Jim Mori

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This transcript is based on a video-recorded interview deposited at MarE3, JAMSTEC (Yokosuka, Japan).

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Interview of James J. Mori by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2025 December 1, Kyoto University, (Uji, Japan). [link]

BMR: Today is December 1st of 2025. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius, historian of science at JAMSTEC, and I’m with Jim Mori in Kyoto University for an oral history interview. Thank you so much.

JM: Thank you for coming.

BMR: Can you introduce yourself? Saying your name, most recent affiliation and position.

James Mori (JM): I’m James Mori. Most people call me Jim. I was a professor here, at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute of Kyoto University, but I retired a couple of years ago. Now I come to the University maybe a few times a month, but mostly I’m relaxing at home these days.

BMR: And what have been your main research lines, your research interests, during your career?

JM: I’m basically a seismologist. I like looking at a lot of different kinds of things related to earthquakes. Before, I especially did a lot of work on looking at the waveforms, the seismic waveforms of earthquakes, and trying to understand what all those little bumps and wiggles were telling us about the earthquake source, or about the wave propagation, or about the site response… There’s a lot of information in seismograms. So, basically, my career has been analyzing such seismic data to try to find out information about the earthquake, the earthquake source, and the path of the seismic waves;

BMR: Also, I’d like to ask you for a brief overview on how this field of research changed since you started your career to nowadays.

JM:  There have been a lot of changes. I think one of the biggest changes from, say, 40 years ago  is just the increase of the computing power. Before, especially when I was a student or the first few years of doing research, we were always up against the memory of the computer, and the time it took to do calculations. … But that has really changed and you can buy a fast computer with lots of memory for a relatively  small price. The computing has stopped becoming the limit.

And in the same way, when I was first started, data was relatively scarce. But now, we have  almost too much data (laughs) and there’s so much  good quality data, that seismologists are often overwhelmed by the amount of data that we have to look at these days. Seismology has always been a data-driven science – at least for the kind of seismology I do. You want to get some new data, or new seismograms, to learn more about the earthquake or the area, or the tectonics of some particular region. But, we have so much data these days that we just don’t have enough time to analyze everything. I think those  are some of the biggest changes,  the computing power and the amount of data that’s available to seismologists.

BMR: It’s kind of a double-edged sword, the opportunity to do more research but at the same time, how do you manage those datasets.

JM: Exactly. How do you pick what’s important? How do you throw away (laughs)? 90% of it usually is not so important, but to really hone in on the parts that can tell you new things is a real challenge these days.

BMR: I will start asking you questions chronologically and then I’m sure that all these things will keep coming up. Where did you grow up and how was your childhood like?

JM: I grew up near Chicago, Illinois, in the US; a suburb of Chicago. I think I had a pretty normal childhood, went to public schools…

BMR: May I ask you about your family background? Are your parents Japanese?

JM: Actually, my parents were also born in the US. My grandparents came from Japan to the US over 100 or 140 years ago. My parents were born in the US,an I was born in the US. I always tell people I’m a real American (laughs). I grew up in Chicago, in a neighborhood that actually had quite a few foreign people, but was a real sort of small American town. So, I consider myself – I don’t know if it’d say a typical – but an American that grew up with  American culture (laughs). That’s my background as a child.

BMR: Were any of your parents related to science or engineering?

JM: . My mother was a librarian. My father worked for a steel company – actually, not in the labor part, but analyzing the samples of the steel. He was a chemist, so he was sort of a scientist, and he was using those skills for working for a steel company.

BMR: How did you get interested in seismology or Earth-related sciences?

JM: In college, actually, I was a Physics major and I enjoyed that. But most of Physics you can’t see anything. Maybe astronomy you can, but most topics are talking about very tiny little quantum pieces, and very… Well, sort of theoretical. There’s not much to actually see. I remember I took one Geology course, and one of the first days they were  showing pictures of volcanoes in Iceland and other places, and I was just so fascinated by some of those photographs and videos. Then, a little bit later, I learned that that might be a good field where you can apply physics. So, that’s where I sort of got the idea of going into geophysics.

I finished my Physics degree at college – I went to Oberlin College in Ohio – and then, for graduate school, I went to Lamont-Doherty Observatory and in New York and started learning geophysics and seismology.

BMR: What year was that, more or less? When you went to Lamont.

JM: That was 1978.

BMR: That time was sort of the peak of marine geophysics at Lamont. And all these big figures in the early years of marine geosciences were there…

JM: Yeah, right. I met a lot of the people involved in plate tectonics, Lynn Sykes, and Wally Broecker, and [Walter] Pitman… A lot of those famous people that really developed the theory of plate tectonics were Lamont. They’re  the  previous the generation before me, but still got to hear their lectures, and it was always talked about, of course, at Lamont.

BMR: How was the environment like in that sort of institution? The relationship with other researchers, the funding situation…

JM: You know, as a student you don’t really keep track of funding, but I really enjoyed it at Lamont as a student.  it’s a campus outside the city. It’s up in the Palisades, New York, so a nice green place to  enjoy and play baseball and basketball in your free time . In general, I think all the students really enjoyed it. And that was sort of a problem (laughs) because they didn’t want to graduate; they just enjoyed staying stay there. So, there were a lot of people on the ten year-plan or the eight year-plan (laughs), and their advisors were always try to get them to finish up and graduate. It was really a nice place to go to graduate school. I enjoyed that a lot.

BMR: Was there someone influential for you, in those years? I mean, if not exactly in those years, you can also expand it back or forward.

JM: Of course, all of my advisors and stuff were good. But actually, in high school, one of the reasons that I decided to try to study Physics is because I really enjoyed my high school physics teacher. He always came in and had some interesting thing to talk about, or some experiment… I don’t know, that just really caught my imagination to  use physics, or the way you describe something mathematically to describe something that you see in nature. So, I think that was a big influence on me to study physics, originally. Like I said, I like studying things that I can see or hold, that’s why I moved away from sort of pure physics into seismology or geophysics.

In graduate school,I am also  greatly indebted to my advisors, Paul Richards and Klaus Jacob, who steered me in interesting and meaningful research directions.

BMR: Related to Lamont, as well, did you start at the time some sort of marine geophysics? Or were you mostly focused on land science?

