Troy Rasbury

field geology, geochemistry, isotopes, oil industry, mainland oil exploration, life onboard, family, childhood, international collaboration.

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Interview of Troy Rasbury by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2024 November 18, D/V Chikyu, IODP Expedition 405, Japan [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is November 18^th of 2024. I’m Beatriz Martinez-Rius and I’m onboard Chikyu, on Expedition 405. Can you please tell me your name, affiliation and current position?

Troy Rasbury (TR): I’m Troy Rasbury. I’m a professor at Stony Brook University.

 BMR: What are your research interests?

TR: I’m an isotope geochemist. I primarily work on uranium lead dating of carbonates, and I’ve just started doing marine geochemistry, which I’m very excited about.

BMR: I guess that during your career you’ve been studying mostly sediments from mainland, right?

TR: Sediments that are found on the continents, yeah. A lot of them are marine, but they were shallow marine seas. So, I work on land (laughs)

BMR: Carbonates that were deposited or formed in shallow waters, but now are on land. In which regions?

TR: I work all over the world. I guess one of the most exotic places I’m working is Turkana Basin, in Kenya. That’s pretty fun. I also have a project right now working in the Porcupine River in Alaska, at the border of Yukon. And I have a project working with Lithium Americas in looking at deposits from the McDermitt caldera in Nevada. Those are my three main projects that I’m working on right now, besides this Japan Trench research.

BMR: So, all over the world. Does it meant that you have traveled to those places?

TR: Yeah, I do a lot of fieldwork and a lot more lab work. (laughs)

BMR: Let’s go back to the beginning. Where did you grow up?

TR: I grew up in central Texas, near Abilene.

BMR: Tell me about your family background and how you got into Earth Sciences.

TR: My dad was a geologist and he wanted to find his own oil field. We moved when my twin sister and I were three years old to Texas from North Carolina so that he could follow that dream. Actually, he built a used auto-parts shop, 20 miles from the nearest town, because somebody told him it was a way to make a lot of money fast. And he wasn’t very mechanical. He didn’t make very much money fast (laughs) but, with the money he made, he bought himself cable tool rig, to try to explore and find an oilfield. So, my siblings and I grew up working with my dad and going out; and my mom… Growing up, the whole family (laughs) would go out and be his roustabout crew. (laughs)

BMR: How did this work? I mean, you said that he wanted to find an oil field. How does that work? You just go wherever you want and try to poke a hole?

TR: No, it’s not quite that simple. He actually started the first subsurface master’s degree at the University of Texas at Austin, and he wasn’t able to finish because his dad died and he went home to take care of the family business. But he was a geologist, so he kind of knew where oil might be. He worked in the Permian Basin. Where we lived, is called the eastern shelf of the Permian Basin. He knew that there was shallow oil potential, there. And, in fact, where we lived, was where the Ranger Boom had happened some few decades before that.

The Ranger [Oil] Boom was a really big rush of people coming into that part of the world. They built lots of buildings – the town I grew up in, Burkett, Texas, is now less than a hundred people. But during the Ranger Boom, it had saloons and a post office… It still has a post office! But it was a big town. The Hilton Hotel was established in Cisco, Texas, which isn’t far away. That was the first Hilton, which was built during this Ranger Boom. So, a really big deal. If you see pictures from that era, you can see gushers, like oil coming out of the ground, and exciting discoveries, and stuff like that. So, that’s where we were living. I think my dad thought maybe the major oil companies had left some scraps behind (laughs). That’s what he was looking for.

BMR: What was the environment like in that oil town, when you arrived?

TR: Well, by the time we moved there, it was just a quiet town. It’s called a ghost town. If you look it up online, it’s like “Burkett, the ghost town”. It shows a picture of the bridge crossing the Pecan Bayou. It’s just a small, very quiet town. But most of the people in the area do work in the oil field, so they’re either actively working on oil rigs or they’re part of the service industry around the oil fields.

BMR: Where there more kids around?

TR: There were few kids in Burkett… I had my siblings, and there were a few kids that were our age, and then they moved away. So, no, mostly it was pretty lonely (laughs).

BMR: How does the process of finding oil with a non-industrial setting actually work?

