Greg Moore

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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 Gregory A. Moore by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2023 October 19, JAMSTEC, Yokosuka, Japan. [link]

Beatriz Martinez Rius (BMR): Thank you very much for coming here. First of all, can you please tell your name, affiliation and current role?

Gregory Moore (GM): My name is Gregory Moore. I am a Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, currently a Visiting Professor at the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute of University of Tokyo.

BMR: Thank you. I would like to start by asking you about your birthplace, and about how your childhood experiences influenced your interest in Earth sciences.

GM: I was born in North Dakota. My mother is from North Dakota. She grew up on a farm out in the central part of the state. My father is from Mississippi. They met right after the Second World War. We stayed in Bismarck, the ND capital, for, I guess, about 12 years or so. At that point, my father joined a company that was doing logistics-type things for the military. So we, then, spent a couple of years out on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. My father was in charge of all of the food facilities on the island. That was at the time the government was building the Nike Zeus antiballistic missile. They were test firing it from there. Living as a young teenager on an island like that was sort of amazing. There were many, many things to do. Of course, it was a very small island, so we were surrounded by water. I was able to get into scuba diving, made friends with some people at the Marine facility, and usually at least once a month they would call me up and say, “Hey, Greg, we have a spot on our fishing boat. You want to go out with us tomorrow?” So I got to see the ocean quite a bit.

We then moved to California for junior high and high school around the San Francisco area. I attended the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). I started out at UCSB as an Electrical Engineering major, and by the end of my first year, I was deciding that I didn’t know whether I would be able to handle doing that for four years because they were clearly trying to turn us into 9 to 5 office people. We had homework assignments that were due at 5:00 a couple days a week. It was just sort of regimented. And during my second year, I had a terrible teacher in Physics for engineers. So I decided I was going to have to do something different. I didn’t want to do Biology because all the pre-med people were in Biology. Chemistry was not my favorite, nor was Physics. One of my friends told me that somebody we had lived with in the dorm the previous year was a Geology major and he really loved it. I knew nothing about Geology. Most high schools in the US don’t teach Geology, so I wanted to talk to my friend and I tried to find him right away, but his roommate said that he was off in the Mojave Desert on some sort of Geology field trip and that he would be back at the end of the week. My friend set up an appointment for me with the Geology undergraduate advisor, who was a really, really nice guy. He asked me what courses I had taken. And I told him: Physics, Chemistry, and two years of calculus. He said I would be to slide right in with no additional time to finish my degree.

So I started my career in Geology and really liked it, including doing field work, going on several extra field trips… Places like the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, up in the Coast Ranges north of Santa Barbara… I got to know Professor Dan Karig, who was in his second year at Santa Barbara. He got his Ph.D. at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, having spent a lot of time doing marine work. He came back from a couple of weeks of lectures around the East Coast, and told me that I really should apply to Cornell because they were about to start a new program having to do with plate tectonics. This was back in 1973, when plate tectonics was turning into something big. A couple other professors said, “No, no. You should really apply to Johns Hopkins, which would be a much better place for you.” I was accepted at both places, so during Spring Break I went to talk to the faculty and it did look like Johns Hopkins really was the better place for me. I spent my first year of grad school there and enjoyed the people and the field trips, but I could never connect with the faculty members on a dissertation topic. When I communicated with Prof. Karig, who had since moved to Cornell, he told me that if I was not really happy at Johns Hopkins, I should come visit Cornell at the end of the semester to talk about the potential for transferring there. He told me he had just gotten back from a Deep Sea Drilling Program cruise to the Nankai Trough (note: DSDP Leg 31). During that summer also had done a side trip to Indonesia and spent a few days on a little island west of Sumatra that was supposed to be something called “an exposed accretionary prism”. Said he was putting in a proposal to go study that area of Sumatra in more detail and would need a graduate student to go with him. So I decided to transfer there. And indeed we did go to the little island called Nias, off the coast of Sumatra, which was within a hundred kilometers or so of the 2004 giant earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. We did that land field work during three field seasons. We were part of a larger group that included people at Scripps, Lamont, Woods Hole… Who were studying Southeast Asia tectonics and resources. The Scripps people put together a cruise around Nias, and asked Prof. Karig to go with them and to bring a student. So I went… We were already there doing field work, so we just jumped on the ship when it passed by and we did some offshore seismic work. The people at Scripps asked me what I was going to do when I finished at Cornell. I said I didn’t know for sure, so Prof. Joe Curray said, “Well, why don’t you come to Scripps and work on the seismic data from this cruise with us?”. So I went out to Scripps and spent four years there, and really got into Marine Geophysics, mostly working on active subduction zones.