JM: When you’re at graduate school or a graduate student at Lamont, you have to take a bunch of general introductory courses. So, everyone learns a little bit about marine geophysics, heat flow, magnetics, and of course all the geological basics for plate tectonics and all the observations that went into those fields. I think that’s very good. I think Lamont graduate students – at least, when I was there – had a pretty good general background in a lot of different fields because you have to take these various courses, and you get asked about them in your examinations. So, you know, every school has their qualifying exams to move to the PhD level.

At Lamont, we had them. But it was not only in your picked major subject, but you also had to choose 2 or 3 minors, other subjects, that were related but not your main subjects. So, you are expected to kind of learn about – not everything, but all the different kinds of geology and geophysics that goes on there. And, like I said, you were tested on that to pass your qualify exams.

BMR: So, you had sort of an introduction, but as you progressed in your career, it was not your main thing.

JM: Right, yeah. I remember my qualifying exams, and also that I got asked about crocodiles  in  Greenland (laughs).  A paleontologist was on my committee, and I hadn’t taken any paleontology courses. Well, I took some basic geology; I took stratigraphy, so I knew a little bit about that. But I was completely stumped in the examination(laughs), I couldn’t answer those questions  and I remember these questions about different kinds of animals at different time epochs around the world, and I was really at a loss.

BMR: Yes, I remember as well from my undergraduate some similar situation, with professors that were very specialized in a particular topic. I was wondering, when was your first time traveling abroad the US to do some research?

JM: Actually, I didn’t really travel abroad very much, but I liked to travel. When I first came to Lamont as a student, you visit people and then decide which research group or which people you want to be affiliated with. And I chose Alaska Group because I wanted to go to Alaska (laughs) and that turned out really well. I went up to Alaska for 4 or 5 field seasons during the summers. That was not abroad, but it’s almost abroad. It’s a very different place to live and work. I really enjoyed going to Alaska. We were running a seismic network up there.

Seeing the wildlife and fishing for salmon was a lot of fun.  On rainy days when we could not work on the seismic stations, we would go fishing. I caught 3 kinds of salmons (pink, silver and king). The king salmon was the largest and best to eat.  One year we froze and shipped back to New York about 100 pounds of salmon.  We had a big salmon bake party back at Lamont.

Photos of Jim’s time in Alaska. Courtesy of Jim Mori.

BMR: What happened after you graduated from Lamont? How did your career continue?

JM: There’s a lot of stories. I graduated in 1984 in seismology, and actually I was lucky enough to have a few choices of what to do after I graduated. I had applied to an oil company, to do seismic work, and they had offered me a position in New Orleans to do  analysis on seismic reflection records. I also applied for a postdoc at Caltech, at the Seismo Lab there, and I was lucky to get that, which academically would have been a good place to go. Also, at the same time, I applied for a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It’s also in Pasadena. They don’t have a lot of seismologists, but they had some Earth geophysics there. The fourth option was to go to Papua New Guinea to work at a volcano observatory. And I chose the last one, but when I told my advisor, he said, “Jim, do you know what you’re doing?” (laughs) because the oil company job was very good salary, and I could probably live comfortably there. A postdoc at Caltech was an attractive position.  … Yeah, everyone would like to go to Caltech to be a postdoc. And I turned those down, and I turned down the job at JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to go to someplace no one had ever heard of in Papua New Guinea.

The reason,  that the job was open was because the last seismologist they had at the Volcano Observatory there had actually gotten killed in a volcano eruption about 4 or 5 years before, and they’d been looking for a seismologist to come for some time. First, they were asking people in Japan. They’re saying, “Do you have any students or some young people that might want to take a seismology job in Papua New Guinea?” And no one in Japan went, but one of my good student friends, Steve McNutt, was a volcanologist, so he also got this information, that they were looking for a volcano seismologist in Papua New Guinea. He didn’t want to go, but he  mentioned that to me one day and , I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting!” And so, I  pursued that.

BMR: So, you actually went there!

JM: (laughs) I went there! I went to Papua New Guinea for three years.

BMR: Oh, wow! How is it, or how was it? I guess it’s pretty different now than it was.

JM: It’s probably not that different, but… Well, I mean, just living everyday was an experience. Actually, I got married the last year I was in graduate school and my wife is Japanese, but she was still living in Japan. And so, I called her up on the phone one day and said, “Would you like to go to Papua New Guinea?” And she really didn’t answer (laughs). So, the two of us went to Papua New Guinea together, and that was my first job.

Actually, I can show you some stuff? (looking at PowerPoint, 19:00). These are just some things I put together when I retired. Like I told you,  I’ve had three jobs: Papua New Guinea for three and a half years years. Then, I moved to the US Geological Survey for eleven years, and  came to Kyoto University for about 20 years. But, in my mind, those three times are almost the same. Have you ever heard about “natural time”? Sometimes we use that in geophysics. Instead of counting time in hours or seconds, you count time in terms of events. For example, you might say every 100 earthquakes something happens or you evaluate the conditions at that time. Instead of counting time, you count events. If you use natural time, these three periods of my career are about the same length, in the way I think about new experiences, the things you learned… I think everyone remembers the first job very clearly or their first postdoc, because everything’s new and everything is exciting. So, those three and a half years in Papua New Guinea were very influential on me.

And then, I went to the USGS for ten years, and lots of different things happening there, but that was also a big part of my life. And then, the 20 years at Kyoto University, has gone by so fast! So, I always think of my career as being  three almost equal natural time periods.

BMR: That’s interesting, because in terms of the impact in your career, one might thing that the relationships or the networks you could establish in Papua New Guinea, for example, can’t compare with the relationships one can establish at the USGS or in a university, for example. But at the same time, these are your formation years, so everything you learn becomes much more influential, potentially, than during the second half of your career.

JM: Right, that’s true. Actually, that’s one thing my advisor told me when I told him I was going to that. He warned me that, the real danger of going to work in such a place was,   not being able to come back into the academic system. Because he said, “You’re going to be on your own” — there’s a few people there, but it’s not like being at a university, or going to  frequent meetings and conferences. And so, he warned me that it might be difficult difficult to get another job or to get back into the main stream of seismology. But I was lucky that I got a job with the USGS after my time in Papua New Guinea .

BMR: What kind of things you learned in Papua New Guinea that were kind of important for the following part of your career?