RT: Well, we didn’t find much. My dad did… We did drill one well that he had oil in, and he set a pump jack on the well. I think that, over the many years, maybe it pumped hundred barrels or something like that. It was never sold. It just sat there in there… As far as I know, the whole package is just sort of rotting into the ground now. I’ve never been back, so I don’t know what it looks like now, but I think it’s just part of the scraps of stuff that sort of litter the country.

BMR: I was more thinking on the process itself. Like, do you go there with – you know, what kind of tools?

TR: It’s typically based on sort of knowing something. If you’re a real wildcater, you’ll maybe just poke a hole. But typically, I think when people drill a well, there’s another well that’s been drilled in the area, or there’s some sort of structural or stratigraphic information that would lead you to believe there might be a stratigraphic or structural trap there that would be a good place to look for oil. In the case of where we were, again, it was the Ranger Boom. So, there were a lot of holes that had penetrated down through most of the rocks. There was evidence that there was oil there.

The lease that my dad leased is called the Star Pasture, and his company was Liberty Lane. That was a place that had been drilled before, and I actually wish I had ever asked my dad why he thought that there was really big potential. But I don’t know the answer (laughs).

BMR: How did you learn about the rocks, the sediments, and the Earth Sciences?

TR: It’s actually kind of cool. Where we grew up, the age of the rocks is Pennsylvanian and Permian, and that was a time of glaciation. So, glaciers advanced and retreated. And as they did, it went from marine to terrestrial, and marine to terrestrial. There are these cyclothemes that are pretty profound, and are found on all the northern continents. They reflect the major advances and retreats of glaciers, during that time. So, we grew up collecting fossils, marine fossils and petrified wood. At the time, I didn’t appreciate how unusual that was, that we had these sort of inter fingering environments of terrestrial and marine deposits. But my dad was a geologist, and we followed him around, and he could identify the fossils. And my mom was, always – she read everything in the house and was really avid. She never got her degree in geology, but she knew as much as my dad, for sure (laughs). The whole family just loved it. We just lived the rocks (laughs).

BMR: That’s really amazing, right? I was actually thinking that you could either go in one of two directions: you could either hate it, or make a career (laughs).

TR: Yeah.

BMR: So, how come that you decided to continue in geology?

TR: Actually, I’m a tennis player. We, my twin sister and I, started playing tennis when we were 15, and we got good enough to get college scholarships. So, we went to Midwestern State University in Texas, and we never even thought about college. We grew up in this area where that really wasn’t on anybody’s radar screen. We had a school counselor, but I never had anybody talk to me about college. The only reason I actually went to college is because I played tennis, and I was excited about continuing to play tennis. So, my parents actually looked at the at the bulletin, you know, the list of classes and majors and they said, “The only thing that really looks interesting is Geology” (both laugh).

Of course, we didn’t choose Geology right away, but… My dad had started a mud logging company about that time, about the time we went to college. And it was good, because we were pretty poor. And mud logging was pretty lucrative, at the time, because there was a lot of wells that needed to be logged. So, it made it possible to go to college (laughs) and put food on the table. So, that was good.

We worked with him in the summer, after our freshman year in college, and we really liked it. I’m the one that got us to major in geology – when we went back to school, I said, “We need to major in Geology.” We signed up for geology, and the chemistry, and physics, and things like that, that you need to take with geology. And then, I was in my chemistry lab, looking out the window at my friends walking by with their tennis rackets, and I said, “I don’t like these labs” (laughs). Actually, I changed my major and became a journalism major for a semester or so. And I realized, you have to go out and interview people in the middle of the afternoon, too. And I hated that worse (laughs). Meanwhile, Sidney, my sister, flourished and loved geology, of course. And so, I’ve been following her ever since (laughs). She’s ahead of me, but I got us into it (laughs).

BMR: So, essentially, you liked tennis more than geology.

TR: I did! But I wasn’t a student. I was a terrible student. I feel it’s kind of bizarre that I’m a professor, now. I never had a goal to be a professor, and never thought really about it, but I feel like my perspective from not being a very good student actually makes me a kinder professor, in a way. Like, I understand people’s baggage, and stuff like that. I think, in a way, that maybe if I had been a really great student and really excelled in everything, I wouldn’t have as much empathy for students excuses. So that’s – I tell myself that, anyway (laughs).

