Henk Brinkhuis

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Interview of Henk Brinkhuis by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2025 April 22 (online). [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is April 22 of 2025. This is Beatriz Martinez-Rius, historian of science at JAMSTEC, and I’m in a virtual interview with Henk Brinkhuis. Thank you for joining me this morning.

Henk Brinkhuis(HB): It’s my pleasure.

BMR: So, first thing, can you tell me your name, your affiliation and your position?

HB: My name is Henk Brinkhuis, and at the moment I have sort of two hats on. I am, let’s call it, a senior researcher, at the [NIOZ] Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, which is based on the island of Texel in the Netherlands. We also have a subsidiary show happening in the south of the Netherlands in a place called Yerseke. This is an institute that I was leading from 2011 to 2022, and they, [after the ending of my role as Chair IODP FORUM], basically grant me now a sort of sliding role, going back to my research, actually, which I do at the Utrecht University, [with my old research group].

My basic background is, on the one hand, the organic side of sedimentary geology and a sense of organic geochemistry, but also the organic world of microfossils, commonly in the field of [marine] palynology. And this is with algal and also terrestrial remains. So, things that blow into the ocean and things that live in the ocean. On the other hand, I’m also a marine geologist – let’s say sedimentary geology in general. Things I do not do is anything outside of the word ‘organic’. This is happening at [NIOZ and at] Utrecht University, and I’m sort of near the end of my paid career, so to say. I have another one and a half years to go before I have to go on a retirement.

BMR: For the previous years, have you been more on the management side or on the scientific side of things?

HB: Well, as I said, I stepped down because what we have in the Netherlands is two times five years of a directorship of these big institutes, and that’s 100% management. You always wish you can do a little bit more science, but obviously you get very broad ideas about science because it has all the fields, like biology, chemistry, physics and geology. But, in the daily life you are really just a pathetic manager, and you have to take care of business. And there was a lot of business that I had to take care of. So, that’s one thing.

Therefore, they basically granted me now to go back to my science on the one hand, but on the other hand, I was invited to apply for the so-called IODP Forum chair, which in the former program, IODP 2 [International Ocean Discovery Program] – as I call it – it was the chairman or chairwoman-ship of the top of the pyramid where all of the – I always call them – the ‘organizing acronyms’ got together. It was actually more like a think tank, where people brought all the news from all of the parts of IODP; were looking into some of the future aspects of the program, and also reviewing how things were going.

But as a [Forum] chair, which was sort of new to me, you have no power. It’s just like the guy who’s running… the general secretary of the United Nations, and it has to be somebody, but he or she has no saying of anything. So, I had to learn… This was really about letting people talk among themselves rather than, you making a decision. That was sort of the other part of management. So, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been for like 12 years, you could say, out of science – by the way, also in between I got the option, the opportunity, at the very end of these 10 or 12 years, to go back to the JR [JOIDES Resolution] and do another expedition with IODP. And this was [expedition] 396, offshore northern Norway.

BMR: Talking about your position as the last IODP Forum Chair of IODP-2, how would you assess the overall balance of what was achieved and what remained to be done, what could have done better…?

HB: That actually is a very broad and difficult question to answer. Answer could take a long time (laughs). Maybe we can chop it up. What were the first two questions?

BMR: Successful achievements, good decisions. And second, decisions that could have been different, things that were unmet.

HB: That sort of reflects a little bit about what I just said, that the Forum actually does not take any decisions. Not a single one. I mean, they, the Forum itself has no power, in the sense of we cannot make things happen. The Forum is not in control of budgets, of all of the separate items, all of the acronyms… So, the only thing actually that the Forum does or did do, is to inform each other and also inform some of the associated organizations, like ICDP [International Continental Drilling Program] and other global operating acronyms and vice versa.

It’s difficult to say therefore whether it was successful or not; you were just informing each other, and you could maybe argue that, or I would tend to say, that because there were some weird circumstances dealing with how I got started. I took over because of my predecessor, Professor Dick Kroon from Edinburgh University – although he was originally a Dutchman -his period [term] of chairmanship was done. So, just by that regulation, he needed to be replaced. This is basically how it happened. He trained me and informed me about all of the things that happened before me; because I joined that last bit in 2020. But then he died. He just suddenly died. It turned out that he was sick. He was a very inspiring person, had it all really aligned in the way that he liked it, and the whole system was working and pumping. But then, [as said], he suddenly died.

At that moment, sort of at the minute that I had to take over, that was sort of a difficult period for everybody obviously, because I have a different style than Dick had. There were some starting issues, and everybody was obviously very sad. By the way, just by the same token I can say here on screen that all the things that the Forum and IODP organizational parts did to celebrate his memory and his legacy were very well received by the family. They went all the way to actually drop a funnel for him on the ocean floor, with his name on it. All of that was highly appreciated by his family, who are [– BTW -] close friends of us, here.

Then we had to get started, but the IODP program was already nearly finished. The biggest thing, of course, was to look at our next program, which is now called IODP³ in a way, but it’s a very different monster. And this all circles around the Americans. What will the Americans do? And how does NSF look at it? This was even before the election of Trump as the [USA] President, which obviously makes things even more gloomier and darker than they were before him. So, these last three years it was really constantly about, what will the Americans do? What are they thinking? And they couldn’t speak… It was actually quite a frustrating ride for that part of the Forum. I don’t know if you have any questions, but that will be my first line of answers to your first set of questions, because it was not all full sunshine, nice weather, easygoing. It was a bit like murky weather, misty, unclear… Also, because the Europeans were not clear at that point, and the Japanese… It was like everything was hanging in the walls and in this mist and fog of how the future would look like. And on top of that, the Chinese… You have the Chinese doing their own thing, and they’re looking at how to cooperate.

And on top of that, there was this constant… I never fully understood. There was this issue between me, and people from ECORD, and people from ICDP. I never understood why ICDP was so much taken on board all the time in the discussions of IODP, without IODP or ICDP doing anything about it. I mean, they were only talking about doing that. They have been talking about doing Land-Sea Correlation for like ten years now. And I would be in total favor of that. Actually, I said, “Look, to make this happen, you have to make a special avenue for this because [otherwise] it will never work”. Because it’s like two totally different organizations and two totally different pathways, to just sit there and talk to each other, “Yes. We should collaborate, yeah!”. Nice. But then… This kind of things. So, it makes it also very interesting times. I’m not a person that is just sitting there for the show. I’m just one to do, so that’s why I’m saying – it’s very frustrating that I had no power. I could not tell these fuckers, “Do this, do that, or at least do it this way”. No. I don’t know if this is an answer. You can peep away any words is not to your liking, I don’t mind (laughs).

