John Ludden

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Interview of John Ludden by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2025 April 27, Vienna International Center (Austria). [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is April 29th of 2025. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius, and I am at the Vienna International Center with John Ludden. Thank you very much. Can you tell me your name, affiliation and position, please?

John Ludden (JL): I am John Ludden. My affiliation is retired, but I was involved extensively in many geoscience projects over the years. In my last project, I was a President of the International Union of Geological Sciences.

BMR: What has been, in one sentence, what has been your relationship to scientific ocean drilling?

JL: When I was in my 30s in Canada, I first became involved in scientific ocean drilling. I became the chair of the Canadian ODP, in those days. I did my first drilling leg, where I was chief scientist – I think I was about 34 years old and it was leg 123 in the Indian Ocean.

BMR: And later on, you continued in managerial sort of positions, right?

JL: Well, not right on. So, back then, when I was in my 30s, I was a professor at the University of Montreal in Canada. Actually, I worked in French. I was a lecturer in French. And that was not that easy initially, but I got used to it. And I was a very active scientist. I ran a laboratory, a geochemistry laboratory for looking at geochemistry of volcanic rocks. I’d done my post-doc in Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, then I went to Montreal, and I was involved at that point in two — well, in the Ocean Drilling Project; and I was involved in a large cross-Canadian geophysical project called LITOPROBE. I was involved in leading them, but scientifically. So, I was still actually doing science as part of that. Later in my career, I think probably when I moved… Probably not until I was about 45-50 that I moved into positions where I was director of like, a director of a big research lab in France, and then I directed the British Geological Survey, and those sorts of things.

BMR: I don’t know where to start! Let’s just start from the beginning. Where did you grow up? And how did you get interested for Earth sciences?

JL: That’s an interesting one because, actually, I didn’t study geology. I grew up in the southeast of England, in a town called Tunbridge Wells, and I used to like fishing. I was a keen fisherman. I would go up in the small rivers around where I lived, I go fishing. And I decided that for my university studies that, I wanted to work for a river authority. In England, you applied to six universities and you get admitted or not. My number one choice was the University of Lancaster Environmental Sciences, and number two choice was University of East Anglia Environmental Sciences. I got admitted to University of Lancaster, because that was as far away from my parents — nothing to do with my parents, but in those days you wanted to get a long way from home — so I went to Lancaster and I studied environmental sciences, and there wasn’t a lot of geology in the program. It was a mixture. It wasn’t what environmental science is now; it was actually quite a hard program, in that it had chemistry, maths and physics. So, it was studying ocean circulation, studying climate, albedo… But also, there was geology, and there was geomorphology, and these things. So, there’s a bit of a mixture, but it was quite hard science.

In my second year, I got very interested in a particular professor, a guy called Ray McDonald who worked on volcanoes. And as often is the case with geologists, we get excited about volcanoes. And I had no idea back then, when I was a student in school, that I wanted to do that. So, in England, you have to do a mapping project. In the second end of the second year, I went to Scotland and do the mapping project in volcanic rocks. Actually, Carboniferous volcanic rocks. And then, I graduated, I got a first class degree, which is good in England; and then, in those days in England, you used to apply for different PhDs. And there were 3 or 4 PhDs available funded by the Royal Society in the petrology area. I mean, basically I’m a petrologist. The one that I took and chose to go to was one in Manchester, the University of Manchester, where I studied my PhD — it’s called The petrology of Piton de la Fournaise volcano, Reunion Island. So, I studied in Reunion Island. There hadn’t been a volcanologist – a part from my thesis director at the time, a guy called John [?] and Brian Lupton — that there had been no French volcanologists on the island since a volcanologist who was there in 1936. So, there was nothing. It was completely open.

I went there, did a PhD, and at the end of my PhD, it was when La Grande Soufrière was potentially going to erupt in Guadeloupe. After that, the French started to take their volcanoes seriously and they established observatories in Reunion Island, Martinique and Guadeloupe. There was a big debate which you may be aware of between [Haroun] Tazieff and Claude Allègre on whether you should evacuate, shouldn’t evacuate, and various things. I wasn’t involved in that. But that kind of set the scene a little bit for French volcanoes. So, I worked on a French volcano funded by the Royal Society, working in the in the UK.

BMR: Was this when your connection to France started?

