Suzanne O’Connell

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

The transcripts of the research project Oral Histories of Scientific Ocean Drilling are polished representations of oral conversations, and are intended solely for the purpose of preserving and documenting personal accounts and memories. They are not a literary product, and are not intended to exhibit literary qualities.

The primary goal of this transcript is to capture the spoken words and memories of the interviewee as accurately as possible. Minor editing and polishing works have been performed to enhance clarity and readability while maintaining the authenticity of spoken discourse, including non-standard grammar, inconsistencies, repetitions, and pauses.

The reader must be aware that memories of an event can vary between individuals and may evolve over time due to various factors, such as subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and personal emotions.

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Please cite the interview as:

Interview of Suzanne McConnell by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2025 April 28, International Center Vienna (Vienna, Austria). [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is April 28 of 2025. I’m Beatriz Martinez-Rius, historian of science at JAMSTEC. I’m at the Viena International Center with Suzanne O’Connell. Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure.

Suzanne O’Connell (SOC): Pleasure to be here.

BMR: So, can you please introduce yourself? Saying your name, your position and your affiliation.

SOC: My name is Suzanne O’Connell. I’m a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. And I’m actually the Harold H. Stearns Professor of Geoscience.

BMR: For how long have you been involved in scientific ocean drilling?

SOC: Well, it’s been in my mind since I first heard about it, which was in the early 70s. When I was an undergraduate, I went to a small college in Ohio called Oberlin College. And in the geology department, there was a woman who I never saw, I never met, and at that time, all the professors were men, and I never had a female professor. And they would whisper like, “she had been on the Glomar Challenger”. And it was like, “Whoa, that must be really special, if they’re whispering about the Glomar Challenger”. Then, of course, in some of our classes we read about some of the results, because this was in the early 70s, and so they had already drilled Leg 3 showing that there was sediment and the crust got older away from the ridge. So, I knew it was a really special program. And I thought, someday I want to be involved in that.

Also, as an undergraduate, we had a great speaker series, and one of the people that came and spoke was someone named John Dewey, who had mapped ophiolites in Newfoundland.  I thought, well, if I ever go to grad school – and I had no intention of going, but if I ever did – I wanted to map ophiolites in Newfoundland. So, I worked for a year in Yosemite National Park and became involved with photography because I learned to print, and Ansel Adams Gallery is a very famous photographer who makes some beautiful large format prints. But in those days, we didn’t have digital photography and it was very expensive to do photography. And, I had a lot of student loans. I had a very low paying job. So I said, “well, I’ll go to graduate school and get a master’s in geology and then go work for an oil company and support my photography habit”. That was my plan.

 Then I went to Suny Albany, where John Dewey was a professor and I had a very funny undergraduate major because Oberlin is a very liberal arts place, and they had very few… I think there were two majors in my year, so they were willing to bend the rules. So, I was missing some very essential courses. Suny Albany said they would accept me, but I first had to make up some courses. It took me three years to get a master’s degree, because one year I was just making up courses, and second year I was there between the second and third… The first summer I was there, I was a mapping assistant for someone else, mapping in the Bay of Islands, which is part of the ophiolites [Note: ophiolites are bits of ocean crust that get pushed onto land when oceans and continents collide. Well preserved ophiolites aren’t that common and therefore they are closely studied by scientists trying to understand how ocean crust forms]. The next year I had my own field area in a place called Table Mountain, which is also part of the Bay of Islands ophiolite complex. When I was there, in those days, JOIDES, the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling, had a panel structure that was subject based. There was the Ocean Drilling Panel, there was the Active Margin Panel, Passive Margin Panel… Things like that. The Ocean Drilling Panel had met maybe in Newfoundland somewhere. I don’t know where they met, but then they had a field trip to the ophiolites in Newfoundland.

They came to my field area, so I met a bunch of them and talked to them. One of the people there, whose name was Jim Hartzler, said he was going to become the head of JOIDES. His office at that time moved every two years between different oceanographic institutions, and he was going to be the head person. I can’t remember what the title is. And he was going to need a science coordinator and that he would be advertising for that in the fall of that year, because it was summer – Newfoundland, you want to be there in the summer, not so much in the winter.

So, I said, well, I kept my eyes out and when the job became available, I applied for it. One of the people at Suny Albany was a person named Jeff Fox, who was on the Ocean Crust Panel. He wasn’t part of the field trip. He decided not to do it, I think because so many people at Suny Albany had been to Newfoundland and mapped ophiolites that it was like, been there, done that. And so, he wrote one of my letters, and I think that must have really helped, because he was on the Ocean Crust Panel. And so, I applied and I got the job.

This brings us up to July of 1978. That was two years after I finished my undergraduate degree, and two years after I first — many years, four years, probably after I heard about ocean drilling. And I was so excited. At that point, the JOIDES’s office has moved from the University of Washington to Woods Hole Oceanographic. So, I was the science coordinator for two years. And it was a fabulous job. At that time, all the heads of the oceanographic institutions composed the Executive Committee. And then, the head of the geoscience part of the oceanographic institutions headed the next down committee. That was the committee that did stuff.

BMR: There was the EXCOM committee and the PCOM, Planning Committee.

SOC: PCOM!  It was all men. I remember my first meeting in July of 1978. At that point, the Soviet Union was part of scientific ocean drilling, Deep Sea Drilling Project, and there was a Soviet guy. At the end of the meeting, they plan for the next meeting. And at the end of the meeting, he got up and invited everyone to come to Moscow for the next year meeting. One guy from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Jerry Winter, got up and started this huge rant about how he would never go to the Soviet Union because they would get nothing done in the Soviet Union. And he went on this – truly – a rant about how bad the Soviet Union was, especially if you want to have a meeting and get something done.

I’ve been working in the office for maybe ten days at that point and was like, “Wow, this is pretty amazing”. So, we decided not to go to the Soviet Union because Jerry wouldn’t go, and we decided we would go the following summer to Italy, which turned out to be great because I had never been – I’d been to Canada, but I had never been outside of North America. And so, for my job in the JOIDES office, I was responsible for taking the minutes for both PCOM and EXCOM. And there was this journal that came out four times a year called the JOIDES Journal. I was the editor of it. And back in those days, we didn’t really have computers to do word typing, so we would have to print all this stuff out and paste it in, and it was a horror, because if there was a mistake, we had to redo the whole thing and reprint… You know, paste the whole thing.