BMR: I understand your point. One of the things you see is a real willingness to collaborate, but to collaborate you need more than just the will of people. You need support, money, a community, to integrate other communities; you need time and platforms…

HB: Yeah, but you also need a couple of basic managerial avenues, let’s call it, to… In my book, if two parties say constantly that they want to collaborate, that’s all, sounds great, but then you have to create an opportunity or an avenue. These are sort of steps of how you then can truly collaborate. And that was not up to the Forum, to see what I mean, because the Forum is just talking; talking and not doing. You need that, as well. It’s maybe like the United Nations. It’s like talking, talking, talking, and then somebody blocks your idea, of veto for whatever reasons, but nothing really actually happens. I granted everybody that that’s part of it, and it was always useful to do this. So, that is in the sense of talking. That is not the argument. My argument was that, “Okay, come on guys, let’s make something happen”.

But all these avenues that I was just saying about, “What will the Americans do? What will this do? What will that do?” There’s one thing about constantly informing each other, and the problem with the Americans was that, by their higher management, they were ordered not to inform. So… Why are you there? If you come to a meeting and you say, “Sorry, guys, I cannot tell you anything”, then, what the hell are you doing here?

I’m sure a lot of people will sort of recognize these kinds of elements, but as I said earlier, I’m not the most politically-verbed person. I typically tell people what I think…

BMR: It’s been a few interesting years, the end of the second IODP and the start of this IODP³. Maybe we will come back here, at some point of the conversation. Let’s start now from your beginning, then we go into how you got into ODP, IODP, all the way up to now. Can you tell me a bit about where did you grow up? And why did you get into Earth Sciences?

HB: This could of course [again] be a long story, but very basically, as you know, I grew up as being part of filmmaking father, at least a filmmaking family. My first wish was.. after high school – I was reasonably successful in high school in the sense of, here in the Netherlands you have two directions in high school, you can be Alpha or Beta, and Beta is all the mathematics, physics, chemistry… all the science part. I was reasonably okay in that. – But I wanted to go to the film academy. There were some sequences and I was actually invited to go there, because I had already made films when I was like seven and growing up. Film and photography were always on my mind.

By the way, there’s a big difference between what my brother Dan [Brinkhuis] later did. In the sense of that, I was really from the film era, where you had like sprockets and all kinds of moving parts, and it’s not video, it’s not electronic. That is a very different medium. People don’t realize that. But, for example, when you cut a movie, you have to take from A to B; you have to cut somewhere and there’s only one option to cut – either there or you can throw it away. Well, in video you can do this a hundred times and say, “Hum… Let’s do this and make it smoother, the sound, let’s do this…”. In the old days, that was not how it was done. But anyway, it was actually funny because, well, I’m sure that my brother told you how we got to be on video.

BMR: He told me that he started in photography, I think.

HB: Yeah. To me, it was sort of the opposite. I actually went on those visiting days for new students at the Film Academy, which is in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. It was just an almost broken down building, with a lot of smoking hippies, grass smokers and heavily bearded, long haired people that were just hanging out there. And I was really from the New Wave generation, from 77 to 80-85, like the early Talking Heads,[US new wave band] early… Early everything (laughs), early Elvis Costello… All kinds of just post-punk bands. So, I had an intrinsic negative feeling about hippies. So, I didn’t go there, and then I didn’t know what to do.

Then, a friend of mine, he was set to go study at the university and he had a booklet of Utrecht University, and it was just falling open on the page of Earth Sciences. And it says, “Earth sciences is a combination of physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and you get to go abroad”. That was it, “let’s try that”. Because all of this individual fields I found a little bit like, just mathematics – too boring; physics – too boring; chemistry – too boring. But when you combine it all, particularly with the biology… Yeah! And we were always going with the family to Switzerland, the mountains, and things like that.

The rest is history in the sense that I was studying in Utrecht, which is also where I was born, by the way, so my early days were all close to Utrecht. Also, because there were only three places in the Netherlands where you can study the Earth Sciences, of which, by the way, right now, very sad they will close the Dutch Amsterdam Geology School, which is really a stupid decision. Anyway. I started as a geochemist, but then got attracted particularly by sedimentary geology and one of the last courses we had to do before you received a bachelor degree happened to be in the so-called Laboratory of Paleobotany and Palynology, which at the time was placed in the Biology Faculty. So, you can see the connections there. They were coming from plants, or botanical lines, which go back to the 1700s in Utrecht, but they were just starting with looking at algal microfossils including the dinoflagellate cysts – one of the most prime examples of that. And somehow, I got attracted by those spiny spheres.

Plus, there was a lot of fieldwork, which I liked a lot. Actually, I did my last exam to get a Bachelor degree and I was actually ready to stop and go back to the filmmaking, perhaps. But then, a guy that I was doing his exam said, “Oh, by the way Henk, you had a good mark. It just so happens that next week, we will go for three months to do fieldwork in Spain, in the Caravaca de la Cruz region for the Lower Cretaceous, and blah, blah, blah. Why don’t you come, and you will do your master subject there?” And I said, right there and then, “Oh, yes! but let me think this for five minutes – Yes”.

For the palynology and paleobotany part, came the marine. For paleobotany, this was sort of new, to look at marine things, and to combine it with marine sedimentology and other deep marine things. Then, I landed and did another [major] big subject, as we call it here in the Netherlands, in the organic geochemistry, which was back then housed at the University of Delft. You just have to know that there’s one really, really world-leading school in organic geochemistry, not because I’m saying that, but because they have shown this. And they happen to be those guys and girls back in the University of Delft, at the time, that later went to the NIOZ; so that was very funny because I became their boss, at some point (laughs). But anyway, that doesn’t matter. I got the both worlds, the organic lines and the molecular lines of things.

I was invited to do a PhD at both of these universities, and I took the one that I wrote myself, a proposal that on the dinoflagellate cysts of the Paleogene of the Mediterranean. Then, came the history where our group – this was happening in the late 80s – we got more and more questions from the oil and gas world to do work for them. [From] worldwide, basically, because there are [only] few schools, still are very few schools, in paleobotany and in particular in marine palynology. And I was wondering, “Why the hell there is no school like this in the US? This is really weird”. They do all these things with these freaking precarious [calcareous] microfossils, which are… I always pumped them up saying, “Why are you looking at these useless microfossils? While you could have done so much beautiful things with these organic walls”. But anyway, we got this work coming along, a lot of commercial work, and we used that to get money to get back into research and to getting students going.