JL: I suppose so. but that wasn’t planned, either. Because after that, I did my postdoc and I got a postdoc fellowship, which is in a MIT-Woods Hole program, but I was based in Woods Hole largely, and I continued to work more as a geochemical. I became more geochemical and – well, even during my PhD I basically was quite geochemical. I worked on rare earth mobility, and how they were mobilized in volcanic rocks through alteration in the seafloor environment. I did that jointly with researchers at MIT, at Woods Hole, and that was really pretty good, because actually it was quite topical at the time. It’s topical now, but back then, it was topical. And I remember my first or my second talk at AGU — my first talk at AGU was about my PhD – and the second time I went to AGU, back in 1979 or 80, it was on how rare earth elements mobilize during alteration. Because a lot of people were using rare earth profiles to sort of characterize the tectonic setting from volcanic rocks. And it was one of those things where I kind of thought, “Well, I’ve done some interesting research, but fine…”.  And there were people outside the door who couldn’t get in. [Do] you know one of those sessions when the room is full and people is outside? Well, wow, I must have done something interesting! (laughs). But basically, my research has been largely on mafic rocks through time.

After my PhD on Reunion Island, I moved towards seafloor systems. Also, because I then became a junior professor in University of Montreal, and they wanted me to work on greenstone belts. So, I started working on 2.7 billion year old rocks. And interestingly, there are lots of similarities between the greenstone belts in Canada and what was being formed in the seafloor back then, and now. There are pillow basalts, there are iron-rich basalts… Then I worked on that, and did probably a number of papers with colleagues on greenstone belts, greenstone belts through time.

The reason I got involved with ODP, specifically, was because we started to get interested in what happens to ocean crust as it gets subducted below an island arc. We were particularly interested in the geochemical fluxes – so, how does altered ocean crust when it goes down? Or even sediments, how does that affect the volcanic rocks that come out of the top, over an arc? That kind of work was called the “subduction factory”. There were a bunch of legs related to this subduction factory. The first one was the one I was co-chief on. But that leg really was not for the subduction factory. It was a leg where we tried to drill into Jurassic ocean crust, just off the top of northwest Australia, before it goes into the Sunda Arc. And because Felix M. Gradstein, the other co-chief, was an expert in Jurassic fossils and Jurassic stratigraphy, he wanted actually to reach Jurassic seafloor – which we never did.

I think, if I’m right, I don’t think IODP or ODP ever did get into real Jurassic. Very close to it, but not quite – well, I could be wrong there, but anyway – I got involved in this leg because at the same time as I was trying to do the stratigraphy, they were going to go into the basement. So, you went into the basement about 300m, and got 300m of altered ocean crust. And then, that was going to be subducted at some point into the subduction zone. And the aim was to: how do you characterize it? What’s the water content? What’s the uranium content? What’s the thorium to uranium ratio, and how does that affect things that get recycled into the Mantle?

I worked there with a lady called Terry Plank — who is as well worth interviewing about IODP. She was a student of Charlie Langmuir but she worked with me, and she was at Lamont. So, at that point, I was on sabbatical at Lamont. It was my first sabbatical.

BMR: I precisely wanted to ask you about, if you were in Montreal at the time, you were co-chief, how was like the relationship of Canada to ODP at that time?

JL: I’m trying to remember exactly. Canada has always been kind of on the periphery of ODP and IODP. They’ve always been a kind of a small member, and I don’t think at that point they had joined the… Ah, I remember now. There was a consortium called the Can-Aus Consortium, at that point, in which Canada and Australia, and possibly New Zealand, were paying about $1 million in membership, which allowed them access to certain things. It was always quite a struggle, in Canada, to raise… I think it might have been more than that, but to raise half a million or one million dollars. It was quite a hard work.

But Canada and Australia, for that matter, profited greatly from ODP and IODP — I don’t know if they were involved in DSDP — because some of the key scientific problems were on their doorstep. So, at that point, Canada was about to set up an observatory in Juan de la Fuca region. Off Vancouver Island, there’s an observatory and the ocean crust there is fairly accessible. So, that allowed us to keep Canadian involvement. I think I was in Montreal and I’m pretty sure I took over from a guy called Steve Scott, who’s now passed away, who was an expert on massive sulfide deposits. I became the scientific lead for Canada-ODP.

The subduction factory thing, the idea and the concept, that kind of happened when I was at Lamont, and that was talking to Charlie [Langer?] and various people. The second ODP leg I did – maybe I’m going too fast, here – but the second ODP leg I did, was leg 185. That was entirely focused on the subduction factory. And that was drilling two holes, like a series of holes, off the Izu Marianas arc. We were trying to characterize the crust just before it went down into the subduction zone. It was much more of a targeted program than the first one. Leg 123 was kind of opportunist. This was very much targeted.