But it was fun! I mean, I was so thrilled just to be close to what was going on in this exciting program. At that point, there was discussion about what would happen when the GLOMAR CHALLENGER was tied up, because the thought was it was getting old – although it was never as old as the JOIDES Resolution. So there was a lot of discussion about maybe having the ship be the GLOMAR Explorer. The GLOMAR Explorer was a ship built to pick up a Russian submarine somewhere in the Pacific. It was an eye opening experience, I think, for everyone involved, because in scientific ocean drilling, we don’t case our wells, and one of the things they wanted – they wanted a new ship just with bigger capability. So, the same requirements that we had for the JOIDES Resolution but also, they wanted to be able to drill in continental margins, in ice conditions, better station keeping conditions… And so, we had several meetings with people from the oil business like Exxon Production Research about how they drilled their wells. And so, we learned about casing. I remember we were all just amazed, because you start out with a big hole and by the time you get to the area that you care about, it’s like a pencil-size core – that’s an exaggeration, but there’s not much core, if you’re going to split it up between a bunch of people. It was also time consuming and expensive. And so, after all of this, they decided they would not try to convert the GLOMAR Explorer. It just wasn’t an appropriate conversion.

At the end of my time – well, during my time there – the office was going to move next to Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Jerry Winter was going to be the head person. So, he asked if I wanted to come to Scripps and work with him. And of course, I didn’t want to work with him (laughs). What a temper! There were other indications of his temper. Oh, this is a backup. He didn’t want to go to the Soviet Union, but National Science Foundation wanted us to go to the Soviet Union.

BMR: So, politics.

SOC: Politics. We had to go to the Soviet Union.

BMR: So, you did end up doing the PCOM meeting in Moscow?

What happened was – for someone who hadn’t traveled much, this was so great. We did the PCOM meeting in Italy, and we did the EXCOM meeting in Iceland because we were looking at geothermal – because these guys wanted to look at geothermal. We had a great field trip to Iceland. Oh my gosh, I had never, ever, been to Iceland and just seeing Iceland with a local guide and a field trip; all the places we went… We went up to a volcanic area. It was so exciting. And then, we had to go to Moscow. So, both the PCOM and the EXCOM went to Moscow.

I don’t think people today can understand the fear during the Cold War of the Soviet Union. It was, you know, very nerve wracking. Anyway, we go to Moscow in November. Every few months you have one of these meetings. So, we go to Moscow and we get there; and the way the memoranda of understanding in those days worked was, because it was hard to hand Soviets small amounts of money to travel other places when they traveled other places, the United States gave them money. And the agreement was that when we Americans came to the Soviet Union, the Soviets would give us money. So, when we get there, we first were met by some eminent person and were given piles of rubles to spend.

BMR: Because the coin exchange, I guess.

SOC: Right. And it was all of this travel that the Soviets had been doing, and I think we were the first group ever to meet there. So, I get piles of rubles and think, “Oh, I’ve always wanted one of those Russian hats”. You know, those Black Russian hats. So, we started the first night. We’re at a hotel. I can’t remember the name of the hotel, but it was a huge Soviet hotel and all the people on the Planning Committee were there, and they sort of put us in a little dark corner, and there was entertainment going on… We didn’t know what was going on, and we waited forever to get served. We were all hungry and jet lagged; so, they served us, finally. And then, we waited forever and they never brought the check. We’re really tired, and we have a meeting the next morning and we all want to get to sleep. So, we figured they’ll come and get us if they want the check to get paid.

Turns out that whoever the person was who was the server, couldn’t leave until the bill was settled. This poor person was a woman and she couldn’t leave. And so, this is what I think – you know, they had this list of names and there was one woman on the list and that was me. And so, she comes. I’m in this bare room, like a small cot, a light hanging from the ceiling. It was bare. I get this knock on the door in the middle of the night, and I’m a sound asleep, and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to the gulag somewhere”. And she said, “Oh, mother O’Connell – my last name is O’Connell – Mother O’Connell, we need you to pay. We need to pay”. She didn’t speak much English. I certainly speak no Russian. Fortunately, I had a big pile of rubles (laughs), so I gave her my big pile of rubles. And that was enough to… I mean, I don’t know if I gave her all. I gave her enough to cover our bill, which was a bill for like 12 people. I’m sure we had a lot to drink.

BMR: Wow, so you were the only woman traveling to these meetings around the world with all these committee men…

SOC: Yeah, I was the only woman. Always the only woman. We used to joke about, “Could you imagine a woman being on EXCOM?” Oh, my gosh, a woman head of oceanographic institution. That would be something. It was almost more than we could imagine. Anyway, I paid for that. The next morning, I told everyone that they owed me money. So, I got more rubles back. Jerry Winter was right, though. Our meeting is supposed to start at nine, and the bus is supposed to take us there. The guide didn’t show up until nine, so he starts at nine. He comes to the hotel to get us. It’s now nine 9:20-30. He drives us to the Institute of Oceanology where we have our meeting. Some of my memories from the Soviet Union are so vivid because we get out of the bus and, you know, things that you wouldn’t do in different countries, like people would comb in their hair in public in the Soviet Union — that’s not something you do in the US, to comb your hair in public. There were people combing their hair in public, but you aren’t supposed to walk in with your jacket on. So, one by one, we had to hand this person our jacket and get a receipt. So, it’s now well after ten and it’s time for tea. We have delicious tea from the samovar… I mean, just like you would imagine. After tea, we talked for a little bit and we get maybe two items on the agenda, and it’s time for lunch! So, we have to go back, hand our little chips, get our jackets on, drive to the place for lunch, get out of the bus, hand our jackets, get a chip, sit down for lunch and wait. And that’s sort of how the whole meeting went, except one… So, in the meetings, one of the things I think we… They had people speaking at the meeting from the Soviet Union, who we all knew spoke fluent English because they’d been on the Glomar Challenger. Many of these guys had sailed with some of these people. Gleb Undiesniev, I remember him. We had to listen as things got spoken in Russian and then translated by an official translator again. So, we got nothing done.

That evening after dinner, which had dragged on forever, we were just hanging out in the room. I don’t remember whose room it was – maybe Ted Moore’s – but we were saying, what we really should do or they should really do is have us speak to people who are interested in the different parts that we’re interested in, and have the Soviets who can speak English speak to us and not do the slow translation. Because we were in these meetings for like three days and we’d really lost the first day. We have three days because we need three days. And so, the next morning we get to the Institute of Oceanology, and the head person from there says, “We were thinking that it really would be best if we split you into groups, and you’ve got to talk to…” – it was like word for word what we said the night before (laughs).