On the other hand, had I been a better student, I would have more background than I have right now. I was an advisor for a program for about a decade, and I always encouraged people to really push themselves because – you could get a major and not push yourself. But I wish I could go back and have more math, chemistry and physics. The things that geologists sort of push back and don’t want to take, are the things that really could make us a really stronger scientist. So, I don’t know, life is an adventure, right? (laughs)

BMR: Yes, having that background is kind of important.

TR: It’s so important. Now I see things that – I think I am a pretty good isotope geochemist, and I think I’m natural in the lab. I think I make good analyses; I think I’m curious, and I dig in, and I try to understand my data. And I think that, if I had the chemistry and physics and math background, I could just take it to the next level. So, now, I feel like I need to get help… My husband is a geophysicist, so he’s very quantitative. So, I always turn to Bill when I need help, and he helps out. We work together. My whole family works together. My sister’s married to a PhD in geology, too. We’re all geologists (laughs), but I do think that having a stronger background would just be more fun.

BMR: Actually, having all the family in geology should feel like you have many points in common.

TR: It is fun; it is pretty fun. I have two kids and they are not geologists. Sadly, I don’t think they’re going to go into geology (laughs).

BMR: Something that has surprised me… When you went into geology in college, I figured that maybe you could have a stronger background or understanding of the geology than the other students, who had not the experience of being in the field, working with rocks, collecting and trying to understand the formations…

TR: Honestly, I don’t know that we had an advantage because of that. Many of the people that were in our class, actually, kind of grew up in a similar situation as we did. They grew up in small towns, their parents likely worked in the oil field; or their fathers likely worked in the oil field… I think that they had maybe as much background as we did. I don’t think that we had an advantage, in that way.

BMR: How did you continue, after college?

TR: I worked in the oil field with my dad. I mud logged for a few years, three years before I went back to grad school. The only reason I quit is because business got really slow, in the 80s. You know, oil is boom or bust, right? It’s like in those cycles. I happened to be in one of the downturns in the oil field.

So Sidney, my sister, went to Tulane to do her master’s degree, and she was really a very good student (laughs) throughout; and she played tennis just as much as I did! But she also paid more attention to the textbooks, and to learning that kind of stuff. So, she immediately went to grad school. And when things were really bad, she said, “Why don’t you think about grad school?” I thought maybe I would, but I have had terrible grades. So, I applied to one school, Tulane, and they were excited to get me because I’m an identical twin, and they just assumed I’d be another Sidney (laughs). And I loved it. I really thrived in the research environment. I had a great time, and I’m sure people cut me a lot of slack until I found my footing.

BMR: In which kind of field or research topics did you specialized, in grad school?

TR: At Tulane, I did a project in the Mexican Volcanic Belt, looking at some deformed sedimentary rocks, alluvial fan deposits, that were associated with the Tepic-Zacoalco Fault Zone]. Basically just got to go to Mexico in the middle of nowhere, do a lot of measurements, and try to put things together for my master’s thesis.

I saw – well, Sidney was doing isotope geochemistry. But I saw a talk by Vickie Hansen at the University of New Orleans. She was putting a lot of things together in Alaska, using isotopes, and dating, and things like that, to work out the really complicated terrains in Alaska. And I just loved it. I was like, “That’s what I want to do”. So, I decided, “I’m going to continue, I’m going to get a PhD”. I applied to programs, to try to work on stuff like that, and I ended up going to University of Texas. But my advisor didn’t get tenure there, so I then came to Stony Brook, which is where Sidney got her PhD, as well. So, I overlapped with Sidney for one semester at Stony Brook (laughs). That’s why I say I have followed her ever since I got started (laughs).

But I went to the University of Texas because a friend said, “You know, you really should go to a place that Sidney didn’t go, so that you can feel like you did it on your own; that you’re a capable geologist and it’s not just that you’re following Sidney”. That resonated with me. So, I went to UT [University of Texas] and I had a really great three years, there. Then, when my advisor didn’t get tenure, I came to Stony Brook and I actually did my PhD there. I then left for a year, when I had a faculty position at Queens College in New York. And then, I got hired back at Stony Brook. So – pretty happy to be there, too.

BMR: At that time, did you know about scientific ocean drilling? I know that your research was not related to it but, at the same time, the DSDP and the ODP in the US were a big thing.