Interestingly, the lady who I worked with in first leg, Terry Plank, who was a PhD student, she was co-chief on the leg 185, which came 7 or 8 years later. And Terry, actually, did some outstanding work on the whole subduction factory problems. She’s now a MacArthur fellow in the States. She’s in Lamont, now. I can give you more details. She has done quite of IODP work, and she is a very strong scientist.

BMR: So, you were deeply involved in ODP-Canada, but at the same time you have been involved in the participation of other countries in IODP. How the community support, the environment, is similar or different in those places?

JL: To start with, in Canda, even though it’s a small community, there were some really good people. And that’s one of the reasons we could get funding. Steve Scott was a big person in massive sulfides; there was Jim Franklin that was looking at Juan de la Fuca; there was a group called [?] who was studying paleoclimate… So there was a really top people in Canada – not many of them, maybe 15-20 – but that allowed them to keep in involved. But it was always a struggle to get serious commitment from Canadian funding.

Then, in France — I actually became head of ODP France, too. I think. I can’t remember… I’m pretty sure I did, I think I replaced Catherine Mevel. In France, it was a hard shell? because the French community, at that point – this would be sort of in the early 90s – the French community was very much focused on climate change, but they were using the [R/V] Marion Dufresne. The Marion Dufresne uses piston cores, and Leonard Laborie was pushing that. The community in France was split between the paleoenvironment people, and the more structural petrology-type people.

In the petrology sort of world, you’ve got people like Catherine Mevel, [?], who’s been looking at ocean crust in rifting environments, and in particular looking at the serpentine, the serpentinization in Hess Deep, and Indian Ocean, as well. And then, you had another group in France – who were based in Spain, for that matter – who were very keen on tectonics of the Mediterranean. A very good friend of mine was Menchu Comas – and she helped my daughter, who went to study to Granada.

But the community in France was split between this sort of more structural petrology group, and the environment group. And the environmental group wanted to actually keep their program going. They wanted to include the Marion Dufresne in IODP. And I pushed for that. That was sort of more or less at the start of when we started talking about having multiple platforms involved; but initially, it was just the Marion Dufresne. And the French would say, “Well, we’re putting out 3 million a year. We want to put up to a million in-kind [contribution] through the Mariane Dufresne”. The ODP-US, the ODP international, refused that. They said – and they were probably right – “We think the ODP should be funding projects that require more than one nation to actually have you achieve the project”. So, the cost of the whole thing is more than one nation can afford. And Marion Dufresne was, you know, the French were already doing they were getting good science out of it. I know some questioned a little bit the quality of the coring in the Marion Dufresne, but it’s, you know, there were doing the best they can. So, that’s the French community. This was happening more or less as discussion about mission specific platforms was getting together.

And then, the UK community. At that point, I had done leg 122, I’d done leg 185, and I’d become head of Earth sciences for the CNRS in France – another thing I did (both laugh). Then, we decided to think about how do we actually structure IODP going forward. How do we keep France involved? So, I went to the UK, then. I’ve talked quite a lot to the UK, at that point, and the UK was very much against the Mission Specific Platform (MSP) concept, initially. They said, “Well, most of our scientists…” – most of the scientists were doing typical IODP-type, deep drilling of structures of seafloor… All those sorts of things. So, actually convincing them to actually bringing MSPs on board was quite difficult. But we did.

At the same time, at that point, there was a consortium. In Europe, there was the UK, Germany, France, and then there was a consortium of all the other European countries — I think probably including Spain — which was run by the ESF, the European Science Foundation. We wanted to bring everyone under one umbrella. One umbrella which would then give Europe a meaning, to be – a part from the obvious good scientists – but to actually contribute physically to the whole program. And so, we managed to do that. And the Germans and the French were very supportive of the whole concept of MSPs. So, the UK came on board, at that point. Largely because the Germans were particularly interested, I think we were all interested because we wanted to run a mission to the Arctic. We wanted to drill what’s called ACEX – I can’t remember which number of leg was. ACEX was a very good example of collaborative research. Europe led it. And when we created ECORD, we needed to have a structure. We needed a scientific structure; we needed a management structure, and we needed a science operator.

I was head of Earth sciences for the CNRS, and we agreed that the CNRS should run the management agency. Basically, you wanted someone to collect the money, and the CNRS collected the various contributions across Europe. And it was important that that was done by someone like the CNRS or the DFG, but someone in a research organization had enough money that if the cash flow got difficult, they could cover it. And it did happen, once or twice, that cash flow got – we knew they were going to pay up; I think Spain’s a good example, actually (both laugh) –we knew they would pay up, but the money was a bit slow coming through. Italy was even worse, but anyway, we needed an agency to do that, and that was the CNRS.