At certain point, I set up a foundation that can act as a commercial window to the outside, but can spend money in the [true] foundation sense, in the inside of Utrecht University. So, I was basically like a geo-consultant. I started on my own but then very quickly, I was already working with like ten to twenty people. And the short version there is that, at certain point, the Dutch Geological Survey had to reorganize and they had to commercialize. They saw this operation and wanted it, basically. So, as I said, this could be a very long story, but the short version is that all of my people and myself would go to the Dutch Geological Survey. And they are still there, actually. We got the merger between Utrecht University and the Geological Survey, and there’s a center of expertise.

But at the same time, my old professor [mentor] got into health problems and they wanted me to run the department. So, I actually stayed at the academic side of things while all of my folks went to the Dutch Geological Survey to do basically commercial, semi-commercial work. [Later] They made me a professor, but I was always very jealous of [those] people. [As a consultant] I worked at platforms [and in-company]; there was a lot of marine geology because of the oil companies. So, I knew about ODP and DSDP, and I was very amazed that they very, very rarely had a palynologist on board of these ships. And still to the present day, it’s not very clear why… I mean, they always flag that, “Yeah, these are people that use dangerous chemicals, and it’s HF…” You know, this is the most terrible [for them] – because what we do is, we destroy everything [laughs]. Like, in this cores you see behind me, this is all like sediments. And what we do, as palynologists, we first grind them, and then we put chloric acid on it to get rid of all these silly calcareous microfossils. And then, we do one really even worse step: we put on the fluoric acid to destroy anything else except for the microplastics, basically, that are in there, which are these organic walls and bits of pieces of plant life, which you can find in these sediments. And so, the sort of power of this is that you get a terrestrial input signal from everything that happened on land together with everything that happened in the ocean, all in one sample. And this is not only because of the morphological things you can see or the things that have a morphology, also things all the way down to the organic molecules. And this has now been developed for the past five or six decades into techniques that we can now do temperature reconstruction on land and in the ocean, the surface water conditions, the productivity, the salinity, the age, of course… Everything that we’ve always dreamed of, as things you would need and would get out of the record.

And so came the [early] connection with the ODP. I tried to get on many expeditions, but they always said, “No, no, no; we don’t do palynology, it’s too dangerous…” It is dangerous because they didn’t have the facilities, but if you just put facilities there, it’s not dangerous at all. But okay, this [was and still] is their philosophy.

BMR: It was ODP times?

HB: Yes, [the early phase] this is all ODP times. Finally, there was a Leg in 2000, which turned out to be my first ODP leg where I could sail [was invited to sail]. This one was run by Jim [James] Kenneth, who is a famous oceanographer from Santa Barbara, and an Australian colleague, Nevil Exxon [co-chiefs]. So, this was Expedition [leg] 189, the Tasmanian Gateway. This is basically the story of Tasmania separating from Antarctica to give a way to a gateway. And Jim – this could also be another four hours of talking – Jim Kenneth was at least so bright, because he drilled there several times before – this was the third expedition – but with the same topics, because this was just his thing: “Antarctica cooled because of the opening of gateways”. That’s why he got so famous. And it’s very tragic for him that because he took me on board, I showed them that that was not true. He basically killed himself, from that point of view. But what he did see is that, [as] [learned from] drilling in the old days, you can imagine when these gateways are opening, when you have like two landmasses and it’s opening and deepening, then it starts with very shallow marine conditions. And the favorite type of ODP, IODP microfossils are all these calcareous things that I keep on blaming (laughs), and they don’t occur there [in those intervals]. They are [just] not there. But my stuff is, because you’re so close to land and you have high productivity, you have high sedimentation rates, so you don’t lose the organics. So, suddenly, we could show him what the true ages were, what the real dynamics were – and, by the way, not only me but also my colleague, Kathy [Catherine] Stickley working with the diatoms. That was why (– actually, it was Mitch [Mitchell] Malone’s, who later become the boss of IODP-2, or the TAMU [Texas A&M] people, he was there as the staff scientist). So that’s also why, at the moment you get on this ship, you become instantly – except for a very few cases – you become friends for life. You connect, and if you’re not connecting right away, you will because it takes like six weeks before you get back. This [the folks on Leg 189] was very funny. Mitch knows all the stories of this leg.

Anyway, that [palynology] was a great success with also IODP. The organization saw that by having palynology, it can really help the science case, or actually solving the reasons why you go out there. That was a good step and, since then, we have been reasonably successful in securing it because then you got into the politics. The Netherlands are typically known as people who are not spending that much money on things. You have the famous Dutch treat: when you want to drink with Dutch people, you have to pay for yourself. But it is true also in scientific spending, because we spend a dime, but we get like a guilder back from IODP. So, we were very lucky, actually, to have many of my students then following. Basically, all of them have been able to join one leg or more. All of my kids are people like Appy Sluijs, Francesca Sangiorgi, Peter Bijl… There are many others in the school of what we have been doing. That has been a joy. And it’s also been a very… It’s THE program of programs.

I also got involved in the organizational part of (I)ODP. I was all the way to being the chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee. The short version is that, after 2000, I became a kid on the block of the IODP organization and also, the success that we had led [to] that I was invited to be on board of the Arctic [expedition]. Because that, of course, was a very exclusive bunch of people. Not because of us, but because the expertise needed or what they thought was needed. That was another lucky… I felt very honored and very lucky that I was invited by people like Jan Backman and Kate [Kathryn] Moran, who were the co-chiefs. Also, at that time, Gilbert Camoin began to replace Catherine Mével to help as well. I was very lucky, and I don’t know how far you want this movie to go forward, but now we are in 2004.

BMR: Yeah, now you are in the MSP expedition – the first MSP expedition [note: IODP expedition 302], ACEX [Arctic Coring Expedition].

HB: Yes.

BMR: You had already some experience in the JR from your ODP expedition. At this point, I guess, you were a mid-career scientist. How was that expedition like? I’m asking for, maybe you are aware of the logistical challenges if any; a review of things that worked well and things that went wrong…

HB: Here, really, you would need another day of me explaining and talking about all the things that were associated with ACEX on the positive side, but also on the negative side.

BMR: Let’s start by compressing it in 10 minutes.

HB: Yes. Let’s just start by saying that it was, as you were just saying, the first of the MSP missions. This was the first time that the Europeans undertook the organization of an IODP expedition, and they did not undertake a very simple one, where you’d just needed one ship or one platform to do things. No. They went directly for the major prize, which was the first ever drilling near the North Pole, which involved tremendous logistics with multiple ships, multiple icebreakers… And coordination. Also having the scientific equipment that would work, because you could not bring the JR there.