I also did some more land fieldwork in northeastern Indonesia and southern part of the Philippines, during that time. I got to know Dr. Tom Shipley, who later moved to the University of Texas. Tom and I hit it off really well and communicated well and wrote many papers together. We put together funding for a few cruises, including to the Middle America Trench, the Cascadia Trench offshore Oregon, and the Middle America Trench. A couple of the cruises that we had spent a lot of time working on writing proposals to NSF, arranging the ship logistics, applying for clearances from foreign governments, etc. We then got into the cruises  and the ships kept breaking down. And I finally said, “I don’t think I want to do this as a long term career.” When I was invited to give a presentation at meeting of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, I was walking down the hall to a presentation room and saw some job add posters. I stopped and glanced at a couple of them, including one that seemed to exactly describe me: “someone who has done Marine Geophysics, including seismic reflection data processing and interpretation, knows about subduction zones, and has carried out land field work.” I said, “I guess I should stop and talk to those people.” The company was called Cities Service, and they had a research lab in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They had just gotten into a lease for drilling in the Philippines in the subduction zone. That’s why they were looking for somebody like me. I decided to leave Scripps and to join Cities Service, but almost as soon as I got there, the company started becoming a target of takeovers. This was during the early eighties. Various smaller oil companies were gobbled up by bigger oil companies. So the upper management was proactive and decided to merge with Gulf Oil instead of being taken over by another company. That was okay for two or three months. And then that deal fell through and they panicked and sold the company to Occidental Petroleum. Occidental, the previous year, had bought a petrochemical company that had a really nice research lab. They fired everybody in the research lab and gave the equipment to the local university. So when a friend of mine said, “Hey, Greg, I can get you an interview with the local university. I know they’re looking for somebody just like you.” So I said, “sure.” And I ended up going to the University of Tulsa, stayed there for about four years, continued my work with Tom Shipley, including a 3D seismic cruise and two drilling expeditions to the Barbados subduction zone, one with Tom as Chief Scientist and the second with Prof. Casey Moore of UC Santa Cruz, who had been a long-term mentor of mine… Then Tom and I later conducted a joint cruise with the Ocean Research Institute here in Tokyo.  That was when I first got to meet Prof. Asahiko Taira (note: in 1987). We did a two-ship operation collecting reflection and refraction data. I spent a month on the ORI research ship, the Tansei Maru, with the people who became my close colleagues for many. One of Taira’s students (note: Shin’ichi Kuramoto, who has been Executive Director at JAMSTEC until April 2024) came to the University of Tulsa to help process the data from our cruise. We then set up a drilling program (note: ODP Leg 131) also in that same area of Nankai Trough. Taira-san was co-chief, and I joined the cruise, which was quite successful. 

Then in 1988, a colleague of mine, Prof. Brian Taylor, who was a fellow graduate student at Lamont when I was at Cornell and had then joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii, called me and said, “Greg, we just got some money at the University of Hawaii to set up a new school, which is going to be the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). We’re going to get new faculty positions in the various departments, and we really want you to apply for one of them.” So I applied for the position, interviewed, got the job, and joined University of Hawaii in December of 1988. I stayed there until I retired in August of 2020. Since joining SOEST, I continued on with doing Ocean Drilling-related projects… Tom (Shipley) and I did another 3D seismic operation, this time in the Nankai Trough, again with (Asahiko) Taira’s group in 1999 that led to another drilling expedition. In that drilling operation (note: ODP Leg 190), Taira and I were Co-Chief Scientists together. In 2000 he invited me to Ocean Research Institute as a visiting professor for three months. We worked together on Leg 190 data. That was when the operations of D/V Chikyu were just being discussed. I guess they probably were actually building Chikyu by that time. We put together a workshop for later in the year and brought a bunch of people from the US and other places and discussed how we would use this new resource to better understand subduction zones. And that was the beginning of our NanTroSEIZE project.

Prof. Taira later invited me to come to JAMSTEC to work with him on NanTroSEIZE, which I did starting in 2006. We had money from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), as well as money from the Japanese government to collect 3D seismic data in the Nankai area. I was sort of in charge of setting up the processing for that data set. We got it processed, picked a number of sites, and started our NanTroSEIZE drilling. By that time, we’d set up an advisory structure, the Project Management Team, which I was a member of. I stayed at JAMSTEC for about two and a half years and went back to the University of Hawaii and have continued working on NanTroSEIZE almost the entire time.In 2017/18 a new group joined our New Zealand and UK colleagues to focus on the Hikurungi subduction zone. I was involved in IODP Expedition 372, which was followed immediately by  a 3D seismic cruise on a Lamont vessel. I sent the student on that cruise, which was followed a couple of months later by Expedition 375.We are still working on that data.

So, here we are today: I’m back at the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute for a couple of months as a Visiting Professor, attending a NanTroSEIZE workshop (note: took place in October 2023) and discussing new Nankai seismic data with my JAMSTEC colleagues.

BMR: Going a bit back in time, I would like to ask you what caught your interest about studying subduction zones in the first place, when you started in marine geosciences?

GM: Studying subduction zones… I guess that it is sort of a typical graduate student thing. Your advisor says, “Why don’t you come and work with me? I have some funding for you and this is the project that I’m going to work on.” And you say, “that sounds interesting.” Well, my interests and the main reason I went to Johns Hopkins was because I wanted to do structural geology and sedimentology. And when I was at Hopkins, I learned a lot more structural geology, got to see the classic exposures of structures in the Appalachians, the stratigraphy in the Appalachians, and sort of got interested in the combination of those two. When Prof. Karig suggested that the island that he was going to go work on was an uplifted accretionary prism, where we could see the geologic structure and look at the interaction between structure and sedimentation, it sounded like a great thing to do. We were going to try to understand the development of the accretionary prism and the seismogenic zone, eventually. So I guess that’s basically what caused me to get interested in subduction zones.

BMR: It was also during your graduate time that you went for the first time onboard on an oceanographic mission, right?

GM: Right. When I arrived at Cornell, my advisor had been there for part of a year. He had a friend, a fellow Scripps graduate student, who was moving to Lamont. His buddy, Dr. Roger Anderson, said that he had a cruise on a Scripps ship coming up to collect heat flow data across the Galapagos spreading center. Said that he would only be at Lamont a couple of months before he had to leave on the cruise, and he had no way to  find Lamont students to come on the cruise. So he offered my advisor the opportunity to go on that cruise and bring some students. Dr. Anderson gave us a couple of days of ship time at the end to do some surveying in Middle America Trench. So that was my first introduction to a real oceanographic cruise.