Then, we set up the first science committee. It was in Cardiff – ESSAC just went to Cardiff, with Chris MacLeod. There was a sort of competition, not to create the management office but to create the science. I think there was a call of, who wants to do it? And at that point we set up a management structure. I think it was agreed, at that point, that the science office should first go to Cardiff, and afterwards it would go to Bremen. We kind of had that sort of planned.

Then, there was a discussion about the science operator. Luckily, I became director of BGS (British Geological Survey) after; but BGS became the science operator. Otherwise, I would have been in conflict of interest. So, there was a competition for who should be the science operator, and I think there were 3 or 4 things that people we looked at somewhere. There were a couple — for example, I think GEOMAR was a potential operator. But the biggest one that won the bid, largely because they had — they did, at that point — had really quite good experience in marine drilling. They had already done some offshore marine drilling; they’d already run platforms… There’s a guy called Ali Skinner, who is retired now, but he was top, top, top in terms of drilling. Ali was the chief driller on ACEX. That’s how things kind of went.

BMR: One of the things that surprised me is that France and the UK were members themselves, before integrating into ECORD. So why being part of a consortium was better, than standing as a full member itself? For example, I understand that as part of a consortium you pay less, but at the same time it translates in lesser representation and leadership in the program.

JL: Yeah. France, UK and Germany were independent. They didn’t pay less. When the consortium was created, they actually paid more. I think Germany went up, France maybe went up but came later. It was the opportunity of contributing a drilling platform to the program, and the research agencies saw that. So, the DFG, the CNRS, NOC in the UK… So we, as a European consortium, were providing something that was unique to the program. And we couldn’t have done it otherwise, because if we’d stayed independent, you would never have been able to pull the funding to actually get — you know, ACEX cost us, I think, 16 million [euro] in those days. Germany was paying three or four, or five [million euro]. So, you would never got that money; and if you kept it running through the US, then the US would have just sucked it up into their ship.

So it was, how can we make this European thing happen? How can we make sure that we have something that is really visible? And that was why they did it really. At the same time, JAMSTEC was coming in with Chikyu. That was the sort of time we were creating this three-leg program: the American with the JR, MSPs, and Chikyu. Actually, when you talk to Catherine (Mevel), she was very influential in negotiating that, getting those three parts to talk. Because – probably not to be recorded — the US and the Japanese didn’t talk to each other very well. And Catherine sort of acted as an intermediary.

That was how it happened, really. At that point, the ESF consortium was a little bit saying, “Well, we’re going to be drowned out by — you know, Spanish are going to be drowned out by the Brits and the Germans”. That wasn’t the case at all, because if you look at the numbers of scientists who sailed, it’s in general across the program, it’s often the people who pay less money who often get more value for their buck. Because there’s some good scientists, but the country isn’t able to support the infrastructure. So, that’s was the case for Australia, and New Zealand, and Canada, for example.

We created in parallel with this cleaver stroke – I think of mine – and to keep the ESF happy, we created the Magellan Program. Which is the Magellan Program for workshops and stuff like this. It was an IODP, ECORD, whatever, but it was essentially run by ESF. And they say that as kind of still keeping a reasonably good role.

BMR: at the time when ECORD was created and the Integrated [Ocean Drilling] Program started, how different or similar was IODP to other programs in which France was involved? How was the attention or interest that IODP sparked at a sort of political level, as compared to other scientific, equivalent programs?

JL: France was paying about 3 or 4 million [euros]. Within the French CNRS, there is a group called Très Grandes Infrastructures de Recherche (TGIR) – it’s basically big infrastructure programs. IODP was teeny. IODP was 3 million, and then there are things like contributions to CERN, contributions to telescopes in Hawaii, and various things of that. The entire program was 300 million, and we were 1% or 2% of that. So, first of all, you have an advantage and a disadvantage. One advantage is that, well, you’re doing good science and is small enough. So, that was going to really get ready, because it doesn’t help anyone to chop it off, if you are only saving a small amount. The other thing is that you tend to be, when you go to the discussions on Infrastructures and you talk to the head of the CNRS, they kind of view it as small, small stuff. It’s easy to get lost in the whole thing. So, in CNRS it’s quite different than in NOC. In NOC, the IODP program or ECORD, there were not many big infrastructure programs. Although they were all in the environment sector. There was IODP, then there’s the British Antarctic Survey, which is a big operation. Then there’s BGS, which is a big operation, too. So, they were all in the same pot; they were all in the same area. Whereas in France, IODP was the only environmental infrastructure, really, at that point. There were telescopes and various things, but which are sort of in the same directorate. I was part of what’s called the INSU, which is the Institute for Science of the Universe. That was astronomy, oceans… There are ships, too, but the ships are run by IFREMER. Yeah, it was small but significant.