BMR: Do you think there were microphones in the room or something?

SOC: We were sure there were microphones in the room, yeah. And there was a woman, a big woman like this, on the floor watching who went up and down and where you went. So, anyway, we were split up into small groups, and it was a great meeting, just in terms of seeing the Soviet Union, seeing their subway system… We went to the circus; we went to see an opera… But I had my rubles. So, there was a store goon – I mean, it was such a cultural education. If you wanted to buy something, you would say, “Okay, I want to buy this”. And they’d say, “Okay”. And they’d hand you a slip of paper and you’d have to take that slip of paper and go to a woman with an abacus who would figure out like what it meant. You would pay her, she would hand you a receipt, and you’d go back to get that item. It was a very slow process, and you have to hope the item is still there.

The thing is, anything you wanted to buy, like a Russian hat, cost dollars. They didn’t take rubles. They had special stores called Beriosky that only took dollars. They didn’t take rubles. What was I going to do with all my rubles? Especially knowing I was coming back in December with the EXCOM. So, what I did is I bought stamps, I bought a lot of stamps, and I wrote my Christmas cards. Back in those days, I always sent Christmas cards, and I mailed them in December with Soviet stamps because – What else I was…? That’s how little there was, that you could buy with rubles that you would want to take home…

BMR: Like, basic, day to day items.

MOC: Yeah. You couldn’t buy souvenirs. Like, the beautiful black boxes… I guess the Russian black boxes, they only took dollars. Anything you wanted to buy? In dollars. One of the things we used to hear was that jeans were the thing that everybody in the Soviet Union wanted. And this guy who was on the PCOM, they used to joke that he came with empty suitcases and filled them up and went back; and he never attended the science part of the meetings anyway. So, we figured he was KGB. Anyway, I had this jean jumpsuit and people were coming up like wanting to buy it – as far as I could understand – either get me to take it off (laughs). I don’t know. That was my experience in the Soviet Union.

I came back in December, and that was for the Executive Committee meeting, and it was a whole other level of… Well-cared, amazing caviar… — the Planning Committee didn’t get caviar. The Executive Committee got caviar. And then, instead of doing so many local things, we took the night train to Leningrad. So, I got to see the Hermitage, which is a place I’d always – you know, since you read about these things, you think, “Oh, someday I want to see that”. I went there. That was fantastic.

BMR: You were young, traveling with these PCOM and EXCOM that are very senior scientists and even directors of research centers.

SOC: Right.

BMR: What kind of things did you learn about scientific ocean drilling that you could only learn if you are involved in those sorts of high-level, decision-making committees?

SOC: Certainly, you learn something about the politics. And the rivalries between… Not so much the countries, but representing your country, you know? Like, in the PCOM there was a representative from France and a representative from England, Joe Cann – trying to remember the name of the French guy… Yves Lancelot – anyways, they always had jokes running about the French and the English. But I always had the feeling that they really cared about the science. The PCOM in particular. I mean, they were all pretty much still active scientists, and they wanted to see the best science done on this amazing ship. And, you know, some things would break, and there would be discussions…

I remember the whole discussion when they were going to start using hydraulic piston coring, because originally the cores were all rotary drilled. So, they looked like in the soft sediment. It’s amazing that in the soft sediment they could have gotten the records they did, because it was like a mix master, you know, just all… And then, how excited they were. There was always a report in the Planning Committee about the most recent expeditions: what it just happened, who was out… They were actively involved, all of them – except for the Soviet guy who never showed up. But I just thought… You know, this is what you would imagine science would be like. There was some politics, like, “Ocean Crust [Panel] has had these many expeditions. And so, we really need Active Margins [Panel]”. There would be that kind of discussion about where the ship should go, because they decided the ship tracks. But it was all for science. It wasn’t like, “I’m interested in active margins and I will only go along with margins”. Like, Joe Cann was only interested in ocean crust. He called all that sediment above it “pigeon shit”. (both laugh) “We don’t want that pigeon shit”. But he cared about understanding Earth processes, and so he understood that we needed other stuff besides ocean crust.

I remember him distinctly because he was on the field trip that I met these people. He was on the Ocean Crust Panel. He must have been the Planning Committee representative. Each member of the Planning Committee was a representative to one of the panels, usually in their interest. So, they would bring that information back. It was very science based. Really, It was like you would imagine really good science is.

And for the Executive Committee, they were pretty removed from science, because now you’re the head of oceanographic institutions and… The guy from Scripps, whose name I can’t remember – Nuremberg, Bill Nuremberg – never came to a meeting; but he would call later and wanted things changed in the minutes. He hadn’t been there while I was taking the minutes, but he demanded things change. Just like, “Bill, you weren’t even there!”

BMR: He was from Scripps you say, so the operator of the JOIDES Resolution…

[Note: Scrips was the science operator of the Deep Sea Drilling Project and the ship they were overseeing was the Glomar Challenger. Scripps served the same function for the Challenger that TAMU did for the JOIDES Resolution.]

SOC: Yes. He had opinions, very strong opinions. But I never met him because he never came to a meeting.

BMR: Just one thing you mentioned – let me go back a bit in time before I forget about it. You mentioned there was a woman who was the first being onboard.

SOC: She wasn’t the first going onboard – she had been on board. She was a woman in this small geoscience department, but she wasn’t in the department. Her husband had been in the department, he had died, but she was still there because she was a radiology specialist. And so, she had a microscope somewhere and was still doing radiology and work, and used to go out to sea fairly often.

BMR: What’s her name?

SOC: Helen Foreman. And then it turns out – this is a fun thing. One of the reasons, or one of the things she liked about going out [at sea] was she was having an affair with one of the members of the crew (both laugh). I don’t know if she was having this affair while her husband was alive because he was deceased before I got to college. I have no idea. But I thought, “Well, that’s cool”. So that’s why – how many radiolarian specialists are there?

BMR: When did you go on board for the first time? How did it happen?

SOC: How did it happen…? Well, it happened because… I can’t remember this guy’s name. He was wonderful. He was the French guy that was with Joe Cann, and he became the person who did the staffing. So, he was in charge of running the science part of the program, and there was a higher up person who — I can think he was the equivalent of the director. There was a higher up person like Brad Clement or Jeff Fox. And then, under them was a person who did the science work and he was French… Lancelot. Yves Lancelot.

BMR: Of course. Yeah, he was in the US and then moved to the CNEXO in France. He started at Lamont.