BMR: How was experience onboard? What do you remember about that?

GM: It was sort of overwhelming. We flew down to Panama, got on the research ship Melville. Went down to the Galapagos. One thing I do remember is we had to stop off at the Galapagos Islands to pick up an Ecuadorian observer. So we got to, at least put our foot on the Galapagos Islands, did a bunch of surveying around the active spreading center, did some heat flow transects… So we got to see what it took to do these kinds of marine operations and how you had to rely on the technicians to make sure that things were working correctly. So it was a little bit overwhelming at that point.

BMR: This was… Sorry to ask you again about this, but… Cornell?

GM: Yes, I was a first year, my first semester graduate student. We just finished… Well, mostly finished the semester then we left for the cruise on the very end of November. Ended up going back to San Diego at just about Christmas time.

BMR: Later on you went to Scripps, and it was at the time when marine geosciences were really blooming and there were many renowned marine geologists and geophysics. How was the academic environment? Did you meet someone who influenced you during your career?

GM: I… On the cruise that we had off Sumatra in… Would that have been 1977? That was when I met Joe Curray. He had been working in the Indian Ocean for years and years, and Joe was the guy who invited me to come to Scripps. We interacted quite a lot. He was pretty influential on getting me going. At the same time, some of the work that I was doing or wanting to do, I got together with another young researcher, Peter Lonsdale. We put in a proposal to do some work in the Middle America Trench. At that time I also got to know a former Scripps graduate who was at UC Santa Cruz. He and my advisor had been graduate students at the same time. His name is Eli Silver. And Eli and I did some collaboration on the northeastern part of the of Indonesia, Molucca Sea. He had a cruise done a couple of years earlier, had some bathymetry and seismic data that he had not yet worked on. He invited me to come up to Santa Cruz and look at it and see whether I wanted to start a project on that. So we worked together on that data. He had done some fieldwork on some of the islands around there. And in the middle of the Molucca Sea there is, in the collision area, an uplifted piece of oceanic crust, or thought to be oceanic crust, and as I was winding up the project with the marine data, I told him that I thought he ought to go to that island and look at those uplifted, ophiolite rocks. And he said, “Sounds like a great idea, but you should be the one to do it.” So I put in a proposal with his help to NSF. It got funded. And I spent a field season working on the Talaud Islands. Seemed like that geologic trend was headed straight up to the Philippines. So I thought I should continue the work up into the southern Philippines as well. At that point, I had been working on the Talaud igneous rocks with Jim Hawkins at Scripps. Jim had a big program working on the Zambales ophiolite in Luzon, Philippines. So he was happy to collaborate with me on the working on the southern Philippines. So yeah, I had lots of influence from more senior people, both at Scripps and in Santa Cruz.

Another long term collaborator, another colleague at UC Santa Cruz, was Casey Moore. He was involved, well, we were involved together (note: with Tom Shipley) in putting together proposals for seismic and drilling in Cascadia, Barbados… He also was involved heavily in our Nankai project, NanTroSEIZE. Casey and I go all the way back to my days as a graduate student… He was only a few years senior to me. He was already at UC Santa Cruz as an assistant professor, and he reviewed my dissertation papers for me. Overall was a great colleague and mentor for many years.

BMR: Could you tell me a bit about your time at the laboratory for the oil industry you were working for?

GM: I was working at the Cities Service Research Center in Tulsa. Probably the main part of that year and a half or so – maybe it was two years – that affected me in the long term, was that even though I was in the Structural Geology Research Group, I also collaborated with the Geophysical Research Group. The structural geology people had told me before I joined that they knew I had some unfinished work from various cruises at Scripps, and if I wanted to take some time to work on that, it would be fine. And they also pointed me to the geophysics people who had state of the art seismic processing hardware and software. So I was able to do some really good processing on data from the Middle America Trench. The advantage of being in Tulsa and working with Cities Service is that they had a very strong relationship with an international company that did seismic processing and acquisition, called Seismograph Service Corporation (SSC), which had its headquarters in Tulsa. So during that time, when I was working with their software, I got to know a bunch of the people who were writing the software and working on it. I got to know pretty well how to operate with that system.

When it was time to leave Cities Service, one of the attractions of staying in Tulsa and working at the University of Tulsa is that SCC had donated one of their processing systems to the university, both hardware and software. So there was sort of mutual attraction there, that the University thought it would be great to have somebody who could come and actually hit the ground running, working with that software system; and I had access to software and hardware that I knew how to run. So during my time at Cities Service and at University of Tulsa, I spent a lot of time working with that software. Companies like that are always upgrading operating systems, software, hardware… And they were porting their software to a mini supercomputer called Alliant. And strangely enough, the University of Hawaii had just bought an Alliant system as I was interviewing there. So the thought that I could transfer the software there and have an even more powerful system was, again, a great deal for me. And they thought it was great that they’d have somebody who could bring in money to use that system. So for me, my industry time was mostly getting the basics of learning and doing seismic processing with an industry standard seismic processing system. I had done some processing at Scripps. We hired a guy out of Texaco who wrote a seismic processing program that we used initially to process the data from our Sumatra cruise. But the SSC package was a full blown system, which was really nice.

BMR: What was the difference in the software? Between a software or a system for industry and the ones you used to work with at universities.

GM: At that time, computers were getting big enough, fast enough to actually do a reasonable job with seismic reflection processing. There were people in the industry who were developing the algorithms to do advanced processing. Things that we had no hope of ever doing in the academic business. So it’s just sort of like starting off driving a go-kart and having somebody say, “Here you can try out this Ferrari, see whether you like that or not.” And so it’s a big, big, big step up.