BMR: that’s very good to set into perspective what IODP is and is not. From inside the community, we normally see it as a big thing – a big ship, infrastructure, logistics… But then, when you put it the context of space, astronomy… is not that much, right?

JL: That’s true. IODP was about 60 to 100 million a year for the whole program. It’s small compared to many infrastructures, but it’s something that we struggle as Earth scientists. I’m involved in another infrastructure at the moment we’re trying to found out in Iceland. We need to raise about 100 million over six years. It’s not difficult. Five countries putting a few million each. And the science is outstanding. I want to do this – I’ve spoiled your interview (laughs). Yeah, we are not used to arguing for big infrastructure, and in general geoscientists are content with their own database, their own outcrop, sometimes. So, we work, even within our science, in silos. It’s very hard to then say to astronomers, who actually have to work outside of the silo just to get money, and even global geophysics models, they need to have seismic seismographs all around the world, but even that was small. In France we had Geoscope. Geoscope it was smaller, and it was funded directly from the Earth science sector of CNRS.

BMR: How to attract funding? I’m asking you because I think you have some experience in raising this sort of funding. So, what would be the way to go? What’s the strategy?

JL: I think that things have changed, recently. I think that back in the day – don’t forget IODP or ODP was happening when we were discovering a lot about the Earth, right? We were discovering plate tectonics. We were we were discovering black smokers. We were discovering the composition of the crust. We were discovering stuff. So, for geologists, it was the science peak. In terms of discovery, right now it’s going down. So, it was relatively easy, I think, to create a big science project to look at things, back in those days. Such as, how much heat is coming from a black smoker, and what’s the importance of all that, and everything else.

In Canada, I run Lithoprobe. I ran part of Lithoprobe. We raised 200 million for that, and it was basically a big geophysical study of the crust that went from various segments across. And that was relatively easy. I mean, you got to convince politicians, you got to bring in the surveys, you’re got to bring in academics; you got to show that you the community is being served… Lithoprobe was good because we had geophysicists and we had paleontologists, getting funded from it.

Now, it’s difficult because I think a lot of people think that Earth science is a fading science. [?] But there’s no doubt, just look around here that all these materials we still need them, right? And basically, geologists anyway have been responsible for finding them. Coal, and stone, and limestone, the three foundations of the Industrial Revolution. Now it’s more like, strategic minerals, and metals, and data, I think, are the foundations of the future. But the whole reason for doing geology seem to be evolving. So, it’s quite hard to convince people.

I think the solution now, I think these guys here in EGU need to wake up at the smell of coffee, because it’s basically the academics talking to academics about academic things, right? And the funding’s going downhill. Not sure what [Donald] Trump’s going to do with climate funding, and stuff like this — it’s quite sad. So, I think that we need to find some new way of talking to philanthropists, industry, and other kinds of people. Industry doesn’t seem to be engaging really with geosciences — at least this sort of geoscience. I mean, they hire geologists still – they are shifting towards new energy solutions, and they need geology and they are hiring them. But they are clearly not particularly interested in what happens here. Otherwise, they would be here (at EGU), right?

They weren’t here 10 to 20 years ago, because we didn’t need them. And now, I think we absolutely need them. I guess you could argue that the people who are here, the industry that is here at the moment, it’s a data industry. You’ve got ESRI and people like this, over here. So, the shift towards digital is happening. A lot of our scientists are probably getting hired by in that area, which is good. So, you could argue that probably the industry has changed, but I don’t think ESRI and some of these data people are putting money back into the system like they should be. Back in the day, if you had a university post – I could be wrong about this – university posts in Cambridge were funded by, and the Bullard Lab was receiving many millions of pounds for the geophysics. Because industry wanted to refine their models. And at the same time as refining their models, people like Dan McKenzey would do really good science, and publish it, and stuff. I think the whole world is in a bit of an upheaval. And how that’s going to pan out, I don’t know.