They built it within the European organization – I always say, if you have three major countries that are basically paying the bills, and you have the English, the British and the French, and they divided the tasks into curation, administration, and operations; if I ask you, as a Spanish, if I talk operations, which of these three countries would you give that to? The Germans, the French or the British?

BMR: Are you asking me to answer this question?

BH: Yeah.

BMR: (laughs) That’s tricky – I would probably go with the Germans.

BH: Exactly. That’s what I would say. But what they did is, they give the curation to the Germans, the administration to the French, and the operations to the British. I mean, this is a joke, right? [laughs] But I tell you, everybody gives the same answer as you just did. So, let the Germans handle this, by God! But no. No, no; it was the British. And obviously this in the end is just – certainly the way I talk about it now it’s a joke, but let’s just say that there were a lot of operational issues, which many of them could have been foreseen. And there’s been a lot of reworking. What’s good about the system is that, in the end, they did investigate and analyze and took steps to improve. We don’t need to go into all of the details.

BMR: Was it also difficult for the scientists, to do the science? I mean, how these logistic challenges impacted in the expedition’s work or results?

HB: Obviously what the scientists want is to have good cores. It’s as simple as that. And the way that they set it up, let’s say that there were no good cores. You can go back to the ACEX records and you can see what typically is plotted in black and white, and people were thinking, “Yeah, you have great paleomagnetic information”, which is also plotted normally in black, white, black, white, black, white… Said, “No, no, no, these are the core gaps”. So, because of all kinds of reasons, there’s very little core and the demand is high.

The other thing was, on the scientific part, what was so beautiful about this operation was that we literally went to a place where nobody knew what to expect. I mean, they had the seismic images who were basically icebreaker-generated seismic images, which is sort of the worst seismic images you can get, that showed like a pancake-situation of the Lomonosov Ridge. And you would basically drill into this pancake, and everything went well, and you would get nicely organized little sediments, and get cores up, blah, blah, blah. But then, everybody began to think about, “Yeah, okay, but what will we expect?” Because the only thing that was known, and actually to the present day – because it was very unfortunate that the one [expedition] planned for last year and the year before didn’t go because of the Russian ‘incident’.

One thing that the co-chiefs organized was a quiz before we left the harbor to all the scientists to basically ask us, what do we expect to find? Because of all the things that have been done in the Arctic, they’re all like gravity coring, bits and pieces… And people were talking about very low sedimentation rates and blah, blah, blah. Then we had the seismic, and we would not penetrate, let’s say, from the top part going down, not older than the Miocene, maybe. That was the question. So, many of the answers were all in this way. But then – maybe I was not well informed, – very likely – but I just looked at the geographic map and what you can see there is that the Lomonosov Ridge actually ripped off the Svalbard – the Spitsbergen, as we say in Holland – margin. The Svalbard margin – which was known – [that] somewhere near the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, to split [and evolve] in a new spreading ridge. So, this means that this was moving to the North Pole [since then].

I was working a lot, at that time, with the oil companies in the Svalbard [region] – with the Norwegian oil companies. And I said, “It’s a ripped off piece of Svalbard. So, what you will have is, a Cretaceous basement, and you will have the latest Paleocene; and then hopefully we will get the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum [PETM], maybe a little bit more. And then you should get higher up; you should get a phenomenon known as the Azolla [phase], which is a famous event. We will maybe get that”. It [Azolla] was an event that I for the first time could identify in the Barents Sea. This is a freshwater plant [fern] that thrived and, back then, you are in the warm Eocene – and this is the sort version – the hydrological cycle is so active that you get a freshwater layer on top of a saltwater basin, like Black Sea in modern times. And on that freshwater surface, you could have the freshwater ferns – actually, like duckweed – flowing all over. So, I said, “Well, hopefully…” – and I actually wrote this down; we weren’t even there – “we will hopefully find this and then hopefully, just like in Spitsbergen, Svalbard, you have a Paleogene-Neogene transition. So, hopefully that will be complete. And then you come into Miocene. So, there should be a gap between the Paleogene and the Neogene”.

Later they called me Nostradamus Brinkhuis, because everything that I said actually happened. But it was totally surprise for all of the other people. And also, that we got bits and pieces, because then you could have said, “Ah, Henk, that sounds nice, but you cannot get all of this. You must make a choice. So, what do you want?”. And I said, “Well, then… I want the Paleocene-Eocene boundary”. Yes. Okay. And then you can choose one more thing. “Oh, I want the Azolla”. No, no, no; you can only choose the base or the top. Well, then I would have the top list because that’s the one that I can correlate. “Okay. And then, one thing more”. “Then, maybe Paleogene-Neogene transition in good cores”. “Uhm… okay…” And that’s exactly what we got. Everything else is a gap. [laughs].

BMR: But did you have experience drilling in an equivalent area? Did you have any kind of equivalent experience in studying…?

HB: As I said, I was one of the few scientists on board that had been doing a lot of work for the Norwegian oil companies. So, the Barents Sea, and I was working on Svalbard… I know the local geology from that point of view. And I know what to expect if – but, as I said, nobody knew because the beauty of ACEX is that there is no core in a 3,000 mile radius. I was just assuming for very simplicity that, as I said, there was a ripped off piece [of continent]. So, the geological history must be very similar to what was basically happening on land in Svalbard. And it just so happens to be true. It’s just that, can you imagine that? [As it turned out] We drilled the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, but that only happens when you can see it later. So, first the core must come out. And that is also another story. But can you imagine, just for a second, what would have happened with that leg in terms of scientific results, if you would have a core – say – from just above the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, or just below the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, and not at the boundary? This is the difference between writing at Nature, an entire Nature volume with data and the stories. Otherwise, we would have said, “Ah, pity! We are very close to the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, but we didn’t capture it”.

In hindsight, if that would have happened… Because this leg, also scientifically, is seen as the biggest result of all IODP. Even by the Americans; they made the ranking of which are the most cited papers and in the top ten there are five papers from ACEX, and four from my group. And this is not because we are so beautiful or we are so brilliant. This is because it is the freaking North Pole, and it is those critical time intervals that are so popular right now. Where does our warming climate go to? The extreme example is the Paleocene-Eocene boundary. So, if you have that on the North Pole, and we could show from the palynology that there were palm trees growing there, and the tropical baobab, that was growing along the Arctic margin at that time, and we proved to have tropical temperatures back then, [matched with] tropical plankton; suppose if that wouldn’t have happened. And this is really by chance, right? This is not the wisdom. It was really, like, extremely lucky (laughs).