BMR: I see.

GM: There is an interesting national organization called Society of Exploration Geophysicists and the oil company geophysicists are really big in that organization, talking to each other about the nuances of the algorithms that are doing processing and imaging. And the more advanced you are with hardware, the more your software is able to do so.

BMR: Around that period you learned about the the Deep Sea Drilling Project. It is true that you have mentioned before, but I was wondering how you came to know about the project, and what were your first thoughts or experiences with it?

GM: I guess I basically first started to understand ocean drilling during the DSDP days. As I said, my advisor Dan Karig had been co-chief scientist on a drilling Leg in the Nankai Trough, and during my first year he was working on that data. So I got to know what the drilling program was, what sorts of things they were doing… I got more involved in thinking about how drilling could answer the questions that I and my colleagues were trying to ask. So it’s just sort of a basic step, from my first days as a graduate student. When I first got to Scripps, Joe Curray was also involved in DSDP, and he had gotten some money to do a site survey in the Gulf of California. He asked me to join that cruise to collect more seismic data. And that was prior to drilling. It eventually led to (DSDP) legs 64 and 65 in the Gulf of California. And I guess that sort of focused me on the combination of collecting seismic data to image things and then go drilling. And the numbers of us, at that time, who were doing reflection data, acquisition, and processing and then interpretation for drilling was pretty small, so it was relatively easy to get funding to do that kind of thing and be able to support the drilling program. So then we evolved from that into collecting more seismic data in the Middle America Trench. Then Tom, Casey and I carried out an academic 3D seismic cruise to the Barbados subduction zone. We also hired an industry ship to collect data in Cascadia, off Oregon, for future drilling as well. So I guess I’ve sort of been involved in drilling — DSDP, ODP, IODP — since my graduate student days.

BMR: How was the first time you collaborated with non-U.S. scientists?

GM: I guess my introduction to that was during my thesis work, when we went over to Indonesia. So we, of course, ran into plenty of problems and delays with the government bureaucracy while trying to work in a place like that. But you sort of get an appreciation when you’re on the ground doing things with the local people. We had to spend a bunch of time early on, as soon as we got there in Jakarta, because we needed first to get permission forms from the government, the government in Jakarta, then those forms had to be taken to the government of the state that we were working in, which was North Sumatra. And then to that little place, on Nias, that we were working. But we also needed permission from the military and the police. So we had permits from all of these guys. Whether it was… I mean, it was certainly to our advantage when we finally got to Nias that we had these little pieces of paper that we handed to people and the translation was basically, “here are these two American guys. And number one, if anything happens to them, you’re going to be in big trouble. And number two, if they cause problems, you’re also going to be in big trouble.” So we’d show up in a village and they greeted us with, “oh, you can come and stay in our in our house tonight, and will feed you…” (laughs). And they were very nice, very cooperative. We had two different geologists who came along with us. So we, I guess at that point, I was sort of indoctrinated early on that working with the local people was something that was not only beneficial to us, but to them as well. We brought one of our Indonesian colleagues back to Cornell. He spent a year there. Of course, having an Indonesian guy show up in Ithaca, New York, in the winter, he was not too happy about that, but he muddled through… Whenever we worked on any of the oceanographic cruises, we always brought with us a local representative, either from Indonesia, Philippines or wherever. So I got to know really well a couple of different organizations in Indonesia, the Geological Survey and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, and got to know those people. They helped us out a lot. That continued on when I was working in the Philippines, working with the Philippine Bureau of Mines. They sent a geologist along with me to do field work, and they gave me a jeep and a driver. That was something that we never had in Indonesia. When we were in Indonesia, it was all by foot. So, developing cooperation with those countries was really beneficial. We worked in Taiwan, established relationships in Taiwan. When I was, early on, at Scripps, there were a couple Taiwanese students who were there. They both since gone back to Taiwan and became sort of big name guys, one at Academia Sinica and the other one at National Taiwan University. So these were all long, long term relationships.

BMR: I have a general question about your relation with people from Indonesia, Philippines, Japan, Taiwan… What have been the biggest cultural shocks or differences you have encountered when collaborating? Or what are the things that have surprised you the most?

GM: (laughs) That one is hard to answer. Maybe… Sort of going back to my earlier history when we were living on Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands. There were not that many workers who had their families there. Managerial level people, all of them from the US, were the only ones who could have their families there. But most of the workers were actually recruited from Hawaii. So my father’s employees were mostly people from Hawaii, a lot of Chinese and local people from Hawaii. And because they all had kids that were in Hawaii and couldn’t bring them there, all of a sudden, I was the only kid and I had half a dozen or a dozen Hawaiian guys who were my uncles (laughs). And so I sort of got used to dealing with “local” people. And just living in a place like Kwajalein, where it’s not the US, and things are different… I guess it was not a big surprise to me, too, to go to Indonesia, Philippines… You sort of learn about the cultures before you go there. My advisor and I spent a year learning Indonesian. Cornell is one of two places, I guess, in the US that actually offers an Indonesia language course. Hawaii being the other one (laughs). But we, you know, we knew that in order to go to a place like Indonesia, we really needed to know the local language. And even then, I guess one of the things that was surprising is, Indonesian is the formal language that most people know. But when you get down to the level of the small villages, they have their own language. It’s completely different. So mostly what we were doing is communicating with the school kids who could translate to the older people. And, you know… You quickly get used to the idea that there aren’t many roads, there aren’t many vehicles. Just got to make do and be nice to the people and they’ll be nice to you. I don’t know that there were any real big surprises.