SOC: Yes, that’s how we got involved in DSDP. He was on the Planning Committee, and then he came back and became the science manager or whatever it was called. Yves Lancelot. Towards the end of my time, after these two years, he said, “Wouldn’t you like to go out on the ship?” (laughs) “I would love to go out on the ship!”. Well, because I was there… First of all, while I was at Suny Albany, I decided I’d want to be a geoscientist, not a photographer. So, I got this job. And then, when I’m in this job, I realized that everyone who’d had my job before me, had a PhD. And I remember this one guy – name I can’t remember – who worked for the USGS, did active margins, he said, “Oh, you must be Jim’s Gal Friday”. It’s like, you know, I have a master’s degree, published a paper… I’m not really his Gal Friday. That was at the first meeting. The first meeting was quite a revelation between Jerry Winter, when the poor Soviet guy and this other guy calling me Jim’s Gal Friday.

BMR: What does it mean, Gal Friday?

SOC: It means that you’re like a low secretary. I was taking notes, but I wasn’t a Gal Friday. You know, it’s like someone who would bring you coffee and not even an executive secretary. I think executive secretaries are a very powerful people, and they can easily run the establishment. But a Gal Friday, she’s bringing you the paper and the coffee. So, “you must be Jim’s Gal Friday”. Everyone else in the position had had a PhD. I didn’t have a PhD. So, during that time, and I was trying to decide – I didn’t want to go work with Jerry Winter, and I decided I really wanted to get a PhD. So, I applied for a PhD and got into Scripps and Lamont. Picked Lamont for all kinds of reasons, and then… Yves said, “Wouldn’t you like to go out on the ship?” It’s like, yeah! and my job ends October or July 1st, and I start September 1st, and there’s [DSDP] Leg 74 in the middle. So, I went on Leg 74, which was to the Walvis Ridge. The co-chiefs were Ted Moore and Phil Rabinowitz. It was just so much fun. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was no internet, there were no phones… There was phone patches. I don’t know if people talked about that, a phone patch.

BMR: You mean, when you could call like certain times per day, but it was super expensive?

SOC: No, no… I couldn’t even do that. A phone patch was – say I wanted to call you, so there was a ham radio operator. So, I would go to the ham radio operator, and he had like a list of times and you could sign up for the 1 p.m. time, 1300. I’d sign up for that, and then I’d go and he would say, “Okay, what’s the number?”; I’d say, “six, eight, o…” and I’d give the number. Then, he would go on the radio and say, “This is – whatever his band name was – wanting to place a call to College Station, Texas, anybody near the area?”. Some radio person would say, “Yeah, I’m in Lubbock. I’ll take the call”. Now it’s a call from College Station to Lubbock. It’s a collect call. So, say you in Lubbock, hear the person I want to call, so they would say, “Would you accept a collect call from Suzanne O’Connell from College Station?” And you would say yes or no. I would say, “Yes, thank you”. Then we’d have this really inconsequential conversation, because I would have to say, “Hello, Beatrice, over”. And you would say, “Hello, Suzanne. Over”. “What’s going on in Lubbock? Over”. And you would say, “Oh, this person just got fired and blah, blah, blah… Over”. Meanwhile, anybody in the ship can hear you, and anybody in the airwaves can hear you. So, I’m not going to say, “I just fell in love and goodbye…” You know, everybody in the world would know.

BMR: So, not really that useful… I mean, just to make sure that everyone was alive and well on land.

SOC: Yes, so, why bother?  I think I only made two, maybe even one call. I called my parents.

BMR: It’s interesting because your pathway is actually quite the opposite to most of the people I’ve met. You started attending upper-level meetings…

SOC: Oh yeah.

BMR: …Learning about DSDP from the ins and outs, the politics of the program, the money, the discussions, the negotiations… And then you went on board like a happy PhD student! (both laugh)

SOC: Yeah, that part is really different. Going back to be like a lonely graduate student, like… Manik Talwani, who was head of Lamont at the time, we were at the executive committees together and we would go out as a group, and do all these things… And now, I’m like a non-person. Now I’m a student. That felt really weird. And all these other people… But I went from Jim’s Gal Friday to a PhD student (laughs).

BMR: You went from eating caviar in the Soviet Union… (both laugh)

SOC: Yes, to a peanut butter and jelly in New York (both laugh). Yeah, yeah. I already knew so much about the program, and the two people who were my PhD advisors were Bill Ryan, who sailed in [DSDP] Leg 13, the Messinian Salinity Crisis, and Denny Hayes, who was the PCOM person for Lamont.

BMR: I think Denny Hayes passed away.

SOC: Yeah, he had Parkinson’s disease. I’m still friends with his wife. He was great. We had fun together. So, anyway, the expedition was terrific. And, you know…When you look back on your career, to like all these opportunities you missed. So here I was, sailing with these two guys, but also Nick Shackelton doing forams [foraminifera]. And I was like, “uh, I don’t think I want to do forams”. Ah! How crazy was that? And they’ve gone back and re-drilled those. Oh my gosh.

Anyway, I was just interested in like getting my PhD, and I was originally going to work with Phil Rabinowitz. But at the end of my first year, he went to College Station, and I had to switch my advisors. There’s a sort of a parallel theme of everybody being involved in scientific ocean drilling. So, Phil goes away, Danny and Bill picked me up, and I mostly worked with Bill, but my office was with Denny, and he had a pretty much a full time drafts person. And, back in those days, when you made your map with a Rapidograph…

BMR: I don’t know what’s a Rapidograph.

SOC: Oh… Glad you don’t know, because they’re horrible.

(BMR laughs)

SOC: What they are is, it’s a pen with different widths, and you put on different things, and they’re always clogging. And you have to hold it just like this, like this (gestures), and go, make your contour lines. You would do it in pencil and then this guy would come and do it. And then you’d have to letter with a lettering set. So, you’d go and – (gestures).  And that’s how all the maps are made on huge sheets of mylar. It’s amazing difference.

BMR: And he had one person only to do that; hired full time.

SOC: Full time to do that – well, for his group. There were several people in his group. I don’t think anyone else in his group got involved in scientific ocean drilling, but I did. So, I sort of came involved.

In those days – oh my gosh, if you wanted color – I remember this is a black pen on white, uncleared mylar. There were these films that you would take and you would put over, and youy would cut it out, the same shape (gestures). And then, take it carefully away so it didn’t rip. ou’d have your orange, or your green, or whatever the color was. So different!

BMR: Now you click a couple of times and you get the perfect coloring.