Actually, this is really one of these IODP stories that, for example, this was a very complex operation, as I said. There were three boats in play: one drillship, one supporting Russian icebreaker that was basically making the biggest Martini cocktail of all time by crushing ice; then we have a Swedish icebreaker, which is crushing the smaller parts, and it was the home of the scientists in containers. This is a commercial icebreaker, which, by the way, was weird in the first place because we had sauna, we had cinema, there was a bar… And you are on the North Pole, so it’s like totally weird. But anyway, what happened was, there was constant helicopter traffic from people who were on the drillship back to the Odin, and one of them was my friend Jerry [Gerald] Dickens. He was one of the geochemists and he was doing the pore water surveys. And Jerry was onboard when [yet] another sort of empty core liner came up and we had already deep down somewhere in the Paleogene, maybe. Jerry actually saw some of the personnel scraping off bits and pieces of this empty core liner which was sort of stuck. They didn’t bring the right drilling tools to really cut through this very hard bio-siliceous sediment. So, they were scraping off stuff and just throwing it away, and Gerry was saying, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, put it in the back and then maybe Henk will be able to do something with it”, because I was just trying to dissolve everything to see if there are any [organic] fossils.

So, it was Jerry who was basically sharp enough to get some of this. It looks like [fine] gravel, you know, you wouldn’t think it has a signal. He took that with him and, you know, I had nothing to do either because there was no core anyway. So, I looked at this, I was beginning to process this, and at some point, to my surprise, it was like, “Oh, shit! This is old, man! We are very close to the Eocene-Paleocene boundary, coming from above”. So, right then, we stopped everything, cleaned everything, try to get good cores because this might save the expedition, basically, on a scientific basis. And they did. So, they did this and the next three cores turned out to be like legendary cores, where at least bits and pieces of the PETM, still not complete but, you know, because I was working and I had to go to bed a certain point because on an off shift, this happened while I was off shift. And then, we had people looking at it already, and I was not getting on shift. So, I asked Mike – Mike Kaminski was there as famous foram guy, and I said, “Hey Mike, did you see anything?”, “No, no, no, I think we are in the Cretaceous”, was his quote. Which would mean that we were hitting on the basement. So, that we’ve missed it. I was like, almost crying (laughs). And then, I started to process those samples anyway, to then find out, like, “This is the PETM!” And yeah, we had a big party. There were some saved items to celebrate with. We actually wrote the first manuscript that we put in a bottle [Talisker Whisky] that we emptied and throw it overboard. It was directed to the editor of Nature. And if you don’t believe this, I got pictures of this, so I can show you.

BMR: Yes, please, share them with me!

HB: This was thrown overboard already back then because all of the scientists, they realized that this story was a career changing. It was a major breakthrough to have it completed – or reasonably completed, it was still a little bit of gaps here and there. And actually, later on, we got a bonus. I don’t know how versed you are in this episode of Earth’s History, but it turns out that the PETM, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, turns out to be the start of several of these kinds of events throughout the early Eocene, which is in the ‘hothouse’, [Earth] and there are these excursions of extreme heat. You can see these by extreme negative carbon isotope excursions, which are linked to the carbon cycling. We can speak another four hours about this, but it is taken as relevant also for our modern future, to see where does this temperature change go to.

And so, [as it turned out later] we also have the first of the next one, so-called hyperthermal [ETM-2]. So we don’t only have the PETM, but it turned out that we also had the next one, and that we could build very decent… We just [recently] published that [in more detail] in [Chris] Fokkema and other people, we now even have an astronomical-tuned age model coming from ACEX [from this interval]. And the same holds for the renewed interest in the Azolla and this freshwater phase. Actually, what I’m doing right now is, after the directorship of the NIOZ, I became full circle and I work again on this [ACEX] material, right as we speak, because we went for the for the highlights but now, I’m looking at everything in between. There’s still a lot of life in the ACEX cores.

BMR: Twenty years later.

HB: This is when I say it’s been lying there for 40 million years, so we can take another 20 years.

BMR: This is super interesting. From what I understood, this ACEX expedition really influenced your career afterwards. Not only in terms of the science you learned, but also on the impact of the results.

HB: Yes. And this was, as I began explaining, because you could have argued – and that’s also why I think it’s a great that ECORD and IODP undertook this mission to the Arctic – it was standing for a long time at the very top of the list of things in science that there was a scientific necessity to do it; and they took it on. That’s all very plus. And then, what I was talking about now is the scientific output. And I didn’t begin yet about the impact of the Azolla layers, and I didn’t begin yet about the relevance of the Paleogene-Neogene boundary which is, you know, very weird [in the ACEX record]. There is [only] one set of cores that was really, truly, very okay taken on board; it later turned out to be the Neogene-Paleogene transition at this place, on the Lomonosov Ridge. And the curious thing about those cores – here I say, as part from the ACEX cores, which are all there, you can still go there, you can see them, and you see the weirdest shit that you’ve ever seen – at least that I or many people of us have – because without going into too much detail, it has a transition which is really very, very strange. Also from a lithological point of view, from a sedimentological point of view, that has been now about ten papers on this, just on these four cores.

This is like four times 1.5m interval, maybe five. So, it’s nothing, in the sense that it’s not like hundreds of meters. And what you see, the short version, is that nobody at all the present day, 20 years after, nobody understands what’s happening there. Nobody. There are theories. This might be this, this might be that. I believe Francesca Sangiorgi and me, who came up with the best idea. But, that’s us. Because we can date them. But there’s another technique that people have been looking at, and they come up with a different answer. I think I know why, but, you know, this is why it’s such a controversy. Understanding this will change the entire thinking of Arctic paleogeography and plate tectonic, but it is not resolved yet.

And these are the best [ACEX] cores. There’s no core issue, here. To describe it to you: you go from top to bottom, into bright red color. So, oxidized deep sea clay, likely. You go suddenly into bright, jeans-like blue. Like bleached jeans, with this kind [hands wide apart] of [large] pyrite crystals in the core, fist-size. So, you are on the redox front, no oxygen reaction stage. And that bright blue jeans color – is also a beautiful sight, the colors – they go into black, white, black, white stripes called the zebra interval; to go into black-grey sharp, and another real black. And then, go black into the Paleogene.  The short version there is, we have probably a story which would tell that there’s a 26 million year gap in time; that actually the Lomonosov Ridge was very shallow in the beginning, but it got uplifted above the sea level, and was eroded partially to then sink down. This gives you first, this black and white, poorly ventilation, well ventilated, sort of fjord-like circulation, with a lot of reworking in it. Therefore, you get a problem with the ages. And then, it sinks to the position where it is today. I mean, nobody will deny that Lomonosov Ridge, where we drilled, is now about the 1,200 meters deep. So, it has to go down sometime. But this would obviously repaint the entire history of how people think about the paleogeography, the paleohistory of the Arctic.