BMR: Let me go back just for one more question about the creation of ECORD. We have been kind of taking for granted IODP, the international collaboration, but now we see that is kind of crumbling…

JL: it’s separating itself.

BMR: Yes, it’s separating. And potentially, ECORD could also become an example of something we have taken for granted, that it exists, but could very well end up some day. So, what aspects do you think would be valuable to remember about what was the purpose of ECORD, why ECORD was conceived as something that should exist for science?

JL: Well, because the requirements of the science that we were trying to do went beyond the abilities of one country. So, you needed to have more than one country involved to actually achieve it. ACEX is a great example, and some of the others are also good examples. I think ECORD came to exist because of that need. But also came to exist because of the need for Europe to assert itself, to get visibility. And then Australia and Canada also join the ECORD consortium because that created this sort of independent branch – independent but dependent. I mean, I think what’s happening now is that it’s clear that there’s very limited dependency of US program on the ECORD program and on the JAMSTEC and probably the Chinese program.

But that’s… it’s always been driven because the US has quite always liked the idea of MSPs. And I often said to them, “Why don’t we just treat the JR as an MSP?”, and that was difficult because they had a management contract. The management contract with the company that dealt with the JR. Plus, a big difference between the US and at least Europe, anyway, is that almost the entire marine geoscience program in the US, NSF, was funded to site surveys for IODP and ODP. They were doing the site surveys; they were preparing the drill sites… That was not the case at all for the UK and France and Germany. So, that meant that the entire marine geology, if you want to put it that way, the marine geology program in the US in NSF, was tied to IODP, ODP, and their own ships. It’s all there. So, if they had started to break that up, then they would lose their funding.

That’s why the actual money that went into ECORD was relatively small relative to the whole program. And the deal we made was that we would pool our money together, it was about 18 million a year, I think. Of that, I think, on average reserved about 10 or 12 million for MSPs. I think 3 million went to the US, towards the IODP program. Only a million went to Chikyu, I think, but not quite right about that. That’s how we did it.

Trump is right, that Europe has free loaded on the Americans. I’m not saying I support Trump at all, but we, as Europeans, we have free-loaded. And they liked it. They wanted us to because they wanted to keep control. Their marine geology program going, and they like the idea of having our European brains working with them, or the Japanese brains… They liked that. But they were in control. So, part of creation of ECORD was to actually lose control or to gain more control. Now, well what’s happened it’s spinning up. Will they continue? I don’t know. I think a lot of the big problems have been solved, right?

BMR: With ocean drilling, you mean?

JL: Yeah. The big ones.

BMR: That’s quite a controversial thing to say (laughs).

JL: It is. Maybe you shouldn’t repeat it but it’s kind of like, there was this heyday in the 80s, 90s and early 2000, when we were discovering stuff like you wouldn’t believe about. About plates, subduction factories, geothermal systems, stratigraphy… All this stuff. And it sort of became somewhat incremental. “Okay, let’s do a bit more of this”. “Now, bit more of that”. That was another reason to create ECORD, because we wanted to do things that we couldn’t do. We argued that the JR couldn’t go into ice-covered waters, you couldn’t drill in shallow water. So, we said, some of the top science problems are in those areas. Arctic – easily number one. But then, the Great Barrier Reef, and coral reefs, and sea level change… They were big problems, really big problems – how fast the sea level changing…. And you could not address that with the JR, because the JR didn’t have the ability to drill up those sections. How did the Arctic form, and what was the temperature, and all this stuff, you couldn’t do that with the JR. You had to have a new program. JAMSTEC, okay – can we drill into a subduction zone? And can we start to instrument drilling as deep as we can? Really ambitious stuff. They still haven’t done it yet, they haven’t quite got there but, you know, it’s very ambitious.

So, when we created ECORD and IODP, we identified as well as the ongoing problems with using the JR, some of which are quite high end, we identified some pretty serious high-level problems that we just needed a new way of drilling to achieve.

I guess the argument now is, have we done them? Well, I mean, there’s always more to do, but other… I mean, it would be nice to do ACEX 2, I agree, to complete that whole Arctic drilling thing. But as long as we got Russia behaving the way it is, that’s not going to happen. So, that might be nice. I think the big groundbreaking, “wow! Isn’t that great? Can we do that?” and back in ODP-IODP days, there was also the deep biosphere. That was quite a big thing – and justifiably. How deep can you get? And what sort of new microorganisms live down there? That was good. That’s another there, were a bunch of really meaty topics that you can identify. And me, actually, back in those days in the French government, I could go to the head of the CNRS and say, “Look at these. This is what we’re going to do, and this is the role of France in those projects.” And they see that. I think it’s quite hard to do that, now, but I haven’t studied what they trying to do.