SOC: Yes. Yes. I still have my students do some contouring. I think it’s important to think – but they think it’s busywork. They don’t like it. But, you know, have a dot here and you have a dot there (gestures), and if you go like this, if it’s going like that, you sort of… I think Marie Tharp talks a lot about that, because her looking at it gave us some really important ideas.

BMR: Did you meet her?

SOC (nods) Aha.

BMR: Wow.

SOC: Yeah, she was a good friend of Bill Ryan’s. Bill Ryan had hired her after Bruce [Heezen] died. She used to come around to see him.

BMR: For me is sort of incredible to meet people like you, who met all these scientists about whom, you know, I’ve been reading a lot about their life and work… They are all kind of famous for me.

SOC: Yeah, yeah… That’s another opportunity. She was so crazy… That she was kind of scary. You know, I didn’t try to strike up conversations with her because she just seemed scary. Another lost opportunity.

BMR: What was the age gap between you both?

SOC: I was in my late 20s and she must have been in her 60s, maybe? She was considerably older and… she was crazy. But I still wish I knew her, and there was a great story about her. Apparently, no one knows what her relationship was to Bruce Heezen, but someone else went out with Bruce Heezen for lunch or something. This was years ago, when she was still working, officially working, with Bruce. And she came and slashed this person’s car all up. So, it was a lot of passion there, however it was dealt with. But nobody knows. Bill doesn’t know… Jeff Fox doesn’t know… And they were his graduates. Bruce Heezen’s graduate students, so they knew Marie [Tharp] very well.

BMR: There’s at least one book and some other things written about Marie’s life and mapping. And as far as I know they’ve tried to understand, to untangle that relationship… One author I think she reviewed her letters or personal documents of Marie, and still, it’s not clear.

SOC: Yeah, I probably read that book because I’ve written about Marie Tharp for The Conversation. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that publication. It’s a great way to, I think, get science information to the public. That particular it’s free… They don’t pay you, in The Conversation. And people read it. You know, you write a science paper and five people read it, if you’re lucky; maybe ten if you have a super paper. But I’ve heard over half a million people read my Conversation articles. In total – I’ve written several. But, you know, that’s worth writing! And they have good editors, too. So, where were we?

Now I’m on my getting my PhD. I’m doing side scan sonar on deep sea fans, which are like deltas in the deep sea… And the last leg – oh, I was on a site survey for the Gulf of Mexico drilling, which became leg 96, the last leg of the Glomar Challenger. I got to go in that, also. And that was a different kind of – it’s close to land, and there were so many people that wanted to go, that they actually switched scientific parties in the middle of the expedition. But I got to stay for the whole thing because I’d been on the site survey. I had all the site survey records and stuff.

BMR: How did you change people with the Glomar Challenger?

SOC: A small boat (gestures as being seasick), and then people went out, in the Gulf of Mexico… Because I remember like Bill Norman, who’s a very famous, deep sea fan person, worked for the USGS. He was on for half of it. And… I don’t think there were any Italians on… Anyway, I finished my PhD. What am I going to do? To become a staff scientist at the Ocean Drilling Program! Then I went to College Station. I got there in 1985, I think, the summer…

BMR: That was at the very start of the ODP, with Phil Rabinowitz.

SOC: I think it was 85. I went there in 85. I think it had already been started. There were just a few legs before I got there, but all of the expeditions had been picked by staff scientists. So, the first leg I got to go out on, on the [JOIDES] Resolution was the Leg 113 to the Weddell Sea. I got to go on a transit because I said, “I’m supposed to know this ship, and it’s so big, and how am I gonna know my way around?” So, there was a transit from Panama to – I can’t even remember. I remember being in Panama on the JOIDES Resolution. We came into Panama and we went through the Panama Canal. We must have been somewhere in Florida. That was my first experience on the JOIDES Resolution, and that was pretty fun.

BMR: What was your job as a staff scientist?

SOC: Oh, well, on that expedition it was just transiting. Everybody was a bunch of like administrators who went out, and we are just going through the Panama Canal. Have you ever done that?

BMR: No.

SOC: It’s great. It’s easy. And you know what they do? I thought this was so amazing! They fill it, and they fill it… And then, the water has to go back down. They use it to run turbines to generate electricity. Brilliant! Brilliant! So, anyway… John Beck, who was the photographer, he was out because there’s a picture of the JOIDES Resolution going through the Panama Canal.

BMR: I think I’ve seen it!

SOC: I was on the ship at that time, and John Beck took the photo. He was also the photographer on leg 113. I got to know him. So, your job as a staff scientist… It was a fun job. I liked it quite a bit. Your job is to make sure the best science gets done. So, you have to learn about the science yourself. You have to work with other people, making sure that people get along as best they can… There are almost always some personal conflicts – 60 days at sea… Yeah, personal conflicts. Do you want a fun side story?

BMR: Of course!

SOC: In leg 105, Brad Clement was the staff scientist, and Brad Juleson — Oh, he came from DSDP to IODP, and he’s still working! He’s probably the longest serving tech around now. And he’s really nice, and he’s good for stories. We still, at leg 105’s time, didn’t have internet on the ship. We’re still doing phone patches. So, Brad Clement was getting married to the person who would be his wife. Brad Juleson was having a hard time with one of the staff scientists who they later got married. So Brad, through the scratchy phone patch, is calling Amanda. And Brad Clement is calling Gail, making their wedding plans. But it’s ‘Brad’. So this poor guy – at this point, a guy in College Station had learned to do it. He was doing all the patches to College Station. He’s like, he doesn’t know what to do. Should Gail know about Amanda? Because clearly this Brad is, you know, no good. And so, in the end, somehow it came out that this was happening. And it all got smoothed over and it was no problem because there were two Brad’s. Or was it one Brad? (both laugh)

BMR: So the guy at College Station thought that there was one Brad, trying to arrange a wedding…

SOC: …While having an affair with Amanda.

BMR: Did he spoke out about this conflict?

SOC: He didn’t know what to do! Because he’s the radio patch operator. So, somehow it came out and it became a big joke for everybody, because that’s how we knew about it. I don’t know if he talked to Amanda, who worked for – actually both Gail and Amanda worked for Ocean Drilling [Program], also. Amanda was a staff scientist and Gail was a chemist, chem tech. Anyway, that’s sort of a fun – I just love that story. The two Brad problem with thinking there’s only one; because you can’t really tell, I mean, they have very different voices…

BMR: Still, I guess in these call patches you don’t get to distinguish clear.