JM: I did a lot of kind of basic things that you  don’t do when you’re in the US or working in a group of scientists. I was working with a staff of about 10 people at the volcano observatory, but I was the only only one trained in seismology. So,  I was doing earthquake locations, and counting earthquakes, and   lots  of simple observations of volcanoes. That probably stayed with me, that I  like more simple, basic things that you understand completely, instead of very complicated computer algorithms and things like that.

BMR: I see it was more like a field-work related work.

JM: Observations, yes.

BMR: And I guess this will give you some pretty unique data to do research, that nobody was using.

JM: Exactly. I was often the first one that who saw the data being recorded on an active volcano. As I said, that was all very exciting to do. Also, because of these exciting data, I could actually get a fair number of papers written, because there were no other seismologists  .

BMR: Was your family happy in Papua New Guinea?

JM: My wife was… Well, there’s ups and downs (laughs), some good things and some bad things. But I think overall, we enjoyed. It was only three years.

BMR: Yeah, three years is a reasonable time to get new experiences.

JM: Yes, and then go into something else.

BMR: How did it happen, that you decided to move back to the US?

JM: I was there on a contract. It was a three year contract and I could have extended it, but I thought it’s time to go.

BMR: In the USGS, was it a research position?

JM: Yes. (looking at the slides) This this is my ancestry. My father’s father, my grandfather, was Kurajiro Mori, and he was born in 1866. He came to the US in 1890. He was born in the 2^nd year of the Keio era (1866) [?]. The story I heard is, he was living in Chiba and he decided he wanted to come to the US, so he walked from Chiba to Yokohama to get on a boat to get into the US.

BMR: So, he had no job or anything in the US; he just wanted to see the other side of the ocean?

JM: I heard  from my dad – actually, I knew my grandfather when I was small, but couldn’t really talk to him. But my father said that my grandfather was a  bad businessman (laughs). He tried to run a clothes cleaners,   repairing watches, making facial cold cream… He tried several  things, but never was very good at business.

During World War 2, I don’t know if you heard that they actually ordered  all the Japanese decendent people in the US to go to these internment camps for the duration of the war. My father said that, you know, a lot of Japanese lost all their homes, and businesses, and everything. But he said, for his family, it was not so bad (laughs) because they were poor anyways. And now, they were living someplace and they got fed three meals a day. At least for them, it was – well, it wasn’t great, but it was not so bad. And my father taught school in the camps, and things like that.

My mother’s side, also her parents went to the US pretty early, in 1903. As I said, my parents were born in the US, my father in California and my mother in Seattle, and I was born in Chicago.

BMR: Were all of them speaking Japanese among them?

JM: No, my parents’ Japanese is not so good. I mean, they probably spoke some Japanese growing up, , but they always spoke  English in our home. So, yeah, like I said, they’re Americans. They were born and grew up in the US. My parents never spoke Japanese to me, but they could sort of speak with their parents. My wife always says that my parents Japanese is American-Japanese (laughs). It’s not very good.

This is probably sort of typical. You have the first generation immigrants coming to the US and trying to make a living.  The second generation (my parents generation)  is born in the US, but their parents are from a foreign land. So, they’re Americans, but probably this generation has the hardest time because they’re sort of in-between. By the time  of my generation, the generation is ‘real’ Americans with parents that were born in the US. ’.  The generations are called issei (first generation), nissei (2^nd generation) and sansei (3^rd generation). Nissei probably have the hardest time, I think,  this is true of immigrants to the US for many different countries.

BMR:  I see, they are in-between.

JM: [In this photo] My grandfather would have been about… between 30 and 40.

BMR: It’s so great that you can have these old photographs.

JM: Papua New Guinea was very exciting in terms of work, because I was there for three and a half or four years, and I saw eruptions at four different volcanoes, and I felt three magnitude seven earthquakes. And so, I could write papers about those (laughs). It was a very active period.

BMR: How do you see the eruption of a volcano, like at this distance? What is considered safe?

JM: How far away? Well, that’s… That depends on how big is the eruption and where you are. This one, was about 5 or 6 kilometers away. And we had a station here, recording the earthquakes. But we walked every day, when I was here, up to maybe around here to put in some portable instruments. So, that was probably about 4 or 5 kilometer walk, something like that.

BMR: So, you assess by yourself what you consider safe.

JM: Yeah. You sort of learn to judge. This one, actually, is from a helicopter. We were close, sort of a few hundred meters away. This one is also probably about the same distances here. When I was with the USGS, I went to the Pinatubo eruption, in the Philippines. It’s a big eruption. We were 20km away, and that was still very dangerous.

One of the reasons I went to Rabaul is because there were lots of earthquakes. And everyone was expecting the volcano to erupt because of all these earthquakes. Also, this land was coming up. In one month at the peak, it came up about it 60  centimeters, in one month. All this is new land that came out of the bay. In 1983, 1984, if you were to ask any volcanologists where they expected the next big eruption, this would have been one of the places. This was very famous in the volcanology community. But it didn’t erupt then.

BMR: You were there at that time.

JM: When the earthquakes were happening and when the uplift was happening. But the eruption actually happened ten years later, in 1994. I wasn’t there, but it was a big eruption there that essentially destroyed that beautiful town. So, that was that was Papua New Guinea.

BMR: Let’s continue when you moved back to the US.

JM: So, USGS. USGS was really different from Papua New Guinea (laughs).

BMR: Of course (laughs). Where was it?

JM: In Pasadena. Actually, our office was on the Caltech campus, so we interacted with the Caltech people all the time. But, you know, in Papua New Guinea, Rabaul, I was the only seismologist. And the town is very small, even though we had magnitude seven earthquakes, they didn’t really do much damage because there’s not much infrastructure. But then, I moved to Southern California, Los Angeles, which is – when you get even a small earthquake there could  be damage and there’s so many people that feel the shaking. So, it was very different.

I was there during the Northridge earthquake in 1994. That was one of the most damaging earthquakes in California. Actually, it wasn’t that big, M6.7, but it was one of the most damaging and costly events in California and the continental US.

BMR: Talking about these differences, was there something specially challenging to adapt to, to start in this new position?

JM: We weren’t in a big office, but there were – how many, ten people?. At that time, the earthquakes in Los Angeles, and the associated hazards, that all was the important part of being with the USGS. When a big earthquake like this happens, you really see the importance of the job.