TR: It was a big thing. I was aware of it, at least by the time I was at UT Austin, because the Institute for Geophysics has a big sort of footprint in doing the ocean drilling stuff. Then, when I was a grad student at Stony Brook, a friend of mine, Diane McDaniel, actually got to go to the Amazon Delta cruise. So, I became more aware of the structure – like, multiple scientists being able to participate, including graduate students; and had a sense of the scale, from that. That was really the first time I really thought about the scale of it, when Diane got to go on that adventure.

BMR: Did you have any experience in international cooperation during the early years of your career?

TR: Not really, no. For my PhD, I actually worked on the Pennsylvanian and Permian cycles I was talking about earlier. So, just totally fortuitously, I came back to – not in Texas, I worked in New Mexico and Central Texas, the Central Basin platform, but not where I grew up. So, it was kind of fun to sort of come back to that, sort of looking at those cyclothems. And I lost my train of thought when I was even talking about that.

BMR: Oh, so you actually ended up studying and looking at the samples you grew up with!

TR: Yeah. I think that’s when it really occurred to me, the sort of mix between looking at marine fossils and also petrified wood in the same day, just walking from one outcrop to another, to pick up these very different fossils.

BMR: So, after you started in your academic career… I’d like to ask you about this relationship between industry and science. How the things that you grew up with kind of helped you in your scientific career?

TR: Well, definitely, I think working in the oil field… When I was a mud logger, I had a 35ft trailer and I had to drive it out to the location and back it in; and hook up the electricity to a generator, and hook everything up, and keep everything going. We had a gas chromatograph, and saw a lot of different equipment that we had to keep going, and looking at samples as we went. I feel like that that skill of having to control how things are flowing, work-wise has been really helpful.

But you’re asking about the science to industry sort of connection, and I feel like that’s a really important question. Especially being in an academic environment, I feel like people have sort of a haughty thought about the industry in general, and how basically oil companies are big corporations. But I do think that the infrastructure that we have for science drilling is because of the oil industry. In the other way around, it’s sort of equivalent to the huge investment that the government agencies have made into going to the Moon, and sending things to Mars. And you might say that it’s just sort of esoteric and… How are those things going to help mankind? But a lot of discoveries come from that huge engineering and science effort that goes into designing things. And I think you’re right. It goes both ways.

Some of the innovations that are surely from the oil industry itself – the effort to drill in the pre-salt in Brazil, in very deep waters, and like, “wow! how cool is that? The pre-salt!” Okay, when people started talking about the pre-salt, I was like, “Okay, so it’s before the salt”. But you know what? I never really thought about it, but it’s really deep water. And there are these carbonates that people who are experts are completely baffled by; like there’s a whole bunch of unknowns, and they’re bickering with each other about what they all mean. They can’t find an analog for it, right? So, there’s this vast amount of carbonates that were deposited off of Brazil in really deep water. And I feel like the effort to get stuff like that out of the ground is part of the reason that we’re able to do stuff with deep sea drilling.

BMR: All the technologies, the safety systems… of scientific ocean drilling came from the industry. Sometimes the problem is precisely that science doesn’t have the means to have the advances that the industry has. So sometimes we are like two steps behind, right?

TR: Yeah, yeah. I’m pretty sure the JOIDES Resolution was originally for oil drilling.

BMR: Yes, it was a SEDCO/BP drillship that was refurbished for scientific ocean drilling.

TR: Yeah.

BMR: The Chikyu was a brand-new ship, but some of its technologies are transformations from oil industry ones.

TR: Yeah; incredible transformations too. That’s the thing about being a mud logger and watching, you know, four guys up on the rig, the roughnecks, throwing the – whatever they’re called, the things to catch the pipe, and yanking the chain around, and doing the pipes, and putting the next one; or watching them trip the pipe out of the hole, and stuff like that. It is really cool to watch it being done by robots (laughs). Now, it is a lot safer. It was it pretty dangerous job. So, I feel like that’s an advance in a big way.

BMR: How come that you applied for an IODP cruise? I know you were in a previous expedition, so maybe we can talk about that first time.

TR: Well, my sister has done several of the IODP cruises. She was actually a co-chief for a cruise in the Indian Ocean – (IODP Expedition) 361, I think. And then, she said, “We should apply to go to one of the Antarctic expeditions”.