BMR: I see, I understand what you mean. Especially when you look at the record, DSDP was a discovery – a “wow!” each time they drilled a hole. ODP still, but then they entered into a transition looking into more societal relevant science. Having goals that would respond directly to societal needs.

JL: I don’t think IODP has ever done that. I mean, you are right. DSDP was the discovery program; ODP was targeted discovery and more thematic; and then it became more thematic – “Okay, let’s work on these big themes”. Fine. Absolutely, absolutely. I don’t think much of it was societal. I think the climate change stuff is really good; understanding how things like climate change have changed since the Cretaceous is good stuff, and really good science, but it doesn’t really help us with the problems of climate change. I think you could argue that the Eocene thermal maximum, okay, fair enough. The Arctic drilling was done, it was discovery but again, how did the Arctic evolved – well, I think there’s very little societal relevance in what we’ve done, and I’ve been part of it. Like a subduction factory. Really good stuff. I wrote papers in Nature, things like this. But – is it relevant? (laughs)

BMR: (laughs) What’s for your society relevant science?

JL: Societal relevance is a – certainly there’s societally relevant that people are interested in, when they watch TV and stuff. Okay, those dinosaurs and all this sort of stuff. And it’s really quite frustrating that people think geology is volcanoes and dinosaurs, actually. I just went to the communication evening this morning. The evening session. They’re nice people. I know them all well, but yeah, you can talk to them about this stuff, but it’s not relevant, really. What the dinosaurs looked like is not society relevant. It’s good for the kids; it’s, again, back in the day when the Industrial Revolution happened, it was because the world needed coal, limestone and ironstone. That’s why the Industrial Revolution happened. That was relevant to completely shift society. In the right way, in the wrong way – who knows? And then petroleum happened, and those things.

So, I think society relevant science, apart from the fact that the interest in understanding how the Earth formed, and dinosaurs…Is science which actually affects the lives of people directly, right? Is it relevant to you and me? The air you breathe, maybe. Fair enough. The water you swim in, fine. The chair you sit in. And you could argue there are other — you know, I run a geological survey. It’s more targeted towards that. But even then, we are criticized for not being relevant enough. Then you always argue, “Well, look, go back to look at – you’re going to need more coal in the future”. Maybe, or maybe not. So yeah, for example, what’s going on right now about and the energy transition and the role of geosciences in that, it’s quite strong now. Now, we struggle to get your created ERE created in EGU – ERE is Energy, Resources and Environment. And we struggled. And even now, it’s not really blooming. You need to go to other meetings, then you get more industry involvement.

So, clearly what we’re doing is not relevant to industry because they are not here. I’ve already said that. Carbon capture, geothermal, new energy systems… All that sort of stuff is what I think is societally relevant. I don’t think the community that I was once part of are interested in that. Look at mantle heterogeneity, and look at the geophysical signatures of deep crust, as opposed to leaking CO2 because they think, “Oh, well, that’s not discovery science. Let the industry do that, because they have to sort that out”. So, I’m a bit skeptical.

BMR: Maybe that’s one of the reasons why there’s this big divide between industry and academy.

JL: Yes, but there isn’t in many other sciences. It’s a very geological thing. In medicine, or biomedicine, if you are a medic and you discover a new genome or something like this, you think – one, can I publish in Nature or Science? And then, second, you think, how can I make money out of this? We don’t do that. We just put it into papers. We’re not big on transitioning across that. They call it the valley of death, right? You know, you go through. And geologists are part of that. Maybe it’s industry’s fault, because they don’t need us. Like, you know, they were quite happy going back to what I said before. Before it was quite okay because they didn’t really care what people like Dan McKenzey and top geophysicists in the UK did, so long as he trained good students so that they could hire. And that was all. That was all they cared about. And then, they would retrain them into that specific stuff.

BMR: We have about fifteen more minutes, so let’s go back to the questions. I’d like to ask you something broader about your career. You’ve served in so many high-level, decision-making positions. Why you? I mean, what’s needed to be in those positions?

JL: Yeah, because I’m good at organizing people. I’m good at managing people. I think that’s really why… And I’m kind of quite scientifically aware. I’m not your typical manager of a funding agency. I’m a scientist who did stuff; who has pretty good citations even now. So, I kind of have ideas. And what I’ve done is, I kind of latched on to things that I think are important. So, I think IODP was one – ODP, back in those days. I think Lithoprobe was very important. I think creating ECORD was important to the community. Becoming President of EGU when we actually fused the EUGENE and the European Geophysical Society to create EGU – that was important. And why me? I don’t know, but anyway.