Actually, another story – I’ve got lots of stories (both laugh). When I was working there, I actually got on TV a lot because after an earthquake I was one of the people that would get on TV and say, “There was an earthquake” (laughs). It’s part  of the job here, with the USGS. We always got on the news, and you had a lot of experience working with media there, television and radio and print. That was part of the job,  conveying earthquake information. But then, this Northridge earthquake happened and it was a big earthquake that did a lot of damage. So, on that day I was on TV quite a bit, but when I got home that day, my wife told me, “You should not smile when you’re on TV after disaster” (both laugh). She said, “All the seismologists were smiling. And that’s because you were so excited”. It’s the first big earthquake that we’ve had in decades and first time for experiencing strong shaking for many of the seismologists.. And so, everyone was really excited and just wanted to do things. But my wife said, “You know, they show all this damage and talk about people getting killed, and then there’s the smiling seismologists giving information”. That’s one thing I learned, to try to have a much more serious face during interviews, especially after disasters like that.

BMR: The relationship between scientists and media is something that, you know, there are social scientists that have a focus on that – how to communicate and how not to communicate scientific information to the public.

JM: We actually got coached a lot – not a lot, but we got coached about how to do TV interviews. One of the reporters was good and he was telling us how to prepare and how to give an interview. And one thing he said, “Prepare what you’re going to say, and say it, and don’t say anything more, because – he said – when you start freewheeling and saying unprepared things, that’s when you get into trouble”. So, to prepare ahead of time what you want to say, and don’t say anything more. So, yeah, I learned a lot about media at this job.

This is another story. In Los Angeles – have you been to Los Angeles? Everyone drives cars, families have  maybe 2 or 3 cars, and there’s not many trains. So, the freeways were severely damaged, that was really a shock for the people in LA. … That’s what people in Los Angeles really remember, they couldn’t get around by the car. We had a lot of visitors right after the earthquake from different countries, like from Japan. And the Japanese engineers looked at damage to the bridges  and said, “Oh, this is, very damaging and very bad because these columns are so thin”. And they were saying, “Well, this shouldn’t happen in Japan” because the engineering standards were very good. The Northridge earthquake was January 17th, 1994. And the Kobe earthquake was exactly one year later, on January 17th, 1995. And this is Japan.

BMR: So, it happened [that the freeway columns collapsed].

JM: It happened in Japan, too. So, you have to be careful with what you say, even with good engineering standards it’s difficult to build. And the reason is probably at that time, 30 years ago, there was not a good idea of how hard the ground would shake. There were much fewer strong motion recordings, and we just didn’t have the data that we have now for lots of earthquakes.  Many people thought that one g acceleration was very rare and wouldn’t happen very often. But… We learned in the past 20 years that the ground shaking is actually  much more severe than what people had thought. It just hadn’t been adequately recorded, because you have to be close to the earthquake to get a good recording of the intense shaking. Or, if you instruments at close distances, most of the time the instruments go  off scale in a large earthquake. That’s one thing that seismologists really learned in the last 30 or 40 years, how hard the ground shakes in a big earthquake. So, our engineering standards now are pretty good, especially in regions such as Japan and western US, where earthquakes are frequent.   There has been a great increase in the strong motion data recorded close to large earthquakes in the last few decades. So there is  fairly good knowledge now about the levels of intense shaking that are expected (as a function of distance and earthquake size) 

[Showing picture] This is the Pinatubo eruption, in the Philippines. This was the second or third largest eruption of this century. This is a big pyroclastic flow, going down the mountain slope to the north.   It is made of hot ash, rock and moving very fast down the slope. Sometimes it’s called a hot avalanche. So, a volcano was over here.

(I was going to tell you this volcano story at the interview but we started talking about other things)

That eruption was a certainly memorable day.  I was with the USGS and PHIVOLCS (Philippine Institue of Volcanology and Seismology)  at the observatory on the US Clark Airbase.  We were 20 km from the volcano but that was still too close. After all of our seismometers that were located between us and the volcano were destroyed (probably by pyroclastic flows), everyone moved to the back of the building (behind several walls). We were expecting a pyroclastic flow to hit the building.  After about an hour, no flow came, but  it was decided that there was reason to stay there and we evacuated to a fall back site 50 km away.  I remember stepping outside the building to go the vehicles. It was pitch black even though it was early afternoon.  There was heavy ash and small stones coming down.  The stones hitting the roof the building made a loud clattering sound.  There was thunder and lighting  from the ash cloud and also a typhoon was coming through at the same time.  There was also a low rumbling we could hear, which was probably a large lahar flowing down a nearby river.  All this seemed to me like the end of the world from some movie. Once in the vehicles we felt a little safer.  It was a long ride because you had to go slowly from all the ash coming down. Every 10 or 20  minutes we had to stop to clear the windshield. We used all the soft drinks that were given to us when we evacuated the base, to wash the windshield.   There were also hundreds of people on the road  fleeing the volcano on foot.  Eventually we made it to the fall-back site that had been prepared by the airforce.  That night we were feeling earthquake lots of earthquakes.  At one point they were coming about one every minute. We stayed at the fall back site for a couple days before going back to the base.  There was lots of damage of the base, but most of buildings were still usable. 

There apparently was a story on the CNN news that the USGS team was missing.  Luckily, my wife did not hear that report.

BMR: It looks like when you study volcanoes, you get the chance to get into helicopters a lot!

JM: Yeah, a lot. When we were in Papua New Guinea, we would rent a helicopter a few times a year to go do inspections of the local volcanos. That was always part of it. I enjoyed that.

This is  a photo of  the media work, when I was at the USGS. We shared facilities with Caltech, and Caltech actually had a press room that reporters would come to whenever there was an earthquake. So, all the TV trucks would be lined up outside, and we’d be giving interviews to the media there.

BMR: How did you decide to move to Japan?

JM: That’s a good question. Like I said before, I really enjoyed working at USGS, and one of the reasons I like working there is because I always felt I was doing something important. I always thought that we were doing the right thing; that we weren’t wasting money, and that we were trying very hard to do things that would help the public and help the people before and when an earthquake occurred. That was the whole Earthquake Hazard Program of the USGS. And then, there were a also lot of academic research programs, too, which we all liked. But overall, I always felt that the USGS had a good mission or good stance for the earthquake work that was being done. And I was  very proud of that. I thought that the USGS was doing a good job for that.

