James A. Austin

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): I am Beatriz Martinez Rius and today is December 11 of 2023. We are in San Francisco at the Axiom Hotel. I am with Jamie Austin, thank you very much. 

Jamie  Austin (JA): My pleasure. 

BMR: First of all, can you please tell your name, affiliation and current role?

JA: My name is James Austin. I’m a United States citizen. I have worked at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin for 45 years, next month, and I’m a marine geologist. 

BMR: Thank you. First of all, I’d like to ask you about your childhood. Where did you grow up? And how did you grow interested in Earth and ocean sciences?

JA: I grew up in New York, the city, and then the suburbs. My father was a Wall Street banker. He ran one of the big banks on Wall Street. But we had a summer house on Cape Cod, which is on the east coast of the US near Massachusetts. And he had a sailboat, so we sailed a lot. I got interested in the oceans because of sailing. My father was a banker and lawyer, but he was also very interested in the ocean. This is way back in the fifties, so I got my interest there. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was within sight of my dad’s house, five miles away across the water, and they used to come over to our front lawn, technical people, and test instruments when I was a kid. So I learned about Woods Hole [Oceanographic Institution] very, very young, and that’s where I ended up going to graduate school. So I was exposed to ocean research very, very young. My father was very supportive of the oceans, and this was a long time before we were worried about anything related to the oceans. It was, for him, just recreation. But he thought it was an important thing to do for a living. And I never thought I would get involved in science until I was in college. Then I got interested in geology and then applied to something they called a joint program, the MIT-Woods Hole Joint Program. And got in, and the rest is… I spent five and a half years in graduate school there and then came to Texas. And I’ve been, I’ve had one job in my whole life, the Institute for Geophysics. That’s it. 

BMR: Was there something as marine geology at that time, when you graduated? 

JA: Yeah. I mean, it was… I remember, ocean sciences then were a much younger field. Plate tectonics was just starting to become a popular theory in the late sixties, and that’s when I went to high school. So, more so than now, the world was being seen in a very different way. Continents were moving. Volcanoes, earthquakes, were all being put into a global theory. And that was just fascinating to me. And I had been a rock collector, I’d been down in mines when I was a high school student. I was, you know, I was fascinated by the Earth in a very naïve, amateur way. But then when I could apply it to the oceans, it was great. And I was very fortunate in graduate school to run across a couple of marine geology people that were wonderful mentors to me. They really turned me on to the field and it was very easy to do it. 

BMR: I wanted to ask you about this. Was there anyone who was influential for your career, during your collage training or graduate training?

 JA: Yeah, two geologists. A guy named Pete Foose, who was before coming to Amherst a department chair at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He was the Amherst College department chair. I went to Amherst College, as an undergraduate. He was a wonderful mentor. Got me interested in geology, and particular in field geology. He realized and told me way back in the early seventies that geology is a field science. You’ve got to go to the field to understand it. You can’t just sit in a lab. I’ve always been a field guy. And then at Woods Hole there was a guy named Elazar Uchupi (note: who had learned under Ken Emery, another famous marine geologist also then at WHOI) who was a famous marine geologist at the time. He had only taken one other student, Bob Ballard, who found the Titanic. I was his number two student. And “Al” and I got along great. He was a gruff Spaniard, not easy to get along with, but he was a wonderful mentor. I wrote many papers with him as a graduate student, and he sent me off to Texas to be a professional. Never thought I’d end up in Texas, I wanted to stay in Woods Hole, but there was no place for me in Woods Hole in the late seventies. So I came out of Texas, and I’ve been there ever since.

BMR: How was your first experience onboard in an oceanographic mission? 

JA: You know, I’ve spent more than four years of my life at sea. In 31 different ships. So, you know, I always understood that I wanted to go to sea because I’d been a sailor when I was young. So it wasn’t just collecting data and doing geology, it was also being at sea. I love ships, I love going on them. I like running cruises. I like running expeditions. I’ve run expeditions all over the world. And it’s, you know, I’ve sailed a lot. So I think that was one of the primary motivations for going to an oceanographic laboratory for graduate school. I could go to sea. I spent six months at sea as a graduate student. So it was… I went all over and you go all over the world. I was in the Caribbean, I’ve been in the Antarctic, I’ve been in the Arctic, I’ve worked in all the major ocean basins, and a lot of the small ones. So, I mean, I love to travel too. So it’s tough, it’s a tough thing not to do once you’ve gotten interested in it. 