I think drilling a drill hole into an active magma chamber in Iceland is very important. And that’s what I’m pushing now (both laugh). There are other people like me, people who choose to do this sort of stuff. In a way I might be a little bit jealous of my friends who stayed active. I might have ended up in the Academy of Sciences or something, if I’d kept on – I have, I’m in the Scottish Academy, it’s okay. But, you know, I got a good geochemist friend of mine who came to stay with me over the weekend and he’s kind of at the top, and that’s all he ever did. I just couldn’t, I wouldn’t; I was too… I just wanted to change. To hop around, trying new things. But everything I’ve ever done has been in geosciences; it’s been the largely solid earth geosciences.

BMR: Is there something particularly important or valuable that you learned or acquired during your time in ODP-IODP, that has been useful later in your career for other managerial positions?

JL: Probably dealing with people. Something you learn when you are a co-chief scientist on the ODP or IODP ship, is that you’ve got on the 20 or 30 scientists out there, and their characters can be quite difficult. And you have to manage that. I think I’m quite good at talking to people. So, talking to people, going up… Did I learn that? I probably improved that there.

One day, there was some guy who was on a diet, he come on the ship and he decided to be on the diet because he’s older guy, actually. But anyway, he was eating onions all the time, and he smelled really bad. After about a week, if you just eat onions, you smell bad. So, I had to go and talk to him and say – I can’t remember his name, he was a nice guy. I said, “Look, you got a problem”. And another different sort of problem is, when I was on ODP leg 123, we were coming back… We went back by Krakatoa, and we managed to go by Krakatoa at a late afternoon, so you can still see it. And I was standing up on the deck with the chief driller, a Texan — big Texan guy. And I said, “This is the Krakatoa, which erupted in 1893”. Or something like this, I said. He said, “I don’t believe you”. So, he is a religious fundamentalist, who basically is the best driller that they have, but he doesn’t believe in the science at all. He just goes in the technically – here you go, kilometer of rock, bang! That was quite interesting.

BMR: I have one more question, just to wrap up. But before that, is there anything you want to explain, some story or experience you think it’s relevant, that we haven’t talked about?

JL: I suppose one comment on IODP, ODP, was – which is a bit unfair, but I think it’s partially right – the staff scientists that IODP and ODP provided, were excellent. And they were largely undervalued by the research scientists on the on the crews. Some of them went on to become research scientist themselves. And they did good things. Some of them sort of were treated a little bit as, “Oh, you’re my technician. You’re going to help me write the report”. And that… I certainly didn’t do that with the two stuff scientists I had but, you know, but you could see that.

BMR: Yeah, sometimes we think about scientific ocean drilling only in terms of the scientists that are on board, and the science they make, but you see this is only the tip of the entire system.

JL: I think in general in science, and maybe in geoscience in particular, we don’t acknowledge the entire structure below. The kind of the example I would give is for a film. So, when you have a film and you have a film crew, and you have the credits roll, there is everyone, right? There’s from the superstar to the chauffeur. And I don’t think we do that enough. There’re all sorts of people, technical people… I was guilty of that. I had a really good technician and I don’t think he wanted to be included, but I can’t remember including him in my papers as author. I certainly thanked him but, you know…

BMR: Yes, in this project I’ve been kind of interviewing all sorts of people and you really see how much work goes behind this.

JL: yes, the technicians, the staff scientists are undervalued; the guy that feeds you on the ship and everything else… Because you do change your behavior. You’re out for two months, on those things, and you try and work out a bit — you normally come back fatter, however hard you try (both laugh).

BMR: Let me ask you a final question. Looking back in your career, what’s the aspect you are most proud of, that you’ve achieved? In any kind of aspect you prefer.

JL: If I had to choose one thing – and I’m not doing this just because I’m talking to you – I think it is ECORD. Creating or being involved in the creation of ECORD, I think it was pretty good. And in five years’ time, I might say to you that it’s actually drilling into my magma chamber in Iceland, but I haven’t got there yet (laughs).

So, yeah. I think ECORD was a really good concept in the way we brought people together, sort of the science we did, the community… Because those communities, the Germans, the French, and the ESF community were not really communicating. And that was really good. So, I’m happy to say that.

BMR: Well, thank you very, very much. It was very interesting.

JL: Thank you, Beatriz. My pleasure.