But then, I moved to Kyoto and there’s really not any reason, a very strong reason, that I moved. One was just coming to a university, because I hadn’t worked at university before; but probably the main reason was simply – if I didn’t change jobs at that particular time, I probably would have been the rest of my career with the USGS in Pasadena, because I liked it there and there’s no reason to leave. And so, I just thought it’s probably better to go try something different. And if I didn’t like it, I figured I could come back. So, that was the main thing, just to  try something different.

BMR: Moving to Japan is a big thing; it’s not like just moving to the East coast within the US.

JM: Right. One helpful thing is, my wife is Japanese, so she helped a lot with a lot of language and stuff like that. But I think it was a big change, and I was a little nervous about – actually, I was nervous for all  my jobs. I remember getting on the airplane going to Papua New Guinea, and arriving in Papua New Guinea, in this really foreign place saying, well, what am I really doing here? (laughs) So, I had that feeling coming to Japan. Going to the USGS was going home, but coming to Japan  I had that fear of, is it going to work out? What am I doing here?

BMR: I know that feeling. Just looking at the chronology here, it was the time that Chikyu was being built (early-2000s). Did you have any relation to scientific ocean drilling?

JM: No, not at that time.

BMR: How did you connect to the scientific ocean drilling world?

JM: One day, I think in 2001 or 2002 – have you met Kiyoshi Suyehiro? He was at JAMSTEC, at that time. He just came up to me one day at a meeting, and said, “Jim, are you interested in being in this IODP committee? They’re looking for someone to be on, the SPC” – that’s sort of one of the higher committees that decides on the proposals and things like that. And I said, “Well, I don’t know anything about ships or the ocean,” or something like that. He said, “Oh, you know, they’re still interested”. Once I sort of got involved, I realized what they really wanted was someone that could speak English well (laughs), because I think they felt that they had Japanese representatives on these committees, but lots of times their English wasn’t very good to communicate the Japanese opinion or the interests of the Japanese side. And I think what they really looking for someone to sort of sum up what the Japanese wanted to say, to make a point, especially when the discussion was about which proposals should  be funded, or the priorities of the Japanese community So, I think probably that was the only reason that they wanted me to be on the committee (laughs).

That’s when I sort of began to learn about IODP. I’d heard about Chikyu when it was being built because it was such a big project. That was when I started going to IODP meetings and learning about the program.

BMR: That was early-2000s, when you started at Kyoto University.

JM: Yeah, I was already in Japan, and Suyehiro-san came up to me at some meeting – I forgot where it was – and  asked me if I was interested in participating in IODP.

BMR: The English is something that always comes up as a challenge, in interviews with Japanese people.

JM: Yeah, and unfortunately Americans often don’t realize that – some do, but some don’t.

BMR: Sometimes I feel like it’s not only about the language barrier, but also a cultural barrier, ways of relating to others.

JM: That’s different, right.

BMR: And how the connection between doing seismology or earthquake research, and IODP, came up for you?

JM: I was in this committee, first and learning about ocean drilling and all that, and later on – well, especially after Tohoku earthquake – began to think about what kind of projects seismologists could do, or more geophysics projects that could be done in IODP. When you are on these committees  it sometimes seemed to me that there were many proposals of the same kind,  especially sedimentary drilling to get the climate change of this area… Well,  that’s reasonable   because the ocean drilling  mostly collects sediments cores and that’s some of the best information you get, the paleo-climate record. So, obviously that’s what most people are doing.

When I was first on the committee, I think there were almost no geophysics or earthquake programs, except for the Nankai Trough project.  More geophysics proposals  began to come later, I think especially IODP realized that they needed to get other groups involved in order to keep the program successful. Then, the Tohoku earthquake happened and that was our big chance.

BMR: What was your role in this JFAST proposal?

JM: I had always been interested in temperature measurements after earthquakes, to see how hot the fault is. And from measuring the temperature, you can measure the friction on the fault. And measuring the friction is actually a big issue for seismologists. They want to know what is the friction. It’s really not known, especially for big earthquakes. So, I’d always been interested in trying to measure the temperature after a big earthquake. The first time we did it was actually in Taiwan, after the 1999 Chichi earthquake. That was one of the first things I did here, was – we got to Taiwan, and from this drill, this borehole into the fault, we measured the temperature. And from the temperature, we could estimate the friction. But this data actually wasn’t very good. For one thing, it was five years after the earthquake, so that the temperature that we measured was 0.02 or 0.03 – very, very tiny. There’s lots of noise and there’s a lot of questions about this data. But this is the first time that this was done. So, we did this, but then we are more interested in really getting good data.

We actually had a workshop, and the workshop was, what should we do after a big earthquake to be able to make these measurements quickly? Not five years, but maybe one year or less. We got geologists, and seismologists, and geophysics together, and we actually made a plan of what to do if a big earthquake happened; how to make a proposal to go and measure the temperature. So, we weren’t expecting it to be in the ocean, but when it did happen, we said, “Oh, this is a good chance. Let’s try it.” That’s what we were waiting for, a chance to go do this at a big earthquake. To do it quickly after the big earthquake.

Installing a temperature sensor in Chelungpu Fault, Taiwan, March 2005. Courtesy of Jim Mori.

BMR: How does it change, organizing this sort of project on land and offshore? Of course, at sea you need a platform; but what are the challenges of doing it on land?

JM: I don’t know which is easier… I would say the cost is much more for offshore. Onshore, there  are not so many logistical problems. Basically, you just have to get the permit, and if you can get a permit to drill, you just drill.  This is about one kilometer depth from the surface, so that’s not real deep and that’s fairly easy to do. I think the budgets are, I don’t know, a few million dollars much less than ocean drilling. And, of course, it’s not just for temperatures, but to get a sample of fault and everything here.

So, yeah, probably on land it’s easier, but again, this is the first time. So, it took 3 or 4 years to write the proposal and get it funded. And by the time it was drilled and we could get there, it was five years after the earthquake. So, that’s why JFAST was named JFAST, because we wanted to get there quickly after the earthquake.

BMR: Who was involved in this rapid response plan?

JM: The workshop? There are four of us that organized the workshop.Emily Brodsky, Kuo-Fong Ma, Damian Saffer and myself.and [?].

BMR: How did you know them?

JM: Emily and Kuo-Fong, were Caltech graduate students  when I was with the USGS, so that’s probably the first time I met them and then I’ve  had  various collaborations with them  since then.  I met Damian through committee meetings of IODP.

BMR: Someone mentioned in an interview that it was through your mediation that this team of people wanting to study the aftermath of Tohoku earthquake got into the IODP system. What was your role in there?