BMR: Maybe we can move to the expedition you mentioned earlier, in which you met (Asahiko) Taira-san. I would like to know more about this expedition. Was that your first time working with Japanese researchers?

GM: That was my first time, indeed, working with Japanese. I guess the one thing that struck me in working with Ocean Research Institute (ORI) at that time, and it really hasn’t changed all that much… In the US, in the oceanographic business, there are lots of technicians. And if you get a grant from the National Science Foundation to do science, that comes with money that goes to the institution that provides the ship and that also comes with money for their technicians. ORI at that time, and even now at AORI (note: ‘Atmosphere’ added to the institute’s name), the scientists are the ones who have to run the equipment. I was just talking with a colleague down the hall the other day, and he and his students were putting together their seismic receiver streamer themselves, and they also have to keep the sound source (note: air guns) running themselves… And that was being done on the Tansei Maru cruise as well, because there just weren’t any technicians. There was only one technical person who worked with the group, but they, the scientists themselves, were the ones who had to keep the equipment working. Tansei Maru was a nice ship, with a good crew.

That was my first encounter with a long-term foe, which is the Kuroshio current. And I was sort of clueless about things like that until, during our two-ship joint operation, we needed to have one ship moving up current and the other one down current, heading towards and past each other, and they needed to go at the same speed.  However, the ship going into the current couldn’t go fast enough and the down current ship was going too fast. So they came up with a good working method. The Tansei Maru just stayed stationary in one place, and shot the sound source, while the US ship towing the receiver cable came streaming by and (laughs) it worked just fine. So they were certainly innovative, certainly know how to do things. And again, really, really cooperative.

Images of the two-ship seismic experiment at the Nankai Trough in July 1987. It was organized as a scientific collaboration between the University of Tokyo’s Ocean Research Institute, the University of Hawaii and the University of Texas Austin. Left, Greg Moore and A. Nishizawa onboard. Center, Asahiko Taira onboard the Tansei Maru. Right, the R/V Fred Moore pictured from the R/V Tansei Maru. Photos courtesy of Asahiko Taira.

BMR: Besides doing science, I know you were a member of the advisory panel for Ocean Science Research at the NSF. How you came to that position? What was your role in there and what did you learn about the relation between sciences and policymaking?

GM: When you write proposals and submit them to the National Science Foundation, you get on their list. So the first thing that happens, since every proposal that gets submitted has to be peer reviewed, the NSF program managers send it out to six different people and hope that three or four of them will actually review it. So they need a large pool of reviewers. So as soon as you submit a proposal, you’re on their list and they send you proposals to review. So, from the very early stage, you are learning about how other people are writing proposals. So you can tell, “here’s a person who knows how to write a proposal” and you sort of get the experience reading it. And after you’ve done that for four or five years, the next thing that happens with that is, after NSF receives the peer reviews, they convene a panel that meets to discuss the proposals and the peer reviews. That’s the advisory panel. So six, eight, ten people show up in Washington, D.C., each of them having gotten these hundred proposals that came in. By the time you get there, the NSF people have decided based on the mail reviews that some number of those, like half of them, are not competitive. So you don’t have to worry about those. But the other 50 proposals or so… Each person is assigned some number, ten or so, to present to the group, and you then have access to all of the other, all of the mail reviews for those proposals, and you simply discuss them and come up with a ranking of all of the proposals. So that’s what the advisory panel is. So it’s not any sort of high-level thing. It’s just sort of giving advice to the program managers as to what proposals should be treated regarded as high versus low. And then the program managers at that point — there are things, especially with the marine programs, there’s a ship availability that this guy wants to work in Indonesia and everybody else wants to work in the in the Atlantic. So that person is probably not going to get funded at all. But the panel  helps the program managers to make those kinds of decisions. And you talk about them. So it’s not any sort of big policy thing.

BMR: Did you meet someone from NSF at the time with which you continued relation?

GM: Yes. At that time… There was a guy named Don Heinrichs, he had come from Oregon State and he was the program manager for Marine Geology and Geophysics. And a couple of years later he was joined by another Oregon State guy, Bruce Malfait. So the two of them were sort of a team over the years. We got to know them pretty well. You run into them at national meetings. If there was any kind of workshop, they would always be there too, to sort of listen to what people were saying. Various other people have… In the last 20 years or so, there have been a large number of people who have kind of cycled in and out of that program. And they rely more on these days than they used to on what they call rotators. So somebody from an institution can go spend two years at NSF and be a program manager and then go back. So you get to know those people reasonably well.

BMR: If I’m not wrong, Malfait and Heinrichs as well were then representatives of NSF in ODP (Ocean Drilling Program), at executive meetings.

GM: Right. So NSF is the US funder of the drilling program. So it started out as, you know, as the Deep Sea Drilling Program. And then there was an international phase of ocean drilling, where they got Japanese and Europeans involved. So it sort of became internationalized. The NSF has always been the group that has money for operating the ship.

BMR: And now that we are talking about ODP. You started in ODP not by going on board but in the West Pacific Panel, right?

GM: Um… I’m trying to think of that advisory structure… Yeah, I guess that was at the beginning of ODP. So they had geographic panels, at the time. There was an Eastern Pacific, Western Pacific, and Atlantic Regional Panel, and then there were focus panels for themes. So there was a Tectonics Panel, a Sedimentary Panel, a Geochemistry Panel, that eventually changed — probably every five years or so. They decided that the regional panels were not the way they wanted to do it, so they expanded the thematic panels. So I guess I started out on the Western Pacific panel and they also had one called the Site Survey Panel. I was on site survey panels because I had done lots of site surveys; Tectonics Panel for a while…

BMR: And you were advising about the Western Pacific, the regions in Indonesia, Philippines, Japan, that you…

GM: Right, that was the first one. And then the Tectonics Panel was more worldwide, there were tectonics issues everywhere.