And other people say, “No, no, no, it was just a condensed horizon. It was maybe shallow marine, but it was always below sea level. Nothing happened. And it was just all the time that is apparently missing sits in just a handful of layers”, and you get a completely different story. This is a nice example of the key role that IODP played and plays. Because, as I said, this is the only core in a 3,000-mile radius that is available for scientific purposes and not for oil and gas purposes. This is understanding how the Earth works, all of the reasoning why we should have IODP cores, together with having these ACEX cores. And, as I said, it’s still not solved.

And then, you come into this Neogene stories of its own, but with this story comes also: for example, the glaciation that we now still have on places like Greenland, if it’s true what we said for Lomonosov Ridge, that got uplifted, it should have meant that there was ice there as well, already, and that there was ice on Greenland during the Eocene-Oligocene transition. And, you know, there’s all of these major geological questions that are out there, which makes this such a focal point. And that’s why it’s also worth making, if you can give any clue, it is a career making. I mean, I will not deny because there was another thing, that I was extremely lucky in that sense, that of all the cores material or the cores that came above water in the ACEX, they were all right in my expertise. And there were like five other scientists who were sitting there like this, like my great friend, for example, Domenico Rio, who was invited to look at the calcareous nannofossils not to find a single one during the whole thing. And other people like this. The co-chiefs did a great job. You go there with your toolbox; you have all your tools. But then, at certain point, turns out you don’t need the hammer, you need the saw. So, the guy with the hammer is just sitting there. And so, he was obviously very enthusiastic about all the results, but he was very sad that he could not contribute – with his thinking yes, but not with his genuine expertise. The same holds for the forams [foraminifera and ostracod] guys. There are just no calcareous materials. Not really; not in the Paleogene at least. Or in like many instances. But that’s why, for us, for Appy [Sluijs] and me, and all my [and his] students, and also with other people associated, and together of course with the co-chiefs, we could produce a whole volume of Nature. And not only one, but also like several further on.

BMR: How much media attention did you got with these results?

HB: Well, you can go back to the archives and try to find information on ACEX. But because we had a lot of tremendous publicity… I just have to say here that at that time – and maybe it’s because they got started [IODP-1] – the publicity that was arranged by IODP itself turned into all kinds really nasty issues. One example would be that a leading press officer was writing his own news reports, bulletins, to the media without talking to the scientists on board. And if there’s one lesson for people working for scientific organizations, from a media point of view, you should not do this, okay? (laughs) And why? Because you’re bound to make many mistakes. Because you’re not an expert. “Look – that’s what I did with NIOZ – we are the scientists. We have our job, and we don’t need former scientists who went into publicity or something. We need professionals, but a professional would know to talk to the scientists”. And just like you started with, and it’s not just to compliment you, but you started by saying – and this is normal, a normal practice – you have a journalist that writes down what you’re saying. And then, if the journalist is okay, it’s sent back to the scientists to check.

In this case, just to make this one case, this never happened. Not in the beginning or not in the end. And then, you’re bound to get all kinds of problems. That is what happened, and that led also to really global, major newspapers like The New York Times – this was on the first page of The New York Times and on the Suddeutsche Zeitung… and, really, in [other] world leading media, who took quotes – this was directly after we returned – they took also quotes from the scientists like me, and I was also blamed for telling certain things. I told them, what I said – and Jerry [Dickens] did, and some others did as well. But obviously that news also went so fast that they didn’t go back to the scientists themselves to check what would happen here, although even that happened in this case. The biggest case was the journalist Andy [Andrew] Revkin, from the New York Times. He actually wrote a piece that was sent back to us, to Jerry, and me, and etcetera, as they were passing by the official lines and we said, “Yeah, okay. This text is correct”. But then his boss put a header on top of it, not by his [Andy] making and not to our liking. And that says, “Under all that ice, maybe oil”. This was only because we mentioned that there were organic rich layers below the Neogene. And, yeah, you could blame me and Jerry and others, but that was just what it was. It was organic rich layers. For us it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t say that these organic rich layers actually generated oil. But this journalist took it that way. Or at least, the guy who made the header. So, then we got a lot of flak for this. That just tells you that this were the instances where IODP was really at the forefront of global news and impact. But the statement that was on top of this Suddeutsche Zeitung, and there were other many, many, many other newspapers that were making this reference to the organic rich layers. But the New York Times was the worst case. Many journalists then come back to me, for example, and I said, “Look, I can make such a statement for my garden, [right] here. In my garden there may be lot of oil”.

BMR: We could talk for four days, actually, about the relationship between scientific ocean drilling and industrial research. The connection is very straightforward for someone who doesn’t know anything about scientific ocean drilling and anything about the oil industry, just by looking at a ship with a derrick, right?

HB: That is true. One thing is that you have to realize that this is was back in 2004. This was, let’s say, and the reasons of my [scientific] existence is really because of the oil and gas companies. I have no negative feeling till the present day. I have many practices with companies, but just the fact that oil is generated by the Earth, that’s just how it is. This is a scientific fact. Hence, there’s also why you need a communications specialist, to handle this kind of thing. Certainly, at that time, we were green grass scientists. And very likely we, even Jerry – I don’t know if you know Jerry Dickens but, well, if you think I am outspoken, he is triple or quadruple that. That’s why we are great friends. Plus, he is like four times my size. Anyway, because he was also the real chemist at work, organic chemist in that sense, we were the ones having results. We were the ones on where the spotlights when the results came in.

You want me to talk a little bit more about other scientific breakthroughs because of IODP, or what would you like?

BMR: We can continue with the scientific breakthroughs, although I think we should finish this first session in about ten more minutes.

HB: Okay. Then I would add, to complete the scientific storylines – and it links to ACEX because, okay, you can go back to the IODP [strategic plan] and look at all its sub-mission parts, the overall mission and the subdivided missions, [like] the crustal elements, how the plates work, how does deep life work, how does these microbes sit in the sedimentary bed…etc. But [here] you are talking to a person who’s more into the sedimentary geology [paleoceanography and paleoclimatology] part – in geology, you have hard rock and soft rock. I’m typically from the soft rock. So, my scientific stories, they all go about that part and they all have to do with paleoceanography, paleoclimatology… That’s the [my] line of things. And dating, understanding how everything that came by, so far, [evolution] like [relationships with] plate tectonics, paleoclimates; was it warm? Was it cold? How can we reconstruct that? But that is not to say that the other parts of IODP, the focal points, are not just as relevant – although I tend to think that my stuff, of course, [laughs] is way more relevant than whatever they want to do. They want to drill into the Moho and… Why would you want to do that? That’s a joke. Anyway, more seriously, and that is/was also the brilliance of it [of IODP].