BMR: How did you know about scientific ocean drilling for the first time? 

JA: I was really fortunate there. [During] my first year at the University of Texas, then it was called the Marine Science Institute down in Galveston, we got an enormous contract to do what we call site surveys or geophysical surveys for what was then the Deep Sea Drilling Project. This was 1979. So I spent three and a half months down on the South Atlantic doing surveys for what later became the Glomar Challenger expeditions to the Walvis Ridge and the Southwest African margin. That was my first chance to be affiliated with drilling. We were funded to do the surveys. And I got invited on a Glomar Challenger expedition (note: DSDP Leg 75 to the Walvis Ridge), but I had a conflict for another survey, so I couldn’t go. One of my big disappointments was that I never got a chance to go out on the Glomar Challenger. The DSDP (Deep Sea Drilling Project) ended in 1983, and in 1984, again, were doing surveys, geophysical surveys, and I ran across some people who were very big players in deep sea drilling. A guy in my lab, Dick Buffler, who was doing a lot of work in the Gulf of Mexico, and a guy named Denny Hayes at Lamont (Doherty Earth Observatory), who had done a lot of work in the Southern Oceans during the Deep Sea Drilling Project. And when the JR (JOIDES Resolution) was acquired in 1984, I had been doing surveys in the Bahamas, again, for a proposal that was in the system to be considered early on for what was then going to be ODP, the Ocean Drilling Program. And Denny and Dick went one night at a dinner asked, “Jamie, why don’t you take the boat out?”. The JR, brand new, on an expedition to the Bahamas. Because we had gotten permission to do drilling in the Bahamas, but we didn’t know that that we would be the first ODP expedition. And they put my name up, and I was asked to be a co-chief. I was 32. I was scared to death, you know, brand new ship. The opposite of where we are now – the ship is being retired. But this is 38 years ago. And the opportunity was just the most exciting thing in the world. I flew out to the JR, I saw her for the first time from a helicopter coming out from Miami. She was in the Straits of Florida at that time just trying to set what we called then and now a reentry cone, for what was going to be our first site of ODP. And so I landed on the helipad, spent a few days, got back to Miami, and then joined the ship in Miami for our expedition in the Bahamas, Leg 101, with a very, very famous carbonate sedimentologist, a guy named Wolfgang Schlager, who was at the University of Miami. He was my co-chief. Again, another great mentor. I didn’t know anything about scientific ocean drilling. I had to learn the acronyms. I had to learn how to write operation summaries. And the ship was brand new. The technicians were brand new. They were all from the oil business, but they didn’t know how to collect cores. So we were learning on the fly. But Wolfgang had been a co-chief during the Deep Sea Drilling Project, and he taught me an enormous amount. And it was great. So I’ve been very fortunate all through my career to have wonderful senior people who helped guide the way. And I try to do that now with students because I think it’s really important. 

BMR: Can you remember something in particular about that expedition, some challenge or something…? 

JA: I was up all the time. I never slept under the covers of my bunk, one day, in almost seven weeks. Because on the drillship you are twelve hours on, twelve hours off. That’s the normal operational tempo. But I was up twenty hours a day. I took a couple of two hour naps each day. My co-chief was telling me to go to bed. He didn’t want me hovering over his shoulder all the time. But I was young. I had a lot of energy. It was fascinating and I was just constantly moving. I lost 16 pounds and I didn’t need to lose 16 pounds, but because I was up, drinking coffee out of a big Styrofoam mug. I was running three or four miles a day on the helipad, along with a lot of other people, and we were all fascinated. Brand new ship. And a lot of us had never been on a drill ship before, but there was this wonderful international group of scientists, the technicians… [Texas] A&M was running the technical staff then as they do today. And it was just fascinating. Who wanted to sleep? I didn’t want to miss a minute. 