SOC: Right. It’s a radio to a phone far away.

BMR: And everyone hears your conversation.

SOC: Everyone hears your conversation. Brad Clement would not have had the conversations, I’m sure, but Brad Juleson was having been very different people. Have you interviewed Brad Clement?

BMR: No. I should get in touch with them. The two Brads… For how many expeditions where you staff scientist?

SOC: Two. Only two. I was on 113 and then I was on 122, which was Exmouth Plateau. So, just to get the best science done, when you’re at sea, personal conflicts… And back in those days, all the sampling was done at sea. Now the sampling is done much later, much more conservatively, in one of the core repositories. So, there were always heated discussions about samples at sea, because you would take like, five per section without a real plan, whereas now, you have to have a real plan: “I need two per section from these five cores, because I’m doing this”.

BMR: The sample request process.

SOC: You would still do a sample request, but it was very different. It was more just, you know, “I want samples, five per section for the entire Cenozoic”. It was really crazy, now that we think about it. And then, at one point, you were only allowed maybe five per section. I don’t remember what the number was. It could have been three… So then, the Heinrich events came up from the ice cores. Why weren’t we seeing them in the deep sea cores? They must have been happening. Well, they showed up in the Greenland cores. Heinrich events, or Dansgaard–Oeschger events. But how come we don’t see them in the sea? Especially in the North Atlantic, right near there. And the reason was, if you’re allowed to say five or three per section, for a Heinrich event, you need to have sampled a whole lot more very closely. And so, I remember having been in that situation, and then going out on leg 151 or 162 – can’t remember which one, Gerry McManus was out – and he was taking a… (gestures detailed sampling)

BMR: So, the entire core.

SOC: It’s like, “What are you doing?”. Well, he’s looking for Heinrich events. If we didn’t know they were Heinrich events. So, little tiny samples every two centimeters, the whole core. It’s like, “That’s crazy!”. It’s a very smart way to sample because he answered some questions. Site 980, where he did all this work, is very important. And if he wouldn’t have… So, one of the things that changed was the sampling policy. You could have the entire Cenozoic say, three per section, but you couldn’t have more than three per section. It was some number, maybe 60cc per section. That might be interesting to see how that evolved, changed.

But to me it happened, at least for the soft sediment part, because we didn’t see Dansgaard–Oeschger in the cores. They’re called Heinrich events now. So, there was changes in that. We just missed it because of the way we were sampling. And probably early on, when they were drilling, they did spot coring…

BMR: What was spot coring?

SOC: I don’t know when they switched from spot coring… Spot coring is – you have your seismic line, and say this is a reflector, and this is a reflector. You want to see what’s happening here, and you want to see what’s happening here. And so, you would drill here, and then you would wash down; and then you would drill here; you’d wash down, and drill here. In theory, it’s faster, in practice unless you’re going a huge distance, you really don’t save that much time. So, same site, and these are the 5 or 4 reflectors that you want to hit at your site, and you have two days. Rather than drill straight drill and bring up the core –depending on the water depth it’s slower – now we would drill, drill, drill, drill, drill, they would drill, wash, drill, wash, drill, wash.

BMR: Oh, I see. I understand now.

SOC: It was called spot coring. If you look at the early volumes… That’s what we had. And that’s why we did it, because we knew nothing. I think it’s hard to imagine how we knew nothing. I mean, you figure that in [DSDP] Leg 3, they didn’t even know that it was really going to get older on either side of the ridge. I mean, the paleomag people [paleomagnetists] said it would, but… That was only the geophysics. It was geophysics. How does that even happen? We still don’t really know how you get that geophysical signal in the ocean crust. So, maybe you’re making it up, you know?

This is a fun story. So apparently, on leg 3, Art Maxwell was one of the co-chiefs and he was good friends with Walter Pitman, who was the Pitman- Heirtzler time scale. So, apparently Walter was out on another ship while the Glomar Challenger was out, and they were nearby. And so, when they did their drilling and showed the older microfossils, younger microfossils, they matched the age of what the magnetic anomalies were, apparently Walter’s ship came by and they had a drink and celebrated.

BMR: (laughs) oh, really?

SOC: That’s what Walter said. I don’t know if it’s true – could have happened in his imagination, but it’s a good story. I hope it’s true because it was such a triumph, I mean… Especially because Walter was at Lamont, and Maurice Ewing went to his grave not believing in plate tectonics. And he was the head guy at Lamont, so… He was a geophysicist.

BMR: I didn’t know that Ewing never believed in plate tectonics.

SOC: (nods)

BMR: When did he die?

SOC: I think that in the mid-seventies.

BMR: Okay. Because I know he was around during the early years of plate tectonics theory; he was co-chief of DSDP leg 1 but he was old by then.

SOC: Yes, he was on leg 1 and they drilled right into a salt dome (both laugh), yeah, they almost ended the program. (both laugh)

BMRL That story is super fun because they managed to get the ship to drill for sediments to show that this is only for science and the first thing they do is finding oil. And we are still today trying to convince people that scientific ocean drilling is not for oil.

SOC: I know! (both laugh) Well, I don’t know how it is now, but certainly in DSDP days there were two whole panels that were run… There was a JOIDES safety panel. And the safety, safety panel was all oil people. They would look at every seismic line and say, “You can’t go here”. Actually, on Leg 122 in the Exmouth Plateau, and in those days, people were really interested in sea level rise as seen in seismic lines. It was Peter Vail, the big guy at Exxon who had the different seismic facies prograding, and anyway, everybody at that time thought sea level was eustatic. It went up and down at the same time. And one of the places a lot of this information came from was – and it was all proprietary and Exxon would never share it – was this place off of the Exmouth Plateau, NW Australia. So, the ship was going there. Bil Haq was chief scientist, and a German was chief scientist, Ulrich von Rad. Anyway, we had sort of the Exxon expert, because Bil Haq had work for Exxon – Woods Hole, Exxon, then NSF. So, we were drilling almost a parallel hole to what they (Exxon) had drilled, and then, the person who was the drill superintendent said – Because they we were carefully monitoring seeing what the carbon ratio was. [the number of long chain hydrocarbons] So, are we getting near important hydrocarbons? And he realized that Exxon stopped suddenly. And we were starting to get higher carbon ratios. So, we think they may have had a blowout, but nobody would know because in the middle of the Exmouth Plateau, in the Indian Ocean, who would know?

BMR: Do you mean that you were basing your site drilling in data from Exxon, that stopped at certain point…

SOC: We didn’t know that.