A very learning school for me was that, so in this whole ACEX thing, I met with many students and one of my PhD students became much better than I ever was. This is Appy Sluijs, who is now a world leading PETM expert. He did this thing, so we know much more about the Eocene-Paleocene boundary, but there are still debates on why did it get so warm. And this is why it has been used as a proxy to what’s happening to our climate right now. So, very fast warming. And this is witnessed by, I don’t know how versed you are in the PETM, this is one of those moments where you have a very unique happening. Something happened in the carbon cycling of the world. And this is about plants using carbon to grow, and then they fall down, it gets remobilized… You have the stable carbon and the instable carbon, but what the PETM shows is a whopping negative excursion in the stable isotopes of carbon. And that is shown to be – it was everywhere. It was in the atmosphere. It’s in the teeth of the mammals that were living at that time, to the trees, to everything. And that is why you can also pick it up on a global scale, because it stands out as a ridiculous, also still poorly understood, excursion. Like, what happens there? There are basically a couple of theories and that one theory, that came from Jerry Dickens actually, where he found out – because what this means, if you have a strong negative excursion, if somebody is throwing a lot of light carbon, so isotopically light carbon, in the system. We always describe it, and actually all these papers about it, Jerry wanted to call that paper “A giant fart at the end of the Paleocene” because it’s just like if somebody, [sound of fart]

BMR: (laughs) It makes a better headline.

HB: Yes, but then they had to change it because of the journal didn’t like that. So, they had to change it in, “A blast of gas at the end of the Paleocene”. Because he was thinking, he was learning about the deep marine bacteria that are basically crunching out carbon and making it into very light methane. The methane-clay rate so, porewater and ice forms under pressure at the seafloor because of just of the bacterial reprocessing of original already lighter methane, typically plant or organic matter, which is also lighter. Plants, if they can choose, they take the light version than the heavy version because this light version is just easier, it’s just less lifting. It’s just the way that I, as simple-mind, explain that. But what happens is, you have this very light excursion. Jerry has a theory:“Okay, this was a release [of methane from the sea floor]. It got so warm that you begin to release all of this submarine methane, which pumped it up to tremendous negative values, because these methanes [clathrates, methane-hydrates] are known to be having a delta C13 off the scale, like -100, which means that you need less of it to create a large excursion. Because, for example, the tree is like -28 to -32. So, you need three trees to dump in the ocean, relative to touch of this methane. Other people seeing a relationship between the opening of the North Atlantic – in terms of tremendous volcanism that is boiling away and pumping away through these big oil reservoir, organic rich layer, that we were drilling also with ACEX, in a way that the oil companies are drilling in Barent Sea. And they saw that there was a connection between the sort of Northern Norway opening ridges, the volcanics -, with the PETM. On seismics, you see a lot of craters on that surface. They can see that with seismic. There was [is] a controversy whether this was truly of Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum age.

The short version there is that Sverre [Planke] and Christian [Berndt], they are the co-chiefs of [IODP] Expedition 396, the theme was to drill through the volcanics, date the volcanics, look at the volcanics; but also look at the sediments directly on top of it, in these craters [and the link with the PETM]. And, [fortunately] again, there they were smart enough to think, “We need people that work with dinoflagellates, with the organic” – because they knew already from all the oil work that there’s very limited other fossils that you can use. So that’s why actually, I was one of two palynologists onboard, and one of them being one of our students [Joost Frieling] who was at the time working, or he is still working, at Oxford University. What happens with the IODP political system is that I got a Dutch ticket, but he gets an English ticket. The short version there is that not only could we demonstrate that indeed the very base of these craters was indeed [of] PETM [age], and that could not track this in 3D seismics, and it is at least contributing to the excursion. But also on top, because you drill down, of course, we came across again this [the same] brilliant Azolla layer that we found in the Arctic. And the story is that it was such a big sort of lake situation that it dribbled all the way down from the north and into the southern North Atlantic, and [even] into the North Sea basin. We found that this Azolla was everywhere. You can google this [plant], there’s seven species living today, and it’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest growing plants of the planet. It’s even [seen] as a pest. So, there are cases where it was thrown into, I think it was a South African lake, and two weeks later the entire lake got filled by mats of this… Actually, it’s a very small little plant, but it actually doubles its biomass in 48 hours. And because this plant is a very, very, special plant, it has its own – you are a biologist, so you know – it has its own nitrogen cyanobacterial community with it. It turns out now that the biologists call this Azolla a superorganism, because the cyanobacteria, they are also part of the sexual reproduction cycle of this fern. So, not only does the fern split, but the cyanos as well. And the only thing this thing needs is carbon. Because for the phosphate it needs, it grows so fast that below the the surface, the phosphate recycles very quickly. So, you need carbon, nitrogen and phosphate, and a little bit of salt to get these plants going. It generates its own nitrogen from the air. It generates its own phosphate from the anoxic part of the mat. It only needs carbon.

So, I got this project going, where I worked with modern day biologists looking into the genetics, but also looking into the ecology of these things. We have these tanks with the Azolla growing and we can do high CO2, and you see this plant growing towards the high CO2 levels. So, one of the theories that basically was prompted by the IODP Arctic Expedition is that, because if you look at the timing of where does the Azolla layer occur in geologic time, it sits exactly at the very top of the warm hothouse worlds. And that is the top of the warmth. And you begin to cool. That never comes back to this warm conditions. You’ve seen these curves of temperature through, that you can now go back and see this. It’s the basal Eocene, is this warm hothouse using climate optimum. And it stops. It does a little bit like this, but it stops, and it will never come back to these values. And precisely there, at that level, is the Azolla. It sits there for about a million years. And if you do the calculations, how get much carbon you can grow and how much you can sink in on to the ocean floor. So, I remove carbon from the atmosphere, and I make it into a plant, and it sinks in an anoxic basin. Well, you can do the math of the… There’s a Dutch proverb saying “On the back of a beer carton”, but you can do the math and even if you say, “Okay, look, let’s suppose that only a 1% of this [Azolla] carbon actually preserves in the past. And you draw the atmosphere out of carbon. So, there is more to that interval, but it would not have happened would there not have been any IODP activities. That’s the bottom line. And this is just a handful of these major scientific findings that you can study only by IODP, and by looking in this fashion.