JM: I don’t know (laughs), I just like to travel, going to meetings and going to different countries. So, I have a fair number of contacts. If a big earthquake happens someplace, I usually know someone or met someone that can do something. I don’t know if it’s anything special, but it was just sort of the right time, and the chance was there. And so, we got a lot of interested people and, the other thing is, I think everyone wanted to be part of this project because it sounded like a good project for an important earthquake– at least, to me.

BMR: What was the most challenging or difficult part of pushing JFAST forward, from the organization?

JM: One of the most impressive things that I was wasn’t really  part of, but was the speed with which it was set. Because the earthquake was in March 2011, and we were at sea  drilling in April 2012. So, just a little over a year. Most IODP projects take three, five, ten years to go. One thing, we were ready with the proposal, because we had this workshop, so we already had layed  out the project, and had prepared the scientific arguments… Even some logistical things; so we could write the proposal very quickly. And then, IODP was very helpful, and they pushed the proposal through all these committees it has to go through. And they (IODP, CDEX) were very supportive and helpful in pushing it through the whole system in, I don’t know, a few months, six months, something like that.

But then, the real sort of work was done by CDEX. That they could prepare for this expedition in one year. And, just things like, they had never drilled this deep so they didn’t have enough pipe to reach the ocean floor. And they did not have the experience of  drilling in this deep water; this is the first time. And then, again, there’s just all these logistics for getting a big project going, the scheduling, and the ship time, and all that. So, I really am grateful to all the efforts that CDEX made to get this project going. It’s amazing that in one year, this whole thing happened from just the plans to the actual drilling. I think that JAMSTEC and CDEX really deserve a lot of credit for that. The scientists, you know, they could do whatever (laughs), but all the practical, logistical kind of things, this was all done very efficiently and very, very well.

BMR: Actually, Chikyu was damaged. There was a thruster they needed to repair…

JM: Oh, yeah, that was at that time. There were other problems, like the system for connecting the (heavy) pipes as you drill had to be replaced.  The very long drill string (7,000 meters) was heavier than what had been used before.

BMR: It’s impressive, so smooth. Talking about that expedition, once you got on board, I want to know your impressions of doing this research at sea as compared to all the fieldwork you’d been doing on land for the past 20 years.

JM: I was most worried the month before we went on board, because we had a lot of meetings and we were getting all ready… And that’s when I’ve heard about all these problems, about the pipe and the weight of the pipe, and all the underwater technology, the cameras, and the drilling, and all that… And the fact that they had never done this before, at such a depth. I just remember the few weeks to months, some of those last meetings, hearing about all these problems, like, “Is this really going to happen?” (laughs) That was probably the time  I was the most worried.

Once you get out of the boat, it’s sort of exciting. And there’s a lot of things going on. But I was just thinking, “There is no way that this all is going to happen in a couple of months”. Actually, the first month – you have heard all these stories – the first month, basically, nothing happened. The drilling, there always were problems, and if something happened, it took three days to go down and up to connect the pipes and break them up. For every problem, you had to wait three days to go try again. The underwater camera didn’t work, or some cable broke, or various sort of technical problems. And I think they’re all because of the deep water, the high pressures there hadn’t been tested before. And so, the first month was very trying, I think, on everybody.

Although one other thing I have to say is, we had really good morale on the ship (laughs).

BMR: How did you manage that situation, being the co-chief scientist?

JM: Maybe… I don’t know how much credit to take for that. Basically, you could tell that everyone was really interested and wanted to be part of this project, so that that really helped. And then, well, one thing that I felt pretty strongly is that we should have meetings every day, even though nothing was going on. Every day we met at 10 or 11, just as the night shift was getting off and the morning shift was coming out. And we had a meeting to say what went wrong or whatever. We also had a lot of seminars, just people talking about their own research, which kept people interested.

The first month could have been bad, but it turned out to be pretty good. And I think it’s just because we really had a good group out there. You know, there were some arguments and some disagreements and stuff like that… Especially geologists, they practice – I don’t know how many times – they practiced what to do when the core’s up, they ran these drills and stuff. I don’t know why, but things went really well, even when the technical logistics  were not very successful. That was a real good point of the expedition.

BMR: Have you had any equivalent experience before, being a chief scientist, spending such an amount of time kind of isolated with other people, sharing the data or whatever came out?

JM: I didn’t tell anyone before the trip, but that was the first time I’ve been on a ship (laughs), so I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know what life was going to be like or anything, and it was all new to me.

The other co-chief, Fred Chester, he was a really good guy and had a lot of experience on Chikyu and in other expeditions. We were always talking, try to kind of try to keep things going, and how to keep people interested and morale up and… it just worked out. I don’t think it was anything particular that we did, but, like I said, we had a really good group of people out there, at that time.

BMR: Thinking about the development and the results of the expedition, I want to ask you for an assessment of what kind of things went well, were a good decision; and in hindsight, things or decisions that you’d have done differently.

JM: I don’t know if I really would have done anything differently. I mean, because of all the little things that that we know now that we didn’t know, but… I don’t know if it was good or not, but so we just decided to try to do it (laughs), and we were lucky. Well, things didn’t work out in the first part, but we managed somehow to get things done. I don’t know if that’s always the best strategy, but for this time it was a good strategy to just try; to just try to do it even though there were a lot of problems.

Actually, a thing that I remember, the engineers or the drillers told me that, especially a few weeks before the expedition sailed, they said, “Yeah, we aren’t sure if we could do this, it is difficult, but if we have enough time, we can do it”, they told us. And that was really true. The first time things don’t work. But if you could go and do it 2 or 3 times, then you learn and eventually you can do it. So, a lot of it is just time or being able to keep trying. And that really turned out to be the case. I mean, like the first month, nothing worked. And we finally did get the core and got to the fault, but that was just a couple days before the end of the expedition. And at that time, we didn’t get the temperature sensors in just because some technical problems. But we went back a couple months later and the second time we drilled successfully very quickly.

So, again, that was just having the chance to do it again, and being successful because you learn for the first time. Same thing, when we went back to pick up the temperature sensors – did you hear about that? – the first time we couldn’t find them, so we were out there for I don’t know how many days, close to a week, and the weather was really bad, and we couldn’t find the site. Then, went back a couple months later – actually I was not in the second time, but the second time they found the drill site  right away. So, you know, you  just try, try. And it really turned out, as they said, that if we have enough time, we can do it. Time is always the limiting thing – the time and money. So, you have limited budget and limited time to get something done and you’re lucky if you can get it done. But if it doesn’t get done, well, if you have more time or money, usually you can make it work.