BMR: Oh, you didn’t know that the data stopped at a certain point.

SOC: Somehow, the drilling superintendent looking at one of the Exxon reports found that they had stopped at a certain point, but it wasn’t really known. And we had seismic lines that were our own, because Exxon wouldn’t share their seismic lines. So, we had our own seismic lines, we had crossing lines, and we were what we called ‘twinning’ their hole. But we didn’t know anything about their hole. And somehow, as we were getting deeper and deeper, this guy said, “I think something funny must have happened because it just stopped”. But… We didn’t know. But so, we were having to measure like, in each core catcher the carbon ratios to make sure we weren’t getting into hydrocarbon territory.

BMR: I think Ted Moore told me about the story of using Exxon data.

SOC: Right, because he worked for Exxon for a while. There was a big group of people in the, I guess, early 80s, and there was sort of a science crisis. People went from oceanographic institutions to oil. Looking for jobs.

BMR: What came next, after your staff scientist period? Because as a staff scientist you were supporting science but not really getting to do the research, I guess.

SOC: I was doing some. For the Weddell Sea, first I hadn’t quite finished my PhD, so I had to put a lot of pictures, images, into my PhD. That distracted me a during my first year, a lot. And then, I was on Leg 113 and I had a master’s student, and we looked at the shapes of the different ice rafted detritus grains, IRD grains. There was a person at Texas A&M named Jim Mazullo who thought that looking at a Fourier analysis of the shapes, you could predict where the grains had originated. Earlier, people had thought just by looking at the scrapes, fractures, and stuff you could predict that they came glacial or river… That’s kind of dicey. But he was saying you could do a better with Fourier analysis. So, I did that with the student. I think that was the only paper I published.

Then, on 122, I published a paper about – because we got into the Triassic – about trace fossils. There’s Dave Bottjer and Mary Droser, and they had a whole set of levels of oxygenation based on the complications of the trace fossils. So, I worked with Mary and we wrote a paper about that. She wasn’t on the expedition, but she knew all about trace fossils. And at that point I’d gotten married, and my husband was in New York. And New Yorkers are extremely provincial. They do not want to leave New York. They think crossing the Hudson River – that’s pretty far. So, he thought he would come to College Station, but… He came for a week, maybe, here and there. He thinks he spent more time there. I think he never spent more than seven consecutive days – if that. So, we wanted to start a family. If I was in College Station and he was in New York, it was going to be pretty hard to… Especially if we had a child, like, you put him on the plane, it’s your turn now… you know? So, I just decided to start looking for other jobs.

We drew a big circle around New York, like two hours, three hours, four hours… And there were a bunch of jobs that were advertised that year. I applied all the jobs, and my first choice was Wesleyan, and I got the job. Wesleyan University, where I am now. It’s just an amazing place. And it’s not too far from New Haven, 17 miles, and there’s a direct train into New York. So, it’s pretty easy to get to New York. I applied for a job in Providence; applied for a job in Pennsylvania… Vermont; Vermont would be so far… I got interviews at those other two places, but I already got the job. I interviewed there, but before I heard, I got this job at Wesleyan.

BMR: Where are you from originally, in the US?

SOC: I was born in Connecticut. Wesleyan is in Connecticut. That’s really dreary. I really wanted my son to be born in Texas. My husband was born in Rome, but he’s from American parents. Stamford, Connecticut. You know…

BMR: Since I’m not from the US, I don’t really get the feeling of what’s like being from Connecticut.

SOC: Was like, “what a boring place to be!”. I was born in Connecticut but I grew up in western Massachusetts, a good 100 miles away. I consider myself a western Massachusetts person. But I’ve lived in Connecticut most of my life.

BMR: Was your family was related to geology, photography… something that inspired you?

SOC: No, it was more like being outside. Where I grew up, it was a very rural area, on a street with no other houses. And we had a regional school district. There were five towns that got together and bussed the kids all over. For elementary school – we moved there when I started fifth grade, but the people who’d been in there, there was a one room schoolhouse. So, grades one, two, and three were taught in the same room, in the same building, because there was one room in the building. Then, they came to a middle school in another town, Mill River. That was about ten miles away. And then, when starting seventh grade, we went to Sheffield, and that was 19 miles away. So, you take the bus every morning and every night.

BMR: Now I can imagine what it meant for you to travel outside the US, like to the Soviet Union and Italy… being with EXCOM and PCOM people…

SOC: It was a thrill, it was really fun, yeah. So, I thought I did want to be part of that world.

BMR: Now, looking back, how much do you think you have achieved of that vision or ambition?

SOC: Well, I can look at it two ways. I can look at it like, I’ve done well. And I can look at it like, I missed too many opportunities. In the “I’ve done well” version, there are so many young – formerly young – women out there who are doing geoscience who did research with me, who I mentored… I can feel really good about that. I remember there was a meeting a long time ago, with Cesar Emiliani. Maybe it was a paleoceanography meeting. And they asked the people under 30, maybe, just because they were taking pictures of the different age groups, and in the people under 30 there were maybe seven [women], and three of them were my students. I was like, “yes!”. And one of my students just sailed on [IODP Expedition] 401. There are all these students, mostly women and minorities – because that’s really been my focus. I can feel really good about that.

Then I can think, “Oh my gosh, you sailed on Leg 74 with Nick Shackleton and you didn’t even pay attention!”. And I can think… Leg 113, that’s probably one of the most important legs. I’m still working on Leg 113 sediment. But if I’d really been focused I’d have mined that expedition from the beginning. Instead, when I went to Wesleyan, I wanted projects that I could do with students locally. So, I got a side-scan sonar, and we side-scan sonared the Long Island Sound and the Connecticut River… Places like that. It was really hard to do because this was a big instrument; we had a boat that really couldn’t tow it, but we tried to tow it. And sometimes we got another boat. One time we got a boat from the Norwalk Maritime Center and we broke their A-frame. So… You know, and if I had stayed focus on 113, I would be a much more well known scientist.