BMR: Together?

TR: Yes. But we didn’t get to… She was selected for – there were two of them, and I applied for both of them and I was not selected for either. And she had to choose between the two, because she was wanted for both of them, which is good. That got me thinking about it. I think that I applied for one other, but I can’t even remember what it is. I had my eye on it.

Then, my friend Cecilia McHugh, who’s at Queens College, has been working on the Japan Trench area and knew about (IODP Expedition) 386. I have been working with her on her samples from the Japan area. And she said, “You should apply for 386”. And I was like, “Why not?” (laughs) So I did, and I got in. That was pretty fun, but we didn’t get to sail because of Covid. So, this is my first cruise.

BMR: Throughout your career you have been working with sediments and samples from mainland. So, do you see any kind of difference in working with samples from the very deep sub-seafloor? I can understand that sediments and rocks are sediments and rocks, no matter where you pick them up. But maybe you can see some differences in the way of working with them.

TR: I think the pore waters are the thing that’s really, really different. You can imagine that the sediments are going to become rocks, and they’re going to be a lot like the rocks that you can find in the Permian Basin or wherever, right? Actually, these kinds of rocks will be subducted and we’ll never see them again (laughs). But it’s not like, the rocks themselves are not outside my experience.

But I really didn’t appreciate the pore fluids, the interstitial waters, the stuff that I’m working on here. I’ve never done anything like that; and they really have a lot to say about what’s happening down there. So, that’s pretty exciting, and that’s very different than anything that I have actually worked on.

BMR: Is because of the content of the waters?

TR: It’s the geochemistry of the waters. When I first got the samples from (IODP Expedition) 386, these were deposits that are very young, ten or twenty thousand years old, maybe fifty thousand to one million… Very young deposits. And, especially the stuff at the top, I just imagined it would look just like seawater, because I can imagine that as the sediments were settling down, seawater was basically being entrapped with it – that’s sort of my going wisdom, anyway. So, when I got the samples, I had a vast number of samples that were sent to me and I’m like, “Oh my gosh”. I ran the first one, and I remember when I first started getting the data, I was thinking, “This is going to look just like seawater and, if it’s a little bit different, I’m going to wonder if is it just an analytical artifact or is it real?”. And it was really different than seawater. So that was very, very exciting. And then, it was like, “Well, but how do you do that?” And I’m still working on how do you do that, because the isotopes are actually really different.

The major elements are not… It looks like seawater, it’s got chlorinity and salinity that’s like seawater, and sodium and things like that. But the boron, and lithium, and strontium, and silicon… And things like that, don’t look like seawater at all! They’re very different. Those are trace elements that are basically the seawater interacting with the sediments. Extracting them, sometimes like lithium is being lost, boron is being added… So, there’s just so many interesting things that are happening. And it was definitely not what I expected. But I’m very excited. That’s why I applied to this cruise, because it’s like the natural extension of what I saw in the Japan Trench. What is the source of those waters? I think they have to be exotic. They’re not from in-place. And nothing like this has been reported. So, it’s like, where did these things come from?

That’s why this is really exciting to me. Especially (the hole) C0026, the one that’s out on the incoming plate. I think those waters maybe hold a ticket to understanding what the waters I’m looking at in the Trench come from. I think that, during the earthquake, you get shaking and that waters move up – and there’s evidence for that. There are mud volcanoes, and there’s other lines of evidence that fluids are moving around like that. But, so far, there’s nothing published that has the same composition as the waters that I’m looking at. So, I think it’s really exciting that this might – you know, maybe or maybe won’t; and I think either way it will be an interesting result, to see where those waters come from.

BMR: It’s fun because I can see that you’re getting passionate about the ocean, right? (laughs)

TR: Yeah, exactly. It’s very interesting (laughs).

BMR: I guess these are things that you can only find at sea. Following up on this, you mentioned that nobody has studied this scientific question before but, is there anyone who has influenced you in pursuing this research? Is there any other research group, in the US or abroad, doing this kind of studies?