BMR: How about the first ODP mission you were on board, how was the experience like?

GM: I guess that the first one would have been ODP Leg 131, when we went to Nankai (Trough). That’s a long time ago now, so it’s hard to remember the details of that. We had done the site surveys, so I knew what the objectives were. I helped put together the drilling plans… I guess that that was probably one of the first times that I came to really understand the difficulties of the international politics. But we overcame those difficulties and had a very successful expedition – this was the first drilling through the frontal thrust of a subduction zone, so we learned a lot about the deformation processes, including dewatering of the sediments caught up in the frontal thrust.

BMR: Now that we are mentioning the first legs in Nankai, I was wondering in which ways working with Japanese researchers, like Taira, who knew about the area, helped you to understand the region? In which ways you learned from each other?

GM: Uhm… That’s also a hard one. When, on Leg 131 – I guess it was 1990. By that time… Ako (Asahiko) Taira had been working on sort of that topic in that area for more than twenty years. So he knew the onshore data. He had been on drilling cruises there. Ako was sort of the guy that knew it all. So he was directing us, telling us what to expect. We worked with him on the seismic data. We actually had seismic data from two transects, one that had been drilled before and another one off to the east, and Ako thought that what we really wanted to be able to do was drill at the top of the accretionary prism, all the way through the prism, down going sediments and into the oceanic crust. And that was sort of the goal. And if you go to the other transects, sediments are too thick to get all the way through. So he was sort of leading that effort. And indeed, we were able to get all the way through, and [it was the] first time than anybody, any group, has ever drilled all the way through on accretionary prism from the top. So he’s sort of, you know, he has been leading the program for a long time (laughs). And I guess it’s hard to give you more details about the day to day interaction. But yeah, sort of, like being in in graduate school where there’s sort of a senior guy and then senior graduate students and junior graduate students and everybody’s kind of got tasks and you’re working together and learning from each other with directions from the co-chief scientists.

BMR: Now we are approaching the end of ODP in the interview. In the transition from ODP to IODP you were not only working on the on some expeditions, but you were also a member of the Planning Committee and the Science Committee. How did you witness this transition, from one program to the other?

GM: I don’t think there was, from our perspective, a huge change. There may have been, well, there always is change in the overall panel structure. Changing the names… But still, you end up with the group of people who are sort of prioritizing where the ship should be going. I’m sure, at the upper levels, there was a lot of difference based on who was funding things, and especially when we went to IODP and when Chikyu came onboard and the Europeans had their ECORD group. I think at that point I was mostly involved with the Chikyu drilling. So I saw that end of things. JR [JOIDES Resolution] was sort of off doing other things and they were, you know, the JR was funded by the US and Chikyu was funded by the Japanese. Luckily we were able to sort of… At our level, the scientist level, it really didn’t matter. You could go on any of the vessels and be working on things.

BMR: Let’s talk about Chikyu. Can you remember the first time you hear about the commitment of the Japanese to build a riser drillship?

GM: Guess I’m not sure what you’re looking for there.

BMR: Well, just if you remember the kind of experience related to the proposal moving, the ideas, what kind of environment was there, whether there was excitement or something else…

GM: For people at my level, we didn’t really know much about what was going on. We knew that the Japanese had said they had convinced the government that the capability of doing riser drilling for science was something that the government should be wanting to do. So we heard that the government had indeed committed to putting together the funding for building such a drilling ship. So I guess in those early days it was just sort of hang on and wait and see what happens, will it actually come to fruition… And eventually, it did.

BMR: The NanTroSEIZE project was designed for having a riser drillship doing it. How the idea of having this proposal came up?

GM: After Leg 190, when Taira and I were co-chiefs, he invited me to come to Ocean Research Institute as a visiting professor. We spent a lot of time talking about where we go from there. We had sort of done everything in accretionary prisms that you can do with non-riser drilling. Thought about what were the possibilities for doing… If we had a riser drilling ship, what can we do? So we organized a workshop that was held at ORI, and I think it was after I went back to Hawaii. So it was later in the year. During the time that I was in ORI, Taira and I were talking to various people. I remember meeting Gaku Kimura and some other people who turned out to be influential in the planning. So it’s just a matter of sort of discussing how we could put together a science plan that was going to be something that would be well received by the community. So we put together a workshop later in the year and got together at ORI for a couple of days. Had a number of Americans, some Europeans, lots of Japanese… And just talked about what we thought we needed to do. And… I guess at that point my main interest was, again, in site survey-type things. We knew that we really need to do a decent job of seismic imaging if we’re going to drill deep. So we started working on… Taira on the Japanese government and me, with NSF, to try to get some funding to do a commercial 3D seismic operation. We had assumed that the drilling ship was going to be ready and operating. I can’t remember exactly when Chikyu came online… It was probably 2003 or four? Early five?… So as that progressed along, we were also progressing along with our overall large scale proposal… Deciding what the targets were… I guess that at our meeting, the main meeting that we had to kind of organize NanTroSEIZE, Ako I had both decided that we were kind of tired of being the leaders of this thing. And at that meeting, sort of the classic of everybody standing in line, and said, “Okay, who wants to lead this?” and I stepped back and a bunch of other people stepped back (laughs). And then Harold Tobin from the US side and Masa Kinoshita from the Japanese side stepped up to be the lead people on that. So, they responded well, and the community responded well. And we just sort of got together and started hammering out the nitty gritty of how we would do it.

