exactly part of that; it’s partly, because there’s the core repository in Bremen, they also have databases, and a lot of the data is in Pangea… But yeah, I mean, maybe we can make it a use case, let’s see. I would love to do that (laughs).

BMR I would love to see that (laughs). I think we are running out of time. Is there something you want to add that I have not asked you, or you’d like to explain…?

ES: it’s pretty interesting, because now talking about it, there’s a lot of things that come back as memories. And, really, ODP and IODP, they really shaped my life, my career, and my thinking; and although, I mean, the program is not perfect, it has its limitations, and everything is organized in expeditions… So, if you want to leave that expedition frame, it’s basically impossible. For example, I had a suggestion that there were these APLACON, COMPLEX Conferences – do you remember? – where they were trying to overhaul the program, and to get new ideas. But in the end, I thought there were not that many really new ideas because everybody was still thinking about expeditions. Everybody was suggesting expeditions, But I would like to have like reference holes, for example, to drill in places just where the ship passes by, drill a hole to see what does the basin look like inside? Nobody was doing that. So, everything we drilled are special places. They are all particular for something that people wanted to find out, but we do not have the background data. And that’s something I would have liked to tackle, at some point, to know what does the average look like? There’s so much to explore still.

BMR: That’s really good. I think it’s great to have sometimes an outside view…

ES: Exactly. So, we think we have 2,000 holes, and we should have covered everything. But no (laughs).

BMR: I see, it’s very focalized.

ES: We have the ridges; we have the deep-sea fans… But we do not have this deep sea planes, and we do not have the fracture zones. There’s not much on fracture zones, for example. So, in fact, we don’t really know how fracture zones work. A couple of years ago, we were thinking about proposing like a large scale, collaborative kind of collaborative project in Germany on fracture zones. But it was not easy to find information to, actually, even write the proposal properly. There’s so much mystery hidden (both laugh). So, the real drilling, working with samples, knowing the original geologic work… I think that’s still there. And the data, information science, data science stuff, that just adds on top of that and gives us another dimension.

BMR: That’s great. Well, thank you very, very much.

ES: Yeah, cool. Thank you very much.