BMR: What was your scientific field of expertise? Your scientific interests at that time. You just mentioned that at that time, you didn’t know about scientific ocean drilling. 

JA: I’m a specialist in continental margins, mostly. How they evolve through time. So I’ve worked on what they call passive margins, and that was part of what we were doing in the Bahamas, because that’s an enormous accumulation of calcium carbonate, in places many kilometers thick. But underneath it, we think – we’re still not sure – is continental crust, extended continental crust, which is part of the amalgamation of continents that then split apart to form North and South America. And so that’s what we were looking for. And I think we found evidence for that. We found evidence that there was an enormous carbonate platform out there, very shallow, that drown rif in the Mid-Cretaceous. But before that, the crust had been a series of ups and downs, horsts and grabens, of continental crust. So that’s what we were looking for. I think we got some evidence for that. That’s the only time that scientific ocean drilling has drilled in the Bahamas. We could still go back, four decades later, we still need to do more work there. But, you know, the drilling program has always been about a [global] look at problems. So when you talk to your people, you interview people about the drilling program, they’ve got a huge array of interests. And that’s the one of the best things about it. We study an enormous diversity of problems. And so you get your chance. Twelve years later, I co-chiefed again on the East Coast for a very different purpose, in 1997. And that’s really exciting, where every time the drill ship goes out, it’s got a new scientific party, it’s got a new set of technical people, and you’re looking at a very different set of problems every couple of months. It’s fascinating. 

BMR: Was Leg 101 the first time that you collaborated with people who was not from the US, but an international team of researchers? 

JA: I had been… No, I had done the surveys off Africa. My first big expedition in 1979, we had people not from the US, so I was comfortable with that. And I think that’s one of the great things about science. The drilling program is one of the best examples of international cooperation, but it’s not the only one. Almost any of the teams you see here, at the Fall Meeting of AGU, a lot of them are international teams studying problems. So I was very comfortable that, I still am. I think it’s one of the reasons that good science gets done on the drillship – is that a lot of different perspectives are coming on the drillship for every expedition to solve problems, and that’s why they get solved. 

BMR: Was there any handicap, challenge, in terms of technology at that time? 

JA: Oh, absolutely. We were using what they call  DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) Pro 350s, you know, little workstations; nothing like we have now. The computing power was rudimentary. We were doing a lot of things on paper forms, paper records. That doesn’t happen now. So we were moving at a slower pace and everybody was learning their jobs. The technical people, the drillers, the scientists, learning how to work together. The lab arrangement was brand new. We were still trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Some of the power outlets didn’t work, for example. So there were challenges early on. But A&M, Texas A&M, was wonderful at supporting its technical people, making the ship as efficient as it could be, and that has happened over decades. It’s gotten better and better. And as technology has gotten better, we still do the same basic methods of coring. I think that’s one of our frontiers, is getting cores better than we do. But we’re, you know, it’s… we as a community persevere. That’s why the program has succeeded for decades, because for the most part, we do a very good job. Sometimes we fail, but we fail generally because the geology is really complicated, or the weather is bad… For every ship going to sea, there are limits. And sometimes those limits keep us from doing our jobs. But it’s not because we don’t try and it’s not because the people are not incredibly dedicated. The scientists as well as the technical people, they are.

BMR: How were you introduced to the Advisory Panels? You’ve been involved in almost all the [ODP and IODP] Advisory Panels. 