BMR: Can you please explain NanTroSEIZE for someone who doesn’t necessarily know about the Earth sciences?

GM: Well, by that time, in our overall study of convergent margins, we knew that most of the large earthquakes that happen on Earth are happening in subduction zones. And… I guess part of what preceded NanTroSEIZE itself was a series of workshops that were held… And we, the US, had a big program that was called MARGINS, which was designed to look at margins around the world — passive margins, active margins, strike slip margins and the active margin group got together… Tom Shipley and I organized the workshop in Hawaii where we started off  getting people to agree on what are the things, what are the specifics about any given margin that would tell us that that’s the place where we need to go. Realizing that in the immediate term, even we weren’t going to be able to do a good job on more than one place. So what do we need? And the number one was to have a long term record of large earthquakes. So when you start talking about large, long-term knowledge of earthquakes, how often they happen, where they happen… You look at Japan and say, “Nankai Trough.” There’s 2000 years of recorded history that says every hundred or so years there’s a big earthquake followed by a tsunami somewhere along the Nankai Trough. So that by itself sort of elevated Nankai to near the top. The Aleutians have large earthquakes and a number of people from the US really wanted to concentrate on Cascadia. But there hasn’t been a giant earthquake there in at least 200 years. No history of that kind of seismicity. Central America, South America, we didn’t know enough about at that time. Barbados… We had pretty well imaged, but not any big earthquakes there. So we started off with that premise. You have to go to a place that has a lot of seismic activity. Sumatra was another potential. But then you start asking the question of… What else is it that we need in order to pick a spot? And one of them is cooperation from the governments. So by that time, we knew that it would be nearly impossible to go to drill in Indonesia, getting permission to work offshore and keep samples, and that sort of thing. Just the cooperation at that level was too difficult. Certainly you could do it in the US, but Japan also seemed to be very cooperative. There was also JAMSTEC, which is close by. One of the things that we wanted to do was put in monitoring equipment in the holes that got drilled. JAMSTEC is sitting right there. Easy access to where those holes are going to be. They have their own ships to be able to go out and service the monitoring equipment. So it seemed at that point that we could make a good case if we if we really wanted to understand a convergent margin as the place where big earthquakes are happening, where we might hope someday to understand the mechanisms of earthquakes… How the whole deformation process goes, then, Nankai was the place to go. So that acronym – obviously the first part “NanTro” is from Nankai Trough. The second part of that is a part of the Margins program, which came up with an acronym for Seismogenic Zone Experiment. So that’s where the SEIZE comes from, ‘seismogenic zone experiment’. And that group of margins, people were… At that point, they were able to be sort of world-ranging where do you want to go to study the most active spreading centers? Where do you want to go to start study the most active convergent margins?… And ‘seismogenic zone’ was sort of the buzzword at that time for active margins. And so what we’re trying to understand is the entire physical process of what’s happening where those two plates are sliding by each other. So that’s NanTroSEIZE.

BMR: NanTroSEIZE has been going on for many years, now. What has been the most challenging and the most rewarding of the program so far?

GM: Most challenging it’s, simply, drilling a deep hole into that kind of environment. We knew that we had to use riser technology in order to drill deep into that kind of environment. You have to be able to overcome the pressure. As you go down, the pressure gets greater. So if you simply are drilling a hole, eventually it’s going to collapse. So that’s the reason why oil companies use risers; a blowout preventer is installed on the seafloor, with steel casing put into the holes, and cement put in to keep the casing in place… So we knew we had to do that. But even with that, we still had problems when drilling into that kind of environment. So that’s… Technologically, probably, we were not quite ready to do that level of exploration in a convergent margin. But we learned a bunch of things, mostly (laughs), mostly how difficult it is to keep a hole open and to keep drilling it.

And I guess one of the challenge was that what you really need to do with drilling that kind of hole… The way the oil companies do it is, (gestures) as they drill it, they just keep on going. But, because of financial constraints, we were not able to simply sit out there for two years straight drilling a hole. So, we had to drill for a few months and then stop and drill again, and stop. And in the intervening time, the hole itself was degrading. So that makes it difficult. I think that we sort of had a phased approach where we went out with non-riser drilling in the first expeditions. (Expeditions) 314, 15, 16, started sort of an exploration. One of the first holes was wanting to go into the leading edge of the thrust, partway up the accretionary prism. And that proved to be way more difficult than we thought. We drilled a second hole into that. Eventually we went back into what we wanted to, our deepest hole, and drilled what we, I guess, would call it pilot hole down. I can’t remember what it was. It was 1500, 2000 meters. So we knew what the overall hole conditions were at the bottom… Needed to come back some future time to continue drilling. But finances, I guess, are always a big problem. Oil companies don’t have to worry so much about that. They allocate as much money as they need from day one and they can just do it.

BMR: We can go to some general concluding questions. Looking back at your career, what role has scientific ocean drilling played? At different levels, not only at the scientific level.

GM: I guess I’m not really sure what you’re after, there.

BMR: So, for example, how it has contributed to establish contact with people from other countries, or foster some kind of collaborations, visits in other countries, the kind of science you’ve done… These kinds of things.