BMR: It’s actually incredible how it makes real leaps forward in understanding past and present climates. And we have just talked about your second expedition! So, we still need to talk about the 318, for example – I know you went to Antarctica with Carlota Escutia.

HB: Yes! My darling Carlota. Well, actually, that’s very good that you remind me of that because that was another, in many ways, another set of tremendous scientific breakthroughs, one of them being, for a normal, simple geologist like myself, very, really, truly breakthrough. Very briefly, one of the other hanging mysteries, if you wish, or questions, was around how exactly and how fast did, and why did, Antarctica – we were talking just now about this cooling trend that started with the Azolla level, or at least it started at the Azolla level, and you go into the rest of the Eocene, you go cooling, cooling, cooling… Until some point you see also in the isotopes, you begin to store a lot of water from the ocean on land. And this is Antarctica. So, this is the beginning of the Antarctic ice sheets. It is sort of 34 million years ago. And so, there were many questions of, “Okay, how did we get [to] this threshold? The opening of gateways, the CO2 in the atmosphere, all of these questions… How did it really work?” That was why, Wilkes Land as an expedition was put together with several add-on expedition parts, even all the way into the Holocene, on a sort of Holocene investigation of when the ice withdrew. So, this whole time series is there. We made several great reconstructions, and also there again with the dinoflagellates, [successful] dating and dating. It has led to a better understanding of the pre-Antarctic ice [oceanic] circulation; the relationship with opening of gateways; and whether or not the Drake Passage was [open] earlier or not. Is all published by, many of them are led by my student [Peter Bijl], who was also on board.  

But one thing which is for me the most fascinating story, and this is a story where the end conclusion is that, with working with organic wall dinoflagellates or microfossils, we could tell the crustal physical density of the crust below Antarctica! Now, how do you do that? Well, this was because, one thing that happens is if you build up a lot of ice on land, it comes from the ocean. So, [a small part of] the ocean therefore has evaporated and is now the snow on land. That means, you have a sea level lowering. It’s a global regression of the sea, as they call it. So, in many geologists’ minds, like myself as well, it means that if I have Antarctic ice, I must see a sea-level lowering in my cores. Stupid me, not realizing that it would be different if you are so close to Antarctica, where we were drilling. Anyway, we were looking at this data thinking, “where is the glaciation boundary?”. The short version there is, that at certain point we had a transect of several holes, one, two, three, four; and in three holes we saw sea level rise, and on one hole, we see a sea level drop. When the sea level drops, it [should] drop everywhere at the same time. That is what you think – at least what I thought. Yeah, it’s a very brilliant story, what happened. To me, is that so we have this problem and we are thinking about it all the time. We have no solution; so the cruise comes back and we are still checking whether the microfossils tell us the correct time, because you always have issues of, or we have [different] opinions about this age, but it [which] is really true? All of these mechanisms are at work.

While we are working, I got to be invited – by chance or not by chance, I don’t know – but there was a Dutch TV program; a Dutch Belgium co-production, where they re-did the Darwin’s Beagle voyages. Like “200 years past Darwin”. So, they did the world trip and they just happened to be in the Hobart area, or actually in Perth, where I had to fly to and then get on board of the Clipper Stad Amsterdam… they had the Clipper, like the old sailing three-masts, all with the television people. They made up to 35 episodes – you should maybe have a look at this [particular] episode, because it is all about ocean drilling, this particular episode. The episode is called “Palm Trees on Antarctica”, because that’s what we found.

But anyway, so you see me in this episode. But what happened there was just that they typically had invited other scientists as well, or were doing other things. Like biologists, geophysicists… And it turns out that they have this other guy on board, who happens to be a specialist in geophysics. And actually, I knew him. I knew of him. And he was working with the sea level dynamics, and he was working particularly also with gravity on a planetary scale. We were traveling from Perth to Mauritius, so you have a lot of time, and you get talking, “what do you do?”, “and what do you do?”, and blah, blah, blah, just as we do now. He said, “oh, so you were on Antarctica?”, and I said, “Well, yes, I actually I have a problem with that,” because we were talking about sea level, and I said, “I have this problem with, you get to build a lot of ice, and I see only sea level rise; or at least and most of the holes”. And then he says, “Oh, but this is very simple. Because you build a lot of ice, this ice has such a gravity power, such a mass, it actually attracts the sea level”. So, if you put this ice on Antarctica on a sort of a regional local scale, you have so much gravity towards this ice mass, the sea level goes up. And then he shows me examples of that. This is also happening if you look at all of the melting glaciers of the world, if you look at this map on the geophysical scale, you see that there are sea level lowerings everywhere. This is not about sea level rise. Also, when you lose the Greenland ice, you get sea level lowering [on a regional scale, near Greenland], like New York will see 50m sea level lowering, not rising.  But this water goes up of course somewhere so, further on, if you go outside of this gravity influence, when you are in Bangladesh, you see double the sea level rise. So, the sea level rise is not a simple thing, actually. They have pictures and when you look at those pictures, you see that the world actually with the oceans looks like a potato. It’s not a sphere.

Also when we went from Perth to Mauritius, you, you go through a sea level low of about 150m, but it’s over a 3000mile radius, so you don’t notice it. But you really go like this, [holding arms in a concave manner] because the water gets pulled to the Australian and African continent. So, he says, “You must see sea level rise”. And I said, “Yeah, but I see that in three holes, not four of them”. “Oh, no, yeah, but that’s exactly what I suppose, because what happens is, if you have a crust and you put a lot of mass on top of this, what will happen is this”. [shows an upward bulge with his arms].

BMR: Oh, yes. I see.

HB: [Also,] Antarctica [crust/continent] will go down, but it will do like this. It will flex [shows arm bulging downward]. This is on the continental scale now. But there’s one point here, where the bulge goes up. And we happen to have exactly a hole right there, on that point. And [the position of] that flexure, [in relation to] the amount of flexibility of the crust, is a function of the density. So, that’s why I’m saying, the short version is that by looking at the palynology of those holes, we could say what the crustal density was below Antarctica, to to decide where the flexure would be. They have this in [real-life, physical] ‘building’ models, these guys. This case it’s like a swimming pool, but it has a mattress, the mattress is filled with some gel. And you dump a bag of cement on top of the mattress. You will see these bulges, right?

Anyway, that was another Nature paper. It was sort of a paradigm change, which could only happen because of IODP.

BMR: That’s really great. It’s a great closing the circle. I’d like to meet again, if you are available.

HB: Yeah, let me go more into the managerial part.

BMR: Well, thank you so much.

HB: Thank you very much, as well.