JA: Yeah, you know, the advisory structure of the drilling program has evolved over decades. There is no right answer to the advisory structure. I think the one we have right now is excellent, but I was, because I was drilling in the Atlantic, back in the eighties, the program had something called regional panels. There was one of the Pacific, there was one on the Atlantic, there was one on the southern oceans… There were also disciplinary/thematic panels. So, ocean history, sediment and geochemistry… I was on a regional panel, the Atlantic panel, with some wonderful luminaries, very senior people. I was the junior guy. And again, I had wonderful mentors. Famous, famous people were spending time with me. We were reviewing proposals. We all walked around with paper proposals in those days, not digital proposals on our laptops. I would walk around with ten linear feet of paper proposals. But it was just great. You learned so much. And then, the regional panels would get together with the – what we called the thematic panels. And every year the program (note: Planning Committee, with liaisons) would plan a drilling schedule based on rankings of those regional panels with the thematic panels. And then I was fortunate to get on that committee, [which] was called the Planning Committee. At that time we spent five days, five days!, not just reviewing all the high-ranking proposals, but then at the end of that week preparing the next year’s drilling schedule. I ended up being the chair of that Planning Committee, again, with a group of incredible senior people. I was only forty and I was with people that were fifteen to twenty-five years older than I was, who knew much more than I did, but I was running that group. Ako (Asahiko) Taira will tell you, one of the ways that I got that group in line in the early 90s was that I stood up the entire meeting, for five days. I never sat down. I would wander around the room, never sit, always kept track of who was talking, what they were talking about. We would write all our motions (decisions) in longhand and put them up on what they used to call view graphs. There was no PowerPoint. It was all… We were in the Middle Ages of technology. But we got a lot done and at the end of that week, we had a drilling schedule for the next year. And that drilling schedule represented the top priority of the thematic panels and the regional panels. And we’re talking about dozens of people, about ten panels, each with about fifteen people. So between a hundred and two hundred scientists reviewing proposals, ranking those proposals. And then the Planning Committee would get together and try to take the best of the best every year. We would have to look at where the drillship was geographically and try to be as efficient as possible. We couldn’t have one high-ranking proposal in the Atlantic and another one in the South Pacific because you couldn’t spend your whole year transiting the ship. We had to do all these things in one five-day period each year. And I did that for three years. I really enjoyed it, was great, but it was exhausting. I was also running an office to, a Planning Office. I ran the JOIDES (Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling) Planning Office from 1990 to 1992 with some excellent, excellent people, and they really helped me get things done. But we were taking minutes in longhand. We would record the five-day meeting; we would have to go back and look at the video recordings of the meeting to remember what [had] happened. Sometimes we couldn’t keep track. There were so many people in the room. All the chairs of all the panels, in addition to all the Planning Committee members. We were around fifty people in the room. It was crazy. But most of the time, we got the best science done.

BMR: I’m interested in knowing some example of how did you reach consensus among so many people. 

JA: Oh, let me tell you something. One week, and the meeting was in Austin. We usually waited… Meetings started on Monday, went till Friday. People would generally want to leave Friday, but I said, “nobody leaves until Saturday because we may need Monday through Friday to get the work done.” So it was Friday morning and we still had no consensus on where we were going to do our work. So I had my assistants order pizza. I locked the doors of the room, the meeting room. I sent them out for pizza. They brought the pizza in and no beer, just pizza and soda. And I said, “we are not leaving this room until we have a schedule. We’re not. No one is going home because that’s our job and we’re going to do it.” And we did it. The next three or four hours, we had a schedule but… You occasionally had to threaten people because sometimes they just didn’t want to agree. That’s one of the ones I remember. And people, you know, people said, “Jesus, if you haven’t done that, if you hadn’t locked the doors of the room, we’d still be there arguing about it.” But the argument was sometimes the best part. You had some of the best people in the world deciding how to use this incredible  tool. There’d be one carbonate sedimentologist, there’d be one structural geologist, it’d be somebody interested in subduction margins and another ones interested passive margins, volcanologists… They weren’t going to agree always. But they had to. A multi-million dollar tool, we had to agree. And most of the time we did, and we most of the time we stayed friends (laughs). 

BMR: That’s interesting. I know that PCOM [Planning Committee] had a very close contact with EXCOM [Executive Committee] and the other Advisory Panels…