TR: Actually, I didn’t do my homework when I applied. I’m actually surprised, in retrospect, that I was selected because I was just like glibly saying, “I’m going to look at boron in these pore waters”. And actually, the places where people have found boron isotopes that are really anomalous are in the accretion wedges around the world. And when people have looked at accretionary prisms, they see unusual chemistries, and they call on really deep sources for those. So, this is really unique, because it’s a very young, undeformed set of samples. And they look a lot like this stuff that’s in the prism. So, the thing is that people haven’t looked at these things that are undisturbed and maybe more boring… But maybe there’s something we need to understand a little bit more about that.

The other place that people have seen it is mud volcanoes. Mud volcanoes are often associated with accretionary prisms. You get this sort of major fluxes of fluid, either because of the mud volcano that’s basically bringing all this stuff up, or along fault zones – like along the decollement. You get very different chemistries. There’re some elegant papers that have been written sort of putting it together in terms of the thickness of the accretionary wedge, or the cycling of elements, through the system. But I think the thing that’s really unique about the Japan Trench sediments and, to my knowledge, nobody’s looked at anything like that, is that they have the anomalous composition that people are scrambling to figure out where they come from in the accretionary wedge, but they’re in these undeformed sediments in the Japan Trench. It’s kind of crazy!

BMR: So, essentially – let me see if I understood it correctly. When there’s a big earthquake, the water that was kind of trapped or deposited millions of years ago, comes up.

TR: Yes.

BMR: And in this movement, it drags isotopes or other components that you won’t be able to find in the younger sediments.

TR: Yes.

BMR: So, if you understand where this water comes from, you can understand past earthquakes?

TR: Yes. Although I actually feel like what we’re seeing in the Japan Trench is probably from Tohoku. The thing is that – there’s no before. We don’t have a record before the earthquake. So, we can only surmise what happened. But it looks like it happened yesterday. These are not stead state diffusion patterns. These are basically just sort of, have kinks in them. They’re really remarkable patterns. So, I think it happened during that Tohoku earthquake. And so, yes, I think the source of the fluids can tell us a lot about how fluids move when you have a substantial earthquake like that.

People have shown that earthquake hydrology reaches – to actually reach sort of 1000km of scale requires a magnitude nine earthquake. This is work that people have done. It’s pretty incredible, actually. I feel like I didn’t know anything about this before I started, but I’m very excited about it. I think there’s a lot of excitement to figuring it out.

BMR: So, you are now starting in this research topic, but at the same time you have a lot of experience in geosciences and in geochemistry. I’d like to ask you about your role onboard. Do you feel that you have to be mentoring the early career researchers? Or, on the contrary, do you feel that yourself are learning new stuff?

TR: I sort of feel like I’m learning new stuff about the time we got our feet, I’m not sure we’re going to see any more samples to squeeze. My partner Junli, he’s probably helped me more than I’ve helped him. We work together as a team, for sure. I don’t think he’s done anything like it before, either. We both had to learn how to do it here, and it is a really physical activity, just squeezing the samples and getting the samples, and making sure you don’t screw up. I screwed up a couple times, but luckily, I think we figured it out. It’s a bookkeeping problem, you know? But, yeah, I think that, at my age and at my experience, I should be mentoring, people. But, you know, with the small geochemistry group that I have, I don’t feel like I have… I feel like they’re ahead of me, if anything (laughs) So I’m not in that place where I could, at least in terms of the science, I don’t think I’m in a place to actually mentor my junior colleagues, here.

BMR: I think it’s very nice that you present it like, I’m still learning.

TR: Well, life is like that. If you don’t keep learning, I don’t know what you would do (laughs).

BMR: Yeah but, I mean, I don’t know if there would be many people with that sort of mindset, where there’s this younger person that is teaching me something that I didn’t know.

TR: The thing I like about the IODP in general is the huge science team, and the potential to learn from either way, junior, senior… Back and forth. I think the extraordinary amount of samples that are being processed by other technicians, the vast amount of data that you get… And not only the geochemistry that we will get, but all the people that are doing physical properties, and the people that are doing all the very careful work, studying the details of the layers, and the structures, and the well logs that were done ahead of time… It’s like there’s this amazing amount of data behind everything that you do. You don’t get that, in a normal situation. Whatever you can put into, is what you get. I wish I had found it earlier, because it is pretty addictive (laughs). I mean, having that much sort of “Ah!” behind the work that you’re doing is pretty cool.