BMR: Actually, maybe you are aware of it. Last year, there was the JTRACK expedition, following up the JFAST, and this year they have recovered the sensors they installed last year. And it’s considered a big success: they were able to drill everything they wanted, to install and recover the sensors… All went super smooth; everyone was so happy. So, you really learn that this is a learning process.

JM: You asked me, would we do differently? I don’t know if I would do everything differently… Trying the first time is probably the most exciting, even if you fail (laughs). But if you have a good group of scientists and engineers, even if you fail, still, it’s a worthwhile project.

BMR: What was the most important result, for you?

JM: Scientific result?

BMR: Yes.

JM: It was measuring the friction, which is what we were set out to do, and  confirming the result that we had in Taiwan. A very low, 0.1 friction. Do you know how to measure friction? We have what’s called a coefficient of friction. That tells you how much force you need to move something compared to the normal pressure; compared to sort of the weight. For example, a car tire on cement has a coefficient of about 1.1. It takes about the same amount of force to make something slip as the weight. A wet tire on cement has a coefficient of about 0.3, and that’s why it can slip much better. Ice skates, steel on ice, has a coefficient of about 0.01 or 0.02. So, we measured a coefficient of friction of about 0.1, which is pretty low friction. Think about rocks, it’s about one. It takes a lot of force, a lot of friction. But this fault was very slippery; the coefficient of friction is 0.1, so it slid fairly easily. And that’s something that seismologists have been worried about a lot in big faults; how much forces to actually make the rocks move past each other. So, for me, getting a good number on that friction of the fault was probably the best scientific result. The friction measurement was ’ what I was most interested in. But I think getting a sample of fault was also very important. And seeing what does a big fault look like that just slipped, maybe 50m. No one has ever seen a fault, got a sample of fault that’s moved that much. And so, seeing all the geological structures in the fault from the earthquake, and how is it deformed during the earthquake.

One other thing related to the friction, then, we could take a sample of fault, and put it in a lab experiment and measure the friction directly. It made us very happy that the number they got from the laboratory was the same number that we got for the temperature experiments. That consistency was very convincing about the friction.

I think those are the two main things, the friction and also just the geologic structures and, you know, being able to put in your hand in this fault that moved so much during the earthquake was very exciting.

BMR: And how this expedition was influential or important for your career? You can approach it as you want – the scientific career, or the more personal-side of things, what you learned, if it changed some of your views…

JM: It didn’t change… if anything, it gave the sort of the same answers that we got from Taiwan. That’s all very satisfying that what you said before wasn’t completely wrong. I don’t think it really changed anything, but just sort of gave me more confidence that when I talk about friction of rocks and friction of big faults… One thing, this is what we call dynamic friction, which means during the earthquake. But if you take the same rocks, normally it has a high value of friction – I mean, you just look at rocks, they don’t slide very easily. And so, it all has to do with the process; it doesn’t happen immediately. Once the fault starts to slip, then something begins to happen, the mechanisms that make the friction drop. That’s why it’s called a dynamic friction. It’s only once the fault starts moving. I think that’s very important, that there’s a lot of these dynamic processes that are going on that you normally can’t see unless the earthquake is happening.

BMR: So, the properties of the rock change in the place where there’s friction.

JM: Right, the properties of the rocks changed and probably there’s also the fluids. There’s one idea, what they call thermal pressurization, which is a process  if there’s fluids in the fault zone.  When the fault begins to move, the initial (high) friction heats the fluid,  then the fluid expands and opens the fault allowing it to move more easily. Like, if you put ice in a crack of rock, it expands and can further fracture  the rock. Well, same thing happens with thermal pressurization, except the with heat instead of ice. . When you heat it up, the volume of the water gets bigger and if it gets bigger, it opens up the fault, so it allows it to slip much more easily. That that’s one of the proposed mechanisms for why the fault slips much more easily, later on, after the rupture begins.

BMR: Do you know if this type of research has continued in these past 10-15 years, somewhere else? Of course, in the Japan Trench there’s team who have continued studying the slip caused by the Tohoku earthquake. But has someone else continued with the rapid response drilling, after an earthquake?

JM: Measuring the temperature? There hasn’t been a chance. I’m just trying to think… We were ready for this one, and we were sort of waiting for the chance to do it and so we did it. Then, after we did it once, we were sort of tired and didn’t do it again. But… I’m just thinking, what earthquakes would have been good?

We need a big earthquake, and you need a big earthquake that slips a lot, especially near the surface. Most earthquakes, if they slip a lot, usually it’s very deep, so you can’t reach them with a borehole. So, we were lucky for JFAST, with about a kilometer deep borehole we could reach the big slip zone. Same with Taiwan, we could reach the slip depth at a depth for about 1100 meters.. You don’t get a good chance… Maybe that Turkey earthquake last year, but… Sometimes, if there’s too much damage, it hard to do… To get a large scale expensive scientific project, may be difficult because people are more  worried about the damage and the social aspects . Anyway, I can’t think of a really good earthquake in the last ten years that would have been good for this kind of study.

BMR: You were lucky, also in the sense that it was pretty fast after you had done the workshop. And that cannot be planned in any way. You could have been waiting even today.

JM: Yeah, totally, maybe for 50 years (laughs). A lot of fortunate events happened for this story. Actually, there was an earthquake just after that workshop, in China. We went there to try to measure the temperature – it was before Tohoku,  in 2008. We got measurements, but some of the measurements weren’t very good, or a lot of noise, and the results just weren’t very clear.

One of the good things of Tohoku is that the results are pretty clear. It’s not fuzzy, but a very clear strong temperature signal that we got.

BMR: How scientific ocean drilling, from your involvement in IODP, is different or similar to other collaborations you’ve been working on?

JM: It definitely was the first time I worked on such a big project. After all, my research has been sort of more, small projects; going to look at damage after the earthquake, or do some specific monitoring… I haven’t been that involved in big international projects. So, this is the first time that I got a chance to do that. And that was good. But in general, probably, I like doing smaller scale things better. Taiwan was good, but that wasn’t nearly the size of this. I mean, it’s mainly Taiwanese and Japanese scientists that worked on that. So, it wasn’t nearly such a big project. So, it’s sort of this whole kind of organization, and large-scale logistics and everything, was all really new to me.