GM: I guess that overall the drilling program has allowed me to sort of keep on doing what has been fun and interesting. And being able to be part of a very, very large international organization, which the drilling program has proven to be. And meeting people from all over the world, being able… One of the advantages of being involved in the panel structure is… Because it’s international, it is hard to simply tell all of the foreign people, “you have to come to the US for these meetings.” So, watch of the panels, usually had one US meeting and then a foreign meeting. Early on, we were doing that. So that meant being able to go to many different places, see different institutions. Usually the meetings were held at other oceanographic institutions. So getting to see the… German institutions, GEOMAR and MARUM, and others, in Southampton and France… Various other places. And then, especially with the Tectonics Panel, those meetings were more often held in an area that some person had been actively working in. One of the best things that I’ve done during that time — there is a guy in the British side, Alistair Robertson, who was on the Tectonics Panel. He hosted one meeting on Cyprus and one meeting in Antalya, in southern Turkey. So those are places that he had been doing field work in. He could take our group and sort of look at the things that he had been working on for twenty years. Mostly, they kind of focused on… Where we’re drilling offshore, but here is what happens to the offshore after 20 million years or 100 million years of deformation, comes up above sea level and you can, in the field, look at things that you’re going to hit with the drill string. So being able to have experts on different places, take you to those places, and in a couple of days point to the key outcrops, and be able to have that as part of your memory of what the sediments are going to look like. You’re drilling through them [and think], “here are these thrust faults”… You can look at the older equivalent on land. Being able just to learn about the local cultures… More interaction with our foreign colleagues than just going to a big meeting like AGU. You don’t really get to see American culture by bringing them into it. But being able to go to a meeting, and then go on a field trip afterwards, it’s probably really one of the more rewarding things that I’ve been able to do.

It has allowed me to have projects that I could have my own graduate students work on aspects of. So bringing along the junior people. One of my graduate students from, I guess probably eight or nine years ago now… More than that; he was a graduate student during the time of the 2011 earthquake. NSF had a program for when something like that happens that they make it easy to go and do some surveys. So I sent him out on a survey with JAMSTEC people, one of the first post-2011 surveys. He worked on the data and published a couple of papers about that. He also went on one of the NanTroSEIZE drilling expeditions. He then spent two and a half years himself at JAMSTEC. Then spent some time at Lamont. Now he has an assistant professorship at Auburn University. And right now, or at least last week, he was involved in the drilling program off Hawaii. So he’s kind of matured and gone off doing his own thing and in drilling different environments, looking at submerged reefs off of Hawaii. So it gives you the chance to sort of have projects that are timely that graduate students can be involved in, develop your own research and sort of do… It’s, I guess, easier with ocean drilling program to kind of have long term programs that they sort of have a life of their own. You sort of go this way and find out that’s not what you want to do. So you have to go back and backtrack somehow and keep on doing things. And there are so many different people with so much different expertise, that you put all of those people together and you come up with good things.

BMR: And how do you see the future of scientific ocean drilling?

GM: That’s hard to say. I don’t know whether the money is available. Whether… What’s the… What’d be the right word? “Will” of the funding people? It’s kind of frustrating, I guess, is the right word for people like us who are hearing that the US doesn’t have enough money anymore to keep our drilling project going. But on a yearly basis, they can spend more money than our entire drilling program, however many million it is, put a zero on that, and NASA’s spending that every year on a different project; and they’re going to the Moon, they’re going to Mars… And the amount of knowledge that we have about what’s under our own seas is pretty small. So that is a little bit on the frustrating side. I don’t know that there is going to be long-term support for drilling… And in the on the U.S. side what’s happening now, we were all hoping that we had sort of been through the planning stage. And the next thing to do is design a drillship and get it moving. And being told that, “no, we haven’t done the planning yet. We’re going to do another two or three or four or five years of planning before.” And that’s just to see whether we really want the drilling program. And by that time, all of the expertise at places like Texas A&M, all of those people, are going to be long gone. And when the U.S. decides that, if they decide they want to continue with the drilling program, they’re going to have to start all over from scratch with people who don’t know what’s gone on  before. It’s not… Having a giant break in the system, it can’t be good. So, I guess all I can say is I’m glad it didn’t happen twenty years ago that I was able to get through my career with a well-functioning drilling program. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the younger people.

BMR: This is my last question. One advice to give to someone who wants to start a career in marine geosciences.

GM: I don’t know what I can tell you. Somebody who thinks they want to have a career in Marine geosciences, it’s not something that they have simply said, “oh, I think I’ll do that.” There’s some reason why they’ve chosen that, which means they have some background. So by that time, let’s say they’re at least graduate student level. So by the time they get to that level, they sort of know what’s out there in front of them. And they’ve have decided that there is some aspect of marine geosciences that they’re interested in, whether it’s tectonic environment, subduction zones or some other spreading centers, whether they’re interested in in sediments or deformation. So drilling is a tool that they can use or maybe they can’t use it. So, they either need to… Sort of shift direction a little bit or maybe a lot, but most I guess anybody who’s at that level of deciding that they want to do marine geosciences knows what the different areas are, areas of concentration and… Just going to, I mean, getting involved in a drilling program certainly is an easy way for a junior person to sort of get into it and move up. There are other big programs that are going on now. The US is several years into a program called SZ4D, subduction zones in four dimensions. There are a lot of young people, ones who have participated with us in Chikyu drilling, who are moving up through that organization, and there are field programs that are happening, big field programs are being planned for other subduction zones. So drilling doesn’t necessarily need to be the ultimate focus. You know, I think anybody who’s wanting to do marine geosciences here, whether subduction zones or whatever, you can probably figure out how to get into one of these organizations then and be able to move up with them.

BMR: Thank you very much. Is there anything else you want to say, expand…?

GM: Probably not.

BMR: Thank you very much.

GM: I spent a long time talking.

BMR: Thank you for all this time.