JA: Well, EXCOM was the executive group. So the Planning Committee was exactly that. We did the planning of the actual drillship. We reported to the Executive, the Committee. The Executive Committee  were mostly lab directors, not just in the US but in the other member countries. We, the Planning Committee – and I was the chair, so I would report to the Executive Committee. We had to convince them that we were using this very expensive tool in a good way. So I would have to go and present a report, show them the rankings of the various panels, and show them, for the most part, because we had to take geographic location into account, that we were doing the best science for the tool, because the ship could not be in multiple places at the same time. So we always had to make a case that, hey, if the ship’s in the Atlantic, we mostly address priorities in the Atlantic. [If] the ship’s in the Pacific, we’ve mostly got to address priorities in the Pacific. But we showed people that over a period of three or four years – and remember, we were looking at a program that was supposed to last for about a decade – that everybody’s priorities would be taken into account. But that community patience was going to be important. Everybody – you won’t get your drilling done this year, but we’re going to your priority in the next year or two, we’ll get your drilling. And patience has always been a big part of the drilling program. You know, when you have a very, very big tool, you don’t get that big tool exactly where you want it. But promises are made. And I think that’s still true, over decades. The drillship isn’t always where people want it to be. But there is a faith in the system. There is a faith that your colleagues, your peer reviewers, are doing the best job they can to put your drilling in a place where eventually it will get done. And I think that’s one of the great things the drilling program has done over decades. We have developed an international community, hundreds of scientists, who believe in the process. They believe in what we’re doing. They believe in the priorities we set. And occasionally we have planning documents. We, the community, gets together and says, “Okay. Some years have gone by. Are we still looking at the right priorities?” And that happened about every ten years. We would get a new document together. And I was involved in several of them. We would look at ourselves and say, “All right, here’s the science. Here are the priorities we had. Are those priorities the same or should we change them?” And sometimes we changed them. That would depend on technology, the progress we made, in certain priorities, like mid-ocean ridges or carbonate margins. And then we would put a new document together and NSF, the National Science Foundation, and NSF’s equivalent agencies in other countries wanted us to do that, to convince them that we were doing the right work. It’s expensive, and that’s still true. The framework that’s out there now, the framework through 2050, it’s not a planning document in the sense that specific priorities were put in place, but it’s a community document from hundreds of scientists saying, “these are where we need to go in the future. These are the big earth priorities” And I think there’s still faith in those documents.

BMR: You were involved in ODP since its start, all the way to its end. How ODP changed in those twenty years? 

JA: The advisory structure changed. We… we evolved panels. Remember, we also had service panels, we had a site survey panel, we had technology panels that were helping us. Well, the technology evolved. I think as we began to understand the vessel better and what it could do, we tested ourselves with different… Sometimes we use the vessel for engineering tests of technology to drill basalts, for example. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. But we would loan the vessel out to engineers occasionally to do that, and that was a good thing for the most part. Logging evolved. I think our logs got better. We learned to integrate logging better with our cores and we sailed people whose job was to integrate the logging information records. That was a big evolution, because initially we were collecting logs but most of us didn’t know how to how to use them well. I think by the end of ODP we were doing that much better. And our technical people got better, the instruments got better, our ability to collect cores got better… So I think that’s what happened in ODP. Still the same ship, but we were just using her as a tool better.

BMR: And also the community grew. There were more experts involved, more scientific fields involved… Was it more complicated?

JA: Yeah, it’s always been complicated. I think we, you know, climate was always an important part of the program. But climate, as we began to realize that humans were affecting climate and that we needed to study climate history more intensively, I think more and more climate people got involved in the program. And they were making demands on us [for] better cores, more cores in one place, because they need material to work on. That was a big evolution. I think our tectonics hypothesis testing got more sophisticated. The Japanese margin – we were instrumenting that margin to try to understand big earthquakes and drilling was fitting into other technologies, like ocean bottom seismometer arrays on the seafloor, so that we understood better time series that we need to understand, to understand those processes. But it’s expensive, so we couldn’t do it everywhere. And that’s still one of the big frontiers. If we’re going to understand subduction zones and tsunamis and so on, we’re going to have to do more work on more margins and invest the kind of money that the Japanese have invested on their margin. I worked off the Sumatra margin after the 2004 tsunami hit there, and we had an expedition, Expedition 362, on the Sumatra margin, and we wrote some important papers about it, but we simply don’t have the information about that margin that we need to have. As the Japanese do. We need to do it off Cascadia. We should do it off the west coast of South America. There are places we need to work, but we’re held back by money. We’re held back by the fact that – for example, we had Brazil as part of the program for a while. Brazil is not part of the program anymore. If you don’t have member countries in places where you’re working, that sometimes makes things more complicated. But it really has been cost. You know, these things are really expensive. And the time series we need to generate are long-term time series, and that’s expensive. Interpreting the data is expensive. You know, and we’ve had generations move through the program. Some people retire, new people come in, young people come in. I’m a big fan of that. We’ve been able to get young people interested in the program. And because running a drilling proposal and getting it through to the drill ship takes years, you’ve got to be dedicated. You’ve got to have other priorities. You can’t just have a drilling priority. You’ll never get your career going – drilling has got to be one piece of a career. But we’ve been able to convince people over decades that the drilling program is one really important way to get things done.