In the end, I tried to get great pleasure out of all of the good parts. Like Shamar, who just sailed on 401. She’s from Jamaica, she’s black… So it’s like, “yes!”. I made a difference. And I think it’s still making a difference. I still have great students and I’m working with, and they’re all – the two students who were doing thesis with me, both are working on [IODP Expedition] 395 samples, and they’re both going to the post cruise meeting. It’s like, “Yeah!” – which is in Cyprus in two weeks. That’ll be so great. And since I became a Professor so early on, startup packages were very different… I was paid very little. I had a new baby. I had loans from undergraduate school… So, I had no money for anything. And now, I’m a Named Professor and I get money to do all kinds of stuff. That’s why I can bring two students to Cyprus, and pay for their plane fare, and their hotel… That’s usually going to be probably $5,000 – certainly four; I’ve already spent four. That part is really good. Those students are going to have a great experience. They’re going to see the Troodos ophiolite, which I’ve never seen and I’ve wanted to since I first learned about ophiolites. So, for over 50 years I’ve wanted to see it. We’re all going together. It’s so much fun.

BMR: It’s like you’re starting new stories like yours.

SPC: Yeah… I wish I had spent more time on 113 data samples, but I have new samples. Shamar did her senior thesis on 113 sediment; and I published a paper with another student on Site 692 [which was drilled on Leg 113] with two people from Lamont. So, I’m like, if I had paid attention and worked on that – but it wasn’t my focus. It was more like working with students. So, if I think of that part, I did really well. If I think of the science part, it’s like, “oh”. And my contemporaries at Lamont were people like Mo [Maureen] Raymo. Maureen Raymo? She was the first woman director at Lamont.

BMR: I don’t know here! Maybe I should…

SOC: Yes! Yes, oh, you definitely want to interview her. She did her PhD pretty much on, I think, [DSDP] leg 94. Not quite sure, but I think 94, North Atlantic. If you heard of the LR04? Lisiecki and Raymo 2004? You’ve got to talk to Mo. She’s probably one of the most famous… And she’s gotten all the awards. And Robin Bell, who you wouldn’t know because she’s not scientific ocean drilling, but she’s amazing. She’s gotten all the awards for doing geophysics in the Antarctic and the Arctic. So, these are the people I think about in terms of what you’ve done, versus all the people that you’ve never heard about, who were also contemporaries, because they even left science.

Mo Raymo, what else should I tell you? She got her PhD She married a fellow graduate student, and then they did a postdoc, I think, in Australia. And then they both got jobs at MIT. And then, while she was pre-tenure at MIT, she was co-chief on – I think it was leg 162, to the North Atlantic — very important leg. I was her roommate, actually. And then I spent a year at MIT on an NSF fellowship working I thought with her, but she didn’t think I was working with her… So. I think the world of her. But this part didn’t work out as I had imagined. And then, shortly after that, she came up for tenure. She didn’t get tenure. Her husband didn’t get tenure. He took up with a graduate student. So, he left her with two kids. And he got a job at Penn State. She wanted to stay in. Her family is from the Boston area. She wanted to stay in Boston. So, she got sort of a part-time soft money job at Boston University and published like the most important papers in paleoceanography; including the LR04, Lisiecki and Raymo, I don’t know if she [Lisiecki] was a grad student or a postdoc. And 04 because they finished the work in 2004. So, Lisiecki and Raymo 04 – the paper was published in 2005, but it’s called 04 because the paper came out in January. Everybody was already using it.

What it is, is they did a compilation for the past 5.1 million years of all of the stable oxygen isotope data, the benthic stable isotope data for the entire world; all the ocean world. And it’s what everybody compares their data to. I have a poster, and I have my data compared to the LR04. If you go to — maybe any paleoceanography talk — people will probably show the LR04, Lisiecki and Raymo 04. And then… I don’t know what prompted her, but after being sort of tenuous at BU for a long time, she came to the head of the core lab at Lamont, and then from there, she was co-chief on expedition 382, which is Iceberg Alley.

And then, she became the director of Lamont. And then, with all of the things that have gone on Colombia and Lamont, we don’t know if she was fired or she resigned because they were asking her to do stuff she wouldn’t do, but now she’s just a scientist there. But she’ll have stories. She was a William Ruddiman student. Anyway, he did forams. I remember when I was going to Lamont, Jeff Fox, who wrote one of my letters, said, “If I could stand forams, Bill Rudman would be a good guy to work with”. But the idea of micropaleontology… And now it’s like, “I wish I’d done diatoms”.

BMR: I’ve heard that on board it’s difficult to get micropaleontologists, right? That there are not a lot of them.

SOC: Right. There used to be a lot more, but nobody’s teaching it anymore because everybody’s just looking at the wiggles, and matching the wiggles.

BMR: We are running out of time and I’m just thinking – how do you want to wrap up? Because this is a life story.

SOC: Yeah, this is a life story because I have been around for a long time.

BMR: Is there something that you want to add or explain that we have not talked about?

SOC: I think I told you [everything] – I mean, if you have other questions, you can get in touch with me.

BMR: Well, I have a last question for you. What’s been the most valuable you take from your career in relation to scientific ocean drilling?

SOC: I think it’s the people. I’ve just met so many wonderful people. And they’re all doing such interesting science. And I think, you know, the excitement of having been the first person to see this part of Earth’s history with other people that care, that you’ve seen this part of Earth’s history, is so exciting. That’s what I love the most. You know, you can look at it yourself and it’s really exciting, but then you share it and if it’s something super cool, you run around the ship and say, “Come on!”, and everybody comes and looks at this layer of something, and that wouldn’t happen without this group of people being together in a confined environment. So, I worry about the future when they aren’t going to have these people in this confined environment. Because for leg 382, we were supposed to sail the summer of 2020. There was no sailing the summer of 2020.

BMR: There was nothing going on in the summer of 2020.

SOC: The summer of 2021, they went and cored some of the sites, but no scientists were aboard, just Leah Levay, who was the project manager. And so, she went out and she did – and the technicians, of course, did everything because they’re amazing. All those cores came back and they had to be described. We had a three-week core description party. It was great, but it wasn’t… It’s not the same. It’s not the same. And it was only three weeks. And I would go out — it was somewhere in College Station. So, I’d go out and see some of my College Station friends, some of my Houston friends… And because we were in the repository, we worked 9am to 5pm, or something. It wasn’t 12 hours shift. It’s very different. That’s my only experience with the shore-based sampling, well, shore-based description party. The discussions that you have because you have the two shifts, like, “You’ve got to save this to show the night shift or the day shift – whichever it is –; keep that section out; Keep that section out!”. It’s so different. In my experience, it’s so different.

BMR: That’s great. I’ve loved this talk.

SOC: You are very welcome. You know, I love this program. I am so sad for my students. And I’m so glad several of them have gotten to sail. But I have two master’s students now, and neither one is going to get to sail. They’re both going to Cyprus, but they aren’t going to sail.