BMR: What kind of things have impressed you the most of Chikyu, in this couple of weeks you’ve been onboard?

TR: Let me just say I like having my laundry done. And I love the food. Okay. That’s just – it’s actually comfortable here, I sleep pretty well, and I’ve had a good time. But in terms of the science, it’s like every day you’re doing a job; you’re just getting your samples squeezed and you don’t really see the data. It’s really very much like a real world situation, where you’re just doing all this sort of grunt work, like getting the samples processed and, at the end, you get this data that you get to look at, and that’s sort of the prize at the end of it. So, at this stage, other than people giving presentations and showing what their data is, maybe getting a few ideas – but I’ve only seen the weekly updates once and… I don’t think I have that much of a feeling about this, in terms of the science part of it, I think that will come. if I can judge from Expedition 386, when we had our sampling party, we actually went really fast. So, they actually gave us a lot of time to have meetings and workshops, and really discuss our data and get to know each other really well. That was the most remarkable and rewarding couple of weeks ever. So, I’m hoping for that here.

BMR: I’m sure it will come. It’s only that this expedition was a bit different, with scientists in two windows, and window 2 starting with an opposite chronology.

TR: Yeah.

BMR: But it’s clear that this is something that most of the people appreciates, working on the same goal from different approaches.

TR: Yes. And they’re all part of the same pie. They have to work – like, your data can’t defy something concrete from another direction. I feel like that’s really interesting, as well.

BMR: How is it like, for you, after growing up and seeing the most rudimentary technologies for drilling, and now seeing how Chikyu operates?

TR: It’s great. Oh my gosh. When I was watching on the TV (laughs), just pull the pipe out of the well, I just was watching it and it is mind-blowing. It’s amazing.

BMR: Actually, Chikyu was one of a kind ship when it was built, almost twenty years ago. It’s impressive to think about the magnitude of drilling beneath seven kilometers of water… and the pipe is rotating down there, but the motion starts here, in the ship, and goes with strength enough as to drill the seafloor.

TR: Yeah. It’s incredible. It’s impressive. And to me, I’m a geochemist, so I have my own lab and I walk through to go acidify my samples. And [here] it’s like, I don’t even know what all the instrumentation in there is. In the little room where I acidify my samples, there are at least two ICP MS instruments and it’s like, “Oh my gosh!” (laughs). And then you go over here, and you can just turn on the water and get milli pure water. We just rinse our stuff with it, here. In my lab, we have an Epure system, but we fill up big  carboys and we have to use it sparingly so we don’t fill it up so often, and stuff like that. So, there’s a lot of stuff here that’s like, “Wow!”. Where I’m doing the gas chromatograph, I’m using one and then there’s two on the other table that are just, I guess, waiting to be used (laughs). So, the equipment on here is really pretty remarkable, as well.

BMR: Yes. You actually see that there’s a system, and an organization, that makes it very easy for living and working efficiently. So, is there anything else I forgot to ask you, or that you’d like to explain…?

TR: I can’t think of anything.

BMR: I think we have covered everything. My last question would be, now that I can see that you are so excited about scientific ocean drilling and studying ocean sediments, do you see yourself continue working on this sort of deep sea drilling sediments? What are your plans?

TR: I definitely hope to apply for the – I don’t know what the number is, but the cruise that it’s going next year to the Japan Trench. I’m going to apply for that. I don’t know how that works, with the US sort of dropping the ball. I mean, I’m not into the politics of it but, you know, apparently dropping the ball in terms of what the future of science drilling is for US scientists… I don’t know, but I’m definitely going to apply, and hope to get in on that.

And from this cruise, I have a ton of samples. It’ll take me several years, I think, to get through all the samples I’ve gathered in this cruise (laughs). So, when I get back to my lab, I have months and months of work to just process the samples that I will have from this cruise. I think, for the next years, I’ll be working on these types of sediments, even if I don’t go on another expedition.

BMR: And this is one more corner of the world you’re in! You’ve been working in Alaska, in Kenya, and now Japan.

TR: Yeah. That’s one of the things about geology that’s really fun, that you get to you get to travel a lot, you get to go see a lot of things.

BMR: That’s great. Thank you very much.

TR: Thank you.

BMR: It was a very fun talk.

TR: Thank you, it was fun for me, too.