BMR: Now that we are talking about money, I wanted to ask you about the relationship with NSF. So how or why NSF has considered scientific ocean drilling programs valuable programs to invest in? And how the scientific community related to NSF?

JA: NSF is all about doing the best science. They don’t have enough money to do all the best science, so it’s very selective. But the drilling program has always been able to convince the National Science Foundation, which is the principal funder of scientific ocean drilling, that the science is superb. It’s great, great science. Even though it’s expensive, they get great return on investment. But as the drillship has gotten older, there has been a feeling for some years now that we have to move on to the next platform or platforms. That’s true of all ships. Ships get old. And that’s where we are now. I mean, it’s not that NSF does not think that our science is exciting. They do. But there are many, many proposals out there. A lot of them are very expensive. And NSF just got to the point where they said, “we can’t fund it all.” And the drillship was getting older. At some point we were having increasing mechanical issues with the ship. There were breakdowns and all ships lives come to an end. So where we are now is in a big transition. We’ve got to ask ourselves not just what is the next set of scientific priorities, [but] what are the next set of tools we’re going to use to tackle them. And that’s a useful exercise. That’s important for a community to do. It’s stressful, and I think everybody’s upset about the fact that the life of the JR is ending. Certainly me. I took her out on her first expedition. It’s like, it’s like saying goodbye to an old friend. But there will be, there will be new technologies, there will be new platforms. And we have other platforms out there that we can do some science on right now. So I’m optimistic. I think the young people are frustrated because they know that they’re losing a tool that has been a great tool. But I think we’ll get through it. I do. So… NSF is still very supportive of the concept of scientific ocean drilling. It was just, “where are we going to find all the money?” And international partnerships were faltering. You know, fuel oil was expensive, salaries were expensive… It was just getting more and more expensive on an older and older vessel to do work. And we know that’s true for the Chikyu. The Chikyu is extremely expensive as a tool. Not being used enough as it could be given the technology, because it’s expensive. And Mission Specific capabilities are out there. But again, you want to go to the high Arctic to drill near the North Pole, you need very expensive platforms to do that. It’s expensive. So you don’t do it every day. You don’t do it as much as the scientists would like. Again, patience is important. But the problems have never been more important. The work that we’re doing has never been more societally relevant than it is right now. Ever. In the fifty years I’ve been in the ocean sciences business, we are studying more important problems now than we’ve ever studied, affecting more people. 

BMR: I’d like to go a bit back in time and ask you about, related to technologies. The period you were director of ODP, was it in 1994? 

JA: Correct. 

BMR: This was the time when Chikyu was being discussed…

JA: This was before Chikyu. But what we realized then – Chikyu came out in 2004. But what we realized based on the science – remember, scientific drilling has always been based on proposals. You know, we don’t tell the community what to do. The community tells the program. Well, what we realized early on in the early 90s, after ODP had been around for seven or eight years, was that the proposals that were coming in demanded other types of technologies. Demanded mission specific capabilities to study coral reefs. We needed to go to higher latitudes where the JR couldn’t go. And that’s what drove it. It was the proposals coming in the door. And we knew that if we were going to respond to those proposals, we needed more technologies, types of technologies, than just the JR. Now, I think something on the order of 80% of the proposals submitted can still be done quite well on the JR. But those other 20% came up, and those 20% of proposals are really important problems: subduction zone margins, studying tsunamigenesis, studying the history of shallow water carbonate systems that have wonderful climate records… And those can’t be studied with the JR. And so what we’re now having to deal with, again as a community, is, “what other technologies are out there to study these kinds of problems and where are we going to find them?,” “will we someday have another dedicated platform?” Yes. We knew that in the early 90s. We needed a dedicated ship, not just because she’s there for us, but because she was a symbol of the international cooperation that makes the program go and that has kept the funding agencies giving us money for decades. I had a former director of NSF tell me twenty-five years ago, she said, “Jamie, we know the science is good, but that’s not why we fund you. We fund you because of the international nature of the program. That’s why we’re putting in the money, because it represents the best of global science.” And that’s still true. So I don’t want to lose the international cooperation. We’re in the process right now of thinking how is the US going to go forward on scientific ocean drilling. Well, okay, I understand that. But the simple fact is the US community, as good as it is, cannot propose all of the science that needs to be done. We need the Japanese. We need the Europeans. And if we don’t have that kind of international cooperation, we won’t do the best science. And that, to me, has always been the reason that I support growing the community. We MUST do the best science all the time. Not all the science that’s proposed. The best science that’s proposed. 