I’d seen all this from being on all these IODP committees for… Probably about 8 or 9 years before JFAST. I’d seen how all these committees work and everything, and then actually having your own project, and seeing it go through all of these steps, that was interesting. I can do smaller projects better, though (laughs).

BMR: I guess there was some satisfaction in seeing your own proposal, your own ideas moving forward and getting approved, but it must also be very draining in terms of time and energy invested. And I can see from JAMSTEC how much it goes into a single expedition.

JM: Yeah, of course.

BMR: So, did you continue your involvement with scientific ocean drilling in some way, after JFAST?

JM: Uhm… I was on the Chikyu Facility Board for a few years after that. I put a proposal there, and they didn’t like it at all (laughs). I put in a proposal to try to trigger earthquakes.

BMR: I’ve seen that! (both laugh) Not the actual proposal, but when I was preparing this interview, I found it in a PowerPoint, a presentation that you did about the proposal. Do you still think that’s…?

JM: I think it’s really valuable thing to do. But I think IODP didn’t like it at all.

BMR: I mean… From a totally outsider point of view, I can’t talk about the science, but from a public perception point of view, I can see that the idea of someone triggering an earthquake at sea sounds like science fiction going in a wrong way. So maybe it will be difficult to get public support for that.

JM: Yeah. I thought it was a good idea. Lots of people thought that.

BMR: How would you do that? Selecting a spot that is safe, that it won’t cause a tsunami…?

JM: For the safety kind of aspects, you want to go out to a transform fault in the middle of the ocean. And there, mainly strikes faults, , usually it’s thrust faults that cause tsunamis, because it’s vertical motion of the ocean floor that displaces the water and causes the tsunami. But strike slip faults generally don’t create tsunamis. The other thing is, we weren’t talking about trigger magnitude 7 or 8; we were talking about magnitude 4 or 5, which is  not going to do any damage.… You’d be lucky if you could even feel it.

The way to trigger it is, as I was saying before, fluids always have a big part of the stress. And so, if you can pump fluid into the fault, that tends to open the fault and it can make earthquakes. Have you heard about all these earthquakes in Oklahoma in the US? There’s been a lot of induced earthquakes from the oil fields in Oklahoma. And a couple of did some damage, they were as big as magnitude five.  The earthquakes are due to pumping water into the faults; pumping water into the oil wells, and that water moves into the faults, so it kind of lubricates the fault and triggers an earthquake. So, if we could figure out how to control and do that, I thought it’d be a real exciting idea. But.

BMR: Why at sea?

JM: Safety. It’s not going to do any damage. Even magnitude 7 or 8 way out in the ocean, no one’s going to feel it. And if it doesn’t produce a tsunami then, I mean, there’s almost no consequences. And like I said, magnitude 4, 5 or 6 is nothing out in the ocean. But on land, it could be…

BMR: Let’s see if it can happen someday, if someone moves the proposal.

JM: I always thought that it’d be good for IODP, too, because it’s a really different kind of proposal. I don’t know, it didn’t get very good ratings in the proposals.

BMR: This is sort of a general question, but looking back at your career, what’s the thing you are most satisfied with? It doesn’t need to be ocean drilling-related because I know this was only a portion of your career.

JM: As I said before, when I was working for the USGS, I always thought that our group was doing valuable work; that we were doing things that helped people understand earthquake hazards, and earthquakes. The US is very different from Japan in that in Japan, everyone knows about earthquakes because almost everyone has felt earthquakes,  and they’re very well-educated about earthquakes. But in the US, just kind of conveying basic ideas is often new to people and can make a big difference. So, I always thought that the work that we did as a group, as an office in California, is one of the things that I’m proud over, I think was good.

Coming to the university, I always think of university jobs as being rather priviledged… What do you think?. Your time is mostly free, you can kind of decide what you want… There’s important aspects to the education and try to train the students to come through the system. But in a sense, most people can pretty much do what they want to do for research. And that’s good, and you get a lot of good science done, but… I always felt that when I was with the USGS that I was doing something more useful.

BMR: Yes, I understand. At JAMSTEC I’m not working with scientists but in the operations department, and I can see the same. I love doing research, but I can see the value of administration and program management, that has sort of more direct connection to… the real world (both laugh). This is my final question. Although you have retired, the field of research – volcanoes, geohazards… — continues moving forward. What are the new frontiers of this research field, and what are the challenges?

JM: Uhm… That’s kind of a hard question. We really want to understand earthquakes better. And by that I mean, you know, earthquakes happen, but we really can’t predict. We can’t say when, or where, or what sort of the main cause or triggering mechanism. And I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to answer that question. Maybe it’s a more sort of random, chaotic process, and it just sort of happens to be if you’re in the right place at the right time that a big earthquake happens.

I’ve always been interested in how earthquakes start, and is there anything different about a small earthquake and a big earthquake at the beginning? Because a big earthquake knows it’s going to be a big earthquake when at the very beginning the rupture begins? Or is a big earthquake just a small earthquake that just keeps on going? And so, it just depends on the conditions along the fault or something like that. And if it’s a second explanation, then it’s very hard to predict, because it’s just kind of a random or statistical process of whether a small crack is going to grow into a big earthquake. If there’s really something different about a big and small earthquake, that’d be very important, obviously, very interesting. But I’ve spent a lot for my career looking for such differences and never found anything I found convincing.

One of the talks I gave at this recent symposium sort for my retirement was that, at this point, after all the research I’ve done, my conclusion is that there isn’t much difference between small earthquakes and big earthquakes at the beginning, and that the difference sort of later on as the rupture grows. That’s sort of discouraging, because you would like to have an explanation about the conditions that a big earthquake could happen in, but I think that’s a very difficult problem, and right now I don’t have any good ideas of what to look at or what to search to answer that.

BMR: It’s so interesting because it makes it realize all the components behind the idea of prediction.

JM: That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do that experiment, of trying to make an earthquake happen. Is there a way we can make a sort of moderate size earthquake happen that’s different from the smaller earthquakes?

BMR: Is there something else that you want to add or something we have missed?

JM: I’ll just take a quick look at your questions. I don’t think so.

BMR: Well, thank you so much. It was great talking to you.

JM: Thank you.