BMR: What’s the relation between international politics and the international relationships that are built in scientific ocean drilling?

JA: You know, some of it is just people in those countries that can influence policymakers to continue to invest in this tool. You know, the same thing happens in astronomy… You’ve got to have influence at the top. I think we’re in the process of a new generation of people advancing to influence levels in these governments. I think the world is not a very cooperative place right now. I think that’s part of our problem as well. Countries are not always talking to each other very well. Science is not always viewed as important as it should be, even though the scientific questions that we’re dealing with – about climate, for example, are really important to society. I think it’s going to be up to the generation that you represent to take over and say, “okay, we need to have science invested in to address this problems.” I’ve been involved from my early thirties and I’m in my early seventies now. I’m not going to be able to continue to do that and my generation will not, we have to hand off. And I think that’s what’s happening now. I think we’re looking at younger people taking leadership roles and that’s really important. 

BMR: Scientific ocean drilling has been doing important work in important scientific studies. But how this science is communicated outside the scientific community and outside funding agencies?

JA: Well, you’re doing it. I mean, this video that you’re preparing. You know, you’ve got a message to people who are not scientists. You know, I’m a scientist. I was touring a vessel that does ocean exploration yesterday for non-scientists. Some scientists are very good at messaging for non-scientists. Most scientists are not very good at messaging. I think part of the skillset that I would like to see younger scientists acquire is better communication skills. We have better communication vehicles than we’ve ever had. The whole world is connected now on social media like we never have before. We now have satellite communications on ships at sea. You can Zoom to somebody in the middle of the Pacific. That wasn’t true when I was your age. You know, when I went to sea, I went to sea. I was out of touch for weeks. That’s not true now. So we’ve all got to be better at communicating science, but particularly to people who pay taxes, that we want to do science. I think that’s a very important part of anybody’s job skillset, now, as a young person. I think the fact that you’re interested in communicating these videos to non-science people is great. That’s one of the things we’ve got to do. We’ve got to convince the taxpayers in various countries to continue to invest in science for their own benefit and for their kids. The planet is stressed, the planet is challenged. The next few decades are going to determine whether humans can live on this planet sustainably or not. So it’s a big challenge, but it’s a challenge that I think young people should welcome. 

BMR: Have you encountered any misunderstanding regarding scientific ocean drilling in your career? 

JA: Yeah, you know, a lot of people when they see a drillship think you’re drilling for oil and gas, you know? And the drillship came from the oil and gas community. Every time you see a drilling derrick, you don’t assume a good thing, particularly now that oil and gas is not viewed as a positive. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that we continue to face when I talk about drilling. That’s why they changed the acronym from International Ocean Drilling Program to International Ocean Discovery Program. Because we got rid of the drilling name. Because drilling is viewed by a lot of people as a negative, an environmental negative. And I’ve had many, many conversations through the years with people and say, “look, we’re not drilling for resources. We’re drilling to understand the history of the planet.” So that is a big challenge and will continue to be a big challenge.

BMR: Yeah, how to convince people?

JA: Well, because you’re asking them to invest hundreds of millions of dollars over time. And that’s a big deal. All of us have got to be part of that process of convincing people that drilling science is worth investing in.